The Doorkeepers

Eighteen

Nancy rang the doorbell three times before Ella answered on the intercom. “Who is it?” she asked, suspiciously.

“It’s Nancy. Something terrible’s happened. Please open the door. I didn’t know where else to go.”

The door buzzed and Nancy pushed her way inside. Ella was waiting for her at the top of the stairs, with Abraxas wagging his tail so hard that it slapped against the banisters.

“Have you been swimming?” asked Ella, when she saw Nancy’s damp clothes and bedraggled hair.

Nancy shook her head. “It was raining in the other London.”

“So you got through,” said Ella, ushering her into her apartment. “Isn’t Josh with you?”

“The candles blew out. I had to leave him behind.”

“You look exhausted. Here – let me give you something dry to wear. You don’t mind a caftan, do you?”

“I had to leave him behind,” said Nancy, desperately. “I didn’t have any choice. These terrible Hooded Men caught him. They have swords, and they cut a young man’s hand off. I don’t know what they’re going to do to Josh.”

“The Hoodies,” said Ella. The sun was shining through the window, and outside the noises of Earl’s Court traffic sounded reassuringly normal.

Nancy was tugging off one of her boots. She stopped, and looked up at Ella in astonishment. “You know about them?”

Ella nodded. “I’ve always known about them. I come from there. This isn’t my London at all.”

“You knew about them and yet you let us go there? They killed a man in front of us! They chased us all across the rooftops and we almost died!”

“I’m sorry. I was taking the chance that you wouldn’t run into them. If I’d told you what it was really like there, would you have gone?”

“I can’t believe this! You tricked us into going!”

“I didn’t trick you, Nancy. You wanted to go. It was just bad luck that you ran into the Hoodies.”

“Why didn’t you warn us? For Christ’s sake, Josh could be dead by now!”

“I couldn’t warn you. I didn’t know if I could trust you or not. If I’d have warned you, it would have been an open admission that I was part of the resistance network.”

“You didn’t trust us?”

“We can never be too careful. The Doorkeepers send all kinds of people through to infiltrate us, and they come in so many different guises. Some of them look so innocent you can’t believe it. University students, council officials, widows who come to me because they want to talk to their dear departed husbands. You and Josh could easily have been planted by the Doorkeepers to find out how many of us there are, and where we live.”

“You really believed that we were spies for the Hooded Men?”

“No, we didn’t. But we had to be sure. Because you and Josh were a godsend. Almost too good to be true.”

“Too good? Too damned gullible!”

“Please … I can understand why you’re angry. But we’ve been trying to catch Frank Mordant for a very long time, and we thought that you might have better luck than us.”

Nancy shook her head in disbelief. “You knew who we were even before you first met us at the subway station, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did. A whole lot of people have been keeping a very close eye on you, ever since you got here. One or two police officers … the receptionist from the Paragon Hotel … Ranjit Singh at St Thomas’s … old Mrs Marmion. The resistance come in all creeds and colors and ages. The only thing they have in common is a hatred of the Doorkeepers.”

“I don’t understand this at all,” said Nancy. “All of those people were watching us?”

“Watching and guiding. Now – why don’t you change, and I’ll make you a cup of tea, and I’ll tell you about it.”

“I have to go back. I have to go back and find Josh.”

“I know. And we can’t waste any time, either. The Hoodies probably won’t hurt him until they find out why he came through the door. But they’re not very patient. There are lots of stories about them cutting people open and eating their livers, but that’s all they are, stories. The Hoodies don’t discourage them, though. It makes them sound more frightening than they really are.”

“You don’t think they’re frightening enough?”

“Come on, don’t worry too much. Josh doesn’t know anything about the resistance, so they can’t charge him with subversion.”

“We met John Farbelow at the British Museum. Josh knows about him.”

“Yes, but how much? And John Farbelow is a totally wild card: even the Hoodies know that. His heart’s in the right place, but he always follows his own nutty agenda. All the same,” she said, “I’m glad you mentioned him. He has outstanding contacts in all kinds of places, including Scotland Yard. He could help us to get Josh free.”

“So if I went back and got in touch with him …?”

“You can’t go back, not until tomorrow. The earth has to turn a full circle before you can go back the way you came.”

“Or what? I just couldn’t get through?”

“Oh, you’d get through, all right. But not to the world you’d just left behind. You’d get through to the next world in the sequence of worlds – and, believe me, you wouldn’t want to do that.”

“There are more Londons?”

“An infinite number, as far as anybody can tell. Some people have tried to go further, to see how different they are, but not many of them have ever come back.” She spooned a powder of peony root into a blue china teapot and poured boiling water over it. “Here … peony is great for calming you down. It restores your sense of reality.”

“That’s good. Right now, I need all the reality I can get.”

Nancy dropped the caftan over her head. It was pure silk, and it felt cool, soft and reassuring, like gently being stroked by an affectionate friend. Ella sat down next to her, cross-legged.

“I was born in the other world. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it, but I had no idea this London existed when I was a child. I was born in British Martinique and my mother was a slave. I would have been a slave, too, if I hadn’t had the same psychic sensitivity as my grandmother. One day I used my sensitivity to find a small child who had been trapped down a well for three days. The slavemaster told the Hoodies what I’d done, and the Hoodies took me away from my family and brought me to London by Zeppelin. They trained me to find subversives and non-believers and Purgatorials.”

“So how did you get here?”

“The Hoodies beat me and they abused me and they treated me so bad. So one day, when a subversive was running away from them, jumping over the candles and right through the door, I followed him. I’ve been here ever since. But I always swore to God that I would get my revenge on the Hoodies one day.”

“What exactly are they, the Hoodies? Why do they wear those horrible hoods all the time?”

“They’re sensitives, too. They’re direct descendants of the Puritan witchfinders. They can actually sense when a man or a woman is an unbeliever. They can almost taste your lack of faith. That’s why they all wear hoods … so that they’re not distracted by what they can see with their eyes. They could find you blindfolded if they really wanted to. Where do you think the game of Blind Man’s Bluff came from? It was children, pretending that they were the Hoodies, hunting for Catholics. Sniffing them out.”

Nancy sipped her tea. Ella was right: she felt very much calmer now, very much more focused. The day seemed clear and sharp, and her panic was beginning to subside.

“Tell me about Frank Mordant.”

“What a piece of work he is. About two years ago we discovered by accident that he was advertising for young girls here in this London; and that he was taking them through the doors to the other London. One of my friends saw him by the Tower of London, taking a girl through the door by Traitor’s Gate. The same thing happened to Julia and it happened to John Farbelow’s girlfriend, too. Frank Mordant always preys on girls who are lonely or distressed or looking for a new life. He gives them a job; but he doesn’t touch them for weeks; or months; or even years. He doesn’t touch them until he thinks that the trail has gone stone cold and hardly anybody in this London is looking for them any more.

“Then – without any warning – he kills them. He hangs them and he takes video pictures while they die. Snuff movies, which he sells for hundreds and thousands of pounds all over the world. He always mutilates them, too, in different ways, although we don’t know why. Some of their bodies he dumps back here, but a whole lot more of them have disappeared for good. We don’t know how many exactly, but we reckon he may have murdered as many as fifty or sixty.”

“My God. Can’t you do anything? Can’t you talk to the cops?”

“We’ve tried more than once. We found a very sympathetic young detective inspector in Chelsea who was prepared to listen to us. But even he had to give up, in the end. He didn’t want to jeopardize his career by sounding as if he was some kind of raving lunatic. And there’s the burden of proof, too. We have to catch Frank Mordant red-handed, actually disposing of one of the bodies, or else we have to find fingerprints and fibers and DNA samples. And even if we do that, we have to catch him and physically drag him back here, without the Hoodies stopping us. And we know from bitter experience that he’s very well in with the Hoodies. They never touch him, no matter how many times he goes backwards and forwards from one London to the next. I don’t know why.

“Then, of course, we have to persuade the police here to arrest him and bring him up in front of a court of law. And do you seriously think that any jury is going to believe anything about nursery-rhyme doors or parallel Londons?”

“Couldn’t you light the candles and show them? They’d have to believe!”

Ella gave her a wry smile. “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. Let’s just see if we can get Frank Mordant first. And before that, let’s see if we can get Josh back.”

“Don’t the police in the other London suspect Frank Mordant of anything? I mean, if girls are disappearing … doesn’t anybody wonder what’s happened to them? Even there, they must have laws against abduction and murder.”

“Don’t ask me. Perhaps the Hoodies protect him. Perhaps he bribes them. Perhaps people from this London aren’t entitled to the same kind of human rights. They don’t have valid birth certificates or passports or any proof of identity. Strictly speaking, they don’t exist. In that other London, they have slavery, don’t they? What are they going to care about a few homeless girls?”

“So, what are you going to do?” asked Nancy.

“I’m going to go through this evening, probably through Bread Street. With any luck the Hoodies won’t be looking for anybody to come through there. I’ll find John Farbelow and see what he can do to help me. I’ll do everything I can, Nancy, I promise. I’ll be back tomorrow evening, and let’s hope that Josh will be coming back, too.”

“And what can I do?”

Ella grasped both of her hands, and gave her a smile of sympathy. “I’m sorry. Nothing. You’ll just have to sit and wait.”

When Nancy returned to their hotel room, a red light was flashing on the phone. She picked it up and the receptionist told her that they had been called by DS Paul. Could they call her back on her mobile?

“Detective Sergeant Paul? This is Nancy Andersen.”

“Is Mr Winward with you?”

“He’s – ah. He had to go out for a while. To buy some dental floss.”

“Well, when he comes back, can you tell him that we may have had something of a breakthrough. A young man called us today to say that he was down by Southwark Bridge on the night that Julia’s body was dumped into the Thames. He was depressed because he had just split up with his girlfriend, and he was thinking of throwing himself into the river. That’s why he’s taken so long to come forward.”

“He saw something?”

“Yes, he did. He saw three men carrying a bundle to the parapet and throwing it over. He swears that it was just like a body. One of the men was oriental in appearance, the other two were white, middle-aged. The young man says that he would be confident about identifying all of them. He’s coming into New Scotland Yard in about an hour to help us prepare a photofit picture.”

“This is amazing. I mean, this is real evidence, right?”

“Oh, we’ve got more than that. After the men had gone, our suicidal friend found a gold and brown enamel cufflink on the pavement, close to the place where they had thrown the bundle over. It was a monogrammed cufflink, with the initials FM.”

Nancy felt as if her stomach had suddenly filled up with icy cold water. “FM?”

“That’s right. Whoever it was, he could hardly have helped us more if he’d left a note stuck to the bridge with his name and address.”

“That’s good news. That’s terrific news. So … all you have to do now is find the guy, yes?”

“There’s more to it than that. We still have to prove that the bundle was Julia’s body, and that whoever this man was, he killed her. But it’s a very, very significant step forward. I don’t have to remind you not to talk to the media about it, do I?”

“I won’t say anything to anybody. I really appreciate all of the hard work you’ve put into this, I can tell you; and I know that Josh does, too. All you have to do now is find the guy, huh?”

“We’ll find him,” DS Paul assured her. “If he’s still in London, I promise you, we’ll find him.”

It all depends on which London, thought Nancy, and put down the phone.

* * *

Late in the afternoon, as the shadows lengthened along Piccadilly, and swallows wheeled over Hyde Park, Nancy took a tube up to Berman’s, the theatrical costumiers. In a huge upstairs room, dimly lit by a grimy skylight, she walked along rail after rail of period costumes. Flamboyant flouncy dresses from The Three Musketeers; crinolines and hobble skirts and flapper dresses made of beads. At last she found a tailored suit in gray Prince-of-Wales check, very fitted, with a skirt that came just below the knee. Very 1955 – a suit that nobody in Frank Mordant’s London would look at twice. She found black high-heeled shoes and a white blouse with a frilly collar to match.

Back at the hotel, she filled a plastic carrier bag with anything she thought she could trade for money. Her watch, her hairdryer, Josh’s alarm clock, even his Nike trainers. She was in bed by eleven o’clock, with a map of suburban London spread over her knees, and BBC’s Question Time burbling in the background.

Before she slept, she said a prayer to the spirits that Josh should be safely rescued from the Hooded Men; and blessed Ella and John Farbelow and whoever might be involved in setting Josh free. Then she asked Gitche Manitou to give her strength to do what she needed to do. If she couldn’t help to rescue Josh, she could at least avenge Julia’s murder by bringing Frank Mordant back to this London, where DS Paul had enough evidence to hold him, and almost enough evidence to convict him.

She closed her eyes, and dreamed of running through twisting alleyways, colliding with the walls. She dreamed of echoing laughter and lashing rain. She dreamed that dogs were after her, and that men in masks were breathing harshly in her ear. They were urging her to go back. Go back, Nancy, there’s nothing here but horror and blood. Go back, Nancy, you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into. There’s blood here – gallons and gallons of blood, and you wouldn’t want to be drowned, now would you?