The Sculptress (13 page)

‘I’m busy.’

‘What if I came back in an hour? Could you talk
then?’

‘Maybe.’

She gave a rueful smile. ‘I’ll 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’ll sit in the car. I’ve
some notes 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 mangetout,
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 naïve.’ 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
naïve 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 naïve’ – 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 clear 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 cafetière. ‘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 draft 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, absent-mindedly 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
cafetière 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 windup?’

‘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. ‘D.S. 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. Je-
sus
! 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.