The Killing Doll (3 page)

Mrs. Brewer had been out at the time. She found the corpse during the evening and sat down and cried. She tried to get Myra on the phone but Myra was out somewhere with the married man. Dolly, who seldom drank before the evening, not before 5:30 anyway, had to have a glass of wine and then another after the Fluffy incident. An Indian woman called Mrs. Das who lived in the flat above Mrs. Buxton had heard Dolly yell and seen Fluffy flee and she told Mrs. Brewer about it. This was not because she liked cats—indeed, where she came from they outlawed cats, believing their bodies to be inhabited by the spirits of dead witches—but because Mrs. Brewer was one of the few people in the neighborhood, apart from other Indians, who condescended to speak to her. Dolly never spoke and Mrs. Das wasn’t to know Dolly hardly ever spoke to anyone.

There was no way of proving it and nothing overt Mrs. Brewer could do. But she told everybody she knew.

“Her mother was as nice a woman as you’d meet,” said Mrs. Buxton. “Your Myra reminds me of her in a way.”

Myra had never seen Edith Yearman. She had already been ill before Mrs. Brewer came to live there. “In
what
way?”

“The hair for a start. The eyes. Of course Myra’s a lot heavier built, she’d need to fine down a bit.”

“Charming,” said Myra to her mother. “That’s the pot calling the kettle black.”

Mrs. Brewer took no notice. “She must be sick in her mind, murdering a person’s pet.”

It seemed to Pup that he had probably stopped growing for good. He had been seventeen in February and five feet seven and he was still five feet seven. No Yearman, as far as he knew, had ever been so tall and he was satisfied. In the golden robe, appliquéd with sun, moon and stars, he made quite a commanding figure.

According to Eliphas Levi, author of
The Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendental Magic,
the magician may buy a knife for use as his dagger, providing he uses this knife to manufacture his other elemental weapons. Pup bought a knife in the big ironmongers in Muswell Hill and painted the hilt of it with the name Lucifer and also with the archangelic name of fire. He could use the knife to make his wand and perhaps his pentacle but he was doubtful about carving a cup.

On the old railway line, the bushes and the branches of the trees were still bare. It had been a cold spring. Harold had had the flu and Dolly had had it mildly and it had swept through Pup’s school and now Mrs. Brewer had it. Mrs. Brewer was fat and aging and her flu turned to bronchitis. Myra came to stay. She kept on with her job as part-time receptionist to a dentist in Camden Town, but she was there in the evenings and overnight. It was years since she had worked full-time. The afternoons were the best times for the married man to get away.

“He won’t miss you,” said Mrs. Brewer, wheezing. “He’ll have a chance to catch up on things with wifey.”

“I don’t know why you’re so cruel to me after all I do for you,” said Myra.

“There’s a saying in the Bible about being cruel only to be kind. You’ve got nothing, d’you realize that? Not even a roof over your head. That little bitch with the birthmark that murdered Fluffy has got more than you have and she’s half your age. At least that’s her father’s house.”

“He owns that great place? All of it?”

“All of it, miss. And a nice little business in the Broadway. Hodge and Yearman, Typewriters and Instant Print. I’m surprised you haven’t noticed it when you’ve been passing through in
his
car.

“All right, Mother, for Christ’s sake. Now you’ve started yourself off coughing.”

Very early in the morning Pup and Dolly went together down on to the old railway line to find a tree branch for Pup’s magic wand. Eliphas Levi, said Pup, suggested that the wand should be a perfectly straight branch of almond or hazel, cut at a single blow with the magical pruning knife or golden sickle, before the rising of the sun, at that moment when the tree is ready to blossom. He had with him his dagger with the painted hilt, ready for cutting the wand from the tree.

It was a cool clear London morning and the old railway line was as green as a country lane. The grass and the budding trees were drenched with bright, cold, glistening dew. Dolly had hardly ever seen the dawn but she guessed that, just as the sky is flooded with gold after the sun has set, so it may be before the sun rises. Between bars of darkish cloud, the sky was livid. Birds had been singing, a concentrated, unmusical twittering, since long before they climbed down the embankment.

Pup knew when the sun would rise, he had a sense about these things. Neither of them was entirely sure they could tell an almond or a hazel tree when they saw one, though Pup said it was faith and love which counted more than accuracy. They walked through the Mistley tunnel and along the channel between the weed-grown platforms which were all that now remained of a station that had once been there—Mount Pleasant Green. They had plenty of time and they walked nearly all the way to Tollington Road, over bridges and through tunnels, on the dewy turf, before they found a tree Pup said must be a hazel. From this tree, as the yellow of the sky began to brighten, he cut with a bold sweep of his arm a slender wand hung with golden catkins.

They walked back the way they had come. The air was not yet tainted with the fumes that would soon come drifting from the traffic passing under and passing over. Along the old railway line you could smell pale green tree flowers breaking into blossom, you could smell the new grass and the cow parsley that sprang up to cover the rank wet newspaper, the empty cans, the broken bottles, the feathers and the cigarette ends. It was cool and fresh, the sun blazing now but cold as midwinter.

Dolly wore her lion’s mane hair in a style designed half to cover her face. She had a tweed suit on and a red wool jersey, both homemade (though few would have guessed it), and sensible brown hide walking shoes. From time to time she glanced at Pup, who carried his wand like a pilgrim’s staff, with love and pride and hope. He had the same lion hair as her but he wore it just to the tips of his ears and this gave him a look of earnest innocence. His face was a long oval and he had the long straight nose and full lips of a saint or perhaps merely a bystander in certain medieval paintings. He was very thin and light on his feet. Although he wore jeans and a sweater and a jacket he somehow gave the impression, so contained and neatly made as he was, of being dressed much more formally.

It was just after half-past seven when they turned the corner into Manningtree Grove. Dolly had not wanted to risk her tights on the embankment again, so they had got off the old railway line by going up the steps in Mount Pleasant Gardens. Harold must have come out to take the milk in, for he stood on the front garden path, a milk bottle cradled like a child in each arm, like twin babies, talking over the fence to Myra Brewer.

With an instinctive gesture that was almost a reflex, Dolly drew the curtain of hair across her cheek. She looked but said nothing. Myra Brewer was wearing a bright green blouse and a green-and-navy check skirt and her gold watch and some gold chains and had on her full panoply of make-up, enough, in fact, for going on a television talk show under powerful lights.

“Good morning, Myra,” said Pup who had never been introduced to her but who happened to know what her first name was.

Myra said hello. Pup smiled gently at his father, gave Dolly the hazel wand to hold, and took the milk bottles out of Harold’s arms as if they were too heavy a load for him or an impediment to his continued conversation. Later that day, after school, he stripped the catkins and the leaf buds from the hazel branch and painted it yellow. He painted a black spiral round it and inscribed upon it the name of Lucifer. Dolly gave him a glass tumbler, the last remaining one of a crystal water set, and he used this for the cup, painting the name of Lucifer on it and the archangelic name for the element of water. The pentacle was more difficult. At last he found a shop in Hornsey where the man agreed to cut him a plywood circle. Pup told him he wanted it for backing a mirror.

Dolly was invited to attend the ceremony of the consecration of the elemental weapons. At his request, she brought him a glass of red wine, a slice of bread and a saucerful of salt. He needed a rose too but they had none in the garden, so Dolly waited till it was dark and stuck her hand through the fence and picked a bud from Mrs. Buxton’s
Rose gaujard
which was just coming out. Pup made his own holy water. Facing towards the north, standing to the south of his altar, he extended his hand over the saucer of salt and chanted:

“May wisdom abide in this salt and may it preserve my mind and body from all corruption. May all phantoms depart from it so that it may become a heavenly salt, salt of earth and earth of salt. May it feed the threshing ox and strengthen my hope with the horns of the winged bull! So mote it be.”

He had got it out of a book but he had learned it by heart. Mixing the salt and some joss-stick ash into the water made it holy. Dolly sat on a cushion on the floor, watching him, feeling a deep thrill of excitement. Pup walked round in a circle with the glass of holy water, sprinkling it to the four quarters of the temple. He lit a joss stick and walked round again, saying:

“And when after all the phantoms are vanished, thou shalt see the holy formless fire, that fire which darts and flashes through the hidden depths of the universe, hear, thou Voice of Fire.”

There was a great deal more. It went on for two hours and Dolly loved every minute of it. As he raised his arms and the golden sleeves hung like pennants, Pup’s face was rapt, his eyes glowing with hieratic fervour. He was obsessed with magic these days, he admitted it himself. He read nothing but books on magic, which might have accounted for his failure to get more than three poorish “O” levels and made it seem unlikely that his “A” levels would be much better, always supposing he stayed on long enough to do them. The word “magician” had a frivolous or even charlatanish ring to it, so Pup called himself a geomancer.

“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

I
n 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.