The Doorkeepers

Seven

Detective Sergeant Paul rang them at seven thirty the next morning. The response to the television appeal had been disappointing, she said. Only seventy-eight people had called in, saying that they had seen Julia sometime during the past ten months, and already the police had weeded out sixty-two of those as definite cases of mistaken identity.

“But it’s early days yet. We’re putting a lot of faith in Crimewatch.”

After Josh had put down the phone, Nancy said, “Why didn’t you tell her about Ella, and the Wheatstone letter and everything?”

Josh climbed out of bed. “I don’t know. I don’t think any of it amounts to material evidence, do you? I’m beginning to think that Ella’s friend was probably right. It was just a practical joke.”

“I can read you like a book, Josh Winward. You want to investigate Julia’s disappearance yourself, don’t you? I mean, you’re so well qualified. You’ve served three and a half weeks in the military police and watched every single episode of Columbo.”

Josh said, “OK. I do want to investigate it. But it needs imagination. It needs an alternative point of view. If I give it to the cops, they won’t see the wood for the trees.”

“But supposing you investigate it, and don’t find out anything at all?”

“Then, fine. I’ll hand it over to Detective Sergeant Paul. But not just yet.”

Nancy knelt up on the edge of the bed and put her arms around him and ruffled his hair. “OK … I guess you need to keep busy, to stop you from grieving.”

“It’s that Wheatstone Electrics that’s bothering me. The letter looked so bona fide, and yet it couldn’t have been. And there’s another thing. Julia was supposed to be starting work as a secretary on the Great West Road, yet her new employer wanted to meet her at a quarter after eight in the morning in the middle of town. I looked up Star Yard in the A-Z and it’s miles away from Brentford. It’s even miles away from here, if she lived around here. Why should he want to meet her someplace so goddamned inconvenient?”

“I don’t know. But let’s have some breakfast, shall we? And then we’ll go find out.”

That morning Josh had his first encounter with a traditional English breakfast: eggs, bacon, sausages, baked beans, grilled tomatoes and black pudding.

“Black pudding?” he asked the waitress at the servery. “What’s this black pudding?”

“If I told you, you wouldn’t eat it.”

“Tell me, I can take it. I’ve eaten hot dogs.”

She told him and he left it on the side of his plate until the very last. Then he poked it with his fork and tried a tiny taste of it.

“It’s good,” he said, after a long and cautious chew. “You want to try some?”

Nancy shuddered. “I wouldn’t put that near my lips if I was dying of starvation.”

“You used to pick your knees and eat your scabs when you were a kid. What’s the difference? This is just a gourmet scab.”

They rented a car from the Hertz desk downstairs in the hotel lobby. They were given a red Nissan Primera which was cramped compared with Josh’s old 1971 Mustang back home, but at least it was automatic. He couldn’t have managed a stick shift in London.

They drove out first to the Great West Road. The sky was wooly gray and the wind was getting up. As Ella had told them, it was nothing but a long string of factories – Rank Audio, Hoover, and Gillette – mile after mile. Except for its distinctive clock tower, the Gillette building looked remarkably like the Wheatstone Electrics factory: white-painted, with neat rows of trees, the model of 1930s consumerism. But even though they drove up and down the Great West Road twice, they found no sign of Wheatstone Electrics itself.

It began to rain, and as they drove back toward the center of London, Josh began to feel deeply dejected. Even if he never found out who had murdered Julia, he needed to know where she had been for so long, and how she had spent the last ten months of her life. Nancy put a consoling hand on his knee. “She must have been someplace, Josh. Nobody just vanishes.”

They reached Carey Street, around the back of the Law Courts, and by now it was raining heavily. They had a drink in a narrow old pub called the Seven Bells, elbow to elbow with noisily braying lawyers. Then they walked down to the end of the street, to Star Yard. It was nothing at all – a narrow flagstoned thoroughfare with high soot-stained buildings on either side, and a black-painted Victorian urinal. They walked up to the end but there was nothing to see, only brick walls and dirt-streaked windows, with curled-up law books on the windowsills inside.

At the corner of the yard there was a narrow niche between one wall and another, but it was clogged up with rubbish and somebody had sicked up a curry in it, so Josh didn’t venture any further.

He looked around, with rain dripping from the tip of his nose. “This Wheatstone guy arranged to meet Julia here, at eight fifteen in the morning. But why?”

With Nancy navigating, they crossed Battersea Bridge and drove to Lavender Hill. Josh had imagined a hill thickly grown with fragrant purple lavender, but instead he found it was just another noisy traffic-blighted road junction with used-car dealers and second-hand furniture shops and kebab restaurants.

He managed to park in a back street, and they walked back down to the main road and went into D.R. Patel newsagents. It was a tiny shop, crammed with shelves of dog-eared birthday cards and fragrant with Indian spices and children’s candies. The bearded newsagent was balanced on a chair, rearranging the adults-only magazines on his top shelf. His wife stood beaming solicitously behind the counter.

“We’re looking for Kaiser Gardens,” said Josh.

The wife said nothing but shook her head.

“Mrs Marguerite Marmion, of 53b Kaiser Gardens?”

Again she shook her head.

At that moment an elderly man came shuffling in, wearing a damp cloth cap and a pair of rain-spotted glasses that magnified his eyes like oysters. “Gissa packet of them froat sweets, love,” he said, digging into his pocket for some loose change.

“These people are looking for Kaiser Gardens,” said the newsagent’s wife.

The man blinked at them, and sniffed. “Kaiser Gardens? Kaiser, like in Kaiser Bill?”

“I guess so, yes.”

“You must be joking, mate. You’re sure you don’t want Hitler Avenue? Or Goring Grove?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t quite—”

“Somebody’s been pulling your leg, mate. You won’t find nowhere in London named after Kaiser Bill. You’re a Yank, incher? How many streets have you got in Yankee-land named after old what’s-his-face, Hirohito?”

Josh looked at Nancy and raised his eyebrows. “Guess we’re on a wild goose chase. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry,” said the newsagent’s wife.

“Very sorry,” said the newsagent.

They arrived back at the hotel and it was still raining hard. There was a message from DS Paul saying that all of the seventy-eight people who had responded to last night’s television news had been eliminated. Apart from the Crimewatch appeal, a new picture of Julia would appear in tomorrow’s morning papers.

Josh called DS Paul but she was out of the office. All the same, he was able to talk to her assistant, Detective Constable Widdows, who sounded as if he were about fifteen years old.

“Yes, that’s right, Mr Winward. None of them checked out. Well, that always happens with a murder inquiry – people like to be helpful even if they don’t have any useful information.”

“So, no leads at all?”

“Nothing that’s panned out yet. We’ve had the full postmortem report, but I’m afraid that doesn’t tell us anything that we didn’t know already. Cause of death was asphyxiation with a rope. Pure hemp rope, apparently, with no nylon or other synthetic ingredient, which is quite unusual these days. Obviously we’re doing the rounds of chandlers and other rope suppliers. Immediately after death the body was eviscerated and then taken to the river and thrown in. There’s very little fingerprint bruising, which suggests that she wasn’t roughly handled before death and that her body was probably carried in a sheet or a duvet or something similar.”

“She wasn’t—”

“Sexually assaulted? No sir, she wasn’t. Whatever the motive was, it wasn’t that.”

For some reason, Josh thought thank God. But of course it didn’t make Julia any less dead.

“You still have no idea where she’s been since she quit that Saudi job?”

“None at all, sir. We’ve checked with the Inland Revenue and the Department of Social Services and she wasn’t registered with either of them. We’ve checked with every employment agency in West London and none of them had your sister on their books, or even a girl who might have been your sister under a false name. We’ve checked with hostels, hotels, clinics and hospitals. We’ve checked with airlines, shipping lines, coach companies and all rail services. Your sister had an American Express Card and a Mastercard, but she made no purchases with either card after six thirty-eight p.m. on the evening of May tenth last year, when she used her American Express Card at Thresher’s off-license in Earl’s Court Road to buy two bottles of Lanson champagne, a packet of dry-roasted peanuts and a Topic. That’s a chocolate bar with nuts in.”

Josh pinched the bridge of his nose. “Thanks,” he said. “I guess you’re doing just about everything that’s humanly possible.”

“It’s only day three, sir. And we’ve still got Crimewatch.”

Josh and Nancy went to the Brompton Library. It was a huge, gloomy red-brick building filled with the sour smell of old books, and it was suffocatingly silent, except for the pattering of rain on the windows. They looked up Wheatstone Electrics in the register of companies and found no mention of it. Upstairs, they found an enormous book on the history of London’s development in the consumer boom of the 1930s with dozens of illustrations of all the spectacular new art-deco factories that were built along the Great West Road – Smith’s Crisps and Hudson Cars and Henly’s Garage – but no reference whatsoever to Wheatstone’s. Josh couldn’t understand it. Wheatstone’s was such a distinctive building that it seemed impossible that a definitive study could have omitted it.

He slammed the book shut and a thin man on the other side of the table gave him a look that could have stunned a tortoise. Josh leaned over to Nancy and whispered, “Ella and her friends were right. It was a practical joke. Kind of a weird joke, I have to admit, but a joke all the same. There never was a Wheatstone Electrics, and there never was a Kaiser Gardens, nor a Marguerite Marmion. Julia made up the whole damn thing, and left the letter under her bed just to make absolutely sure that Ella found it.”

“But what was the point of it?” asked Nancy. She had her hair pinned back and she was looking tired.

“I don’t think there was any point. She was depressed, she was mixed up, maybe that had something to do with it. Maybe she’d caught a dose of the English sense of humor. Kaiser Gardens, for Christ’s sake. She made a fool out of all of us.”

“So what are we going to do now?”

“There’s nothing else we can do. We’ve checked every possible angle.”

“What about the old woman’s rhyme?”

“I don’t think that meant anything, either. She was senile, that’s all. I was still in shock after seeing Julia in the mortuary.”

“What happened to all of that stuff about her tuning in to your anxiety?”

“I was in shock, wasn’t I? I was subconsciously looking for some kind of meaning in Julia’s murder. Some kind of an explanation, I guess.”

“The old woman couldn’t have known you, but she said your name.”

“She was reciting Mother Goose rhymes, that’s why she said my name. When I walked past she happened to be saying ‘Jack be nimble’. Sheer coincidence.”

“Ella seemed to think that it meant something.”

“Ella’s a … spiritualist, for Christ’s sake. She reads tealeaves. She talks to dead people.”

“Well, let’s look up the six doors rhyme, anyway. I mean, just out of interest. I think this British culture is really fascinating.”

“I think it’s really depressing. It’s so old.”

They found the latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, but it contained no mention of the six doors. In an older book, however, Goosey Goosey Gander & Other Rhymes, by James and Sylvia Wilmott, almost three pages were devoted to it, including a disturbing but beautiful drawing by Walter Crane, the famous children’s illustrator.

“Look at this,” said Nancy. “This is really strange.”

The drawing showed a high brick wall with a door in the middle of it. On one side of the door was a rain-lashed medieval city, with dark overhanging buildings and cobbles strewn with straw. In the near distance, a group of six or seven men were approaching, with high Puritan hats and black capes and buckled shoes. They were all carrying swords. Strangest of all, though, under their hats, their faces were completely covered with rough hessian hoods, with staring black eyes painted on them. A fearful mother was snatching her tiny children out of the Puritans’ path; and a bristling black cat was jumping for shelter.

The door was half-open, and a handsome young man with long curly hair was stepping through it, turning around as he did so to see how near the Puritans were. Ahead of him he was pushing a young woman with a baby clutched tight in her arms, presumably his wife.

On the other side of the door, in complete contrast to the grimness of the city, the sun was shining, and there were fields of barley and apple orchards. A small thatched cottage stood in the distance, under a large elm, with smoke rising from its chimney. Two or three laborers were scything the barley, and it looked as if one of them were running toward the door to help, or maybe to shut it; who could tell?

But there was another man, too, who was disproportionately tall, almost as tall as the cottage. His back was turned so that his face was hidden, and he wore a long cloak with a pentagram marked on it.

“Weird,” said Josh.

Nancy read out the rhyme. “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?”

Underneath, the commentary read:

Although it is less well known than many nursery rhymes, Six Doors They Stand is probably one of the oldest, dating back to the early part of the seventeenth century. There are several different interpretations of its meaning, but most historians agree that it was at its most popular in London in 1650, immediately after the execution of Charles I. Samuel Pepys refers to it briefly in the first volume of his diaries in 1659, and says that “Even now, this simple rhyme still excites a quiver of dread, conjuring up as it does such vivid memories of the Hooded Men, hurrying about their terrible business in the name of the Almighty.”

In the first years of the Commonwealth, a secret society of extreme Puritans sent groups of Hooded Men through the streets of London every night, hunting down Catholic and Episcopalian families. Those who refused to deny their popery or their allegiance to the Book of Common Prayer were cruelly tortured or put to death.

Some say that the “six doors” were the doors of six London churches in which the Catholics could seek sanctuary from the Hooded Men. However, this sanctuary was only limited, and by the time the next Sabbath day came around, the Catholics were given the option of renouncing their religion or of being forced back on to the streets. The clerics in some of the churches, however, were thought to have been more tolerant, and assisted the Catholics to escape by river to France. Hence the question, “who’s to say which way they face”.

Others suggest that the “six doors” were the doors of secret Catholic meeting places, where they could safely celebrate mass together. Yet another interpretation is that they were gaming houses where dice was played for large sums of money. The question about “which face is true” is a reflection on the common practice of weighting dice to change the odds in favour of the house.

Perhaps the most colourful explanation is that the “six doors” were six places in London where it was possible to pass from the world of harsh Puritan reform into a parallel world of tolerance and happiness. The stories go that the location of these “doors” was known only to a select few, called the Doorkeepers, who became extremely wealthy by charging Catholics huge sums of money to escape from Puritan London. The likelihood, however, is that once the Catholics had paid their extortionate “fare” into the next world, they were simply murdered and their bodies dropped into the Thames – their friends innocently believing that they were now living another, Elysian existence, beyond the reach of the Puritans’ Hooded Men.

The Doorkeepers were said to practise the very oldest of magical arts, since it was only by the use of certain occult rituals that one could safely pass through to the other side. Part of the ritual was probably Druidic. Another part involved the lighting of communion candles and leaping over them, which by 1688 had given rise to another famous nursery rhyme, “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick” – “Jack” being seventeenth-century slang for Jacobite, a Roman Catholic supporter of the Stuart restoration.

Nancy said, “That’s some legend. You jump through the door and you’re someplace else!”

Jack touched the illustration with his fingertip, tracing and retracing the outline of the door. “Yeah. Wild, isn’t it?”

Nancy narrowed her eyes. “I know that look. Just a minute ago you were telling me that the old woman was senile. Just a minute ago, you were telling me that the nursery rhyme was just a coincidence.”

“A hundred to one it probably is.”

“But?”

“I don’t know. I seriously don’t know what to think.”

“We have a parallel world in Modoc and Klamath mythology, too. A world without white men, where we still hunt, fish and farm without interference from you palefaces.”

“Sure. But you’ve never actually been there, have you? And you don’t know anybody else who’s been there, either?”

“I’ve never been there because I don’t believe in it, I mean not as an actual reality, and anyhow I like palefaces and I’ve never wanted to fish or farm. Apart from that, I wouldn’t have the first idea how to get there.”

Josh looked down at the illustration. “But supposing you did know how to do it?”

“Josh … you don’t seriously think this could have anything to do with Julia’s disappearance, do you?”

“What? No, how could it? This is nothing but a children’s rhyme.”

“But?”

“But, like you said, Ella thought that it was important. Ella thought the old woman was trying to tell me something.”

“But a parallel world? A real parallel world? Come on, Josh!”

“Sure, you’re right, you’re absolutely right. I’m tired. I’m still jet-lagged. I’m letting my imagination run away with me. It’s crap.”

“But? Look at you, your whole face is saying but!”

“But it really clicked with something I was reading a couple of weeks ago, in the Chronicle. They had a scientific convention down in San Diego, and they were talking about parallel worlds. About two hundred of the world’s greatest eggheads. And they decided that the likelihood of a parallel world not existing was so remote it was almost impossible. In fact, they thought there could be an infinite number of them, because the universe is all about an infinite number of choices, an infinite number of alternatives. It simply wouldn’t make sense if there weren’t any parallel worlds.”

“That’s easy to say. But where are they, these parallel worlds? And how do you get to them?”

“How the hell should I know? In 1491, they probably used to say that about America. But it’s a possibility, isn’t it? Julia disappeared for ten whole months, and in all of that time nobody saw her and nobody knew where she was. Nobody. She was supposed to be working for a company that doesn’t exist, and she left an address that doesn’t exist, either.”

“This is the great skeptic speaking, remember.”

“And I’m still skeptical. But that doesn’t mean I have to close my mind off altogether, does it? OK, the Wheatstone letter could have been a practical joke. That’s the most likely explanation, even if it isn’t a very good explanation. So what are the other possibilities? Maybe Julia left London altogether. Maybe she left England altogether. Maybe she was still in London but she was abducted and kept tied up in a cellar someplace. But then again …”

Nancy said, “Go on.”

Josh slowly closed the book. “Maybe there is a parallel world, where Wheatstone Electrics really exists, and Kaiser Gardens really exists. Maybe there are six doors, and Julia found out how to get there, and that’s where she’s been.”

They left the library and walked down the steps. The rain had stopped and the streets were glistening with reflections, an upside-down world of blackness and lights beneath their feet.

Nancy said, “Even if these six doors exist, how did Julia find them?”

“Search me. They can’t be easy to find, or everybody would be jumping through them.”

“You’re not going to tell Detective Sergeant Paul about this, are you?”

Josh unlocked their car, and they climbed in. He switched on the windshield wipers and a parking ticket was dragged backward and forward across the windshield in front of him.

“No,” he said. “I’m not going to tell Detective Sergeant Paul. The first thing I’m going to do is find somebody who knows more about these six doors.”

Nancy kissed him on the cheek; and then on the lips. “What was that for?” he asked her.

“Because you’re always trying to make out that you’re such a logical, rational person when all the time you’re crazy and spontaneous and you follow your instincts just like one of your dogs.”

“Woof,” he said, and shifted into reverse by mistake, colliding with the car parked behind him.