The Sculptress (15 page)

Namely that, acting alone, she had, on the morning of the ninth of September, 1987, murdered her mother and sister by cutting their throats with a carving knife.

There was a lengthy silence. Hal splayed his hands on the scrubbed deal table and pushed himself to his feet.

“How about some more coffee?” He watched her industrious pen scribbling across a page of her notebook.

“More coffee?” he repeated.

“Mm. Black, no sugar.” She didn’t look up but went on writing.

“Sure, baas. Don’t mind me, baas. I’se just de paid help, baas.”

Roz laughed.

“Sorry. Yes, thank you, I’d love some more coffee. Look, if you can just bear with me for a moment, I’ve a few questions to ask and I’m trying to jot them down while the thing’s still fresh.”

He watched her while she wrote. Botticelli’s Venus, he had thought the first time he saw her, but she was too thin for his liking, hardly more than seven stone and a good five feet six.

She made a fabulous clothes’-horse, of course, but there was no softness to hug, no comfort in the tautly strung body. He wondered if her slenderness was a deliberate thing or if she lived on her nerves.

The latter, he thought. She was clearly a woman of obsessions if her crusade for Olive was anything to go by. He put a fresh cup of coffee in front of her but stayed standing, cradling his own coffee cup between his hands.

“OK,” she said, sorting out the pages, ‘let’s start with the kitchen.

You say the forensic evidence supported Olive’s statement that she acted alone. How?”

He thought back.

“You have to picture that place. It was a slaughter house, and every time she moved she left footprints in the congealing blood. We photographed each one separately and they were all hers, including the bloody prints that her shoes left on the carpet in the hall.” He shrugged.

“There were also bloody palm-prints and fingerprints over most of the surfaces where she had rested her hands. Again all hers. We did raise other fingerprints, admittedly, including about three, I think, which we were never able to match with any of the Martins or their neighbours, but you’d expect that in a kitchen. The gas man, the electricity man, a plumber maybe. There was no blood on them so we inclined to the view that they had been left in the days prior to the murder.”

Roz chewed her pencil.

“And the axe and the knife? I suppose they had only her fingerprints.”

“Actually no. The cutting weapons were so smeared that we couldn’t get anything off them at all.” He chuckled at her immediate interest.

“You’re chasing red herrings. Wet blood is slippery stuff. It would have been very surprising if we had found some perfect prints. The rolling pin had three damn good ones, all hers.”

She made a note.

“I didn’t know you could take them off unpolished wood.”

“It was solid glass, two feet long, a massive thing. I suppose if we were surprised by anything it was that the blows she struck with it hadn’t killed Gwen and Amber. They were both tiny women. By rights she should have smashed their skulls with it.” He sipped his coffee.

“It leant some credence to her story, in fact, that she only tapped them lightly in the first instance to make them shut up. We were afraid she might use that in her defence to get the charge reduced to manslaughter, the argument being that she slit their throats only because she believed they were already dead and she was trying to dismember them in panic. If she could then go on to show that the initial blows with the rolling pin were struck with very little force well, she might almost have persuaded a jury that the whole thing was a macabre accident. Which is one good reason, by the way, why she never mentioned the fight with her mother. We did push her on that, but she kept insisting that no mist on the mirror meant they were dead.”

He pulled a face.

“So I spent a very unpleasant two days working with the pathologist and the bodies, going step by step through what actually happened. We ended up with enough evidence of the fight Gwen put up to save her life to press a murder charge. Poor woman. Her hands and arms were literally cut to ribbons where she had tried to ward off the blows.”

Roz stared into her coffee for some minutes.

“Olive was very kind to me the other day. I can’t imagine her doing something like that.”

“You’ve never seen her in a rage. You might think differently if you had.”

“Have you seen her in a rage?”

“No,” he admitted.

“Well, I find it difficult even to imagine that. I accept she’s put on a lot of weight in the last six years but she’s a heavy, stolid type.

It’s highly strung, impatient people who lose their tempers.” She saw his scepticism and laughed.

“I know, I know, amateur psychology of the worst kind. Just two more questions then I’ll leave you in peace. What happened to Gwen and Amber’s clothes?”

“She burnt them in one of those square wire incinerators in the garden.

We retrieved some scraps from the ashes which matched the descriptions that Martin gave of the clothes the two women had been wearing that morning.”

“Why did she do that?”

“To get rid of them, presumably.”

“You didn’t ask her?”

He frowned.

“I’m sure we must have done. I can’t remember now.”

“There’s nothing in her statement about burning clothes.”

He lowered his head in reflection and pressed a thumb and forefinger to his eyelids.

“We asked her why she took their clothes off,” he murmured, ‘and she said they had to be naked or she couldn’t see where to make the cuts through the joints. I think Geof then asked her what she had done with the clothes.”

He fell silent.

“And?”

He looked up and rubbed his jaw pensively.

“I don’t think she gave an answer. If she did, I can’t remember it. I have a feeling the information about the scraps in the incinerator came in the next morning when we made a thorough search of the garden.”

“So you asked her then?”

He shook his head.

“I didn’t, though I suppose Geof may have done. Gwen had a floral nylon overall that had melted over a lump of wool and cotton. We had to peel it apart into its constituent elements but there was enough there that was recognisable. Martin ID’d the bits and so did the neighbour.” He stabbed a finger in the air.

“There were some buttons, too.

Martin recognised those straightaway as being from the dress his wife had been wearing.”

“But didn’t you wonder why Olive took time out to burn the clothes? She could have put them in the suitcases with the bodies and dumped the whole lot in the sea.”

“The incinerator certainly wasn’t burning at five o’clock that night or we’d have noticed it; therefore disposing of the clothes must have been one of the first things she did. She wouldn’t have seen it as taking time out because at that stage she probably still thought dismembering two bodies would be comparatively easy. Look, she was trying to get rid of evidence.

The only reason she panicked and called us in was because her father was coming home. If it had been just the three women living in that house she could have gone through with her plan, and we’d have had the job of trying to identify some bits and pieces of mutilated flesh found floating in the sea off Southampton. She might even have got away with it.”

“I doubt it. The neighbours weren’t stupid. They’d have wondered why Gwen and Amber were missing.”

“True,” he conceded.

“What was the other question?”

“Did Olive’s hands and arms have a lot of scratches on them from her fight with Gwen?”

He shook his head.

“None. She had some bruising but no scratches.”

Roz stared at him.

“Didn’t that strike you as odd? You said Gwen was fighting for her life.”

“She had nothing to scratch with,” he said almost apologetically.

“Her fingernails were bitten to the quick. It was rather pathetic in a woman of her age. All she could do was grip Olive’s wrists to try and keep the knife away. That’s what the bruises were. Deep finger-marks.

We took photographs of them.”

With an abrupt movement Roz squared her papers and dropped them into her briefcase.

“Not much room for doubt then, is there?” she said, picking up her coffee cup.

“None at all. And it wouldn’t have made any difference, you know, if she’d kept her mouth shut or pleaded not guilty. She would still have been convicted. The evidence against her was overwhelming. In the end, even her father had to accept that. I felt quite sorry for him then. He became an old man overnight.”

Roz glanced at the tape, which was still running.

“Was he very fond of her?”

“I don’t know. He was the most undemonstrative person I’ve ever met. I got the impression he wasn’t fond of any of them but’ he shrugged ‘he certainly took Olive’s guilt very badly.”

She drank her coffee.

“Presumably the post-mortem revealed that Amber had had a baby when she was thirteen?”

He nodded.

“Did you pursue that at all? Try and trace the child?”

“We didn’t see the need. It had happened eight years before.

It was hardly likely to have any bearing on the case.” He waited, but she didn’t say anything.

“So? Will you go on with the book?”

“Oh, yes,” she said.

He looked surprised.

“Why?”

“Because there are more inconsistencies now than there were before.”

She held up her fingers and ticked them off point by point.

“Why was she crying so much when she telephoned the police station that the desk sergeant couldn’t understand what she was saying? Why wasn’t she wearing her best dress for London? Why did she burn the clothes?

Why did her father think she was innocent? Why wasn’t he shocked by Gwen and Amber’s deaths? Why did she say she didn’t like Amber? Why didn’t she mention the fight with her mother if she intended to plead guilty? Why were the blows from the rolling pin so comparatively light? Why? Why? Why?” She dropped her hands to the table with a wry smile.

“They may very well be red herrings but I can’t get rid of a gut feeling that there’s something wrong. Ultimately, perhaps, I cannot square your and her solicitor’s conviction that Olive was mad with the assessments of five psychiatrists who all say she’s normal.”

He studied her for some minutes in silence.

“You accused me of assuming her guilt before I knew it for a fact, but you’re doing something rather worse. You’re assuming her innocence in spite of the facts. Supposing you manage to whip up support for her through this book of yours and in view of the way the judicial system is reeling at the moment, that’s not as unlikely as it should be have you no qualms about releasing someone like her back into society?”

“None at all, if she’s innocent.”

“And if she isn’t, but you get her out anyway?”

“Then the law is an ass.”

“All right, if she didn’t do it, who did?”

“Someone she cared about.” She finished her coffee and switched off the tape.

“Anything else just doesn’t make sense.”

She shut the recorder into her briefcase and stood up.

“You’ve been very kind to give up so much of your time. Thank you, and thank you for the lunch.” She held out a hand.

He took it gravely.

“My pleasure, Miss Leigh.” Her fingers, soft and warm in his, moved nervously when he held them too long, and he thought she seemed suddenly rather afraid of him. It was probably for the best. One way and another, she spelt trouble.

She walked to the door.

“Goodbye, Sergeant Hawksley. I hope the business picks up for you.”

He gave a savage smile.

“It will. This is what’s known as a temporary blip, I assure you.”

“Good.” She paused.

“There’s just one last thing. I understand Robert Martin told you he thought the more likely scenario was that Gwen battered Amber, and Olive then killed Gwen trying to defend her sister. Why did you dismiss that possibility?”

“It didn’t hold water. The pathologist established that both throats were cut with the same hand. The size, depth, and angle of the wounds were consistent with one attacker. Gwen wasn’t just fighting for herself, you know, she was fighting for Amber, too. Olive is completely ruthless. You would be very foolish to forget that.” He smiled again but the smile didn’t reach his eyes.

“If you’ll take my advice you’ll abandon the whole thing.”

Roz shrugged.

“I tell you what, Sergeant’ she gestured towards the restaurant ‘you mind your business, and I’ll mind mine.”

He listened to her heels tapping away down the alley, then reached for the telephone and dialled.

“Geof,” he snapped into the mouthpiece, ‘get down here, will you? We need to talk.” His eyes hardened as he listened to the voice at the other end.

“Like hell it’s not your problem. I’m damned if I’ll be the fall guy for this one.”

Roz glanced at her watch as she drove away. It was four thirty.

If she pushed it she might catch Peter Crew before he went home for the day. She found a parking space in the centre of Southampton and arrived at his office just as he was leaving.

“Mr. Crew!” she called, running after him.

He turned with his unconvincing smile, only to frown when he saw who it was.

“I’ve no time to talk to you now, Miss Leigh. I have an engagement.”

“Let me walk with you,” she urged.

“I won’t delay you, I promise.”

He gave a nod of acquiescence and set off again, the hair of his toupee bobbing in time to his steps.

“My car isn’t far.”

Roz did not waste time on pleasantries.

“I gather Mr. Martin left his money to Amber’s illegitimate son. I have been told’ she stretched the truth like a piece of elastic ‘that he was adopted by some people called Brown who have since emigrated to Australia. Can you tell me if you’ve made any progress in finding him?”

Mr. Crew shot her an annoyed glance.

“Now where did you find that out, I wonder?” His voice clipped the words angrily.

“Has someone in my practice been talking?”

“No,” she assured him.