The Killing Doll (17 page)

Only Diarmit knew he was in Ireland and knew he had killed the girl. Only Diarmit knew where the weapons he had used were. He intended to make a statement about all this to the police, lay all the facts about Conal Moore before them and hand over to them the Harrods bag of knives, but at the moment he was too busy to get around to it. Unlike Conal Moore, he was a responsible hard-working person with a job and he didn’t have the time to devote to all these outside things.

Conal had been a mass of nerves, afraid of all kinds of things. One of the things he had been afraid of was that they would demolish the house while he was in it and he would be buried in the rubble. Diarmit couldn’t help laughing to himself when he thought of anyone believing a thing like that. For one thing, the men would have seen him if he had put his head out of the window and shouted. He had been a small insignificant creature, Diarmit remembered, but not that small, not so small you couldn’t see him. He, Diarmit, could wear his clothes, after all, did wear them every day. It wasn’t that he much cared for the idea of wearing a murderer’s clothes, especially the dark red trousers and shirts Conal had worn so that they should not show bloodstains, but it was a terrible waste not to wear them. Waste not, want not, as his mother used to say. Diarmit Bawne had no family now, he was alone in the world, standing on his own feet, but Conal Moore had a dozen or so brothers and sisters living all over Ireland and in London and Liverpool and Birmingham. He was their responsibility now, they must do the best they could for him, for Diarmit had done enough, looking after his home and his clothes and his possessions, not many would do as much.

It was only two or three weeks after Conal had run away that Diarmit had got himself the job in the Greek’s shop that was part butcher’s, part delicatessen. It was only a short walk from Mount Pleasant Green. The Greek could understand very little of what Diarmit said and Diarmit could understand about as much of what the Greek said, but this suited them both. Formerly the Greek had always employed other Greeks who talked all day to him in his own tongue. He wanted someone who would leave him to the quiet and solitude he liked. Diarmit never tried to talk to him much; they had nothing in common and he was busy with his own thoughts. He had begun thinking a lot about Conal Moore.

With his lazy ways, his nerves, the crazy way he had of thinking people were going to knock him over and trample on him, Conal would have made a bad impression on Georgiou, he would never have got the job. Probably he hadn’t got a job at home in Ireland. People like that were always out of work, living on the dole or, worse, on the charity of their families. Conal had thought he was going to do that with his relations in Kilburn but his brother-in-law had been too tough a nut to crack. None of his family wanted him any more, they had had enough to last them a lifetime. It seemed likely to Diarmit that Conal would never be seen again. He would either disappear quietly among the wilds of County Clare and his crimes disappear with him or else he would be caught and spend the rest of his life in prison. Either way they would all be rid of him. Sometimes Diarmit thought that perhaps he wouldn’t go to the police after all. What had the police ever done for him? They hadn’t even had the common courtesy to come back and tell him how their case against Conal was progressing. Besides, he would have to tell them everything he knew about Conal and that would take hours, take all day, for he knew him as he knew himself, and quite frankly he was getting a bit sick of him, he often thought he’d like to banish him from his mind altogether.

Georgiou had once employed two assistants and a girl part-time but he did so no longer; times were hard and wages high. There were just himself and Diarmit in the shop. The lease came up for renewal in the summer and Georgiou knew his rent was going up, though he did not yet know by how much. “Sky-high” was what the tenants of the other shops in the row said. Georgiou would not fight it, he said to his wife, he would make the landlords a reasonable offer and if they wouldn’t have it, too bad. People talked about the rents going up double, he couldn’t pay double, if that happened he’d retire. He was past sixty anyway. No one said any of this to Diarmit. What business was it of his? He was only an employee and if Georgiou retiring meant he had no job, too bad.

Diarmit sat in his window in the evenings and looked across the green at the block of sheltered flats going up next to the hall. Progress had been slow but they were nearly done now. The roof was on. His own mother was dead, God rest her, but Conal’s was alive and wouldn’t one of those flats be just the thing for her? But Conal would never think of a thing like that, too feckless, too lacking in responsibility.

Sometimes Diarmit gave the room a good clean. The first time he did this he was appalled at the mess Conal had left behind him. Bits of stale food dropped behind things and now coated in mold, a heap of dried-up, mildewed teabags on a newspaper under the bed, dirty clothes in piles, a drawer that had once had biscuits in it now full of mouse droppings.

Once he had cleaned up Conal’s mess, he felt really clean in himself and he felt free. Keeping the room and himself that way had become very important to him. Now he would have liked to clean his mind of Conal too, but that was much harder than cleaning a room. Try as he did, he found himself dwelling on Conal when he lay down to sleep, on the way to work, at work and on the way back, when he sat at the window, watching the green and the new flats and the hall where all those cranky people came. He would think of Conal’s past and his present, imagining him in the green west and weaving about him long strange fantasies.

And by night he often had a Conal dream in which the other man sometimes appeared bound and gagged and led by a halter, and sometimes, more often, toiling up a hillside, bearing a heavy sack on his shoulders.

15

H
arold sat in the breakfast room, surrounded by mementoes of Myra, writing his novel. It had come to him some months before, round about the time of Pup’s twentieth birthday, that with his surely unrivaled knowledge, it would be a good idea for him to attempt a work of historical fiction. He wrote in longhand on pads of pale blue Basildon Bond. His subject was the unsavory life of that least exemplary of the sons of George III, Ernest Duke of Cumberland, who was said to have committed incest with his sister and murdered his valet. Harold was treating these allegations as fact. He was in the middle of Chapter Five in which the young prince and the Princess Amelia began their guilty liaison.

He read nothing now but works on and novels about the children of George III. He read them at home and he read them in the shop when the new assistant was attending to customers and Pup wasn’t about. Pup was often absent these days, up at the new branch he had opened in Crouch Hill. In an armchair very like the one at home, Harold sat in the storeroom, which was now stuffed full of Pup’s word processors, and read about the English court in the late eighteenth century. His writing, what he should write next and how the plot should develop, filled his waking thoughts so that he became quieter than ever and apparently morose. This withdrawal into himself was attributed to the loss of Myra and some said that poor Harold was beginning to break up.

He had told no one what he was doing. In the days before he was a writer and had merely been a reader, he had never talked about what he read. He didn’t expect others to be interested in what he did; he wasn’t interested in them. His children, in these past months, had become rather shadowy to him. He was aware that Dolly was in the house, that meals appeared and housework was done, but he seldom said much to her. She had her own friends, he thought when he thought about it at all.

Ron and Eileen Ridge came round to ask him if he felt like starting bingo again. They would call for him, they would like to. Dolly admitted them to the house and called out to her father, rather than showing them straightaway into the breakfast room. This gave Harold the chance to hide the Basildon Bond away out of sight and be discovered brooding in his sanctuary.

“You’ve got to come out of yourself sooner or later, Harold,” said Eileen in a mildly scolding tone. “You owe it to Myra’s memory.”

Harold nodded vaguely.

“I know you’ll say you’ve got your daughter and that’s perfectly true.”

“She has her own friends,” said Harold.

Mrs. Collins, Wendy Collins, Miss Finlay, Mrs. Leebridge. Dolly had never much liked the last two, which was just as well, since she never saw them any more. The Adonai Spiritists had closed their doors to her.

“I couldn’t take the responsibility, could I?” said Mrs. Collins while Dolly was measuring Wendy for a trouser suit. “You might have another of your fits and then where should I be?”

“I didn’t have a fit.”

“Whatever it was, dear. You can kill a medium like that. Mrs. Fitter was under the weather for days. And all because you were privileged to catch a glimpse of young Mrs. Yearman.”

Dolly said nothing about its having been more than a glimpse. It was only Pup she had told about hearing the tap of Myra’s high heels following her up the path that night and up the steps to the door. Only he knew how she heard Myra’s whisper as well as Edith’s now. Once or twice, with gooseflesh on her arms, she had felt Myra’s hand lift up the curtain of hair and a finger run across the nevus.

Wendy bought the Chinese girl doll with the black pigtail and the dark blue quilted jacket. She wanted it for a present for a friend’s child whose birthday wasn’t until November. She might as well buy it now, she said, since she didn’t expect she would be seeing much of Dolly once the trouser suit was finished. Dolly was left alone with the ballet girl and the Chinese boy, who sat together on the mantelpiece staring across the room at Myra’s now dead rubber plant and Myra’s calendar for the previous year.

Pup did the Rosy Cross ritual to banish Myra. Long ago he had told Dolly that, if you became involved in the serious practice of geomancy, it was likely that the invisible world would begin to intrude on your everyday life. He had told her and then she had read it in one of his books. It might take the form of a series of coincidences or of poltergeist activity or simply of strange sights and sounds. The ritual of the Rosy Cross extended a protection against such things; it placed a barrier or veil between you and them.

As soon as Dolly told him about the voices and the invisible hands, Pup wanted to do the ritual. He said she must have faith in the ritual and then she would be all right. They had gone into the temple together, Pup had made crosses and circles in the air with an incense stick and had chanted:

“Virgo, Isis, Mighty Mother,
Scorpio, Apophis, Destroyer,
Sol, Osiris, Slain and Risen,
Isis, Apophis, Osiris,
Ee-ay-oo, el-ewe-ex, lux,
light,
The Light of the Cross,
Let the Light descend!”

As Pup and the book had promised, Myra went away after that. But she came back and Edith came back with her. Dolly knew she could have asked Pup to do the ritual again or even attempted it herself and one evening she tried it, chanting the words from the book and making the signs with a sandalwood joss stick. But she had barely finished when she sensed the two women had come into the temple. The lemon scent was so strong it overcame that of the sandalwood. She heard Myra’s light brittle laugh.

Edith said: “That’s Pup’s job, dear. Better leave that sort of thing to Pup.”

He was away that night and the next and the next on a weekend course in Hertfordshire, learning how to operate the Infra-Hyposonic XH450 word processor. The manufacturers liked retailers as well as prospective customers to be conversant with the intricacies of their equipment. The course was in a country house called West Lawn near Puckeridge. Pup was not the only man there but he was the only one under forty. Most of the girls were young and pretty. It was more like a model school seminar than instruction in working a glorified typewriter.

Apart from the obvious one, Pup recognized an immediate affinity between himself and the prettiest girl. She lived in Islington, a mile or so from his own home. After the Saturday lesson and the lecture on advanced techniques, he drove her down into the village for drinks and chicken and chips at The Green Man.

“Have you got a girl friend, Peter?”

“She just got engaged to someone else,” said Pup with perfect truth. Suzanne, having found out about Philippa and an occasional pal of Pup’s called Terri, had declared on the rebound her intention of marrying the brother of one of the students. “Rather sad but I suppose that’s life. I’ll survive.”

In the van she sat close up to him. She had a bottle of wine in her room, she said, and if he didn’t mind its not being iced …

“The sadness isn’t so bad,” said Caroline. “It’s the frustration I mind, it’s so—well, kind of degrading.”

“Here, let me,” said Pup, taking the corkscrew from her. He gave her his other-worldly look. “I wouldn’t know about that, never yet having succumbed. That may have been part of the trouble with Suzanne. But I mustn’t bore you with my problems. Cheers.”

“Cheers. Do you mean what I think you mean?”

Pup nodded. “I had this idea of saving myself for the perfect girl, Caroline.” He took her hand. “A kind of crazy idealism, I suppose you’ll say.”

“It’s the most romantic thing I ever heard!”

He got home to hear that the estate agents had found a buyer for Mrs. Brewer’s flat. Harold seemed to have lost interest, so Pup had quietly taken the matter over himself. Thirty-one thousand pounds to be paid over a month after exchange of contracts which would be the following week. Caroline had told him that her friend’s sister was secretary to a man who was managing director of a company taking a lease for two floors of the new tower block. It was a new company, starting from scratch, and Caroline not only got hold of its name for him but also the private phone number of this guy her friend’s sister was secretary to.

What with that and opening the new branch Pup was kept busy. The shop had been a butcher’s and delicatessen, so the whole interior had to be remodeled and refitted. Pup felt rather proud of getting it because he could afford a higher rent than Georgiou, who had had the place before.