His knees creaked like an old rocking chair as he walked over to the desk telephone, which sat next to a pile of orders, printed off the Internet, and a spike for the ones he’d fulfilled.

He listened to the rhythm of his call ringing out in a darkened house on The Avenue a few hundred yards away.

When the receiver was picked up and a voice, quiet and guarded, spoke into the night, he did not reply, but placed the phone back in its cradle.

By the second hand on the watch on his wrist, he waited for two minutes to pass, and pressing the tip of his finger into the rotary dial, careful to withhold his own number, he dialed the same house once more.

This time the telephone rang out again and again until the sound was scratched into his mind.

Three minutes and forty-seven seconds later, it was answered.

“Hello?” A pause. More aggressive. “Hello?”

Lovell waited just long enough for the silence to fill with threat, then pulled the doll’s body away from its oversized head. This action tugged on the string that was connected to a phonograph inside the toy. He had used his skills to doctor the recording and, after a moment’s pause, the doll began to speak, a slow, mechanical singsong.

“The stains of your sins will never wash clean.”

“Who is this?” Ill temper leaked down the line. “What do you want?” A gathering of strength. “If you call again, I’ll ring the police.”

Lovell picked at a spot of dried paint with his thumbnail. He knew the voice at the end of the line would never call the police. He breathed quietly.

“Please.” Pleading now. “Leave me alone.”

He closed his fingers around the doll’s body and pulled for a second time, enjoying the stretching out of the string between her head and torso.

“The stains of your sins will never wash clean,” the doll said again, her words rusty with menace. “And you are going to be punished.”

He didn’t bother to ring a third time because he’d said what he’d wanted to. He had learned long ago that words were a powerful weapon, that the fear of what might happen, the waiting for it, was far more brutal than the clean relief of the guillotine.

The dread of discovery was something that Trefor Lovell understood.

He had lived with it for months.

He put the pull-string doll back in his drawer and withdrew the small notebook he kept in the back pocket of his trousers, scribbling the time and date next to the telephone number he had just dialed.

Next, he cleaned his brushes and rinsed the ceramic tile he used as his palette to grind and mix his paints. The porcelain doll’s eyes followed him as he tidied. There was a sadness in her, exactly as he’d intended. He screwed up a stray piece of newspaper and put it in the bin, preferring to start each new day with a clear space and a clear head.