The Killing Doll (29 page)

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.

It was then that he knew he must get out and defend himself against them. Once the morning came he must get out, taking his property with him, to find himself a refuge. The electric knife sharpener made scarcely any sound. He sat cross-legged on the floor, sharpening the knives and testing them on his left hand until the fingertips were all scored across and bloody. If Diarmit heard the faint noise and came up, he would be ready for him, but Diarmit did not come.

It was in a state very like a trance that Dolly walked back up the steep hill. And for almost the first time since Myra died she found herself in silence. Myra and Edith had whispered together, making a sound like the shrill twittering of frightened birds, then sighed, then gasped, then gone. She knew she would never hear them again or smell the lemon of her mother or see the green that was Myra. They had gone and left her in utter silence.

She hardly noticed the wind. The bus came after she had waited twenty minutes for it. For a stupid moment she thought the bus driver had a dog’s face but she closed her eyes and opened them and saw a brown man, an Indian, with an aquiline nose. A deadly silence enclosed her on the bus. She put up her hand and felt the hard edges of the talisman through her dress and it made her easier, it brought her a little life.

There was no need to hurry home. She could not have hurried if she had wanted to. The news would not reach Yvonne until the evening or perhaps even tomorrow if she saw no paper and had to wait for George to tell her. Dolly got off the bus in Highgate village and walked slowly, buffeted by the wind, down the hill to Holmesdale Road where she made her way on to the old railway line.

Spring catkins were appearing on the birch trees and the willows. By the time the summer came, she and Pup would be on their own in their own house and George and Yvonne happy again in their own house. Tomorrow, if she hadn’t heard from Yvonne, she would send her the blonde bridal doll by Pup. It was wonderfully peaceful without Myra and Edith. Dolly thought she would drink a bottle of wine when she got home, though it was so early. Enough wine would kill the day for her until Yvonne phoned.

She touched the talisman. Feathers were flying out of the mouth of the Mistley tunnel like snow blown from a drift. Dolly walked through the tunnel and went up the steps on the other side.

Harold was at home. She could hear the clatter of his typewriter from the breakfast room. In the kitchen she opened a bottle of burgundy and drank a glassful down at a gulp. She took the bottle with her into the living room and began drinking the wine steadily, not bothering to make it last. There was another bottle where that one had come from; in the wineshops there was an infinite number of bottles waiting for her to come and buy. The typewriter rattled away on the other side of the wall. She missed Edith and Myra. Often she had hated them and tried to drive them away, but now that they had gone back to their abode on the Other Side, she wanted their voices back again, their comments on what she had done, their judgment.

She fetched the other bottle and drew the cork. Her hands were shaking. She realized that tremors had been passing through her whole body ever since she came back into the house. It was a strange thing to happen because she was happy, now Ashley Clare was dead she was as content with her life as she ever could be.

Wendy Collins arrived in her car to take Harold out somewhere. Dolly thought of when she and Pup would be alone, of turning the dining room into a temple, of George and Yvonne coming. Her thoughts buzzed in her head like a skep full of bees. Harold and Wendy went arm in arm down the path and got into Wendy’s car. Dolly thought she might sleep, it was many nights since she had slept well. The dolls on the mantelpiece seemed to be watching her, their eyes following her, swiveling in their padded rag faces.

She sat down at the sewing machine but her hands were too unsteady to hold her work. Half the bottle of burgundy remained. She slopped some of it into the glass, spilling red drops, a little red pond of it, on to Myra’s haircord. The dolls put their heads on one side and stared, Ashley Clare and Yvonne began to shake their heads and roll their embroidered eyes. Dolly finished the wine and got up, holding on to the furniture to help her across the room. She saw her face and the masking red nevus in Myra’s mirror and as she looked at it with misted, distorting eyes, she saw another face appear behind her, its dog snout peer over her left shoulder.

She closed the door and turned the key in the lock, shutting Anubis in with the dolls. It was impossible to walk upstairs, so she crawled from tread to tread, crawled across the landing, climbed on to her bed and slept.

The wine stains on the carpet looked like spots of spilled blood. Dolly moved the sewing machine table a foot or two to hide them. She had slept for ten hours, turning day into night, and now, primed with aspirin—she had taken six—she felt weak and shaky and somehow disembodied. Harold was still out or had gone out again, Pup had neither come nor phoned. Or she supposed he had not phoned. She had been dead to sound or any change or disturbance of her surroundings.

She could feel the presence of the dog-faced god but she could not see him. She walked about the house, turning the light on as she entered a room and off as she left it. It was as if she were getting her bearings, taking a view of the new life that was opening ahead of her. All the time as she walked she could hear, or perhaps only feel by means of soft vibrations, some creature always padding a little way behind her. When she looked to see, there was nothing there. It was a couple of days since she had eaten anything more than a couple of biscuits or two but she did not feel like eating now. She took a bottle of white wine, Sauterne, out of the fridge, drew the cork and sipped it slowly straight from the bottle. It made her feel queasy and weak-kneed but she went on drinking it.

Still Pup did not come. Once she would have believed him to be at the Golden dawn but she could hardly think that now. Once, before the Golden Dawn days, she would have worried, imagining him mugged or run over. He had grown too self-sufficient, indeed too great and powerful, for her to feel those things now.

Harold was back. She heard Wendy leave him and the smack of their good-night kiss. Night had become day for her. She would sit up through it, sit in the living room with her last bottle of wine, waiting for Pup to come.

Very early in the morning, Saturday morning, Conal began moving his stuff out. He started before it was light. There was a lot of stuff belonging to Diarmit Bawne: a gray duffel coat, a raincoat, blue jeans and light shirts that had to be washed and ironed. There were tins of food and bottles of sauce, a colored blanket that looked as if it had been made out of wool by some woman, an ashtray with a shamrock leaf painted on it. All this he left behind for its rightful owner. Into the place where he would withstand their siege he took his red clothes and the knife sharpener and the Harrods bag with the knives and the cleaver in it. He walked through the cold dark morning, carrying his possessions, down the muddy steps to the platform of the old station.

He had to make three journeys. When he had got everything that was Conal Moore’s and left everything that was Diarmit Bawne’s, he opened the room door and left it propped wide open with one of Diarmit’s tins of Campbell’s soup. Diarmit would not have been capable of writing them a note, he could write his own name and that was about all. Conal could write, he was an educated man, but he did not choose to do so. Why bother with them? Why make their job easier for them?

They would guess where he was anyway. When they came he would be ready for them. The dawn had come, it was almost sunrise, the sun was showing in pale yellow bars above a ridge of black roofs and the black featheriness of tree branches. He humped his stuff along the platform and into the tunnel. The mattress had dwindled in the eighteen months that had passed but it was still a mattress and it was still possible to stand it up on its side and curve it round into a windbreak or defensive barrier. He had brought a blanket from the bed and the dark red anorak that Conal had bought third or fourth hand in the Mind shop. The knives and the cleaver were what were important, his weapons. The sight of them, sharp and shining, laid out carefully, each parallel to the others, on a thick pad of damp newspaper, comforted him and made him feel safer. Any policeman or woman, any spy, who came near him had better look out, that was all.

Conal Moore had always been a brave boy, a daredevil, a wild fellow. He sat down behind the barricade on a mound of wet newspaper, the blanket tented round him, ready for anything.

At 9:00 in the morning Pup came home. Dolly, waking up on the living-room sofa, heard him go straight upstairs. She just had time to put her shoes on, run her fingers through her hair, stretch, before he came running down again and was in the room with her.

She hoped to avoid having to explain, she hoped he would simply think she was up and dressed early for a Saturday. But he was not even looking at her. He was looking at the dolls on the mantelpiece.

“Don’t you think we’d better put them away now?” he said gently. “Well, the—the man, anyway. Not in very good taste.” He hesitated. “You do—know?” She remained still, saying nothing. He picked the dolls off the shelf. “I tried to phone you a good many times yesterday.”

She said indifferently, “I was out a lot yesterday,” and with a show of insouciance, “What should I know?”

“You didn’t see an evening paper?”

She shook her head, waiting for the pleasant news that was no news to be broken.

He opened the lid of the remnants box and slipped the dolls inside. She thought he looked suddenly much older, far older than his years, and content in a strained kind of way. He must be happy for Yvonne, relieved for Yvonne getting her husband back. She laid her hand on his sleeve.

“It’s been quite a shock,” he said. “Yesterday morning—well, twenty-four hours ago now, George Colefax fell on to the line at Hampstead in front of the incoming train.”

24

A
fter he had gone, she found the photograph Yvonne had sent her and looked at it. For some reason—because George Colefax had spoken of Ashley Clare as a beautiful boy?—she had taken the man smoking the cigar for George and the slimmer handsomer one for Ashley Clare. She had been wrong, just as she had been wrong that evening on the platform at Camden Town, only then it hadn’t mattered, it hadn’t been too late and beyond remedy.

Yvonne’s husband was dead. She had murdered him. Since Pup told her, her head had been full of a rushing, roaring sound and full, too, of thick mist. She sat where he had left her, quite still, staring, afraid to move lest any movement she might make should bring down fresh disaster on them all.

The thought came to her that she would never see anyone again, no one would ever again see her or speak to her. There was even no sound of Harold in the house this morning. Pup had gone without saying when he would come back. Yvonne hated her. She was left alone for the rest of her life—or alone but for a single companion and even he had deserted her since, just before Pup came, she had for a moment seen the shadow of his dog’s head appear on the wall.

It was more than twenty-four hours, much more, since she had taken her clothes off. The rust-red dress was crumpled and it seemed to her that it smelled of sweat and pain. Without getting up, without drawing the curtains, she began unbuttoning it. But before she had reached the waist she was aware of loss, of something—more than everything else—being wrong, of a terrible lack. Both her hands went to her neck, her breasts, searching.

The talisman was gone.

She cried out, a useless cry, since there was no one to hear her and no one to come. Was it because she and the talisman had been parted that this horror had happened? But no, it had been with her then, she had felt it against her skin. If she were not to lose everything, to lose her own self as well, she must find the talisman, she must not permit it to be lost, to wander the world ownerless.

Feverishly she began to search the house.

“I suppose,” Yvonne said, holding on to the Pup very tight, her head on his shoulder, “I suppose what happened to poor George was like they say in the papers, the balance of his mind was disturbed. The policeman said to me it would just be made out to be accidental at the inquest but what I think is he meant to do it, don’t you?”

“It seems an odd way to do it,” said Pup, “and an odd place to choose.”

Yvonne shivered. “If your mind’s unbalanced you don’t think of things like that. It was quick. You see, he told me he couldn’t live without Ashley and the chances were Ashley’d be dead in a year. I think he must have been feeling very sort of low and he got down on that platform and despair came over him and he jumped. But we don’t have to tell them that at the inquest, do we?”

“Of course we don’t.”

“Poor George. I was very fond of him once, you know. I do feel quite upset. It’s awful to have been a widow twice when you’re only twenty-five.”