The doll who ate his mother: a novel of modern terror Read online

“I mean, that report won’t stop you writing your book. They still don’t know that you know his name. Maybe some people will be more ready to help, now they know about your books.”

  His fist was still clenched, wrestling with the cap.

  “I’ll help you if I can. I feel better about helping now,” she said, “because the police told me today they’ve decided not to prosecute, now that they’ve realized the psychopath was involved. They said I should have heard from them already. It must be our new postman’s fault. So anyway, I can help you now.”

  “You’re a nice girl, Clare.” He was filling her tumbler with gin, well past her cry of protest. “We’re going to get on well together.

  I’ll tell you one thing I don’t like about London: it made me forget there were girls like you.”

  “Oh yes?” she said, laughing uneasily.

  “Yes. You’re not like the women down there. Too bloody sure of themselves, all of them. And half of them are fake inside and out. Listen,” he said, “I haven’t bought you that dinner yet. What night are you free?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Edmund.” All she could see was his small dented nose, twitching a little like a sleepy rabbit’s amid the solemn frowning friendliness of his face. “Not for a while,” she said.

  He brought her her gin and tonic, rocking stormily in its tumbler. “Oh, come on, Clare,” he said, putting one large hand on her shoulder. It leaned there, hot and moist as a patch of fever. “You’re not doing anything tonight,” he said, stooping his face at her.

  She edged forward on her chair. He tottered sideways to keep hold of her shoulder, almost overbalancing; his eye had pulled free of his face and was caught in the lens of his spectacles, blinking in front of itself.

  “I’m very busy tonight. I must straighten up my flat before the school term starts.” At once, like full stops forbidding him to add to her paragraph, came three sharp knocks at the door.

  “You bugger,” Edmund said. He levered himself away from her and strode furiously to the door.

  Surely as a writer he ought to appreciate dramatic timing. “What’s your problem?” he demanded.

  At the end of the hall, beyond the bathroom, a young man’s voice said, “I hear you want help from the victims of the man you’re hunting.”

  “Oh yes,” Clare cried. “We do, don’t we.”

  The young man strode lithely into the room and gazed at her with unconcealed delight. His shoulder-length fair hair swung against his face; he shook it back impatiently, gazing at Clare as if she were an unforeseen bonus. “Hello,” he said. “Who are you?”

  Edmund appeared from the hall, nose twitching with displeasure. “Her name’s Clare,” he said.

  “I didn’t catch your name,” the young man said to her.

  “I’m Clare. Who are you?”

  “I’m Chris Barrow.”

  She felt uncomfortable beneath his gaze, yet not unpleasantly so. Somehow it was too open and childlike to be embarrassing. His clear-skinned, shaven face looked very young, late teenage; but that might have to do with the sense of innocence she felt in him. He’d strode into the room as if nothing bothered him, like a child who has yet to learn selfconsciousness. Even his clothes—a wide-sleeved Oriental shirt, joining his flared trousers snugly at his tight heavy crotch, drawing her gaze there—seemed part of a little boy’s inoffensive delighted exhibitionism. His eyes were surrounded by thin silver frames. Nobody had ever looked at her like that before. When Edmund had said she looked like a ballerina she hadn’t seen his face; but there was no sign of flattery on Chris Barrow’s.

  Edmund gripped the bourbon bottle, staking his claim. “Who told you I need help?” he demanded.

  “The newspaper that interviewed you.”

  “They would. What makes you think you can help?”

  “I’m a victim. Well, my cat was.” His pale gaunt face was flushed now.

  “Your cat?” Edmund said, snorting mirthlessly. “You’re joking.”

  “No, why? They found her in the alley, half eaten. Not far from where Mrs. Pugh lived.”

  “Strange I didn’t read about it.”

  “It was in the paper. I’ve still got the report. I’ll bring it to show you if you like.”

  “I’m not that interested.” Edmund rolled the neck of the bottle between his fingers, as if it were a good cigar. “I can’t offer you a drink,” he said happily. “No more glasses.”

  “You can finish mine if you like gin,” Clare said.

  “It’s okay, I don’t drink.”

  Edmund stared at him, stretching the silence, clearly hoping he would leave. “What do you do?” Clare asked Chris.

  “I’m with TTG. Total Theatre Group.”

  She could see he thought she was distracting him unnecessarily, but Edmund seemed determined to ignore him. “What sort of things do you perform?”

  “Street theatre mostly, and in the parks. Stuff for kids particularly.”

  “Is that all?” Edmund said. “Sounds more like a game to me.”

  “Oh, right. But everything’s a game really, isn’t it?”

  Edmund stared at that contemptuously.

  “Do you visit schools?” Clare said.

  “Yeah, sometimes.”

  “Maybe you could visit mine. I’d like my kids to see some of that kind of theatre. It would help them, I think.”

  “Oh, right, yeah. Get in touch with TTG at the Upper Parly Arts Centre. Anyway,” he said to Edmund, “I’d better tell you about my cat.”

  “I don’t think it’s any use to me.”

  “Why not?” Chris asked. Clare sensed his impatience, uncomprehending as a child’s.

  “Did you see the man do it?”

  Chris gazed at him speechlessly.

  “You see what I mean,” Edmund said. “You’ve no proof it’s connected with this case. It’s not worth putting in my book, a dead cat in an alley.”

  Chris’s shoulders shifted restlessly. In that moment he seemed to Clare hardly more than a vulnerable little boy. “She was worth a lot to me,” he said. “I used to play with her.”

  Edmund stared at him. “The people who are helping me have lost relatives,” he said, “not bloody cats!”

  After a moment Chris whirled and stalked out, slamming the door; the bottles chattered on the tray. Edmund poured himself another bourbon, sniggering. “Bloody prima donna,” he said.

  “Was it necessary to be so nasty to him?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t stand his type. London’s full of them, poncing about, pretending to be artists. I doubt he’s ever done a proper day’s work in his life.”

  “I still think his story sounded genuine.”

  “Oh, it was. I wasn’t going to tell him, but I’d read the report he mentioned. I just couldn’t have stood having him around. Besides,” he raised his voice as she turned her back on him, “a dead cat could have been anything. A mad dog might have done it. That area’s full of strays.”

  Clare gazed down ten storeys at the Saturday crowd in Elliott Street, a swarming multicoloured beehive. Behind her, Edmund said plaintively, “You’re not going to walk out on me as well, are you?”

  The cathedrals challenged each other above the roofs: the red sandstone Gothic tower of the Anglican, the spiky glazed lantern crowning the concrete drum of the Catholic. “I’ve said I’ll help,” she said without turning. “But you won’t tell me how.”

  “Well,” he said. “Are you back at school on Monday?”

  “Tuesday.”

  “Then you’ve got yourself a job. Try to find out the address of Kelly’s mother or whatever she was. If she’s still alive—she looked pretty old when I saw her. I’ve tried ringing the Education Offices, but they wouldn’t tell me. Seemed suspicious.”

  She moved away from the window, leaving the half-full tumbler behind the curtain. “I think they’d read about me,” he said. “But the school won’t associate you with me. You’d better tell them you’re a teacher. Then you ask to consult their rec
ords—”

  “I know what to do,” she said impatiently, feeling patronized.

  “Fine. I’ll leave it to you, then.”

  In the lift, she shrugged off the offers of the menu, angry with herself. Fool. She’d talked herself into going to lie at a school less than a mile from her own.

  Monday,

  September 8

  “Go all the way up them stairs,” the boy said. “The staffroom’s at the top.”

  Clare leaned against the railings, trying to fan away some of the still, oppressive heat. In a minute she would go up. She was from the Vale School in Aigburth. A relative of Christopher Kelly’s guardian needed her address urgently. She didn’t know why. The Education Offices had mislaid the address, the Vale School didn’t have it; St. Joseph’s was the relative’s last hope. Since Clare had had to come home this way, the head had delegated her to fetch the information. They’d felt they ought to send someone personally; certainly her school, the Vale School, would never give out such information over the phone.

  Irrationally, she dreaded meeting someone here from her own school, Durning Road Primary. Nonsense. The staff would be making the most of this last day of their holidays. But she couldn’t rid herself of the dread. If she met them, what could she say?

  She gazed out through the railings. The sky was overcast; fragments of china blue were trying to pierce the slow grey wool. Around the school the windows of derelict terraces were curtained with corrugated tin. Facing her at the end of a side street, one house had been torn down; four of its hearths still clung to the next house, black shrines to soot. She could smell houses smouldering. Against the dull sky, birds rose and swooped like black tatters of ash.

  Uniformed boys were staring at her, this alien creature. Some of them towered above her, gangling. She felt dwindled. She couldn’t go up those stairs. One of the older boys swaggered by whistling loudly, to show his friends he could. She remembered that they were only boys. And she’d let them deter her. She strode through them to the doorway in the long Victorian building, to the stairs.

  The stairs were wide black stone. They made her footsteps clank however carefully she walked, like children shouting a message she’d wanted to keep to a whisper. She clanked upstairs loudly, defiantly, feeling hemmed in by the railings that barred children from the stairwell. I must have this address urgently. I’m from the Vale School. In fact she had just come from there; they’d said they would need a request on headed notepaper for the information; they had seemed suspicious. Round and up and round and up, clank clank. I’m from the Vale School.

  At the top, a notice on a dauntingly tall door said KNOCK AND WAIT. The door was ajar; she went in.

  She thought at first that the staffroom was empty. Nobody sat at the long central table, which was bare except for a Bible and, lying in a pool of ketchup on a plate, the chewed stump of a sausage roll. Even the greenish walls seemed deserted. There was a smell of charred baked beans; saucepans gathered in the sink, wearing dirty plates. Men, Clare thought angrily. She was angry with herself for having dared the stairs for nothing.

  Then a grey-haired head rose above the end of the table and demanded, “Yes?”

  The man had been sitting back in an easy chair. She guessed him to be in his early sixties, but the lines that pinched his eyes and mouth were less lines of age than a weary cynicism, the kind of cynicism she’d seen turn to vindictiveness. She had hoped for a young man, so that she could make him feel masculine for helping her. But if she didn’t go through with it now she couldn’t come back. She was reaching for her story when he said, “If you’re here for David, he’ll be back at one.”

  The large clock on the wall said twenty-five to one; the minute hand sprang up a minute. Before she knew what she was risking she said, “Has David told you all about me?”

  If he had, she could say, “Well, you can see that’s not me,” laughing, passing it off as a joke, she didn’t mean any harm, please let her go now, only a joke. But the man said, “All he said was that if a girl came up she’d be for him.”

  “Aren’t men conceited?” She was beginning to enjoy the game even though she felt light-headed, almost weightless. She floated to the easy chair opposite the man. The clock’s hand twitched, as if the nostrils of its winder holes were tickling. Twenty-three minutes. “Have you worked here long?” she said.

  “Since you were in your cradle, I should think.”

  She toyed with a magazine that had perhaps been confiscated. HE CUT UP YOUNG VIRGINS AND LAUGHED. His Potency Came From Not Having Orgasms. “You must have been here when Christopher Kelly was,” she said, gazing blindly at the magazine.

  His bright sharp eyes were scrutinizing her. “What do you know about Kelly?”

  “Well, er,” she said. She had to chance it.

  “David,” she said.

  “David wasn’t here then.”

  “No, someone told him about it. Perhaps you did.”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised.” He’d completed his scrutiny; she managed to look up. “That terrible boy,” he said, shaking his head. “These children today are bad enough, but I don’t think anyone who was here then will ever forget him. I only hope he had no lasting influence on the other children. He had too many friends, that boy, he was always riding someone else’s bicycle. He shouldn’t have been allowed into an ordinary school at all. That’s not our job, that kind of case.”

  She nodded eagerly. Perhaps he would tell her something new about Kelly; he might even give her a cue to ask to look at their records. “I pity whoever had to deal with him after he left us,” the teacher said. “And his poor grandmother having to look after him by herself, oh dear. Do you know, I think he was even worse when he came back.”

  “Came back here?” Her surprise was showing. “To this school?”

  “That’s right.” He frowned at her. “Why are you so interested in Kelly?” he said sharply.

  “Didn’t David tell you what I do?”

  “He told me nothing. Not even your name.”

  “It’s—” (Oh God, a name, a name!) “It’s Clare,” she said. “I’m a teacher too. That’s why I’m interested.”

  “Haven’t you a surname?”

  She’d anticipated that; she grabbed the last name she could remember having heard. “Clare Barrow,” she said.

  “And you’ve come into teaching? May God protect you, then. The law won’t. Or are you one of those who don’t believe in upsetting the little dears? Let me tell you, I used to teach them more with a clout round the head than half of these people teach them in years. But now it’s oh no, you might damage their poor little brains. Brains! Half of them haven’t got any, and most of the rest are warped beyond repair. These days they’re sending them up from the junior school not even able to read. And as for spelling, oh dear me. The teachers want teaching themselves these days.”

  “Have you tried teaching a class of thirty-five lately?” Clare said furiously. “Maybe if they gave us enough staff for a sensible pupil-teacher ratio, you wouldn’t have so much to complain about.”

  He relaxed visibly. “Yes, you’re a teacher,” he said. “I thought for a while you were trying to delude me. We have to be careful in this district, you see. Last year we had a man pretending to be an electrician. He didn’t get past me. I don’t exercise every day for no reason. He must have been thirty years my junior, but I held on to him until the police arrived.”

  Seventeen minutes to one. Clare smiled, nodding. He doesn’t suspect any more, she reassured the cold hole of fear in her stomach. “You were saying Kelly came back,” she said.

  “Yes, he came back. Dear me, he did. When I saw him in the playground I thought it must be his double, until I saw his expression. No one else on earth ever looked like that. He always looked as if he were listening to something no one else could hear. Like Joan of Arc. But it must have been a devil he was listening to.

  “I went straight up to him, among all his schoolfellows, and took him by the collar.
His school had sent one young girl in charge of the whole group, supposed to keep discipline. She didn’t look much older than her charges. I told her in front of them: “We’ve thrown this one out once, don’t think we won’t throw him out again if he isn’t on his best behaviour.”

  Clare smiled down at the magazine; she didn’t trust herself to look at him. Interfering old maid. She’d have liked him to try that on with her. “Am I boring you?” he said.

  WAS HIS POWER OVER HIS VICTIMS BLACK MAGIC? “No, of course not,” she said, forcing herself to lay aside the magazine and smile at him. “Please go on.”

  “This young girl told me they were from the Vale School. They’d come to give us an end-of-term treat,” he said. “I wasn’t interested. That’s not why the country pays for schools. Of course it wasn’t up to me to challenge the head’s decision,” he said rather bitterly. “So here was Kelly back again, as if he hadn’t entertained us enough when we had him.

  “My class had to go to watch their treat, but I didn’t. I wasn’t going to let that boy have me as an audience, though some of my colleagues had no compunction. I came up here and marked homework. And that was how I came to see Kelly chasing the cat.

  “The caretaker had a cat called Felix. I was opposed to letting him keep it in the school, but of course that was the head’s decision; he didn’t consult me. Half the boys here would set fire to a cat, given half the chance. But Felix had managed to escape injury.

  “I presume they didn’t need Kelly for a while, otherwise he couldn’t have slipped out of the hall unnoticed. I might not have noticed him myself if I hadn’t found this room stuffy and got up to open the window. I was about to do so when I saw Kelly down there in the playground, chasing the cat. But chasing isn’t the right word. He was stalking it, like an animal.

  “I once saw a film on television. I don’t watch as a rule, but I don’t think a little does harm. They showed a lizard which had lived underground all its life, an eyeless thing. They showed how it walked, slowly and delicately, with its fingers stepping along, feeling its way. I had never seen anything so furtive and horrible—until I looked out of that window. Because out there in the sunlight that enormous fat boy was stalking exactly like the lizard, on all fours. And on his face was a sort of hungry joy I shall always hope to forget.