The Sculptress (18 page)

‘What a ghastly place this is,’ said Iris, gazing critically
about the bleak grey walls of Roz’s flat from her place
on the vinyl sofa. ‘Haven’t you ever felt the urge to
liven it up a bit?’

‘No. I’m just passing through. It’s a waiting room.’

‘You’ve been here twelve months. I can’t think why
you don’t use the money from the divorce and buy
yourself a house.’

Roz rested her head against the back of her chair.
‘I like waiting rooms. You can be idle in them without
feeling guilty. There’s nothing to do except wait.’

Thoughtfully, Iris put a cigarette between her brilliant
red lips. ‘What are you waiting for?’

‘I don’t know.’

She flicked a lighter to the tip of her cigarette while
her penetrating eye-lined gaze fixed uncomfortably
on Roz. ‘One thing does puzzle me,’ she said. ‘If it
wasn’t Rupert, then why did he leave another tearful message on my answerphone, telling me he had
behaved badly?’

‘Another?’ Roz stared at her hands. ‘Does that
mean he’s done it before?’

‘With tedious regularity.’

‘You’ve never mentioned it.’

‘You’ve never asked me.’

Roz digested this for some moments in silence,
then let out a long sigh. ‘I’ve been realizing recently
how dependent I’ve become on him.’ She touched
her sore lip. ‘His dependence hasn’t changed, of
course. It’s the same as it always was, a constant
demand for reassurance. Don’t worry, Rupert. It’s
not your fault, Rupert. Everything will be all right,
Rupert.’ She spoke the words without emphasis. ‘It’s
why he prefers women. Women are more sympathetic.’
She fell silent.

‘How does that make you dependent on him?’

Roz gave a slight smile. ‘He’s never left me alone
long enough to let me think straight. I’ve been angry
for months.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s very destructive. You
can’t concentrate on anything because the anger
won’t go away. I tear his letters up without reading
them, because I know what they’ll say, but his handwriting
sets my teeth on edge. If I see him or hear
him, I start shaking.’ She gave a hollow laugh. ‘You
can become obsessed by hatred, I think. I could have
moved a long time ago but, instead, I stay here waiting for Rupert to make me angry. That’s how I’m
dependent on him. It’s a prison of sorts.’

Iris wiped her cigarette end round the rim of an
ashtray. Roz was telling her nothing she hadn’t
worked out for herself a long time ago, but she had
never been able to put it into words for the simple
reason that Roz had never let her. She wondered what
had happened to bring the barbed wire down. Clearly,
it was nothing to do with Rupert, however much Roz
might like to think it was. ‘So how are you going to
break out of this prison? Have you decided?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Perhaps you should do what Olive has done,’ said
Iris mildly.

‘And what’s that?’

‘Let someone else in.’

Olive waited by her cell door for two hours. One of
the officers, wondering why, paused to talk to her.
‘Everything all right, Sculptress?’

The fat woman’s eyes fixed on her. ‘What day is
it?’ she demanded.

‘Monday.’

‘That’s what I thought.’ She sounded angry.

The officer frowned. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing
wrong?’

‘There’s nothing.’

‘Were you expecting a visitor?’

‘No. I’m hungry. What’s for tea?’

‘Pizza.’ Reassured, the officer moved on. It made
sense. There were few hours in the day when Olive
wasn’t
hungry, and the threat of withholding her
meals was often the only way to control her. A medical
officer had tried to persuade her once of the benefits
of dieting. He had come away very shaken and never
tried again. Olive craved food in the way others craved
heroin.

In the end Iris stayed for a week and filled the sterile
waiting room of Roz’s life with the raucous baggage
of hers. She ran up a colossal telephone bill phoning
her clients and customers at home and abroad, piled
the tables with magazines, dropped ash all over the
floor, imported armfuls of flowers which she abandoned
in the sink when she couldn’t find a vase, left
the washing-up in tottering stacks on the kitchen
work-tops, and regaled Roz, when she wasn’t doing
something else, with her seemingly inexhaustible flow
of anecdotes.

Roz said her farewells on the following Thursday
afternoon with some relief and rather more regret. If
nothing else, Iris had shown her that a solitary life
was emotionally, mentally, and spiritually deadening.
There was, after all, only so much that one mind
could encompass, and obsessions grew when ideas
went unchallenged.

Olive’s destruction of her cell that night took the
prison by surprise. It was ten minutes before the duty
governor was alerted and another ten before a
response was possible. It required eight officers to
restrain her. They forced her to the ground and
brought their combined weight to bear on her, but
as one remarked later: ‘It was like trying to contain a
bull elephant.’

She had wreaked complete havoc on everything.
Even the lavatory bowl had shattered under a mighty
blow from her welded metal chair which, bent and
buckled, had been discarded amongst the shards of
porcelain. The few possessions which had adorned
her chest of drawers lay broken across the floor and
anything that could be lifted had been hurled in fury
against the walls. A poster of Madonna, ripped limb
from limb, lay butchered on the floor.

Her rage, even under sedation, continued long into
the night from the confines of an unfurnished cell,
designed to cool the tempers of ungovernable
inmates.

‘What the hell’s got into her?’ demanded the duty
governor.

‘God knows,’ said a shaken officer. ‘I’ve always said
she should be in Broadmoor. I don’t care what the
psychiatrists say, she’s completely mad. They’ve no
business to leave her here and expect us to look after
her.’

They listened to the muffled bellowings from behind the locked door. ‘BI-ITCH! BI-ITCH! BI-ITCH!’

The duty governor frowned. ‘Who’s she talking
about?’

The officer winced. ‘One of us, I should think. I
wish we could get her transferred. She puts the wind
up me, she really does.’

‘She’ll be fine again tomorrow.’

‘Which is why she puts the wind up me. You never
know where you are with her.’ She tucked her hair
back into place. ‘You noticed none of her clay figures
were touched except the ones she’s already mutilated?’
She smiled cynically. ‘And have you seen that mother
and child she’s working on? The mother’s only smothering
her baby, for God’s sake. It’s obscene. Presumably
it’s supposed to be Mary and Jesus.’ She sighed.
‘What do I tell her? No breakfast if she doesn’t calm
down?’

‘It’s always worked in the past. Let’s hope
nothing’s changed.’

THE FOLLOWING MORNING
, a week later than
planned, Roz was shown through to a clerical supervisor
at the Social Security office in Dawlington. He
regarded her scabby lip and dark glasses with only
mild curiosity and she realized that for him her appearance
was nothing unusual. She introduced herself and
sat down. ‘I telephoned yesterday,’ she reminded him.

He nodded. ‘Some problem that goes back over
six years, you said.’ He tapped his forefingers on the
desk. ‘I should stress we’re unlikely to be able to help.
We’ve enough trouble chasing current cases, let alone
delving into old records.’

‘But you were here six years ago?’

‘Seven years in June,’ he said without enthusiasm.
‘It won’t help, I’m afraid. I don’t remember you or
your circumstances.’

‘You wouldn’t.’ She smiled apologetically. ‘I was a
little economical with the truth on the telephone. I’m
not a consumer. I’m an author. I’m writing a book about Olive Martin. I need to talk to someone who
knew her when she worked here and I didn’t want a
straight refusal down the phone.’

He looked amused, glad perhaps that he was spared
an impossible search for lost benefits. ‘She was the fat
girl down the corridor. I didn’t even know what her
name was until it appeared in the paper. As far as I
remember, I never exchanged more than a dozen
words with her. You probably know more about her
than I do.’ He crossed his arms. ‘You should have
said what you wanted. You could have saved yourself
a drive.’

Roz took out her notebook. ‘That doesn’t matter.
It’s names I need. People who did speak to her. Is
there anyone else who’s been here as long as you?’

‘A few, but no one who was friendly with Olive. A
couple of reporters came round at the time of the
murders and there wasn’t a soul who admitted to
passing anything more than the time of day with her.’

Roz felt his distrust. ‘And who can blame them?’
she said cheerfully. ‘Presumably it was the gutter press
looking for a juicy headline.
I HELD THE HAND OF A
MONSTER
or something equally tasteless. Only publicity
seekers or idiots allow themselves to be used by
Wapping to boost their grubby profits.’

‘And your book won’t make a profit?’ There was a
dry inflection in his voice.

She smiled. ‘A very modest one by newspaper
standards.’ She pushed her dark glasses to the top of her head, revealing her eyes and the yellow rings
around them. ‘I’ll be honest with you. I was dragooned
into this research by an irritable agent
demanding copy. I found the subject distasteful and
was prepared to abandon it after a token meeting with
Olive.’ She looked at him, turning her pencil between
her fingers. ‘Then I discovered that Olive was human
and very likeable, so I kept going. And almost everyone
I’ve spoken to has given a similar answer to you.
They hardly knew her, they never talked to her, she
was just the fat girl down the corridor. Now, I could
write my book on that theme alone, how social ostracism
led a lonely, unloved girl to turn in a fit of
frenzied anger on her teasing family. But I’m not
going to because I don’t think it’s true. I believe
there’s been a miscarriage of justice. I believe Olive is
innocent.’

Surprised, he reassessed her. ‘It shocked us rigid
when we heard what she’d done,’ he admitted.

‘Because you thought it out of character?’

‘Totally out of character.’ He thought back. ‘She
was a good worker, brighter than most, and she didn’t
clock-watch like some of them. OK, she was never
going to set the world alight, but she was reliable and
willing and she didn’t make waves or get involved in
office politics. She was here about eighteen months
and while no one would have claimed her as a bosom
friend she made no enemies either. She was one of
those people you only think about when you want something done and then you remember them with
relief because you know they’ll do it. You know the
type?’

She nodded. ‘Boring but dependable.’

‘In a nutshell, yes.’

‘Did she tell you anything about her private life?’

He shook his head again. ‘It was true what I said
at the beginning. Our paths rarely crossed. Any contact
we had was work related and even that was minimal.
Most of what I’ve just told you was synthesized
from the amazed reactions of the few who did know
her.’

‘Can you give me their names?’

‘I’m not sure I can remember.’ He looked doubtful.
‘Olive would know them better than I do. Why
don’t you ask her?’

Because she won’t tell me. She won’t tell me anything
.
‘Because,’ she said instead, ‘I don’t want to
hurt her.’ She saw his look of puzzlement and sighed.
‘Supposing doors get slammed in my face and I’m
given the cold shoulder by Olive’s so-called friends.
She’s bound to ask me how I got on, and how would
I answer her? Sorry, Olive, as far as they’re concerned
you’re dead and buried. I couldn’t do that.’

He accepted this. ‘All right, there is someone who
might be willing to help you but I’m not prepared to
give you her name without her permission. She’s
elderly, retired now, and she may not want to be involved. If you give me five minutes, I’ll telephone
and see how she feels about talking to you.’

‘Was she fond of Olive?’

‘As much as anyone was.’

‘Then will you tell her that I don’t believe Olive
murdered her mother and sister and that’s why I’m
writing the book.’ She stood up. ‘And please impress
on her that it’s desperately important I talk to someone
who knew her at the time. So far I’ve only
managed to trace one old school friend and a teacher.’
She walked to the door. ‘I’ll wait outside.’

True to his word, he was five minutes. He joined
her in the corridor and gave her a piece of paper
with a name and address on it. ‘Her name’s Lily
Gainsborough. She was the cleaner-cum-tea-lady in
the good old days before privatized cleaning and automatic
coffee machines. She retired three years ago at
the age of seventy, lives in sheltered accommodation
in Pryde Street.’ He gave her directions. ‘She’s expecting
you.’ Roz thanked him. ‘Give my regards to Olive
when you see her,’ he said, shaking her hand. ‘I had
more hair and less flab six years ago, so a description
won’t be much use, but she might remember my
name. Most people do.’

Roz chuckled. His name was Michael Jackson.

‘Of course I remember Olive. Called her “Dumpling”,
didn’t I, and she called me “Flower”. Get it, dear? Because of my name, Lily. There wasn’t an
ounce of harm in her. I never believed what they said
she done and I wrote and told her so when I heard
where they’d sent her. She wrote me back and said I
was wrong, it was all her fault and she had to pay the
penalty.’ Old wise eyes peered short-sightedly at Roz.
‘I understood what she meant, even if no one else
did. She never did it but it wouldn’t have happened
if she’d not done what she shouldn’t have. More tea,
dear?’

‘Thank you.’ Roz held out her cup and waited
while the frail old lady hefted a large stainless steel
teapot. A relic from her job on the tea trolley? The
tea was thick and charged with tannin, and Roz could
hardly bring herself to drink it. She accepted another
indigestible scone. ‘What did she do that she
shouldn’t have?’