Sculptress

THREE

Graham Deedes was young, harassed, and black. He saw Roz’s surprise as she came into his room, and he frowned his irritation.

“I had no idea black bannisters were such a rarity, Miss Leigh.”

“Why do you say that?” she asked curiously, sitting down in the chair he indicated.

“You looked surprised.”

“I am, but not by your colour. You’re much younger than I expected.”

“Thirty-three,” he said.

“Not so young.”

“No, but when you were briefed to appear for Olive Martin you can only have been twenty-six or twenty-seven. That is young for a murder trial.”

“True,” he agreed, ‘but I was only the junior. The QC was considerably older.”

“But you did most of the preparation?”

He nodded.

“Such as there was. It was a very unusual case.”

She took her tape-recorder from her bag.

“Have you any objections to being recorded?”

“Not if you intend to talk about Olive Martin.”

“Ido.”

He chuckled.

“Then I’ve no objections, for the simple reason that I can tell you virtually nothing about her. I saw the woman once, on the day she was sentenced, and I never even spoke to her.”

“But I understood you were preparing a diminished responsibility defence. Didn’t you meet her in the course of doing that?”

“No, she refused to see me. I did all my work from material her solicitor sent me.” He smiled ruefully.

“Which wasn’t much, I have to say. We would, quite literally, have been laughed out of court if we’d had to proceed, so I was quite relieved when the judge ruled her guilty plea admissible.”

“What arguments would you have used if you had been called?”

“We planned two different approaches.” Deedes considered for a moment.

“One, that the balance of her mind was temporarily disturbed as far as I recall it was the day after her birthday and she was deeply upset because instead of paying her attention the family teased her about being fat.” He raised his eyebrows in query and Roz nodded.

“In addition, I believe, she made a reference in her statement to not liking noise. We did manage to find a doctor who was prepared to give evidence that noise can cause such violent distress in some people that they may act out of character in trying to stop it. There was no psychiatric or medical evidence, however, to prove that Olive was of this type.” He tapped his forefingers together.

“Two, we were going to work backwards from the appalling savagery of the crime and invite the court to draw what we hoped to persuade them was an inescapable inference that Olive was a psychopath. We hadn’t a cat’s chance on the balance of her mind argument, but the psychopathy’ he made a see-saw motion with one hand ‘maybe. We found a professor of psychology who was prepared to stick his neck out after seeing the photographs of the bodies.”

“But did he ever talk to her?”

He shook his head.

“There wasn’t time and she wouldn’t have seen him anyway. She was quite determined to plead guilty. I assume Mr. Crew told you that she wrote to the Home Office demanding an independent psychiatric report to prove that she was competent to plead?” Roz nodded.

“After that there was really nothing we could do. It was an extraordinary business,” he mused.

“Most defendants fall over themselves to come up with excuses.”

“Mr. Crew seems convinced she’s a psychopath.”

“I think I’d agree with him.”

“Because of what she did to Amber and her mother? You don’t have any other evidence?”

“No. Isn’t that enough?”

“Then how do you explain that five psychiatrists have all diagnosed her normal?” Roz looked up.

“She’s had several sessions, as far as I can gather, in the prison.”

“Who told you this? Olive?” He looked sceptical.

“Yes, but I spoke to the Governor afterwards and she verified it.”

He shrugged.

“I wouldn’t place too much reliance on it.

You’d have to see the reports. It depends who wrote them and why they were testing her.”

“Still, it’s odd, don’t you think?”

“In what way?”

“You’d expect some measurable level of sociopathic behaviour over a period of time if she was a psychopath.”

“Not necessarily. Prison may be the sort of controlled environment that suits her. Or perhaps her particular psychopathy was directed against her family. Something brought it on that day and once rid of them, she settled down.” He shrugged again.

“Who knows? Psychiatry is hardly an exact science.” He was silent for a moment.

“In my experience, well adjusted people don’t hack their mothers and their sisters to death. You do know they were still alive when she set to with the axe?” He smiled grimly.

“She knew it, too. Don’t imagine she didn’t.”

Roz frowned.

“There is another explanation,” she said slowly, ‘but the trouble is, while it fits the facts, it’s too absurd to be credible.”

He waited.

“Well?” he asked at last.

“Olive didn’t do it.” She saw his amused disbelief and hurried on.

“I’m not saying I go along with it, I’m just saying that it fits the facts.”

“Your facts,” he pointed out gently.

“It seems to me you’re being a little selective in what you choose to believe.”

“Maybe.” Roz remembered her extremes of mood of the previous evening.

He watched her for a moment.

“She knew a great deal about the murders for someone who wasn’t responsible for them.”

“Do you think so?”

“Of course. Don’t you?”

“She doesn’t say anything about her mother trying to ward off the axe and the carving knife. But that must have been the most frightening part. Why didn’t she mention it?”

“Shame. Embarrassment. Traumatic amnesia. You’d be surprised how many murderers blot what they’ve done from their memories. Sometimes it’s years before they come to terms with their guilt. In any case, I doubt the struggle with her mother was as frightening for Olive as you suggest. Gwen Martin was a tiny woman, five feet at the most, I would think. Physically, Olive took after her father, so containing her mother would have been easy for her.” He saw the hesitation in Roz’s eyes.

“Let me put a question to you. Why would Olive confess to two murders she didn’t commit?”

“Because people do.”

“Not when they have their lawyers present, Miss Leigh. I accept that it happened, which is why new rules were introduced governing the taking of evidence, but Olive did not fall into the category of either forced confession or having her confession subsequently tampered with.

She had legal representation throughout. So I repeat, why would she confess to something she didn’t do?”

“To protect someone else?” She was relieved they weren’t in court. He was a bruising cross-examiner.

“Who?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t know.”

“There was no one else except her father, and he was at work.

The police had him thoroughly checked and his alibi was unbreakable.”

“There was Olive’s lover.” He stared at her.

“She told me she’d had an abortion. Presumably, then, she must have had a lover.”

He found that very entertaining.

“Poor Olive.” He laughed.

“Well, I guess an abortion is as good a way as any of keeping her end up. Especially’ he laughed again ‘if everyone believes her. I shouldn’t be too gullible, if I were you.”

She smiled coldly.

“Perhaps it’s you who is being gullible by subscribing to the cheap male view that a woman like Olive could not attract a lover.”

Deedes studied her set face and wondered what was driving her.

“You’re right, Miss Leigh, it was cheap, and I apologise.”

He raised his hands briefly, then dropped them again.

“But this is the first I have heard about an abortion. Let’s just say it strikes me as a little unlikely. And somewhat convenient, perhaps?

It’s not something you can ever really check, is it, not without Olive’s permission. If laymen were allowed to browse through other people’s medical records some very delicate secrets might be exposed.”

Roz regretted her waspish remark. Deedes was a nicer man than Crew and hadn’t deserved it.

“Olive mentioned an abortion. I assumed the lover. But perhaps she was raped.

Babies can be conceived as easily in hate as in love.

He shrugged.

“Beware of being used, Miss Leigh. Olive Martin dominated the court the day she appeared in it. I had the impression then, and still have it, that it was we who were dancing to her tune not she to ours.”

Dawlington was a small eastern suburb of Southampton, once an isolated village, now swallowed up in the great urban expansion of the twentieth century. It maintained an identity of a sort by the busy trunk-roads that gave it tarmac boundaries but, even so, the place was easy to miss. Only a tired peeling shop sign, advertising Dawlington Newsagents, alerted Roz to the fact that she had left one suburb and entered another. She drew into the kerb before a left-hand turning and consulted her map.

She was, presumably, in the High Street and the road to the left she squinted at the sign was Ainsley Street. She ran her finger across the grid.

“Ainsley Street,” she muttered.

“Come on, you bugger, where are you? OK. Leven Road. First right, second left.” With a glance in her driving mirror, she pulled out into the traffic and turned right.

Olive’s story, she thought, grew odder by the minute, as she studied number twenty-two, Leven Road, from her parked car. Mr. Crew had said the house was un saleable She had imagined something out of a Gothic novel, twelve months of dereliction and decay since the death of Robert Martin, a house condemned by the haunting horror in its kitchen.

Instead, the reality was a cheerful little semi, freshly painted, with pink, white, and red geraniums nodding in boxes beneath its windows.

Who, she wondered, had bought it? Who was brave enough (or ghoulish enough?) to live with the ghosts of that tragic family?

She double-checked the address from press cuttings she had put together that morning in the archives basement of the local newspaper. There was no mistake. A black and white photograph of “The House of Horror’ showed this same neat semi, but without its window-boxes.

She climbed out of the car and crossed the road.

The house remained stubbornly silent to her ring on the doorbell, so she went next door and tried there. A young woman answered with a sleepy toddler clinging round her neck.

“Yes?”

“Hello,” said Roz, “I’m sorry to bother you.” She indicated towards her right.

“It’s your neighbours I really want to talk to but there’s no one in.

Have you any idea when they might be back?”

The young woman thrust out a hip to support the child more easily and subjected Roz to a penetrating glare.

“There’s nothing to see, you know. You’re wasting your time.”

“I’m sorry?”

“They pulled the innards out of the house and revamped the whole of the inside. They’ve done it up nice. There’s nothing to see, no blood stains, no spirits roaming about, nothing.” She pressed the child’s head against her shoulder, a casual, proprietary gesture, a statement of tender motherhood at odds with the hostility in her voice.

“You want to know what I think? You should see a psychiatrist. It’s the likes of you who’re the real sick people of society.” She prepared to close the door.

Roz raised her palms in a gesture of surrender.

She smiled sheepishly.

“I haven’t come to gawp,” she said.

“My name is Rosalind Leigh and I’m working in co-operation with the late Mr. Martin’s solicitor.”

The woman eyed her suspiciously.

“Oh, yeah? What’s his name?”

“Peter Crew.”

“You could of got it from the paper.”

“I have a letter from him. May I show it to you? It will prove Iamwholsaylam.”

“Go on then.”

“It’s in the car. I’ll fetch it.” She retrieved her briefcase hurriedly from the boot, but when she got back, the door was closed.

She rang several times and waited for ten minutes on the doorstep, but it was obvious the young woman had no intention of answering. From a room above came the wail of a baby. Roz listened to the mother’s soothing tones as she climbed the stairs, then, thoroughly annoyed with herself, she retreated to the car and pondered her next step.

The press cuttings were disappointing. It was names she wanted, names of friends or neighbours, even old school teachers, who could give her background detail. But the local newspaper had, like the nationals, sensationalised the crime’s horror without uncovering any details about Olive’s life or why she might have done it. There were the usual quotes from ‘neighbours’ all anonymous and all wise after the event but they were so uniformly un enlightening that Roz suspected imaginative journalism at work.

“No, I’m not surprised,” said a neighbour, ‘shocked and appalled, yes, but not surprised. She was a strange girl, unfriendly, kept herself to herself. Not like the sister. She was the attractive, outgoing one.

We all liked Amber.”

“The parents found her very difficult. She wouldn’t mix or make friends. She was shy, I suppose, because of her size but she had a way of looking at you that wasn’t normal.”

Beyond the sensationalism, there had been nothing to write about. There was no police investigation to report Olive had phoned them herself, had confessed to the crime in the presence of her solicitor, and had been charged with murder.

Because she had pleaded guilty there had been no salacious details from a lengthy trial, no names of friends or associates to draw on, and her sentencing had rated a single paragraph under the headline: TWBNTY-FIVE YEARS FOR BRUTAL MURDERS. A conspiracy of journalistic apathy seemed to surround the whole event. Of the five cardinal his of the journalist’s creed Where?” When?” What?” Who?” and Why? the first four had been amply covered. Everyone knew what had happened, who had done it, where, and when.

But no one, it seemed, knew why. Nor, and this was the real puzzle, had anyone actually asked. Could teasing alone really drive a young woman to such a pitch of anger that she would hack her family to pieces?

With a sigh, Roz switched on the radio and fed Pavarotti into the tape-deck. Bad choice, she thought, as “Nessun Dorma’ flooded the car and brought back bitter memories of a summer she would rather forget.

Strange how a piece of music could be so evocative, but then the path to separation had been choreographed around the television screen with “Nessun Dorma’ triggering the stops and starts of their rows. She could remember every detail of every World Cup football match. They were the only peaceful periods in a summer of war. How much better, she thought wearily, if she had called a halt then instead of dragging the misery out to its far more terrible conclusion.

A net curtain, in the semi to the right, number 24, twitched behind a Neighbourhood Watch sticker which proclaimed itself loudly against the glass. A case, Roz wondered, of locking the stable door after the horse had bolted? Or was that Same net curtain twitching the day Olive wielded her chopper? Two garages filled the gap between the houses, but it was possible the occupants had heard something.

“Olive Martin took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks…” The words circled in her brain as they had done, on and off, for days.

She resumed her contemplation of number 22, but watched the net curtain out of the corner of her eye. It moved again, plucked by prying fingers, and she felt unreasonably irritated by the busybody spying on her. It was an empty, wasted life that had time to stand and stare.

What sort of interfering old bitch inhabited there, she wondered? The frustrated spinster who got off on voyeurism? Or the bored and boring wife with nothing better to do than find fault? Then something clicked inside her head, a realignment of thought like the points on a railway line.

Just the sort of busybody she wanted, of course, but why had that not occurred to her immediately? Really, she worried about herself. She spent so much time in neutral now, just listening to the footfalls, leading nowhere, that echoed in her memory.

A frail old man opened the door, a small, shrunken person with transparent skin and bowed shoulders.

“Come in, come in,” he said, standing back and ushering her into his corridor.

“I heard what you said to Mrs. Blair. She won’t talk to you, and I’ll tell you something else, it wouldn’t help you if she did. They only came four years ago when the first youngster was on the way.

Didn’t know the family at all and, as far as I know, never spoke to poor old Bob. What shall I say? She’s got a nerve. Typical of today’s youngsters. Always wanting something for nothing.” He muttered on, leading the way into his living room.

“Resents living in a goldfish bowl but forgets that they got the house for a pittance just because it was a goldfish bowl. Ted and Dorothy Clarke virtually gave the place away because they couldn’t stand it any longer. What shall I say? Ungrateful girl. Imagine what it’s like for those of us who’ve always lived here. No bargains for us. We have to put up with it, don’t we? Sit down.

Sit down.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re from Mr. Crew, you say. They found the child yet?”

He stared into her face with disconcertingly bright blue eyes.

Roz stared back, her mind racing.

“That’s not my province,” she said carefully, ‘so I’m not sure where they are on that one. I’m conducting a follow-up of Olive’s case. You did know that Mr. Crew is still representing her?”

“What’s to represent?” he asked. His eyes strayed in disappointment.

“Poor little Amber. They should never have made her give it up. I said it would cause trouble.”

Roz sat very still and stared at the worn carpet.

“People don’t listen, of course,” he said crossly.

“You give them well-meant advice and they tell you you’re interfering.

What shall I say? I could see where it would lead.” He fell into a resentful silence.

“You’re talking about the child,” said Roz at last.

He looked at her curiously.

“If they’d found him, you’d know.”

It was a boy, then.

“Oh, yes.”

“Bob did his best but there’s rules about these things.

They’d signed him away, given up their stake, so to speak.

You’d think it was different where money’s concerned, but there’s no contest for the likes of us against the government.

What shall I say? They’re all thieves.”

Roz made what she could of this speech. Was he talking about Mr.

Martin’s will? Was this child (Amber’s child?) the beneficiary? On the pretext of looking for a handkerchief, she opened her bag and surreptitiously switched on her tape-recorder. This conversation, she felt, was going to be tortuous.

“You mean,” she tried tentatively, ‘that the government will get the money?”

“Course.”

She nodded wisely.

“Things aren’t exactly stacked in our favour.”

“Never are. Damn thieves. Take every last penny off you. And what for? To make sure the ski vers go on breeding like rabbits at the expense of the rest of us. Makes you sick. There’s a woman in the council houses has five children, and all by different fathers.

What shall I say? They’re all worthless. Is that the sort of breeding stock we want in this country? Goodfor-nothings, with not a brain between them. Where’s the sense in encouraging a woman like that?

Should have sterilised her and put a stop to it.”

Roz was noncommittal, unwilling to be drawn down a culdesac, even more unwilling to antagonise him.

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“Course I’m right, and it’ll be the death of the species.

Before the dole, she’d have starved to death and her brood with her, and quite right too. What shall I say? It’s the survival of the fittest in this world. There’s no other species mollycoddles its rotten apples the way we do, and certainly none that pays its rotten apples to produce more rotten apples. Makes you sick.

How many children have you got?”

Roz smiled faintly.

“None, I’m afraid. I’m not married.”

“See what I mean?” He cleared his throat noisily.

“Makes you sick. What shall I say? It’s your sort, decent sort, should have the children.”

“How many do you have, Mr. er-?” She made a play of consulting her diary, as if looking for his name.

“Hayes. Mr. Hayes. Two lads. Fine boys. Grown up now, of course.

Only the one granddaughter,” he added morosely.

“It’s not right. I keep telling them they’ve a duty to their class but I could be pissing in the wind excuse my French for all the good it does.” His face set into familiar lines of irritation. His obsession was clearly a deep-seated one.

Roz knew she had to take the plunge or one hobby horse would follow another as inexorably as night follows day.

“You’re a very perceptive man, Mr. Hayes. Why were you so sure that making Amber give up her son would cause trouble?”

“Stands to reason there’d come a time when he was wanted again. It’s sod’s law, isn’t it? The minute you throw something out, that’s the minute you find you needed it after all. But it’s too late by then.

It’s gone. My wife was one, forever throwing things away, pots of paint, carpet, and two years later you needed to patch. Me, I hoard.

What shall I say? I value everything.”

“So, are you saying Mr. Martin wasn’t bothered about his grandson before the murders?”

He touched the end of his nose with thumb and forefinger.

“Who’s to say? He kept his own counsel, did Bob. It was Gwen who insisted on signing the kid away. Wouldn’t have it in the house.

Understandable, I suppose, in view of Amber’s age.”

“How old was she?”

He frowned.

“I thought Mr. Crew knew all this.”

She smiled.

“He does but, as I told you, it’s not my province. I’m just interested, that’s all. It seems so tragic.”

“It is that. Thirteen,” he said wistfully.

“She was thirteen. Poor little kid. Didn’t know anything about anything. Some lout at the school was responsible.”

He jerked his head towards the back of his house.

“Parkway Comprehensive.”

“Is that the school Amber and Olive went to?”

“Hah!” His old eyes were amused.

“Gwen wouldn’t have stood for that. She sent them to the posh Convent where they learnt their times tables and didn’t learn the facts of life.”

“Why didn’t Amber have an abortion? Were they Catholics?” She thought again about Olive and foetuses being washed down the sink.

“They didn’t know she was pregnant, did they?

Thought it was puppy fat.” He cackled suddenly.

“Rushed her off to hospital with suspected appendicitis and out pops a bouncing baby boy. They got away with it, too. Best kept secret I’ve ever come across. Even the nuns didn’t know.”

“But you knew,” she prompted.

“The wife guessed,” he said owlishly.

“It was obvious something untoward had happened, and not appendicitis neither. Gwen was well-nigh hysterical the night it happened and my Jeannie put two and two together. Still, we know how to keep our mouths shut. No reason to make life harder for the kid. It wasn’t her fault.”

Roz did some rapid mental arithmetic. Amber was two years younger than Olive which would have made her twenty-six if she were still alive.

“Her son’s thirteen,” she said, ‘and due to inherit half a million pounds. I wonder why Mr. Crew can’t find him. There must be records of the adoption.”

“I heard they’d found traces.” The old man clicked his false teeth with disappointment.

“But, there, it was probably just rumour, Brown Australia,” he muttered with disgust, as if that explained everything.

“I ask you.”

Roz allowed this cryptic remark to pass unchallenged. Time enough to puzzle over it later without claiming ignorance yet again.

“Tell me about Olive,” she invited.

“Were you surprised that she did what she did?”

“I hardly knew the girl.” He sucked his teeth.

“And you don’t feel surprised when people you know get hacked to death, young lady, you feel bloody sick. It did for my Jeannie. She was never the same afterwards, died a couple of years later.”

“I’m sorry.”

He nodded, but it was clearly an old wound that had healed.

“Used to see the child come and go but she wasn’t a great talker. Shy, I suppose.”

“Because she was fat?”

He pursed his lips thoughtfully.

“Maybe. Jeannie said she was teased a lot, but I’ve known fat girls who’ve been the life and soul of the party. It was her nature, I think, to look on the black side. Never laughed much. No sense of humour. That sort doesn’t make friends easily.”

“And Amber did?”

“Oh, yes. She was very popular.” He glanced back down the passages of time.

“She was a pretty girl.”

“Was Olive jealous of her?”

“Jealous?” Mr. Hayes looked surprised.

“I’ve never thought about it. What shall I say? They always seemed very fond of each other.”

Roz shrugged her bewilderment.

“Then why did Olive kill her? And why mutilate the bodies? It’s very odd.”

He scowled suspiciously.

“I thought you were representing her. You should know if anyone does.”

“She won’t say.”

He stared out of the window.

“Well, then.”

Well then what?

“Do you know why?”

“Jeannie reckoned it was hormones.”

“Hormones?” Roz echoed blankly.

“What sort of hormones?”

“You know.” He looked embarrassed.

“Monthly ones.”

“Ah.” PMT? she wondered. But it was hardly a subject she could pursue with him. He was of a generation where menstruation was never mentioned.

“Did Mr. Martin ever say why he thought she did it?”

He shook his head.

“The subject didn’t arise.

What shall I say? We saw very little of him afterwards. He talked about his will once or twice, and the child it was all he thought about.” He cleared his throat again.

“He became a recluse, you know. Wouldn’t have anyone in the house, not even the Clarkes, and there was a time when Ted and he were close as brothers.” His mouth turned down at the corners.

“It was Ted started it, mind. Took against Bob for some reason and wouldn’t go in.

And others followed suit, of course, the way they do.

Reckon I was his only friend at the end. It was me as realised something was wrong, seeing the milk bottles outside.”

“But why did he stay? He was rich enough to let number twenty-two go for peanuts. You’d have thought he’d go anywhere rather than stay with the ghosts of his family.”

Mr. Hayes muttered to himself.

“Never understood it myself. Perhaps he wanted his friends about him.”

“You said the Clarkes moved. Where did they go?”

He shook his head.

“No idea. They upped and went one morning without a word to anyone. A removal van took out their furniture three days later and the house stood empty for a year till the Blairs bought it. Never heard a word from them since. No forwarding address. Nothing. What shall I say?

We were good friends, the six of us, and I’m the only one left now.

Strange business.”

Very strange, thought Roz.

“Can you remember which estate agent sold the house?”

“Peterson’s, but you won’t learn anything from them. Little Hitlers,” he said, ‘all bursting with self importance Told me to mind my own business when I went in and asked what was what. It’s a free world, I pointed out, no reason why a man shouldn’t ask after his friends, but oh, no, they had instructions of confidentiality or some such rubbish.

What shall I say? Made out it was me the Clarkes were cutting their ties with. Hah!

More likely Bob, I told them, or ghosts. And they said if I spread those sort of rumours, they’d take action. You know who I blame. The estate agents’ federation, if there is one, which I doubt…” He rambled on, venting his spleen out of loneliness and frustration.

Roz felt sorry for him.

“Do you see much of your sons?” she asked when he drew to a halt.

“Now and then.”

“How old are they?”

“Forties,” he said after a moment’s thought.

“What did they think of Olive and Amber?”

He pinched his nose again and waggled it from side to side.

“Never knew them. Left home long before either of the girls reached their teens.”

“They didn’t baby-sit or anything like that?”

“My lads? You wouldn’t catch them baby-sitting.” His old eyes moistened, and he nodded towards the sideboard where photographs of two young men in uniform crowded the surface.

“Fine boys. Soldiers.” He thrust out his chest.

“Took my advice and joined up. Mind, they’re out of jobs now, what with the bloomin’ regiment being cut from under them. It makes you sick when you think them and me’s served Queen and country for nigh on fifty years between us. Did I tell you I was in the desert during the war?” He looked vacantly about the room.

“There’s a photograph somewhere of Churchill and Monty in a jeep. We all got one, us boys who were out there. Worth a bob or two, I should think. Now where is it?” He became agitated.

Roz picked up her briefcase.

“Don’t worry about it now, Mr. Hayes. Perhaps I could see it next time I come.”

“You coming back?”

“I’d like to, if it’s no trouble.” She took a card from her handbag, flicking the switch on the recorder at the same time.

“That’s my name and telephone number. Rosalind Leigh. It’s a London number but I’ll be down here regularly over the next few weeks, so if you feel like a chat’ she smiled encouragingly and stood up - ‘give me a ring.”

He regarded her with astonishment.

“A chat.

Goodness me. A youngster like you has better things to do with her time.”

Too right, she thought, but I do need information.

Her smile, like Mr. Crew’s, was false.

“I’ll be seeing you then, Mr. Hayes.”

He pushed himself awkwardly out of his chair and held out a marbled hand.

“It’s been a pleasure meeting you, Miss Leigh. What shall I say? It’s not often an old man sees charming young ladies out of the blue.”

He spoke with such sincerity that she felt chastened by her own lack of it. Why, oh why, she wondered, was the human condition so damn bloody?