The Doorkeepers (7 page)

“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 tried 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.”

“Yeah, well.” The woman looked impatient to cross the road.

“Listen, would you mind if we asked you some questions about her? She was missing for nearly a year, and nobody seems to have any idea where she was.”

“Well … all right, then. But we can't do it out on the street, can we? Come back to my place. It's only just around the corner.”

It was too noisy to talk as they walked along Earl's Court Road, but once they had turned into Trebovir Road, the woman said, “I just couldn't believe that anybody would want to do anything like that to Daisy. She was a treasure, you know. A real treasure.”

“Did you know her very well?” asked Josh.

“She stayed with me for a couple of weeks, after she walked out on those horrible Arabs. She was supposed to stay in some hotel, but I wouldn't let her. She was too – what d'you call it? – vulnerable, you know what I mean? I didn't want her staying in some crappy hotel room all on her own and cutting her wrists in the bath.”

“You think she was suicidal?” asked Nancy.

The woman opened a peculiar black bag that looked like a shrunken head, and took out a set of keys. “She might have been, left on her own. But she wasn't left on her own.”

The dog had already trotted ahead of them until it reached the steps of a gloomy red-brick mansion block. They climbed the brown and white tiled steps and the woman opened the front door. Inside it was impenetrably dark until she pressed the timeswitch. The hallway was cold and narrow with an old-fashioned bicycle in it.

“I'm right at the top,” she said. “Up in the tower, like the Wicked Witch of the West.” She led them up a steep flight of stairs. Halfway up, the timeswitch clicked and they were plunged into darkness again. “Don't move,” warned the woman. She found the switch on the next landing and they continued their ascent. Behind every door they passed they could hear music, or the television, or people talking.

The woman opened the door to her flat. It was a wide, open-plan space, right up in the roof, with sloping ceilings, illuminated by an odd collection of spotlights and lamps made out of bottles and seashells and colored glass vases. The walls were painted gray and hung with literally hundreds of charms and mascots and mystical pictures of saints and demons. To the left, under the window, lay a crumpled black futon, with a mobile of sequinned fishes circling over it. To the right, there was a table and chairs in the Mexican rustic style, painted red and gold. Ahead, under another window, was a small kitchen area, with shelves that were crowded with every conceivable kind of spice and herb and seasoning, from cassareep to dry masala. There was a lingering aroma of sandalwood joss sticks and Caribbean cooking.

The dog immediately went to his bowl and started to make a furious lapping noise. The woman dropped her bag on the table and said, “How about a cup of tea? I always have a cup of tea as soon as I get home.”

“Sure, that'd be great. My name's Josh, by the way. Josh Winward. This is Nancy.”

The woman held out her hand, her wrist jangling with bangles. “Ella Tibibnia, and my dog's called Abraxas. That's a very magical name, Abraxas. It's a pity he's such a plonker. You never think of dogs being plonkers, do you? But he is.”

Josh didn't have the faintest idea what a “plonker” was, but he pulled a kind of Harrison Ford grimace to show that he probably agreed. Ella filled a big blue enamel kettle with water and put it on the gas to boil. “You like hawthorn flower tea? It's very good for insomnia.”

“Sure, whatever you're brewing up.” Josh looked around the room. Nancy was inspecting an opalescent glass globe in a decorative bronze base, and a collection of sinister little figurines, like chess pieces, all with their heads covered with hoods.

“When was the last time you saw Julia?” Josh asked Ella.

“I can tell you the exact date.” She went across to a bookshelf
crowded with an odd assortment of paperbacks and old leather-bound volumes, and brought down a dog-eared exercise book marked DiArY in multicolored pens. She thumbed through it for a while, and then she said, “Here it is. May tenth last year. It was a Sunday. We took Abraxas for a walk in the morning, in Holland Park. Then we had lunch with Wally and Kim in Philbeach Gardens, which is just across the road from here. Daisy was in a really good mood, because she'd found herself a new job. In fact she was almost in too much of a good mood. She kept talking all the time and flapping her hands around. I remember one of my friends asking if she was on something.”