‘I can’t keep my mind on cutting out properly,’ Sybil confessed. ‘I make all sorts of silly mistakes. Perhaps,’ she said uncertainly, ‘your idea of writing to the psychical research people might do some good.’

‘Just make us look like a couple of fools,’ said Alicia Coombe. ‘I didn’t seriously mean it. No, I suppose we’ll just have to go on until—’

‘Until what?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Alicia, and she laughed uncertainly.

On the following day Sybil, when she arrived, found the door of the fitting-room locked.

‘Miss Coombe, have you got the key? Did you lock this last night?’

‘Yes,’ said Alicia Coombe, ‘I locked it and it’s going to stay locked.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I just mean I’ve given up the room. The doll can have it. We don’t need two rooms. We can fit in here.’

‘But it’s your own private sitting-room.’

‘Well, I don’t want it any more. I’ve got a very nice bedroom. I can make a bed-sitting room out of that, can’t I?’

‘Do you mean you’re really not going into that fitting-room ever again?’ said Sybil incredulously.

‘That’s exactly what I mean.’

‘But—what about cleaning? It’ll get in a terrible state.’

‘Let it!’ said Alicia Coombe. ‘If this place is suffering from some kind of possession by a doll, all right—let her keep possession. And clean the room herself.’ And she added, ‘She hates us, you know.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Sybil. ‘The doll hates us?’

‘Yes,’ said Alicia. ‘Didn’t you know? You must have known. You must have seen it when you looked at her.’

‘Yes,’ said Sybil thoughtfully, ‘I suppose I did. I suppose I felt that all along—that she hated us and wanted to get us out of there.’

‘She’s a malicious little thing,’ said Alicia Coombe. ‘Anyway, she ought to be satisfied now.’

Things went on rather more peacefully after that. Alicia Coombe announced to her staff that she was giving up the use of the fitting-room for the present—it made too many rooms to dust and clean, she explained.

But it hardly helped her to overhear one of the work girls saying to another on the evening of the same day, ‘She really is batty, Miss Coombe is now. I always thought she was a bit queer—the way she lost things and forgot things. But it’s really beyond anything now, isn’t it? She’s got a sort of thing about that doll downstairs.’

‘Ooo, you don’t think she’ll go really bats, do you?’ said the other girl. ‘That she might knife us or something?’

They passed, chattering, and Alicia sat up indignantly in her chair. Going bats indeed! Then she added ruefully, to herself, ‘I suppose, if it wasn’t for Sybil, I should think myself that I was going bats. But with me and Sybil and Mrs Groves too, well, it does look as though there was something in it. But what I don’t see is, how is it going to end?’

Three weeks later, Sybil said to Alicia Coombe, ‘We’ve got to go into that room sometimes.’