“I don’t know. I heard the rhyme and I guess it seemed like the only possibility. You know what Sherlock Holmes said.”
“No. And I don’t wish to know. The fact remains … that your story is fanciful and full of… unexplained discrepancies. I suspect that you are bent on crime or subversion or both and I intend to discover … exactly why you came here and what you intended to do.”
“Then I’m sorry. You’ll have a hell of a long wait.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.” Edridge beckoned the Hooded Man, who came over to the desk and inclined his head so that Edridge could whisper in his ear. He nodded once, and then again, and Josh could see his eyes shining inside the torn-open gaps of his hessian hood.
“You have a last opportunity … to explain why you came through the door.” Edridge slid a sheet of paper across the desk and offered Josh his fountain pen. “I want it all here. Names. Addresses. Meeting places. Dates.”
“I can’t help you.”
“Is that your last word?”
“First and last. I’ve told you why I’m here. I’m trying to find out what happened to my sister, that’s all.”
“Have you heard of the Holy Harp?” asked the Hooded Man, harshly.
“Somebody mentioned it, yes. I don’t know who.”
“The Holy Harp sings with the voice of pure truth. As you will shortly discover.”
Josh tried to stand up, but the dog leaped up at him so ferociously that he sat back down again. “Listen,” he insisted. “I’m not a Communist or an atheist or a terrorist. All I want to do is go back home and leave you people to run your society the way you see fit. You want to cut people’s hands off? Fine. You want to keep slaves? I’m not arguing. You want to deny everybody their basic religious rights? That’s up to you. Just let me go and you won’t see me again till Doomsday.”
“Doomsday!” said Edridge. “What an appropriate word to conjure up! The day when everybody has to give an honest account of themselves in the face of God. Well, today is your Doomsday, Mr Joshua B. Winward. And may the Lord have mercy on you.”
Eighteen
Nancy rang the doorbell three times before Ella answered on the intercom. “Who is it?” she asked, suspiciously.
“It’s Nancy. Something terrible’s happened. Please open the door. I didn’t know where else to go.”
The door buzzed and Nancy pushed her way inside. Ella was waiting for her at the top of the stairs, with Abraxas wagging his tail so hard that it slapped against the banisters.
“Have you been swimming?” asked Ella, when she saw Nancy’s damp clothes and bedraggled hair.
Nancy shook her head. “It was raining in the other London.”
“So you got through,” said Ella, ushering her into her apartment. “Isn’t Josh with you?”
“The candles blew out. I had to leave him behind.”
“You look exhausted. Here – let me give you something dry to wear. You don’t mind a caftan, do you?”
“I had to leave him behind,” said Nancy, desperately. “I didn’t have any choice. These terrible Hooded Men caught him. They have swords, and they cut a young man’s hand off. I don’t know what they’re going to do to Josh.”
“The Hoodies,” said Ella. The sun was shining through the window, and outside the noises of Earl’s Court traffic sounded reassuringly normal.
Nancy was tugging off one of her boots. She stopped, and looked up at Ella in astonishment. “You know about them?”
Ella nodded. “I’ve always known about them. I come from there. This isn’t my London at all.”
“You knew about them and yet you let us go there? They killed a man in front of us! They chased us all across the rooftops and we almost died!”
“I’m sorry. I was taking the chance that you wouldn’t run into them. If I’d told you what it was really like there, would you have gone?”
“I can’t believe this! You tricked us into going!”
“I didn’t trick you, Nancy. You wanted to go. It was just bad luck that you ran into the Hoodies.”
“Why didn’t you warn us? For Christ’s sake, Josh could be dead by now!”
“I couldn’t warn you. I didn’t know if I could trust you or not. If I’d have warned you, it would have been an open admission that I was part of the resistance network.”
“You didn’t trust us?”
“We can never be too careful. The Doorkeepers send all kinds of people through to infiltrate us, and they come in so many different guises. Some of them look so innocent you can’t believe it. University students, council officials, widows who come to me because they want to talk to their dear departed husbands. You and Josh could easily have been planted by the Doorkeepers to find out how many of us there are, and where we live.”
“You really believed that we were spies for the Hooded Men?”
“No, we didn’t. But we had to be sure. Because you and Josh were a godsend. Almost too good to be true.”
“Too good? Too damned gullible!”
“Please … I can understand why you’re angry. But we’ve been trying to catch Frank Mordant for a very long time, and we thought that you might have better luck than us.”
Nancy shook her head in disbelief. “You knew who we were even before you first met us at the subway station, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did. A whole lot of people have been keeping a very close eye on you, ever since you got here. One or two police officers … the receptionist from the Paragon Hotel … Ranjit Singh at St Thomas’s … old Mrs Marmion. The resistance come in all creeds and colors and ages. The only thing they have in common is a hatred of the Doorkeepers.”
“I don’t understand this at all,” said Nancy. “All of those people were watching us?”
“Watching and guiding. Now – why don’t you change, and I’ll make you a cup of tea, and I’ll tell you about it.”
“I have to go back. I have to go back and find Josh.”
“I know. And we can’t waste any time, either. The Hoodies probably won’t hurt him until they find out why he came through the door. But they’re not very patient. There are lots of stories about them cutting people open and eating their livers, but that’s all they are, stories. The Hoodies don’t discourage them, though. It makes them sound more frightening than they really are.”
“You don’t think they’re frightening enough?”
“Come on, don’t worry too much. Josh doesn’t know anything about the resistance, so they can’t charge him with subversion.”
“We met John Farbelow at the British Museum. Josh knows about him.”
“Yes, but how much? And John Farbelow is a totally wild card: even the Hoodies know that. His heart’s in the right place, but he always follows his own nutty agenda. All the same,” she said, “I’m glad you mentioned him. He has outstanding contacts in all kinds of places, including Scotland Yard. He could help us to get Josh free.”
“So if I went back and got in touch with him …?”
“You can’t go back, not until tomorrow. The earth has to turn a full circle before you can go back the way you came.”
“Or what? I just couldn’t get through?”
“Oh, you’d get through, all right. But not to the world you’d just left behind. You’d get through to the next world in the sequence of worlds – and, believe me, you wouldn’t want to do that.”
“There are more Londons?”
“An infinite number, as far as anybody can tell. Some people have tried to go further, to see how different they are, but not many of them have ever come back.” She spooned a powder of peony root into a blue china teapot and poured boiling water over it. “Here … peony is great for calming you down. It restores your sense of reality.”