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

that girl,” said Myra to her mother. “You should see the bottles. I shall have to get a second dustbin. You should see that house! I’d no idea. To be perfectly honest, it needs thousands spent on it. She never cleaned it and I don’t suppose the first wife did. I’ve got my work cut out there for years to come.”
    “Marriage isn’t all roses,” said Mrs. Brewer. “You’ve got your hubby and now you’re paying the price.”
    “For Christ’s sake, Mother, there’s no pleasing you.”
    “Got married to please me, did you? You can tell your little bitch of a stepdaughter if she lays a finger on my Gingie, I’ll have the RSPCA on her.”
    Myra had married principally to have a home of her own. She saw a future in which she gave little dinner parties or even quite large cocktail parties, in which the cavernous drawing room was furnished dashingly with stripped pine and Korean cane-work, corner units and glass tables with upholstered surrounds. That was the way she imagined the interior of the house in Hampstead Garden Suburb, home of her dentist employer and his wife. It was a little dream of hers one day to invite George and Yvonne Colefax to Manningtree Grove, to a home she need not be ashamed of.
    Already she had livened the place up with some of her own pieces from West Hampstead, the Athena Art Van Goghs, the gold chrome spotlights, the reproduction wine table. Her plastic apron had on it a map of the London tube system. If Peter and Doreen didn’t want a bathroom of their own, she might as well spend the money having a really super Wrighton kitchen put in here. She called to her husband.
    He came into the kitchen, still holding the open copy of Her Grace of Amalfi by Grenville West, which was providing him with a little light relief from a life of the Princess Frederick, mother of the Kaiser. Myra put a tube-map dishcloth into his hands. Before his second marriage and during his first he had never dried dishes but had rinsed cups and plates under the tap and left them to drain. Plates had never got sticky because he had lived contentedly off Cornish pasties and Scotch eggs and apples and tomatoes and tubs of ice cream, foodstuffs which scarcely need plates at all.
    Dolly, in her window, watched them go off down the road for a drink in The Woman in White or perhaps to bingo. Harold had never played bingo before, but Myra had and Mrs. Brewer had frequently. Pup was in the temple, performing a Lesser Pentagram ritual as an opening for a piece of practical work. He had told Dolly nothing of what this practical work might be but she guessed it was something to do with the changes he was bringing into being at Hodge and Yearman. Already he had had the sign over the shop altered to “Yearman and Hodge,” the Hodge part in very small letters. The name of the company had been changed, he told Dolly, but she didn’t follow that, she wasn’t interested.
    She looked down on Myra, who was dressed as usual in her favorite green, the emerald blouse tonight with all the gold chains, black cotton satin trousers, and black patent sandals. Dolly had very good taste herself, she had a fine color sense, and she knew that people with Myra’s coloring should never wear bright greens and blues but rather shades of stone and brown or even pink or the red of their hair. It exasperated her, but her face, to any passer-by looking up, gave no sign of this. Long ago she had learned to control its natural movements so that an observer’s attention might not be drawn to it. Like Diane de Poitiers—her father might have told her—she never smiled and never frowned. She was holding the talisman so tightly in her hand that the rather sharp-sided heptagon made a red imprint on the palm. From the other side of the wall, Pup’s low voice could be heard maintaining a low regular chant. He was invoking archangels. Dolly refilled her wine glass, stood up against the wall with her ear to it and listened to Pup.
    “Ateh malkuth ve-geburah