Down on the sidewalk, Simon had gone into shock. He was trembling like a run-over stag and his eyes had rolled up into his head. One of the drummers knelt beside him and looped a lanyard around his arm, just below his elbow, and knotted it tight. The blood stopped spurting across the yard, but it was still leaking all over the paving stones, and so the drummer wrapped a grimy-looking cloth around it and told Simon to press it against his stump as hard as he could.
“Jesus save me,” Simon quivered, through whitened lips.
“Oh, Jesus will save you, mate,” said the drummer. “Jesus saved Barabbas, didn’t he?”
Nancy was still hesitating. None of the Hooded Men made any attempt to follow her, and of course they couldn’t, unless they relit the candles. She was already through to the “real” London – a different existence altogether. With an expression of bewilderment and anguish, she lifted both hands, with the palms flat, as if she were pressing them against a window. Josh knew what it meant: I love you, and I’m not going to abandon you. She stood like that for three or four helpless seconds, before she turned and walked away. She turned right and then she was gone.
“Pity your poor lady,” said the Hooded Man. “She’s going to miss all the amusements.”
“Call an ambulance!” Josh demanded. “If this man doesn’t receive medical attention right now he’s going to go into deep shock.”
“He’ll have his ambulance. Meanwhile, you can come with us.”
“What am I supposed to have done?”
“Did I say that you’d done anything? We’d like to engage you in a little conversation, that’s all.”
“And supposing I don’t want to?”
“Oh, you will, sir. Believe me, you will.”
Josh was turned around and pushed firmly against the opposite wall. There was a broken guttering high above his head and the rainwater splattered against his shoulder. He tried to edge sideways but one of the Hooded Men prodded him with his sword. “Stay where you have been told to stay.”
“I’m an American citizen. You don’t have any right to hold me like this.”
“Yes, I do.”
“At least let me talk to the US Embassy.”
“You’re making no sense, sir.”
The Hooded Man quickly searched through his pockets and discovered his billfold in the back pocket of his jeans. He sorted through his credit cards and his driver’s license and his photographs of Julia and Nancy.
“Joshua B. Winward, is that your name?”
“You can read, can’t you? How about calling that ambulance?”
“If I were you, Mr Joshua B. Winward, I would concern myself more with my own welfare.”
“But you’re not me. You’re just a goddamned sadist with a sack over his head.”
The Hooded Man, unexpectedly, laughed. “You have a great deal to learn about life in this London, sir. A very great deal. Now, let’s get you off and ask you some questions.”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“Wiser if you do, sir. We don’t want to have to open you up, do we, and read what we want to know from the disposition of your vitals?”
“I see … you’re going to cut me open, just like you cut open that woman in Lavender Hill.”
“Keep your peace, sir.”
They heard an ambulance bell approaching from Chancery Lane. Simon, without warning, began to wave the stump of his arm in the air and scream. He screamed so loudly that one of the dog-handlers slapped his face with his dog leash, but it didn’t stop him. Two or three of the dogs began to join in his screaming with a mournful howling of their own.
What with that, and the rain, and the fact that he was now alone with the Hooded Men, Josh began to feel that – even if he hadn’t really returned from Purgatory – he had certainly been sent to hell.
Seventeen
With their drums beating a fierce tattoo, the Hooded Men marched Josh to the end of Chancery Lane. There, a black van was parked, of the kind they used to call a Black Maria. They opened the back doors and heaved him inside, forcing him to sit on a varnished wooden bench, handcuffed to a rail that ran the length of the interior.
“You can’t do this.”
“I don’t think you understand, sir. We can choose to do whatever we wish.”
“Why don’t you just let me leave? I didn’t come here to cause trouble.”
“Believe me, you’ve caused a bushel of trouble already.”
With that, the Hooded Man stepped down from the van, slammed the doors, and locked them. After a few moments, the van’s engine started up, and Josh was driven off at high speed. Every time the van swung around a corner, he was pitched against the side of it, bruising his shoulder.
He felt the van drive down a steep cobbled hill and then turn to the right. It swayed from side to side as if they were weaving through traffic, and every now and then it shrilled its bell. After less than five minutes it slowed down, turned again, and stopped. The doors opened and the Hooded Man reappeared, with a dog-handler and two police constables, both of them wearing high-collared tunics with silver buttons.
“Welcome to Great Scotland Yard,” said the Hooded Man, as one of the constables unlocked Josh’s handcuffs. He was led across a wide courtyard surrounded by towering red-brick offices. It was raining even harder, and the day was so dark that green-shaded desk lamps were dimly shining in almost every window.
Josh was escorted through black-painted double doors marked MORO ONLY, then marched along a narrow corridor with an echoing parquet floor. He was pushed into an elevator with clattering steel gates and he had to stand with the dog panting and slavering only inches away from him while it clanked its way up to the fifth floor. He tried to give the dog his famous “chill-out” look, which would have had any Marin County pooch rolling over on to its back and whining in pleasure; but the dog-handler was pulling the animal’s choke-chain so hard that it was practically asphyxiated. The gates clashed open.
At the end of another narrow corridor, he was steered into a large room with a bare table and two upright wooden chairs. Outside the window there was a dreary view of the Thames, with the rain dredging down, and Waterloo Bridge. The tide was flooding in, so that lighters and pleasure boats rode high at their moorings, and an archipelago of driftwood and oil and nameless flotsam was being carried slowly upstream, in the same way that Julia’s body had been.
They kept Josh waiting for over an hour, with the dog wheezing against its chain, as if it was waiting to take a bite out of his face. He developed an agonizing cramp in his left ankle, and began to feel sick with hunger and delayed shock.
“How about a cup of coffee?” he asked the Hooded Man; but the Hooded Man said nothing.
At last the door opened and a small, bald-headed man entered, dressed in a black Puritan tunic and breeches. He had the features of an ill-tempered doll. He had a tiny braided pigtail at the back of his head, tied with a thin black ribbon.
He sat down on the opposite side of the table, spread out a sheaf of papers, and unscrewed a fountain pen. Then he stared at Josh for a long time without saying anything, his pen poised as if he were deciding what he ought to write down.
“I insist that you call the US consul,” said Josh. “You can’t hold me here without making any charges.”
The bald-headed man spoke very softly, punctuating each phrase with a little suck of his lips. “My name is Master Thomas Edridge. You … I gather … are Joshua B. Winward … from Mill Valley, California.”