Read The Killing Doll for Free Online

was wasted on shopping in Crouch End Broadway or down the Holloway Road. This was the first time she had been out in the evening for she didn’t know how long.
    Before leaving she had drunk a tumblerful of wine to give her courage but, even so, being out alone at this hour filled her with unease. She had those agoraphobic sensations not uncommon in housebound, withdrawn people. She felt exposed and vulnerable and threatened. The people who were about in the evening were a different set from those she encountered shopping in the mornings and they seemed to her to have more curious eyes and less guarded expressions. Dolly had no friends. Pup didn’t count, he was her child. Her mother had been her friend and her mother was dead. She wondered how she would feel when, in the next hour or so perhaps, she heard her mother’s voice.
    But in the event it was very different. No more than a dozen people came for the seance and that included Mrs. Collins and her daughter Wendy and the medium. The hall was a not very large room with a small curtained-off stage at one end. There were green roller blinds at the windows and coconut matting on the floor. Mrs. Collins was wearing the navy blue suit she called a costume that Dolly had made her. She smiled in a way Dolly knew that wearing it was meant as a compliment to her. Wendy was fat and long-chinned and well over thirty but she had no birthmark on her right cheek.
    They all sat in a row on rush-bottomed tip-up chairs. Mrs. Collins switched off the uncompromising, high-wattage overhead light and turned on the table lamp she had brought, plugged in on yards of lead to somewhere at the back of the stage. The medium was an old woman, fatter even than Wendy, and had a somewhat more comfortable chair in which, as soon as everyone was seated, she went promptly into a trance.
    After a while, people began to come through with messages: an old friend for Wendy Collins, an aunt for a Miss Finlay. They spoke through the medium’s lips in strangled whispers. It was not frightening, not exciting, not even believable. Edith’s voice didn’t sound like Edith. It was too soft and lugubrious.
    “Dear daughter, I am always near you, I watch you taking care of Peter and my beloved husband …”
    Edith had never spoken like that. Dolly felt indignant that the medium should be such a fraud, callously deluding people, and then, simultaneously with that thought, there came to her a breath of perfume, of lemon verbena. She almost cried out, so powerful for a brief moment was this scent of her dead mother.
    It was gone in an instant, the medium was waking and the Adonai Spiritists were preparing to leave. Dolly was trembling from the shock that scent had given her. It seemed to prove the truth of what she had read in Pup’s books.
    During the séance it had grown dark outside. The yellow and white street lamps were on and a single white lamp shone in the center of Mount Pleasant Green. It would not have occurred to her to feel frightened to walk home in the dark on her own. But in the little vestibule where the notice boards were between the inner glass doors and the outer doors, a woman touched her sleeve, said she was Miss Finlay and might they walk home together? Dolly nodded and followed her out. At the touch she had smelt lemon verbena again. It was Miss Finlay’s scent, that was all, it was Miss Finlay’s lemon scent that she had smelt all the time.
    Miss Finlay scurried along as if pursued and Dolly had to take long strides to keep up with her. As they walked Dolly thought about that scent and about her mother’s voice sounding so soft and low-pitched and Miss Finlay talked about how wonderful the séance had been and how amazing the medium.
    “It must be marvelous to have powers.”
    Dolly felt affronted. “My brother has real powers. He does magic.”
    “What, like sticking pins in a wax image?”
    “Of course not, nothing like that. He’s a geomancer, it’s scientific.”
    Miss Finlay