The Doorkeepers (23 page)

At that moment, an immense gray shape appeared over the rooftops, no more than two hundred feet above their heads. It was ten times the size of a whale, although it was almost the same shape. It had eight propeller engines suspended underneath it, which accounted for the grinding noise, and a large pale cigar-shaped gondola, with windows all the way along.

It seemed to take an age to pass over their heads, and all the time the dog kept on barking and the windows continued to rattle. Josh watched it with his hand cupped over his eyes to keep out the rain. He felt an unexpected sense of dread, as if he were watching aliens landing in
The War of the Worlds.
At last it turned north-eastward, over the Thames, and gradually disappeared behind the clouds.

“Wouldn't get me up in one of those,” said Simon, giving another sharp knock at the door. “Full of toffs and hydrogen.”

There was still no answer. The rain made a prickling noise in the nettles.

“Maybe she's out,” Josh suggested. “Looks like we'll have to come back later.”

Simon lifted the letterbox flap, and peered inside. “I don't know … I think I can hear a television. She wouldn't go out and leave a television on. Besides, there's nothing on at this time of the morning. Only the test card.”

He tried the door, but it was locked. Josh said, “Let's take a look around the back. Maybe she simply can't hear us.”

Simon went up to the side gate, reached over the top and pulled back the bolt. They walked along the narrow path at the side of the house, negotiating three overflowing trash cans, until they found themselves in a small sloping backyard, with a scrubby patch of wet green grass and a lineful of washing hanging up to dry – frayed towels, socks, and a brassiere.

“What woman leaves her washing out in the pouring rain?” said Nancy.

Simon went up to the back door and rapped his ring-covered fingers on the frosted glass. “Mrs Marmion! You in there, Mrs
Marmion?” He rapped again and this time the door swung open. He ran his fingers down the left-hand side of the frame. “Somebody's had a jemmy to this.”

Josh came up behind him and opened the door a little wider. Inside he could see a small scullery with a floor covered with green and cream linoleum. There was a heavy china sink with a single cold faucet dripping into it, and a knocked-over bucket with a mop. In the background, he could hear the high-pitched whining of a television set.

“Hallo?” he called. “Mrs Marmion? Are you there? It's Josh Winward, I called you yesterday!”

Still there was no reply. Simon said, “Something's wrong here, guvnor. Let's hop the Charley before we get caught.”

“Let me take a quick look inside,” said Josh. “It'll only take a minute.”

“Entering somebody's house, that's chancing it.”

“I have to see Julia's room. Mrs Marmion tried to tell me over the phone that somebody had been here to take all of her things away. But you never know. She might have left some kind of clue behind. A note. A letter. She always kept a diary, too.”

He stepped into the scullery. It smelled like old damp floorcloths and it was crowded with buckets and brooms and shelves full of firelighters and Brasso and tins of shoe polish. There was a coal-burning boiler at one side of the room, but when he laid his hand on it, it was stone cold. Josh hesitated for a moment and then he made his way through to the kitchen. This wasn't much larger than the scullery, with a view of the side wall of the house next door, a small enamel-topped table, and a cream-painted hutch stacked with yellow tins of Colman's mustard and brown jars of Marmite and boxes of Shredded Wheat.

Simon said, “We really should get out of here, guvnor. Half the street knows we're in here, and it only takes one old busybody to call the Old Bill.”

“I'll be quick, I promise you,” said Josh. He opened the kitchen door and found himself in a narrow corridor that led to the front door. Beside the door was a mahogany
hat-stand with a mirror in it. Josh caught sight of his own face: the stained-glass galleon cast a green-and-yellowish pattern across his cheeks, so that he looked as if he were dead and decayed.

He opened a door leading to the right. There was a small living room with a dull brown carpet. It was here that the television was still switched on: a black-and-white set showing a test card from the BBC. Josh went into the room and switched it off. Nancy came in close behind him and looked around. She picked up some framed black-and-white photographs from the mantelpiece: one of them showed a group of people at the seaside, paddling in the water in long one-piece bathing costumes. Another one showed a white-haired old lady sitting in a sunny room somewhere, with a cat nestling in her lap.

“Josh,”
said Nancy, and passed him the picture.

Josh angled it so that the gloomy light from the window fell across it. “It couldn't be, could it? But it looks so much like her.”

“I'm sure it's her. Look at the way she's sitting. And that smile.”

“But what's her picture doing here?”

Nancy took the picture frame, turned it over, and unfastened the clip at the back. She took out the photograph and held it up. “Mother. Iverna Court. 16/08/99.”

“So the old lady in the hospital was Mrs Marmion's mother. That's deeply weird.”

Simon was growing agitated. He kept peeping out through the net curtains into the street to make sure that the police or the Hooded Men hadn't showed up. “I dodged them once. I don't think they'll let me dodge them again.”

Josh clapped him on the shoulder. “Don't lose your nerve, kid. Be calm. Think about something soothing, like the sea.”

“The sea makes me sick.”

Josh slipped the photograph of Mrs Marmion's mother into his coat pocket. Then he went back out to the hallway and climbed the steep flight of stairs that led up to the first-floor landing. There was a bedroom immediately on his right and
another on his left. Ahead of him was a door with a ceramic plaque on it marked
Bathroom.

He went into the right-hand bedroom. It was wallpapered with pale pink flowers, and there was a cheap oak-veneered double bed with a pink satin quilt on it. Behind the door stood a 1950s-style wardrobe and under the window stood a chest of drawers with a crochet cloth on top of it. An electric alarm clock chirruped loudly on the nightstand.

Nancy went through the chest of drawers. “Nothing, only two buttons and a light bulb.”

Josh opened the wardrobe doors. There was nothing inside except an odd collection of wire hangers, the kind that Joan Crawford detested so much, and two pairs of women's flat-heeled shoes, right at the bottom. Josh picked up one of the shoes. Inside, faded gold lettering said
Steps, San Francisco.

“This is Julia's,” he said, holding it up. “She always bought her shoes at Steps.”

“Well, that proves that she was here. But that doesn't prove who killed her,” said Nancy.

“She was killed in
this
world, I'm sure of it.”

“By this guy Frank Mordant, from Wheatstone Electrics?”

“It looks suspiciously like it, don't you think?”

“I think you should be very careful. Just because the love of John Farbelow's life disappeared when she was working for Frank Mordant, that doesn't necessarily mean that he murdered her, and it certainly doesn't prove that he murdered Julia. I've met guys like John Farbelow before. They're charismatic, they're revolutionary, but they're usually full of shit.”

Josh picked up the other shoe. It was blue suede, stained with grit and rainwater, as if Julia had been wearing it when she walked through a park. Its toes were packed with newspaper to stop them from curling up. Josh wormed his finger into the toes, pulled out the newspaper and spread it flat on the bed. It was a page from the appointments section of the London
Evening Standard.
Circled in red was a small display ad which read:

Looking For A New Job? Looking For A New Life? If
you're looking to leave your old job and your old life behind you, if you want to work somewhere totally fresh and totally different, our international electrical company has vacancies for young and enthusiastic secretarial staff. Above average pay. No computer or w/p skills required. Apply Box 331 for details.

“There's no date on it,” said Josh. “But I can guess.”

“So what do you think this man Frank Mordant is doing? Hiring girls in our world, bringing them through to this world, and murdering them?”

“The ideal crime, isn't it? Nobody misses them in this world, because they never existed. No birth records, no school records, no social security number. And nobody in our world can find the murderer, because he's here.”

“But why is he murdering them?”

“Why does anyone murder anybody else? Maybe Frank Mordant is a psychotic serial killer who has found a way to kill as many women as he likes and get away with it, and maybe that's good enough for him.”

“So what do we do now?”

Josh folded up the paper. “What I've seen here today … that's proof enough for me that Julia was living here. All we have to do now is go see what Frank Mordant has to say for himself.”

He crossed the landing and opened the door to the second bedroom. It was similar to Julia's room, except that it had a bay window, and there was a small brick fireplace with a damp patch beside it. He opened the wardrobe but it was stacked with neatly-folded blankets, a hot-water bottle, and an old electric fire without a plug.

He went back out to the landing and opened another door. Airing cupboard, filled with sheets. Then bedroom three, a smaller bedroom at the back, crowded with cardboard boxes and books. “Looks like the boxroom,” said Josh, peering around. But with a prickle of shock he suddenly caught sight of a dark figure standing in the corner, half-hidden behind the wardrobe.

“Jesus!” he said, jumping back, and jarring his shoulder against the door frame.

“Let's go!” shouted Simon, and launched himself down the stairs. But Nancy said, “Stop it! Stop it! What are you afraid of?”

Josh stopped, and took another look in the corner. The dark figure remained motionless. It was nothing but a dressmaking dummy with a large felt hat tilted sideways on top of it. He covered his face with his hands and shook his head. “I must be letting this whole thing get to me. Scared of a one-legged dummy.”

He closed the bedroom door and went across to the bathroom. Simon stayed where he was, halfway down the stairs. He didn't say anything: he had given up trying. But he remained poised, ready to run out of the house at the slightest suggestion of trouble.

“I just want to check that Julia didn't leave anything personal here,” said Josh. “If she left a toothbrush or a razor or something, we could have that checked for DNA.”

“Who by? The police in this world won't be able to do it. Even if they have the inclination, I doubt if they have the technology.”

“I just want to gather as much proof as possible,” said Josh. “I'll worry about the way we're going to use it when I've got it.”

“You're the boss,” said Nancy, and it was then that Josh opened the bathroom door.

It was the smell that hit them first, and all three of them cried out in a chorus of disgust. Josh couldn't imagine how it hadn't permeated the whole house; and then he realized that he
had
been smelling it, all the way upstairs, and that he hadn't really registered what it was. And then there was the noise: the furious zizzing of hundreds of glittering bluebottles as he disturbed them in the middle of their feasting and their egg-laying.

The smell was ripe and sweet and almost visibly green. All of the bathroom windows were closed and an electric wall-heater had been left on, which had increased the temperature inside the bathroom to well over eighty degrees. Above the bath hung a wooden drying-frame, intended for drip-dry shirts and pantyhose. But spreadeagled on this frame was what appeared at first sight to be a half-gutted animal.

It was only when Josh stepped closer, keeping his hand clamped over his nose and mouth, that he understood what he was actually looking at. The animal was a woman – a naked, gray-haired woman, her body split wide open from her chin to her pubic hair. It was impossible to see who she was, or who she might have been, because her face was crawling with bluebottles, as if she were wearing a living Mardi Gras mask.

On the green-tiled wall, a large cross had been marked in blood and excrement.

Josh pulled the door shut. Nancy was already halfway down the stairs, with Simon close behind her. Simon didn't bother to go back through the kitchen: he snatched open the front door and took three stiff-legged steps outside, gasping for
air. Nancy leaned up against the porch, both hands clasped over her stomach, saying, “God … oh my God. That was appalling.”

Josh said, “We'd better get out of here. Whoever did that to Mrs Marmion, they won't hesitate to do it to us, too.”

“The Hoodies,” said Simon. “Didn't you see the cross? They always do that.”

They climbed back into the Austin. Simon swung the starting-handle and the motor chugged into life. Then he executed a fifteen-point turn, with a gladiatorial clashing of gears, and managed to point the car back the way they had come.

“They must have guessed that we were coming to see her,” said Nancy.

“I doubt if it was a guess,” put in Simon. “The Hoodies have people in the telephone exchange, they listen to everything. You can't even phone up your fishmonger without them knowing about it.”

“Isn't that illegal?”

“Course not. It's all allowed under the God's Word Act. They can't allow people to talk a lot of popery, even in private.”

They drove down St John's Hill toward Wandsworth. Josh glanced out of the rear window from time to time to make sure that they weren't being followed, but there was a convoy of three buses behind them which would have made it very difficult for anybody to keep them in sight.