The Killing Doll

by Ruth Rendell

  A man coming down the hill said, “Here, steady on, love. Real little piss artist you are.”

  Under the light he saw her face, her cheek, and she saw him look away embarrassed. He thought she was drunk. The funny thing was it was the first evening she could remember when she hadn’t had a drink. Her body craved it. She went up the steps on to the Archway bridge and Hornsey Lane. Standing on the bridge, close by one of the yellow-painted, concrete lamp standards, Anubis pointed his dog snout at the smoky purple sky. She looked away and looked again and he was gone, melted into the ironwork. In Manningtree Grove she met Miss Finlay, scuttling home from the Adonai Spiritists, but she did not acknowledge Miss Finlay’s timid greeting. She passed on, her head averted, scolding Myra who kept touching her and whispering. The wine, after the first tumblerful, drove Myra and Edith temporarily away.

  “I’m leaving,” the policewoman said. “I’m moving out.” He saw her give him a cunning look, seeing how he would take it. “I’ve come up to say goodbye.”

  He wondered whether to believe her. You could never really trust those people.

  “I’m moving to St. Alban’s,” she said. “I’ve got a flat there.”

  An unlikely story. “Who’ll be moving in then?”

  She said she didn’t know. She was going in an hour or so and she had all this stuff left over, tins of food and jam and some potatoes, scouring powder and washing-up liquid, and she wondered if he’d like to have it. It seemed a pity to throw it away.

  “You can leave it with me,” he said and he smiled, pulling the wool over her eyes. They still thought they could drug him. If you looked closely at those tins you’d see minute pin holes they’d pushed the hypodermic through. The potatoes too. They must think him daft if they reckoned on him eating that jam.

  “Well, I’ll say goodbye then, Diarmit.”

  That angered him and told him a lot. “My name’s Conal Moore, I’ll thank you to call me by my name.”

  She shrugged. “Goodbye.”

  After she had gone and it got dark he took the tins and the potatoes and the jam across the street to the green and divided them among the three litter bins. Someone had been up and searched the room in his absence, he was sure of it. The Harrods bag containing the knives was lying a little further from the bed than it had been. He could smell that girl in the room. Cautiously he sniffed the scouring powder, the washing-up liquid, then the scouring powder again. It made him sneeze. He sneezed twenty times or more and his nose started to run. They were trying to poison him now. He opened the window and put his head out into the frosty February night.

  After a time his head cleared a little and he began to understand what they were doing. They had tried to make him say he was Diarmit Bawne, for Diarmit Bawne was a witness and could tell the whole truth about Conal Moore. Hadn’t he helped the police before? That responsible hard-working citizen had helped the police before, had them here in Conal’s room, talked to them, asked them to keep in touch. They’d tried that on with persuasion and drugs, sending that woman to disarm him, but they had failed. No one should make him say he was who he was not. But he would have to get out of here, he was in grave danger here.

  He must get out before the new policeman moved in downstairs. Carefully he scattered scouring powder, a very thin, almost invisible, film of it, on to the surface of the Harrods bag, on to the heap of red clothes, on to the draining board and around the knob on the cupboard door. Then he put out the light and crept downstairs with the tin of powder and the plastic container of liquid. These he deposited in one of the house dustbins in the side entrance. Returning, he removed from under his bell by the front door the piece of card with “Diarmit Bawne” on it to reveal the old one that said “C. Moore.”

  Slowly he went back upstairs, allowing them plenty of time for their searching. But when he came into the room he found everything undisturbed and the scattered powder lying as he had left it, like a slight fall of virgin snow.

  Pup and Yvonne stood on the Chinese bridge, looking down at the red fish in the dark water. It was one of those mild days that sometimes occur at the start of Lent and it was the eve of Pup’s twenty-first birthday.

  “So it looks,” said Yvonne in the voice that had never grown up, “it looks as if he won’t live very long. Poor Ashley! I never thought the time would come when I’d say poor Ashley.”

  “What is it exactly that’s wrong with him?”

  “Something with his heart. He can’t work anymore, he’s had to give that up. He could just drop down dead in the street, George said. I’ve never seen George so depressed.”

  “And if he dies,” Pup said in a low voice, “George will come back here? Come back for good?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose. Let’s go in, I’m getting cold.”

  Pup put his arm round her and they walked back to the house. He was very much in love; he was, as he had never been before, ill with love. With Yvonne, primarily and absolutely with Yvonne, but also with everything she represented and everything that formed the matrix of her, with Ivoire perfume and Cacharel clothes, red lacquer bridge and swimming pool, house and car and breath of affluence. For wasn’t Yvonne herself those things and those things Yvonne?

  They sat on the white fur rug in front of the log fire that Yvonne’s cleaner had built and lit and maintained. Yvonne’s fingernails were painted a pearl color and she wore a pearl ring. Pup kissed her hand and her wrist.

  “I love you. I don’t want to lose you to George.”

  “Ashley might live for years,” she said. “Isn’t it funny? It’s not very long since I asked Dolly to get you to split them up. And now I only want them kept together. Could you have?”

  “Split them up? Of course not. Yvonne?”

  “Yes, darling?”

  “I wish you still saw Dolly.”

  “It’s a bit embarrassing, isn’t it? You know, you and me. After what I told her about George. And besides—you mustn’t be hurt.”

  “I won’t be hurt.”

  “She’s so strange. I’m afraid of her.”

  “She’s harmless,” said Pup. “She loves us—I mean us two—more than anyone in the world. She’d do anything to make us happy. At least give her a ring sometime, would you? To please me?”

  “Shall I tell her about us?”

  He looked into her eyes. They were the only eyes he had ever seen that actually reminded him of jewels, large, uncut, water-washed gems. “There isn’t much to tell, is there? Only that I love you and you say you love me—and your husband’s coming back.”

  Yvonne, having rehearsed what she would say, tried to phone Dolly next morning. Dolly was out, buying her wine. She tried again in the evening and Dolly, machining the seams of a dress for herself, heard the phone but let it ring. She thought it was Wendy Collins, who had already phoned twice that day. Yvonne gave up, postponing her call until the next day.

  She could only have been in time, she could only have talked to Dolly in time, if she had phoned before 7:30, and no one does that.

  The Yvonne doll and the Ashley Clare doll sat side by side sedately on the mantelpiece. Dolly looked at them with a constriction in her throat. What she had to do frightened her and if there had been another way she would have taken it. There was no other way, she had tried the other possible means and this was all that remained.

  It was a blue morning, bright and with a tearing wind. She wrapped up warm, once more tying the scarf to hide half her face. The confidence this gave her she needed. Myra and Edith meant to go with her, there was no escaping them. Myra’s greenness awaited her in the hall by the front door, a misty mass of emerald green, and as she approached it to open the door, her hands held out in front of her, she recalled another occasion when her hands had reached towards greenness. She seemed to see that shocked face looking at her, the aghast eyes, full comprehension of what she had been about to do distorting a pleasant, kindly face into a mask of shock.

  The green mist melted away and for a while there was n
o whispering. Dolly walked along through the driving wind to the bus stop down below the Archway. It was more than likely, of course, that she would not see him. She was rather late. Perhaps she should postpone it till tomorrow. But what was the point of putting off and putting off while Yvonne’s disappointment in her grew and Yvonne began more and more to hate her? The bus came and still, as it drew to a stop, she considered postponement, going home, leaving it for a day or a week even. But she got on the bus and paid her fare to the driver and found herself a seat where she could sit with her right cheek against the glass.

  Edith and Myra had got on the bus with her and they chattered to each other in a fretful, scared kind of way. The bus was going down Hampstead Lane, already under the overhanging trees of Kenwood, before she could make out what they were saying. They wanted her to stop, they wanted her to stop now and go back.

  “I’m on the bus, I can’t go back,” she said to them.

  A man sitting in front of her looked round and at the empty seat beside her. Dolly was embarrassed because the man was not psychic and couldn’t hear them. She held her hand over her mouth. While she was dressing she had put on Pup’s talisman, put it on over her dress which was rust red and matched it, but now, to feel the comfort of it closer to her, she undid the top button and slipped the talisman in against her skin. The whispering had not stopped but it had become very faint. No one, whatever they might say about magic, whatever Pup might say, was going to convince her the talisman was not fraught with power and charged with protection.

  The wind caught her as she stepped off the bus. It caught one passenger after another, tore them off the bus and sent them half-running, holding on to hats and scarves. A regatta of tiny clouds was racing across the blue sky. London lay down there in the bowl beneath the heights, all bright and glittering in the smokeless, fogless, clear air.

  It had been precisely 8:30 when he had come out last time, just after 8:30 that morning when she had followed him into the train and plucked the hairs from his coat collar. The time now was twenty-five past. She had no clear idea yet of what she would do when she saw him, how she would act, certain only of one thing, that she would follow him and stick to him, all day if necessary, for the rest of her life if necessary, until she had done what had to be done. After all, what else was there for her to do?

  George Colefax’s Mercedes stood in the car park, the nearest vehicle to the flats’ entrance. A girl came out of the swing doors, then a couple, then, walking languidly in spite of the cold, a man in a long white sheepskin coat. It was Ashley Clare.

  He glanced into the car as he passed it. He turned up the collar of his coat and pushed his hands into his pockets. She saw his face closer to and more clearly than she had ever done. It looked dark and drawn with deep lines running from the nostrils to the corners of the mouth, it looked very middle-aged. There was a sallow pallor about that face as if there were no blood under the skin to give it color.

  He passed within a yard of Dolly. She let him get a little ahead and then she followed him down the hill, down steep, winding Heath Street where the ramparts of walls and tall houses did something to shelter the narrow defile from the wind. He walked with his shoulders hunched and his head dipped as if the cold pained him. At the bookstall outside Hampstead tube station she expected him to stop and buy a paper so that he could do the crossword as he had before, but instead he went straight into the station and, holding out his season ticket, turned left for the lift. Neither of the ticket machines was working. Dolly had to join the queue to buy a ticket, but Ashley Clare had not gone down. The green metal doors had already closed before he reached the lift which must have contained its requisite maximum of thirty passengers.

  The station was crowded this morning. Unlike last time there was for some reason a great crush of people. Ashley Clare and Dolly were among the first to get into the lift and Myra and Edith got in with them. Dolly couldn’t see the greenness or smell the lemony scent, nor could she decipher their words but their whispering had become intense and shrill.

  In the passage at the bottom of the lift a gale was blowing as strongly as aboveground, only here the wind was warm and with a metallic smell. The crowd went hard along the passage and over the bridge above the line like a herd of animals starting to stampede. Once or twice Dolly lost sight of the white sheepskin coat ahead of her and then, as they went down the steps, it was gone altogether.

  It was a train northward bound for Golders Green that was making the hot wind. Dolly and almost everyone else took the left-hand turn for the line that went down into the center of London. It was a nasty moment for Dolly when she thought she saw the bun-faced woman in the brown coat who, that evening at Camden Town, had seen her hands flexed to push. She was standing reading a poster for a new film. Dolly gazed. The woman turned and looked at her and of course it was not the same one at all, not in the least like, only the coat was similar.

  Dolly walked along the platform, looking for Ashley Clare.

  Last time she had made a mistake, she had picked the wrong person, which in the circumstances had hardly mattered. But what if her hands had not drawn back? What if she had pushed? There would be no other man here wearing white sheepskin, she thought, and then she looked up and saw him. He too had been reading a film poster and now he was looking at her, studying her so intently, that she wondered for a moment if, once upon a time, Myra had told George and George had told him of her stepdaughter with the birthmark or if Yvonne had told George … But it was more likely that with the arrogance of the handsome unblemished he was merely staring at the nevus itself. She returned the look so savagely, hating him with a personal hatred now, that he moved his eyes, turned his head, and, with his hands still in his pockets, walked towards the edge of the platform.

  Once more the waiting passengers had formed themselves into huddled groups at points where they guessed the doors would be. Instead of doing the same, Ashley Clare had stationed himself between two such groups and he stood there with his head bowed, very close to the edge. But a fresh surge of people had come on to the platform from the next lift and he was joined by a man on one side of him and a woman on the other. Dolly moved herself in behind him. She looked up at his hair above the coat collar and thought it seemed grayer than before. Edith and Myra were chattering away urgently now, they sounded nearly hysterical.

  The train would come in from the left. Already the warm wind had begun to blow. There were two people standing very close behind Dolly now and they seemed very tall people. She was surrounded by tall people, a man at least six feet two on her left, a girl stilted up on immense heels on her right. She felt small, hidden, squashed. She heard someone say over her head that there had been a breakdown and a train left out, that was why there was such a crowd, the whole platform packed. Hemmed in, towered over—or so it felt—she moved her hands. The cream woolly gloves she wore were almost exactly the same color as the sheepskin. One of his hairs, a dark one, such as she had used in the making of the useless wax image, fell from the back of his head to alight on the pale knitted back of her glove. She looked at it, clinging there, and Myra and Edith’s frenzied shouting roared around her.

  The train came out of the tunnel and through a gap between sheepskin and the tall man’s herringbone tweed she could see the driver’s face, young and pink. Before he was lost to view she saw his mouth open and screaming, for by then she had pushed.

  He might have given a cry as he went over. How could she tell when, as the crowd went back like a wave, a sound rose from it that was a mingling of screams and gasps and dreadful moans? She cried out with them and the wave drew her back with it. An impersonal, inhuman voice arrested movement and made temporary silence.

  “There has been an accident. I repeat, there has been an accident. Please keep calm and don’t panic …”

  A woman standing beside Dolly, a stranger, began to weep.

  23

  The man who had moved in downstairs came under immediate suspicion. Conal had seen hi
m only in the distance, the dark hair, the blank meaningless face, the blue jeans. He heard his voice too, with the false English accent they had taught him while he was away training to be a police spy. Could he be Diarmit Bawne? For a moment the fog cleared and Conal knew he was himself Diarmit, it was his mind that had done this to him. But it was only for a moment. The fog rolled back and he was Conal again. That evening, he thought, the man downstairs would come up and knock on the door, introduce himself by some outlandish name and offer Conal food or ask him to make less noise. Conal was very careful to make no noise and at 7:00, when Diarmit had not appeared, he went out.

  He had no doubt the room would be searched in his absence. Diarmit had a key and would have no need to pick the lock as the so-called Andrea had done. This time he had not scattered any scouring powder. What was the point? He knew they would search and he was tired, he hardly cared any more. Most of the energy and high spirits essential to Conal Moore had subsided and he felt himself becoming as slow and steady and dead as Diarmit had been. He tramped the silent streets with nothing to do and nowhere to go, half afraid to go back.

  But at last he had to. He fully expected the man who was to be inside the room, waiting there to speak to him and urge him to give himself up. Find a priest to confess to, tell it all to Kathleen, then go to the police. But it was worse than that, more sinister than that, for the room was empty and reeking of Diarmit and the girl, her perfume and Diarmit’s stinking clothes.

  They had taken the knives. He couldn’t see the Harrods bag anywhere. In a burst of panic that renewed his strength, he threw open doors and drawers, pulled the pile of red clothes apart, scrabbled under the bed, pulling out papers, old carriers, and, at last, the carrier. He fell asleep on the bed from the exhaustion of it.

  When he awoke in the deep middle of the night, he saw chaos around him. They had searched without caution, without caring if he knew. Drawers were tumbled on to the floor, their contents scattered, clothes lay everywhere and in the middle of the room, as a signal to him, he supposed, that all was now known, on top of a pile of newspapers and carrier bags lay the cleaver and the two knives.