The Doorkeepers (39 page)

Josh couldn't help smiling. He was exhausted and he couldn't think about anything else but Nancy, caught by the Hooded Men – but he was still amused by Petty's unshakable conviction that men were only interested in one thing. Hanky-panky? he thought. You wish.

It was another gusty day, and Josh had difficulty in lighting the candles. Abraxas stood beside him, patiently panting. Josh had made a lead for him out of a suitcase strap. One or two passers-by stopped to watch him, and one old woman asked him if he was making a shrine.

He told her yes; and in a way he was. This niche in the wall was a shrine to Julia, and to Ella, and all of those who had been killed or tortured at the hands of the Hoodies.

At last the candles were burning strongly. Josh hefted Abraxas up in his arms and recited the words of the Mother Goose rhyme. There was hardly anybody around – only a girl with a basket of sandwiches walking up from Carey Street – and so he stepped over the candles and into the niche. Abraxas barked three or four times as they turned the corner out of this Star Yard and made their way through the passageway.

The other Star Yard was almost deserted. Josh peered around the corner of the niche, to make sure that there were no Hoodies or Watchers waiting for him. Then he tugged at Abraxas' lead and said, “Come on, boy. Let's go find Nancy.”

He had almost reached Carey Street when a hand seized his left shoulder. “'Ere! Don't go beetling off! I've been waiting for you for days!”

It was Simon Cutter, although Josh could hardly recognize him. His face was swollen and scratched, both his eyes were black, and his two front teeth were missing. His right arm was wrapped in filthy bandages and held up in a sling. His long coat was covered in mud and straw and the lining dragged along the paving stones.

“God almighty, what happened to you?” Josh asked him.

“The Hoodies gave me a going-over, didn't they? They wanted to know all about John Farbelow and the rest of his subversives. They wanted to know all about you.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I didn't tell them nothing. What could I tell them, I didn't know nothing. They were going to scrag me, and then they were going to transport me, but in the end the reeve said that since I'd lost my hook and feeler, that was punishment enough.”

“Where's Nancy?”

Simon took hold of Josh's arm and pulled him back up Star Yard. “I heard from one of my street arabs that they took her to the Puritan Martyrs Hospital in the City. That's not a hospital for sick people, guvnor. It used to be a plague hospital, so they say, but it's closed these days. The windows are always lit up at night, and there's coming and going, but nobody ever says what goes on there.”

“Can we get in there, do you think?”

“Why do you think I sent you that note? It so happens that I know a lad who works in the kitchens at the Puritan Martyrs. Me and him used to do a little business together. Leather goods.” He hesitated for a second, and then he added, “Wallets, purses, that kind of thing. He can let us in through the scullery, ten o'clock sharp.”

“OK … do you know someplace we can stay until then?”

“There's a room up over the Old Cat & Ninepence. We can use that.”

The Old Cat & Ninepence was a seventeenth-century pub wedged in the corner of Gough Square, between two glass and concrete office buildings. Outside, it was tile-hung, with a crazily tilting chimney. Inside it was all dark paneling and tobacco-stained plaster, and the ceiling beams were so low that Josh had to duck his head as they went in through the front door.

Simon led the way up a flight of narrow, sloping stairs, and then along to the back of the building, where there was a small sitting room with a chintz-covered sofa and two armchairs, a
large radio set, and a magazine rack stuffed with yellowing copies of
Radio Times
and
The People's Friend.

“We'll be snug enough here,” said Simon, easing himself stiffly into one of the chairs. “The Hoodies may have sensed somebody coming through the door, but they won't think to look in a gaff like this.”

Josh went to the window. It was made up of small octagonal panes of yellowish glass, with bubbles and inclusions in them, so that when the sun shone through it on to his face he looked as if he were suffering from leprosy. Abraxas sat down at his feet and yawned.

“You're sure you don't have any idea why the Hoodies might have taken Nancy to the hospital?”

“Search me, guvnor.”

“You see, what worries me is that Julia was mutilated. When they found her body in the Thames it was empty, all of her internal organs taken out. And apparently it had been done by experts. Frank Mordant may have hung her, but what happened after that?”

Simon coughed, holding his right arm close to his chest.

“You sound pretty sick,” said Josh.

“It's my stump, isn't it? It's infected. I kept it in a bowl of salty water but that still didn't stop it from turning rotten.”

“Can't you ask your doctor to prescribe you some antibiotics?” Josh asked him, but remembered almost at the same time that this was a world that was medically equivalent to the 1930s, before penicillin had been discovered.

Simon coughed again, and this time he brought up a handful of blood. “I'm bloody dying,” he said. “You don't know what those bloody Hoodies did to me.”

Josh said nothing. He couldn't quite understand why, but he felt uneasy. Why had the Hooded Men let Simon go so readily? After all, they had slaughtered all of John Farbelow's people, in revenge for Master Thomas Edridge's murder. And if they were holding Nancy prisoner, they must have guessed that he would come looking for her. So why hadn't they been keeping a constant watch on the doors?

Unless they wanted to be absolutely sure that they had
him trapped, where he didn't have any chance of escape whatsoever. Josh remembered Ella's tarot card with the man snaring songbirds. “You're not setting me up, are you?”

Simon looked up at him, the whites of his eyes still stained with blood, like a broken vampire. “You can trust me, guvnor. You know that.”

Josh sat down next to him and pointed a finger directly at his nose. “If this is a trap, I swear to God that I will kill you first.”

Josh and Simon reached the rear of the Puritan Martyrs Hospital through a narrow alleyway that led from the side of a parade of shops on Bunhill Row. On the far side of an overgrown allotment stood a high corrugated-iron fence with its top cut into serrated saw-blade points. There was a gate in the middle of it, but it was locked.

“How do we get over this?” Josh demanded.

Simon checked his watch, and at the same time the bells of a nearby church struck ten o'clock. “Whippy should be here any second. He's always dead reliable, Whippy.”

Abraxas was snuffling around the weeds, searching for interesting smells. He was still whuffling when they heard a padlock clanking, and the sound of bolts being drawn back. The gate was opened, and a short, stocky young man appeared, with black curly hair and a Roman nose and eyes as bright as a badger's. He was wearing a long white apron and he was carrying a large bowl of vegetable peelings.

“Simon! Christ almighty! Look at the state of you!”

“I'm all right, Whippy. Don't make a song and dance about it. I'm lucky I'm still living and breathing. This is Mr Winward.”

Whippy wiped his hand on his apron and held it out. “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” he said, in a strong Manchester accent. “Any butty of Simon Cutter's is a butty of mine. Taking your dog for a walk, are you?”

“He'll be OK, don't you worry.”

“I hope so. If those Hoodie dogs get a smell of him, it'll be mutt chops for breakfast.”

Whippy tossed the vegetable peelings on to a compost heap,
and then he beckoned that they should follow him through the gate and into the grounds.

The hospital was set amongst wide, well-trimmed lawns, and was illuminated by floodlights, which gave it an appearance of unreality, as if it were constructed of nothing more substantial than cardboard. It was a large three-story Victorian building built in the shape of a cross, with four Gothic towers at each end. There were lights shining in almost every window, but there were no ambulances here, no staff walking around. Beyond the hospital walls they could hear the sound of buses and horse-drawn wagons clattering along Bunhill Row; and in the distance they could make out the mournful drone of a Zeppelin as it flew toward London Airport. But inside the hospital grounds it was oddly quiet, and windless, as if the whole world were holding its breath.

Whippy led them along a gravel path to the kitchen entrance, his feet noisily scrunching. “I'm cleaning up now, that's all, so there's only me.” The kitchen was large and bright, with white enamel worktops and a wide green-enamel range. There was a faint smell of steak-and-kidney pie in the air, but a very much stronger smell of pine disinfectant.

“Do you have any idea where Nancy is?” asked Josh.

“Oh, yes. I have to cook her tea in the evening and send it up. Room three-thirteen, on the third floor.”

“Is the room guarded?”

“Doesn't have to be. It's locked.”

“Have you seen her? She isn't hurt or anything?”

Whippy lifted a casserole dish out of the sink, rinsed it under the faucet and wiped it with a tea-towel. “I haven't seen her myself, but Sophie has. She's the nurse who takes her food up for her. She says she's amazing, for a Purgatorial. She talks, she eats. You'd have never credited it, would you, a dead person talking and eating? But I suppose that's the way it happens, isn't it? If God doesn't want you, and the Devil sends you back, what else can you do?”

“What has she eaten?”

“Eggs, bacon; a nice cheese omelet; steak-and-kidney pie; gooseberry fool.”

“Has it occurred to you that somebody who eats like that can't possibly be dead?”

Whippy clattered saucepans. “I'm a cook, mate. Not a fucking philosopher.”

“She's alive and I have to get her out of here.”

“Come on, Whippy,” said Simon. “You said you would. You owe me that much after everything I did for you. Your kid brother would be brown bread by now, if it wasn't for me.”

Without another word, Whippy reached into his apron pocket and produced the key to a five-lever lock. “I lent it off Sophie. Whatever happens – if you get caught – don't you say where you got it from. Otherwise it's both of us heads.”

Josh said, “What kind of security do they have in this place? Any Hoodies? Any patrols?”

“There's only a skeleton staff. You shouldn't have any worries, so long as you're quick.”

“Right, then. Let's get going.”

Simon sat down behind the kitchen table. “I'm sorry, guvnor. This is as far as I go.”

“What the hell do you mean?”

“I mean that I've got you into the hospital, and given you the key, and they could scrag me for either of those. I can't risk going any further.”

“Simon, you're beginning to give me a very bad feeling about this.”

“I've lost my hand. I've had three ribs broken. My balls have been burned to buggery. I don't want to lose my bonce, that's all.”

Josh stared at him narrowly. “You're telling me the truth here, right?”

Simon shrugged, and looked down at the kitchen floor.

“You're telling me the truth here, right? There are no Hoodies waiting for me up on the third floor? Nancy's safe and well?”

“I brought you here – what more do you want? I almost died, because of you!”

Josh went up to him and laid his hand on Simon's shoulder.
Under his coat, his shoulder felt like chicken bones. “Yes, you did, and I'm sorry.”

He took Abraxas and walked out of the kitchen, into the corridor beyond.

It wasn't difficult to locate the third floor. The corridor led to a huge, high-ceilinged hallway with a highly-polished floor of white and tawny marble. A sweeping flight of stairs led up to the first-floor landing, with nude bronze figures holding up torches on the newel-posts. Abraxas had difficulty crossing the hallway: it was so shiny that his paws kept slipping, and he made a loud scrabbly sound until he managed to reach the other side. “You should wear Keds,” Josh admonished him, and he let out a thin, suppressed whine.

They climbed the stairs to the first-floor landing, where huge dark oil paintings hung: portraits of famous benefactors and doctors. Abraxas was panting again. Ella had kept him in her apartment for most of the day so he wasn't very fit. Josh almost had to drag him up the next flight of stairs, and at the bottom of the third flight he refused to move, and sat on his haunches whining.

“Come on, Abraxas, you can't stay here. We have to go find Nancy.”

He heard echoing voices in the hallway below. Footsteps, and people laughing. “Come on, Abraxas, for Christ's sake! We have to go find Nancy!” The footsteps began to mount the stairs, and there was even more laughter.

Abraxas still refused to budge. Josh tried pulling the leash, but he sank his shoulders lower to the floor and frowned up at him, defying him to try to pull him bodily up the next flight of stairs. The footsteps were climbing higher, and the voices were so clear that Josh could actually hear what they were saying.

“…
plenty of new supplies, and without any risk whatsoever
…”

“…
don't have to be squeamish
…”

“…
who's squeamish
…?”

Josh came back down the stairs and sat close to Abraxas. “You are going to come up these stairs with me, and you are
going to be alert and hot and ready to trot whenever you're told. Do you understand that?”

There was a moment when he knew that Abraxas had agreed to do what he was told. It was hard to tell exactly how he knew; but he felt something pass between them – not spiritual perhaps, but certainly empathetic. That weird understanding between one species and another.