The Doorkeepers Read online

  “Sure,” he said. He couldn’t take his eyes away from the picture of Julia on the television screen, smiling at him. He could remember the morning that he had taken that picture. He could remember it as clearly as if it had been today.

  That afternoon, shortly before five o’clock, a police car came to collect them and take them to the mortuary at St Thomas’s Hospital. The car was so tiny that Josh had to try three different ways of folding himself up before he managed to climb into the front passenger seat. They drove along the Embankment, and for the first time Josh saw the River Thames, shining brilliant gold in the afternoon sun.

  Josh peered at it over his knees. “It’s a whole lot wider than I imagined it,” he told the young constable who was driving them. “I thought it was going to be real narrow. You know, and dirty.”

  “Oh, no, sir, it’s much cleaner than it used to be. They’ve caught salmon, right up as far as Chelsea Harbour. Mind you, I wouldn’t swim in it. Too many dodgy currents.”

  Josh thought of the “dodgy currents” that must have swirled Julia’s body upstream, like Ophelia.

  Then they were driving around Parliament Square, and he saw Westminster Abbey for the first time, and the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. He always felt a sense of history in San Francisco, with the wooden houses and the cable cars, but London’s history was different: older, darker, much more complicated, much more multi-layered. In a way that he had never expected, he found it threatening – as if the British knew something that he didn’t know, and would never tell him what it was.

  They drove over Westminster Bridge. “Earth has not anything to show more fair,” quoted the young constable.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “William Wordsworth, that’s what he wrote about standing on Westminster Bridge.”

  “William Wordsworth actually wrote that here?”

  “Well, no, sir. I expect he went home and did it.”

  Josh turned and looked at the constable and said, “Do you mind if I ask your name?”

  “Not at all, sir. Police Constable Smart.”

  “Yes,” said Josh. “I might have guessed.”

  The morgue attendant switched on the closed-circuit TV camera and there she suddenly was. Her face was fluorescent gray, like all drowned people. Her eyes were open and staring straight at him, out of the screen.

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s her.”

  DS Paul said, “Thank you, Mr Winward,” and led him out of the room.

  “Is that it?” he asked her.

  “Just for the moment, yes. But depending on what response we get from the public in the next thirty-six hours, we may ask you to go on television and make an appeal for witnesses. You wouldn’t mind doing that, would you?”

  He shook his head. He was beginning to feel badly jet-lagged and the floor kept rising and falling. Nancy said, “Let’s go back to the hotel, OK? I think you’ve had enough for one day.”

  They walked along a long, antiseptic-smelling corridor. An elderly woman approached them, pushed in a wheelchair by a hospital porter in a turban. She was so old that she was almost transparent: white hair, white skin, even her eyes were colorless. As she was wheeled past them, she whispered, “Jack.”

  Five

  Josh froze, and then turned slowly around to stare at the old woman as she was pushed away.

  “Josh?” said Nancy. “What’s the matter?”

  “That old woman … she just said my name. Well, she said ‘Jack’, anyhow.”

  “Oh, come on, you’re imagining it. How could she know your name?”

  “I swear it, Nance. She said, ‘Jack’.”

  DS Paul impatiently looked at her watch. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I’m late for a meeting. Perhaps I can call you tomorrow morning.”

  “Oh, sure, yes,” said Josh, still staring after the old woman. She was pushed through a pair of double swing doors, and then she was gone. Josh hesitated for a moment and then began to hurry after her.

  “Josh!” Nancy protested, jogging after him with her Indian bead bag slap-slap-slapping on her thigh.

  Josh shoved his way through the double doors and there was the woman and her Sikh attendant, silhouetted against the window at the end of the corridor. He called out, “Pardon me!” and hurried after them. He reached the old woman just as the Sikh was about to open a door marked X-ray Department: Authorized Personnel Only.

  “I’m sorry,” said Josh, “but I believe this lady called out my name.”

  The Sikh porter stared at him impassively. “She is having to go for an X-ray, sir. Excuse me.”

  Josh hunkered down beside the wheelchair and took hold of the old lady’s hand. The skin was thin and crinkly, like tissue paper. She looked down at him and gave him something that could have passed for a smile. She was so old that it was impossible to tell if she had ever been really beautiful, but Josh could see that she had never been ugly.

  “You said my name. Back there, in the corridor, you said ‘Jack’.”

  “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick,” she whispered. She spoke so softly that he could barely hear her.

  “How did you know what my name was? That’s what my mother calls me, Jack.”

  “I know what you’re looking for, Jack. But you won’t find it, you know. Not unless you look here.” She tapped her forehead with her long chalky fingernail.

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “You won’t understand, either. Not unless you’re nimble. Not unless you’re quick.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the porter interrupted. “This lady has to get to X-ray.”

  Josh slowly stood up. Maybe the old woman hadn’t really whispered his name at all. Maybe she was senile, and had simply been babbling a nursery rhyme from the days that she could still remember clearly.

  “Take care,” he told her, and turned to go. But suddenly she reached out and snatched at his sleeve.

  “Come on, Polly, leave the gentleman alone,” the porter smiled. “Our Polly, she’s one for the men, aren’t you, Polly?”

  But the old woman continued to clutch at Josh’s sleeve and she wouldn’t let go. She fixed him with her boiled-cod eyes and hissed at him as loudly as she could manage. “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?”

  “That’s enough, Polly,” said the porter, and before Josh had a chance to ask her what she was talking about, she was pushed into the X-ray department and out of sight.

  “What the hell was all that about?” asked Nancy.

  Josh shook his head. “I don’t have any idea. It sounded like a Mother Goose rhyme.”

  The Sikh porter came out again, pushing an empty wheelchair. “I’m sorry if Polly was any trouble to you. She is a very determined lady, even for one hundred and one.”

  “One hundred and one? That’s how old she is?”

  “She celebrated her birthday last week. She is very wonderful for her age, you know. But she does like to be grabbing people.”

  “Do you have any idea what she was talking about? The six doors standing in London Town?”

  The porter gave Josh a dazzling smile, full of gold teeth. “I’m sorry. I never listen to anything they say. I nod my head and I say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and ‘really’ and ‘how terrible’. But you can’t listen to them all day. You would be going doolally in your head, too.”

  “It could be a Mother Goose rhyme, couldn’t it … Six doors they stand in London Town?”

  The porter didn’t stop smiling. “I was brought up in Punjab. I didn’t speak English until I was seventeen.”

  “OK, thanks,” said Josh, and together he and Nancy walked back to the front of the hospital, where PC Smart was waiting for them.

  “All right, then?” he asked. “Back to Earl’s Court, is it?”

  “Yes, please.” It was nearly eleven o’clock already and Josh wanted to collect the photographs of Julia from the Kall-
Kwik print shop.

  They struggled their way through the mid-morning traffic. “Is it always as busy as this?” asked Nancy.

  “It’s not too bad today. At least they’re not having a demonstration or a state opening of Parliament. Then it’s murder.” He sat for a while, drumming his fingers on his steering wheel. Then he said, “It’s not getting any worse, though. They just brought out a report that London’s traffic moves at exactly the same average speed today that it did in 1899.”

  “You know a whole lot about London.”

  “I know a lot about a lot of things. It’s my hobby, general knowledge. Here’s one for you – do more people die every year from air crashes, or accidents with donkeys?”

  “I really couldn’t guess.”

  “Accidents with donkeys. Amazing, isn’t it? So when you’re going to fly back to the States, make sure you pick an airplane and not a donkey. You’ll thank me for it, I promise you.”

  Josh stared at Nancy in disbelief. He was beginning to feel that he was in the middle of a very long Monty Python sketch. Nancy must have felt the same way, too, because she reached over and squeezed his hand.

  “Did you ever hear of a Mother Goose rhyme about six doors standing in London?” Josh asked PC Smart.

  “Yes, sir. My nan used to sing it to me. Six doors they stand in London Town. Six doors they stand in London, too.”

  “Any idea what it means?”

  “Haven’t the foggiest. Sorry.”

  “It doesn’t seem to make any sense, does it? Six doors standing in London, but six doors standing in London, too?”

  “No, sir. Not unless there are twelve doors altogether.”

  Nancy said, “You don’t honestly think it’s relevant to Julia, do you? That poor old woman was demented.”

  “She knew my name was Jack, and who knows that except for you and my mother? And she knew that I was looking for something. Maybe that doesn’t mean anything at all. But then maybe it does. Maybe she was trying to give me some kind of a clue.”

  “Come on, Josh. You don’t believe in all that psychic stuff.”

  “No, I don’t. But I do believe that some people have heightened perception, the same as dogs.”

  “But knowing what somebody’s thinking … that’s a whole different ball game than being able to hear them or smell them.”

  “Why should it be? Everybody’s brain gives off electric pulses, right? I mean, that’s how we think. The pulses are pretty weak, not like radio waves. But if somebody happened to be sensitive enough to pick them up, they could hear what you were thinking, as clearly as smelling you from five miles away.”

  “That’s a monster if.”

  “I know it is. But old Polly knew what my name was and she knew that I was looking for something. So what explanation do you have for that?”

  “Josh,” said Nancy, “what happened to Julia was terrible. But you mustn’t let it push you off the edge.”

  “No, well, no, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. But I’d still like to know what that rhyme means. And Jack be nimble, Jack be quick. What was that all about? Why do I have to be nimble? Why do I have to be quick?”

  “Because we’ve arrived, sir,” put in PC Smart, pulling up in front of their hotel. It was beginning to rain, and a few large spots were measling the sidewalks.

  “Have a good evening, sir. Detective Sergeant Paul will be in touch with you tomorrow. Oh, and just a word of advice. I know you’ve probably seen all these TV programs where an American comes over to London and sorts out a crime that the poor old British woodentops can’t make head nor tail of. But the team we’ve got on your sister’s case, they’re absolutely shit-hot. So there’s no need to try any amateur detective-work of your own. Just relax while you’re here, and enjoy the sights, if you get my drift.”

  “Were you specially instructed to tell me that?

  PC Smart nodded. His cheeks were bright pink and he only shaved in two small patches on either side of his chin.

  “No amateur detective-work?” Josh retorted. “This is the city of Sherlock Holmes!”

  “Sherlock Holmes was a story, sir. This is real. And the point is, if you did find something, you might compromise valuable evidence without even realizing what you were doing.”

  “All right,” said Josh, as he climbed awkwardly out of the car. “Drift got.”

  All the same, he and Nancy went to collect 200 posters of Julia from the Kall-Kwik copy shop, as well as two boxes of thumbtacks, and they spent over two hours fastening them to fence posts and gates and the scabby gray-green trunks of plane trees. They stopped for half an hour at Pizza Express, and for once the coffee was tolerable and the pizza was marginally tastier than they would have been served in the States.

  Nancy said, “I want to make sure that you stay balanced, Josh. I know you have to grieve, but don’t let your grieving drive you crazy.”

  Josh was coping with a mouthful of hot pepperoni. “I wohmp.”

  “Like, if we find out anything, we tell the police, OK? We don’t try to follow it up on our own?”

  Josh swallowed, and wiped his mouth. “We haven’t found out anything yet, and I don’t think we’re likely to.”

  “But if we do.”

  “Even if we do, how are we going to be able to tell if it’s serious or not? They don’t speak English here, they speak Sarcastic. ‘Wordsworth went home and wrote it’ – haw, haw, haw. No wonder they lost the Colonies.”

  By the time they had finished their pizza it had stopped raining and a sick, watery sunlight was shining down the Earl’s Court Road. They fastened their “Have You Seen This Girl?” posters of Julia on to the front of their windbreakers with safety pins and stood against the railings right outside the station entrance. Rush hour was approaching, and every time a train arrived another surge of people came hurrying out, all elbows and umbrellas and grim, tired, determined faces. At the same time there was a sluggish cross-tide of people walking up and down the sidewalk in front of the station, and people stopping to buy copies of the Evening Standard from the newsstand, and people just milling around as if they had nothing to do and no place to go.

  Josh and Nancy stood there for three and a half hours, until the rush hour subsided and the streetlights came on. They had almost given up when a black mongrel with a pointed nose came trotting out of the station entrance. It wore bells around its collar and a little sheepskin coat. It seemed to be on its own, and Josh immediately stuck two fingers in his mouth and gave it a high, piercing whistle. It stopped and stared at him with bulging amber eyes, one ear floppy and the other pricked up.

  “Here,” called Josh. He pointed his finger at the dog, and then drew it downward to point to a place by his side. The dog looked around with a querying expression on its face, as if it were asking the crowds of people in the station entrance what the hell this was all about, all this whistling and pointing. But Josh repeated his gesture and the dog obediently walked up to him.

  “Sit right there,” Josh ordered, and it sat. “I don’t know what you’re doing, running around on your own without a leash, but that’s pretty heavy traffic out there. You try crossing that street in that little coat of yours, you could end up looking like a sheepskin tortilla.”

  Nancy hunkered down beside the dog and stroked him. “Hi, little fellow! He’s cute, isn’t he? What breed do you think he is?”

  “You mean, what breed do I think he isn’t?”

  Nancy took a bag of dried apricot slices out of her pocket and held one up in front of the dog’s nose. “You want some organic fruit? Hmmh? Do you know how to say please?”

  Josh pointed at the dog’s right leg and gave the animal a curt, beckoning gesture. “Lift your paw. That’s right. Lift it right up. Now bark. Come on, woof.”

  The dog barked, but at that moment a young black woman in a black beret pushed her way out of the station entrance and said, “Hey! What are you doing? That’s my dog!”

  She came up to them indignantly and trie
d to open the dog’s mouth. “What did you feed him? You shouldn’t feed other people’s dogs!”

  “Come on,” said Nancy, confused and embarrassed. “It was only a piece of dried apricot.”

  The woman stood up straight and looked at Josh and Nancy with a frown of almost ludicrous severity. She was not tall, only 5ft 4ins or thereabouts, but she had extraordinary presence. Josh could sense a kind of drama about her, an invisible cyclone of self-possession, as if she were the ringmistress and the world around her was her private circus. Her beret was studded with enamel pins and glittery glass brooches and her hair was plaited with colored beads. She wore a black velvet-collared cape and a very short black dress, with thick black leggings and black boots.

  “Dried apricot?” she said, wrinkling up her nose.

  “Nancy’s into … organic food,” Josh explained.

  The woman looked down at her dog, which had finished the fruit and was licking its lips for more. Then she said, “OK. But I have to be careful, you know what I mean? People give him all kinds of rubbish, you know, like bits of old chicken tikka sandwich.”

  “Sorry,” said Josh. He was already learning that “sorry” was a very useful word in England. If somebody bumped into you in the street, you both said “sorry”, for some inexplicable reason.

  “OK, no harm done.” She reached down to clip a leash on the dog’s collar, and as she did so she glanced at the posters of Julia pinned on to their windbreakers. “You’re looking for her?”

  “That’s right,” said Josh. “I’m her brother, and this is my girlfriend. We’re trying to trace anybody who might have known her.”

  “I knew her.”

  Josh stared at her. “You knew her?”

  “Yeah. Daisy, we always used to call her, because of her tattoo. I couldn’t believe it when I heard that she’d been murdered.”

  “Why didn’t you call the police?”

  “What was the point? I hadn’t seen her for ages. Besides, you know.” She gave an eloquent shrug which showed that she didn’t like the idea of having anything to do with authority.

  Josh said, “For Christ’s sake, any little piece of information might help.”