Sculptress

SIX

The car park of the Poacher was as deserted as before but this time itw as three o’clock in the afternoon, lunchtime was over, and the door was bolted. Roz tapped on the window pane but, getting no response, made her way round to the alley at the back where the kitchen door must be.

It stood ajar and from inside came the sound of singing.

“Hello,” she called.

“Sergeant Hawksley?” She put her hand on the door to push it wider and almost lost her balance when it was whipped away from her.

“You did that on purpose!” she snapped.

“I could have broken my arm.”

“Good God, woman,” he said in mock disgust.

“Can’t you open your mouth without nagging? I’m beginning to think I did my ex-wife an injustice.” He crossed his arms, a fish slice dangling from one hand.

“What do you want this time?”

He had a peculiar talent for putting her at a disadvantage. She bit back an angry retort.

“I’m sorry,” she said instead.

“It’s just that I nearly fell over. Look, are you busy at the moment or can I come in and talk to you?” She examined his face warily for signs of further damage but there were none that hadn’t been there before.

“I’m busy.”

“What if I came back in an hour? Could you talk then?”

“Maybe.”

She gave a rueful smile.

“I’il try again at four.”

He watched her walk up the alleyway.

“What are you going to do for an hour?” he called after her.

She turned round.

“I expect I’il sit in the car. I’ve some flotes to work on.”

He swung the fish slice.

“I’m cooking steak au poivre with some lightly steamed vegetables and potatoes fried in butter.”

“Bully for you,” she said.

“There’s enough for two.”

She smiled.

“Is that an invitation or a refined form of torture?”

“It’s an invitation.”

She came back slowly.

“Actually, I’m starving.”

A slight smile warmed his face.

“So what’s new?” He took her into the kitchen and pulled out a chair at the table. He eyed her critically as he turned the gas up under some simmering pans.

“You look as if you haven’t had a square meal in days.”

“I haven’t.” She recalled what the young policeman had said.

“Are you a good cook?”

He turned his back on her without answering, and she regretted the question. Talking to Hawksley was almost as intimidating as talking to Olive. She couldn’t speak, it seemed, without treading on a nerve.

Except for a muted thank you when he poured her a glass of wine she sat in uncomfortable silence for five minutes, wondering how to open the conversation. She was highly doubtful that he would greet her proposed book on Olive with any enthusiasm.

He placed the steaks on warmed plates, surrounded them with fried whole potatoes, steamed mange tout and baby carrots, and garnished them with the juices from the pan.

“There,” he said, whisking a plate in front of Roz, apparently unaware of her discomfort, ‘that’ll put some colour in your cheeks.” He sat down and attacked his own plate.

“Well, come on, woman. What are you waiting for?”

“A knife and fork.”

“Ah!” He pulled open a drawer in the table and slid some cutlery across.

“Now, get stuck in and don’t yatter while you’re eating. Food should be enjoyed for its own sake.”

She needed no further bidding but set to with a will.

“Fabulous,” she said at last, pushing her empty plate to one side with a sigh of contentment.

“Absolutely fabulous.”

He arched a sardonic eyebrow.

“So what’s the verdict? Can I cook or can I cook?”

She laughed.

“You can cook. May I ask you something?”

He filled her empty glass.

“If you must.”

“If I hadn’t turned up would you have eaten all that yourself?”

“I might have drawn the line at one steak.” He paused.

“Then again I might not. I’ve no bookings for tonight and they don’t keep. I’d probably have eaten them both.”

She heard the trace of bitterness in his voice.

“How much longer can you stay open without customers?” she asked incautiously.

He ignored the question.

“You said you wanted to talk to me,” he reminded her.

“What about?”

She nodded. Apparently, he had no more desire than she to lick wounds in public.

“Olive Martin,” she told him.

“I’m writing a book about her. I believe you were one of the arresting officers.”

He didn’t answer immediately but sat looking at her over the rim of his wine glass.

“Why Olive Martin?”

“She interests me.” It was impossible to gauge his reaction.

“Of course.” He shrugged.

“She did something completely horrific. You’d be very unnatural if you didn’t find her interesting. Have you met her?”

She nodded.

“And?”

“I like her.”

“Only because you’re naive.” He stretched his long arms towards the ceiling, cracking the joints in his shoulders.

“You steeled yourself to delve in the sewer, expecting to pull out a monster, and you’ve landed yourself something comparatively pleasant instead. Olive’s not unusual in that. Most criminals are pleasant most of the time. Ask any prison officer. They know better than anyone that the penal system relies almost entirely on the goodwill of the prisoners.” His eyes narrowed.

“But Olive hacked two completely innocent women to death. The fact that she presents a human face to you now doesn’t make what she did any less horrific.”

“Have I said it does?”

“You’re writing a book about her. Even if you castigate her, she will still be something of a celebrity.” He leaned forward, his tone unfriendly.

“But what about her mother and sister?

Where is the justice for them in giving their murderer the thrill and the kudos of being written about?”

Roz dropped her eyes.

“It does worry me,” she admitted.

“No, that’s wrong.” She looked up.

“It did worry me. I’m a little more sure now of where I’m heading. But I take your point about her victims. It’s all too easy to focus on Olive. She’s alive and they’re dead, and the dead are difficult to recreate.

You have to rely on what other people tell you, and just as their perceptions at the time were not always accurate, neither are their memories now.” She sighed.

“I still have reservations there’s no point in pretending I don’t but I need to understand what happened that day before I can make up my mind.” She fingered the stem of her wine glass.

“I think I may very well be naive but I’d need convincing that that is a bad thing. I could argue, with considerable justification, that anyone delving regularly in sewers must come up jaundiced.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He was amused.

She looked at him again.

“That what Olive did shocks you but doesn’t surprise you. You’ve known, or known of, other people who’ve done similar things before.”

“So?”

“So you never established why she did it. Whereas I, being naive’ she held his gaze ‘am surprised as well as shocked and I want to know why.”

He frowned.

“It’s all in her statement. I can’t remember the exact details now, but she resented not being given a birthday party, I think, and then blew a fuse when her mother got angry with her for persuading the sister to ring in sick the next day.

Domestic violence erupts over the most trivial things. Olive’s motives were rather more substantial than some I’ve known.”

Roz bent down to open her briefcase.

“I’ve a copy of her statement here.” She handed it across and waited while he read it through.

“I can’t see your problem,” he said at last.

“She makes it dear as crystal why she did it. She got angry, hit them, and then didn’t know how to dispose of the bodies.”

“That’s what she says, I agree, but it doesn’t mean it’s true.

There’s at least one blatant lie in that statement and possibly two.”

She tapped her pencil on the table.

“In the first paragraph she says that her relationship with her mother and sister had never been close but that’s been flatly contradicted by everyone I’ve spoken to. They all say she was devoted to Amber.”

He frowned again.

“What’s the other lie?”

She leaned over with her pencil and put a line by one of the middle paragraphs.

“She says she held a mirror to their lips to see if there was any mist.

According to her, there wasn’t, so she proceeded to dismember the bodies.” She turned the pages over.

“But here, according to the pathologist, Mrs. Martin put up a struggle to defend herself before her throat was cut. Olive makes no mention of that in her statement.”

He shook his head.

“That doesn’t mean a damn thing. Either she decided to put a gloss on the whole affair out of belated shame, or shock simply blotted the less acceptable bits out of her memory.”

“And the lie about not getting on with Amber? How do you explain that away?”

“Do I need to? The confession was completely voluntary. We even made her wait until her solicitor arrived to avoid any hint of police pressure.” He drained his glass.

“And you’re not going to try and argue that an innocent woman would confess to a crime like this?”

“It’s happened before.”

“Only after days of police interrogation and then, when it comes to the trial, they plead not guilty and deny their statement.

Olive did neither.” He looked amused.

“Take it from me, she was so damned relieved to get it all off her chest she couldn’t confess fast enough.”

“How? Did she deliver a monologue or did you have to ask questions?”

He clasped his hands behind his neck.

“Unless she’s changed a great deal I should imagine you’ve already discovered that Olive doesn’t volunteer information easily.” He cocked his head enquiringly.

“We had to ask questions but she answered them readily enough.” He looked thoughtful.

“For most of the time she sat and stared at us as if she were trying to engrave our faces on her memory. To be honest, I live in terror of her getting out and doing to me what she did to her family.”

“Five minutes ago you described her as comparatively pleasant.”

He rubbed his jaw.

“Comparatively pleasant as far as you were concerned,” he corrected her.

“But you were expecting something inhuman, which is why you find it difficult to be objective.”

Roz refused to be drawn again down this blind alley. Instead she took her recorder from her briefcase and put it on the table.

“Can I tape this conversation?”

“I haven’t agreed to talk to you yet.” He stood up abruptly and filled a kettle with water. You’d do better,” he said after a moment, ‘to ring Detective Sergeant Wyatt. He was there when she gave her statement, and he’s still on the Force. Coffee?”

“Please.” She watched him select a dark Arabica and spoon the grounds into a cafetiere.

“I really would rather talk to you,” she said evenly.

“Policemen are notoriously difficult to pin down. It could take me weeks to get an interview with him. I won’t quote you, I won’t even name you, if you’d rather I didn’t, and you can read the final draught before it goes to print.” She gave a hollow laugh.

“Assuming it ever gets that far. What you say may persuade me not to write it.”

He looked at her, absentmindedly scratching his chest through his shirt, then made up his mind.

“All right. I’ll tell you as much as I can remember but you’ll have to double check everything. It’s a long time ago and I can’t vouch for my memory. Where do I start?”

“With her telephone call to the police.”

He waited for the kettle to boil, then filled the cafetiere and placed it on the table.

“It wasn’t a 999 call. She looked up the number in the book and dialled the desk.” He shook his head, remembering.

“It started out as a farce because the sergeant on duty couldn’t make head or tail of what she was saying.”

He was shrugging into his jacket at the end of his shift when the desk sergeant came in and handed him a piece of paper with an address on it.

“Do me a favour, Hal, and check this out on your way home. It’s Leven Road. You virtually pass it. Some madwoman’s been bawling down the phone about chicken legs on her kitchen floor.” He pulled a face.

“Wants a policeman to take them away.” He grinned.

“Presumably she’s a vegetarian.

You’re the cookery expert. Sort it out, there’s a good chap.”

Hawksley eyed him suspiciously.

“Is this a wind-up?”

“No. Scout’s honour.” He chuckled.

“Look, she’s obviously a mental case. They’re all over the place, poor sods, since the Government chucked ‘em on to the streets. Just do as she asks or we’ll have her phoning all night. It’ll take you five minutes out of your way.”

Olive Martin, red eyed from weeping, opened the door to him. She smelt strongly of B. O. and her bulky shoulders were hunched in unattractive despair. So much blood was smeared over her baggy T-shirt and trousers that it took on the property of an abstract pattern and his eyes hardly registered it. And why should they? He had no premonition of the horror in store.

“DS.

Hawksley,” he said with an encouraging smile, showing her his card.

“You rang the police station.”

She stepped back, holding the door open.

“They’re in the kitchen.” She pointed down the corridor.

“On the floor.”

“OK. We’ll go down and have a look. What’s your name, love?”

“Olive.”

“Right, Olive, you lead the way. Let’s see what’s upset you.”

Would it have been better to know what was in there?

Probably not. He often thought afterwards that he could never have entered the room at all if he’d been told in advance that he was about to step into a human abattoir. He stared in horror at the butchered bodies, the axe, the blood that ran in rivers across the floor, and his shock was so great that he could hardly breathe for the iron fist that thrust against his diaphragm and squeezed the breath from his lungs.

The room reeked of blood.

He leant against the door jamb and sucked desperately at the sickly, cloying air, before bolting down the corridor and retching over and over again into the tiny patch of front garden.

Olive sat on the stairs and watched him, her fat moon face as white and pasty as his.

“You should have brought a friend,” she told him miserably.

“It wouldn’t have been so bad if there’d been two of you.”

He held a handkerchief to his lips as he used his radio to summon assistance. While he spoke he eyed her warily, registering the blood all over her clothes. Nausea choked him.

Jesus JESUS! How mad was she? Mad enough to take the axe to him?

“For God’s sake, make it quick,” he shouted into the mouthpiece.

“This is an emergency.” He stayed outside, too frightened to go back in.

She looked at him stolidly.

“I won’t hurt you. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

He mopped at his forehead.

“Who are they, Olive?”

“My mother and sister.” Her eyes slid to her hands.

“We had a row.”

His mouth was dry with shock and fear.

“Best not talk about it,” he said.

Tears rolled down her fat cheeks.

“I didn’t mean it to happen.

We had a row. My mother got so angry with me. Should I give my statement now?”

He shook his head.

“There’s no hurry.”

She stared at him without blinking, her tears drying in dirty streaks down her face.

“Will you be able to take them away before my father comes home?” she asked him after a minute or two.

“I think it would be better.”

Bile rose in his throat.

“When do you expect him back?”

“He leaves work at three o’clock. He’s part-time.”

Hal glanced at his watch, an automatic gesture. His mind was numb.

“It’s twenty to now.”

She was very composed.

“Then perhaps a policeman could go there and explain what’s happened.

It would be better,” she said again. They heard the wail of approaching sirens.

“Please,” she said urgently.

He nodded.

“I’ll arrange it. Where does he work?”

“Carters Haulage. It’s in the Docks.”

He was passing the message on as two cars, sirens shrieking, swept round the corner and bore down on number 22. Doors flew open all along the road and curious faces peered out. Hal switched off the radio and looked at her.

“All done,” he said.

“You can stop worrying about your father.”

A large tear slipped down her blotchy face.

“Should I make a pot of tea?”

Hal thought of the kitchen.

“Better not.”

The sirens stilled as policemen erupted from the cars.

“I’m sorry to cause so much bother,” she said into the silence.

She spoke very little after that, but only, thought Hal on reflection, because nobody spoke to her. She was packed into the living room, under the eye of a shocked W. P. C.” and sat in bovine immobility watching the comings and goings through the open door. If she was aware of the mounting horror that was gathering about her, she didn’t show it. Nor, as time passed and the signs of emotion faded from her face, did she display any further grief or remorse for what she had done. Faced with such complete indifference, the consensus view was that she was mad.

“But she wept in front of you,” interrupted Roz.

“Did you think she was mad?”

“I spent two hours in that kitchen with the pathologist, trying to work out the order of events from the blood splashes over the floor, the table, the kitchen units. And then, after the photographs had been taken, we embarked on the grisly jigsaw of deciding which bit belonged to which woman. Of course I thought she was mad. No normal person could have done it.”

Roz chewed her pencil.

“That’s begging the question, you know. All you’re really saying is that the act itself was one of madness. I asked you if, from your experience of her, you thought Olive was mad.”

“And you’re splitting hairs. As far as I could see, the two were inextricably linked. Yes, I thought Olive was mad. That’s why we were so careful to make sure her solicitor was there when she made her statement. The idea of her getting off on a technicality and spending twelve months in hospital before some idiot psychiatrist decided she was responding well enough to treatment to be allowed out scared us rigid.”

“So did it surprise you when she was judged fit to plead guilty?”

“Yes,” he admitted, ‘it did.”

At around six o’clock attention switched to Olive. Areas of dried blood were lifted carefully from her arms and each fingernail was minutely scraped before she was taken upstairs to bathe herself and change into clean clothes. Everything she had been wearing was packed into individual polythene bags and loaded into a police van. An inspector drew Hal to one side.

“I gather she’s already admitted she did it.” Hal nodded.

“More or less.”

Roz interrupted again.

“Less is right. If what you said earlier is correct, she did not admit anything. She said they’d had a row, that her mother got angry, and she didn’t mean it to happen. She didn’t say she had killed them.”

Hal agreed.

“I accept that. But the implication was there which is why I told her not to talk about it. I didn’t want her claiming afterwards that she hadn’t been properly cautioned.”

He sipped his coffee.

“By the same token, she didn’t deny killing them, which is the first thing an innocent person would have done, especially as she had their blood all over her.”

“But the point is, you assumed her guilt before you knew it for a fact.”

“She was certainly our prime suspect,” he said drily.

The inspector ordered Hal to take Olive down to the station.

“But don’t let her say anything until we can get hold of a solicitor.

We’ll do it by the book. OK?”

Hal nodded again.

“There’s a father. He’ll be at the nick by now. I sent a car to pick him up from work but I don’t know what he’s been told.”

“You’d better find out then, and, for Christ’s sake, Sergeant, if he doesn’t know, then break it to him gently or you’ll give the poor sod a heart attack. Find out if he’s got a solicitor and if he’s willing to have him or her represent his daughter.”

They put a blanket over Olive’s head when they took her out to the car.

A crowd had gathered, lured by rumours of a hideous crime, and cameramen jostled for a photograph. Boos greeted her appearance and a woman laughed.

“What good’s a blanket, boys? You’d need a bloody marquee to cover that fat cow. I’d recognise her legs anywhere. What you done, Olive?”

Roz interrupted again when he jumped the story on to his meeting with Robert Martin at the police station.

“Hang on. Did she say anything in the car?”

He thought for a moment.

“She asked me if I liked her dress.

Isaidldid.”

“Were you being polite?”

“No. It was a vast improvement on the T-shirt and trousers.”

“Because they had blood on them?”

“Probably. No,” he contradicted himself, ruffling his hair, ‘because the dress gave her a bit of shape, I suppose, made her look more feminine. Does it matter?”

Roz ignored this.

“Did she say anything else?”

“I think she said something like: “That’s good. It’s my favourite.”

“But in her statement, she said she was going to London. Why wasn’t she wearing the dress when she committed the murders?”

He looked puzzled.

“Because she was going to London in trousers, presumably.”

“No,” said Roz stubbornly.

“If the dress was her favourite, then that’s what she would have worn for her trip to town.

London was her birthday treat to herself. She probably had dreams of bumping into Mr. Right on Waterloo station. It simply wouldn’t occur to her to wear anything but her best. You need to be a woman to understand that.”

He was amused.

“But I see hundreds of girls walking around in shapeless trousers and baggy T-shirts, particularly the fat ones. I think they look grotesque but they seem to like it.

Presumably they’re making a statement about their refusal to pander to conventional standards of beauty. Why should Olive have been any different?”

“Because she wasn’t the rebellious type. She lived at home under her mother’s thumb, took the job her mother wanted her to take, and was apparently so unused to going out alone for the day that she had to beg her sister to go with her.” She drummed her fingers impatiently on the table.

“I’m right. I know I am. If she wasn’t lying about the trip to London then she should have been wearing her dress.”

He was not impressed.

“She was rebellious enough to kill her mother and sister,” he remarked.

“If she could do that, she could certainly go to London in trousers.

You’re splitting hairs again. Anyway, she might have changed to keep the dress clean.”

“But she definitely intended to go to London? Did you check that?”

“She certainly booked the day off work. We accepted that London was where she was going because, as far as we could establish, she hadn’t mentioned her plans to anyone else.”

“Not even to her father?”

“If she did, he didn’t remember it.”

Olive waited in an interview room while Hal spoke to her father. It was a difficult conversation. Whether he had schooled himself to it, or whether it was a natural trick of behaviour, Robert Martin reacted little to anything that was said to him. He was a handsome man but, in the way that a Greek sculpture is handsome, he invited admiration but lacked warmth or attraction. His curiously impassive face had an unlined and ageless quality, and only his hands, knotted with arthritis, gave any indication that he had passed his middle years.

Once or twice he smoothed his blond hair with the flat of his hand or touched his fingers to his tie, but for all the expression on his plastic features Hal might have been passing the time of day. It was impossible to gauge from his expression how deeply he was shocked or whether, indeed, he was shocked at all.

“Did you like him?” asked Roz.

“Not much. He reminded me of Olive. I don’t know where I am with people who hide their feelings. It makes me uncomfortable.”

Roz could identify with that.

Hal kept detail to a minimum, informing him only that the bodies of his wife and one of his daughters had been discovered that afternoon in the kitchen of his house, and that his other daughter, Olive, had given the police reason to believe she had killed them.

Robert Martin crossed his legs and folded his hands calmly in his lap.

“Have you charged her with anything?”

“No. We haven’t questioned her either.” He watched the other man closely.

“Frankly, sir, in view of the serious nature of the possible charges we think she should have a solicitor with her.”

“Of course. I’m sure my man, Peter Crew, will come.” Mild enquiry twitched his brows.

“What’s the procedure? Should I telephone him?”

Hal was puzzled by the man’s composure. He wiped a hand across his face.

“Are you sure you understand what’s happened, sir?”

“I believe so. Gwen and Amber are dead and you think Olive murdered them.”

“That’s not quite accurate. Olive has implied that she was responsible for their deaths but, until we take a statement from her, I can’t say what the charges will be.” He paused for a moment.

“I want you to be quite clear on this, Mr. Martin. The Home Office pathologist who examined the scene had no doubts that considerable ferocity was used both before and after death.

In due course, I’m afraid to say, we will have to ask you to identify the bodies and you may, when you see them, feel less charitably inclined towards any possible suspect. On that basis, do you have any reservations about your solicitor representing Olive?”

Martin shook his head.

“I would be happier dealing with someone I know.”

“There may be a conflict of interests. Have you considered that?”

“In what way?”

“At the risk of labouring the point, sir,” said Hal coldly, ‘your wife and daughter have been brutally murdered. I imagine you will want the perpetrator prosecuted?” He lifted an eyebrow in enquiry and Martin nodded.

“Then you may well want a solicitor yourself to ensure that the prosecution proceeds to your satisfaction, but if your own solicitor is already representing your daughter, he will be unable to assist you because your interests will conflict with your daughter’s.”

“Not if she’s innocent.” Martin pinched the crease in his trousers, aligning it with the centre of his knee.

“I am really not concerned with what Olive may have implied, Sergeant Hawksley. There is no conflict of interest in my mind. Establishing her innocence and representing me in pressing for a prosecution can be done by the same solicitor. Now, if you could lend me the use of a telephone, I will ring Peter Crew, and afterwards, perhaps you will allow me to talk to my daughter.”

Hal shook his head.

“I’m sorry, sir, but that won’t be possible, not until we’ve taken a statement from her. You will also be required to make a statement. You may be allowed to speak to her afterwards, but at the moment I can’t guarantee it.”

“And that,” he said, recalling the incident, ‘was the one and only time he showed any emotion. He looked quite upset, but whether because I’d denied him access to Olive or because I’d told him he’d have to make a statement, I don’t know.” He considered for a moment.

“It must have been the denial of access. We went through every minute of that man’s day and he came out whiter than white. He worked in an open-plan office with five other people and, apart from the odd trip to the lavatory, he was under someone’s eye the whole day. There just wasn’t time for him to go home.”

“But you did suspect him?”

“Yes.”

Roz looked interested.

“In spite of Olive’s confession?”

He nodded.

“He was so damn cold blooded about it all. Even identifying the bodies didn’t faze him.”

Roz thought for a moment.

“There was another conflict of interest which you don’t seem to have considered.” She chewed her pencil.

“If Robert Martin was the murderer, he could have used his solicitor to manipulate Olive into confessing. Peter Crew makes no secret of his dislike of her, you know. I think he regrets the abolition of capital punishment.”

Hal folded his arms, then smiled in amusement.

“You’ll have to be very careful if you intend to make statements like that in your book. Miss Leigh. Solicitors are not required to like their clients, they merely have to represent them. In any case, Robert Martin dropped out of the frame very rapidly. We toyed with the idea that he killed Gwen and Amber before he went to work and Olive then set about disposing the bodies to protect him, but the numbers didn’t add up. He had an alibi even for that. There was a neighbour who saw her husband off to work a few minutes before Martin himself left. Amber and Gwen were alive then because she spoke to them on their doorstep.

She remembered asking Amber how she was getting on at Glitzy.

They waved as Martin drove away.”

“He could have gone round the corner and come back again.”

“He left home at eight-thirty and arrived at work at nine. We tested the drive and it took half an hour.” He shrugged.

“As I said, he was whiter than white.”

“What about lunch? Could he have gone back then?”

“He had a pint and a sandwich in the local pub with two men from the office.”

“OK. Go on.”

There was little more to tell. In spite of Crew’s advice to remain silent, Olive agreed to answer police questions, and at nine-thirty, expressing relief to have got the whole thing off her chest, she signed her statement and was formally charged with the murder of her mother and sister.

Following her remand into custody on the morning of the next day, Hal and Geof Wyatt were given the task of detailing the police case against her. It was a straightforward collating of pathological, forensic, and police evidence, all of which, upon examination, supported the facts given in Olive’s statement.

Namely that, acting alone, she had, on the morning of the ninth of September, 1987, murdered her mother and sister by cutting their throats with a carving knife.