He dropped backward on to the road, with blood squirting out of his neck like a crimson geyser. He tried to reach up to his neck, to stop himself from hemorrhaging, but the wound gaped open so wide that there was nothing he could do. He let out a horrible gargling, his hands shaking and his feet kicking, and then he lay still.
“Oh my God,” said Petty. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
Josh stood back, the smoke still swirling all around him. Christ almighty, he had killed a man, and killed him with a sword. He didn’t know whether he felt like a medieval hero or a homicidal maniac. The feeling was completely primitive.
“We should run,” Petty told him, glancing back anxiously in the direction of the single drumbeat. “Don’t tell me they won’t be looking for us.”
“Yes,” said Josh. “You’re absolutely right. We should run.”
“Then run, for fuck’s sake!”
Josh nodded. But for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to leave the still-shuddering body on the ground. He approached the Hooded Man, and stood over him. His hessian mask was almost completely soaked in blood, and his head was tilted sideways at an impossible angle. One more swipe from his sword would have beheaded the Hooded Man completely.
“Please,” begged Petty. “Let’s get out of here!”
Josh prodded the Hooded Man’s chest with the point of his sword. Then, carefully, he started to cut at the side of his hessian hood.
“What are you doing?” Petty fretted.
“I want to see,” said Josh. “I want to see what these bastards really look like, underneath their hoods.”
He carried on cutting. The hessian was old and fragile, so he cut through it quite easily. Then, still using the point of his sword, he pulled it off the Hooded Man’s head, and flung it aside.
“Oh, my God,” said Petty; and even Josh could only look for an instant before he turned away.
Twenty-Two
Nancy walked into the echoing lobby of Wheatstone Electrics and briskly approached the reception desk.
“Can I help yew?” asked the girl behind the marble-topped desk. She wore a tight beige cardigan and brown plastic combs in her hair.
“I don’t have an appointment. But I wonder if Mr Mordant could spare me a minute.”
“Mr Mor-dant? I don’t know about thayt. Mr Mordant only sees people by appoint-munt.”
“All the same, maybe you could tell him I’d like to see him.”
The girl looked Nancy up and down, and then sniffed. “I suppose I could try. You’re wasting your time, though. Mr Mordant’s always up to his eyes.”
“He’s up to his eyes?”
“Oh, yace. If he’s not here he’s somewhere else.”
“You know,” said Nancy. “That’s been happening to me lately, too.”
The girl plugged in the telephone line, and rang it, and after a few moments she said, “Mr Mor-dant? Yace. Brenda here in reception. I’ve got a young lady here to see yew.”
“Nancy Andersen.”
“Her name’s Nancy Andersen. That’s right. No, I haven’t asked her. No.”
The receptionist covered up the mouthpiece with her hand and said, “What’s it about?”
“Tell him I’m a friend of Julia Winward.”
The receptionist rolled her eyes up into her head. “She says she’s a friend of Julia’s.”
She listened again, and then she said, “He’ll be right down. If you wouldn’t mind taking a seat.”
Nancy sat in a large brown art-deco couch, next to a glass-topped table on which there was a fanned-out display of Advanced Electrics and Grid & Generators Monthly.
She didn’t have to wait long, though. Frank Mordant came down almost immediately. The elevator chimed and he stepped out into the lobby, wearing white shirtsleeves and pinstripe pants and very shiny black Oxford shoes. So this is the terrible Frank Mordant, thought Nancy. This ratty little gent with his clipped moustache and his Brylcreemed hair. Mind you – who would have thought, looking at pictures of Ted Bundy, or Son of Sam …?
“Miss—?” he said, crossing the lobby with a grin, and holding out his hand.
“Andersen. Nancy Andersen.”
“Well, well,” he said, sitting on the couch beside her and resting his arm along the back of it, so that she couldn’t miss the whiff of body odor. “So you knew Julia. What a smashing girl she was. I was very sorry when she went.”
“You don’t know what happened to her, do you? I expected to hear from her weeks ago, but – you know, nothing.”
“I don’t know. One day she was here, happy as a skylark. The next day, nothing. She didn’t turn up for work, and that was that. I tried to ring her at home but her landlady said that she had moved away. Perhaps she had personal problems. I simply don’t know.”
“You didn’t report her missing?”
“What for? She was a grown-up girl, after all.”
“You didn’t think that anything might have happened to her?”
“Such as what?”
“Well, anything. Julia was one of my best friends. She would never disappear without telling me where she was going.”
Frank Mordant examined his well-buffed fingernails. “You’re American, aren’t you?”
“Hey, full marks.”
“What could we see by the dawn’s early light?”
“Old Glory, of course.”
Frank Mordant looked up at her with a chilling smile. “You don’t come from here, do you?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Oh, you’ve tried hard. The tweed suit. The shoes. But I can always tell. The hair’s not right. You haven’t tweezered your eyebrows. You smell too good and you’re too damned self-assured. This is like Britain in the 1930s. Women aren’t confident. There hasn’t been a war, remember. They haven’t been driving ambulances and making munitions and looking after their families on their own.”
He looked at her for a while, still smiling, and then he said, “In this world, my dear, Old Glory doesn’t exist, and never has. The United States of America is nothing but a rather prosperous part of the British Commonwealth. You’d recognize it, if you took the Zeppelin over and had a look around. Similar accent, similar culture. They make cars in Detroit and films in Hollywood. Perhaps they’re rather more class-conscious. You know, they have dukes and earls, just like we do. And nobody’s invented the hamburger, thank God.”
Nancy said, “Look, I’m really worried about Julia. I was hoping you could help me.”
“Of course.” Frank Mordant had such a sinister aura about him that Nancy felt her skin prickling. It was the kind of personal darkness that her grandfather used to call “crow-feathers.” It was the aura of carrion-pickers, those huge black birds that tear at the corpses of rabbits and gophers on the highway, and only lazily flap away when you’re almost about to run them over. Greedy and cheap and contemptuous, with a kind of throwaway evil about them.
“I met Julia two or three times in London,” Nancy lied. “She told me all about Wheatstone Electrics, and you, and how much she liked her job.”
“Really? You met her? She didn’t tell me that she’d ever been back.”
“Oh, sure. She told me all about the doors, and the candles. Of course I didn’t believe it at first, but the second time we met, she showed me.”
“She showed you.”
“That’s right. She lit the candles and recited the rhyme, and she was gone.”
“Well, she never told me that, I must admit. She never told me that she’d been back. But then, I was only her employer, wasn’t I? So long as she was happy and she did her job.”