The Doorkeepers

Six

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.”

“Maybe she was just excited,” Nancy suggested.

“No, no, it was more than just excitement. I mean, what are we talking about here, it was only a secretarial job for some electrical company out on the Great West Road. But she was bubbling, you know? And saying that she couldn’t wait to start. You’d have thought that she was going off somewhere really exotic.”

Josh said, “I don’t know the Great West Road. Is that someplace you might get excited about?”

“You’re joking, I hope. It’s just one boring factory after another. Hotpoint washing machines. Smith’s Crisps.”

“She didn’t leave you her new address?”

“She kept saying that she was going to, but we all got a bit pissed that afternoon and I forgot to ask her for it. But …” Ella returned to the bookcase and took out a folded letter that was tucked between two books. “I found this under her futon after she’d gone.”

Josh angled the letter toward the nearest lamp. It had a black and white illustration of a 1930s factory on the top, with pennants flying from the roof, and the name Wheatstone Electrics C° Ltd in elegant, dated lettering. The address was Great West Road, Brentford, Middlesex, and the telephone number EALing 6181.

The letter was addressed to Julia here, at 37 Trebovir Road. It was dated May 6, 2000, and it was signed by somebody called F.G. Mordant, Sales Director. It said: “We are pleased to be able to offer you a secretarial position, commencing on May 11, at a salary of £7.13s.6d a week. Please be at Star Yard as before at 8:15 a.m.”

“This was written on a manual typewriter,” said Josh. “You don’t often see that these days.”

“You don’t often see somebody being offered £7.13s.6d a week, either,” put in Ella. “That’s old money, before Britain went decimal, and that was over twenty-five years ago. Apart from the fact that a secretary gets seven pounds an hour these days, not seven pounds a week.”

“Did you try calling this number?”

“No point. They haven’t had an EALing exchange since 1966. It’s all numbers these days. I tried directory enquiries, too, but they didn’t have any record of a company called Wheatstone Electrics.”

“What about Star Yard?”

“I looked that up in the A-Z. It’s just a little pedestrian cut-through off Carey Street, near the Law Courts. Right in the city – nowhere near the Great West Road.”

Josh turned the letter over. There was another address, written in blue ballpoint pen, on the other side. He recognized Julia’s writing immediately. 53b Kaiser Gardens, Lavender Hill. And the name Mrs Marguerite Marmion.

Ella poured boiling water into a large brown teapot and swirled it around. “Before you ask, there is no Kaiser Gardens in Lavender Hill, nor anywhere else in London, and there’s no Mrs Marguerite Marmion in the London telephone directory.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Look them up for yourself. It’s possible that Mrs Marguerite Marmion hasn’t got a phone, or else she’s ex-directory. But if the street doesn’t exist …”

Nancy took the letter and examined it minutely. “This is really strange, isn’t it? I mean, it’s quite fashionable for companies to use a traditional old picture on their letterhead, but they’d put their up-to-date telephone number and fax and e-mail numbers on it, wouldn’t they?”

Ella shrugged. “What difference does it make, if there’s no such company?”

“Well, none. But if Julia didn’t go to the Wheatstone Electrics Company, where did she go?”

“My friend Wally thinks she was playing a practical joke. She must have found some old paper and made a copy of it.”

“You think so?” said Josh. “You feel this letterhead. It’s all embossed, and embossing doesn’t come cheap. Why would Julia go to the expense of producing a single sheet of embossed paper, just for a practical joke? And if it was a practical joke, what was the point of it?”

“Maybe she found an original sheet of paper from the 1930s,” Ella suggested.

Nancy rubbed it between her fingers and sniffed it. “I don’t know. It looks new. It feels new. It even smells new.”

They sipped tea for a while, in silence. Josh thought that it tasted like boiled hedges, but it was strangely soothing, and cleared his sinuses. He passed the letter back to Ella and said, “Did you try going out to the Great West Road, to see if this factory’s actually there?”

“No, we didn’t. We talked about it, but you know. It looked like Julia wanted to disappear and that she didn’t want anybody to find her. We decided that leaving us a letter like this was her way of saying that she was going to start a new life, and that she didn’t want any of us to be a part of it.

“But somebody murdered her. We have to find out where she went.”

“I don’t know. I wish I could help.”

Abraxas came up to Josh and nuzzled against his knee. “That dog likes you,” Ella smiled. “That’s very unusual. I’ve always taught him to bite first and ask questions afterwards.”

Nancy smiled. “Josh has a certain way with animals, don’t you Josh? I think he understands them much better than he understands people. He has a degree in animal behavior.”

“Seven-tenths of a degree in animal behavior,” Josh corrected her. “I was asked to reconsider my future after I prescribed Prozac for a chronically depressive ragdoll. I happen to believe that there isn’t very much difference between animals and people. They’re both stupid. But it’s amazing what they can do if you encourage them.”

“Hey, I don’t think dogs are stupid,” said Ella. “I think they’ve got incredible abilities.”

“They do, you’re absolutely right. But they’re far too lazy to use them. Evolution, who needs it, when you’ve got a nice warm basket and all the food you can eat.”

“I don’t know. You should see Abraxas whenever I hold a séance. He goes crazy, chasing around the room and barking. It’s the spirits, you know. I’m sure that Abraxas can actually see them.”

“You’re a medium?” asked Nancy.

“Sort of. I do a bit of fortune-telling and a bit of your spiritual conversation. I learned it from my aunt. She came from Martinique and she was heavily into voodoo and black magic and all that stuff. She taught me how to tell fortunes and how to raise up spirits so that they can talk to their loved ones that they left behind. Well, I make a little pin money doing it. It helps to pay the rent.”

Josh lifted both hands. “Whoa, don’t look at me. I’m the skeptic around here. I believe that dogs can hear things and smell things that are way beyond human capabilities. But spirits? I don’t think so.”

“What about that old woman at the hospital?” Nancy challenged him.

“That wasn’t anything supernatural. She could sense what I was thinking about, that’s all. She tuned in to my anxiety.”

Nancy explained to Ella what had happened at St Thomas’s. “Ah!” said Ella. “She didn’t just read your mind, though. She tried to tell you something.”

“She told me a Mother Goose rhyme, that’s all I know.”

“But that’s the way these things work. The spirits always speak in a kind of code, right. They tell you things in messages that you can’t immediately understand. Snatches you pick up from the radio. Or a song that you only half-hear. How many times have you come across an unusual word, right, or maybe a reference to something strange, and after that you hear it again and again? That’s the spirit world, talking to you, guiding you, warning you, when it’s necessary, and it’s so much closer than you think. The spirit world is totally mixed up with ours. You can’t say where one world ends and the other begins. Sometimes you feel as if somebody’s touched you. That’s not a human hand, that’s a spirit.”

Josh said, “I’m sorry, I just don’t believe in it. I believe in the wind, and I believe in radio waves. They’re invisible, too, but they’re scientifically measurable.”

“But that old woman gave you a message. Six doors they stand in London Town. Six doors they stand in London, too. She was trying to tell you something, put you on the right track.”

“Well, yes. Maybe she was – although I still can’t be persuaded that there was anything supernatural about it. I’m going to check it out. I’m going to find out what that rhyme actually means. Just like I’m going to go to the Great West Road and find the Wheatstone Electrics Company. And I’m going to find Kaiser Gardens, too, and the mysterious Mrs Marguerite Marmion. I don’t believe that any of this has anything to do with spirits. Julia’s disappearance was pretty damned strange, I admit. But there’s a totally rational and scientific explanation for it.”

“Which is what, do you think?”

“I don’t know. I’m not a scientist. But one day, somebody’s going to discover what it is, one day, and then all you mediums are going to have to hang up your crystal balls.”

Ella poured them all another cup of tea. She was silent for a while, but then she said, “May I ask you something? If you do all of that, and you still can’t find out where Julia went, will you come back here, and ask me to try?”

“So what could you do that Nancy and I can’t do?”

“I’m very sensitive, Josh,” she said, and tapped her forehead just like the old woman in the hospital had done. “If you can bring me a clue – a name, a place, even a piece of clothing – I’ll do whatever I can to find out what happened to Julia. If I succeed, it doesn’t matter whether you believe in spirits or not, does it? And if I fail, well, there won’t be any mischief done, will there?”

She paused, and held up her hands in front of her face, so that only her shining brown eyes looked out. “I was very fond of Daisy. She was your sister but she was also my friend. I don’t like to think that any part of her life was lost.”

She slowly took her hands away, but she kept staring at Josh as if she could see right inside his head. Abraxas, who was standing close beside Josh’s thigh, suddenly shivered; and even Josh felt as if something cold had passed through the room. He looked at Nancy, and by the expression on her face he could tell that she had experienced it, too.

Ella said, “You felt that? You know what that was?”

Josh shook his head.

“That was your fortune. A cold wind, blowing through your life. A cold wind, coming tomorrow maybe; or maybe the day after.”

She sipped her tea, still without taking her eyes off Josh. “Better to wrap up warm against it. That’s my advice.”