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

the patience to wait for a slower but possibly more powerful and accurate mind than her own to find the words it needed without prompting. She kept very still while he talked, and she thought deeply and talked openly when it was her turn. Once she had made up her mind there were no half-measures.
    “Yes, you’re right, of course, he did come to me. After he’d found nothing in the archives, I suppose. He wanted to know if I’d kept any of the unused pictures from that country house series. He didn’t say which one he was interested in at first, and if I’d had anything to show him I don’t think he’d have committed himself any further, but I don’t keep past material, except file copies of my own work. And it hadn’t seemed likely that there’d be any future sales in that particular set, they were commissioned, and nobody else was going to show interest. As I remember it, all the houses were much the same—after all, the major ones are too well known, it was the small stuff we were concerned with. These tumbledown dumps miles from anywhere, with arthritis in every flagstone—So when it was clear I had nothing to show, then he did begin to probe in another way. That was the first time he actually mentioned Mottisham Abbey. I read the papers, I knew about the door being put back into the church porch, it didn’t take much guessing to decide that he’d been covering the ceremony. He started reminding me of what the house was like, and asking how much I remembered. In the end it came down to what he really wanted. How well did I remember the wine-cellar door.”
    She looked up at Dave, across her plain, practical, uncluttered workroom, and smiled. Smiling made her mouth slightly oblique, one corner flicking engagingly upwards.
    It sounded hopeless. One house in a series of at least five, one minor feature in the house, one visit… “It was expecting a lot,” Dave owned ruefully.
    “As it happens, I had some reason to remember it, though not enough to be much use to him, apparently. I do remember it was a nice piece of carving, though very dark and coated with a rather nasty varnish…”
    “They’ve removed that,” said Dave.
    “Good for them! It did look well worth cleaning up. But nobody said a word, about any legends attaching to it, not to us, at any rate. Of course, it was the old man himself who showed us round, and he wasn’t the kind to retail legends, from what we saw of him. He scoffed at the whole thing. I was slightly offended, to tell the truth, after all I was twenty-three then, and took my job very seriously, and I expected patrician elderly gentlemen to take their historic houses seriously, too. He didn’t. He told me exactly what he thought of old, cold, insanitary stone houses, and said if my rag thought so highly of the place they could have it, he was only waiting for a reasonable offer. He was a character. And handsome, too. Not to say oncoming! What I chiefly remember about the wine-cellar is that he contrived to close the door—or partially close it—with himself and me inside, while Gerry was making some shots of the outside.”
    “Then he
did
photograph the door?” Dave interrupted quickly.
    “Oh, yes, both he and I were quite sure of that, that’s why he was hunting for the prints, but none of us had kept them—they weren’t used, as you’ve seen. And when we were alone inside there, not to make a long story of it, old Mr. Martel made a very debonair but very determined pass at me, and I had to whip the door open pretty smartly and make a discreet getaway. The things I know about that door are not so much visual, consequently. What I remember most is how surprised I was, considering its size, at the sweet way it swung. Whoever hung it knew his business. It balanced beautifully, even though it wasn’t all that well cared for, and creaked a little in motion.”
    It sounded absolutely authentic. Given the late Robert’s reputation, it would have been unthinkable for him