The Killing Doll (16 page)

Dolly was so close to him she could read along the line of his thoughts. Not read them, thank God, but read along the periphery of them.

“You’ve got a meeting of the Golden Dawn tomorrow night, haven’t you?”

Pup nodded. He was going round to Suzanne’s.

“Will you tell them?”

He looked at her. The question that came into his mind was, would a normal person ask that? “Tell them what?” he stalled.

“How you did magic and made Myra die.”

His own steady sanity recoiled. Every word was an affront. He suddenly saw clearly what he wanted from life and meant to have: pleasure, joy, peace, material things, money, worldly success, women. And, looking hopelessly at her, he saw something else, too. It had all come about because of him. If he had never sold his soul to the devil, Dolly would never have heard of the occult, if he had done no magic, not made the temple, Dolly would have thought magic something conjurors did for kids at parties. He had begun it and for her sake as well as his own he couldn’t let her down now. He smiled at her.

“We—you—can tell people I can harness certain powers. I can make things happen, if you like, but we mustn’t tell them about Myra. Can’t you see that, dear? You’re not allowed to kill people, you know that, it’s against the law.”

She nodded. When she spoke after a moment or two, he thought with relief that she had changed the subject.

“You’ve got your driving test tomorrow?”

“Yes, at ten.”

She laid her hand on his arm. “Let’s go into the temple and perform a Pentagram ritual for success.”

“I’m going to pass anyway.”

“Isn’t that what you learn magic for? Isn’t that what you sold your soul for? For success and getting what you want?”

How well she had learned the lessons he had taught her! He had run out of joss sticks but that was no excuse as she had bought some herself to keep in stock for him. She sat on the cushion with her glass of wine, watching him make the Cabalistic Cross and utter the prescribed words for success in a coming venture.

The next day he passed his driving test as he had known he would.

“Now you’ll be wanting us to get that van, I daresay,” said Harold.

“I’m taking delivery this afternoon.”

Harold, who had been in the middle of an account of the sorrows of Prince Leopold after the death in childbirth of the Princess Charlotte, a subject fairly appropriate to his own situation, stuck his finger in the book to keep his place. “You haven’t wasted much time.”

“What were you thinking of doing with the money you get from Mrs. Brewer’s flat?” said Pup.

“Now you wait a minute, you hold your horses, that’ll be months and months.”

“Maybe. We should be able to get a good big bank loan on the strength of it, though. I want you to put it all in the business. We could take over one of those shops in Crouch Hill when the leases fall in in the summer and go into word processors. I’ve got it all worked out.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Harold, turning pale. “There’s a recession on or hadn’t you heard?”

“That’s the time to expand. There won’t always be a recession. I’ve got my eye on that new tower block going up at the Archway.”

“We’re not moving into any tower block.”

“Of course not. It’s something else I’ve got in mind.” Harold gave him a hopeless look and returned to his reading. “All this drive,” he said. “I don’t know where you get it from.”

“I don’t know where we’re going to go,” said Suzanne, sitting on her bed and handing Pup his cup of herb tea. “They say they’ll go in the bathroom for half an hour but I draw the line at that.”

“I’ve got a car,” said Pup. “Well, a van. No windows in the back and I’ve bought one of those duvets.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Come and see. I thought we might go up on the Heath.”

“You know, you’re pretty amazing,” said Suzanne, twining herself round him.

They were putting up a block of old people’s flats on the site at Mount Pleasant Green. It was so cold that the frost lay white on the builders’ tarpaulins and stacks of bricks. The air was still but with a cutting edge to it and the sky sparkled with stars rarely seen in the London suburbs. There was a starry-eyed look about the lighted houses that surrounded the green as if surprised by the bitter cold that had suddenly clamped down on them.

“I always feel better once the winter solstice is behind us,” said Miss Finlay, scurrying along so fast that Dolly had to trot to keep up with her. “You know the days are getting longer even if you don’t feel it.”

A handwritten and hand-drawn poster advertised Roberta Fitter’s seance. Dolly had paid her five pounds, she was coming willingly, but she rather resented that poster. “They ought to have my brother here.”

“He’s not a medium, though, is he, dear?”

“He could be. He’s got amazing powers. I had this cold last week and he cured it. My colds usually go on for weeks but my brother did this special invocation and next day it was practically gone.”

Talking about him recalled to her mind how he had refused to come with her. Well, not refused exactly. He had a meeting to go to. But she felt the lack of his company. It had been so nice last time. He was always out now and she was always alone. That was why she had come here tonight, to see Edith again, if possible to bring Edith more positively back with her, to have more of her than an occasionally heard voice. And as she entered the hall she sniffed the air, hoping for an early foretaste of lemon scent, but the place smelt faintly of some kind of cleaning fluid and tonight Miss Finlay had used lavender water.

It was cold, in spite of the two wall heaters with their thin, glowing elements. The curtains to the cabinet were open and you could see a green and black tartan blanket thrown over the chair Mrs. Fitter would sit in. This time Dolly was not asked to assist the medium with her dressing. Graciously, as to a favored novice, Mrs. Leebridge gave her the black clothes to hand round among the audience. Again Miss Finlay pulled the black tights inside out, her face drawn into a frown of concentration. Roberta Fitter was rather a long time getting ready, and a murmur of relief went up from the twenty or so people there when at last she appeared in the shapeless dress and the black Chinese slippers, crossed the stage with bowed head and hunched shoulders, and sat in the chair, drawing the blanket around her knees.

“It’s no trouble to her, going into a trance, is it?” Miss Finlay whispered. “It’s a knack I could do with. I find it more and more difficult getting off to sleep these days.”

“Sssh,” said Mrs. Leebridge.

When the lights were turned off, it was much darker in the hall than it had been in August. It was so dark, pitchy black, that at first Dolly thought they would be able to see nothing. Then Mrs. Collins put on the red lamp by the cabinet. It was a relief. The brief blackness, the icy cold blackness, had for a moment been alarming, bringing her a choking feeling of panic. Her hands, though in fur-lined mittens, still felt as cold as when she was walking along the street. She moved them about, rubbing the fingertips together. The red lamp gleamed but not warmly, not with the suggestion of a glowing brazier, but rather as a red warning light may shine in the darkness on a lonely road.

The curtains were drawn and the medium lost to view. Mrs. Collins came on to the front of the stage and suggested they sing the “Indian Love Call.” Miss Finlay put up her hand like a child in school and said she didn’t think it was the right sort of Indian. So they sang “The Volga Boatmen” once again, out-of-tune elderly voices mostly, cracked voices but for Dolly’s clear soprano, and after a chorus or two the curtains opened and the thin, turbaned figure of Hassan appeared between them.

“Good evening, friends.”

One or two people said good evening. The curtains seemed to move and he was gone, though it was too dark to see him go. The fidgeting among the audience ceased and there was silence, stillness, the dark and the cold. Someone had switched off the wall heaters. Their light would have been a distraction but the air seemed to be growing steadily and rapidly icier. Miss Finlay, her hands in woollen gloves, was pulling the front of her coat down to cover her calves. Dolly glanced to her right and she could just see, now her eyes had become used to the dark, that the woman who sat next to her was holding hands with the man on her other side. They were not young or good-looking or well-dressed, they were just an ordinary, middle-aged, working-class, married couple, but they had each other and each had the other’s hand to hold. Dolly hunched her shoulders, tense with increasing, incomprehensible alarm. If nothing happened in the next few minutes she wouldn’t be able to stand it, she would have to leave. Someone coughed slightly, a nervous clearing of the throat.

Then, when it felt as if you could have cut the cold, tense air with a knife, Hassan spoke from the cabinet:

“Is there someone here who has lost a gentleman who liked growing things? A market gardener perhaps? A gentleman with green fingers?”

The audience was silent.

“He’s waiting to come through,” Hassan’s voice said. “A florist, could it be?”

A woman behind Dolly piped nervously, “My husband had his own greengrocery business.”

“That’s the voice!”

The curtains quivered. A figure appeared in something whitish that caught the red gleam from the lamp. It suddenly struck Dolly, for the first time it truly came to her, how terrible and wonderful it was, how it changed your whole life and way of looking at things, to have spirits brought to you thus from the abode of the dead. She trembled and stared.

“Is it you, Stan?” the woman said. Dolly heard the chair behind her creak and scrape as the greengrocer’s widow got to her feet. Her voice was yearning. “I’ve missed you so, Stan. Put out your hand to me, won’t you put out your hand?”

The specter extended a long thin hand that quivered. The arm, from which draperies fell back, passed in its own miasma of coldness close to Dolly’s face and she gazed at it, that skinny, sinewy arm, very thin for a man’s. The woman leaned forward between Dolly and her neighbor and reached out her own hand as if to try and touch the outstretched fingers but the spirit retreated with a slow twirling movement, glided away without even a whisper of sound from its trailing wrappings, and slipped between the curtains.

The widow was still standing up, still half-leaning across the people in front of her. “He didn’t speak to me, he didn’t speak a word. I wonder if he’s angry. They say they know everything on the Other Side. I wonder if he knows I couldn’t keep the business going. I did try but it was too much for me. Oh, Stan, why didn’t you speak to me … ?”

“Silence, please, friends,” said Mrs Collins. “We must have quiet.”

The woman’s voice dropped to a whisper and then was hushed. People seemed stilled by the cold, paralyzed by it. Dolly was so cold now she was hugging herself for warmth. But there seemed no warmth left anywhere to find and the cold as deep now as in the place where those shrouded figures came from and returned to.

Hassan’s voice came hollowly from the cabinet.

“I have a lady waiting to come through. She’s a lady who died before her time. An operation perhaps or a wound in the lower parts.”

Dolly kept absolutely still. Her mother had had two abdominal operations before she died. She waited for the lemon scent to come and, when there was no lemon scent, for someone else to claim the woman. Somehow she knew her mother would not come without that heralding breath of perfume. It was not Edith who waited there on the edge of the living world for Hassan to lead her over the threshold.

And now she was becoming afraid. Someone surely would claim the woman. Please, please claim her, Dolly mouthed silently.

“A young lady,” Hassan’s voice persisted. “There’s somebody here who must have lost a young lady that passed over in November.”

Then Dolly knew no one would claim her, for she knew who it was and knew it was for her. Perhaps she had really known for a long time now and that was why she was shivering with cold. Her teeth would have chattered if she had not held them clenched.

She gathered her strength. Her teeth chattered as soon as she parted them but she spoke. “Is it for me?”

“That’s the voice!”

“Myra,” Dolly said, “is it you?”

The curtains parted and Myra came out of them. She wore a long white robe like all the specters did but the red light gleamed on her red hair, and when Dolly saw the dabble of blood on her skirts, the flickering spotting of red, she jumped up and screamed aloud. She couldn’t help herself. The scream came involuntarily from her throat and she went on screaming until Mrs. Collins seized her and clamped a hand over her mouth.

Myra had retreated swiftly. The cabinet was open and Roberta Fitter sat there, staring wildly about her like a madwoman. Someone in the audience called out:

“Put the lights on!”

“No, you don’t,” said Mrs. Leebridge. “You’ll kill her. Look at her! Look what that girl’s done.” She went almost fearfully to the cabinet and took one of Mrs. Fitter’s hands in hers. “The ectoplasm rushing back like that, it’s a wonder she’s not all burned up.”

Dolly broke away from Mrs. Collins’s grasp and ran out of the hall. She knew there was no escaping Myra now and Myra was waiting for her in the porch, not visible, not tangible—unless that tremor against her face was her cold touch—but a voice that spoke in Myra’s accents.

“I may as well walk home with you, Doreen.”

Dolly pushed open the door and went out. It had begun to snow lightly, a fine icy powder. She began to walk home through the snow with Myra by her side.

14

T
he cleaver and the knives, Diarmit Bawne’s elemental weapons, lay gathering dust. They were still in the Harrods bag on the floor in a corner of the room and he never looked at them. They did not belong to him but to Conal Moore who had been a thief and a murderer and who, when the police were after him, had run away home to Ireland.

Conal Moore had a sister and brother-in-law in Kilburn who refused to speak to him and did not want to know him because of his criminal behavior. For this reason, too, no one would have anything to do with him, would not recognize his existence, except the police. The worst of his crimes had been to hide in a tunnel on the old railway line and kill a girl who came through and cut her head off. After that, there was no help for it but to run away back to County Clare. But before he left he had had the sense to leave his room and some of his belongings in the care of a responsible citizen called Diarmit Bawne.