‘I wish to hell those dolls would stop moving,’ I shouted to all the empty rooms in my silent house.
The rustling stopped.
We sat around the kitchen table, just drinking coffee and waiting; kidding ourselves that we were waiting for the police. We couldn’t seem to find anything to say, except I kept bursting out that I hadn’t meant Mrs Westover any real harm, and Ursula kept assuring me she knew that. Once she said, ‘I won’t leave you alone in this house till . . . it’s all over, Geoff.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, and meant it. As if finally to reassure me, she rang up Christie’s and cancelled her appointments for the next two days, merely saying calmly that she was on to something ‘interesting’.
When she came back to the table, I said to her, ‘You know more about this than you’re letting on.’
She raised one eyebrow. ‘Perhaps. You can’t be around dolls long without coming across some funny things. They’re images of people, you see.’
‘So are toy soldiers . . . so are bronze statues.’
‘Toy soldiers are too little . . . and European statues are empty, somehow. People don’t have feelings about them. They’re just art.’
‘What about crucifixes?’
‘Crucifixes know their Master. So do most Buddhist statues. I wouldn’t be without my Buddhas – they’re better company than a cat. But Hindu stuff can be nasty. And there are the little Eastern cults. I’ve seen one or two things out of Mesopotamia I wouldn’t give house-room to, at any price. Be careful of anything with wings and little moveable arms.’
‘But dolls . . .’ Even in a near panic, I was scornful.
‘The French for doll is poupée. Did you ever hear of something called a poppet?’
‘Some might say you’re rather a poppet yourself.’ Feeble, but the best I could do in the circumstances.
She smiled wanly. ‘How the meanings of words do change. In Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1690s, you could be hanged as a witch for having poppets. Little figures made of cloth or wax, in the image of some neighbour you didn’t like . . . stick a pin in them, the neighbour got sick. Melt them, the neighbour died. That’s what the witchcraft tribunals reckoned, anyway – and hanged people on the strength of it.’
‘Oh, come on, this is the twentieth century.’
‘What difference does that make? I am sick and tired of people telling me it’s the twentieth century, as if that ever solved anything. Aleister Crowley happened in the twentieth century; Adolf Hitler happened in the twentieth century.’ Such a look came over her face that I was glad to answer a knock on the door.
The police. Uniformed constable, carrying his notebook; plainclothes sergeant, CID.
I introduced Ursula; they were duly appreciative. Then the damned woman excused herself, saying she’d do some shopping while I was busy. At least she was keeping her word, and not leaving me in the house alone. The police gave me a searching look, but it was envious rather than censorious . . . then got abruptly down to business.
‘You seem upset, sir. Nervous. Has something been upsetting you?’ Why do books always make the police out to be fools?
‘Well . . . I am upset about Mrs Westover, naturally.’
They did not look convinced.
‘And, as a matter of fact, I’ve been awake most of the night.’
It was all too obvious what they were thinking, with those little smiles. I had a reputation as a sober citizen to keep up.
‘We’ve been up repairing those dolls I bought off Mrs Westover. They’re going to London for sale. They’re pretty valuable.’
‘Yes, we knew that, sir. She had them insured for ten thousand pounds. She sold you the lot, did she, sir? We couldn’t find any round the house.’
‘Yes.’
‘For only two hundred and fifty pounds. That’s what the cheque said. We thought it was a bit odd, that.’
‘She’d . . . damaged them . . . pulled them to pieces. That’s why we were up all night, repairing them.’
‘All night, sir?’
‘Till six this morning.’
‘And the lady will vouch for that?’ They notably relaxed, and I felt wrongfully acquitted of the crime of murder; but absurdly, almost tearfully glad, just the same.
‘Mind if we see the dolls, sir?’ I took them into the kitchen and showed them; almost hoping that the dolls would rise up and dance. Not just for the looks on their faces; not for the thought of what they would write in their notebooks; but because Ursula and I wouldn’t be alone any more.
But the dolls lay quite still, in their beds of newspaper.
We returned, for some reason, to the shop, where I’d first let them in. The sergeant, whose name was Weatherill, sat down heavily on the Regency sofa. Then he noticed the brown velvet doll, sitting next to him. He picked it up.
‘Nasty-looking sod, that one. Not going to London with the rest?’
‘We forgot about it. It was the only one that wasn’t broken, and I just tossed it down here.’
‘That was the last one she bought. I remember her showing it to me – the night her husband died. She’d left it lying on the stairs and we reckoned he’d tripped over it when he came downstairs in the middle of the night, looking for burglars.’
‘Burglars?’
‘That was the sad thing about it. They thought they heard burglars moving about downstairs, and he went down to look, tripped over the doll and broke his neck. But when we looked there was no sign of burglars, every window and door tight shut and nothing missing – a tragedy that. A well-liked couple, they were. She went to pieces after he died – took to the drink. Never looked like getting over it. I don’t know how often she had us out to the house in the middle of the night, that last year. She’d ring us up, quite frantic, but every time we got there, there was nothing. It got embarrassing . . . sad, really. Ah well, give my regards to the lady when she gets back.’
Again, the little knowing grins. I watched them get into their Panda. The sergeant made some kind of remark about what a smashing doll Mr Ashden had acquired, and the constable said ‘Lucky for some’, I think – I have a certain gift for lip-reading. Then they drove away.
Leaving me alone . . .
But before I had time to do more than go and slam the lid on the dolls and fasten the straps, there was a reassuring tooting of a car horn outside the shop. Ursula was back.
She came in triumphantly, bearing a large faded book that she said she’d conned out of the public library on a temporary ticket, using my name. She laid it on the kitchen table, put on reading spectacles that made her look a lot more scholarly without diminishing her attractiveness, and opened it at a certain page.
‘Listen, Geoff. And don’t interrupt till I’ve finished.’ She pushed the spectacles further up her proud nose. ‘Have you heard of someone called Matthew Hopkins?’
‘The Witch-finder General? The one who burnt a lot of harmless old women during the Civil War?’
‘I think,’ she said, ‘that most of them were harmless. But Hopkins was certainly nobody’s fool – he knew a lot about witchcraft. And when he was trying a witch, he always attacked on two grounds, the first of which was that witches kept familiar spirits – cats and frogs and such, that went out to do their evil work for them. Carry out their wishes . . .’
‘But . . .’
‘Shhh. Listen to this. “Evidence against Goody Mercer, by Thomas Applewick, farmer. Item. That early one morning, about four o’clock, he did pass Goody Mercer’s door. It being a moonlit night, he did perceive the door to be open. He did look into the house, and presently came four things in the shape of black rabbits, leaping and skipping about him. Having a good stick in his hand, he struck at them, thinking to kill them, but could not.
‘ “But at last he caught one, by the body of it, and did beat its head against the ground, intending to beat the brains of it. But when he could not, he took the body in one hand and the head in the other, and endeavoured to pull off its head. But the head stretched and slipped throu
gh his hands like a lock of wool.
‘“Yet he would not give up his intended purpose, but knowing a pool to be nearby, he went to drown it. But as he went he fell down and could not go, except crawling on his hands and knees, till he came to the water. When, holding the thing fast in his hand, he did plunge his hand down into the water, up to his elbow. After a good space, he conceived it was drowned and let go. Upon which it sprang from the pool high into the air, and so vanished away.” ’
‘Oh, go on. Black rabbits! What’s that got to do with it?’
‘I think you’ve somehow got hold of a familiar spirit, Geoff. That carried out your wish against Mrs Westover. I think it made the dolls dance, to get your attention, then . . .’
‘Oh, rubbish!’
‘Rubbish? Listen to this, then. Hopkins’s own speech for the prosecution. “The land is full of witches; they abound in all places. I have hanged many of them. Few of them would confess. But they do have on their bodies divers strange marks at which – for some have confessed – their familiar devils have sucked their blood.”
‘This thing, Geoff, having worked your will on Mrs Westover, came back and . . .’
I glanced at the white bandage on my wrist. Beneath, the wound was still throbbing.
And, diabolically, it all came together. I remembered the odd little velvety footsteps upstairs, that I’d spent half of yesterday looking for. The thing that sounded like half a cat – the thing that ran on two legs – while Mirabelle crouched terrified on the garage roof. I remembered wishing Mrs Westover harm, and the dolls stopping dancing, then the cat-flap banging, as something that was not Mirabelle slipped out. Then Mirabelle daring to come back into the house, ravenous with hunger. Then Mirabelle fleeing again, and the little velvety thing sucking at my wrist. And the dreams of what must have been a witchcraft trial, and the witch’s body hanging, and Mrs Westover burning . . .
A doll? It had come with the dolls . . . but the dolls were all locked up.
Except the brown velvet doll, lying on the sofa in the shop. The doll that had tripped up the late Mr Westover and broken his neck, having lured him with soft noises downstairs . . .
‘It’s in the next room – in the shop,’ I said. I don’t know how I kept my voice as steady as I did.
‘Yes,’ said Ursula, with a matching, vulnerable steadiness.
It lay there, quite still. It was, as Sergeant Weatherill had said, a nasty-looking sod.
‘The doll itself,’ said Ursula, clinging to her scholarship like a drowning man clutching at straws, ‘is certainly nineteenth-century. The china head bought, the rest made by somebody.’
‘But that dream was seventeenth-century.’
‘It’s not the doll itself – it’s what’s inside it. What the doll was made to hold. And the hair.’
The frizzy red hair, that went so ill with the faded brown velvet, was certainly human.
I picked up an antique pistol from a shelf; like poor old Farmer Applewick must have brandished his stick at the black rabbits.
‘I’m going to finish it,’ I said. ‘The Aga’s on – I’ll smash it and burn it.’
‘No,’ said Ursula, urgently. ‘No. It’s on your side at present. It thinks it’s your servant – and while it thinks that, you’re safe. If it turns against you . . . It’s probably indestructible anyway. Oh, you could probably burn the velvet, even the hair . . . but . . . who knows how old it is? Maybe thousands of years. They had familiar devils in Mesopotamia three thousand years before Christ. Don’t touch it, Geoff.’
But she said it too late. I did not go to it, but it stirred, got up on its tiny bolster legs and feet, and began to walk towards me. Its tiny teeth glinted in its near-closed mouth; its tiny near-closed eyes were fixed on my bandaged wrist.
I stayed transfixed, till it touched my hand. Then I went berserk; if I paid with my life, it would not have any more of my blood willingly. If it killed my body, I would keep my soul.
I hit it several times with the pistol; then the barrel of the pistol broke off from the butt, leaving me with a handful of useless broken wood. It tried to run behind the sofa. I grabbed at it; felt, inside the velvet, bone . . . and sinew . . . a terrifying life, quite unlike the automaton movement of the other dolls. It wriggled like a rat . . . and bit me like a rat. I felt a sharp pain in my hand, and the blood flowing down my fingers again.
Then as if satisfied with the taste of my blood, as if it had shown me who was master, it climbed back on to the sofa and was still.
But it had broken my nerve; I stood there whimpering like a child.
And then the bell on the shop-door rang.
It was Tyzack, mountainous in his green jacket.
‘You hurt yourself?’ he asked, with more curiosity than sympathy. ‘You want to get that seen to – it looks deep.’ He proferred a handkerchief, much dirtier than Ursula’s. ‘And broken a good fake pistol too – you have been in the wars!’
Somehow his heartlessness steadied me more than the deepest sympathy would have done. I wrapped his filthy hanky round to stop my hand bleeding on the wall-to-wall carpet, and said nastily, ‘What can I do for you, squire?’
‘Harry Prendergast said you’d acquired a lot of dolls from a woman who’s just died over Westover way. He’s been chatting to the police about who’s going to auction her stuff. You know how keen he is on house-clearances . . . when there’s real money in it.’ He leered at Ursula lecherously.
‘Those dolls,’ said Ursula stiffly, ‘are now the responsibility of Christie’s.’
‘And I suppose you’re going to be the best doll in the auction,’ said Tyzack. ‘I wouldn’t mind bidding for you.’ He looked round in his usual predatory way, and picked up the brown velvet doll. ‘This one going to Christie’s as well?’
‘No,’ said Ursula. ‘That doll is for sale. Isn’t it, Geoff?’
‘Not good enough for Christie’s. But good enough for old Tyzack,’ said Tyzack, to no one in particular. ‘How much?’
‘Fifty,’ I said weakly. If I asked too little, he’d smell a rat.
‘Twenty,’ he said insultingly.
‘Thirty.’
‘Done!’ He stuffed the brown velvet doll into the capacious sagging pocket of his combat-jacket, and began peeling fivers off a greasy wad. ‘Tara then. Seeya. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!’ He looked from me to Ursula, and lumbered out to his Volvo estate.
‘You’re free, Geoff,’ said Ursula. ‘He took it voluntarily; you gave it voluntarily. Like with you and Mrs Westover. It’s passed on – you’re shot of it.’
‘What about old Tyzack?’
‘It’s his worry now. I should think he can look after himself.’
Tyzack drove away, waving triumphantly.
‘Will you marry me?’ I asked her. It just popped out.
She frowned, half smiled. ‘Come on – you’re just overwrought. You couldn’t afford me, little dealer – I’m the enormous overhead. But I’ll make you some fresh coffee. Then I must be on my way.’
I still see her for lunch, when I go up to town.
I expect you’re worrying about Tyzack?
You really needn’t have bothered. After a decent interval, I rang him up.
‘It’s gone, old lad,’ he said. ‘Got a hundred for it. How’s that for a quick profit? You’re too soft, Ashden.’
‘But it was . . .’
‘I knew what it was. D’you think I’m a fool?’
‘So who did you sell it to?’
‘A witch, old mate. She’s had me looking out for something like that for years.’
‘Which witch? Where?’
‘Don’t you worry your head. She lives up Huddersfield way – old girlfriend of mine, when I was in the army. It’s in good hands, Ashden. Don’t worry, you’ve seen the last of it.’
And I suppose he was right. That was ten years ago, and I haven’t touched a doll since.
The Last Day of Miss Dorinda Molyneaux
Life’s ironical; bu
t sometimes nice-ironical. Take the time I was struggling with all my might and main to overtake Clocky Watson in the antique trade. As you know, I failed. What I never noticed, in the middle of my exertions, was that I was becoming a very solid, prosperous citizen in the eyes of my fellow-citizens.
Not, that is, until people began having a quiet word with me, putting in a quiet word for me, ringing me up and conducting rambling, ambiguous, awkward conversations that always ended up with me being invited to join something.
The Freemasons I refused; if I have one belief, it’s that I must make my own way by my own bloody efforts, and my sense of humour would never let me appear in a funny little apron. The invitation to be a magistrate I put off for years; in my game the line between crook and Honest John is drawn in some very funny places (as it is in most games, if the truth be known) and I would not play the hypocrite. But I joined Rotary without a qualm, though I never did much apart from eat, drink and gossip. My starring moment always came in their annual sale of second-hand goods in aid of the hospital radio. I think at first they hoped I’d find a long-lost Rembrandt. But in the end they put me in charge of the old lawn-mowers, in the rain outside. (It always seemed to be raining.) And if I got the odd sideboard as a bargain, or a set of good Victorian chairs, I always paid more than the price they’d put on them, in their ignorance. Of course, they reckoned they were making my fortune . . .
But the invitation I liked best was to be a school manager at Barton Road Primary. I was still unmarried at thirty-four – though not from lack of wining and dining young women – and having despaired of ever having children, the chance to acquire three hundred at one blow was too great a temptation.
The third meeting I attended was to appoint a new teacher. I found it amusingly boring at first. My fellow-managers were not a brilliant lot, being mainly the weaker hangers-on of the local political parties. Each seemed to have a set question which he asked every candidate in turn, with an air of profound wisdom. We interviewed three worthy female mice, in tweed skirts and jumpers, and the only difference I could make between them was that one was rather tall, one rather fat, and one amazingly minute.
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