The Sculptress (28 page)

‘Yes.’

‘Are you brave enough to collect them or do you
want me to post them?’

‘It’s not bravery that’s required, Hawksley, it’s
thick bloody skin. I’m tired of being needled.’ She
smiled to herself at the pun. ‘Which reminds me, was
it Mrs Clarke who said Gwen and Amber were alive
after Robert went to work?’

There was a slight pause while he tried to see a
connection. He couldn’t. ‘Yes, if she was the one in
the attached semi.’

‘She was lying. She says now that she didn’t see
them, which means Robert Martin’s alibi is
worthless. He could have done it before he went to
work.’

‘Why would she give Robert Martin an alibi?’

‘I don’t know. I’m trying to work it out. I thought
at first she was alibiing her own husband, but that
doesn’t hold water. Apart from anything else, Olive
tells me he was already retired so he wouldn’t have gone to work anyway. Can you remember checking
Mrs Clarke’s statement?’

‘Was Clarke the accountant? Yes?’ He thought for
a moment. ‘OK, he ran most of his business from
home but he also looked after the books of several
small firms in the area. That week he was doing the
accounts of a central heating contractor in Portswood.
He was there all day. We checked. He didn’t get home
until after we had the place barricaded. I remember
the fuss he made about having to park his car at the
other end of the road. Elderly man, bald, with glasses.
That the one?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but what he and Robert did during
the day is irrelevant if Gwen and Amber were dead
before either of the men left for work.’

‘How reliable is Mrs Clarke?’

‘Not very,’ she admitted. ‘What was the earliest
estimate of death according to your pathologist?’

He was unusually evasive. ‘I can’t remember now.’

‘Try,’ she pressed him. ‘You suspected Robert
enough to check his alibi so he can’t have been ruled
out immediately on the forensic evidence.’

‘I can’t remember,’ he said again. ‘But if Robert
did it, then why didn’t he kill Olive as well? And why
didn’t she try and stop him? There must have been a
hell of a row going on. She couldn’t possibly have
avoided hearing something. It’s not that big a house.’

‘Perhaps she wasn’t there.’

*

The Chaplain made his weekly visit to Olive’s room.
‘That’s good,’ he said, watching her bring curl to the
mother’s hair with the point of a matchstick. ‘Is it
Mary and Jesus?’

She looked at him with amusement. ‘The mother
is suffocating her baby,’ she said baldly. ‘Is it likely to
be Mary and Jesus?’

He shrugged. ‘I’ve seen many stranger things that
pass for religious art. Who is it?’

‘It’s Woman,’ said Olive. ‘Eve with all her faces.’

He was interested. ‘But you haven’t given her a face.’

Olive twisted the sculpture on its base and he saw
that what he had taken to be curls at the side of the
mother’s hair was in fact a crude delineation of eyes,
nose and mouth. She twisted it the other way and the
same rough representation stared out from that side
as well. ‘Two-faced,’ said Olive, ‘and quite unable to
look you in the eye.’ She picked up a pencil and
shoved it between the mother’s thighs. ‘But it doesn’t
matter. Not to MAN.’ She leered unpleasantly. ‘MAN
doesn’t look at the mantelpiece when he’s poking the
fire.’

Hal had mended the back door and the kitchen table,
which stood in its customary place once more in the
middle of the room. The floor was scrubbed clean,
wall units repaired, fridge upright, even some chairs
had been imported from the restaurant and placed neatly about the table. Hal himself looked completely
exhausted.

‘Have you had any sleep at all?’ she asked him.

‘Not much. I’ve been working round the clock.’

‘Well, you’ve performed miracles.’ She gazed about
her. ‘So who’s coming to dinner? The Queen? She
could eat it off the floor.’

To her surprise he caught her hand and lifted it to
his lips, turning it to kiss the palm. It was an unexpectedly
delicate gesture from such a hard man.
‘Thank you.’

She was at a loss. ‘What for?’ she asked helplessly.

He released her hand with a smile. ‘Saying the right
things.’ For a moment she thought he was going to
elaborate, but all he said was: ‘The photographs are
on the table.’

Olive’s was a mug-shot, stark and brutally
unflattering. Gwen and Amber’s shocked her as he
had said they would. They were the stuff of nightmares
and she understood for the first time why everyone
had said Olive was a psychopath. She turned them
over and concentrated on the head and shoulders’
shot of Robert Martin. Olive was there in the eyes
and mouth, and she had a fleeting impression of what
might lie beneath the layers of lard if Olive could ever
summon the will-power to shed it. Her father was a
very handsome man.

‘What are you going to do with them?’

She told him about the man who sent letters to Olive. ‘The description fits her father,’ she said. ‘The
woman at Wells-Fargo said she’d recognize him from
a photograph.’

‘Why on earth should her father have sent her
secret letters?’

‘To set her up as a scapegoat for the murders.’

He was sceptical. ‘You’re plucking at straws. What
about the ones of Gwen and Amber?’

‘I don’t know yet. I’m tempted to show them to
Olive to shock her out of her apathy.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘I’d think twice about that
if I were you. She’s an unknown quantity, and you
may not know her as well as you think you do. She
could very easily turn nasty if you present her with
her own handiwork.’

She smiled briefly. ‘I know her better than I know
you.’ She tucked the photographs into her handbag
and stepped out into the alleyway. ‘The odd thing is
you’re very alike, you and Olive. You demand trust
but you don’t give it.’

He wiped a weary hand around his two-day growth
of stubble. ‘Trust is a two-edged sword, Roz. It can
make you extremely vulnerable. I wish you’d remember
that from time to time.’

MARNIE STUDIED THE
photograph of Robert Martin
for several seconds then shook her head. ‘No,’ she
said, ‘that wasn’t him. He wasn’t so good looking
and he had different hair, thicker, not swept back,
more to the side. Anyway, I told you, he had dark
brown eyes, almost black. These eyes are light. Is this
her father?’

Roz nodded.

Marnie handed the photograph back. ‘My mother
always said, never trust a man whose earlobes are
lower than his mouth. It’s the sign of a criminal. Look
at his.’

Roz looked. She hadn’t noticed it before because
of the way his hair swept over them, but Martin’s ears
were almost unnaturally out of symmetry with the
rest of his face. ‘Did your mother know any criminals?’

Marnie snorted. ‘Of course she didn’t. It’s just an
old wives’ tale.’ She cocked her head to look at the picture again. ‘Anyway, if there was something in it
he’d be a Category A by now.’

‘He’s dead.’

‘Perhaps he passed the gene on to his daughter.
She’s Category A all right.’ She got busy with her nail
file. ‘Where did you get it, as a matter of interest?’

‘The photograph? Why do you ask?’

Marnie tapped the top right-hand corner with her
file. ‘I know where it was taken.’

Roz looked where she was pointing. In the background
beyond Martin’s head was part of a lampshade
with a pattern of inverted
ys
round its base. ‘In his
house, presumably.’

‘Doubt it. Look at the sign round the shade.
There’s only one place anywhere near here has shades
like that.’

The
ys
were lambdas, Roz realized, the international
symbol of homosexuality. ‘Where?’

‘It’s a pub near the waterfront. Goes in for drag
acts.’ Marnie giggled. ‘It’s a gay knocking-shop.’

‘What’s it called?’

Marnie giggled again. ‘The White Cock.’

The landlord recognized the photograph immediately.
‘Mark Agnew,’ he told her. ‘Used to come here a lot.
But I haven’t seen him in the last twelve months.
What happened to him?’

‘He died.’

The landlord pulled a long face. ‘I shall have to go
straight,’ he said with weary gallows humour. ‘What
with AIDS and the recession I’ve hardly any customers
left.’

Roz smiled sympathetically. ‘If it’s any consolation
I don’t think he died of AIDS.’

‘Well, it is some consolation, lovey. He put himself
about a bit, did Mark.’

Mrs O’Brien regarded her with deep displeasure.
Time and her naturally suspicious nature had persuaded
her that Roz was nothing to do with television
but had come to worm information out of her about
her sons. ‘You’ve got a flaming cheek, I must say.’

‘Oh,’ said Roz with obvious disappointment, ‘have
you changed your mind about the programme?’ Lies,
she thought, worked if you kept repeating them.

‘Programme, my arse. You’re a bloody snooper.
What you after? That’s what I want to know.’

Roz took Mr Crew’s letter out of her briefcase and
handed it to the woman. ‘I explained it as well as I
could last time, but these are the terms of my contract
with the television company. If you read it, you’ll see
that it sets out quite clearly the aims and objectives
of the programme they want to make.’ She pointed
to Crew’s signature. ‘That’s the director. He listened
to the tape we made and liked what he heard.
He’ll be disappointed if you back out now.’

Ma O’Brien, presented with written evidence, was
impressed. She frowned intelligently at the unintelligible
words. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘a contract makes a difference.
You should of shown me this last time.’ She
folded it, preparatory to putting it in her pocket.

Roz smiled. ‘Unfortunately,’ she said, whisking it
from Ma’s fingers, ‘this is the only copy I have and I
need it for tax and legal purposes. If it’s lost, none of
us will get paid. May I come in?’

Ma compressed her lips. ‘No reason not to, I suppose.’
But suspicion died hard. ‘I’m not hanswering
hanything fishy, mind.’

‘Of course not.’ She walked into the sitting room.
‘Is any of your family at home? I’d like to include
them if possible. The more rounded the picture the
better.’

Ma gave it some thought. ‘
Mike!
’ she yelled suddenly.
‘Get yourself down. There’s a lady wants to
talk to you.
Nipper!
In ’ere.’

Roz, who was only interested in talking to Gary,
saw fifty-pound notes flying out the window by the
bucket-load. She smiled with resignation as two
skinny young men joined their mother on the sofa.
‘Hi,’ she said brightly, ‘my name’s Rosalind Leigh
and I represent a television company which is putting
together a programme on social deprivation . . .’

‘I told them,’ said Ma, cutting her short. ‘No need
for the sales pitch. Fifty quid per ’ead. That’s right,
isn’t it?’

‘As long as I get my money’s worth. I’ll need
another good hour of chat and I’m only really prepared
to pay fifty apiece if I can talk to your eldest
son, Peter, and your youngest son, Gary. That way I
get the broadest viewpoint possible. I want to know
what difference it made to your older children being
fostered out.’

‘Well, you’ve got Gary,’ said Ma, prodding the
unprepossessing figure on her left, ‘young Nipper ’ere.
Pete’s in the nick so you’ll ’ave to make do with Mike.
‘E’s number three and spent as much time being
fostered as Pete did.’

‘Right, let’s get on then.’ She unfolded her list of
carefully prepared questions and switched on her tape-recorder.
The two ‘boys’, she noticed, had perfectly
proportioned ears.

She spent the first half-hour talking to Mike, encouraging
him to reminisce about his childhood in foster
homes, his education (or, more accurately, lack of it
through persistent truanting) and his early troubles
with the police. He was a taciturn man, lacking even
elementary social skills, who found it hard to articulate
his thoughts. He made a poor impression and Roz,
containing her impatience behind a forced smile,
wondered if he could possibly have turned out any
worse if Social Services had left him in the care of his
mother. Somehow she doubted it. Ma, for all her sins and his, loved him, and to be loved was the cornerstone
of confidence.

She turned with some relief to Gary, who had been
listening to the conversation with a lively interest. ‘I
gather you didn’t leave home till you were twelve,’
she said, consulting her notes, ‘when you were sent
to a boarding school. Why was that?’

He grinned. ‘Truanting, nicking, same as my
brothers, only Parkway said I was worse and got me
sent off to Chapman ’Ouse. It was OK. I learnt a bit.
Got two CSEs before I jacked it in.’

She thought the truth was probably the exact
opposite, and that Parkway had said he was a cut
above his brothers and worth putting some extra
effort into. ‘That’s good. Did the CSEs make it easier
to find a job?’

She might have been talking about a trip to the
moon for all the relevance a job seemed to have in
his life. ‘I never tried. We were doing all right.’

She remembered something Hal had said. ‘They
simply don’t subscribe to the same values that the
rest of us hold.’ ‘You didn’t want a job?’ she asked
curiously.

He shook his head. ‘Did
you
, when you left school?’

‘Yes,’ she said, surprised by the question. ‘I
couldn’t wait to leave home.’

He shrugged, as perplexed by her ambition as she
was perplexed by his lack of it. ‘We’ve always stuck together,’ he said. ‘The dole goes a lot further if it’s
pooled. You didn’t get on with your parents then?’

‘Not enough to want to live with them.’

‘Ah, well,’ he said sympathetically, ‘that would
explain it then.’

Absurdly, Roz found herself envying him. ‘Your
mother told me you worked as a motorbike courier
at one point. Did you enjoy that?’