The Sculptress (28 page)

“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 recognise 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 twoedged sword, Roz. It can make you extremely vulnerable. I wish you’d remember that from time to time

Mamie 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.

Mamie 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?”

Marine 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?”

Mamie tapped the top right-hand corner with her finger.

“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 realised, the international symbol of homosexuality.

“Where?”

“It’s a pub near the waterfront. Goes in for drag acts.” Mamie giggled.

“It’s a gay knocking-shop.”

“What’s it called?”

Mamie giggled again.

“The White Cock.”

The landlord recognised 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 ‘cad. 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 the relevance a job seemed to have in his life.

“Inever 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?”

“So-so. It was all right at the beginning but there’s no fun driving a bike in town and it was all town work. It wouldn’t ‘ave been so bad if the bastard who ran it ‘ad paid us enough to cover the cost of the bikes.” He shook his head.

“E was a mean sod. We ‘ad ‘em took off us after six months and that was it. No bikes, no work.”

Roz had now heard three different versions of how the O’Brien boys had lost their jobs at Wells-Fargo. Were any of them true, she wondered, or was it that they were all true, but seen from different perspectives? Truth, she thought, was not the absolute she had once believed it to be.

“Your mother told me,” she said with a look of innocent amusement, ‘that you had a brush with a murderess while you were doing that job.”

“You mean Olive Martin?” Whatever qualms he had had on the matter at the time of the murders had obviously disappeared.

“Funny business, that. I used to deliver letters to her on a Friday evening from some bloke she was keen on, then -wham! she did her folks in. Bloody shocked me to tell you the truth.

“Ad no idea she was a nutter.”

“But she must have been to hack her mother and sister to pieces.”

Yeah.” He looked thoughtful.

“Never did understand it. She was all right. I knew eras a kid. She was all right then, as well. It was the bloody mother who was the cow and the stuck-up sister. Christ, she was a ‘orrible little swine.”

Roz hid her surprise. Everyone loved Amber. How often had she heard that said?

“Maybe Olive had had enough and just snapped one day. It happens.”

“Oh,” he said with a dismissive shrug, ‘that’s not the bit I don’t understand. It’s why she didn’t just go off wither fancy man instead.

I mean, even if ‘e was married, ‘e could’ve set her up in a flat somewhere.

“E wasn’t short of a bob or two judging by what ‘e paid to have the letters delivered. Twenty quid a throw.

“E must have been bloody rolling in it.”

She chewed her pencil.

“Maybe she didn’t do it,” she mused.

“Maybe the police got the wrong person. Let’s face it, it wouldn’t be the first time.”

Ma compressed her lips.

“They’re all corrupt,” she said.

“Nick anyone for any think these days. You don’t want to be Irish in this country. You’ve no ‘ope if you’re Irish.”

“Still,” said Roz, looking at Gary, ‘if Olive didn’t do it, who did?”

“I’m not saying it wasn’t ‘er,” he said sharply.

“She went guilty so she must of done it. All I’m saying is she didn’t need to do it.”

Roz gave a careless shrug.

“Just lost her temper and didn’t think. You’ll probably find the sister provoked her. You said she was horrible.”

Surprisingly, it was Mike who spoke.