“Thank you,” said George, “I think that’s all, just for the moment. But I would like a word with you still, if you wouldn’t mind waiting until I take Miss Trent back to her friends. You may be able to help me over one or two matters.”
Robert’s enervated voice said with resignation, but still with immaculate politeness: “Certainly, I’m at your disposal.”
They climbed the steps, and Robert switched out the light. The arched window showed a clinging, gossamer darkness of trees, dappled irregularly with the pallor of the sky showing through. The hall was ill-lit and hollow-sounding, a desolation. At the front door Robert said goodbye to Alix distantly, and withdrew again into the house, pointedly leaving the door ajar. In the waiting police car, Detective Constable Reynolds and Detective Sergeant Brice sat silent, watching the house while not for a moment appearing to be watching it.
“Well?” said George quietly, as soon as they were out of earshot in the drive. “Anything to comment on?”
It was left to her, of course, he was not going to prompt her, she understood that.
“Yes, something definite, but I don’t know if it means anything. There’s the floor—those marks as if the door dragged. But the door doesn’t drag. And neither did the old one, at least not when I was here previously, six years ago. It isn’t that I remember whether there were any marks on the floor then or not,” she said carefully. “I think I should have noticed at the time if there had been, but I doubt if I should have remembered. But what I do know is that the old door didn’t drag when I came here on that visit. It was beautifully hung—all that weight and mass, and it swung at a touch.”
“You’ve got a special reason for being so sure of that?” asked George curiously.
It was the one thing she had not felt it necessary to include in her statement, but she told him now. They were approaching the parked car, and Dave was standing by the door waiting for her.
“Yes, I have. We were being shown round by the old owner, the one who’s dead. I’m told he had a reputation as a woman-chaser. Well, he lived up to it. While Gerry Bracewell was taking some shots of the carving of the door, our host contrived to shut himself and me on the inner side of it—it was quite easy, obligingly drawing it to so that Gerry could operate freely. And so that he could, too. I moved fast, and the door behaved like silk. I remember what a surprise it was to find such a barrier moving so sweetly to let me out. That’s how I know.”
“Thank you,” said George. “That sounds absolutely reliable, and may be more useful than you know.”
But the look she gave him as they parted, level and long and silent, stayed with him as he turned back towards the house; and it was in his mind that her intelligence worked always one step ahead, and that somewhere within her, whether she had yet worked it out or not, she already possessed the full knowledge of the significance of what she had told him, and had foreseen its consequences.
In the back seat of the car Dinah said with a sigh: “I’ve hardly had time even to say hullo to you yet, Alix, and Dave’s only known you a few days, and already we seem to have landed you in more complications than I can add up at this moment, in my confused condition. You won’t let it put you off us, will you? Or off this place? We don’t always behave like this, sometimes we’re more or less normal.”
“Murder’s abnormal anywhere,” said Alix ruefully. She had told them what had passed in the house, since no one had suggested she should necessarily keep it to herself, and in any case the indications were that it, or its results, would soon be known to everybody. “At least I can’t complain that Mottisham is boring, can I?”
“But what on earth does it all mean?” Dinah fretted. “Drag marks under a door aren’t so rare, couldn’t the old door have dropped a little during the last few years, since you first saw it?”
“After being in position and perfect for centuries,” Dave said from the driving seat, “why should it drop suddenly now?”
“If the National Trust are taking the place over,” Alix said slowly, thinking it out, “then as soon as the agreement is finally made they’ll put their own experts in to see what restorations and renovations are necessary. If a place is going to be shown to the public as a historical monument, then everything possible about it has to be authenticated and documented. Do you suppose that could be the real reason why the door was given back to the church? Not because it once belonged there, but because it would attract too much attention where it was, and might give something away that wasn’t supposed to be given away? Is there any real evidence that it once belonged to the church porch?”
“Almost everything about the Abbey,” said Dave, “is an open question. Before it folded, this had become a degenerate and disorderly house. Apparently the standard of scholarship was low, and what was left of the library was burned, and most of the records with it. You could make up what stories you like about the last years of Mottisham Abbey, and if you can’t prove ’em, neither can anyone else disprove ’em. The door’s obviously a genuine part of the old abbey set-up, but as for where it belonged, who’s to say?”
“But Robert Macsen-Martel, apparently, did say. He said it came from the south porch.”
“He said family tradition said so. Who’s going to argue about family tradition—especially against the family?”
“He also said,” Dinah pointed out, “that there was this story about the monk and the devil and the sanctuary knocker. But now it seems there wasn’t really a knocker on the door at all, not while it was in the house.”
“I wonder,” said Dave, as they turned into the Comerbourne road, “what would have happened if they had left the door in position in the house? The prowling experts would be pretty quick to notice if it dragged, wouldn’t they? Old, settled floors and doors don’t suddenly change their habits. If that’s the oldest part of the house, it would have come within the scope of their brief right away. They’d have wanted to put it right, even if they didn’t burn with curiosity to find out how it ever got put wrong. Either re-hang the door, or re-lay the flagstones—one way or the other.”
Yes, thought Alix, that’s exactly what they’d have done. And now somebody else is surely doing it in their place. But try as she would, she could not see any farther ahead than that, what came next was impenetrable mystery. The question: “Who?” might by now have a potential answer, but the question: “Why?” produced only a blank silence.
Dinah turned and looked back through the rear window towards the overgrown shrubberies and old trees of the Abbey grounds.
“I wonder what the police are doing there now?”
“They’re taking up the cellar floor,” said Alix.
CHAPTER 9
« ^ »
Moving in unobtrusively from Comerbourne without touching the centre of the village, three more police cars had wound their way up the Abbey drive, and found themselves parking space at the rear, in what had once been the stableyard. No one here had owned horses since old Robert broke his neck, and the rank autumn grass was growing high between the cobbles, and the moss shone lime-gold on the roofs. The clock on the stumpy little tower over the entrance had not gone for years; one hand was missing from its dial, and the weathercock that had once crowned it now sagged upside-down against its side. Both time and season had stopped in Mottisham Abbey.
There was one more car visiting that evening, but it contented itself with circling the flower-beds, ready to leave again, and Dr. Braby, scuttling in through the hall with his bag and up the stairs to his patient, never realised that the police were in the house at all. Robert had seen him coming, and excused himself with probable relief but undoubted dignity in order to let him in and escort him upstairs. It was nearly twenty minutes before he came back into the dismal, shadowy drawing-room. Standing in the centre of this mouldering and menacing magnificence, everywhere besieged by the evidences of decay and senility, his pallor and stringiness seemed appropriate, as if he had been sucked dry by his environment long ago, and it was too late now for life to offer him any kind of transfusion.