The Killing Doll (8 page)

By daylight, Harold was proud of his wife’s appearance. When they went out together, it gratified him to be seen arm-in-arm with her. Harold was one of those men who like to say they don’t understand women, women are a mystery. His mind ranged sometimes over the incomprehensible women of history—Messalina, Catherine de’ Medici, Anne Boleyn, Charlotte Corday— their unaccountable behavior lending weight to his convictions. Women were an enigma and his own wife as great an enigma as any. He derived an almost complacent satisfaction from thinking this way. It absolved him from having to consider why Myra accepted his lack of ardor so equably, why she was wearing herself out painting, and why, instead of having a bit of hush now the dining room was done, she should wish to invite people to eat in it.

Myra couldn’t catch Dolly in the hall again, so she went upstairs and tapped on the door. Dolly guessed who it was, snatched up the dolls and put them in the remnants box out of sight.

“We’re having a few friends in for dinner on Thursday week,” Myra said in her best suburban wife manner. “I hope you and Peter will join us.”

“I’ve got to go to a meeting.” The Adonai Spiritists were holding another seance and Dolly had almost decided not to go but she would now. “What friends? Dad hasn’t got any friends.”

“Quite frankly, Doreen, I think I’m a better judge of that than you are. Of course he’s got friends. If you must know, we’re having my boss Mr. Colefax and his wife and a very nice couple Hal and I got to know at bingo. If you won’t come, I expect my mother will.”

The dining room had apple-green walls now, beige Dralon curtains, haircord on the floor, aluminum-framed Constable prints, and on the table Ravenhead glass and stainless steel cutlery and tablemats of British game birds.

Pup didn’t refuse the invitation. He performed an Elemental ritual and went out and bought himself a suit, gray flannel, plain and elegant, and a gray shirt with a small pink and white pattern on it. He thought it unnecessary to mention this to Dolly or that he had cast the I Ching and it had told him that the desires of the superior man are not thus to be pacified.

He came out of the temple, wearing his robe, and kissed Dolly, who was just leaving for her seance. Just as she closed the front door behind her, Miss Finlay came tearing along at her usual pace. There were police everywhere, she said, and did Dolly know what it was about? When she, Miss Finlay, had tried to get on to the old railway line down the steps at Crescent Road, a policeman had turned her back. There was nothing in the evening paper and she hadn’t got television. Dolly hadn’t got television either, though Myra had just bought a color set. They walked down Manningtree Grove towards Mount Pleasant Green and in that short time two police cars passed them with blue lights flashing.

Myra’s guests all had television and they had all had their radios on while getting ready to come out. When they were having their pre-dinner drinks in the pine and cane living room they talked about nothing else, not that it wasn’t a horrible thing to talk about, a horrible thing to happen, the man who did it must be a monster, no better than an animal.

“I’ve yet to hear of animals cutting each other’s heads off,” said Mrs. Brewer.

Pup said nothing. He was sorry it had happened on the old railway line and inside that very tunnel where, long ago now, he had performed the first ritual of his career. On a fine summer evening like this one it was hideous to think and talk of murder. He was looking at Yvonne Colefax, a very pretty blonde who wore a white dress made of some clinging pleated material. What would make a man want to kill a girl—a
girl,
of all possible victims—and then sever her head from her body with a hatchet?

“Unresolved aggression,” said George Colefax as if Pup had spoken aloud. “A hatred of women whose challenge he can’t meet.” He said it with an emphasis that seemed heartfelt and his wife gave him a glance. “Cutting off the head would silence a mocking tongue and make certain the eyes could no longer see him.”

Myra came in to announce dinner. They trooped into the dining room. Harold had never before sat down to a three-course meal at 8:30 in the evening. All this talk of decapitation made him feel queasy, especially as he was halfway through a book mostly concerned with the torture meted out to Madame de Brinvilliers. He had to sit between Mrs. Brewer and Eileen Ridge, the bingo friend. Myra wore a long green polyester skirt with black daisies on it and a very tight, sleeveless, black polo-necked sweater and all her gold jewelry. Mrs. Brewer, in blue Crimplene, picked at her food and actually sniffed a dish of courgettes in cream sauce. Besides the courgettes, Myra had cooked strange food in elaborate ways, chicken with walnuts, potatoes gummed together with egg and cheese, cabbage that had bits of bacon and caraway seeds in it. George Colefax picked all the caraway seeds out of his very white, even teeth with a gold toothpick. He was a doctor of medicine as well as a dentist and had no compunction (did not even realize such talk might be distasteful) about explaining to the company what a difficult job cutting someone’s head off would be and how the perpetrator, whoever he might be, would have needed knives and perhaps a saw as well as a hatchet. Myra brought in raspberry Pavlova cake.

“It was a woman with a dog found her,” said Mrs. Collins outside the hall after the seance was over. “She’s a woman who lives in Stanhope Road that’s got that great big white dog, great big white Pyrenean something. She was on the old line and the dog started sniffing at something and she saw it was this girl without a head. Then she saw the head a little way away. They took her into hospital for the shock.”

“What an experience,” said Miss Finlay. “It would haunt you to your dying day.” Today she smelt, Dolly had noticed, only of Pear’s soap.

“You’d never get over it. Who’d do a thing like that? Only an animal, an absolute animal.”

Dolly was tired of hearing about it. She stood by the gate, picking leaves from a bush of lemon mint which grew there, crushing them in her fingers and smelling the scent. Her mother had not appeared during the seance, had spoken no word. The leaves had a pungent lemony scent.

“My mother used to use cologne like that,” Dolly said, holding her fingers under Mrs. Collins’s nose.

“Brings her back, does it? You don’t get over losing your mother. I know I never have. You don’t want to go off on your own, you two, not after what’s happened today. You’d best wait here with me, my daughter’s coming for me in the car and she’ll drop you both off.” It was barely dark yet. Miss Finlay looked fearfully along the street and across the green. “We can expect you both, I hope,” said Mrs. Collins, “for Mrs. Fitter’s seance on the fifteenth of next month. You’ve heard of her, haven’t you? She’s wonderful. The tickets are going like hot cakes. Five pounds a seat but you can take my word for it, it’s cheap at the price. Oh, that lemon scent is strong, isn’t it, dear?”

When Wendy Collins dropped off Dolly, the party was still in full swing. She went straight upstairs and just avoided encountering Yvonne Colefax, who had gone to the bathroom to dab herself with more Balmain’s Ivoire. Back in the living room, Yvonne sat on one half of Myra’s new two-seater settee. Pup hesitated, remembering the I Ching and the Pentagrammic Banishing ritual, and then he went and sat next to her. At a loss for what to talk to her about, he offered to tell her fortune. He had overheard Myra regaling his father with details of the Colefaxes’ private life, so he was able to give her a very accurate assessment of her past. She thought he was amazing and said so, looking into his eyes.

“How
could
you know I lost my first husband when I was only twenty-one?” said Yvonne, having forgotten she had imparted this fact to Myra during the previous week.

“Your eyes told me,” said Pup gracefully.

“Load of wicked rubbish,” said Mrs. Brewer.

“Excuse me, but everything he said was the absolute truth.”

Mrs. Brewer’s face was very red as if she were going to have some sort of attack. Yvonne could hardly take her eyes off Pup, was looking at him as if he were a seer or guru, and Pup felt quite weak and faint. He had to keep telling himself how precious and requisite was the retention of virginity to a young geomancer. Yvonne smelled wonderful and her white silk thigh, the whole smooth slippery length of it, was pressed softly against his own. She had a rather breathy, childlike voice, full of wonder, a wide-eyed voice if that was possible. And although she must have been seven or eight years older than him, she seemed younger.

It was half an hour since he had heard Dolly come in. He ought to go, it would be wise to go. Myra was telling her guests how she and Hal were planning an autumn holiday in Cyprus.

“I don’t know about that,” said Harold. “It’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

“Oh, darling, you and your memory!”

“I must be going now,” said Pup. “Goodbye. Thank you for the delicious dinner.” Some impulse made him go up to Myra, lift her hand and kiss it.

It was a signal for everyone else to make a move. Myra could have killed him. Mrs. Brewer wanted Harold to accompany her next door, put all the lights on and search the flat in case an intruder had got in in her absence. Like the man who cut off heads, for instance. Pup went upstairs. Dolly was in their living room, drinking rosé. Often on summer evenings, instead of putting the light on, she lit a candle. She was sitting in the half-dark with her single candle burning, looking down from the window at Ronald and Eileen Ridge getting into their car.

“Pup,” she said, “did you hear about the girl on the old railway line?”

He nodded. “We don’t have to talk about it, do we? How was your meeting?”

“It was all right. Listen, we’ve got a physical medium coming in three weeks’ time, what they call a materialization medium. You will come with me, won’t you? You have to say by tomorrow because the tickets are going to sell like hot cakes.”

“I never knew anyone actually buy cakes when they were hot, did you?” Her puzzled, slightly offended expression made him smile. “Of course I’ll come, dear.”

After Harold had left her, Mrs. Brewer began to feel very ill. She thought she had indigestion as a result of eating Myra’s strange food. It had begun as heartburn while she was still next door, sitting in one of the uncomfortable pine armchairs. Now this had intensified into a deep pressing pain down her left side, paralyzing her left arm and clamping her as if in an iron cage. It might have occurred to Mrs. Brewer that she was having a heart attack except that she believed women never have heart attacks and no one had told her that this immunity ends with the menopause.

Gingie came and lay on her bed. She passed an uncomfortable night and felt so tired that she stayed in bed all day and the next day, but when Myra came in on Sunday, she was up and about again and she said nothing of her illness.

8

O
ne hundred and four people passed through the tunnel before the fateful one. Diarmit counted them. Three or four a day they came, occasionally more, and he had been stationed behind his barricade for twenty-three days before the attack came on the twenty-fourth.

By then he was becalmed in a false security. Huge though they were, they kept to the center of the tunnel and he was just outside the range of their sweeping strides and great stamping feet. But the girl on the twenty-fourth day left the path and came juggernauting towards the mattress. She was in search of something, he thought in his terror, the roll of wire perhaps or the wooden cask or the old chair with which, through the weeks, he had bolstered his fortifications. Her head reached the roof, and her great flailing arms, swinging above the mattress, made a gale in the air. He jumped up in his fear, though he knew himself too small and too faint in substance to be seen, but he jumped up with a spurt of courage, a knife in each tiny feeble hand to defend himself.

The sound she made was a screaming roar of fury. He almost quailed at that, he almost yielded. It was as much as he could do to keep on his feet, not to shrivel into the ground and scuttle, certain prey for her foot. But he remained there with unflinching bravery, stabbing his sting at her, his double sting, pounding into that vast threatening mass, until the weight of it subsided, sinking on to him, a bloodied hulk.

He had done it, he had won. He struggled free. He stepped back, gasping, looking at the thing at his feet as a knight might have looked at a slain dragon. His hands were red and sticky with blood. In death his attacker had shrunk rapidly. Her body was no bigger than an ordinary girl’s now, a small young girl. Diarmit marveled that such things might be, that courage and defiance might reduce a powerful aggressor to this little dead thing.

Perhaps he should reduce it more. After all, he knew all about dismemberment. Wishing he had a saw, he got to work with the cleaver, then the knives. He abandoned the task because he got tired and, as he heard in the distance by the chiming church clock, it was 5:00 now and safe to go home.

The sunshine felt as strong as at noon. A warm curtain of it met him as he came out of the tunnel mouth, carrying the hatchet and the knives in his Harrods bag. The buddleias and willow herb and marguerite daisies were thronged with bees, a white butterfly pursued its waving, fluttering flight, and a ginger cat walked along the edge of the old station platform, but he met no one and passed no one until he had gone up the steps and was in Mount Pleasant Gardens.

Although he was covered with blood, the splashes and great soaked areas did not look like bloodstains on the red shirt and the red cords. In any case, no one looked at him, he remained invisible. On the demolition site beyond the green the workmen had knocked off for the day and the dust had settled. There was very little left of the houses; there were only bricks and rubble and an empty site. Diarmit went upstairs, up and up and up to his top floor. There was one bathroom for all the rooms on the top and in the mornings and the evenings it was always occupied but it was empty now. He took the cleaver and the knives out of the Harrods bag and washed them under cold running water. Then he turned the bag inside out and washed that.