The Doorkeepers (4 page)

“He slobbers something awful,” said the owner, as Josh heaved it up on to the table. “I wouldn't mind myself but the wife keeps on about the loose covers.”

“Have you noticed any change in his motions?” asked Josh.

“Can't say that I have. One leg in front of the other, same as usual.”

“Sit,” said Josh, but the bull terrier only growled at him. “Sit, damn it,” he repeated, and pressed both hands down on its rump.

“He don't sit much,” the owner remarked. “Not when people tell him to, anyhow.”

Josh lifted one finger in front of the bull terrier's eyes. The bull terrier snarled and shook its head, so that strings of thick saliva flew in all directions. But then Josh slowly brought his finger nearer and nearer to the bull terrier's nose, and then he touched it very lightly on the top of its head.

“You will sit,” he said, in a very quiet voice. “You will be calm and well behaved and you will not snarl.”

The bull terrier looked up at him wide-eyed. Then it gave a pathetic, throaty whine and obediently sat down.

“How do you do that?” asked the owner, in amazement. “I could break a stick on his back and he wouldn't do that for me.”

“Alternative pet management. You use the animal's natural stupidity against him.”

Josh was about to unbuckle the bull terrier's muzzle when Nancy came through to the kitchen. Her long shiny brunette hair was tied up in a blue bandanna and she was wearing one of Josh's checkered shirts and a tight pair of white sailcloth jeans.

“Josh – I'm sorry to break in, but there's a cop here to see you.”

“Yes, I saw him. Jesus. You run one red light and you never hear the end of it.”

“It's not that,” said Nancy. “He wanted to know if you had a sister called Julia.”

“Julia? What did he want to know that for?” Josh turned to the owner of the bull terrier and said, “Excuse me a minute, will you? Maybe you could finish taking this guy's muzzle off.”

The owner stared at him as if he were mad. “Hey, come on now! You're the animal doctor.”

Josh went through to the living room. It was long and low-ceilinged, with Navajo rugs thrown over the furniture and naif oil paintings of animals on the whitewashed walls. Pigs, cockerels, cows, dogs and even more pigs. The deputy was standing uncomfortably by the window, in a sharply pressed khaki uniform, his hat in his hand.

“Mr Joshua Winward?” he asked.

“That's right. Is anything wrong?”

“I'm sorry, sir. I'm afraid we've received some real bad news. Do you want to sit down or something?”

“No,” said Josh. “Just tell me what's wrong.”
Dad,
he thought.
His heart's given out.

“Well, sir, we had a call from London, England. Your sister was found dead yesterday.”

“My sister?” he repeated. “What do you mean, ‘found dead'?”

The deputy consulted his notebook. “Her body was discovered in the River Thames near a place called Kew and was picked up by a police river patrol just after five thirty a.m. London time.”.

Josh reached for the arm of the old colonial rocking chair and awkwardly sat down on the edge of the seat.
Julia!
He couldn't believe what the deputy was telling him. He hadn't heard from Julia in nearly a year now, but he had known why she wanted to escape to England. He had written to her from time to time, with all the latest gossip from Mill Valley, but he hadn't seriously expected her to reply, not till she was ready. He looked across the room and there she still was, in a wooden photo frame, smiling at him as if everything was fine. It was impossible to think that she was dead.

“Do they know—” he began, but then he had to clear his throat. “Do they know how it happened?”

The deputy shook his head. “If they do, they didn't say. All they told me was, they're going to be holding a post-mortem, and they'll e-mail any further information, if it's relevant.”

“But what? Did she fall in, was she pushed in, or what?”

“They didn't say, sir. I'm sorry.”

“Well, is there anybody I can call? I mean, who did you speak to?”

The deputy copied out a name in his notebook and tore off a page. “Here you are – Detective Sergeant Paul, New Scotland Yard. There's the number, too.”

Josh took the note and said, “Thank you.”

“If there's anything else we can do, sir, don't hesitate to call the sheriff's department. My name's Rudy Goralnik.”

The deputy hovered a little longer, but when Josh said
nothing more, he mumbled an embarrassed goodbye, and left. Nancy closed the door behind him and came back into the living room. Josh looked up at her, stricken. “She's dead,” he whispered. “They found her in the river.”

Nancy knelt down in front of him and put her arms around him. “Oh, Josh. I'm so sorry. I don't know what to say.”

“The British police didn't tell them how it happened. She wouldn't have jumped in, would she? She wouldn't have tried to kill herself? I know she was depressed and everything, but she was very positive, wasn't she? Very self-protective. She wouldn't have taken her own life, ever. She would have worked things through.”

“I'll tell your patients what's happened,” said Nancy. “You can't do any more animals today.”

Josh sat up straight. “I'll tell them myself. They came all this way.”

He made his way back to the kitchen, with Nancy close behind him. The man with the bull terrier still hadn't attempted to remove its muzzle, and was waiting for him with an expression on his face that was half-sheepish, half-belligerent.

“I'm sorry, sir,” said Josh. “You'll have to make another appointment.”

“Hey, listen, just because I happen to own the dog, that doesn't mean I'm skilled in handling him, does it? You think I want my fingers bitten off? I play Hawaiian guitar.”

Josh patted him on the shoulder and said, “Never mind. Just make another appointment, will you? The clinic is closed for today.”

He went out on to the verandah and told the rest of his clients the same thing. “I'm sorry,” he heard himself saying, “but there's been a kind of family tragedy.” He paused, and suddenly he couldn't stop the tears from running down his cheeks. “I've just been told that my sister has died.”

Everybody came up to him and squeezed his hand or murmured some small condolence. Only the small boy with the box remained behind.

“I'm sorry, kid,” Josh repeated. “I can't see any more animals today.”

The boy looked up at him in obvious distress. Josh hesitated, and then he went over and said, “Come on then, show me.” He took the lid off the box and there was a cricket lying inside, a cricket with only one leg.

“I just wanted to know if you could sew his other leg back on. I've saved it, look.” He produced a carefully-folded piece of Kleenex.

Josh bent down and gently prodded the cricket with the tip of his finger. It tried to hop but it succeeded only in falling on to its side. “I'm sorry, kid,” Josh told him. “Some things are just beyond saving.”

He called the number that the deputy had given him. He was told that Detective Sergeant Paul had left for the evening, but that he could call in the morning, around eight. That meant midnight, Pacific time.

He sorted through his scruffy, higgledy-piggledy phone book, and found the last number that Julia had given him in London, the Golden Rose Employment Agency, in Earl's Court. He called it, but all he got was a nasal answerphone message. There was nothing else he could do until tonight, when the sun came up over London and everybody went back to work.

Nancy came in. “How about some coffee?” she asked him, putting her arm around his shoulders and kissing him.

“I think a Jack Daniel's would go down better. You know what I have to do now, don't you? I have to phone the folks.”

“OK. One Jack Daniel's coming up.”

She held on to him for a moment, and he was glad of it, because right now he really needed her strength. She had always been strong, which was one of the things that had attracted him so much. Her late father had been a Norwegian-born merchant seaman and her mother was an artist, a full-blooded Modoc, which had given Nancy a startling combination of high cheekbones and dark skin and ice-blue eyes. It had also given her an inner toughness, a very sinewy sense of herself, and even though that often
led them to argue, Josh was glad of it. When he lay in bed at night, he knew who was lying next to him.

Nancy was very silent at night, he could never hear her breathing, and he used to wake her up to make sure that she wasn't dead. This had annoyed her, of course, because Josh snored like a riot in a zoo, and she could never get back to sleep again. But Josh had always been noisy and messy and untidy, ever since he was a small boy. He tried his best to be neat. He tried to be organized. But he was always too interested in moving on to the next thing before he had cleared up the thing before.

Josh was tall, like his father Jack. In fact he looked so much like his father that his mother always called him “Jack” – 6ft 2½ins in his long bare feet, and very lean, with chopped brown hair that looked as if Edward Scissorhands had been at it. He had a long, handsome face and very large brown eyes, but he was the only one in his family to have inherited his great-grandfather's large triangular nose. He had also inherited his great-grandfather's extraordinary empathy with animals. The old man had worked with Barnum & Bailey for years before he eventually came to San Francisco and opened up a pet store on Folsom Street, Winward's World of Waggers.

Josh had spent his childhood nursing crushed snails and feeding abandoned fledglings with eyedroppers, and he had always wanted to be a veterinarian. But his approach to animal medicine had been so unorthodox that he and the California State Veterinary College had parted company by mutual agreement. At college he had set up a pulsed electromagnetic field in order to improve the general health and intelligence of cats; and he had taught dogs to meditate.

He swallowed a mouthful of whiskey and then he punched out his parents' number in Santa Barbara. It rang and rang and he could imagine his father saying, “Who the hell is
thatV
and at last climbing testily out of his deckchair and making his way into the house. He could imagine him shuffling down the pale blue-painted hallway and picking up the phone. And right on cue he heard, “Winward residence … what do you want
now?”

“Dad, it's Josh.”

“Josh? Well, how about that? I thought you were dead.”

“Dad, listen. Something terrible's happened.”

Josh called Detective Sergeant Paul dead on midnight. Common sense told him that he would need a few minutes to get to his desk, but he couldn't wait any longer. As it was, it was picked up instantly, and a woman's voice snapped, “Incident room.”

“Hallo? I'm calling from the United States. I'm trying to get in touch with Detective Sergeant Paul.”

“That's me.”

“Oh, I see. I'm real sorry, I expected—”

“I know. You expected a man. Quite understandable. You must be calling about Julia Winward.”

“That's right. My name's Josh Winward, I'm her brother.”

“Well, I hope you'll accept our condolences, Mr Winward. This is obviously a most distressing time for you.”

“It came as a shock, for sure. Do you have any idea how it happened? I mean, Julia went to England to get over a messy romance, but she wasn't the suicidal kind. Not unless something's happened to her that none of her family know about.”

“This wasn't a suicide, Mr Winward.”

“What does that mean? That somebody else pushed her in?”

“Somebody else
dropped
her in, sir. We haven't had a complete post-mortem, but there's no question at all, she was dead before she went into the river.”

“You're sure about that?”

“Absolutely, sir. Yes.”

“You mean there was no water in her lungs or anything? I'm sorry – maybe I've been watching too much
Murder, She Wrote.”

“There was no water in her lungs, sir.” Pause. “Not as far as we know.”

There was something about the way she paused that aroused Josh's suspicion. “You mean you don't definitely know whether there was water in her lungs or not?”

“Not at this stage, sir. I'm afraid there was some degree of tampering with your sister's body.”

“Tampering?”

Another pause, and then the word that Josh had been dreading. “Mutilation, I suppose you'd have to call it. I really can't say any more over the phone. But we've initiated a full-scale murder inquiry and I'd like to reassure you that everything possible is being done to find the person or persons responsible for your sister's death.”

Josh had to take three deep breaths. He felt as if a huge weight were pressing on his chest.

Detective Sergeant Paul said, “Are you still there, Mr Winward?”

“Yes, I'm still here. I was just a little … overwhelmed, that's all.”

“I'm sorry, sir. But I can't pretend that it was anything other than a very brutal murder. Whoever did it is an extremely dangerous individual, and your sister's case has absolute top priority. Do you have e-mail?”

“Yes, yes I do.”

“In that case, I can send you copies of some of the newspaper reports. But only if you don't think you'll find them too upsetting.”

“No, no, please. I wish you would. Right now … well, I'm still finding it difficult to get my head around it.”

“I do need to ask you some questions, too. Quite a lot of questions.”

“Fire away. Anything I can do to help. Anything.”

“Well, let me send you the newspaper reports first. I've got one or two things on my plate at the moment. Supposing I call you back in a couple of hours?”