Sculptress

SEVEN

There was a lengthy silence. Hal splayed his hands on the scrubbed deal table and pushed himself to his feet.

“How about some more coffee?” He watched her industrious pen scribbling across a page of her notebook.

“More coffee?” he repeated.

“Mm. Black, no sugar.” She didn’t look up but went on writing.

“Sure, baas. Don’t mind me, baas. I’se just de paid help, baas.”

Roz laughed.

“Sorry. Yes, thank you, I’d love some more coffee. Look, if you can just bear with me for a moment, I’ve a few questions to ask and I’m trying to jot them down while the thing’s still fresh.”

He watched her while she wrote. Botticelli’s Venus, he had thought the first time he saw her, but she was too thin for his liking, hardly more than seven stone and a good five feet six.

She made a fabulous clothes’-horse, of course, but there was no softness to hug, no comfort in the tautly strung body. He wondered if her slenderness was a deliberate thing or if she lived on her nerves.

The latter, he thought. She was clearly a woman of obsessions if her crusade for Olive was anything to go by. He put a fresh cup of coffee in front of her but stayed standing, cradling his own coffee cup between his hands.

“OK,” she said, sorting out the pages, ‘let’s start with the kitchen.

You say the forensic evidence supported Olive’s statement that she acted alone. How?”

He thought back.

“You have to picture that place. It was a slaughter house, and every time she moved she left footprints in the congealing blood. We photographed each one separately and they were all hers, including the bloody prints that her shoes left on the carpet in the hall.” He shrugged.

“There were also bloody palm-prints and fingerprints over most of the surfaces where she had rested her hands. Again all hers. We did raise other fingerprints, admittedly, including about three, I think, which we were never able to match with any of the Martins or their neighbours, but you’d expect that in a kitchen. The gas man, the electricity man, a plumber maybe. There was no blood on them so we inclined to the view that they had been left in the days prior to the murder.”

Roz chewed her pencil.

“And the axe and the knife? I suppose they had only her fingerprints.”

“Actually no. The cutting weapons were so smeared that we couldn’t get anything off them at all.” He chuckled at her immediate interest.

“You’re chasing red herrings. Wet blood is slippery stuff. It would have been very surprising if we had found some perfect prints. The rolling pin had three damn good ones, all hers.”

She made a note.

“I didn’t know you could take them off unpolished wood.”

“It was solid glass, two feet long, a massive thing. I suppose if we were surprised by anything it was that the blows she struck with it hadn’t killed Gwen and Amber. They were both tiny women. By rights she should have smashed their skulls with it.” He sipped his coffee.

“It leant some credence to her story, in fact, that she only tapped them lightly in the first instance to make them shut up. We were afraid she might use that in her defence to get the charge reduced to manslaughter, the argument being that she slit their throats only because she believed they were already dead and she was trying to dismember them in panic. If she could then go on to show that the initial blows with the rolling pin were struck with very little force well, she might almost have persuaded a jury that the whole thing was a macabre accident. Which is one good reason, by the way, why she never mentioned the fight with her mother. We did push her on that, but she kept insisting that no mist on the mirror meant they were dead.”

He pulled a face.

“So I spent a very unpleasant two days working with the pathologist and the bodies, going step by step through what actually happened. We ended up with enough evidence of the fight Gwen put up to save her life to press a murder charge. Poor woman. Her hands and arms were literally cut to ribbons where she had tried to ward off the blows.”

Roz stared into her coffee for some minutes.

“Olive was very kind to me the other day. I can’t imagine her doing something like that.”

“You’ve never seen her in a rage. You might think differently if you had.”

“Have you seen her in a rage?”

“No,” he admitted.

“Well, I find it difficult even to imagine that. I accept she’s put on a lot of weight in the last six years but she’s a heavy, stolid type.

It’s highly strung, impatient people who lose their tempers.” She saw his scepticism and laughed.

“I know, I know, amateur psychology of the worst kind. Just two more questions then I’ll leave you in peace. What happened to Gwen and Amber’s clothes?”

“She burnt them in one of those square wire incinerators in the garden.

We retrieved some scraps from the ashes which matched the descriptions that Martin gave of the clothes the two women had been wearing that morning.”

“Why did she do that?”

“To get rid of them, presumably.”

“You didn’t ask her?”

He frowned.

“I’m sure we must have done. I can’t remember now.”

“There’s nothing in her statement about burning clothes.”

He lowered his head in reflection and pressed a thumb and forefinger to his eyelids.

“We asked her why she took their clothes off,” he murmured, ‘and she said they had to be naked or she couldn’t see where to make the cuts through the joints. I think Geof then asked her what she had done with the clothes.”

He fell silent.

“And?”

He looked up and rubbed his jaw pensively.

“I don’t think she gave an answer. If she did, I can’t remember it. I have a feeling the information about the scraps in the incinerator came in the next morning when we made a thorough search of the garden.”

“So you asked her then?”

He shook his head.

“I didn’t, though I suppose Geof may have done. Gwen had a floral nylon overall that had melted over a lump of wool and cotton. We had to peel it apart into its constituent elements but there was enough there that was recognisable. Martin ID’d the bits and so did the neighbour.” He stabbed a finger in the air.

“There were some buttons, too.

Martin recognised those straightaway as being from the dress his wife had been wearing.”

“But didn’t you wonder why Olive took time out to burn the clothes? She could have put them in the suitcases with the bodies and dumped the whole lot in the sea.”

“The incinerator certainly wasn’t burning at five o’clock that night or we’d have noticed it; therefore disposing of the clothes must have been one of the first things she did. She wouldn’t have seen it as taking time out because at that stage she probably still thought dismembering two bodies would be comparatively easy. Look, she was trying to get rid of evidence.

The only reason she panicked and called us in was because her father was coming home. If it had been just the three women living in that house she could have gone through with her plan, and we’d have had the job of trying to identify some bits and pieces of mutilated flesh found floating in the sea off Southampton. She might even have got away with it.”

“I doubt it. The neighbours weren’t stupid. They’d have wondered why Gwen and Amber were missing.”

“True,” he conceded.

“What was the other question?”

“Did Olive’s hands and arms have a lot of scratches on them from her fight with Gwen?”

He shook his head.

“None. She had some bruising but no scratches.”

Roz stared at him.

“Didn’t that strike you as odd? You said Gwen was fighting for her life.”

“She had nothing to scratch with,” he said almost apologetically.

“Her fingernails were bitten to the quick. It was rather pathetic in a woman of her age. All she could do was grip Olive’s wrists to try and keep the knife away. That’s what the bruises were. Deep finger-marks.

We took photographs of them.”

With an abrupt movement Roz squared her papers and dropped them into her briefcase.

“Not much room for doubt then, is there?” she said, picking up her coffee cup.

“None at all. And it wouldn’t have made any difference, you know, if she’d kept her mouth shut or pleaded not guilty. She would still have been convicted. The evidence against her was overwhelming. In the end, even her father had to accept that. I felt quite sorry for him then. He became an old man overnight.”

Roz glanced at the tape, which was still running.

“Was he very fond of her?”

“I don’t know. He was the most undemonstrative person I’ve ever met. I got the impression he wasn’t fond of any of them but’ he shrugged ‘he certainly took Olive’s guilt very badly.”

She drank her coffee.

“Presumably the post-mortem revealed that Amber had had a baby when she was thirteen?”

He nodded.

“Did you pursue that at all? Try and trace the child?”

“We didn’t see the need. It had happened eight years before.

It was hardly likely to have any bearing on the case.” He waited, but she didn’t say anything.

“So? Will you go on with the book?”

“Oh, yes,” she said.

He looked surprised.

“Why?”

“Because there are more inconsistencies now than there were before.”

She held up her fingers and ticked them off point by point.

“Why was she crying so much when she telephoned the police station that the desk sergeant couldn’t understand what she was saying? Why wasn’t she wearing her best dress for London? Why did she burn the clothes?

Why did her father think she was innocent? Why wasn’t he shocked by Gwen and Amber’s deaths? Why did she say she didn’t like Amber? Why didn’t she mention the fight with her mother if she intended to plead guilty? Why were the blows from the rolling pin so comparatively light? Why? Why? Why?” She dropped her hands to the table with a wry smile.

“They may very well be red herrings but I can’t get rid of a gut feeling that there’s something wrong. Ultimately, perhaps, I cannot square your and her solicitor’s conviction that Olive was mad with the assessments of five psychiatrists who all say she’s normal.”

He studied her for some minutes in silence.

“You accused me of assuming her guilt before I knew it for a fact, but you’re doing something rather worse. You’re assuming her innocence in spite of the facts. Supposing you manage to whip up support for her through this book of yours and in view of the way the judicial system is reeling at the moment, that’s not as unlikely as it should be have you no qualms about releasing someone like her back into society?”

“None at all, if she’s innocent.”

“And if she isn’t, but you get her out anyway?”

“Then the law is an ass.”

“All right, if she didn’t do it, who did?”

“Someone she cared about.” She finished her coffee and switched off the tape.

“Anything else just doesn’t make sense.”

She shut the recorder into her briefcase and stood up.

“You’ve been very kind to give up so much of your time. Thank you, and thank you for the lunch.” She held out a hand.

He took it gravely.

“My pleasure, Miss Leigh.” Her fingers, soft and warm in his, moved nervously when he held them too long, and he thought she seemed suddenly rather afraid of him. It was probably for the best. One way and another, she spelt trouble.

She walked to the door.

“Goodbye, Sergeant Hawksley. I hope the business picks up for you.”

He gave a savage smile.

“It will. This is what’s known as a temporary blip, I assure you.”

“Good.” She paused.

“There’s just one last thing. I understand Robert Martin told you he thought the more likely scenario was that Gwen battered Amber, and Olive then killed Gwen trying to defend her sister. Why did you dismiss that possibility?”

“It didn’t hold water. The pathologist established that both throats were cut with the same hand. The size, depth, and angle of the wounds were consistent with one attacker. Gwen wasn’t just fighting for herself, you know, she was fighting for Amber, too. Olive is completely ruthless. You would be very foolish to forget that.” He smiled again but the smile didn’t reach his eyes.

“If you’ll take my advice you’ll abandon the whole thing.”

Roz shrugged.

“I tell you what, Sergeant’ she gestured towards the restaurant ‘you mind your business, and I’ll mind mine.”

He listened to her heels tapping away down the alley, then reached for the telephone and dialled.

“Geof,” he snapped into the mouthpiece, ‘get down here, will you? We need to talk.” His eyes hardened as he listened to the voice at the other end.

“Like hell it’s not your problem. I’m damned if I’ll be the fall guy for this one.”

Roz glanced at her watch as she drove away. It was four thirty.

If she pushed it she might catch Peter Crew before he went home for the day. She found a parking space in the centre of Southampton and arrived at his office just as he was leaving.

“Mr. Crew!” she called, running after him.

He turned with his unconvincing smile, only to frown when he saw who it was.

“I’ve no time to talk to you now, Miss Leigh. I have an engagement.”

“Let me walk with you,” she urged.

“I won’t delay you, I promise.”

He gave a nod of acquiescence and set off again, the hair of his toupee bobbing in time to his steps.

“My car isn’t far.”

Roz did not waste time on pleasantries.

“I gather Mr. Martin left his money to Amber’s illegitimate son. I have been told’ she stretched the truth like a piece of elastic ‘that he was adopted by some people called Brown who have since emigrated to Australia. Can you tell me if you’ve made any progress in finding him?”

Mr. Crew shot her an annoyed glance.

“Now where did you find that out, I wonder?” His voice clipped the words angrily.

“Has someone in my practice been talking?”

“No,” she assured him.

“I had it from an independent source.

His eyes narrowed.

“I find that hard to believe. May I ask who it was?”

Roz smiled easily.

“Someone who knew Amber at the time the baby was born.”

“How did they know the name?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“Robert certainly wouldn’t have talked,” he muttered.

“There are rules governing the tracing of adopted children, which he was well aware of, but even allowing for that he was passionate on the subject of secrecy. If the child were to be found he didn’t want any publicity surrounding the inheritance.

The stigma of the murders could follow the boy all his life.” He shook his head crossly.

“I must insist, Miss Leigh, that you keep this information to yourself.

It would be gross irresponsibility to publish it. It could jeopardise the lad’s future.”

“You really do have quite the wrong impression of me,” said Roz pleasantly.

“I approach my work with immense care, and I do not set out to expose people for the sake of it.”

He turned a corner.

“Well, be warned, young lady. I shan’t hesitate to take out an injunction against your book if I think it justified.” A gust of wind lifted the toupee’s peak and he pressed it firmly to his head like a hat.

Roz, a step or two behind him, scurried alongside.

“Fair enough,” she said, biting back her laughter.

“So, on that basis, could you answer my question? Have you found him yet? Are you anywhere near finding him?”

He padded on doggedly.

“Without wishing to be offensive, Miss Leigh, I don’t see how that information can help you. We have just agreed you won’t be publishing it.”

She decided to be straight with him.

“Olive knows all about him, knows her father left him his money, knows you’re looking for him.” She lifted her hands at his expression of irritation.

“Not, in the first instance, from me, Mr. Crew. She’s very astute and what she hadn’t guessed for herself she picked up on the prison grapevine. She said her father would always leave money to family if he could so it hardly required much imagination to guess that he would try and trace Amber’s child.

Anyway, whether or not you’ve had any success seems to matter to her. I hoped you could tell me something that would set her mind at rest.”

He stopped abruptly.

“Does she want him found?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hm. Perhaps she thinks the money will come to her in the absence of the named beneficiary?”

Roz showed her surprise.

“I don’t think that’s ever occurred to her. It couldn’t, anyway, could it? You made that point before.”

Mr. Crew set off again.

“Robert did not insist that Olive should be kept in the dark. His only instruction was that we should avoid distressing her unnecessarily.

Wrongly, perhaps, I assumed that knowledge of the terms of the will would distress her. However, if she is already acquainted with them well, well, you can leave that with me, Miss Leigh. Was there anything else?”

“Yes. Did Robert Martin ever visit her in prison?”

“No. I’m sorry to say he never spoke to her again after she was charged with the murders.”

Roz caught his arm.

“But he thought she was innocent,” she protested with some indignation, ‘and he paid her legal bills.

Why wouldn’t he see her? That was very cruel, wasn’t it?”

There was a sharp gleam in the man’s eyes.

“Very cruel,” he agreed, ‘but not on Robert’s part. It was Olive who refused to see him. It drove him to his death, which, I think, was her intention all along.”

Roz frowned unhappily.

“You and I have very different views of her, Mr. Crew. I’ve only experienced her kindness.”

The frown deepened.

“She did know he wanted to see her, I suppose.”

“Of course. As a prosecution witness he had to apply to the Home Office for special permission to visit her, even though she was his daughter. If you contact them they’ll verify it for you.” He moved on again and Roz had to run to keep up with him.

“What about the inconsistencies in her statement, Mr. Crew?

Did you ask her about them?”

“What inconsistencies?”

“Well, for example, the fact that she doesn’t mention the fight with her mother but claims Gwen and Amber were dead before she started to dismember them.”

He cast an impatient glance at his watch.

“She was lying.”

Roz caught at his arm again and forced him to stop.

“You were her solicitor,” she said angrily.

“You had a duty to believe her.”

“Don’t be naY ve Miss Leigh. I had a duty to represent her.”

He shook himself free.

“If solicitors were required to believe everything their clients told them there would be little or no legal representation left.” His lips thinned in distaste.

“In any case I did believe her. She said she killed them and I accepted it. I had to. In spite of every attempt I made to suggest she said nothing, she insisted on making her confession.” His eyes bored into hers.

“Are you telling me now that she denies the murders?”

“No,” Roz admitted, ‘but I don’t think the version she gave the police is the correct one.”

He studied her for a moment.

“Did you talk to Graham Deedes?” She nodded.

“And?”

“He agrees with you.”

“The police?”

She nodded again.

“One of them. He also agrees with you.”

“And doesn’t that tell you anything?”

“Not really. Deedes was briefed by you and never even spoke to her and the police have been wrong before.” She brushed a curl of red hair from her face.

“Unfortunately, I don’t have your faith in British justice.”

“Obviously not.” Crew smiled coolly.

“But your scepticism is misplaced this time. Good day to you, Miss Leigh.” He loped away up the wind-swept street, the absurd toupee held in place under his hand, his coat-tails whipping about his long legs.

He was a comical figure, but Roz did not feel like laughing. For all his idiotic mannerisms he had a certain dignity.

She telephoned St. Angela’s Convent from a payphone but it was after five o’clock and whoever answered said Sister Bridget had gone home for the evening. She called Directory Enquiries for the DSS number in Dawlington, but, when she tried it, the office had closed for the night and there was no answer. Back in her car she pencilled in a rough timetable for the following morning, then sat for some time with her notebook propped against the steering-wheel, running over in her mind what Crew had told her. But she couldn’t concentrate. Her attention kept wandering to the more attractive lure of Hal Hawksley in the Poacher’s kitchen.

He had an unnerving trick of catching her eye when she wasn’t expecting it, and the shock to her system every time was cataclysmic. She thought ‘going weak at the knees’ was something invented by romantic authoresses. But the way things were, if she went back to the Poacher, she’d need a Zimmer frame just to make it through the door! Was she mad? The man was some sort of gangster. Whoever heard of a restaurant without customers? People had to eat, even in recessions. With a rueful shake of her head, she fired the engine and set off back to London. What the hell, anyway! Sod’s law predicated that because thoughts of him filled her mind with erotic fantasies his thoughts of her (if he thought about her at all) would be anything but libidinous.

London, when she reached it, was fittingly dogged and oppressive with Thursday night rush-hour traffic.

An older motherly inmate, elected by the others, paused nervously by the open door. The Sculptress terrified her but, as the girls kept saying, she was the only one Olive would talk to.

You remind her of her mother, they all said. The idea alarmed her, but she was curious. She watched the huge brooding figure, clumsily rolling a cigarette paper around a meagre sprinkling of tobacco, for several moments before she spoke.

“Hey, Sculptress! Who’s the redhead you’re seeing?”

Except for a brief ifick of her eyes, Olive ignored her.

“Here, have one of mine.” She fished a pack of Silk Cut from her pocket and proffered it. The response was immediate. Like a dog responding to the ringing tap of its dinner plate, Olive shuffled across the floor and took one, secreting it in the folds of her dress somewhere.

“So who’s the redhead?” persisted the other.

“An author. She’s writing a book about me.”

“Christ!” said the older woman in disgust.

“What she want to write about you for? I’m the one got bloody stitched up.”

Olive stared at her.

“Maybe I did, too.”

“Oh, sure,” the other sniggered, tapping her thigh.

“Now pull the other one. It’s got frigging bells on.”

A wheeze of amusement gusted from Olive’s lips.

“Well, you know what they say: you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time…” She paused invitingly.

“But not all of the people all of the time,” the woman finished obligingly. She wagged her finger.

“You haven’t got a prayer.”

Olive’s unblinking eyes held hers.

“So who needs prayers?”

She tapped the side of her head.

“Find yourself a gullible journalist, then use a bit more of this. Even you might get somewhere. She’s an opinion-former. You fool her and she fools everyone else.”

“That stinks!” declared the woman incautiously.

“It’s only the bloody psychos they’re ever interested in. The rest of us poor sods can go hang ourselves for all they care.”

Something rather unpleasant shifted at the back of Olive’s tiny eyes.

“Are you calling me a psycho?”

The woman smiled weakly and retreated a step.

“Hey, Sculptress, it was a slip of the tongue.” She held up her hands.

“OK? No harm done.” She was sweating as she walked away.

Behind her, using her bulk to obscure what she was doing from prying eyes, Olive took the day figure she was working on from her bottom drawer and set her ponderous fingers to moulding the child on its mother’s lap. Whether it was intentional or whether she hadn’t the skill to do it differently, the mother’s crude hands, barely disinterred from the day, seemed to be smothering the life from the baby’s plump, round body.

Olive crooned quietly to herself as she worked. Behind the mother and child, a series of figures, like grey gingerbread men, lined the back of the table. Two or three had lost their heads.

He sat slumped on the steps outside the front door of her block of flats, smelling of beer, his head buried in his hands. Roz stared at him for several seconds, her face blank of expression.

“What are you doing here?”

He had been crying, she saw.

“We need to talk,” he said.

“You never talk to me.”

She didn’t bother to answer. Her ex-husband was very drunk.

There was nothing they could say that hadn’t been said a hundred times before. She was so tired of his messages on her answer phone tired of the letters, tired of the hatred that knotted inside her when she heard his voice or saw his handwriting.

He plucked at her skirt as she tried to pass, clinging to it like a child.

“Please, Roz. I’m too pissed to go home.”

She took him upstairs out of an absurd sense of past duty.

“But you can’t stay,” she told him, pushing him on to the sofa.

“I’ll ring Jessica and get her to come and collect you.”

“Sam’s sick,” he muttered.

“She won’t leave him.”

Roz shrugged unsympathetically.

“Then I’ll call a cab.”

“No.” He reached down and jerked the jack plug from its socket.

“I’m staying.

There was a raw edge to his voice which was a warning, if she had chosen to heed it, that he was in no mood to be trifled with. But they had been married too long and had had too many bruising rows for her to allow him to dictate terms. She had only contempt for him now.

“Please yourself,” she said.

“I’ll go to a hotel.”

He stumbled to the door and stood with his back to it.

“It wasn’t my fault, Roz. It was an accident. For God’s sake, will you stop punishing me?”