Ellis Peters - George Felse 10 - The Knocker On Death's Door Read Free Page B

slightly to flesh, with a shock of untidy straw-coloured hair and inquisitive eyes. He hadn’t been priming Saul, he hadn’t been doing much talking, but it was plain that he had missed nothing.
    “What about this door?” he said. “If it was originally one door of the church, how did it get into their house in the first place?”
    Saul trimmed his sails nimbly, got halfway through an unplanned sentence, decided to revise it, and created a mild diversion by peering meaningfully into his empty pint-pot. One of his two interlocutors took the hint and filled it again.
    “It got there because they took it, along with a few other things, when the monastery here was closed down under Henry Eight, that’s how. A very nice bit of carving it is, you can see that, and made locally, so the experts say, and there’s bits inside the old part o’ the church by the same hand. Closed down, the monastery was, and the brothers turned out on to the road. The abbey church was looted and abandoned for a while, and then it was took over for the parish church and repaired again. And the Macsen-Martels sided with the commission, they did, and they got the abbot’s lodging to live in, and that’s how the door came to be there.”
    “And what,” the photographer wanted to know, “put it into their heads to give it back now? Nobody knew about it. Nobody was asking for it. Nobody was in any position to ask for it. Are you telling me they suddenly went to the trouble and expense of having the thing cleaned and restored, after all this time, just in a fit of belated honesty? It doesn’t make sense.”
    They all turned to look at him more carefully, for the tone of his questioning was curiously more purposeful than that of his colleagues. Dave came back with the drinks, and put Dinah’s half-pint into her hand. Hugh levelled black eyes above the rim of his pint-pot. “Who is he?” he asked softly. “Not a Comerbourne man, I know them all.”
    “Brummagem, I think. Some freelance.” Dave was uninterested; he didn’t question other people’s declared motives for what they did.
    “Don’t,” warned Saul unexpectedly, his voice receding hollowly into a cavern of senile solemnity, “don’t ask me about that! There’s reasons for wanting to have things—like a good cellar door when you’re setting up house and there’s one standing handy—and reasons for wanting not to have things any longer when they begin to turn malignant towards them that took them out of their right place. Don’t forget ’tis a
church
door. Better for everybody, maybe, to put it back where it was afore, and have the bishop say the good words over it that it might be glad to hear. Mind, I’m not saying it
is
so, I’ve only said it
might
be so. I haven’t even said it would be effective, have I? Just that there’s no harm in trying.” And he shook his grey head as though he foresaw the failure of this belated attempt at exorcism of something unnamed and undefined. “Did you know what sort of monastery we had up here at the finish?” he asked mildly. “There were only four o’ the brothers left to take to the roads, and a beggarly sort of place they kept here. Hospitality for the stranger, my eye! There were strangers slept here overnight that never got where they were going. It was a long way for any bishop to come, to see for himself what was going on. And then, bishops are as fond of sleeping safe as the next man. No, I wouldn’t say Mottisham Abbey had a particularly holy reputation in its last days. Even the church, they say, saw some very odd goings-on before the finish.”
    “Are you saying,” demanded the photographer bluntly, “that there’s something uncanny about that door?”
    “I’m saying nothing, except that it’s better to be safe than sorry,” mumbled Saul darkly, “and back in the church is the best place for a door the like of that one. Don’t you get too inquisitive, my lad, about things that’s best let