The Doorkeepers (27 page)

“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?

Josh was jolted awake by the feeling that his jaw had cracked apart. He opened his eyes and the room suddenly tilted. His mouth was stretched wide open, and crowded with a whole array of tight steel wires. He tried to swallow and he almost choked himself in his own saliva.

He couldn't think where he was, or even
who
he was. All he knew was that his head was swimming like a lava lamp, and that he was shivering cold.

He tried to close his eyes, to deny that this was happening, but he was in too much pain to fall back into unconsciousness, and so he opened them again. Reality began to reassemble itself, like a broken mirror in a movie run backward.

He was bound upright in a cramped and very uncomfortable wooden chair. Not only that, his mouth hurt so much that his gums had started to throb. And his legs hurt, too. And there was a pain between his legs that was worse than that time that Sergeant Szymanski had kicked him in the crotch for refusing to climb up the scramble-nets.

He tried again to swallow, and this time he retched, with a horrible cackle. But it was all he could manage: he couldn't even manage a whimper. The wires that crowded his mouth were attached by screws to a triangular iron frame which stood on the floor just in front of him, a little over four feet high – a grotesque parody of a harp. The wires formed a fan shape as they entered his open lips, and each of them was attached to one of his molars. He must have been given a general anesthetic when they were fastened, because each molar had been drilled right down to the nerve. Every time he moved his head or accidentally tugged on one of the wires, he suffered a blinding
spike-shaped surge of utter pain in every tooth. He would have shrieked out loud, if it had been humanly possible.

Shuddering with shock and cold, he looked down and saw that more steel wires had been screwed into his kneecaps and all along his thighs, seven or eight of them, right into the bone. These, too, were attached to the frame of the harp, so that every time he shifted his legs, they tugged at his nerve endings and gave him a kind of pain that he never could have imagined possible.

His penis looked as if it were half-erect, and it took him a few seconds to focus and understand why. A single steel wire had been inserted into his urethra, and he could feel something sharp and prickly deep between his legs. Blood was dripping from the end of his penis, and this alone would have been enough to make him weep.

But there was more. Wires had been screwed into his forearms and his shoulder blades. Wires had been driven right through his nipples, through his body, and attached by screws to the chair in which he was sitting. If he had tried to sit up, he would have sliced himself into a grisly
julienne
of Josh.

He waited, shaking like an epileptic. He was sitting in a bare cream-painted room, nothing exceptional about it, except a large portrait of a somber-looking man dressed all in black. A police officer was standing in the far corner, staring at the floor.

“Ah …” Josh choked. “Ahh … agghh … ah!”

The police officer lifted one finger, as if cautioning Josh to have patience. He picked up the phone, and said, “Yes, Master Edridge. Yes, he's come round. He seems well enough, yes.”

When he had finished, the police officer hunkered down next to Josh and smiled at him for a while, as if enough smiling could compensate for what they had done to him. The police officer had pitted cheeks and a tiny gingery moustache, no bigger than a smoker's toothbrush. He could have been painted by Norman Rockwell, if there hadn't been such deadness in his eyes.

“Master Edridge is coming to see you. Take my advice. If Master Edridge asks you a question, answer it. Don't
try to tell lies. The pain isn't worth it. You'll probably be dead by the end of the day, so don't worry about heroic gestures, if you know what I mean. And the rest of your lot, what are they worth? All you subversives. They'd sell you down the river, too, if it meant they didn't have to suffer the Holy Harp.”

So this was the Holy Harp that Simon Cutter had warned him about. He tried to choke out some kind of reply to the police officer, but he was suffering far too much pain, and all he could manage was a gargling sound. He dropped his head down, but the wires tugged at the nerves in his teeth and he had to lift it up again.

“They'll execute you quick and clean if you confess,” said the police officer, surreptitiously checking his watch. “The longer you mess them about, the more riled they're going to get, and the more they'll make you suffer. And let me tell you, some of the things I've seen them do … They're agents of the Lord, that's what they call themselves. And that gives them carty blanky.”

The door opened and Master Thomas Edridge came in, with a loose black hood draped over his head. He was closely followed by a dog-handler with a vicious pink-eyed terrier, whose claws kept dragging up the rugs. Edridge approached the Holy Harp, slowly and almost prissily, and when he was standing close enough he dragged a long white handkerchief out of his sleeve and patted his face and his scalp. Josh saw his eyes glance for a split second between his legs, but then he coughed like the Bey in
Lawrence of Arabia
and said, “Ready to be cooperative yet, Mr Winward?”

Josh couldn't say anything. His lips were numb, his tongue was swollen, and his teeth felt as if they had been wrenched around in his gums.

“I don't expect you to talk,” said Edridge. “We don't expect miracles, after all. But here is a pen and here is a sheet … of good-quality paper. On this paper you will explain exactly why you came here. And you will list the names and addresses of all of those you came to see, and what help you expected from them.”

Josh hesitated for a moment, but then he took the pad and wrote the only word he could think of.
No.

“You came here to make contact. With troublemakers. Come on. Admit it.”

No.

“If that wasn't the reason for your coming through the door, then what was?”

I told you,
Josh wrote.
I want to know who killed my sister.

“To find out … who killed your sister. That's brilliant! What a cover. One of the very best that the subversives have ever come up with. It wouldn't surprise me if you killed your sister … yourself. In order to give yourself a watertight cover.”

You're sick.

“Sick? You talk to me of sick? I'll show you a world where people no longer fear God. I'll show you a world where every one of the ten commandments has been crushed underfoot. I'll show you a world of such greed and licentiousness and lack of faith that it would take your very breath away. Except that it wouldn't. Because that is
your
world, my friend. And that is why we guard our doors, and hunt down subversives with such vigor. To prevent you from infiltrating us, from corrupting us, from undermining our faith and our moral fortitude. For let me tell you, Mr Winward, the world where you come from is the very definition of hell on earth.”

Josh hesitated for a moment. He felt such pain that he could hardly keep the pen steady. Then he wrote,
Hell is made by bigots.

Edridge stood up. He circled around the room for a moment, but then he leaned close to Josh and whispered in his ear, “You could have everything you wanted, in this world, if you helped us.”

Josh flicked his eyes toward him. It would have been too painful for him to try to move his head.

“We reward those who help us to track down subversives. We reward them very well. You could find yourself with a very fine house in the country, and substantial money in the
bank. Do you know the price on John Farbelow's head? Three thousand pounds. Think of it! A man could live like a king.”

Josh wrote,
Don't know squat.

“Squat? What's squat?”

Josh tossed the pen down on to the paper. Edridge suddenly lost his patience. He stepped away from Josh's chair and beckoned the policeman forward. “Show him how the Harp works. Play him a penitential hymn.”

With a serious, wary look on his face, the policeman approached the Holy Harp and flexed his fingers. Josh stared back at him, sitting rigidly upright, hardly able to bear the idea of the pain that he was going to feel. The policeman hesitated for a moment, but then he dragged the tips of his fingers down the tightly-stretched wires. They made a plangent, harmonic sound, in a minor key, like the beginning of an avant-garde symphony. At the same time they tugged at the naked roots of Josh's teeth, so that he let out a hoarse, incoherent roar of total agony. They pulled at every ganglion in his shoulders. They dragged at his nipples and made his stomach muscles convulse. His knees shuddered; his thighs tensed in a vicious, vise-like cramp; and his penis felt as if it had been peeled inside out, and every single nerve exposed.

The pain was so intense that it was almost wonderful. Josh felt crucified, sanctified – lifted above his everyday existence into a world where there was nothing but dazzling red light and blinding white pain. He could almost believe that he was close to God.

The strings of the Holy Harp were rippled again, and he closed his eyes tight as the pain made every nerve ending in his body contract and flinch. It was his teeth that hurt him the most, though. His teeth hurt so much that he was far beyond weeping.

The policeman stepped back, and Edridge came up to Josh again.

“What a hymn that was,” he said, softly. “Now do you think you might tell me what I have to know?”

Josh reached out for the pen but his hand was like a helpless claw. Edridge picked it up for him and placed it between his
fingers, like a solicitous mother teaching her three-year-old to write. He pushed the paper nearer, and Josh was able to scrawl
I know 0.

“Nothing?” said Edridge. “That can't be right. Young Simon Cutter has already told us that he took you to meet John Farbelow, and that you and he spent the evening discussing acts of sabotage and subversion. Don't tell me he was lying to us. If he was lying to us, he will have to die for obstructing our investigation – and very unpleasantly, too. The wicked must be permitted to see the evil of their ways before they are allowed to enjoy the comforts of the grave.”