Graham Masterton - The Doorkeepers

The dog immediately went to his bowl and started to make a furious lapping noise. The woman dropped her bag on the table and said, “How about a cup of tea? I always have a cup of tea as soon as I get home.”

“Sure, that’d be great. My name’s Josh, by the way. Josh Winward. This is Nancy.”

The woman held out her hand, her wrist jangling with bangles. “Ella Tibibnia, and my dog’s called Abraxas. That’s a very magical name, Abraxas. It’s a pity he’s such a plonker. You never think of dogs being plonkers, do you? But he is.”

Josh didn’t have the faintest idea what a “plonker” was, but he pulled a kind of Harrison Ford grimace to show that he probably agreed. Ella filled a big blue enamel kettle with water and put it on the gas to boil. “You like hawthorn flower tea? It’s very good for insomnia.”

“Sure, whatever you’re brewing up.” Josh looked around the room. Nancy was inspecting an opalescent glass globe in a decorative bronze base, and a collection of sinister little figurines, like chess pieces, all with their heads covered with hoods.

“When was the last time you saw Julia?” Josh asked Ella.

“I can tell you the exact date.” She went across to a bookshelf crowded with an odd assortment of paperbacks and old leather-bound volumes, and brought down a dog-eared exercise book marked DiArY in multicolored pens. She thumbed through it for a while, and then she said, “Here it is. May tenth last year. It was a Sunday. We took Abraxas for a walk in the morning, in Holland Park. Then we had lunch with Wally and Kim in Philbeach Gardens, which is just across the road from here. Daisy was in a really good mood, because she’d found herself a new job. In fact she was almost in too much of a good mood. She kept talking all the time and flapping her hands around. I remember one of my friends asking if she was on something.”

“Maybe she was just excited,” Nancy suggested.

“No, no, it was more than just excitement. I mean, what are we talking about here, it was only a secretarial job for some electrical company out on the Great West Road. But she was bubbling, you know? And saying that she couldn’t wait to start. You’d have thought that she was going off somewhere really exotic.”

Josh said, “I don’t know the Great West Road. Is that someplace you might get excited about?”

“You’re joking, I hope. It’s just one boring factory after another. Hotpoint washing machines. Smith’s Crisps.”

“She didn’t leave you her new address?”

“She kept saying that she was going to, but we all got a bit pissed that afternoon and I forgot to ask her for it. But …” Ella returned to the bookcase and took out a folded letter that was tucked between two books. “I found this under her futon after she’d gone.”

Josh angled the letter toward the nearest lamp. It had a black and white illustration of a 1930s factory on the top, with pennants flying from the roof, and the name Wheatstone Electrics C° Ltd in elegant, dated lettering. The address was Great West Road, Brentford, Middlesex, and the telephone number EALing 6181.

The letter was addressed to Julia here, at 37 Trebovir Road. It was dated May 6, 2000, and it was signed by somebody called F.G. Mordant, Sales Director. It said: “We are pleased to be able to offer you a secretarial position, commencing on May 11, at a salary of £7.13s.6d a week. Please be at Star Yard as before at 8:15 a.m.”

“This was written on a manual typewriter,” said Josh. “You don’t often see that these days.”

“You don’t often see somebody being offered £7.13s.6d a week, either,” put in Ella. “That’s old money, before Britain went decimal, and that was over twenty-five years ago. Apart from the fact that a secretary gets seven pounds an hour these days, not seven pounds a week.”

“Did you try calling this number?”

“No point. They haven’t had an EALing exchange since 1966. It’s all numbers these days. I tried directory enquiries, too, but they didn’t have any record of a company called Wheatstone Electrics.”

“What about Star Yard?”

“I looked that up in the A-Z. It’s just a little pedestrian cut-through off Carey Street, near the Law Courts. Right in the city – nowhere near the Great West Road.”

Josh turned the letter over. There was another address, written in blue ballpoint pen, on the other side. He recognized Julia’s writing immediately. 53b Kaiser Gardens, Lavender Hill. And the name Mrs Marguerite Marmion.

Ella poured boiling water into a large brown teapot and swirled it around. “Before you ask, there is no Kaiser Gardens in Lavender Hill, nor anywhere else in London, and there’s no Mrs Marguerite Marmion in the London telephone directory.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Look them up for yourself. It’s possible that Mrs Marguerite Marmion hasn’t got a phone, or else she’s ex-directory. But if the street doesn’t exist …”

Nancy took the letter and examined it minutely. “This is really strange, isn’t it? I mean, it’s quite fashionable for companies to use a traditional old picture on their letterhead, but they’d put their up-to-date telephone number and fax and e-mail numbers on it, wouldn’t they?”

Ella shrugged. “What difference does it make, if there’s no such company?”

“Well, none. But if Julia didn’t go to the Wheatstone Electrics Company, where did she go?”

“My friend Wally thinks she was playing a practical joke. She must have found some old paper and made a copy of it.”

“You think so?” said Josh. “You feel this letterhead. It’s all embossed, and embossing doesn’t come cheap. Why would Julia go to the expense of producing a single sheet of embossed paper, just for a practical joke? And if it was a practical joke, what was the point of it?”

“Maybe she found an original sheet of paper from the 1930s,” Ella suggested.

Nancy rubbed it between her fingers and sniffed it. “I don’t know. It looks new. It feels new. It even smells new.”

They sipped tea for a while, in silence. Josh thought that it tasted like boiled hedges, but it was strangely soothing, and cleared his sinuses. He passed the letter back to Ella and said, “Did you try going out to the Great West Road, to see if this factory’s actually there?”

“No, we didn’t. We talked about it, but you know. It looked like Julia wanted to disappear and that she didn’t want anybody to find her. We decided that leaving us a letter like this was her way of saying that she was going to start a new life, and that she didn’t want any of us to be a part of it.

“But somebody murdered her. We have to find out where she went.”

“I don’t know. I wish I could help.”

Abraxas came up to Josh and nuzzled against his knee. “That dog likes you,” Ella smiled. “That’s very unusual. I’ve always taught him to bite first and ask questions afterwards.”

Nancy smiled. “Josh has a certain way with animals, don’t you Josh? I think he understands them much better than he understands people. He has a degree in animal behavior.”

“Seven-tenths of a degree in animal behavior,” Josh corrected her. “I was asked to reconsider my future after I prescribed Prozac for a chronically depressive ragdoll. I happen to believe that there isn’t very much difference between animals and people. They’re both stupid. But it’s amazing what they can do if you encourage them.”

“Hey, I don’t think dogs are stupid,” said Ella. “I think they’ve got incredible abilities.”

“They do, you’re absolutely right. But they’re far too lazy to use them. Evolution, who needs it, when you’ve got a nice warm basket and all the food you can eat.”