The Killing Doll (21 page)

“Her father was a professional man and her husband’s a professional man. It’s a question of class really. Well, isn’t it always?”

Pup was coming home for a meal. He was wondering—it occupied his mind a great deal these days—how he could get his father to retire. For a long while Harold had been useless in the shop but now he was becoming worse than useless, impeding Pup like an iron on his leg. He mooned about, replying to customers with the vague near-incomprehension of someone who has been addressed in a forgotten foreign language. He was always to be seen stooped over the Xerox or lugging brown paper parcels of the kind that contain a ream of paper.

Pup, however, had a horror of hurting people’s feelings, of causing pain. It would be unthinkable to make Harold feel unwanted, he must instead be made to wish to go of his own accord. Perform a Pentagram ritual, Dolly would no doubt advise, but he had lost all belief in the efficacy of that. In the days when he had bargained and cajoled for height, he had had faith—or perhaps the simple answer was that all along five feet eight had been written in his genes.

The first thing he saw when he walked in was the doll. He gave an exclamation which sounded like pure astonishment but was really dismay. Any of these items of evidence that his sister was unlike other women, was growing more and more strange, filled him with foreboding. But he said nothing. Dolly had already begun on her bottle of wine and he started his supper. At the last meal he had eaten at home he had mentioned over the tinned tongue and defrosted sausage rolls that he liked seafood, though knowing as he spoke of it that this would lead to his being served prefabricated prawn cocktail twice a week for years. The first of the series was before him, all the ingredients fresh from a freezer pack and topped with a dollop of bottled sauce.

Dolly was glad to have given him something different, something he would really enjoy. It distracted her from her preoccupation with Yvonne, though only for a while. They were back in the living room and she three-quarters through her Chianti Classico when she made up her mind. She picked up the receiver and dialed, resolving to put it down again if George Colefax answered.

Yvonne’s little girl voice said like a receptionist:

“Dr. Colefax’s residence.”

“It’s Dolly. Your dress is finished.”

“Dolly, did you get my letter? I was expecting you to phone before.”

So it was she, not Yvonne, who had been at fault, she who had committed the breach of conduct. She gave a sigh of relief which made Pup look up from his evening paper.

“Would you—would you like to come over? Would you come over tomorrow?”

But Yvonne said why shouldn’t Dolly come to her? She would like to return Dolly’s hospitality. Say Monday or Tuesday? It wouldn’t occur to her of course, Dolly thought with a flicker of resentment, it never did occur to people with cars, what a difficult and time-consuming journey it would be, getting from Manningtree Grove to the Bishop’s Avenue by public transport. But she was too gratified by Yvonne’s invitation to demur.

“I’ll pick you up on my way home if you like,” Pup said. She had a friend, a young, suitable, normal friend at last. The relief was great. He remembered Yvonne Colefax, he remembered the scent of her and the feel of that slim thigh against his leg. And at Myra’s funeral … He took his eyes from the olive-skinned, red-lipped doll on the mantelpiece. “Ask her what time.”

As happy now as she had been tense and fearful before, Dolly sat on the settee beside him and told him of the love affair between Ashley Clare and George Colefax.

“And he’s married to that lovely Yvonne?”

“We’ll have to do something about it.”

“What can I do?” said Pup absently and he returned to his paper.

When he had first come to London, he had put himself into Conal’s hands and Conal had had to look after him. Not that he had made a very good job of it. True, he had provided him with a roof over his head but the job had never come to anything and there was no doubt Conal had simply made use of him as someone on whom to unload all his dreads and terrors. Thanks to Conal, he might even have been suspected of the murder and decapitation of that girl, for Conal had had no qualms about returning here with the knives and his bloodstained clothes. But this time, once Conal had returned and they were together again, Diarmit knew it would be him who must look after the other man. It filled him with anxiety.

The knives of the Harrods bag and the heap of clothes still lay in the middle of the floor. Diarmit cursed them, for every time he crossed from his bed to the sink or from the cupboard to the window he had to step over them and once or twice he stumbled and fell headlong. Dressed in blue jeans, a gray shirt and a gray sweater, he went to the Job Center but still they had nothing for him. He dreaded having to confess to the feckless criminal Conal Moore that he was out of work, that he was on the dole.

The two dogs scavenged from the litter bins on Mount Pleasant Green, the Dalmatian and the mongrel collie, dissecting the wrappings of takeaway food, running on the grass like a pair of jackals. The old people had moved into the sheltered housing and a woman of seventy or so could be seen in the window of the communal room, arranging flowers in a vase. A lawn had been started in the garden and little evergreen trees planted. The workmen had long been gone. That would worry Conal, Diarmit thought, he would wonder where they were and expect them to come demolishing this house. He would be afraid to stay in in the daytime, it would all begin again.

Sitting at the window, looking across the green in the direction of Crouch Hill station which was the way Conal would come, Diarmit told himself that to avoid Conal he had only to run away. He had only to leave and go back to Liverpool. But it was not realistic thinking, for he knew he would never so shirk his responsibilities, and besides he had no family in Liverpool, they were all dead and only Conal’s relations lived there. He could go down on the old railway line and hide out in the Mistley tunnel, taking provisions with him and sleeping on the feather mattress. But that would be no good when the fine weather broke and the autumn came. Diarmit shivered, resigning himself to his doom, waiting for his doom to come across the green from Crouch Hill station.

As it happened, though, when Conal came Diarmit did not see him come. He must have slipped into the room during the night. For when Diarmit awoke he was there, wearing dark red clothes and taking his knives out of the Harrods bag, examining them closely, to check no doubt that Diarmit had taken care of them in his absence. Conal the murderer, Conal the criminal, Conal the outcast. Jobless, friendless, hated, mad Conal.

Because he knew what would happen if he left the house, because he dared not go out yet must have exercise, he began pacing the room. Up and down, he paced the small cluttered room with a heavy dogged tread that after a while grew weary, but he paced on.

He did not speak. There was no one to speak to, for Diarmit had gone.

It was the girl’s first day in the Unisex salon in Tottenham Lane and Pup’s first visit. They closed at lunchtime on Mondays and he was her last client. His was also the nicest hair she had handled that morning, fair and wavy, more like a girl’s than a man’s.

“You could do anything with your hair,” she said.

“Like what? Knit it? Grow it up a beanstalk?”

She giggled. “I mean have it in any style. You know what I mean.”

“Okay, stop that cutting and I’ll have dreadlocks. They said your name but I didn’t catch it. Anthea?”

“Andrea. I’m going to start the blow-drying now.”

“Wait a minute. The racket it makes kills me. Look, Andrea, I don’t know how I’ll get through the day if you won’t say you’ll come out with me tonight.”

“I don’t even know your name,” said Andrea.

“You’ve only got to ask. It’s Peter. And you like my hair, don’t you? That’s a start. We can go to the new disco in the Broadway …”

Pup had to pick up Dolly first. He got to Shelley Drive at two minutes past six. Because he was going dancing, he was wearing his tightest jeans but, changing quickly on his return home from work, an idea had come to him that for Dolly’s sake he should impress Yvonne Colefax with some sort of weird or magicianly air. Dolly had told him how she and Yvonne had been up to the temple together and how Yvonne remembered him as a clairvoyant. So he put on a plain black velvet sweatshirt and hung round his neck on a long thong the solar talisman—gold letters on black painted metal—he had made for himself when he was sixteen. It was a costume equally appropriate for the disco. Perhaps this thought rather summed up the attitude Pup had come to take towards the practice of magic arts.

The Colefax home was a white-walled, green-roofed hacienda whose architecture also owed something to art deco and Moroccan influence and had in its pillared porch a hint of Palladio. It was not the largest house but among the larger houses in quiet, luxurious, bosky Shelley Drive and its grounds ranged extensively. Those in the front were an intricate lay-out of little rockeries, cypress trees, gravel walks and geometric flowerbeds, while on the far side at the back a red lacquer Chinese bridge, such as one associates with the Summer Palace of Peking, could be glimpsed. The lawns, as smoothly green as the jade silk dress Pup had seen Dolly making for Yvonne, obviously required the at least twice-weekly attentions of the old-age pensioner who was at present steering round the turf with an electric lawn mower. Yvonne came down the steps when she heard the van’s tyres crunch on the gravel. She was in a candy-pink lawn dress and she looked very young and fragile.

“It’s lovely to see you again. Come in and have a drink. Do you know, I always think of you as some sort of supernatural being, a kind of guru perhaps.”

Pup smiled. They walked across expanses of oak parquet on which pink and yellow Kashmiri rugs were artlessly spread, to where Dolly sat on a terrace in a white cane chair. There was an empty wine bottle on the white wrought-iron table and another bottle which Dolly was rapidly emptying. Pup said he would have a glass of sherry. From the terrace you could see no other houses, only lawns and shrubberies and, surrounding it all, an apparent woodland whose foliage doubtless concealed other scattered palaces. The Chinese bridge spanned a little lake in which swam fish as vermilion as its lacquer. Dolly said the swimming pool was behind that hedge over there.

Yvonne came back with sherry and dry roasted peanuts in a glass dish. She sat in the swing seat and her wispy pink skirt rode up a little to show off her legs that the sun had tanned to a very light biscuit color.

“I was reading something in a magazine the other day. About ESP and harnessing energy and making use of powers we don’t know we have. It said that, in the future, we’d take it for granted these powers existed, we’d accept telepathy as a fact like—like electricity. It said there was about ninety percent of our brains never got used but still there was this enormous—well, potential in them. That’s the kind of thing you do, isn’t it?”

She spoke as if she had learned it all off by heart for him, like a little girl reciting a poem she barely understands for a teacher she admires. He was curiously touched. He nodded.

“The power of your mind could alter the way another person’s mind thinks and feels?”

“That would be the theory.”

She turned away. “I shall be all alone after you’ve gone. I haven’t seen George since Saturday morning. I don’t suppose he’ll bother to come home tonight.”

Dolly said, “I could stay for the evening. My brother won’t mind coming back for me, will you, Pup?”

“Pup?” said Yvonne.

“A pet name,” Pup said imperturbably. “And I’m afraid I would mind. I’ve an appointment, I’m going out.”

Dolly looked disappointed but proud. “He goes to this society,” she explained to Yvonne. “It’s a kind of sacred order, like—well, Templars or Freemasons, but they learn to be adepts in the occult.”

She was quoting directly from some book, Pup thought, but he didn’t deny that the meeting place of the Golden Dawn was his destination that evening. He finished his sherry and got up.

Not much more than an hour later he was gyrating with Andrea under the orange, viridian and purple rippling lights of the Damaria Disco and Wine Bar.

She said nothing to him of the small adventure which had befallen her during the afternoon. She did not yet know him well enough for that. She had gone home to the room she rented in a house at Mount Pleasant Green, expecting the house to be empty at that hour, expecting to have a quiet afternoon setting the room to her liking and arranging her things. On the way there she had bought three small houseplants from a florist: a Christmas cactus, a croton, and a fern.

It was like the continuous low rumble of thunder overhead. But a noise which is, so to speak, an act of God is much easier to put up with than that made, and deliberately or thoughtlessly made, by man. The sound was immediately above her, coming from the room over hers, at the back and on the top floor. There were only two rooms on the top because of the way the roof sloped. Andrea went down to the front door and went outside and read under the topmost bell the name “Diarmit Bawne,” printed in a hand that seemed unused to handling a pen.

She had suffered from the noise for more than two hours. Suppose it went on at night too? She would have to move out and she had only just moved in. It took nerve to go up there but she screwed herself up to it and went. She knocked timidly on the door and then had to knock again.

It was a young man who opened the door. He was in his middle twenties but she would have described him as a boy, a nondescript boy, neither tall nor short, with dusty-looking brown hair—that his hair was dirty she particularly noticed—and features that looked as if roughly shaped out of putty, gray eyes that stared. She spoke in a rush.

“Excuse me, but would you mind not pacing all the time? You’ve been pacing up and down for nearly three hours, I timed you. I’ve got the room below you and the noise is really awful.

I don’t like complaining but I just don’t think I can stand any more of it.”