The Doorkeepers (5 page)

“Sure, please do.”

Josh quickly left his number and then let the phone drop. Nancy appeared, bundled up in a white feather comforter. It had been hot during the day, but it was one of those foggy coastal nights when the temperature suddenly drops, and the windows look as if long-drowned mariners have been breathing on them.

“You need some sleep,” Nancy told him.

“Not tonight,” said Josh. “Not until I know what happened to Julia.”

They read the newspaper reports two and three times over. Julia's death had been the lead story in the London
Evening Standard:
RIPPER VICTIM FOUND IN THAMES. Most of the national dailies had carried it as a second lead, and all of them reported that this was the seventh such murder in less than three years.

The Daily Telegraph
read: “Police are strenuously trying to deter the media from jumping to the conclusion that a serial killer is at work. Detective Chief Inspector Kenneth Bulstrode pointed out that none of the seven women had been murdered in exactly the same way, and that not all of them had been mutilated as extensively as Julia Winward. Some victims had lost only their eyes or their livers, while Julia Winward had been ‘to all intents and purposes, emptied'.”

Emptied,
thought Josh. Jesus. He couldn't imagine it. He didn't
want
to imagine it.

Julia had been identified only by chance. She had a tiny tattoo on her right shoulder in the shape of a daisy, and a Soho tattooist had recognized it from the pictures that appeared on ITN News. Josh's eyes filled with tears again when he read about the daisy. For some reason, it had always been Julia's favorite flower, and she had told him that it symbolized “something you're not quite capable of reaching, not just yet, but one day you will”.

He finished reading the last report and yawned. Nancy was fast asleep on the floor, silently breathing, as if she were dead. He reached out for his half-empty glass of Jack Daniel's and it was then that the phone rang.

“Mr Winward? Detective Sergeant Paul here. Did you receive the newspaper cuttings?”

“Yes, thank you. I read them.”

“You don't mind if I ask you some questions over the phone? It shouldn't take more than an hour.”

“Listen, I have a much better idea. Why don't you ask me face to face?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I mean I'm catching the first available flight to London. My kid sister's dead, detective. I'm not leaving her body all alone in a strange country, with nobody to look after her.”

There was a pause. Then DS Paul said, “All right. I understand. As soon as you've booked your flight, call me and tell me, and I'll arrange to pick you up at the airport.”

Josh put down the phone and shook Nancy awake. “What is it?” she blinked. “Earthquake?”

“Get your things together,” he told her. “We're going to London.”

Detective Sergeant Paul met them at Heathrow Airport as they came out of immigration, holding up a cardboard sign saying
Winward.
To Josh's surprise, she was a petite Asian woman in a smart black suit and a brown silk blouse, her hair tightly braided on top of her head. Quite pretty, and very delicate, with hand movements like an Oriental temple-dance. “Mr Winward? I'm Indira Paul. I'm so pleased you made the effort to come here. This could be a considerable help, you know.”

“Anything we can do,” said Josh.

It was a warm, sunny day, unusually warm for March. As they drove along the M4 into West London, Josh saw pink cherry trees blossoming and bushes coming into leaf, and the sun sparkling from the windows of thousands of suburban houses and factories. Up above them, the sky was the clearest of blues, with large white cumulus clouds rolling across it like Nelson's navy.

“You know, I thought it was always raining in London,” Josh remarked.

“We get our share,” said DS Paul. “But we've been having a dry spell. When your sister was found the river was very low, and her body was caught on a mudbank. Otherwise, you know, she might have been carried a lot further, even back out to sea.”

“Who found her?”

“Some anglers, digging in the mud for worms, at a place called Strand-on-the-Green. But we think she was dropped into the river much further downstream.”

“Downstream?”

“The Thames is tidal, up as far as Teddington Lock. The pathologist estimates that she was in the water for approximately five to six hours, which means that she went into the river just before midnight. At that time, the tide was coming in, and her body would have been carried upstream. We've worked out how far she would have traveled before the tide began to turn, and we think that she was probably dropped into the river somewhere between Southwark Bridge and London Bridge.”

“I see,” said Josh, although he had no idea of where any of these places were. Nancy, in the back seat, reached forward and touched his shoulder, just to comfort him. The morning sunlight flickered through the car as they drove over a long flyover with Victorian church spires on one side and glittering office blocks on the other. Then they descended into three lanes of solid traffic, and rows of apartment blocks and hotels and shops.

Josh had never visited England before, but he had never imagined that London would feel so foreign. The buildings weren't tall, but they had a grimy Imperial massiveness about them. The traffic was deafening and hair-raisingly fast, and the sidewalks were crowded with hordes of shoppers. The famous red buses didn't drive sedately along, the way they always did in movies: they barged through the traffic at full speed, belching out clouds of diesel smoke, and the black taxicabs were just the same. DS Paul drove around Hyde Park Corner, where six lanes of traffic jostled to go in twelve different directions, and as they narrowly missed a white decorator's van and turned into Grosvenor Place, all Josh could say was, “Jesus.”

They arrived at last in DS Paul's office in the bland 1960s office block of New Scotland Yard. It was a large untidy room which she shared with four other officers, with a view of the building next door. Phones kept ringing and people kept hurrying in and out, and in the far corner a detective was frowning at a computer as if he couldn't understand what it was.

“How about a cup of coffee?” DS Paul suggested.

“You have decaf?” asked Nancy.

“Sorry. We've got black or white, with sugar or without. Or tea, if you'd rather. Or oxtail soup.”

Josh and Nancy settled for two Cokes. They sat down next to the air-conditioning vent, which was uncomfortably hot, while the sun shone through the dusty windows into their eyes. DS Paul sat down at her desk and opened a file containing interview sheets and glossy color photographs.

“You realize that, now you're here, I'm going to have to ask you to make a formal identification of your sister's body.”

“Yes, well, I guessed you would.”

“I have some photographs here. I wonder if you could look at them and confirm that it's her.”

Josh swallowed and Nancy reached out and held his arm. “OK,” he said, his mouth suddenly dry.

DS Paul handed over one color print, and then another. In the first, which was taken from the neck up, Julia lay against a pale green background, her eyes open, her hair wet and bedraggled, her cheeks puffy and pale. It was true what they said about your soul leaving you, when you died. It looked like Julia, but Julia simply wasn't there.

The second print showed her right shoulder, and the tiny daisy tattoo.

“That's her,” said Josh. “That's Julia. But I never saw the tattoo before.”

“Well, as I said, it was the tattoo that identified her. The tattoo artist called us and said he remembered an American girl who had asked him to do it specially. Apparently she was very chatty. She told him that she had only just arrived in England and that she was looking for a new life. She was trying to find a job as a nanny or something similar, but she didn't have a work permit. So the tattoist put her on to a girlfriend of his who knew an employment agency that didn't ask too many questions about where a girl came from, or what her qualifications were.”

“Was that the Golden Rose Employment Agency? That was the last contact number Julia gave me.”

“That's right. They found her a position with a Saudi family
in Holland Park, looking after two small children. But it seems as if she didn't like the job very much. The mother treated her like a slave, and the father kept making advances. So after three weeks she left.”

“What did she do then?” asked Josh.

DS Paul took back the pictures. “I was hoping that you could tell
me
that. Didn't she contact you at all?”

“Not once. Not a word. I tried calling the agency a couple of times, but they just said that they hadn't heard from her, either. I just assumed that she would get back in touch with us when she felt ready. Didn't she go back to the agency for another job?”

“No. She told them over the phone that she was quitting the Saudi job and that was the last time they ever heard from her. She didn't even collect her wages, and they didn't know where to send them.”

“They had no address for her?”

DS Paul shook her head. “She told them she was in temporary accommodation at the Paragon Hotel in Earl's Court. It's a very cheap place, fifteen pounds a night, popular with backpackers. But wherever she was, she wasn't there. The management always keep their guests' passports – you know, just in case they try to do a runner – and no single American females have stayed there for over a year.”

“And nobody else knows where she might have been?”

DS Paul shook her head. “Nobody. But we've sent her picture out to the media, and we're trying to arrange an appeal for information on
Crimewatch
– that's a BBC-TV program where we ask viewers to help solving crimes. We usually get a very good response to that.”

“How can somebody just disappear like that? I mean, totally?”

“People do it every day, Mr Winward. There are eight million people in London and it isn't difficult to get swallowed up, especially if you want to be.”

They ate lunch at a pub called The Frog & Waistcoat, around the back of Victoria Station. It was smoky and noisy and
crowded with a mixture of office workers and miserable-looking travelers with too many bulging bags.

“I feel like I've walked right into a Dickens novel,” said Josh. Everybody around him was talking very loudly but he couldn't understand a word they were saying. He had always assumed that the English spoke English the way they did in movies, clipped and precise, but instead they talked in a mangled torrent, and he couldn't tell when one word ended and another began. He had ordered shepherd's pie, and then the barman had asked him again if he wanted a pie.

“Yes, the pie.”

“Pie of what?”

“Sorry, I don't understand.”

“Pie of ordinary, pie of best, pie of Guinness, what?”

He was almost reduced to sign language, but even sign language didn't help when the girl behind the food counter asked if Nancy wanted a jacket. He thought that they might have inadvertently offended the pub's dress code.

“Maybe this was a mistake,” said Josh, as he poked at his shepherd's pie.

“You think
that's
a mistake, you ought to taste this lasagne.”

“No, I mean coming here. The police don't seem to know squat.”

“Oh, come on, Josh. You have to give them time. It was a miracle they even found out who she was.”

“I guess you're right. But where the hell has Julia
been
for the last ten months? You'd have thought that she'd have left some kind of forwarding address.”

“Think about it: if she told her employment agency that she was staying at the Paragon Hotel in the Earl's Court district then she must at least have
known
it, even if she didn't actually check in there. So maybe we should look around Earl's Court, and see if we can find anybody who remembers her.”

“You don't think the police are going to do that?”

“I'm sure they will. But where's the harm in us doing it, too?”

Josh took a cautious mouthful of pie. “This is weird,” he
said, after a while. “I hate it, but I want some more.” He paused, and then he said, “What do you think a ‘jacket' is?”

Nancy said, “We could print up some enlargements of a picture of Julia, and stick them on lamp-posts and stuff. You know, ‘Have You Seen This Girl?'”

Josh nodded. “That's a good idea.” He pushed aside his plate and opened up his newly bought A-Z Guide to London. “I guess we're here, right? Earl's Court is here, only three subway stops away. If we can find ourselves a hotel around there …”

They took the tube to Earl's Court, where the sidewalk was crowded with young people waiting for nothing in particular and old people shuffling along with shopping baskets on wheels. There was a pungent smell of hamburgers-and-onions in the air.

They found the Paragon Hotel two streets down, in Barkston Gardens – a red-brick Edwardian building with battered cream paintwork and drooping net curtains as gray as cobwebs. Inside it was gloomy and overheated and the crimson patterned carpet was worn down to the string. Behind the reception desk sat an overweight woman with dyed-blonde hair and a black suit that was far too tight for her.

“If you're looking for a room, dear, sorry – we're full to busting.”

“No, no, we don't need a room. We were wondering if you might remember seeing this girl.” Josh handed over a picture of Julia standing outside a bookstore. “We're talking about a year ago, last spring sometime.”

The woman found a pair of thumbprinted reading glasses and peered at the photograph closely. “No,” she said, after a while. “Can't say I do. But, you know, they come and they go, thousands of them, these young people, and they all look the same to me. All looking for something, or running away from something.”