In the narrow gateway, which it was necessary to approach with great care from either direction, they came nose to nose with another car turning slowly in. A police car, with three men in plainclothes aboard. Both cars halted politely, as if in neighbourly conversation. The police car began to back out and clear the gate, and then as abruptly stopped; a window was rolled down, and George Felse leaned out.
“Mr. Cressett?—I thought I knew the car!” The door opened, and George came loping alongside. “Have you still got Miss Trent with you?” It was not yet dusk, but there between the overgrown trees a green twilight hung, obscuring colours and outlines.
“I’m here,” said Alix, lowering the window.
“If your friends wouldn’t mind waiting a quarter of an hour or so, Miss Trent, will you come back with me to the house? I’m going to have a look at the cellar where the church door used to hang, and I’d be very grateful if you’d come with me and see if you notice anything—anything at all—to remark on.”
Alix began to say: “But wouldn’t Mr. Macsen-Martel be more…” but she let the sentence die away on her lips. “Yes, I see,” she said. Until that moment it had not been clear to her that she was the only remaining witness, on this particular subject, who could be regarded as disinterested. Robert’s role was not yet clear, and no doubt he would be expected to co-operate, too; but that tall, thin figure of his was beginning to cast a long shadow. “Yes, I’ll come, of course,” she said, and got out of the car.
“I’ll back up under the trees there, where there’s room to pass,” said Dave, “and let you through. We’ll wait, Alix.”
The police car slid by, long and dark, and rolled to rest in front of the doorway of the house. And correct and impenetrable as ever, Robert opened the door to them.
“Good evening,” said George. “You remember me? Chief Inspector Felse—I’m in charge of the inquiry into this murder case, I had occasion to call and see you some days ago, the day the body was discovered, in fact. I wonder if you can give me ten minutes or so of your time, just long enough to show me the site where the door used to hang before you gave it back to the church. Oh, by the way, I believe you and Miss Trent have already met. Miss Trent did a feature article on the house a few years ago, and remembers the wine-cellar as it was then. I was lucky enough to meet her and her friends in your gateway, and I took the liberty of asking her to come back with me. I hope we don’t come too inconveniently?”
His voice was cool, neutral and disarming. And if Robert was going to inquire about a search warrant, he would have to do so now, and in doing so surrender altogether too much of the cramped room he had for manoeuvring. But Robert’s face remained impassive, apart from the faintest air of distaste and weariness, and he looked at them without apparent disquiet, and stepped back from the doorway courteously to allow them in.
“Of course not. I realise the extreme pressures there must be on your time, Chief Inspector. Mine is very much less valuable. Please come in, Miss Trent. I didn’t know you’d seen the Abbey before. I should have been glad to show you the house if I’d realised, though I’m afraid we haven’t always been able to maintain it as we should have liked. In the future I hope it will be possible to look after it properly.”
He closed the outer door, and they stood in the chill, dusky hall. The arched window at the far end of the room shimmered greenly with the movement of leaves, in the rising wind of the October evening. It gave almost the appearance of a french door opening on to the garden, but when they drew nearer Alix saw that outside the glass the ground fell away, so that this floor was six feet or so above the level of the sloping lawn below. The cellars beneath this rear part of the house were only partially buried.
“This way,” said Robert, and turned left beside the window, where two massive stone newel posts jutted, and a broad, open stairway descended some eleven or twelve feet into a flagged passage, too wide, perhaps, to be truly a passage, more of a square lobby. They could see only part of the paved floor from the head of the stairs; and across the grey surface, more dimly than here above, the restless shimmer of light and shadow ran like the movement of a brook from right to left. Somewhere on the right there was a window or an open grille above ground-level, through which the light and movement of the outer world could still enter.
“Be careful on the stairs,” said Robert scrupulously. “The treads are very worn. Shall I go first?”
As soon as he switched on a light below, the pattern of flowing, reflected light from outside the window paled and submerged into the flat grey stone of the flooring. The wide treads of the stairs were hollowed two inches deep, and none of them had ever been replaced. Alix thought of all the feet that had passed up and down here over the centuries to achieve that bended bow of stone at every step. Towards the foot of the stair they already had a ceiling over their heads, and at once there was a hollow echo, distant and delayed, as though someone unseen and unknown trod always one step behind them. And some eight feet from the foot of the stairs the new cellar door came into view, directly facing them.
They stood in a stone box which was almost a perfect cube, except that the ceiling over their heads was a shallow vault instead of flat. In the wall on their right the expected lunette of window—she remembered it now—began at ground level, five feet above the floor on which they stood, and arched to the ceiling, but all it let in now, in competition with the single electric bulb within, was a green dusk rapidly deepening into darkness. Otherwise this small anteroom was empty and bare; and the door facing them was merely a plain new door, a lightweight compared with the one it had replaced, finished in natural oak but of ordinary thickness and without ornament.
“Not as spectacular as the other one,” said Robert with detached appraisal, “but more in keeping with our circumstances, perhaps. It isn’t locked, if you want to go inside.”
He pressed the plain, respectable iron latch and pushed the door open, standing back to let them go in. The door swung smoothly, and brought them into a narrow, barrel-vaulted cellar which must surely be the oldest remaining fragment of the Abbey. A low stone settle was built along one wall, and here and there on the wall itself they could trace the round marks left by the rim of large wine-casks. The opposite wall was built off by buttress-like excrescences into three empty compartments. The whole room was bare, clean and cold, and there was nothing in it to be recorded by the mind or the eye.
Except, perhaps, the slight irregularity of the flagstones inside the doorway, and the shallow, rounded scars that marked some of them. Broken arcs of three concentric circles, centring on the hinges of the door. The outside one of the three was the most noticeable, and reappeared three times on the arc described by the outer edge of the door, which was so wide that it spanned nearly half the cellar when it was opened. Some of the stones were unmarked, some rose slightly higher and carried the scars. The two inner circles showed only here and there, and more shallowly. Not from this door, so much was certain; it swung above the marks without grazing anywhere. Perhaps the old one had dropped a little before it was moved. But was that likely, after all those centuries? And the scrape-marks, though not brand-new, were notably paler grey than the rest of the stone, like slate-pencil marks on slate.
“You remember it like this?” George asked causally.
“It’s some time ago,” Alix said, “but I do remember it, now that I see it again. I remember the vault—actually it’s rather a nice one, and not very usual—and the size of the flags.”
Robert stood courteously holding the door wide, not following them within; a gentle indication that though he was willing to co-operate fully, nevertheless even his time had its value, if only to him. His pale face was quite motionless.