The Killing Doll

by Ruth Rendell

  “Have you got your black tie?”

  Harold nodded. He shambled off to the breakfast room and sat in the armchair where, surrounded by mementoes of Myra, he had passed so many happy hours lost in the bypaths of the romantic past. He stared at the rectangle of window, the gray sky beyond, the first drops of rain splashing against the glass.

  That day Pup, with mock solicitude (Harold thought), had inquired more persistently than usual after his health, suggesting, though not putting it into actual words, that he might think of early retirement. He had been incensed. He was only fifty-five.

  “I’m not getting out for a little whippersnapper like you.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Pup said in his courteous way. “I’m sorry. You’ll do as you like of course. Only you don’t seem to be getting much fun out of it.”

  “Work’s not supposed to be fun,” said Harold but his mind harked back to when he had been writing his novel. That had been fun, the best fun he had ever known. A gust of anger shook him. “All these big ideas you’ve got, you’ll ruin the business I built up and you not yet twenty-one.”

  Pup said no more. He watched Harold shamble off the premises, no library book under his arm or in a carrier these days. It would all work out one day, he supposed. Tonight was not one of those times he was obliged to be in. He locked up, got into the van and drove round to Andrea’s at Mount Pleasant Green. She had to work Saturdays but Thursday was her day off, the salon closed on Thursdays. She was the most domesticated of his girls, the only one who was houseproud, who could cook. When she came down to let him in, she was wearing an apron.

  Halfway up the stairs she paused and listened. All seemed quiet.

  “It worries me when he paces up and down like that,” said Andrea. “Like a caged lion.”

  The room was neat and warm, flowers in a vase, hyacinth bulbs poking through the loam in a pot, a Christmas cactus showing buds. Andrea did her level best to make the bed look as little like a bed as possible with cushions and a stripy cover. This evening there was even a tray on it. She had not yet allowed him into it, the stripy cover was never more than rumpled. On top of the little Belling stove were vegetables steaming in a wok and inside it something emitting delicious smells.

  “I’ve made two chicken pies, one for us and one for the boy upstairs.”

  “What a kind girl you are!”

  “Do you really think so? I like to do what I can. He’s really rather pathetic.”

  “I’d better go up the road and get us some wine.”

  “No need, I’ve got it. It’s in the sink cooling.” She beamed on him, the perfect manager, the future helpmeet, the prize candidate in the fiancée stakes. She came and sat next to him on the bed. “Peter?”

  “Mmm?”

  “The boy upstairs, when I asked him his name he said Conal Moore but that isn’t his name, his name’s Di-ar-mit Bawne, I asked some people downstairs. Someone called Conal Moore used to live there but he went away ages ago, last year, and this boy came. Don’t you think it’s peculiar?”

  “This is a peculiar place,” said Pup. “It’s a rough area. Not the best place for a girl on her own. Can’t you find somewhere better?”

  “It’s only temporary.” She looked into his eyes. “Do you think I ought to ask this Di-ar-mit why he says he’s someone who went away a year ago?”

  “I don’t think you ought to have anything to do with him. I think you should keep out of it, Andrea. It’s nothing to do with you anyway.”

  “I read somewhere,” said Andrea sententiously, “that no man is an island.”

  “I am,” said Pup. “I’m one of those privately owned islands in the Aegean and I’m very fussy about who comes ashore.”

  “I’m not sure I know what that means.”

  “It means to keep clear of unemployed Irish riffraff,” said Pup.

  Dolly was making Yvonne a tweed skirt. She knew it was only to be an ordinary everyday skirt to be worn for shopping in the Market Place or a little light gardening. For anything requiring a higher sartorial standard, Yvonne would have gone to Brown’s or at any rate Jaeger. The Ashley Clare doll, its legs straddled on the mantelpiece, watched her as she plied the Singer. After she had put the zip in and tacked the waistband in place there was nothing more she could do until Yvonne had had another fitting. She opened the lid of the remnants box and looked at the figure which, wrapped in a sheet of white tissue paper, lay on top of the pieces of material.

  The wax from four white candles had gone to shape it. Dolly took off the paper. Her skill was with cloth and a needle, not in molding wax, and the figure appeared wretched compared to the doll, a sausage-shaped manikin covered in dirty fingerprints with a tuft of stolen hairs on its golf-ball head. There was something intensely unpleasant about it, something obscene. Dolly, holding it up, could recognize that without knowing why. After all, it was only wax and dust that had somehow got on her hands and hairs from a man’s coat collar. She wouldn’t have had to make it if Pup had not been so difficult about the doll. He had been home last night and she had carefully prepared the way for asking him. She had watched his face grow wary as she worked up to her question, then harden as the harsh refusal came.

  “I’m not making a fool of myself with that, Dolly.”

  “You didn’t make a fool of yourself when you killed Myra.”

  “For the thousandth time, I did not kill Myra!”

  “Well, of course he did, Doreen,” Myra said into Dolly’s ear. “On the Other Side we know everything and I can tell you for a categorical fact that healthy girls don’t drop dead from giving themselves an ordinary douche.”

  Dolly swatted her away. “You’re not going to tell me you’re giving up magic?”

  He shrugged. Then he looked at her. “No. No, of course not, not white magic. But I won’t play at killing people. Right?”

  For the wax doll she cut out and sewed up a piece of the tweed for trousers, a scrap of lawn for a shirt. It took her less than an hour. A long loneliness stretched before her, encompassing half the evening and the whole night and all the next day until Pup was home again. Now she half wished that this evening she had done what she had been doing every evening lately when Pup was out, going to Hampstead to watch Ashley Clare.

  She hardly knew why. Simply for something to do? Something to break the loneliness? Or because she thought genuine advantage might be derived from it? Since the morning she had secured the hairs, she had twice seen him come out of Arrowsmith Court and make his way down Heath Street to the station. Once in the evening she had witnessed his return home, at twenty to six, and once he and George Colefax had come home together, Colefax dressed very much as he had been in the photograph, so she had had no trouble recognizing him.

  After that, she had stood for a long while outside the flats and had been rewarded by the sight of a light coming on and George Colefax appearing for a moment at the window. He did not draw the curtains. With a lubriciousness or voyeurism unusual in her, Dolly stood there waiting, hoping to see the two of them embracing behind the window, in the yellow light. She did not herself want to be seen even by the porter of the flats, but Hampstead is full of trees and creeper-hung walls and leafy shrubs and one of these hung low over the little wall where she sat, where after a while Myra and Edith came to join her, one sitting on either side.

  “You’d think a woman’d have more sense than marry a man who’s that way inclined,” said Myra. “It’s not as if she hadn’t been married before.”

  Edith whispered confidingly, “When I was young, things like that weren’t talked about in public. The expression ‘homo’ meant nothing to me. I still don’t know what they do and I don’t want to.”

  “To be perfectly frank, it’s the mothers make them that way. I read that in an article. They’re not born like it.”

  “Put the blame on the poor parents,” said Edith, “that’s always the way these days.”

  George Colefax and Ashley Clare did not embrace, or not where they could
be seen from the window, and they came out again at 7:00. George was dressed as he had been when he came off the train, Ashley now in brown sweater and trousers of a fine khaki-and-white check pattern. Perhaps they were going out to eat. Dolly followed them as far as the Hollybush but no further. She had never in her life been in a pub.

  The next morning—this morning—she was outside the flats early. What was the point in staying at home? Pup wasn’t there and Harold ate nothing. It was cold and damp, not clear and not foggy either, the kind of day that makes everything look dirty.

  Ashley Clare did not appear at all, though George did, very casually dressed for a dentist, Dolly thought, in a kind of anorak and Ashley’s check trousers. Or perhaps they were his trousers and it was Ashley who had borrowed them last night, not George this morning. It made her feel rather uncomfortable. Nothing so far had shown her the intimate relation in which they stood to each other, but this did. Like sisters or heterosexual lovers, they wore each other’s clothes. Poor Yvonne! Dolly felt certain now that the bond between them was unbreakable except through Ashley Clare’s death.

  She caught the No. 210 bus to Highgate, replenished her wine stocks from her favorite shop and walked home along the old railway line. The leaves were falling but the buddleias were still in flower. A butterfly lay dead on the path, its tiger’s-eye wings spread wide. She climbed up out of the damp grassy gully, shooing Gingie, who hunted unknown things among the long stalks and seedling trees.

  She put the doll back in the box, picked up the phone and dialed. A man’s voice answered and she replaced the receiver. George went home sometimes, once a week maybe, Yvonne had said. Dolly had finished the day’s bottle of St. Nicolas and after a moment’s hesitation she opened one of those she had bought that morning.

  Presently, from the temple, she fetched some of Pup’s books. For the ceremony of the destruction of Ashley Clare, she had decided to ask Pup to evoke a god. Evocations of that kind, all the books said, should only be attempted by a proficient and experienced magician—but what was he if not that after that long training with the Golden Dawn?

  The god she fixed on was Anubis, the jackal-headed. There were lists and lists of gods in those books of his. She might have had Enlil or Marduk, the Dagda or Balder, Khol, Sin, Ruda, Wadd, Apollo, Teteshapi or a host of others, but there was a picture of Anubis, a man whose height and thinness somehow reminded her of Ashley Clare himself and whose dog face was not unlike that of the dog who had found the girl’s body and her head. But more than that, Anubis was a god of death. The ancient Egyptians called him the Lord of the Mummy Wrappings. It was him who opened for the dead the roads to the Other Side.

  Dolly took the books and the rest of the wine to bed with her. Muzzy by now, her head singing, she gazed at the picture of dog-headed Anubis, fearful of what she had to do but unable to see any other way. Pup came home at twelve. She heard him moving about with deliberate care, tip-toeing and closing doors gingerly so as not to wake her or Harold. Myra was sitting on the end of her bed and Edith under the center light, sewing. She could just see them, but when she tried to look more closely, they, though not their voices, were gone.

  “If you want the honest truth, Doreen, you’re turning into a real alcoholic, a wino.”

  “She’s got to have some consolation, poor thing, with that disability of hers. We did everything we could, took her to specialists. Nothing to be done, they all said that.”

  “Don’t think I’m blaming you, Edith,” Myra said. “All I’m saying is, we all have our troubles and we have to learn to live with them.”

  “That’s true, that’s very true.”

  They began talking to each other as if she wasn’t there.

  “Get out, the pair of you!” Dolly shouted. “Get out of my room!

  Pup, coming out of the bathroom, heard her and stared. He went cold down his spine as if someone had put an ice cube down the back of his neck. But he didn’t go into her room or even knock on the door. He told himself she had been calling out in a dream.

  19

  Once Diarmit Bawne had gone, Conal felt grand. That was how he put it to himself.

  “I feel grand, boy, grand!”

  Like a schoolmaster, Diarmit had watched over him and ruled him and told him how to be. But in the end, Conal had been too much for him, refusing to wash or clean the place or go to bed at a regular hour, and he had the law on his side too. It was his room, he was the tenant, not Diarmit. If he said to get the hell out of here, Diarmit had to get the hell out.

  “And take your rubbish with you!”

  Diarmit had not done that, so one evening when it was too late for anyone to come and start demolishing the building, Conal had taken all the clothes that were not dark red and four plates and some cutlery and a teapot and a mug and stuffed them in one of the litter bins on the far side of the green. That would be a disappointment for the Dalmatian and the collie when they came scavenging in the morning, he thought, laughing. He laughed all the way back to the room.

  And now Diarmit was really gone. Conal need not be conscientious or steady or a good citizen any more. Diarmit had kept on at him about getting a job and that was something else he could forget now. He could forget about getting up early and going out into the cold and worrying about his duty and the future. He was Conal Moore, who was wanted by the police for robbery and for murder.

  These afternoons it began to get dark at four. Once it became dusk he felt safe. He went out and bought himself an electric knife sharpener. He sat on the floor in the middle of the room, sharpening his knives with the knife sharpener and testing the edges on his left hand. After a while the pads of his thumb and fingers were crisscrossed with cuts. He wiped the blood off on his trousers or the tail of his shirt which, being dark red, showed no marks.

  Once or twice Diarmit tried to come back. He didn’t knock on the door or call out but scrabbled with his nails on the linoleum outside which was how Conal knew it was him. Like a mouse, so who else could it be?

  Pup knew very little about Anubis, he had heard of him and that was all. But he mugged it up. He read up about evocation ceremonies and realized it was hopeless trying to get that lot by heart. Presumably, if he had really done two or three nights a week training he would be able to recite evocations from memory in much the same way as a clergyman can recite the marriage service.

  Dolly wanted it done for her birthday. She wanted a god evoked. Pup thought of someone—Dilip, say, or Andrea—asking him what was he going to give his sister for her birthday and his saying a god. Putting it like that made him see just how badly disturbed Dolly had become. She must have alcoholic poisoning, he thought vaguely with the hazy notions of someone who on the whole prefers a cup of tea to a double Scotch.

  He had asked her if she’d like to go out or have a piece of jewelry or something to wear. At the time she had been wearing that red and green painted bit of tin and which, each time he saw it on her, made him wince. She had said no, she’d like them to do something in the temple, she’d like him to evoke Anubis for her.

  It was going to be the last time, he was resolved on that. Afterwards, without telling her, he would quietly take the temple apart, so that the next time she went up there, she would find an ordinary, shabby, empty bedroom. And his alibis? He would think of something. The time might even be coming when he must tell the truth and let her make the best of it. She could hardly be worse than she was now, could she?

  Yvonne had sent Dolly a card. She had happened to mention her birthday was coming and Yvonne had remembered and sent her a card. There was one from Pup and one from Harold with “Dad” on it in Pup’s writing. Dolly bought a Tunis cake for herself and set it out on the tea table.

  She had dressed with care. No one was coming and they were not going out but she dressed with greater care than usual in her new plum-colored velvet skirt and top with the plum and lilac blouse. There was a tradition among the women of the Yearman family that you dressed up on Christmas Day and for your own bir
thday. All the time she was getting ready, she could hear Edith telling Myra about it.

  “No matter how busy I was, I could be up to my neck in it, I’d always find time to run upstairs and change into something nice.

  “To be perfectly honest with you, I’d say life was too short for that kind of carry-on.”

  “It was short for us, wasn’t it, dear?” said Edith.

  Pup blew the dust off the elemental weapons. The cup was the one that would chiefly be used. He wondered to which Sephirah of the Tree of Life Anubis was attributed. Might as well say the fourth. He drew a circle on the floor with a four-sided figure inside it and hung up over the window a length of sky-blue material which Dolly had given him. On the altar he displayed the four fours of the tarot. He tied round his waist, over the golden robe, a sky-blue sash.

  All the time he was doing these things he felt he was behaving in an insane way. He felt this more than he had ever done in the past and it affected him so strongly that from time to time he paused in his preparations and said aloud: “Are you mad? Are you quite crazy?”

  He was glad he couldn’t see himself, that there was no mirror in the temple. It was bad enough seeing Dolly, her face flushed as it usually was these days, her eyes bloodshot, yet dressed up as if for a party. He wondered how many bottles of wine she was getting through a week now, he wondered—as often, as daily—what he ought to do. Tell their father, get their father’s help? That was a laugh. She was holding something in her hand, wrapped in tissue paper, and he supposed it was the present he had given her. It would be like Dolly to carry about with her wherever she went anything he had given her, though she had not seemed much to like the Hand of Fatima on a silver chain and he doubted if she would replace the tin talisman with it.

  He lit the two blue candles on the altar and filled the cup with wine Dolly had brought him in a glass. Before evoking a god the magician should cleanse his temple with a Banishing ritual and Pup had told Dolly this had been done, though in fact he had done nothing, he knew himself incapable now of getting up to any of this mumbo-jumbo while alone.