The Killing Doll Read Free Page B

was thirty-seven and her hair looked awful if she didn’t put henna on it. She had been in the ladies’ loo at West End Green on the way here and there had been this graffito on the wall that said: “The quietest thing on earth is the sound of hair going gray.”
    “It’s no good looking like that,” said Mrs. Brewer, putting cream in her tea the way she had done when a girl in Devonshire. “It’s no good getting down in the mouth. You can talk all you like about the second half of the twentieth century and all that but human nature doesn’t change. You should have seen the writing on the wall when his boys went to boarding school and he didn’t divorce her then.”
    Myra said nothing. She had had enough writing on walls for one day.
    “There’s that little bitch with the birthmark throwing stones at Fluffy again,” said Mrs. Brewer.
    Fluffy was a long-coated tabby that Mrs. Brewer called a Persian. Sometimes he sat on the post between the Yearmans’ front fence and the house next door. Mrs. Brewer had the ground-floor flat and the people on the next floor and the people on the top floor all had cats, though only Fluffy sat on the post. Dolly said there were more cats in Crouch End than in all the rest of London put together.
    “Well, there are more mice in London than people,” said Pup who knew about things like that.
    Edith used to tidy up the front garden in the autumn, cut down the Michaelmas daisies, pull out the enchanter’s nightshade and sweep up the leaves. Dolly supposed she would have to do it now. Wearing the cotton gloves that had been her mother’s, using Edith’s secateurs and Edith’s small red-and-silver painted trowel, brought her mother most forcefully back to her. She could almost see her when she closed her eyes, that thin, pinched face, that fiery red hair, and smell the lemon verbena toilet water she used. The tears came into her eyes. She began furiously digging out weeds.
    Fluffy came tightrope-walking along the fence, did his claw-scraping act up the side of the post and then sat on top of it. Dolly looked up at him while he was scraping and again when he settled down. Manningtree Grove was long and straight and fairly wide in spite of the cars parked nose-to-tail along it, and motorists used it as a through route between Crouch End Hill and Stroud Green. Cars went down it very fast, especially the ones driven by boys of seventeen and eighteen. Dolly heard a car coming as it bounded over the hump where Mistley Avenue went across. She knew what she was doing and yet she did not quite know; her intention was half-fantasy. She leapt to her feet, clapped her hands and shouted out. Fluffy jumped off the post and fled across the road.
    Dolly heard the car roar by, without a pause, with no sound of brakes. It had been going very fast; they thought nothing of driving at fifty down there. She waited for Fluffy to come back, to scrape the post and then sit on it. She even selected a stone to throw at him. After a little while she laid down the trowel and got up and went down the path, through the gate, out on to the pavement and looked. Fluffy lay near the gutter on the opposite side of the street between the front bumper of a red Datsun and the rear bumper of a green Volvo. Dolly went across the road. He was dead, limp, though still very warm. A little blood was coming from the corner of his mouth but otherwise he was unmarked. The impact had killed him and flung him there. Dolly felt rather sick. She went back indoors and washed her hands.
    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