The Doorkeepers

Four

Detective Sergeant Paul met them at Heathrow Airport as they came out of immigration, holding up a cardboard sign saying Winward. To Josh’s surprise, she was a petite Asian woman in a smart black suit and a brown silk blouse, her hair tightly braided on top of her head. Quite pretty, and very delicate, with hand movements like an Oriental temple-dance. “Mr Winward? I’m Indira Paul. I’m so pleased you made the effort to come here. This could be a considerable help, you know.”

“Anything we can do,” said Josh.

It was a warm, sunny day, unusually warm for March. As they drove along the M4 into West London, Josh saw pink cherry trees blossoming and bushes coming into leaf, and the sun sparkling from the windows of thousands of suburban houses and factories. Up above them, the sky was the clearest of blues, with large white cumulus clouds rolling across it like Nelson’s navy.

“You know, I thought it was always raining in London,” Josh remarked.

“We get our share,” said DS Paul. “But we’ve been having a dry spell. When your sister was found the river was very low, and her body was caught on a mudbank. Otherwise, you know, she might have been carried a lot further, even back out to sea.”

“Who found her?”

“Some anglers, digging in the mud for worms, at a place called Strand-on-the-Green. But we think she was dropped into the river much further downstream.”

“Downstream?”

“The Thames is tidal, up as far as Teddington Lock. The pathologist estimates that she was in the water for approximately five to six hours, which means that she went into the river just before midnight. At that time, the tide was coming in, and her body would have been carried upstream. We’ve worked out how far she would have traveled before the tide began to turn, and we think that she was probably dropped into the river somewhere between Southwark Bridge and London Bridge.”

“I see,” said Josh, although he had no idea of where any of these places were. Nancy, in the back seat, reached forward and touched his shoulder, just to comfort him. The morning sunlight flickered through the car as they drove over a long flyover with Victorian church spires on one side and glittering office blocks on the other. Then they descended into three lanes of solid traffic, and rows of apartment blocks and hotels and shops.

Josh had never visited England before, but he had never imagined that London would feel so foreign. The buildings weren’t tall, but they had a grimy Imperial massiveness about them. The traffic was deafening and hair-raisingly fast, and the sidewalks were crowded with hordes of shoppers. The famous red buses didn’t drive sedately along, the way they always did in movies: they barged through the traffic at full speed, belching out clouds of diesel smoke, and the black taxicabs were just the same. DS Paul drove around Hyde Park Corner, where six lanes of traffic jostled to go in twelve different directions, and as they narrowly missed a white decorator’s van and turned into Grosvenor Place, all Josh could say was, “Jesus.”

They arrived at last in DS Paul’s office in the bland 1960s office block of New Scotland Yard. It was a large untidy room which she shared with four other officers, with a view of the building next door. Phones kept ringing and people kept hurrying in and out, and in the far corner a detective was frowning at a computer as if he couldn’t understand what it was.

“How about a cup of coffee?” DS Paul suggested.

“You have decaf?” asked Nancy.

“Sorry. We’ve got black or white, with sugar or without. Or tea, if you’d rather. Or oxtail soup.”

Josh and Nancy settled for two Cokes. They sat down next to the air-conditioning vent, which was uncomfortably hot, while the sun shone through the dusty windows into their eyes. DS Paul sat down at her desk and opened a file containing interview sheets and glossy color photographs.

“You realize that, now you’re here, I’m going to have to ask you to make a formal identification of your sister’s body.”

“Yes, well, I guessed you would.”

“I have some photographs here. I wonder if you could look at them and confirm that it’s her.”

Josh swallowed and Nancy reached out and held his arm. “OK,” he said, his mouth suddenly dry.

DS Paul handed over one color print, and then another. In the first, which was taken from the neck up, Julia lay against a pale green background, her eyes open, her hair wet and bedraggled, her cheeks puffy and pale. It was true what they said about your soul leaving you, when you died. It looked like Julia, but Julia simply wasn’t there.

The second print showed her right shoulder, and the tiny daisy tattoo.

“That’s her,” said Josh. “That’s Julia. But I never saw the tattoo before.”

“Well, as I said, it was the tattoo that identified her. The tattoo artist called us and said he remembered an American girl who had asked him to do it specially. Apparently she was very chatty. She told him that she had only just arrived in England and that she was looking for a new life. She was trying to find a job as a nanny or something similar, but she didn’t have a work permit. So the tattoist put her on to a girlfriend of his who knew an employment agency that didn’t ask too many questions about where a girl came from, or what her qualifications were.”

“Was that the Golden Rose Employment Agency? That was the last contact number Julia gave me.”

“That’s right. They found her a position with a Saudi family in Holland Park, looking after two small children. But it seems as if she didn’t like the job very much. The mother treated her like a slave, and the father kept making advances. So after three weeks she left.”

“What did she do then?” asked Josh.

DS Paul took back the pictures. “I was hoping that you could tell me that. Didn’t she contact you at all?”

“Not once. Not a word. I tried calling the agency a couple of times, but they just said that they hadn’t heard from her, either. I just assumed that she would get back in touch with us when she felt ready. Didn’t she go back to the agency for another job?”

“No. She told them over the phone that she was quitting the Saudi job and that was the last time they ever heard from her. She didn’t even collect her wages, and they didn’t know where to send them.”

“They had no address for her?”

DS Paul shook her head. “She told them she was in temporary accommodation at the Paragon Hotel in Earl’s Court. It’s a very cheap place, fifteen pounds a night, popular with backpackers. But wherever she was, she wasn’t there. The management always keep their guests’ passports – you know, just in case they try to do a runner – and no single American females have stayed there for over a year.”

“And nobody else knows where she might have been?”

DS Paul shook her head. “Nobody. But we’ve sent her picture out to the media, and we’re trying to arrange an appeal for information on Crimewatch – that’s a BBC-TV program where we ask viewers to help solving crimes. We usually get a very good response to that.”

“How can somebody just disappear like that? I mean, totally?”

“People do it every day, Mr Winward. There are eight million people in London and it isn’t difficult to get swallowed up, especially if you want to be.”

They ate lunch at a pub called The Frog & Waistcoat, around the back of Victoria Station. It was smoky and noisy and crowded with a mixture of office workers and miserable-looking travelers with too many bulging bags.

“I feel like I’ve walked right into a Dickens novel,” said Josh. Everybody around him was talking very loudly but he couldn’t understand a word they were saying. He had always assumed that the English spoke English the way they did in movies, clipped and precise, but instead they talked in a mangled torrent, and he couldn’t tell when one word ended and another began. He had ordered shepherd’s pie, and then the barman had asked him again if he wanted a pie.

“Yes, the pie.”

“Pie of what?”

“Sorry, I don’t understand.”

“Pie of ordinary, pie of best, pie of Guinness, what?”

He was almost reduced to sign language, but even sign language didn’t help when the girl behind the food counter asked if Nancy wanted a jacket. He thought that they might have inadvertently offended the pub’s dress code.

“Maybe this was a mistake,” said Josh, as he poked at his shepherd’s pie.

“You think that’s a mistake, you ought to taste this lasagne.”

“No, I mean coming here. The police don’t seem to know squat.”

“Oh, come on, Josh. You have to give them time. It was a miracle they even found out who she was.”

“I guess you’re right. But where the hell has Julia been for the last ten months? You’d have thought that she’d have left some kind of forwarding address.”

“Think about it: if she told her employment agency that she was staying at the Paragon Hotel in the Earl’s Court district then she must at least have known it, even if she didn’t actually check in there. So maybe we should look around Earl’s Court, and see if we can find anybody who remembers her.”

“You don’t think the police are going to do that?”

“I’m sure they will. But where’s the harm in us doing it, too?”

Josh took a cautious mouthful of pie. “This is weird,” he said, after a while. “I hate it, but I want some more.” He paused, and then he said, “What do you think a ‘jacket’ is?”

Nancy said, “We could print up some enlargements of a picture of Julia, and stick them on lamp-posts and stuff. You know, ‘Have You Seen This Girl?’”

Josh nodded. “That’s a good idea.” He pushed aside his plate and opened up his newly bought A-Z Guide to London. “I guess we’re here, right? Earl’s Court is here, only three subway stops away. If we can find ourselves a hotel around there …”

They took the tube to Earl’s Court, where the sidewalk was crowded with young people waiting for nothing in particular and old people shuffling along with shopping baskets on wheels. There was a pungent smell of hamburgers-and-onions in the air.

They found the Paragon Hotel two streets down, in Barkston Gardens – a red-brick Edwardian building with battered cream paintwork and drooping net curtains as gray as cobwebs. Inside it was gloomy and overheated and the crimson patterned carpet was worn down to the string. Behind the reception desk sat an overweight woman with dyed-blonde hair and a black suit that was far too tight for her.

“If you’re looking for a room, dear, sorry – we’re full to busting.”

“No, no, we don’t need a room. We were wondering if you might remember seeing this girl.” Josh handed over a picture of Julia standing outside a bookstore. “We’re talking about a year ago, last spring sometime.”

The woman found a pair of thumbprinted reading glasses and peered at the photograph closely. “No,” she said, after a while. “Can’t say I do. But, you know, they come and they go, thousands of them, these young people, and they all look the same to me. All looking for something, or running away from something.”

“You’re absolutely sure you don’t remember her?”

“I honestly wish I did. But, no. I’m sorry. Missing, is she?”

“You could say that. She’s dead.”

“Oh, I’m really sorry. She’s not that girl the police were here asking about? The American one?”

“That’s right, Julia Winward. She’s my sister. She was my sister.”

“It’s a bloody tragedy,” said the woman, shaking her head. “So young, too. They come and they go, you know, thousands of them, and sometimes I feel like taking hold of them and shaking them and saying, ‘Where are you going? What on earth do you think you’re going to find?’ But still they come, year after year. So hopeful, you know. Backpacking round God knows where, looking for God knows what.”

“We’re going to have some copies of this picture printed,” said Nancy. “Is it OK if we pin one up in here?”

“Oh, of course it is. You’re very welcome. But I’ll tell you what you ought to do. Make a big picture like a poster and stand outside the tube station. Just stand there, all day. If she’s ever been around here, sooner or later somebody will recognize her.”

“Well, thanks, you’re really kind,” said Josh.

“Don’t mention it. I lost somebody once. My only son Terence. He went off to India, that was back in the Beatles days. Can’t think what he was looking for. We all end up with two kids and a mortgage and a clapped-out Datsun, don’t we? We don’t need no maharishi to tell us that.”

She found a small lacy handkerchief in her pocket and dabbed her nose. “He died, my Terence. Hepatitis. Such a waste. All those shirts I ironed for him, for school. All those packed lunches. And they cremated him, and scattered his ashes in the bloody Ganges.”

They found a hotel overlooking West Brompton Cemetery, a real Victorian cemetery with tilting headstones and weeping angels. In complete contrast, the hotel was a seven-story concrete block with air-conditioning and new blue carpets and crowds of bewildered Japanese around the reception area. It could have been any hotel anywhere at all, and that was what Josh wanted. As they went up in the elevator he saw himself reflected in the stainless steel doors and he thought that he looked like a ghost. His hair was tousled and his eyes were reddened and his nose looked twice as big as normal. His first day in London had left him grimy and depressed and tired, and he was desperate for a cold beer and a shower and some mindless TV.

He showered until his skin was bright pink, and then he lay on the bed in his complimentary Sheridan Hotels bathrobe watching The Simpsons and drinking Harp lager out of the can. It was four o’clock now, and the sun was much lower. Nancy came out of the bathroom toweling her hair. “I don’t know how you can come all the way to England and watch The Simpsons. Apart from that, you hate The Simpsons.”

“I know I do. But at least I can understand what they’re saying. Did you bring any dental floss?”

“I forgot. We’ll have to buy some.”

“They’ve probably never heard of dental floss in England. Or they call it something totally different, like ‘trousers’, and we’ll never find out what it is.”

“What are you panicking about? You never used to floss at all until you met me.”

“Of course I flossed before I met you. You’re trying to make me sound like some kind of animal.”

“You are a kind of animal. You’re more like an animal than any man I ever met. Gentle, affectionate, stupid and manic-depressive.”

“I love you, too.”

Nancy went to the window and drew back the nets, and Josh climbed off the bed and joined her. Six stories below they could see rows of small backyards, some with sheds, some with pink-blossoming trees, some with rusty automobile parts, some with fish ponds. In the distance, in the late-afternoon haze, they could see thousands of chimney pots, and turrets, and spires, and more trees. Josh had never seen a city with so many trees in it.

He picked up his A-Z. “That’s south-east we’re looking at, toward Fulham.”

“They call it ‘Fullum’. I heard a woman in reception.”

“All right, Fullum. And beyond Fullum is Walham Green, except they probably call it ‘Wallum’. And beyond Wallum Green is … the River Thames.” He closed the book. “I don’t know whether I want to see the Thames. I keep thinking about Julia floating along it. Upstream. Empty.”

They were still staring out of the window when the news came on the television: “In the Middle East … six Israelis were killed and two seriously injured… Police today released a new picture of the murdered woman found floating in the Thames two days ago … Miss Julia Winward, twenty-three, from San Francisco, California, could have been the seventh victim of a serial killer who mutilates his victims and drops them in the river at or near Southwark Bridge … If you knew Julia Winward or if you saw her at any time in the past twelve months, please contact New Scotland Yard on this special number …”

“You see,” said Nancy, curling a finger around Josh’s hair. “They’re doing everything they can.”

“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.”