“You mean it’s true,” asked Dinah, astonished, “that there were only four brothers left here at the end, and they weren’t any model of holiness?”
“They were anything but. And for that there is good evidence. You know something about the end of the abbey, men?”
“I didn’t,” she admitted honestly, “except that they were talking about it in ”The Sitting Duck‘ on Sunday night.”
“They?”
“Saul Trimble,” Hugh supplied with a reminiscent grin. “And believe me, he shouldn’t be underestimated. The essence of his nonsense is that about sixty per cent of it at least is good sense. It makes it more baffling. Even sceptics make inquiries, and get converted.”
“Quite a lot of the monastic houses had degenerated badly by that time,” Robert said, “especially the more remote ones that were a law to themselves. And ours was pretty remote. This tale about the church door belongs towards the end. They say one of the brothers—there must have been more than four then—had made the classic pact with the devil, signing away his soul in return for diabolical help in this world, especially at raising spirits, and then tried to back out of the bargain at the crucial hour by taking refuge in the church. But wherever he tried to enter, the doors remained barred against him. In his despair he fell on his knees in the south porch and clutched at the sanctuary knocker, as the best he could do, but the cold iron burned his hand as if it had been red-hot, and forced him to loose his hold. And the devil took him.” Robert’s quiet voice quivered momentarily. Such a pale, still face… Dinah shivered, watching him. She had never really noticed him before, only recorded externals, measuring a potential enemy. “Not physically, however. According to the story, the monks came down for Prime, and found his body huddled at the foot of the door, stone dead. No marks on him, not even a burned hand.”
“How very odd,” said the old lady with detached disapproval, “that I never remember hearing this nonsense before! And what nonsense it is! Just a perfectly ordinary door!”
“I quite agree,” admitted Robert. “Most such stories are nonsense, but people go on telling them. The door has always been credited—or discredited—with being haunted, but I can’t say we ever had any odd experiences with it here, or noticed anything queer about it. I don’t know— maybe we’re just inured, because we lived with all these things so intimately and so long. The time might come when one took even ghosts for granted, and failed to see them…”
Dinah shuddered and shook herself. Perhaps, she thought, even that could happen, when you belong only to the past; not even to the present, much less the future. And she thought, well, yes, there’s always Canada—or Australia, where you have to be real or people fail to see you!
She thought of the antique iron beast, playfully proffering his twisted ring of hope, and grinning as it burned the desperate hand that reached for it. For the rest of the evening—mercifully it was short, old people retire early— she could not get it out of her head. She was grateful to Hugh for his delicacy and affection when he broke up the coffee-party in the drawing-room—Robert had made the coffee, of course!—and took her tenderly home through the thinning fog, at a slow speed which permitted him to keep an arm about her all the way. He was warm, quiet and bracing. She was practically sure that she loved him.
Dave was brewing tea in the kitchen when she came in from the yard, with Hugh’s kiss still warm and confident on her lips, and her backward glance still illuminated by the light from Hugh’s flat over the stable. He hadn’t drawn the curtains, and he had just hauled off his shirt and plunged across the bedroom towards the shower-room beyond. Then the light went out, and the October night swallowed him. Good night, Hugh!
“That Brummagem bloke didn’t come in for his car,” Dave said. She hardly heard him, she was so far away. “He must be staying overnight. He said he might. Wonder what on earth he expected to find worth his while in these parts?”
“Ghosts, hobgoblins, pacts, devils… who knows?” said Dinah, yawning. “Witchcraft and such is news these days, didn’t you know?”
“How did it go?” asked Dave curiously.
“Oh, not so bad! They’re dead,” she said simply, “but never mind, Hugh’s alive.” She wandered to bed, hazy with Traminer. Dave watched her go, reassured. As for Bracewell, he’d be in early in the morning, just as he’d said.
But early is a relative term, and freelance photographers, perhaps, keep different hours from office workers, garage proprietors and such slaves of the clock. The Brummagem bloke had still not put in an appearance to claim his repaired Morris when Dave drove the vicar’s third-hand Cortina back to the vicarage, on its new tyres at just after nine o’clock, as promised. His nearest way back to the garage was through the churchyard. Thus it was Dave who happened to be the first person to pass close by the south porch on this misty Wednesday morning, and casting the native’s natural side-glance towards the legendary door within, register the startling apparition of size ten shoe-soles jutting into the dawn.
There was a man inside the shoes. The dim light under the trees drew in outline long, trousered legs in flannel grey, the hem of a short car coat, bulky shoulders under brown gaberdine, straw-coloured hair spilled on the flagstones from a lolling head that was not quite the right shape.
Dave advanced by inches, chilled and yet irresistibly drawn. He saw an extended arm, fingers and palm flattened against the foot of the closed door. He stepped over the sprawled legs, and peered at the motionless face. The eyes were open, glazed and bright, glaring at the shut door, straining after the calm within. The jaw had dropped, as if parted upon a desperate cry for help.
The photographer from Birmingham, who had sensed a story here in the barbarian territory of Middlehope, and staked his freelance reputation upon cornering the scoop, was never going to file his story after all. He was dead and cold at the foot of the sanctuary door.
CHAPTER 3
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DAVE started back for the vicarage at a run. The nearest telephone was there, and the vicar had to know, in any case, and was by far the most suitable person to stand guard over the scene until the police arrived. The one thing everyone knows about the scene of a crime—especially a murder—is that nothing must be moved or touched until the whole circus has had its way. That this was a crime was not in doubt for a moment. And not merely a murderous assault, but a murder. The large, jagged stone that lay in the middle of the flagged path, ominously stained, had not fallen out of the trees; there was a gap among the whitened stones fringing the grass, to show where someone had plucked it from, and there was the dark, muddied red hollow in the photographer’s skull to show what the same someone had done with it. There was no misting of breath on metal when Dave held his silver lighter against the open lips, the hand he touched gingerly was marble-cold. It never entered his head to think of a doctor. Doctors weren’t going to do anything for this poor devil from now on, except haggle over the time and the exact cause of his death. The Reverend Andrew, a realistic soul, accepted what he was told without demanding that it be repeated. When he said something he meant it, and not being lavish or fluent with words, he expected to have the few he did use taken as gospel. Moreover, he recognised a like directness in Dave. He waved him at once to the telephone, and galloped off towards the churchyard, to mount guard over the body that must have lain unguarded all night. And Dave called, not headquarters at Comerbourne, as the vicar would probably have done, but Sergeant Moon, up the valley at Abbot’s Bale. The moment the outside world laid an encroaching hand on the property, privacy or peace of mind of Middlehope, the whole valley closed its ranks.