The Killing Doll

by Ruth Rendell

  He was standing between the back door and the fridge, tall and glistening, his crested headdress reaching to the ceiling, his furred snout twitching and his muzzle bared in a snarl. Lord of the Cemetery, Anubis, jackal scavenger, bearing in his hands the caduceus and the palms. Dolly screamed. There was no one to hear her. She screamed and slammed the door on him and fled back to the living room where she lay screaming and beating the floor with her fists.

  The footsteps sounded heavily above them, pacing up and down. It was unpleasant, inescapable, it made the room vibrate.

  “It’s worrying me,” Andrea said. “I’m worried sick.”

  “You’ll have to move,” Pup said. “What else can you do? You’ve been up and asked him to stop and I’ve been up. I’ll do anything you want but I don’t know what to suggest.”

  Andrea looked at him. They were sitting on her neat bed eating eggs Benedict, which she had gone to infinite trouble to make for him.

  “There is one thing you could do. Come with me to a doctor and tell him we think the boy upstairs is having a—well, a mental breakdown, and ask him to do something. He ought to be in a mental hospital, Peter, he ought to be having treatment.”

  “I don’t think I could do that,” Pup said slowly. He told himself that he had trouble enough of that kind at home without looking for it outside. “It’s nothing to do with me.”

  “Who is it to do with, then? He’s all on his own, he doesn’t seem to have any family. I said mental breakdown but it’s more than that, he’s not sane, I’m sure of it, he’s crazy. He thinks if he goes out in the daytime, workmen are going to come and demolish the house, he told me so, he believes it. And he says his name’s Conal Moore. Three people in this house have told me Conal Moore was a big, tall, fair fellow who moved out last July twelvemonth and hasn’t been back since.”

  “You want me to go with you and tell a doctor that? What doctor anyway?”

  “I haven’t got a doctor here yet but you must have. You must have a GP.”

  “You mean you want to have the poor guy—what do they call it—committed? You want him committed to a mental hospital?”

  “It would be for his own good, Peter.”

  “You go to a doctor if you must,” said Pup, “but you can count me out. If I were you, though, I’d find another place to live. It would be simpler.”

  She looked at him as if she wanted to say something but did not quite dare. He raised an eyebrow but the moment was past and she shook her head. She took their plates and began to de-mold a crème brûlée. Above them the footsteps marched wearily back and forth across the twelve-foot-square floor space.

  Later, when he got home, Dolly asked him to put a new bulb in the kitchen light. He noticed she wouldn’t go out there until the new bulb was in and the light switched on. She smelled of brandy this evening, not wine. There had been some brandy in the sideboard, he remembered, left over from the days of Myra.

  Charity begins at home. Before he did anything about Diarmit Bawne he must do something about his own sister. He watched her creep fearfully into the brightly light kitchen and look wide-eyed about her. Without thinking of the implications, wanting only to bring her back to normalcy, he said: “By the way, George Colefax’s friend has been taken into the Royal Free.”

  “Into hospital?”

  He nodded. “He’s got congestion of the lungs. He’s quite seriously ill.”

  “How do you know?” she said sharply.

  Which of them was she jealous of? Him or Yvonne? He lied smoothly, “I was doing a servicing job in the Suburb and I ran into Yvonne.”

  Her eyes and her very slightly trembling mouth were full of suspicion. He saw her keep glancing at him. At breakfast next morning she began on the subject again.

  “I don’t know anymore,” he said, an edge now to his usually gentle voice. “Only that he’s in his hospital and they’re not happy with the electrocardiograph they did. They say he has a heart murmur.”

  She gave a sort of grunt, staring intently at him like one of those mothers who say they can tell their child’s deceit by the way his eyes shine. Harold came to the table in his best suit but tieless. He accepted a cup of tea and scattered dry rustling cornflakes into his bowl, though making no attempt at first to eat them. The suit hung in folds on his small, now emaciated frame.

  “Not another funeral, surely?” said Pup.

  Harold shook his head. “Can you let me have a loan of a tie? Mine aren’t up to much. Nothing flashy, mind.”

  Pup went upstairs and brought him down three ties, a navy patterned with white daisies, a dark gray with tiny fawn and pink squares, a cream and silver stripe with a brown chevron cutting across the center. Being Pup’s, they were all of silk. Harold chose the dark gray.

  “I shan’t be in the shop today. I’m going up to town.”

  “Christmas shopping?” said Pup.

  Harold, who had not smiled for weeks, now burst into a high-pitched cackle of laughter. The idea of him going Christmas shopping!

  “I don’t know about that, I don’t know about that at all.” Mirth shook him. As if his laughter had effected some kind of catharsis or liberation, he suddenly grabbed the sugar basin, sugared his cornflakes, poured milk on them, and began voraciously to eat. Pup said no more. He could tell his father didn’t want to say where he was going or why. Probably, whatever it might be, it had something to do with the typewritten letter which had arrived for him two days before and which had thrown him, also at breakfast, into a minor excited panic.

  After they had gone, Dolly phoned the Royal Free Hospital. It took her a while to find out which ward Ashley Clare was in. When they put her on to the staff nurse on duty, she said she was his sister.

  “There’s no change,” the nurse said. “He’s as well as can be expected.”

  Dolly had to be content with that. She tried to phone Yvonne but there was no reply. Since that evening in the kitchen she had not directly seen Anubis, not face to face, but she had glimpsed him out of the corner of her eye, the glitter of his headdress, the snakelike skin, or his dog’s face had looked at her suddenly out of a darkening recess of the room. She could bear it, she set her teeth against the fear. He would stay until his work was done, she thought, but when Ashley Clare was dead he would depart.

  She finished the green cord dungarees. The idea came to her of making a doll for Yvonne, a doll to match her white and gold bedroom, to sit on her bed and conceal a nightdress under its skirts. That night she dreamed of Anubis for the first time. He was performing his function of conducting the dead along the path to the underworld or Other Side. Edith and Myra followed him and Ronald Ridge and Mrs. Brewer with Fluffy in her arms, but ahead of them all, at the god’s side, was Ashley Clare. And the path they walked along, leading into the Mistley tunnel, was the old railway line.

  Pup came home at about eight in the evening. He kissed her cheek and she smelled Balmain’s Ivoire on him. She heard Myra and Edith whispering and she jumped away from Pup as if, instead of French perfume, she had smelt a foul stench. He didn’t seem to notice.

  “I’ve got something interesting to tell you,” he said.

  She was instantly suspicious. “What sort of something?”

  “Dad’s written a book. It’s a historical novel and it’s going to be published. That’s where he was going the other day, to see these publishers. They wrote to him to say they like the book, they want him to make some changes but they like it and they want him to do a sequel. How about that? He’s going to retire and leave me a clear field.”

  “Oh,” she said, thinking.

  “He’s over the moon. I left him in the pub, having a drink with Eileen Ridge to celebrate.”

  “So he’s happy and successful,” she said in a strange concentrated tone. “He’s got what he wanted. Everything has come right for him.”

  “You could put it that way, yes.”

  She was silent. He suddenly felt, without knowing why, extremely uncomfortable. She was staring
at him, her eyes slightly out of alignment, so that the left one seemed to be looking at something beyond or behind him. It made him turn round and look. She had been making a doll that looked exactly like Yvonne, with beige-blonde nylon hair and dressed all in bridal white. Why? he asked himself, what for?

  She said, “Pup?”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “Could we go up to the temple?”

  He shrugged. He was tired and he had a lot to think about. The color had come up into her face, a dark ugly flush.

  “You can do anything,” she said. “I know that now. You’ve got power, more than a doctor, more than anyone … So will you—will you …” Her hand went trembling up to her cheek. “Will you take this away?”

  He was speechless. She held her hand there, covering the nevus.

  “You could do a Pentagram ritual,” she said. “Or an invocation. You could do it by degrees, it doesn’t have to be all at once, you could …”

  He shouted at her when of all times he should have been gentle. “I can’t! You know I can’t!”

  She nodded, said in perfect faith, “You can do anything.”

  “Dolly, I can’t. Listen to me.” He came and sat beside her, taking her by the shoulders. “I’m sorry I shouted at you, I shouldn’t have done that. I can’t take away your birthmark, do you understand? I can’t, it’s impossible.”

  “You mean you won’t.”

  “No, I don’t mean that. Listen to me, I’d give everything I’ve got, I’d give years of my life to take it away if I could.” He believed he was speaking the truth. “I’d do anything in the world for you but it’s not in my power to do that.”

  She said slowly, heavily, “You killed Myra, you made yourself pass your driving test, you brought Dad happiness and success, you’ve got the business for your own, so why can’t you do that for me?”

  “I did not do those things. They happened. Don’t you see? Myra dying was a coincidence. I passed my driving test because—well, because I can drive. Dad wrote his book himself, didn’t he? How could magic make him a writer?”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  Desperately, forgetting the consequences, he said, “There’s no such thing as magic, Dolly. There never was and there never will be. They were all crooks or mad or superstitious fools who wrote those books. It’s all rubbish. You can’t reverse the laws of nature with water and incense and stupid words, you can only deceive people. If I’ve deceived you, I’m sorry, I’m desperately sorry, but you’ve got to know sometime, it may as well be now. I was just a kid dressing up and pretending, don’t you see?”

  She didn’t. He saw, to his horror, disbelief in her face and pain and resentment.

  “Why did you keep on with it then? Why do you go to the Golden Dawn?”

  “I was wrong,” he said bitterly. “I was wrong and I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again, though, that I can promise you. I’m going to see to it I never can do it again.” He jumped up and went swiftly out of the room, closing the door behind him.

  She sat there quite still. She could see herself in the small mirror that Myra had hung on the opposite wall and she turned her face aside. Pup’s footsteps running up the stairs made a soft pounding through the house. The front door opened, closed, and she heard Harold cross the hall and go into the breakfast room.

  “He doesn’t mean it,” Edith’s voice said. “He’ll calm down in a day or two.”

  Myra laughed. “The fact is, Edith, he’s been seeing Yvonne Colefax, he’s been in her house with her, I could smell that perfume she uses all over him. Well, she was bound to prefer him over Doreen, wasn’t she? It stands to reason.”

  “He’s upstairs now looking through his books to see what he can do for poor Dolly.”

  “Mind you,” said Myra, “once that fellow is dead and George goes back to her, he’ll put a stop to that. He won’t want Peter there and Yvonne won’t want Peter either. The sooner that happens the better for all concerned, I’d say.”

  “He’s upstairs making holy water and studying high magic,” Edith whispered.

  At 9:30 Dolly picked up the phone. Yvonne answered after the second double ring. This time she did not say it was Dr. Colefax’s residence but uttered a timid “Hello?”

  “It’s Dolly.”

  “Oh, Dolly, how are you?”

  “I’m all right. I’ve made you something for a surprise. Well, two things. Something to wear and something else. Would you like to come and fetch them sometime?”

  Yvonne did not reply immediately. Her voice sounded strained and awkward.

  “I’m a bit busy at the moment actually, Dolly.”

  “I could come to you.”

  “Just let’s leave it a bit, shall we? I mean, unless you think your brother would run them up to me sometime in the van. I tell you what, I’ll ring you.”

  Dolly felt cold. She needed a glass of wine. As soon as she had rung off, she would brave the passage and the kitchen and fetch herself a fresh bottle of wine. But first …

  “How is Ashley Clare? Is he—is he dead?”

  “Dead?” echoed Yvonne shrilly. “No, of course he isn’t dead. He’s much better. He’s coming out of hospital for Christmas and George is taking him to Morocco for a week to convalesce.”

  Dolly put the receiver back and left the room. There were no voices now, no shapes in the dark corners, nothing but herself alone, walking towards the kitchen and her wine. She had failed Yvonne and because of that Yvonne would never want to see her again.

  21

  The girl downstairs was a policewoman. Either that or a spy set on him by the builders. He was not sure which or she might be both, it hardly mattered. What was important was not to have too much to do with her. He must never allow himself to forget that he was wanted for murder, the police wanted him for murder, only as things stood they couldn’t quite pin it on him.

  The girl downstairs called him Diarmit, pronouncing it incorrectly. He supposed she did that because the name Diarmit Bawne was still under his bell at the front door. He had left it there deliberately to keep the police from knowing Conal Moore had come back. That she called him Diarmit proved she didn’t know. She said she was called Andrea, an obvious invention, laughable when you thought about it.

  “You ever go down on the old railway line?” he had asked her.

  She shook her head. She said she had never heard of it, she didn’t know there was an old railway line.

  “There was a girl murdered down there a year and a half back,” he said. “You want to be careful. He might strike again.”

  “I don’t go there,” she said. “I told you, I don’t even know where it is.” And he saw that he had frightened her.

  But he must be careful to give her a wider berth now, not to get talking with her, he might say dangerous things. Before he said that about the girl being murdered, she had tried to persuade him that there was no fear of the house being pulled down. As if she would know! Sometimes he thought she was a bit mentally unbalanced. At Christmas, before she went off somewhere for the four days, she brought him a piece of cold roast turkey and four mince pies. He didn’t eat them, though, he knew for a fact they had a truth drug in them which would make him reveal everything next time he saw her. He took them across the road by night and left them on the green for the Dalmatian and the collie to find in the morning. Truth drugs were harmless to dogs, who couldn’t talk anyway.

  The New Year was two days old when the builders came back and started pulling down a row of shops with mansion flats over them on the west side of the green. The shops had been boarded up for months. He felt very relieved to see the men so fully occupied over there because it meant they couldn’t start here yet. For the first time in months he went out in daylight and the place he went to revisit was the old railway line and the Mistley tunnel, scene of Conal Moore’s crime.

  Coming home, he met Andrea in the hall and with her that police colleague of hers, the fair-haired cop who drove a van camoufl
aged to look like it came from a typewriter firm. He looked through them, he ignored them, not speaking a word, it was the only way.

  “You see?” said Andrea. “Now don’t you think we ought to do something?”

  “He’s harmless,” said Pup. “It’s no business of yours.”

  “Yours,” not “ours.” She noticed that. They went upstairs and Andrea unlocked the door of her room. Knowing he was coming home with her, she had left the room spick and span before she went out in the morning. The steel of the draining board, glimpsed through the canework of her new room divider, shone like a mirror. On the coffee table lay a large and glossy Haringey Public Library book of Audubon prints, open at a printing of Columbian humming birds. He felt uncomfortable and sad.

  She began making coffee. Overhead the pacing had started. “I still think I ought to do something,” she said. “I,” he noticed, not “we.” She looked at him. “Peter?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Mr. Manfred’s opening a new salon in St. Alban’s. He says if I’ll go there he’ll let me have one of the flats.”

  As the footsteps pounded, “That might be the answer,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said. “It was just that I thought … Oh, well.”

  He knew what she thought. That there was a chance he might ask her to stay, to tell her they’d start going steady, get engaged.

  “It wouldn’t work out,” he said gently. “Really. We’ve had a nice time but it wouldn’t work.”

  She glanced at the bed where the cushions were arranged with perfect symmetry, as smooth and shiny as mint humbugs. “Is it because I wouldn’t—you know?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “My mother says that, if you do, a boy doesn’t want you afterwards but my girl friend at the salon says they only want you if you do. It’s hard to know.”

  “It wouldn’t have made any difference. Really.”

  Andrea poured two cups of coffee. “I’ll tell Mr. Manfred in the morning that I’ll go to St. Alban’s. I think it could be quite soon.”