The Killing Doll

by Ruth Rendell

  It was rare for him but he was suddenly furiously angry. He controlled himself. “He’s not a businessman. I think I am. I think I’m lucky enough to have a flair for it.”

  She said quietly and dolefully, “I thought you had a flair for—you know what I thought.”

  The only thing to do with that was ignore it. “Come on,” he said, “we’ll celebrate. I’ll take you out to dinner.”

  She shook her head. “I’m tired. You know I don’t like going out to eat in those places.” He saw what she meant and he was powerless. “Besides, I’ve got your meal here.”

  Salami, rolled turkey breast sliced thin as paper, cole slaw, potato crisps, chocolate Swiss roll, tinned peaches and tinned custard. He felt disloyal but he was growing out of that kind of food, the child’s dream of a feast. Harold was already seated at the kitchen table, The Daughters of George III propped up in front of him between his plate and the milk jug.

  “Hello, Dad,” said Pup, who hadn’t seen him since the morning. “Had a good day?”

  “I don’t know about good. I know I’m worn out.”

  And this time he was. That afternoon at 5:00, sitting in the room behind the Crouch End Broadway shop, operating one of the new Olympia ES100s, he had finished typing his novel. He was reading The Daughters of George III less from need than habit.

  Dolly poured out two cups of tea. She sensed it would be unwise that evening to tell Pup about Yvonne Colefax and her trouble. Wait a day or two, wait until next time he was home in the evening. She had had too much wine to feel like eating but she took a piece of bread and buttered it and made herself a sandwich with the sliced turkey. It was rare for Pup to be home two evenings in succession. She almost trembled when she thought of what that might mean, that he was growing tired of the Golden Dawn.

  The ins and outs of why Georgiou came to lose the shop Diarmit never fully comprehended. Not that Georgiou, hitherto taciturn, had not talked of it all day long, grumbling in his thick harsh accent about landlords and rent acts and the iniquity to be found everywhere in the United Kingdom. Not that he had not attempted to explain, his voice snapping and crackling as he stumbled over difficult words.

  “That place that sells the typing machines, they are after my shop.” Georgiou threw back his head and lifted up his hands. “Oh, nobody is saying but I have ways of knowing. Expansion is the word, expand, expand, that is all—everything—nowaday. Typing machines, photomachines, this is what people like today. Good food they don’t like, they don’t care.”

  Diarmit smiled uneasily at him, mystified.

  “So if that’s what people like,” said Georgiou, “let these typers and photoers pay the rent. Me, I don’t care, I retire. I leave this rat race for good.”

  Once more Diarmit was on the dole. He had all the time in the world on his hands and no purpose to put it to. He was ashamed of being without work and even more ashamed to be seen to be without it by the other tenants of the house. They would think him no better than Conal, they would think that birds of a feather flocked together.

  Of necessity he now spent hours in his room. If he went out it was never for more than an hour or so. He spent all night and most of the day in that room. The fact that Conal’s things were in it, were still taking up space in it, began to anger him. He put Conal’s clothes and the knives in the Harrods bag in the middle of the room in a pile. Whenever he moved about, he had to step over them or walk round them but he felt that at any rate he had made a gesture, he had made it plain to whomever might call or look in the window or somehow observe the interior of the room that those things were not his and had nothing to do with him. He stopped wearing Conal’s red clothes and went back to the denim jeans he had had on when first he came to take over the room.

  Then it occurred to him that Conal’s sister Kathleen was a more suitable person to give her brother’s things house room than he was. He made them all into a parcel which he wrapped in newspaper and bound with adhesive tape. It took him nearly all of one day to pack and wrap that parcel, and on the next, a hot day in August, he took it over to Kilburn on the train from Crouch Hill.

  A man opened the door to him. He said he was Kathleen’s husband and Kathleen was out at her work.

  “She’s lucky then, lucky to have work,” Diarmit said politely. “I could do with work myself.” He had heard the man’s voice before, he remembered now, when he had made that phone call on Conal’s behalf. Cowardly Conal had got him to phone them because he was scared to. “These are her brother Conal’s things now that I’ve brought all the way over on the train. I’ve no use for them, you see, so you’d best take care of them till he comes.”

  The man stared. “She hasn’t got a brother called Conal.”

  So that was the way the wind blew. They meant to disown him entirely. Diarmit could not blame them but he persisted. “Moore’s the name, same as her maiden name. Conal Moore.”

  “My wife’s maiden name was Bawne.”

  Diarmit laughed. He couldn’t help it. The effrontery of it, the sheer nerve of skiving off out of your responsibilities by pretending to be a member of his own family! Bawne, indeed. He laughed humorlessly, tossing back his head, and he tried to thrust the parcel into the man’s arms, but before he could do so, the door was shut in his face.

  Why had the man refused even to admit Conal was his brother-in-law? That he and his wife might want nothing to do with Conal, Diarmit could readily understand. But why deny the relationship and refuse to take in a parcel of Conal’s property? It must be because they had had word that Conal was coming back and they were scared of any involvement with him.

  He was coming back … It was a year now since he had murdered that girl and cut her head off, since they had called him The Headsman and written about him in the papers. He was coming back because it had all blown over and he was safe. Diarmit climbed the stairs to his room. He unpacked the parcel and laid the red clothes out carefully on the end of the bed and over the backs of chairs. The knives and the cleaver were clean but he washed them at the sink and dried them and replaced them in the bag. Conal was coming back and might be back any day…

  The letter was in a brown envelope addressed to Ms. Doreen Yearman and it was such as Dolly had hardly ever received in her life before, for it began “Dear Dolly” and ended “Love from Yvonne.” With it was a photograph of two men in a living room sitting at either end of a velvet sofa. It had been taken with a flash and both were blank-faced and stary-eyed. George Colefax was smoking a cigar but the other man sat with his hands rather girlishly folded in his lap. A beautiful boy, perhaps, though that surely had been rather a long time ago. His black hair, swept back Byronically, had silver wings at the temples and although the flash had obliterated lines on the forehead and under the eyes, you felt that they were there.

  Dolly put the photograph and the letter in her handbag. Something impelled her to keep taking the letter out and rereading that “Dear Dolly” and “Love from Yvonne.” She was going shopping in the Holloway Road, walking part of the way there along the old railway line. It was a warm hazy day with the promise of great heat by noon and the grass was flushed pink where the rosebay willow herb was in bloom. You could hear the hum of insects in the flowers above the hum of traffic.

  As she stepped inside the comparative coolness and darkness of the Mistley tunnel, it occurred to Dolly that it must be a year since The Headsman’s murder. It had been a Wednesday, she recalled, the day before Myra’s dinner party at which Pup had accurately told Yvonne the events of her past life. She, Dolly, had been out, making her first visit to a seance of the Adonai Spiritists. Because of that she could remember the dates, Wednesday, 12 August, Thursday, 13 August. And today was Wednesday, 11 August. A year had passed, exactly a year, today was the anniversary.

  Dolly quickened her step through the tunnel and felt a certain relief at coming out at the other end into the soft warm light. A black and red butterfly flew across, an inch or so from her eyes, and settled on a spray of buddleia.
She walked along the old station platform. Approaching her, in the distance, was the woman with the white Pyrenean mountain dog, the animal ambling indifferently as if a year ago it had never nosed out a corpse and then a human head.

  17

  The man in the photograph appeared to have an olive skin, so Dolly made the doll’s body from the kind of coarse unbleached linen that is called crash. There was a piece left over from Edith’s tapestry work. Dolly embroidered Ashley Clare’s face, the curved black eyebrows, the almond eyes, the red sensuous mouth. She sewed a headful of black hair on him but she used silk, not wool, and at the temples she stitched in fine threads of silver. Almost by chance she seemed to have caught the man’s expression. The face, she felt, would be instantly recognizable.

  In the photograph he was wearing velvet cord jeans, a shirt open at the neck and a zipper jacket but Dolly wanted to see him more formally dressed as he must surely be for his daily work, whatever that might be. She made him a suit from gray polyester that had been left over from a skirt of Wendy Collins’s, a shirt from one of Edith’s lawn handkerchiefs, and a red silk tie from the lining of her own velvet coat. She painted his cardboard shoes with Woolworth’s Chinese lacquer. Complete, he was the perfect man doll, the best doll she had ever made.

  Even Myra admired him. Myra and Edith had been there with her, watching her work.

  “I must say, Doreen, it’s a perfect likeness. I saw him once when he came into the surgery. You’ve got him to a t.”

  “You’ve made a very nice job of that, dear, but isn’t he a bit cross-eyed?”

  It was rare for them to speak to each other but sometimes they did. “To be honest with you, Edith,” Myra said, “he is a bit cross-eyed.”

  Dolly put him on the mantelpiece between the Chinese boy and the ballet girl. Making the doll had taken up all her time and she had done nothing more to the green silk dress. While she was stitching in the facings at neck and armholes there was a ring at the door and she was sure it must be Yvonne calling unexpectedly. But it was only one of the girls from next door with a pair of denims over her arm to say that Mrs. Buxton had told her mother that Dolly did dressmaking, so could she find time to turn her jeans up four inches? She saw the doll, said it looked like Robert de Niro and giggled. Dolly took the jeans and said she would have to charge four pounds and would that be all right? She could see the girl trying not to look at her right cheek.

  Since the letter, read and reread, especially the opening and concluding words, there had been no sign at all from Yvonne. Dolly had never before known what it is to sit by a telephone waiting for it to ring, longing for it to ring. She tacked the green silk hem and began sewing it with fine slip stitches.

  “Once you’ve finished that dress,” Myra said, “she’ll be off like lightning. You know that, don’t you, Doreen? She won’t bother with you. I mean, frankly, give me one good reason why she should.”

  “It’s a difficult shade to match the Sylko to,” said Edith. “That jade is a difficult shade to match and a difficult shade to wear.”

  “Her father was a professional man and her husband’s a professional man. It’s a question of class really. Well, isn’t it always?”

  Pup was coming home for a meal. He was wondering—it occupied his mind a great deal these days—how he could get his father to retire. For a long while Harold had been useless in the shop but now he was becoming worse than useless, impeding Pup like an iron on his leg. He mooned about, replying to customers with the vague near-incomprehension of someone who has been addressed in a forgotten foreign language. He was always to be seen stooped over the Xerox or lugging brown paper parcels of the kind that contain a ream of paper.

  Pup, however, had a horror of hurting people’s feelings, of causing pain. It would be unthinkable to make Harold feel unwanted, he must instead be made to wish to go of his own accord. Perform a Pentagram ritual, Dolly would no doubt advise, but he had lost all belief in the efficacy of that. In the days when he had bargained and cajoled for height, he had had faith—or perhaps the simple answer was that all along five feet eight had been written in his genes.

  The first thing he saw when he walked in was the doll. He gave an exclamation which sounded like pure astonishment but was really dismay. Any of these items of evidence that his sister was unlike other women, was growing more and more strange, filled him with foreboding. But he said nothing. Dolly had already begun on her bottle of wine and he started his supper. At the last meal he had eaten at home he had mentioned over the tinned tongue and defrosted sausage rolls that he liked seafood, though knowing as he spoke of it that this would lead to his being served prefabricated prawn cocktail twice a week for years. The first of the series was before him, all the ingredients fresh from a freezer pack and topped with a dollop of bottled sauce.

  Dolly was glad to have given him something different, something he would really enjoy. It distracted her from her preoccupation with Yvonne, though only for a while. They were back in the living room and she three-quarters through her Chianti Classico when she made up her mind. She picked up the receiver and dialed, resolving to put it down again if George Colefax answered.

  Yvonne’s little girl voice said like a receptionist:

  “Dr. Colefax’s residence.”

  “It’s Dolly. Your dress is finished.”

  “Dolly, did you get my letter? I was expecting you to phone before.”

  So it was she, not Yvonne, who had been at fault, she who had committed the breach of conduct. She gave a sigh of relief which made Pup look up from his evening paper.

  “Would you—would you like to come over? Would you come over tomorrow?”

  But Yvonne said why shouldn’t Dolly come to her? She would like to return Dolly’s hospitality. Say Monday or Tuesday? It wouldn’t occur to her of course, Dolly thought with a flicker of resentment, it never did occur to people with cars, what a difficult and time-consuming journey it would be, getting from Manningtree Grove to the Bishop’s Avenue by public transport. But she was too gratified by Yvonne’s invitation to demur.

  “I’ll pick you up on my way home if you like,” Pup said. She had a friend, a young, suitable, normal friend at last. The relief was great. He remembered Yvonne Colefax, he remembered the scent of her and the feel of that slim thigh against his leg. And at Myra’s funeral … He took his eyes from the olive-skinned, red-lipped doll on the mantelpiece. “Ask her what time.”

  As happy now as she had been tense and fearful before, Dolly sat on the settee beside him and told him of the love affair between Ashley Clare and George Colefax.

  “And he’s married to that lovely Yvonne?”

  “We’ll have to do something about it.”

  “What can I do?” said Pup absently and he returned to his paper.

  When he had first come to London, he had put himself into Conal’s hands and Conal had had to look after him. Not that he had made a very good job of it. True, he had provided him with a roof over his head but the job had never come to anything and there was no doubt Conal had simply made use of him as someone on whom to unload all his dreads and terrors. Thanks to Conal, he might even have been suspected of the murder and decapitation of that girl, for Conal had had no qualms about returning here with the knives and his bloodstained clothes. But this time, once Conal had returned and they were together again, Diarmit knew it would be him who must look after the other man. It filled him with anxiety.

  The knives of the Harrods bag and the heap of clothes still lay in the middle of the floor. Diarmit cursed them, for every time he crossed from his bed to the sink or from the cupboard to the window he had to step over them and once or twice he stumbled and fell headlong. Dressed in blue jeans, a gray shirt and a gray sweater, he went to the Job Center but still they had nothing for him. He dreaded having to confess to the feckless criminal Conal Moore that he was out of work, that he was on the dole.

  The two dogs scavenged from the litter bins on Mount Pleasant Green, the Dalmatian and the mongrel co
llie, dissecting the wrappings of takeaway food, running on the grass like a pair of jackals. The old people had moved into the sheltered housing and a woman of seventy or so could be seen in the window of the communal room, arranging flowers in a vase. A lawn had been started in the garden and little evergreen trees planted. The workmen had long been gone. That would worry Conal, Diarmit thought, he would wonder where they were and expect them to come demolishing this house. He would be afraid to stay in in the daytime, it would all begin again.

  Sitting at the window, looking across the green in the direction of Crouch Hill station which was the way Conal would come, Diarmit told himself that to avoid Conal he had only to run away. He had only to leave and go back to Liverpool. But it was not realistic thinking, for he knew he would never so shirk his responsibilities, and besides he had no family in Liverpool, they were all dead and only Conal’s relations lived there. He could go down on the old railway line and hide out in the Mistley tunnel, taking provisions with him and sleeping on the feather mattress. But that would be no good when the fine weather broke and the autumn came. Diarmit shivered, resigning himself to his doom, waiting for his doom to come across the green from Crouch Hill station.

  As it happened, though, when Conal came Diarmit did not see him come. He must have slipped into the room during the night. For when Diarmit awoke he was there, wearing dark red clothes and taking his knives out of the Harrods bag, examining them closely, to check no doubt that Diarmit had taken care of them in his absence. Conal the murderer, Conal the criminal, Conal the outcast. Jobless, friendless, hated, mad Conal.

  Because he knew what would happen if he left the house, because he dared not go out yet must have exercise, he began pacing the room. Up and down, he paced the small cluttered room with a heavy dogged tread that after a while grew weary, but he paced on.