The Killing Doll by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page A

about her being too young and pretty for him really, people would call him a cradle snatcher. The truth was that while embracing Myra on the previous night, not in the Newquay hotel but for the first time in the matrimonial bed in the sacred bedroom, her resemblance to his dead wife, at first so seemingly attractive, had unnerved him. The room was dark but not absolutely dark, for the light from a yellow street lamp penetrated the olive-colored curtains, shedding a pale green luminosity. Myra’s face had looked glaucous and gaunt while her red hair spread out over the pillow just as Edith’s had. A certain amount of guilt had been affecting him—not much but a little—over his failure to visit his dying wife during her last days. He could imagine how she must have looked, though. With Myra he had been unwise enough to look at the mantelpiece while he poked the fire and he had had the horrible notion he was making love to a corpse. Much more of that and he wouldn’t be able to do it at all.
    “Can I give you some charlotte russe?” said Myra.
    Dolly had made no fuss about moving upstairs because anything was preferable to sharing living space with Myra. At first she was stunned by what had happened and happened so quickly. In spite of the reassuring things she had said to Pup, the things a dispossessed mother says, she had felt helpless. She had felt lost or as if all her security had been knocked from under her feet and left her floating towards danger and want. It was now that she needed that friend to confide in and consult for advice. Wendy Collins might have been that friend, for a day or two Dolly thought she could be, but it was strange, whenever she opened her mouth to talk to Wendy about Myra, to explain what it was like to be deposed and pushed out, to have Myra down there, the words remained trapped inside her and what came out were things about the weather and the price of food.
    She tried to get on with her sewing but it was neither so easy nor so pleasant up there. Mrs. Collins, who had been her best customer, had varicose veins and refused to climb all those stairs for fittings. There was no way out of the house except through the hall whether Dolly sought the street or the old railway line. She got to know when Myra went to work. Monday and Wednesday and Friday mornings and all day Thursday, and she tried to pass through the hall only at those times herself. Thursdays she longed for, just to feel herself alone and free in her own home again. The rest of the days she took to spending more and more time in the temple, just sitting in there and being quiet. Or she would sit on the cushions, reading his books, with a single joss stick burning. Unlike her father, Dolly had never been a reader of fiction. Fiction was about beautiful women and handsome lovers and adventure and the great world, about which Dolly knew nothing and which frightened her. It was about people who had friendships with other people.
    The books were always back in their right places when Pup came home from work. Like a wife, she had ready for him the food he liked: cold barbecued chicken, pork pies, turkey roll, tomatoes, potato crisps, tinned peaches and evaporated milk, real dairy-cream-filled sponge, chocolate digestives, dry roasted peanuts. She always offered him a glass of her wine but he nearly always refused. He spent all evening in the temple and she was mostly invited to be with him. But like a wise mother she knew better than to obtrude into his life to that extent; she knew when to say no.
    “I don’t think I will tonight, Pup,” she would say and go and sit in the dormer window, her left cheek turned to the street. On the window sill there and on her bedroom window sill at the back she kept a little mound of stones to throw at Gingie. But he never sat on the post as Fluffy had done or ventured into the Yearmans’ back garden. Those evenings she sometimes drank a whole bottle of wine.
    “She’s practically an alcoholic,