The Sculptress (14 page)

“Then perhaps a policeman could go there and explain what’s happened.

It would be better,” she said again. They heard the wail of approaching sirens.

“Please,” she said urgently.

He nodded.

“I’ll arrange it. Where does he work?”

“Carters Haulage. It’s in the Docks.”

He was passing the message on as two cars, sirens shrieking, swept round the corner and bore down on number 22. Doors flew open all along the road and curious faces peered out. Hal switched off the radio and looked at her.

“All done,” he said.

“You can stop worrying about your father.”

A large tear slipped down her blotchy face.

“Should I make a pot of tea?”

Hal thought of the kitchen.

“Better not.”

The sirens stilled as policemen erupted from the cars.

“I’m sorry to cause so much bother,” she said into the silence.

She spoke very little after that, but only, thought Hal on reflection, because nobody spoke to her. She was packed into the living room, under the eye of a shocked W. P. C.” and sat in bovine immobility watching the comings and goings through the open door. If she was aware of the mounting horror that was gathering about her, she didn’t show it. Nor, as time passed and the signs of emotion faded from her face, did she display any further grief or remorse for what she had done. Faced with such complete indifference, the consensus view was that she was mad.

“But she wept in front of you,” interrupted Roz.

“Did you think she was mad?”

“I spent two hours in that kitchen with the pathologist, trying to work out the order of events from the blood splashes over the floor, the table, the kitchen units. And then, after the photographs had been taken, we embarked on the grisly jigsaw of deciding which bit belonged to which woman. Of course I thought she was mad. No normal person could have done it.”

Roz chewed her pencil.

“That’s begging the question, you know. All you’re really saying is that the act itself was one of madness. I asked you if, from your experience of her, you thought Olive was mad.”

“And you’re splitting hairs. As far as I could see, the two were inextricably linked. Yes, I thought Olive was mad. That’s why we were so careful to make sure her solicitor was there when she made her statement. The idea of her getting off on a technicality and spending twelve months in hospital before some idiot psychiatrist decided she was responding well enough to treatment to be allowed out scared us rigid.”

“So did it surprise you when she was judged fit to plead guilty?”

“Yes,” he admitted, ‘it did.”

At around six o’clock attention switched to Olive. Areas of dried blood were lifted carefully from her arms and each fingernail was minutely scraped before she was taken upstairs to bathe herself and change into clean clothes. Everything she had been wearing was packed into individual polythene bags and loaded into a police van. An inspector drew Hal to one side.

“I gather she’s already admitted she did it.” Hal nodded.

“More or less.”

Roz interrupted again.

“Less is right. If what you said earlier is correct, she did not admit anything. She said they’d had a row, that her mother got angry, and she didn’t mean it to happen. She didn’t say she had killed them.”

Hal agreed.

“I accept that. But the implication was there which is why I told her not to talk about it. I didn’t want her claiming afterwards that she hadn’t been properly cautioned.”

He sipped his coffee.

“By the same token, she didn’t deny killing them, which is the first thing an innocent person would have done, especially as she had their blood all over her.”

“But the point is, you assumed her guilt before you knew it for a fact.”

“She was certainly our prime suspect,” he said drily.

The inspector ordered Hal to take Olive down to the station.

“But don’t let her say anything until we can get hold of a solicitor.

We’ll do it by the book. OK?”

Hal nodded again.

“There’s a father. He’ll be at the nick by now. I sent a car to pick him up from work but I don’t know what he’s been told.”

“You’d better find out then, and, for Christ’s sake, Sergeant, if he doesn’t know, then break it to him gently or you’ll give the poor sod a heart attack. Find out if he’s got a solicitor and if he’s willing to have him or her represent his daughter.”

They put a blanket over Olive’s head when they took her out to the car.

A crowd had gathered, lured by rumours of a hideous crime, and cameramen jostled for a photograph. Boos greeted her appearance and a woman laughed.

“What good’s a blanket, boys? You’d need a bloody marquee to cover that fat cow. I’d recognise her legs anywhere. What you done, Olive?”

Roz interrupted again when he jumped the story on to his meeting with Robert Martin at the police station.

“Hang on. Did she say anything in the car?”

He thought for a moment.

“She asked me if I liked her dress.

Isaidldid.”

“Were you being polite?”

“No. It was a vast improvement on the T-shirt and trousers.”

“Because they had blood on them?”

“Probably. No,” he contradicted himself, ruffling his hair, ‘because the dress gave her a bit of shape, I suppose, made her look more feminine. Does it matter?”

Roz ignored this.

“Did she say anything else?”

“I think she said something like: “That’s good. It’s my favourite.”

“But in her statement, she said she was going to London. Why wasn’t she wearing the dress when she committed the murders?”

He looked puzzled.

“Because she was going to London in trousers, presumably.”

“No,” said Roz stubbornly.

“If the dress was her favourite, then that’s what she would have worn for her trip to town.

London was her birthday treat to herself. She probably had dreams of bumping into Mr. Right on Waterloo station. It simply wouldn’t occur to her to wear anything but her best. You need to be a woman to understand that.”

He was amused.

“But I see hundreds of girls walking around in shapeless trousers and baggy T-shirts, particularly the fat ones. I think they look grotesque but they seem to like it.

Presumably they’re making a statement about their refusal to pander to conventional standards of beauty. Why should Olive have been any different?”

“Because she wasn’t the rebellious type. She lived at home under her mother’s thumb, took the job her mother wanted her to take, and was apparently so unused to going out alone for the day that she had to beg her sister to go with her.” She drummed her fingers impatiently on the table.

“I’m right. I know I am. If she wasn’t lying about the trip to London then she should have been wearing her dress.”

He was not impressed.

“She was rebellious enough to kill her mother and sister,” he remarked.

“If she could do that, she could certainly go to London in trousers.

You’re splitting hairs again. Anyway, she might have changed to keep the dress clean.”

“But she definitely intended to go to London? Did you check that?”

“She certainly booked the day off work. We accepted that London was where she was going because, as far as we could establish, she hadn’t mentioned her plans to anyone else.”

“Not even to her father?”

“If she did, he didn’t remember it.”

Olive waited in an interview room while Hal spoke to her father. It was a difficult conversation. Whether he had schooled himself to it, or whether it was a natural trick of behaviour, Robert Martin reacted little to anything that was said to him. He was a handsome man but, in the way that a Greek sculpture is handsome, he invited admiration but lacked warmth or attraction. His curiously impassive face had an unlined and ageless quality, and only his hands, knotted with arthritis, gave any indication that he had passed his middle years.

Once or twice he smoothed his blond hair with the flat of his hand or touched his fingers to his tie, but for all the expression on his plastic features Hal might have been passing the time of day. It was impossible to gauge from his expression how deeply he was shocked or whether, indeed, he was shocked at all.

“Did you like him?” asked Roz.

“Not much. He reminded me of Olive. I don’t know where I am with people who hide their feelings. It makes me uncomfortable.”

Roz could identify with that.

Hal kept detail to a minimum, informing him only that the bodies of his wife and one of his daughters had been discovered that afternoon in the kitchen of his house, and that his other daughter, Olive, had given the police reason to believe she had killed them.

Robert Martin crossed his legs and folded his hands calmly in his lap.

“Have you charged her with anything?”

“No. We haven’t questioned her either.” He watched the other man closely.

“Frankly, sir, in view of the serious nature of the possible charges we think she should have a solicitor with her.”

“Of course. I’m sure my man, Peter Crew, will come.” Mild enquiry twitched his brows.

“What’s the procedure? Should I telephone him?”

Hal was puzzled by the man’s composure. He wiped a hand across his face.

“Are you sure you understand what’s happened, sir?”

“I believe so. Gwen and Amber are dead and you think Olive murdered them.”

“That’s not quite accurate. Olive has implied that she was responsible for their deaths but, until we take a statement from her, I can’t say what the charges will be.” He paused for a moment.

“I want you to be quite clear on this, Mr. Martin. The Home Office pathologist who examined the scene had no doubts that considerable ferocity was used both before and after death.

In due course, I’m afraid to say, we will have to ask you to identify the bodies and you may, when you see them, feel less charitably inclined towards any possible suspect. On that basis, do you have any reservations about your solicitor representing Olive?”

Martin shook his head.

“I would be happier dealing with someone I know.”

“There may be a conflict of interests. Have you considered that?”

“In what way?”

“At the risk of labouring the point, sir,” said Hal coldly, ‘your wife and daughter have been brutally murdered. I imagine you will want the perpetrator prosecuted?” He lifted an eyebrow in enquiry and Martin nodded.

“Then you may well want a solicitor yourself to ensure that the prosecution proceeds to your satisfaction, but if your own solicitor is already representing your daughter, he will be unable to assist you because your interests will conflict with your daughter’s.”

“Not if she’s innocent.” Martin pinched the crease in his trousers, aligning it with the centre of his knee.

“I am really not concerned with what Olive may have implied, Sergeant Hawksley. There is no conflict of interest in my mind. Establishing her innocence and representing me in pressing for a prosecution can be done by the same solicitor. Now, if you could lend me the use of a telephone, I will ring Peter Crew, and afterwards, perhaps you will allow me to talk to my daughter.”

Hal shook his head.

“I’m sorry, sir, but that won’t be possible, not until we’ve taken a statement from her. You will also be required to make a statement. You may be allowed to speak to her afterwards, but at the moment I can’t guarantee it.”

“And that,” he said, recalling the incident, ‘was the one and only time he showed any emotion. He looked quite upset, but whether because I’d denied him access to Olive or because I’d told him he’d have to make a statement, I don’t know.” He considered for a moment.

“It must have been the denial of access. We went through every minute of that man’s day and he came out whiter than white. He worked in an open-plan office with five other people and, apart from the odd trip to the lavatory, he was under someone’s eye the whole day. There just wasn’t time for him to go home.”

“But you did suspect him?”

“Yes.”

Roz looked interested.

“In spite of Olive’s confession?”

He nodded.

“He was so damn cold blooded about it all. Even identifying the bodies didn’t faze him.”

Roz thought for a moment.

“There was another conflict of interest which you don’t seem to have considered.” She chewed her pencil.

“If Robert Martin was the murderer, he could have used his solicitor to manipulate Olive into confessing. Peter Crew makes no secret of his dislike of her, you know. I think he regrets the abolition of capital punishment.”

Hal folded his arms, then smiled in amusement.

“You’ll have to be very careful if you intend to make statements like that in your book. Miss Leigh. Solicitors are not required to like their clients, they merely have to represent them. In any case, Robert Martin dropped out of the frame very rapidly. We toyed with the idea that he killed Gwen and Amber before he went to work and Olive then set about disposing the bodies to protect him, but the numbers didn’t add up. He had an alibi even for that. There was a neighbour who saw her husband off to work a few minutes before Martin himself left. Amber and Gwen were alive then because she spoke to them on their doorstep.

She remembered asking Amber how she was getting on at Glitzy.

They waved as Martin drove away.”

“He could have gone round the corner and come back again.”

“He left home at eight-thirty and arrived at work at nine. We tested the drive and it took half an hour.” He shrugged.

“As I said, he was whiter than white.”

“What about lunch? Could he have gone back then?”

“He had a pint and a sandwich in the local pub with two men from the office.”

“OK. Go on.”

There was little more to tell. In spite of Crew’s advice to remain silent, Olive agreed to answer police questions, and at nine-thirty, expressing relief to have got the whole thing off her chest, she signed her statement and was formally charged with the murder of her mother and sister.

Following her remand into custody on the morning of the next day, Hal and Geof Wyatt were given the task of detailing the police case against her. It was a straightforward collating of pathological, forensic, and police evidence, all of which, upon examination, supported the facts given in Olive’s statement.