Graham Masterton - The Doorkeepers

“Hold up a minute! Please!”

The porter gave him a gilded grin. “It’s all right. This lift takes a very long time coming. I didn’t have a beard when I first pushed the button … That’s a joke,” he added, with the pedantic care of somebody who looks after the elderly.

“Polly,” said Josh. “The old girl, one hundred and one years old.”

The porter kept smiling, but his eyes were no longer focused. “I’m sorry.”

“What do you mean, you’re sorry? Yesterday morning we met outside the X-ray Department. You were pushing this very old woman in a wheelchair. She called out my name, so I stopped you and I talked to her for a couple of minutes. You told me her name was Polly and that she had just celebrated her hundred-and-first birthday.”

The porter kept on smiling at him blankly.

“You don’t remember that? That was less than twenty-four hours ago.”

“We asked you about the Mother Goose rhyme,” put in Nancy. “Six doors they stand in London Town. Don’t you remember that?”

“I’m sorry, madam. I was born in Punjab. I didn’t speak English until I was seventeen.”

“That’s what you said yesterday, too.”

“I don’t think so, sir. You must be making a misidentification.”

“It was you, God damn it. You were pushing this white-haired old lady called Polly. You told me how she kept on grabbing people.”

The elevator arrived, and the door opened. A man on crutches pushed his way between them. “I’m sorry, sir,” said the porter. “But I am very busy now. So, please.”

Josh snatched his lapel and pulled him quite violently away from the elevator doors. “You listen to me, my friend. I don’t know why you’re lying to me, but I need to find that old lady and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Either you take me right to her, right now, or else I’m going to drag you around this hospital, ward by ward, until I do.”

“I’m sorry, I shall have to call security.”

“Go on then, call security,” Josh challenged him, although he didn’t have the faintest idea of what he would do if he did.

The porter looked at him for a long time, saying nothing.

“Well?” Josh demanded.

“It is the best plan for you, sir, if you leave quietly. There is no woman called Polly.”

“What are you trying to say to me?”

“I am saying that there is no woman called Polly. Enough that you know the rhyme. Now, please release me. There could be somebody watching.”

Josh released his grip on the porter’s lapel and slowly looked around. He didn’t know what he was looking for. Men in hoods? But all he could see was people in plaster and people in wheelchairs and people with an almost comical assortment of exaggerated limps. When he turned back, the porter had gone.

“Something’s wrong here,” he said, taking hold of Nancy’s hand. “Something’s very, very wrong.”

“This is beginning to frighten me,” said Nancy, as they left the hospital and walked back across the parking lot. The sun was dazzling and the wind fluttered her scarf. “What happened last night… that was so gross. And now this. That porter was telling us a barefaced lie.”

Josh unlocked the car. “First I want to go back to the alleyway in Star Yard. We both saw it, didn’t we, and theoretically that’s impossible, two people having the same hallucination. So it must have some kind of significance. If there’s nothing there, then OK. We’ll have to admit that somebody’s playing us for mugs. We’ll tell Detective Sergeant Paul everything that’s happened and leave it to her to go figure. That’s a promise.”

DS Paul had left them a message to call her. When Josh managed to get through, she sounded brusque and busy. “Crimewatch was a washout, quite frankly. Very disappointing. We had only twenty-seven calls, which must be their worst response ever.”

“Any leads at all?”

“We’re still checking two of them, but I’ll have to be candid with you and say that they don’t look hopeful.”

“You mean you’re stymied?”

“That’s not entirely accurate. We still have quite a few avenues of inquiry left open to us.”

“Avenues of inquiry? That sounds suspiciously like official speak for sitting on your butts scratching your heads.”

“Mr Winward, you’re an American. You’re probably not used to the way that police investigations are conducted in Britain. They’re extremely low key, as a rule. No car chases, no gunfights. Just steady, solid policework.”

“Resulting so far in what we Americans call squat.”

“You don’t have to be shirty, Mr Winward. I assure you that we’re doing everything possible to find the people who murdered your sister.”

“Tell me the truth. She was my sister. I think I deserve the truth.”

“All right. But if you quote me on this, I shall deny it. We have interviewed more than two and a half thousand people in two days. We have checked every single working CCTV camera in central London, every single one, and inspected the CCTV systems of more than four hundred restaurants and nightclubs. We have carried out DNA tests on forty-three different men of seven different ethnic origins. We have contacted every single employment agency in the Greater London area, as well as every hospital and clinic, private or NHS. We know a lot of people who didn’t kill your sister, but so far we’re no nearer to discovering who did.”

Josh was silent for a while. Then he said, “I see. OK. Well, thanks for being upfront. I didn’t mean to embarrass you or anything. Perhaps you’d check with me tomorrow.”

He put down the phone. Nancy looked up and said, “Why do you talk to everybody as if they’ve brought you a molting cockatiel to look at?”

“The police haven’t gotten anyplace at all.”

“What about that Crimewatch program?”

“Nothing. It’s supposed to have the biggest audience of any crime-prevention program in Britain. You’d think that at least one person would have remembered seeing Julia. Shit, she was pretty. You’d think that one guy would have noticed her, walking along the street. Well, maybe not. There’s supposed to be more gays to the square inch in Britain than there are in San Francisco. Maybe they just don’t notice women.”

He paused, and massaged the back of his neck with his hand. “Unless, of course, she wasn’t here to be noticed.”

It was two thirty-five p.m. when they found a spare parking meter on Carey Street, less than a hundred yards away from Star Yard. The day was still sunny, although the traffic fumes had created a faint haze everywhere, as if the Gothic buildings and the brightly dressed people who were hurrying around them were slightly out of focus. Nancy was carrying six candles and three metal candleholders in her bag, which they had bought at the Roman Catholic shop behind Westminster Cathedral. Neither of them were Catholics, but Josh thought that Catholic candles might carry more mystical authority. It was all that Nancy had been able to do to prevent him from buying a vial of holy water and a genuine palm crucifix from Jerusalem.

“For that price, they should at least have given you a guarantee that it was trodden on by Jesus’ personal donkey.”

They turned into Star Yard. It faced south, so the sun was shining into it, but somehow the sun fell short of the corner where the niche was. Josh peered into the shadows. The niche still looked like a complete dead end. It was still cluttered with rubbish and it still stank of rotten leaves and urine. “This isn’t the way I saw it last night,” said Josh. “It was deeper, then. What do you think?”

“You’re right. It was definitely deeper.”