Free The Killing Doll by Ruth Rendell Page B

teeth with a gold toothpick. He was a doctor of medicine as well as a dentist and had no compunction (did not even realize such talk might be distasteful) about explaining to the company what a difficult job cutting someone’s head off would be and how the perpetrator, whoever he might be, would have needed knives and perhaps a saw as well as a hatchet. Myra brought in raspberry Pavlova cake.
    “It was a woman with a dog found her,” said Mrs. Collins outside the hall after the seance was over. “She’s a woman who lives in Stanhope Road that’s got that great big white dog, great big white Pyrenean something. She was on the old line and the dog started sniffing at something and she saw it was this girl without a head. Then she saw the head a little way away. They took her into hospital for the shock.”
    “What an experience,” said Miss Finlay. “It would haunt you to your dying day.” Today she smelt, Dolly had noticed, only of Pear’s soap.
    “You’d never get over it. Who’d do a thing like that? Only an animal, an absolute animal.”
    Dolly was tired of hearing about it. She stood by the gate, picking leaves from a bush of lemon mint which grew there, crushing them in her fingers and smelling the scent. Her mother had not appeared during the seance, had spoken no word. The leaves had a pungent lemony scent.
    “My mother used to use cologne like that,” Dolly said, holding her fingers under Mrs. Collins’s nose.
    “Brings her back, does it? You don’t get over losing your mother. I know I never have. You don’t want to go off on your own, you two, not after what’s happened today. You’d best wait here with me, my daughter’s coming for me in the car and she’ll drop you both off.” It was barely dark yet. Miss Finlay looked fearfully along the street and across the green. “We can expect you both, I hope,” said Mrs. Collins, “for Mrs. Fitter’s seance on the fifteenth of next month. You’ve heard of her, haven’t you? She’s wonderful. The tickets are going like hot cakes. Five pounds a seat but you can take my word for it, it’s cheap at the price. Oh, that lemon scent is strong, isn’t it, dear?”
    When Wendy Collins dropped off Dolly, the party was still in full swing. She went straight upstairs and just avoided encountering Yvonne Colefax, who had gone to the bathroom to dab herself with more Balmain’s Ivoire. Back in the living room, Yvonne sat on one half of Myra’s new two-seater settee. Pup hesitated, remembering the I Ching and the Pentagrammic Banishing ritual, and then he went and sat next to her. At a loss for what to talk to her about, he offered to tell her fortune. He had overheard Myra regaling his father with details of the Colefaxes’ private life, so he was able to give her a very accurate assessment of her past. She thought he was amazing and said so, looking into his eyes.
    “How could you know I lost my first husband when I was only twenty-one?” said Yvonne, having forgotten she had imparted this fact to Myra during the previous week.
    “Your eyes told me,” said Pup gracefully.
    “Load of wicked rubbish,” said Mrs. Brewer.
    “Excuse me, but everything he said was the absolute truth.”
    Mrs. Brewer’s face was very red as if she were going to have some sort of attack. Yvonne could hardly take her eyes off Pup, was looking at him as if he were a seer or guru, and Pup felt quite weak and faint. He had to keep telling himself how precious and requisite was the retention of virginity to a young geomancer. Yvonne smelled wonderful and her white silk thigh, the whole smooth slippery length of it, was pressed softly against his own. She had a rather breathy, childlike voice, full of wonder, a wide-eyed voice if that was possible. And although she must have been seven or eight years older than him, she seemed younger.
    It was half an hour since he had heard Dolly come in. He ought to go, it would be wise to go. Myra was telling her guests how she and Hal