The Killing Doll by Ruth Rendell Page A

no bigger than an ordinary girl’s now, a small young girl. Diarmit marveled that such things might be, that courage and defiance might reduce a powerful aggressor to this little dead thing.
    Perhaps he should reduce it more. After all, he knew all about dismemberment. Wishing he had a saw, he got to work with the cleaver, then the knives. He abandoned the task because he got tired and, as he heard in the distance by the chiming church clock, it was 5:00 now and safe to go home.
    The sunshine felt as strong as at noon. A warm curtain of it met him as he came out of the tunnel mouth, carrying the hatchet and the knives in his Harrods bag. The buddleias and willow herb and marguerite daisies were thronged with bees, a white butterfly pursued its waving, fluttering flight, and a ginger cat walked along the edge of the old station platform, but he met no one and passed no one until he had gone up the steps and was in Mount Pleasant Gardens.
    Although he was covered with blood, the splashes and great soaked areas did not look like bloodstains on the red shirt and the red cords. In any case, no one looked at him, he remained invisible. On the demolition site beyond the green the workmen had knocked off for the day and the dust had settled. There was very little left of the houses; there were only bricks and rubble and an empty site. Diarmit went upstairs, up and up and up to his top floor. There was one bathroom for all the rooms on the top and in the mornings and the evenings it was always occupied but it was empty now. He took the cleaver and the knives out of the Harrods bag and washed them under cold running water. Then he turned the bag inside out and washed that.
    In his room he felt more safe and sound than he had done for a long time. He made himself a pot of tea and sat drinking it by the open window. The Dalmatian and the collie lay on the grass, sleeping in the sunshine. How good it would be if Conal Moore were to come now! Diarmit felt somehow that his existence, his selfhood, was seeping back; first, the act of defense in the tunnel, then the warm sun, then the tea—all this was bringing him out of limbo, out of nothingness. Conal would see him, know him, he felt sure of that. Kathleen would know him if he went to her door now. The brave stand and the shed blood had made him recognizable, solid, whole.
    I kill, therefore I am.
    It was not until the next day that the woman with the Pyrenean mountain dog found the girl’s body and not until two days after that that Diarmit knew it had been found. He saw a newspaper which someone had left on top of a pile of them on a dustbin in the side entrance. The photograph was of that face which, hugely enlarged and violently colored, had loomed over him in the tunnel and had let out those terrible sounds. He sat on a bench on the green and deciphered the headlines, then the text, working very slowly and moving his forefinger along the lines of print.
    It was then that he understood they were calling him a murderer. “The Headsman,” they called him.
    That was like calling a soldier in a war a murderer! If anyone came and asked him why, he had his explanation ready. You see how you would feel, driven out of the only home you’ve got by a threat of being buried under tons of rubble, only allowed home during the hours of darkness, forced to take shelter out of doors and barricade yourself in lest the stampeding hordes trample you. You try it and see how you’d feel when a huge scavenger threatens to crush you. You’d lash back with all your poor little strength, wouldn’t you? If you had the nerve, if you were brave enough.
    They had not worked on the site the day before and no workmen had appeared today. Diarmit sat on the bench and watched the site and the house where his room was. The weather was still warm and sunny and the stains on his clothes began to give off a hot fetid reek. The Dalmatian came and sniffed at him. A woman, passing, pushing a bicycle, wrinkled her