The Killing Doll

by Ruth Rendell

  Mrs. Collins gave Dolly a ten-pound note which Dolly, crossing the road from Mrs. Collins’s little terraced cottage in Orchard Lane, spent on stocking up with wine at the off-license. Five bottles, wrapped in tissue in two carriers.

  It was a dull warm, white-skied summer day. Dolly climbed up the steps and got on to the old railway line by the bridge in Northwood Road. A woman was walking along with a white Pyrenean mountain dog on a lead. Dolly was wearing a pink and yellow and brown plaid cotton dress with a wide brown belt, tights, and low-heeled sandals. The tights were new, on for the first time, and to protect them she decided not to climb up the embankment but to go through the Mistley tunnel to the station and up the steps.

  It was absolutely dry underfoot; there had been no rain for a fortnight. Usually it was a bit muddy inside the tunnel but not today. Footprints and cycle tire marks were etched in the hard, pale, feather-strewn clay. Dolly walked through the tunnel, carrying her bags of wine bottles. Someone had stacked the mattress up on its side and propped it up with an oil drum and some wire. Perhaps, rather, the council or the railway people or somebody or other were collecting up the rubbish in here at last before taking it away. Dolly nearly went over to the mattress to see, at closer quarters, if it did look as if some genuine tidying work had been done, but she thought better of it. The bags were heavy, and the smelly dirty old tunnel was no place in which to linger.

  She mounted the steps. In Manningtree Grove, outside the house, she paused for a moment. Myra had lost no time in revitalizing the garden. The Michaelmas daisies and Solomon’s seal were all gone and in their place she had planted annuals—lobelias and tagetes and petunias—and these were in flower. Dolly was not one of those people who think all flowers beautiful and here she thought the juxtaposition of cobalt blue, orange, and shocking pink particularly inharmonious. Gingie, for once, was sitting on the post.

  “Get off!” said Dolly and clapped her hands. The cat fled.

  She let herself into the house but not quietly or cautiously. It was a Monday and Myra worked till lunchtime.

  “Doreen!”

  Dolly froze. The door to the front room opened and Myra came out, wearing jade green dungarees and a navy-and-white striped T-shirt.

  “Caught at last,” said Myra but not unpleasantly. “I always seem to see the tail end of you disappearing. Now I’ve got you, come in here and give me the benefit of your advice.”

  “Why aren’t you at work?”

  These were practically the first words Dolly had ever addressed to her but Myra gave no sign that she realized this. “I’ve started a fortnight’s holiday, my dear. I’m going to begin on the painting tomorrow. Now don’t look like that!” Dolly hadn’t looked like anything. Her face, as usual, was expressionless. “Yes, I mean me with my own two hands,” Myra said. “To be perfectly honest with you, I spent so much on converting your kitchen I can’t afford to have the men in again.”

  “They only put a sink in,” said Dolly, “and we didn’t want that.”

  Myra gave her tinkling laugh. “Oh, well, that’s frank if you like. We won’t argue about it. I didn’t bring you in here to argue. I want you to tell me what color scheme you think I ought to have.”

  This was something Dolly had plenty of ideas about. For a moment she forgot her hatred of Myra. “It’s a light room. You could have a strong color. You could have a white ceiling and brilliant white paintwork and deep russet walls. That would tone in with the carpet and those chairs.”

  Myra was astonished. She had spoken to Dolly because she had genuinely thought it would be better to be on speaking terms with her. But in answer to her question she had expected some such rejoinder as “I don’t know” or “Whatever you like.” “I’m not keeping that filthy old carpet or those chairs,” she said scornfully. “I’m having haircord and stripped pine. And I think a natural beige for the walls, there’s a shade they call papyrus.”

  “Suit yourself.” Dolly shrugged her shoulders. It was still early in the day but she suddenly felt she needed a glass of wine badly and she made for the door.

  Myra had hoped for an offer of help which she now saw she wasn’t going to get. She remembered, though, the original purpose of accosting Dolly. “Want a coffee? I was just going to have one.”

  Coffee was no substitute for a tumblerful of Spanish burgundy. “No, thanks.”

  “Well, if I can’t twist your arm, I can’t. Come and inspect the work, though, will you? I hope to have a good bit done by Friday. Come and have a look and tell me what you think. We ought to be friends, Doreen, two girls living in the same house.”

  Instead of putting up the real objections to Myra as usurper and iconoclast, Dolly chose a less obvious impediment. There was little she had to be proud of but she was proud and jealous of her youth. While she had her youth, miracles could still happen, her blind prince might come or some genius find a cure. “You’re older than me,” she said.

  “A little bit,” Myra said, going red.

  “I’m twenty-six. How old are you?”

  The flush deepened. “When I’m asked that I usually say ‘somewhere between thirty and death.’ To be perfectly honest with you, I’m thirty-eight.”

  “I thought so.” Dolly picked up her bags and went off upstairs.

  She poured herself a big glass of wine and sat down to drink it. Four dolls sat on the mantelpiece, two little girls with yellow plaits, Myra, and an Indian boy doll in a silk turban. Dolly sipped her wine, watched by the dolls.

  “Sunbeach” was the name of the color Myra chose for the living room, a compromise between her choice and Dolly’s. She thought Dolly might come down and see how she was getting on but Dolly did not. She worked every day and when she had finished the living room she started on the dining room, bought cheap but smart-looking brown haircord to carpet the floors and a three-piece suite in pine with brown-and-white check cotton upholstery. Pup looked in sometimes to give her a kindly word of encouragement, and occasionally Harold, conscious of the huge sacrifice he was making on the altar of marriage, turned his back on the shabby delightful solitude of the breakfast room and sat reading his book in a chair by her stepladder.

  After that initial nasty feeling that he was indulging in necrophilia, Harold had only twice made love to his wife and neither time had been particularly satisfactory. For a while he was uneasy about denying her what he thought of as a wife’s right. He lay in bed waiting for the touch or the question, and when neither came but instead a cheerful “Good night, Hal,” he felt he had been given another night’s reprieve. But in fact, though he knew nothing of this, Myra had not married him for love, still less for sex. She had had all the sex, and indeed all the passion and fulfillment, she had wanted with the married man. She was a trumpery, shallow, insincere woman was Myra, but she had her happinesses and her miseries like anyone else and for her, all the happiness of love had gone when the married man went. In a husband, in Harold, she wanted a man to go about with and be seen with, someone of the opposite sex to talk to, and a provider of a big house and the security it brought. She was not dissatisfied with her bargain, and all the better if she could honor her part of it with her skills and her savings rather than a pretense of sexual enthusiasm.

  By daylight, Harold was proud of his wife’s appearance. When they went out together, it gratified him to be seen arm-in-arm with her. Harold was one of those men who like to say they don’t understand women, women are a mystery. His mind ranged sometimes over the incomprehensible women of history—Messalina, Catherine de’ Medici, Anne Boleyn, Charlotte Corday— their unaccountable behavior lending weight to his convictions. Women were an enigma and his own wife as great an enigma as any. He derived an almost complacent satisfaction from thinking this way. It absolved him from having to consider why Myra accepted his lack of ardor so equably, why she was wearing herself out painting, and why, instead of having a bit of hush now the dining room was done, she should wish to invite people to eat in it.

  Myra couldn’t catch
Dolly in the hall again, so she went upstairs and tapped on the door. Dolly guessed who it was, snatched up the dolls and put them in the remnants box out of sight.

  “We’re having a few friends in for dinner on Thursday week,” Myra said in her best suburban wife manner. “I hope you and Peter will join us.”

  “I’ve got to go to a meeting.” The Adonai Spiritists were holding another seance and Dolly had almost decided not to go but she would now. “What friends? Dad hasn’t got any friends.”

  “Quite frankly, Doreen, I think I’m a better judge of that than you are. Of course he’s got friends. If you must know, we’re having my boss Mr. Colefax and his wife and a very nice couple Hal and I got to know at bingo. If you won’t come, I expect my mother will.”

  The dining room had apple-green walls now, beige Dralon curtains, haircord on the floor, aluminum-framed Constable prints, and on the table Ravenhead glass and stainless steel cutlery and tablemats of British game birds.

  Pup didn’t refuse the invitation. He performed an Elemental ritual and went out and bought himself a suit, gray flannel, plain and elegant, and a gray shirt with a small pink and white pattern on it. He thought it unnecessary to mention this to Dolly or that he had cast the I Ching and it had told him that the desires of the superior man are not thus to be pacified.

  He came out of the temple, wearing his robe, and kissed Dolly, who was just leaving for her seance. Just as she closed the front door behind her, Miss Finlay came tearing along at her usual pace. There were police everywhere, she said, and did Dolly know what it was about? When she, Miss Finlay, had tried to get on to the old railway line down the steps at Crescent Road, a policeman had turned her back. There was nothing in the evening paper and she hadn’t got television. Dolly hadn’t got television either, though Myra had just bought a color set. They walked down Manningtree Grove towards Mount Pleasant Green and in that short time two police cars passed them with blue lights flashing.

  Myra’s guests all had television and they had all had their radios on while getting ready to come out. When they were having their pre-dinner drinks in the pine and cane living room they talked about nothing else, not that it wasn’t a horrible thing to talk about, a horrible thing to happen, the man who did it must be a monster, no better than an animal.

  “I’ve yet to hear of animals cutting each other’s heads off,” said Mrs. Brewer.

  Pup said nothing. He was sorry it had happened on the old railway line and inside that very tunnel where, long ago now, he had performed the first ritual of his career. On a fine summer evening like this one it was hideous to think and talk of murder. He was looking at Yvonne Colefax, a very pretty blonde who wore a white dress made of some clinging pleated material. What would make a man want to kill a girl—a girl, of all possible victims—and then sever her head from her body with a hatchet?

  “Unresolved aggression,” said George Colefax as if Pup had spoken aloud. “A hatred of women whose challenge he can’t meet.” He said it with an emphasis that seemed heartfelt and his wife gave him a glance. “Cutting off the head would silence a mocking tongue and make certain the eyes could no longer see him.”

  Myra came in to announce dinner. They trooped into the dining room. Harold had never before sat down to a three-course meal at 8:30 in the evening. All this talk of decapitation made him feel queasy, especially as he was halfway through a book mostly concerned with the torture meted out to Madame de Brinvilliers. He had to sit between Mrs. Brewer and Eileen Ridge, the bingo friend. Myra wore a long green polyester skirt with black daisies on it and a very tight, sleeveless, black polo-necked sweater and all her gold jewelry. Mrs. Brewer, in blue Crimplene, picked at her food and actually sniffed a dish of courgettes in cream sauce. Besides the courgettes, Myra had cooked strange food in elaborate ways, chicken with walnuts, potatoes gummed together with egg and cheese, cabbage that had bits of bacon and caraway seeds in it. George Colefax picked all the caraway seeds out of his very white, even teeth with a gold toothpick. He was a doctor of medicine as well as a dentist and had no compunction (did not even realize such talk might be distasteful) about explaining to the company what a difficult job cutting someone’s head off would be and how the perpetrator, whoever he might be, would have needed knives and perhaps a saw as well as a hatchet. Myra brought in raspberry Pavlova cake.

  “It was a woman with a dog found her,” said Mrs. Collins outside the hall after the seance was over. “She’s a woman who lives in Stanhope Road that’s got that great big white dog, great big white Pyrenean something. She was on the old line and the dog started sniffing at something and she saw it was this girl without a head. Then she saw the head a little way away. They took her into hospital for the shock.”

  “What an experience,” said Miss Finlay. “It would haunt you to your dying day.” Today she smelt, Dolly had noticed, only of Pear’s soap.

  “You’d never get over it. Who’d do a thing like that? Only an animal, an absolute animal.”

  Dolly was tired of hearing about it. She stood by the gate, picking leaves from a bush of lemon mint which grew there, crushing them in her fingers and smelling the scent. Her mother had not appeared during the seance, had spoken no word. The leaves had a pungent lemony scent.

  “My mother used to use cologne like that,” Dolly said, holding her fingers under Mrs. Collins’s nose.

  “Brings her back, does it? You don’t get over losing your mother. I know I never have. You don’t want to go off on your own, you two, not after what’s happened today. You’d best wait here with me, my daughter’s coming for me in the car and she’ll drop you both off.” It was barely dark yet. Miss Finlay looked fearfully along the street and across the green. “We can expect you both, I hope,” said Mrs. Collins, “for Mrs. Fitter’s seance on the fifteenth of next month. You’ve heard of her, haven’t you? She’s wonderful. The tickets are going like hot cakes. Five pounds a seat but you can take my word for it, it’s cheap at the price. Oh, that lemon scent is strong, isn’t it, dear?”

  When Wendy Collins dropped off Dolly, the party was still in full swing. She went straight upstairs and just avoided encountering Yvonne Colefax, who had gone to the bathroom to dab herself with more Balmain’s Ivoire. Back in the living room, Yvonne sat on one half of Myra’s new two-seater settee. Pup hesitated, remembering the I Ching and the Pentagrammic Banishing ritual, and then he went and sat next to her. At a loss for what to talk to her about, he offered to tell her fortune. He had overheard Myra regaling his father with details of the Colefaxes’ private life, so he was able to give her a very accurate assessment of her past. She thought he was amazing and said so, looking into his eyes.

  “How could you know I lost my first husband when I was only twenty-one?” said Yvonne, having forgotten she had imparted this fact to Myra during the previous week.

  “Your eyes told me,” said Pup gracefully.

  “Load of wicked rubbish,” said Mrs. Brewer.

  “Excuse me, but everything he said was the absolute truth.”

  Mrs. Brewer’s face was very red as if she were going to have some sort of attack. Yvonne could hardly take her eyes off Pup, was looking at him as if he were a seer or guru, and Pup felt quite weak and faint. He had to keep telling himself how precious and requisite was the retention of virginity to a young geomancer. Yvonne smelled wonderful and her white silk thigh, the whole smooth slippery length of it, was pressed softly against his own. She had a rather breathy, childlike voice, full of wonder, a wide-eyed voice if that was possible. And although she must have been seven or eight years older than him, she seemed younger.

  It was half an hour since he had heard Dolly come in. He ought to go, it would be wise to go. Myra was telling her guests how she and Hal were planning an autumn holiday in Cyprus.

  “I don’t know about that,” said Harold. “It’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

  “Oh, darling, you and your memory!”

  “I must be going now,” said Pup. “Goodbye. Thank you for
the delicious dinner.” Some impulse made him go up to Myra, lift her hand and kiss it.

  It was a signal for everyone else to make a move. Myra could have killed him. Mrs. Brewer wanted Harold to accompany her next door, put all the lights on and search the flat in case an intruder had got in in her absence. Like the man who cut off heads, for instance. Pup went upstairs. Dolly was in their living room, drinking rosé. Often on summer evenings, instead of putting the light on, she lit a candle. She was sitting in the half-dark with her single candle burning, looking down from the window at Ronald and Eileen Ridge getting into their car.

  “Pup,” she said, “did you hear about the girl on the old railway line?”

  He nodded. “We don’t have to talk about it, do we? How was your meeting?”

  “It was all right. Listen, we’ve got a physical medium coming in three weeks’ time, what they call a materialization medium. You will come with me, won’t you? You have to say by tomorrow because the tickets are going to sell like hot cakes.”

  “I never knew anyone actually buy cakes when they were hot, did you?” Her puzzled, slightly offended expression made him smile. “Of course I’ll come, dear.”

  After Harold had left her, Mrs. Brewer began to feel very ill. She thought she had indigestion as a result of eating Myra’s strange food. It had begun as heartburn while she was still next door, sitting in one of the uncomfortable pine armchairs. Now this had intensified into a deep pressing pain down her left side, paralyzing her left arm and clamping her as if in an iron cage. It might have occurred to Mrs. Brewer that she was having a heart attack except that she believed women never have heart attacks and no one had told her that this immunity ends with the menopause.

  Gingie came and lay on her bed. She passed an uncomfortable night and felt so tired that she stayed in bed all day and the next day, but when Myra came in on Sunday, she was up and about again and she said nothing of her illness.