The Doorkeepers Read online

  DS Paul had left them a message to call her. When Josh managed to get through, she sounded brusque and busy. “Crimewatch was a washout, quite frankly. Very disappointing. We had only twenty-seven calls, which must be their worst response ever.”

  “Any leads at all?”

  “We’re still checking two of them, but I’ll have to be candid with you and say that they don’t look hopeful.”

  “You mean you’re stymied?”

  “That’s not entirely accurate. We still have quite a few avenues of inquiry left open to us.”

  “Avenues of inquiry? That sounds suspiciously like official speak for sitting on your butts scratching your heads.”

  “Mr Winward, you’re an American. You’re probably not used to the way that police investigations are conducted in Britain. They’re extremely low key, as a rule. No car chases, no gunfights. Just steady, solid policework.”

  “Resulting so far in what we Americans call squat.”

  “You don’t have to be shirty, Mr Winward. I assure you that we’re doing everything possible to find the people who murdered your sister.”

  “Tell me the truth. She was my sister. I think I deserve the truth.”

  “All right. But if you quote me on this, I shall deny it. We have interviewed more than two and a half thousand people in two days. We have checked every single working CCTV camera in central London, every single one, and inspected the CCTV systems of more than four hundred restaurants and nightclubs. We have carried out DNA tests on forty-three different men of seven different ethnic origins. We have contacted every single employment agency in the Greater London area, as well as every hospital and clinic, private or NHS. We know a lot of people who didn’t kill your sister, but so far we’re no nearer to discovering who did.”

  Josh was silent for a while. Then he said, “I see. OK. Well, thanks for being upfront. I didn’t mean to embarrass you or anything. Perhaps you’d check with me tomorrow.”

  He put down the phone. Nancy looked up and said, “Why do you talk to everybody as if they’ve brought you a molting cockatiel to look at?”

  “The police haven’t gotten anyplace at all.”

  “What about that Crimewatch program?”

  “Nothing. It’s supposed to have the biggest audience of any crime-prevention program in Britain. You’d think that at least one person would have remembered seeing Julia. Shit, she was pretty. You’d think that one guy would have noticed her, walking along the street. Well, maybe not. There’s supposed to be more gays to the square inch in Britain than there are in San Francisco. Maybe they just don’t notice women.”

  He paused, and massaged the back of his neck with his hand. “Unless, of course, she wasn’t here to be noticed.”

  It was two thirty-five p.m. when they found a spare parking meter on Carey Street, less than a hundred yards away from Star Yard. The day was still sunny, although the traffic fumes had created a faint haze everywhere, as if the Gothic buildings and the brightly dressed people who were hurrying around them were slightly out of focus. Nancy was carrying six candles and three metal candleholders in her bag, which they had bought at the Roman Catholic shop behind Westminster Cathedral. Neither of them were Catholics, but Josh thought that Catholic candles might carry more mystical authority. It was all that Nancy had been able to do to prevent him from buying a vial of holy water and a genuine palm crucifix from Jerusalem.

  “For that price, they should at least have given you a guarantee that it was trodden on by Jesus’ personal donkey.”

  They turned into Star Yard. It faced south, so the sun was shining into it, but somehow the sun fell short of the corner where the niche was. Josh peered into the shadows. The niche still looked like a complete dead end. It was still cluttered with rubbish and it still stank of rotten leaves and urine. “This isn’t the way I saw it last night,” said Josh. “It was deeper, then. What do you think?”

  “You’re right. It was definitely deeper.”

  “So what do we do? Light the candles, and say a few words, and hope that it mysteriously changes?”

  “Why not?”

  Josh opened the box of candles, shook out three of them, and stuck them on to the spikes of the candleholders, in front of the niche. Several passers-by glanced at them curiously, but nobody stopped to ask them what they were doing. That was one thing that Josh liked about England: at least people pretended that they were minding their own business.

  He lit the candles and stepped back. “Still doesn’t look any different,” said Nancy, shading her eyes with her hand.

  “Maybe there’s a special ritual.”

  “Maybe we should just recite the rhyme.”

  “OK,” said Josh. He stood in front of the niche, with the three candles flickering at his feet, and raised both hands, palm outward, as if he were giving the benediction.

  “Six doors they stand in London Town. Six doors they stand in London, too. Yet who’s to know which way they face? And who’s to know which face is true?”

  He repeated the rhyme three times. Nothing happened. The niche remained solidly bricked up.

  “I’m beginning to feel a little stupid here,” said Josh.

  “Let me try,” said Nancy. She stood in front of the niche in his place. She crossed her arms high in front of her, closed her eyes, and repeated the rhyme three times. Then she said, “Great Spirit, if there is a way through here, show it to me, guide me, that I may discover the white man’s Happy Hunting Ground. Show me the way, so that I may find answers for my questioning mind, and peace for my anxious heart.”

  She recited something else, in Modoc. Then she bowed her head and stepped back.

  “What did you say?” asked Josh.

  “I appealed to the Great Spirit’s pride. I said that He could open any door, even a white man’s door.”

  Josh waited beside her, but still nothing happened. Five minutes passed, and the sun went in.

  “Nothing,” said Nancy.

  “Well … I guess that’s it. No door. No parallel world. I never really believed in it, did you? Not in my heart of hearts. Not one hundred percent. All I can say is, it was better than thinking that some sadistic bastard had her locked up in a basement all that time.”

  Nancy looked down at the candles. “What are we going to do with these?”

  “Leave them there. It’s not much of a shrine, but it’s better than no shrine at all.”

  They waited for a moment longer, and then they began to walk back down Star Yard toward Carey Street. A gray cat came around the corner, a gray cat with green eyes and sharply pointed ears. It had a black leather strap around its neck and a small silver cylinder was dangling from the strap. It walked up the yard at an odd diagonal, crossing in front of them.

  “Here, puss,” said Josh. It glanced up at him disdainfully and went on its way.

  “That must be a first,” said Nancy. “An animal that ignores you.”

  Josh stopped to watch the cat go on its haughty way up Star Yard. “What does it mean when a gray cat crosses your path? You’re only going to have moderately bad luck?”

  “Maybe it’s lost,” said Nancy.

  “It didn’t look lost.”

  “You never know. It had something around its neck. Maybe we should check it out.”

  Josh stuck two fingers in his mouth and let out three slurred whistles, like a California quail. “Here, boy! Here, Smokey! Let’s take a look at you!”

  “How do you know its name?”

  “Because I know owners. Black cat, Lucifer. Tabby cat, Tabitha. Gray cat, Smokey. And for some reason, stick insects are always called Randy.”

  The gray cat ignored him and continued to walk up the yard. When it reached the candles, however, it stopped for a moment and regarded them with narrowed green eyes.

  “Here, Smokey!” Josh called it. But without any warning the cat jumped over the candle flames and disappeared into the niche.

  Josh and Nancy waited for a moment. “What the hell is that a
nimal up to?” said Josh.

  “It’s probably doing its business.”

  “Great. So what I thought was the door to a parallel world was nothing more than a cat’s toilet?”

  All the same, Josh waited a little longer. Nancy said, “Come on, Josh,” but Smokey still didn’t reappear.

  “So what’s taking him so long?”

  “How should I know? Maybe he’s found something interesting to read.”

  “Jesus, Nancy, I’m being serious.”

  He walked back to the corner and looked into the niche. He turned back to Nancy and shrugged. “He’s not here. He’s vanished.”

  “You’re sure he’s not hiding under all of those leaves?”

  “No. He’s vanished.”

  Nancy looked up. On all three sides of the niche, the soot-stained walls rose more than seventy feet, up to roof level. Josh said, “He couldn’t have climbed up there. Not without ropes and pitons.”

  “So where did he go?”

  “I don’t know. He just jumped over the candles, and he—”

  They looked at each other. “He jumped over the candles,” Josh repeated.

  “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick. You didn’t do that, did you? You didn’t jump.”

  Josh looked around. Star Yard was quite busy now with people walking through it on their way to Chancery Lane – solicitors’ clerks and secretaries and superior-looking barristers with their book-bags slung over their shoulders. The last thing that he wanted to do was hurl himself over the candles and collide with a solid brick wall, right in front of an audience. Especially such a stiff-upper-lip audience.

  “Are you going to try it, or what?” asked Nancy.

  “Sure. Sure, I’ll try it.”

  “Well, go on then. Try it.”

  “What if I’m wrong?”

  “Then you’re wrong, that’s all. Look – if you don’t want to do it, I will.”

  “Maybe I ought to say the rhyme again.”

  “The cat didn’t say the rhyme, did it? The cat just jumped.”

  Josh took a step back, ready to jump, but before he could do so, Nancy said, “For God’s sake, Josh,” and jumped herself.

  “Nance!” Josh shouted. But Nancy didn’t hit the wall. She landed on the other side of the candles, among the leaves, and in some extraordinary way the wall seemed further away, even though it wasn’t. She turned to him and smiled. “It’s all right” she said, although her voice sounded watery and strange, as if she were trying to talk to him through a diving mask. She started to make walking movements toward the wall even though she must have already reached it. She walked six or seven paces before she turned around again.

  “It’s here!” she called. Her voice sounded even more distorted. “There’s another alleyway, here to the left!” She lifted her arm and pointed and her hand disappeared from sight, right into the brick. “It’s here, you can make your way through!” With that, she took a step sideways and disappeared too.

  Eleven

  Josh shouted out, “Nancy! Nance! Wait up, will you! Nance!”

  Several passers-by stared at him. He was shouting at a brick wall, after all. Three young secretaries in short skirts looked at him and burst into fits of giggles.

  There was nothing left to do. He prayed to God that his faith in the jumping-over-the-candle ritual was as strong as Nancy’s, and jumped.

  He landed in the leaves on the other side, holding out his hand to balance himself. Nothing seemed to be different, except that the wall at the end of the niche appeared to be much further away than it was before. He turned around and looked back, and Star Yard was just the same. He could hear the shuffling of feet and the bustle of traffic and he could even feel the warm morning breeze.

  He turned back and started to walk to the end of the niche. Nancy was right: there was a turning on the left, which seemed to lead to another dead end, just as it had in his hallucination. But he could hear Nancy’s footsteps through the leaves ahead of him, and when he called out, “Nancy!” she called back, “Hurry up, slowpoke!” and her voice sounded normal once again.

  He went to the end of the next section of alleyway, and there was another alleyway, on the right. He went down that, and turned left. As he turned the corner, he made a point of looking up. The sky was uniformly gray, just like his hallucination, and there were scores of pigeons clustered on the window ledges of the buildings on either side. His sleeves brushed against the dirty brickwork.

  Nancy was waiting for him at the end of the last section of alleyway, the back of her hand lifted against her forehead. The sun wasn’t shining here. In fact, it looked like rain. But as they stepped out of the niche, they were still in Star Yard, exactly where they had been before. People were still hurrying through it, swinging their briefcases, and at first the noises of a busy day in the City of London sounded just the same.

  As he stood and listened, however, Josh gradually became aware of a difference in pitch. The traffic seemed to whine more; with a chug-chugging undertone; and he heard two or three motor-horns make an old-fashioned regurgitating noise, instead of the nasal beep of most modern cars. And there was a mixture of other unfamiliar sounds, too. The rumbling of cartwheels, and the clopping of horses.

  Up above the rooftops he heard an abrasive droning, like a circular saw. It grew louder and louder, and he looked up to see a small stubby-winged airplane fly overhead, with a huge, idly rotating propeller, closely followed by another, and then another.

  The effect was astonishing. Wonderful, and frightening, both at the same time. Josh took hold of Nancy’s hand. “Jesus, Nance. We’ve done it. We’ve come through, haven’t we?”

  He looked back at the niche. It was exactly the same, except that there were no candles burning in front of it. “It’s one of the six doors. No doubt about it. We’re through. This is the parallel world.”

  The people who walked past them were dressed in heavy, formal clothes. Everybody wore a hat: the men in bowlers or trilbies or pork pies, the women in berets or cloches. They all wore overcoats. Nobody wore sneakers and it was noticeable how well polished their shoes were.

  “Do you think we’ve come back in time?” asked Nancy. Several people slowed down and stared at her, in her fringed buckskin coat, her short white skirt and her knee-high buckskin boots.

  “I don’t know. Maybe we have. It doesn’t look like anybody ever even heard of Adidas.”

  Nancy glanced anxiously back at the niche. “I just hope we can find our way back OK.”

  “We must be able to. If Julia was here, and they dumped her body back in the real world, then the doors must work both ways.”

  A young lad with a cloth cap went past, carrying a large basket heaped with loaves of bread. When he caught sight of Nancy he turned around and gave her a piercing wolf-whistle. “’Ere, miss! Left your frock at ’ome?”

  “This is so embarrassing,” said Nancy. “Even if we haven’t come back in time, I don’t think anybody’s seen a miniskirt before.”

  “You could button up your coat.”

  “I have a much better idea. Let’s go back and find some clothes that don’t attract so much attention.”

  “We’ll have to find some candles first.”

  “What? I thought you bought a whole box.”

  “I did, but I left them behind on the sidewalk.”

  “God, Josh. You’re a genius. How did you think we were going to get back?”

  “I didn’t. I didn’t really believe that we’d get here at all.”

  “Well, we must be able to buy some candles.”

  They walked down to the bottom of Star Yard. Most of the people who passed them were in too much of a hurry to notice them, but a rowdy group of office girls and their bowler-hatted boyfriends all stopped and stared and said, “Blimey, look at ’er!”

  When they reached Carey Street they began to realize what a different world they had walked into. The older buildings were almost all the same, except that
they seemed much more heavily blackened with soot. But the road was cobbled, even if the cobbles had been covered over with tarmacadam, and the traffic that snarled it up looked as if somebody had emptied a 1930s motor museum. Rileys, Bentleys, Wolseleys – all with huge chrome-plated headlamps and sweeping mudguards and running-boards.

  They made their way down Chancery Lane, past the dark Gothic windows of the Law Society building. The sidewalks on both sides of the street were crowded with people, all dressed in overcoats and hats. Josh was beginning to think that he must be the only person on the planet who wasn’t wearing anything on his head. An old gentleman with a red carnation in his lapel stopped and took off his bowler hat and stared at Nancy with his mouth open, as if Mary Magdalene had just walked past him.

  Fleet Street was even more crowded than Chancery Lane. The traffic was at a standstill, all the way down the hill to Ludgate Circus. A steam train crossed the railway bridge on the other side of the circus, chuffing thick brown smoke and orange sparks into the air. Through the smoke Josh could make out the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral.

  They crossed Fleet Street, weaving their way between buses and taxis. On the opposite corner there was a newsstand, with scores of magazines and newspapers on display. The posters for The Evening News announced ZEPPELIN ACCIDENT: SEVEN KILLED and RANGOON RIOTS: REBELS QUELLED. The news-vendor wore a flat cap and a long shabby coat and had a burned-down cigarette stuck to his lower lip. Every now and then, without warning, he whooped out, “‘Orrible hairship haccident, seven day-ead!”

  Josh offered him a fifty pence coin and said, “News, please.”

  The vendor looked down at the coin as if a pigeon had blessed the palm of his hand. “What’s this, then? Bloody American, is it?”

  “It’s a fifty pence piece. A British fifty pence piece.”

  The news-vendor turned it this way and that, and then handed it back. “Sorry mate. Tuppence-ha’penny in real money or nothing.”

  “This is real money. Look, it has the queen’s head on it.”

  “’Oo, the queen of Sheba?”

  “The queen of England, of course.”

  The news-vendor turned away and served another customer, and then another, tossing their coins into the upturned lid of a biscuit tin. Nancy tugged Josh’s sleeve and gave a meaningful nod of her head toward the money. There were heaps of large brown pennies, as well as small silver coins the size of dimes, and some little gold-colored ones, too, with seven or eight sides. None of them bore a likeness of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.