The Killing Doll Read online

  “Can you be a geomancer without ‘A’ levels?” asked Dolly, who seemed to think it was something like going into computers or being a physicist.

  Pup did not disillusion her. He was beginning to see that by Edith’s death he had lost a cook and housekeeper and gained a mother. It seemed a long time ago now that he had cut his thumb and parted with his soul to the devil, a very long time since he had asked for anything. Wearing the robe, holding the dagger in his hands, he stood before his altar and asked for his own version of what Faustus had desired: a successful career, magical powers, wealth, Helen of Troy—but a Helen many times multiplied and to have, not merely to see and snatch at in vain.

  3

  In a house at the Stroud Green end of Mount Pleasant Gardens, facing what remained of the old green and opposite the meeting place of the Adonai Church of God Spiritists, Diarmit Bawne sat in his room on the top floor. It was a so-called double room because it contained two beds, though it was no more than ten feet by fifteen. The other bed had been occupied by a kind of family connection of Diarmit’s called Conal Moore, and when Conal had gone away he had promised to come back, but he had still not come back after three weeks and Diarmit was waiting for him anxiously. Diarmit had no work and no home but this room and knew hardly anyone in London. Fortunately, there was the Department of Health and Social Security to keep him and pay the rent of the room.

  These days Diarmit spent a lot of time sitting at the window looking down into the street and at Mount Pleasant Green, across which he expected Conal Moore to come because that was the direction in which Crouch Hill station was. The green was deserted and had been for some time except for the pigeons, and the Dalmatian and the mongrel collie that half-heartedly chased the pigeons and scavenged from the litter bins. Diarmit made himself a cup of tea in a mug with a teabag and powdered milk. Conal had left two large tins of powdered milk in the room and three large boxes of teabags and some noodles and curry stuff you added hot water to to make a meal but he had left nothing else of his, not even any of his clothes. Diarmit wished he would come back because he was growing more and more frightened of being alone. He knew no one in the house and it was several days since he had spoken a word to anyone or anyone had spoken to him. He sat in the window and drank his tea, watching the Dalmatian and the collie, watching the chestnut leaves falling on to the wet green grass.

  He was twenty-four, the youngest of twelve children. When he was nine in County Armagh, his mother had been killed by a bomb intended for a Member of Parliament whose house she cleaned. Diarmit saw the bomb go off and he saw what happened to his mother, though he was not injured, or not apparently injured, himself. His father, long before, had gone to America “to see what it was like,” had seen and never come back. Diarmit’s brothers and sisters were scattered about the British Isles. First he went to his eldest sister in Dublin but she had seven children of her own and an extra one was too much for her, so he was passed on to divide his time between his two sisters in Liverpool.

  He had a brother in Belfast, a butcher with his own shop, the most successful and well-to-do of the Bawnes. When he was sixteen, Diarmit was sent back to Belfast to live with his brother and learn his trade. He was there two years. Then the whole street, including the shop, was bombed one day and the opposite side reduced to rubble. Neither the butcher nor Diarmit was hurt but Diarmit vanished and was found some days later, wandering in the countryside twenty miles away, having lost the power of speech and his memory.

  After that he spent nearly a year in a mental hospital, though he was never certified. He came out, returned to Liverpool and resumed the existence of moving from one sister to the other. Neither wanted him. Family conferences were held to discuss the big question of what was to be done with Diarmit, what permanent job could be got for him, where was he permanently to live. The army was considered as a possibility, work on the land, bus driving, security officer, traffic warden. His mental history was against him; there was that black-out, that year in the hospital, that loss of speech that had afflicted him on several later occasions. He lived more or less always on the dole. Sometimes he had doubts as to whether he actually existed at all, and these were particularly strong when his speech failed him or when his sisters, exasperated, ignored his presence or their children acted as if any room in which he was was an empty room.

  Conal Moore was his sister Mary’s brother-in-law. He lived in London and worked for Budgen’s on the delicatessen counter. Everybody in the family and everybody connected with the family was rooting for something for Diarmit, just to get him off Mary’s back, so it was welcome news to hear from Conal, though it was no great surprise. Conal said he could get Diarmit a job on the butchery counter, after all that was Diarmit’s line, and if he liked to come down he could share his place for a bit till he found somewhere.

  Diarmit had come to Mount Pleasant Gardens and found a note waiting for him and the key to the room. The note and the key were on the table in the downstairs hall where all the tenants’ correspondence was put. Diarmit could read his own name on the note but nothing else. He was better with print, for instance he could make out a lot of what was in a newspaper, but handwriting defeated him. He had let himself into the room and ever since then he had been waiting for Conal to come back and he had been wondering what was in the note.

  The note was in his pocket. He carried it about with him. He had a sister living in London. Her name was Kathleen, she was married and she lived in Kilburn. Every day Diarmit meant to go and see Kathleen so that she could read Conal’s note to him and so that he might have someone to talk to and be with. But every day it became harder and harder for him to do this, a now nearly impossible feat of effort and endurance. He had been to Kilburn, it was easy to get there from Mount Pleasant Green, you took the train from Crouch Hill to Brondesbury, it was easy to get there and he had got as far as walking along the road where Kathleen lived but he had not gone up to the house to knock at the door. He was too afraid. Sometimes he thought it would be better if he walked there instead, it would not be so quick and sudden as going by train.

  When he had finished his tea he put on his jacket and went downstairs and out of the house. He walked across the green towards Crouch End. There was a Budgen’s supermarket at Crouch End and another at Muswell Hill but neither had a butchery counter. Perhaps there were others he didn’t know about, he couldn’t ask, he didn’t know what to ask or how to frame the words.

  It was a coldish, dull, negative sort of day in autumn. He went into Budgen’s and bought a single item, a loaf of bread. It puzzled him that there was no butchery counter, only a section where pre-packed cuts of meat were on sale. He said thank you to the girl at the check-out but she said nothing to him. He wondered if she could see him or hear him, and he thought of giving a sudden loud shout but he was too afraid to do that. Never before had he been alone like this, but somehow always involved, for good or ill, with his large family.

  He came out once more into the raw gray afternoon. There were a lot of people in Crouch End Broadway, slouching along or scurrying or marching fast, regardless of the small and timid in their path. Their faces were sullen and hostile or indifferent. Now he had bought the loaf he knew he wouldn’t go to Kathleen’s, he would go back to Mount Pleasant Gardens and wait for Conal Moore.

  A woman in a fur coat walking ahead of him dropped a plastic carrier bag into the litter bin attached to a lamp-post. Diarmit turned his head this way and that to see if anyone was looking and then he took the carrier bag out again and put his loaf in it. It was a shiny olive-green bag with the name “Harrods” written on it in gold. He walked back across the green, carrying a small, sliced, wrapped white loaf in a Harrods bag, and the pigeons flapped and scuttered out of his way.

  4

  At the end of the autumn term, Pup left school. He left on a Thursday and on the Monday set off with Harold in the morning to work at Hodge and Yearman. Jimmy Hodge, who Harold had been in business with for thirty years, had just reti
red.

  Dolly was cross about it and disappointed. She wanted him to get his “A” levels and go to a university. He had read so many books and learned so much and spent so much time in the temple and now it would all go to waste.

  “It won’t go to waste,” said Pup. “I shall do it in my spare time, I shall do it in the evenings.”

  While he was at work, Dolly borrowed some of his books and tried to read them. The subject was immense and her brain reeled. The Philosopher’s Stone, the Ancient Mysteries, the Qabala, Dr. Dee and Helena Blavatsky, Magnetism and the Golden Flower—from all this she was able only to isolate and establish that the adept, the magus, once he had learned it all, might achieve anything he desired and have anything he wished. It was a science right enough, thought Dolly, to whom this signified a study that required protracted concentration and the learning of thousands of facts. What other science could be so complicated and so taxing to the mind? Dolly read about the magical Order of the Golden Dawn, that group or circle of magicians, founded in 1888, to which, it seemed, all the great names that figured in this pile of books had belonged. She imagined him one day as another Waite or Regardie, world-famous as the author of some such weighty textbook as one of these.

  Pup himself was as keen as any student might be, embarking on the long training for a professional career. He and Harold came home from work together, sometimes calling in at the Haringey Central Library to change Harold’s books; they had their tea and then, when Harold retreated to the breakfast room with the memoirs of a princess of Thurn und Taxis or went out on one of his mysterious trips, presumably to a pub, Pup would go up to the temple. He was obsessed with magic, it was an all-absorbing craze with him as football was to some of his contemporaries. The occult had him in its grip. He could hardly wait to get into the golden robe and begin an incantation or make divinations with the tarot cards or settle down to the study of etheric projection.

  He cast horoscopes and he made talismans. He went back to the shop where the man had cut him the plywood for the pentacle and got him to cut out in metal two small polygonal shapes and pierce a hole in each. Dolly was a Venusian subject, so her talisman was a seven-sided pendant which he painted green and the letters on it red as was correct. For this, he had to use “virgin” instruments, unused before, bought new for the purpose, the brush, the paint, the thong.

  “And I’m a virgin,” said Pup.

  Dolly nodded her head vigorously. That was how it should be. The magical powers were enhanced by virginity. Time after time, instructions in the books for performing a certain evocation or banishing ritual stressed that the magician should be chaste. It made Dolly happy that Pup never looked at a girl. He had friends of his own sex, sometimes he went to their homes, he went out for a drink occasionally with Chris Theofanou, but he had no eyes for girls. Carefully, almost reverently, she hung the talisman he had made her round her neck. It would keep away harm, he said, it would protect her from evil powers.

  Quite often he invited her into the temple to watch him perform a particular rite. She covered some cushions in scarlet and gold and black material and on these she sat, watching him with awe and admiration. But he didn’t always want her there and she never invited herself, she wouldn’t put herself forward. It was enough for her to know he was making progress, that he was not like so many other boys of his age but was up there, quietly applying himself to his studies.

  Sitting downstairs in the front room, pinning on a pattern or working the sewing machine, Dolly thought how proud their mother would have been if she could have seen him and known what he was doing. Perhaps she could see and did know. It was missing her mother that made Dolly go to the Adonai Church of God Spiritists.

  Mrs. Brewer had a new cat, a ginger and white kitten that was too wise ever to go near the road or even into the front garden. It stayed in the back, prowling across conservatory roofs and hunting on the old railway line. Dolly kept a pile of stones on the old bookcase outside the kitchen window to hurl at it when it came into her garden, just as she had done in the days of Fluffy.

  She wore her talisman for her first visit to Mount Pleasant Hall. Although she knew by sight many of the people who attended and could see that not one of them had any claim to elegance or style, she dressed herself with care. Dolly felt that if she could only be well enough dressed, well enough groomed, there must come a point where people would observe this alone and the nevus pass unnoticed. She wore the dress and coat she had just finished making for herself in tweed of a smart olive-drab shade. At the neck she tied a little vermilion silk scarf and hung on the pendant so that it showed between the lapels of the coat. She had chosen the tweed and the scarf particularly to complement the talisman.

  No one in Manningtree Grove and its environs dressed as well as her except perhaps some of the young black girls going off to catch trains in the mornings. And yet, as she seldom went out, all this elegance was wasted on shopping in Crouch End Broadway or down the Holloway Road. This was the first time she had been out in the evening for she didn’t know how long.

  Before leaving she had drunk a tumblerful of wine to give her courage but, even so, being out alone at this hour filled her with unease. She had those agoraphobic sensations not uncommon in housebound, withdrawn people. She felt exposed and vulnerable and threatened. The people who were about in the evening were a different set from those she encountered shopping in the mornings and they seemed to her to have more curious eyes and less guarded expressions. Dolly had no friends. Pup didn’t count, he was her child. Her mother had been her friend and her mother was dead. She wondered how she would feel when, in the next hour or so perhaps, she heard her mother’s voice.

  But in the event it was very different. No more than a dozen people came for the seance and that included Mrs. Collins and her daughter Wendy and the medium. The hall was a not very large room with a small curtained-off stage at one end. There were green roller blinds at the windows and coconut matting on the floor. Mrs. Collins was wearing the navy blue suit she called a costume that Dolly had made her. She smiled in a way Dolly knew that wearing it was meant as a compliment to her. Wendy was fat and long-chinned and well over thirty but she had no birthmark on her right cheek.

  They all sat in a row on rush-bottomed tip-up chairs. Mrs. Collins switched off the uncompromising, high-wattage overhead light and turned on the table lamp she had brought, plugged in on yards of lead to somewhere at the back of the stage. The medium was an old woman, fatter even than Wendy, and had a somewhat more comfortable chair in which, as soon as everyone was seated, she went promptly into a trance.

  After a while, people began to come through with messages: an old friend for Wendy Collins, an aunt for a Miss Finlay. They spoke through the medium’s lips in strangled whispers. It was not frightening, not exciting, not even believable. Edith’s voice didn’t sound like Edith. It was too soft and lugubrious.

  “Dear daughter, I am always near you, I watch you taking care of Peter and my beloved husband …”

  Edith had never spoken like that. Dolly felt indignant that the medium should be such a fraud, callously deluding people, and then, simultaneously with that thought, there came to her a breath of perfume, of lemon verbena. She almost cried out, so powerful for a brief moment was this scent of her dead mother.

  It was gone in an instant, the medium was waking and the Adonai Spiritists were preparing to leave. Dolly was trembling from the shock that scent had given her. It seemed to prove the truth of what she had read in Pup’s books.

  During the séance it had grown dark outside. The yellow and white street lamps were on and a single white lamp shone in the center of Mount Pleasant Green. It would not have occurred to her to feel frightened to walk home in the dark on her own. But in the little vestibule where the notice boards were between the inner glass doors and the outer doors, a woman touched her sleeve, said she was Miss Finlay and might they walk home together? Dolly nodded and followed her out. At the touch she had smelt lemon verbena again
. It was Miss Finlay’s scent, that was all, it was Miss Finlay’s lemon scent that she had smelt all the time.

  Miss Finlay scurried along as if pursued and Dolly had to take long strides to keep up with her. As they walked Dolly thought about that scent and about her mother’s voice sounding so soft and low-pitched and Miss Finlay talked about how wonderful the séance had been and how amazing the medium.

  “It must be marvelous to have powers.”

  Dolly felt affronted. “My brother has real powers. He does magic.”

  “What, like sticking pins in a wax image?”

  “Of course not, nothing like that. He’s a geomancer, it’s scientific.”

  Miss Finlay giggled. Dolly was very offended and when Miss Finlay said she was looking for a dressmaker, she wanted a velvet skirt made, she merely shrugged and said she was in the phone book. They were outside the Yearmans’ house and Dolly pushed the gate open. Nervous Miss Finlay had another half mile to walk up to Crescent Road all on her own. Dolly said good night absently. This was not the companion she was looking for, the friend that would make her forget her birthmark in the excitement of their meeting.

  Pup must be in the temple. The landing light on the top floor was on. Dolly let herself into the house and without taking her coat off, went straight to the kitchen. There was an open bottle of Soave in the larder and she needed a glass of it. The second shock of the evening was when she opened the door and found the light on and Harold sitting at the table with Myra Brewer, two cans of Double Diamond and two bags of crisps between them.