The Sculptress (23 page)

“They moved after the murders,” said Roz thoughtfully.

“Vanished one morning without leaving a forwarding address.

No one knows what happened to them or where they went.”

“Doesn’t surprise me. I expect she was behind it.”

“Mrs. Clarke?”

“She never liked him coming round to our house. He used to hop across the fence at the back and he and Dad would shut themselves in Dad’s room and not come out for hours. I should think it must have worried her sick after the murders when Dad was all alone in the house.”

Images, gleaned from things people had said, chased themselves across Roz’s mind. Robert Martin’s vanity and his Peter Pan looks; he and Ted Clarke being as close as brothers; the room at the back with the bed in it; Gwen’s keeping up appearances; her frigid flinching from her husband; the secret that needed hiding. It all made sense, she thought, but did it affect anything if Olive hadn’t known it at the time?

“Was Mr. Clarke his only lover, do you think?”

“How would I know? Probably not,” she went on, contradicting herself immediately.

“He had his own back door in that room he used. He could have been out after rent-boys every night for all any of us would have known about it. I hate him.”

She looked as if she were about to erupt again but Roz’s look of alarm gave her pause.

“I hated him,” she repeated, before lapsing into silence.

“Because he killed Gwen and Amber?” asked Roz for the second time.

But Olive was dismissive: “He was at work all day. Everyone knows that.”

Olive Martin took an axe… Are you raising her expectations by telling her your book will get her out?

“Did your lover kill them?” She felt she was being clumsy, asking the wrong questions, in the wrong way, at the wrong time.

Olive sniggered.

“What makes you think I had a lover?”

“Someone made you pregnant.”

“Oh, that.” She was scornful.

“I lied about the abortion. I wanted the girls here to think I was attractive once.” She spoke loudly as if intent on the officers hearing everything.

A cold fist of certainty squeezed at Roz’s heart. Deedes had warned her of this four weeks ago.

“Then who was the man who sent you letters via Gary O’Brien?” she asked.

“Wasn’t he your lover?”

Olive’s eyes glittered like snakes’ eyes.

“He was Amber’s lover.”

Roz stared at her.

“But why would he send letters to you?”

“Because Amber was too frightened to receive them herself.

She was a coward.” There was a brief pause.

“Like my father.”

“What was she frightened of?”

“My mother.”

“What was your father frightened of?”

“My mother.”

“And were you frightened of your mother?”

“No.”

“Who was Amber’s lover?”

“I don’t know. She never told me.”

“What was in his letters?”

“Love, I expect. Everyone loved Amber.”

“Including you?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And your mother. Did she love Amber?”

“Of course.”

“That’s not what Mrs. Hopwood says.”

Olive shrugged.

“What would she know about it? She hardly knew us. She was always fussing over her precious Geraldine.”

A sly smile crept about her mouth, making her ugly.

“What does anybody know about it now except me?”

Roz could feel the scales peeling from her eyes in slow and terrible disillusionment.

“Is that why you waited till your father died before you would talk to anyone? So that there’d be no one left to contradict you?”

Olive stared at her with undisguised dislike then, with a careless gesture hidden from the officers’ eyes but all too visible to Roz she removed a tiny clay doll from her pocket and turned the long pin that was piercing the doll’s head. Red hair. Green dress. It required little imagination on Roz’s part to endow the clay with a personality.

She gave a hollow laugh.

“I’m a sceptic, Olive. It’s like religion. It only works if you believe in it.”

“I believe in it.”

“Then more fool you.” She stood up abruptly and walked to the door, nodding to Mr. Allenby to let her out. What had induced her to believe the woman innocent in the first place?

And why, for Christ’s sake, had she picked on a bloody murderess to fill the void that Alice had left in her heart?

She stopped at a payphone and dialled St. Angela’s Convent. It was Sister Bridget herself who answered.

“How may I help?” asked her comfortable lilting voice.

Roz smiled weakly into the receiver.

“You could say: “Come on down, Roz, I’ll give you an hour to listen to your woes.”

Sister Bridget’s light chuckle lost none of its warmth by transmission down the wire.

“Come on down, dear. I’ve a whole evening free and I like nothing better than listening. Are the woes so bad?”

“Yes. I think Olive did it.”

“Not so bad. You’re no worse off than when you started. I live in the house next to the school. It’s called Donegal. Totally inappropriate, of course, but rather charming. Join me as soon as you can. We’ll have supper together.”

There was a strained note in Roz’s voice.

“Do you believe in black magic, Sister?”

“Should I?”

“Olive is sticking pins into a clay image of me.”

“Good Lord!”

“And I’ve got a headache.”

“I’m not surprised. If I had just had my faith in someone shattered, I would have a headache, too. What an absurd creature she is! Presumably it’s her way of trying to regain some semblance of control. Prison is soul destroying in that respect.” She tut-tutted in annoyance.

“Really quite absurd, and I’ve always had such a high esteem for Olive’s intellect. I’ll expect you when I see you, my dear.”

Roz listened to the click at the other end, then cradled the receiver against her chest. Thank God for Sister Bridget… She put the receiver back with two hands that trembled. Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!

THANK GOD FOR SISTER BRIDGET… Supper was a simple affair of soup, scrambled eggs on toast, fresh fruit and cheese, with Roz’s contribution of a light sparkling wine. They ate in the dining room, looking out over the tiny walled garden where climbing plants tumbled their vigorous new growth in glossy green cascades. It took Roz two hours to run through all her notes and give Sister Bridget a complete account of everything she had discovered.

Sister Bridget, rather more rosy-cheeked than usual, sat in contemplative silence for a long time after Roz had finished. If she noticed the bruises on the other woman’s face, she did not remark on them.

“You know, my dear,” she said at last, ‘if I’m surprised by anything it is your sudden certainty that Olive is guilty. I can see nothing in what she said to make you overturn your previous conviction that she was innocent.” She raised mildly enquiring eyebrows.

“It was the sly way she smiled when she talked about being the only one who knew anything,” said Roz tiredly.

“There was something so unpleasantly knowing about it. Does that make sense?”

“Not really. The Olive I see has a permanently sly look. I wish she could be as open with me as she seems to have been with you, but I’m afraid she will always regard me as the guardian of her morals. It makes it harder for her to be honest.”

She paused for a moment.

“Are you sure you’re not simply reacting to her hostility towards you?

It’s so much easier to believe well of people who like us, and Olive made no secret of her liking for you on the two previous occasions you went to see her.”

“Probably.” Roz sighed.

“But that just means I’m as naive as everyone keeps accusing me of being.” Most criminals are pleasant most of the time, Hal had said.

“I think you probably are naive,” agreed Sister Bridget, ‘which is why you’ve ferreted out information that none of the cynical professionals thought worth bothering with. Naivety has its uses, just like everything else.”

“Not when it encourages you to believe lies, it doesn’t,” said Roz with feeling.

“I was so sure she had told me the truth about the abortion, and if anything set me questioning her guilt it was that. A secret lover floating around, a rapist even’ she shrugged ‘either would have made a hell of a difference to her case. If he didn’t do the murders himself, he might well have provoked them in some way. She cut that ground from under me when she told me the abortion was a lie.”

Sister Bridget looked at her closely for a moment.

“But when did she lie? When she told you about the abortion or, today, when she denied it?”

“Not today,” said Roz decisively.

“Her denial had a ring of truth which her admission never had.”

“I wonder. Don’t forget, you were inclined to believe her the first time. Since when, everyone, except Geraldine’s mother, has poured cold water on the idea. Subconsciously, you’ve been slowly conditioned to reject the idea that Olive could have had a sexual relationship with a man. That’s made you very quick to accept that what she told you today was the truth.”

“Only because it makes more sense.”

Sister Bridget chuckled.

“It makes more sense to believe that Olive’s confession was true but you’ve highlighted too many inconsistencies to take it at face value.

She tells lies, you know that. The trick is to sort out fact from fiction.”

“But why does she lie?” asked Roz in sudden exasperation.

“What good does it do her?”

“If we knew that, we’d have the answer to everything. She lied as a child to shore up the image she wanted to project and to shield herself and Amber from her mother’s angry disappointment. She was afraid of rejection. It’s why most of us lie, after all. Perhaps she keeps on with it for the same reasons.

“But her mother and Amber are dead,” Roz pointed out, ‘and isn’t her image diminished by denying she had a lover?”

Sister Bridget sipped her wine. She didn’t respond directly.

“She may, of course, have done it to get her own back. I suppose you’ve considered that. I can’t help feeling she’s adopted you as a surrogate Amber or a surrogate Gwen.”

“And look what happened to them.” Roz winced.

“Getting her own back for what, anyway?”

“For missing a visit. You said that upset her.”

“I had good reason.”

“I’m sure you did.” The kind eyes rested on the bruises.

“That’s not to say Olive believed you or, if she did, that a week of resentment could be cast off so easily. She may, quite simply, have wanted to spite you in the only way she could, by hurting you. And she’s succeeded. You are hurt.”

“Yes,” Roz admitted, “I am. I believed in her. But I’m the one who’s feeling rejected, not Olive.”

“Of course. Which is exactly what she wanted to achieve.”

“Even if it means I walk away and abandon her for good?”

“Spite is rarely sensible, Roz.” She shook her head.

“Poor Olive. She must be quite desperate at the moment if she’s resorting to clay dolls and outbursts of anger. I wonder what’s brought it on. She’s been very tetchy with me, too, these last few months.”

“Her father’s death,” said Roz.

“There’s nothing else.”

Sister Bridget sighed.

“What a tragic life his was. One does wonder what he did to deserve it.” She fell silent.

“I am disin dined to believe,” she went on after a moment, ‘that this man who sent the letters was Amber’s lover. I think I told you that I bumped into Olive shortly before the murders. I was surprised to see how nice she looked. She was still very big, of course, but she had taken such trouble with her appearance that she looked quite pretty. A different girl entirely from the one who’d been at St. Angela’s. Such transformations never come about in a vacuum. There’s always a reason for them and, in my experience, the reason is usually a man. Then, you know, there is Amber’s character to consider. She was never as bright as her sister and she lacked Olive’s independence and maturity. I would be very surprised if, at the age of twenty-one, she had been able to sustain an affair with anybody for as long as six months.”

“But you said yourself, men can bring about amazing transformations.

Perhaps she changed under his influence.”

“I can’t deny that, but if he was Amber’s lover, then I can point to a very definite lie that Olive has told you. She would know exactly what was in the letters, either because Amber would have told her or because she would have found a way to open them. She always pried into things that weren’t her concern. It sounds so churlish to say it now, but we all had to be very careful of our personal possessions while Olive was at St. Angela’s. Address books and diaries, in particular, drew her like magnets.”

“Mamie at Wells-Fargo thought Gary O’Brien had a yen for Olive. Perhaps he was the man she was dressing up for.”

“Perhaps.” They sat in silence for some time watching twilight fall.

Sister Bridget’s cat, a threadbare tabby of advanced years, had curled in a ball on Roz’s lap, and she stroked it mechanically in time to its purrs with the same careless affection that she bestowed on Mrs.

Antrobus.

“I wish,” she murmured, ‘there was some independent way of finding out whether or not she had the abortion, but I’d never be allowed within spitting distance of her medical records. Not without her permission, and probably not even then.”

“And supposing it turns out that she didn’t have an abortion?

Would that tell you anything? It doesn’t mean she didn’t have a man in her life.”

“No,” agreed Roz, ‘but by the same token if she did have an abortion then there can be no doubt there was a man. I’d be so much more confident about pressing ahead if I knew a lover existed.”

Sister Bridget’s perceptive eyes remained on her too long for comfort.

“And so much more confident about dropping the whole thing if you can be convinced he didn’t. I think, my dear, you should have more faith in your ability to judge people.

Instinct is as good a guide as written evidence.”

“But my instinct at the moment tells me she’s guilty as hell.”

“Oh, I don’t think so.” Her companion’s light laughter rang about the room.