Ramsey Campbell - 1976 - The Doll Who Ate His Mother (8 page)

 
          
“You’ve
had books published, have you?
Such as what?”

 
          
Edmund
listed them. His voice returned muffled down the long narrow auditorium, with a
kind of frustrated echo. The single slope of seats was dim; above it a spread
of tobacco smoke drifted reluctantly away, toward the ventilation. At the
screen, curtains twitched and fidgeted, rattling; the projectionist peered
through his window, trying to settle them. Mr. Pugh tugged vigorously at the
chains of the exit doors. “You’re not telling me you’re protecting society with
books like those,” he said.

 
          
Clare
realized how easily she had let Edmund persuade her; he had no room for faint
amusement now. She felt wickedly pleased. “With respect,” he said, “you haven’t
read them. They’ve been praised by criminologists.”

 
          
“Experts,”
Mr. Pugh cursed.

 
          
They
emerged from the stalls as he hurried into his office. Clare heard the lady
from the kiosk saying, “I’m sorry, Mr. Pugh. I didn’t mean what I said. It was
a dreadful thing to say.”

 
          
“All
right, Mrs. Freeman. Thank you for waiting.”

 
          
A
few of the lines on his face had softened. Clare saw Edmund note that too.
Edmund motioned her to the vacant chair,
then
stood
gazing down at Mr. Pugh across the desk. “In my own
defence
,”
he said, “I must say nobody has ever accused my books of inciting crime. Not
like some of the films nowadays. Aren’t there some films you wish you didn’t
have to show?”

 
          
“Of
course there are.” He checked the lady’s calculations rapidly. “But they’re
what the public wants these days. You can’t go against the public.”

 
          
“Well,
that’s it. You show them because it’s your job.”

 
          
“That’s
right. My job,” he said, locking the safe. “There’s place and means for every
man alive.” Isn’t that right?”

 
          
“Sorry?”

 
          
“All’s
Well That Ends Well. We can all see what my job is.” He glanced sharply at
Edmund. “But I still don’t know what job you think you’re doing.”

 
          
“I
believe I’m helping people understand what makes a criminal. And I think that
may help prevent crime.”

 
          
“Understand?”
His voice boomed in the small office; Clare started. “You want me to understand
that animal? You want me to understand the man who could do that to an old
lady?”

 
          
“I
know exactly how you feel. If it had been my mother I’d want to meet the man
who did it face to face.”

 
          
“But
it wasn’t your mother, so you write about it. I don’t want to catch him. I
wouldn’t trust myself. It’s the job of the police to catch him. You help them
if you want to protect society so much.”

 
          
“We
will be helping them, by pursuing an independent line of enquiry. We’ll tell
them as soon as we have something worth telling. But I have to make a living
too, you know. I don’t always like what I have to do—you should be able to
appreciate that. I have my job to do, just as you do.”

 
          
Mr.
Pugh squeezed his bottom lip forward thickly, shaking his head. He reached for
the phone and
dialled
. “Yes, it’s me, dear,” he said.
“In fifteen minutes. Bye-bye now, dear. Bye-bye.” It was clearly a ritual.
“Sounds as if you’re doing everybody’s job to me,” he told Edmund. “Coroner,
detective, God knows what. Just tell me this: what made you pick on my mother?”

 
          
He
was tidying his desk, though it was neat already. “It wasn’t only your mother,”
Edmund said. “There was another incident, just as tragic. Someone caused a car
crash almost outside where your mother lived. We’re sure it was the same man.”

 
          
Mr.
Pugh held open the front doors of the cinema for them, and switched off the
lights. “Yes, my mother mentioned it,” he said. “I’m sorry someone was killed.
But I’ll lose no sleep over a car crash.” He gestured at the cars hurtling by
beneath the sodium lights of West Derby Road. “Let the buggers—excuse me, my
dear—let the drivers kill each other off. The air might be a bit cleaner. The
sooner they have to use bicycles the better.”

 
          
Clare
watched Edmund timing his move exactly. He waited for Mr. Pugh to lock the
doors and turn before he said, “Clare was the driver in that crash. Her brother
was killed.”

 
          
Mr.
Pugh swung around to her; his face was the face of a schoolboy who had betrayed
his awkwardness and youth. “My dear, I am sorry,” he said. “I wouldn’t have
upset you for the world. I won’t try to excuse myself. But I’m under a bit of a
strain at the moment, as I suppose you are, my dear.”

 
          
“Don’t
worry. I know what you must be going through. You can call me Clare if you
like,” she said, as a token of forgiveness.

 
          
He
smiled but withdrew a little; she knew he wanted to escape them, to hurry home.
“My name’s George,” he said, rather unwillingly.

 
          
“Like
my guitar.” She smiled at his puzzled frown. “I’ve a guitar called George,” she
said. She thought he looked faintly insulted. “He’s a very good guitar,” she
said reassuringly.

 
          
His
frown was fading, and she was about to say, “We mustn’t keep you,” when Edmund
said, “Perhaps you’ll let Clare tell you the background to this business.”

 
          
He’d
told her she might be able to help him with Mr. Pugh; now she saw how. “What
background?” George said.

 
          
“The history of the man who killed your mother.”

 
          
“I’m
walking home through the park,” George said discouragingly.

 
          
“We’ll
walk along with you, if we may.”

 
          
“Suit
yourself.” George hurried away beneath the railway bridge beside the
Newsham
; a train went over like thunder.

 
          
Clare
was about to protest when Edmund said, “Please, Clare. It’ll come better from
you. You said yourself it sounds just like a story when I tell it. If George
still doesn’t want to help then, we won’t need to bother him further.”

 
          
“I
don’t want to bother him at all,” she said, resounding from the bridge.

 
          
Abruptly
George turned back to them. “Go on, Clare,” he said. “Tell me if he wants you
to. I suppose I ought to know, since you do.”

 
          
Beyond
the bridge and the police station lay the park. The sodium glow drained from
George’s back; Clare hurried to overtake him. Overhead opened the deep blue
sky, hung with large white clouds almost as still as the small clear new moon.

 
          
George
left the park road for the main walk through the trees. The tall windows of the
Park Hospital blazed; the lake stretched their lights into thick pillars,
supporting a slab of darkness on which the reflection of the hospital rested.
“Building up the suspense?” George said. “Are you a writer as well?”

 
          
“No, a teacher.
Sorry, I was thinking how to start. The man
we’re after,” she said, “we think he used to go to St. Joseph’s School in
Mulgrave
Street. It was supposed to be quite a good school
in its day. But now they’re pulling all the houses down round there.”

 
          
A
duck jeered raucously on the lake, flapping its wings like a wet coat. There
was no need to put off what she had to tell. It was only like telling the kids
a story. It should be easier, since the policeman had been to question her
today about the man who’d caused the accident. He’d looked uneasy, as if he
hoped she wouldn’t ask his reasons. She’d realized they had connected Rob’s
death with George’s
mother’s
. She had begun to feel
someone else might be guilty instead of her, after all. He was finding out for
her whether they intended to prosecute. “There was something obviously wrong
with the boy before he did anything,” she said, and glanced at Edmund as if he
should have noticed.

 
          
As she talked George glanced about constantly, at the trees.
She looked, and saw what perhaps he was seeing: great feathers against the sky,
conical leafy beehives as high as a house, swelling billows like smoke from a
factory chimney, a bent old man scratching his armpit beneath a covering of
shaggy lumps of dust. Beneath she could make out the winter patterns, thick
vertical piping, candelabras sprouting candelabras sprouting candelabras,
intricate webs of twigs gliding over one another and changing, all standing
still against the sky—until a branch stood still almost into her face and she
slipped on a twig. He must walk home this way every night, looking at the
trees.

 
          
“He
sat on the bus with this absolutely horrible look of anticipation,” she said.
The story was reaching for her; she glanced about uneasily. Three tower blocks
twenty-two
storeys
high
squatted
together close as witches on the far side of the green, beyond the trees. Light
leaked from scattered windows, diluting each block grey as mist; the huge
threatening shapes dissolved luminously into the sky. She thought of Dorothy,
gazing down.

 
          
“And
this boy Cyril kept on teasing him. That may have been what pushed him over the
edge.” Behind her rationalization the luridly orange face loomed toward her.
Toward the tower blocks, beneath foliage that glowed dimly like sprouting
clouds, an owl called plaintively; George glanced toward it. Perhaps he was an
amateur naturalist; perhaps that was why he walked through the park.

 
          
They
passed a shuttered kiosk, its green paint raw with slashes of red graffiti. A
man came striding round it, nearly knocking Clare down, snarling, “I know what
I mean, don’t I?” to nobody. George caught her elbow, steadying her.

 
          
“She
sat with her back to him and told the headmaster about him. She wouldn’t even
look at him. “Have you any children? I thought so.
Could you
do that to one of yours?”
But she hated herself for dreading, deep in
her mind, that the woman might have had a reason.

 
          
They
walked around the stone rim of a pond; the water sounded as if it were
discovering that it had blubbery lips. Trails from streetlamps shivered in the
pond; shadows of branches lay still along the trails of light. A few ducks
floated, as if in a bath. Clare felt Edmund pacing behind her and George, like
a chaperon.

 
          
“And
after he’d caused the accident,” she said, “he stole part of my brother’s
body.” This part was more like a
story,
she’d heard it
so many times. Suddenly, as she became more conscious of Edmund, she wondered
why he was so anxious to involve George.

 
          
George’s
spectacles blinked as a car went by on the park road. He was looking at her for
the first time since she’d begun. He hadn’t really wanted to hear at all. Why
had Edmund made her trouble him? It must be a masculinity thing. Because George
had been difficult, Edmund was determined to overcome him, to give himself a
sense of power.

 
          
“I’m
sorry about your brother. At least you weren’t hurt. No, I go this way,” George
said as she continued walking forward.

 
          
Clare
looked where he was pointing. If he lived near the tower blocks, why had he
come the longest way through the park? She gazed, bewildered, at the long dark
curve of houses surrounding the green. She gazed at the streetlamps planted
widely along the dark curve, each revealing part of a tiny house and sometimes
of a tree: shrines of light, mysterious and calm.
Calm.
At once she knew why George had wanted to walk alone through the park on the
night before the inquest on his mother.