The Sculptress (3 page)

Peter Crew’s office was in the centre of Southampton, in a street where estate agents predominated. It was a sign of the times, thought Roz, as she walked past them, that they were largely empty. Depression had settled on them, as on everything else, like a dark immovable cloud.

Peter Crew was a gangling man of indeterminate age, with faded eyes and a blond toupee parted at the side. His own hair, a yellowish white, hung beneath it like a dirty net curtain. Every so often, he lifted the edge of the hair-piece and poked a finger underneath to scratch his scalp. The inevitable result of so much ill-considered stretching was that the toupee gaped perpetually in a small peak above his nose. It looked, Roz thought, like a large chicken perched on top of his head.

She rather sympathised with Olive’s contempt for him.

He smiled at her request to tape their conversation, a studied lift of the lips which lacked sincerity.

“As you please.” He folded his hands on his desk.

“So, Miss Leigh, you’ve already seen my client. How was she?”

“She was surprised to hear she still had a solicitor.”

“I don’t follow,”

“According to Olive, she hasn’t heard from you in four years.

Are you still representing her?”

His face assumed a look of comical dismay but, like his smile, it lacked conviction.

“Good Heavens. Is it as long as that? Surely not. Didn’t I write to her last year?”

“You tell me, Mr. Crew.”

He fussed to a cabinet in the corner and flicked through the files.

“Here we are. Olive Martin. Dear me, you’re right.

Four years. Mind you,” he said sharply, ‘there’s been no communication from her either.” He pulled out the file and brought it across to his desk.

“The law is a costly business, Miss Leigh. We don’t send letters for fun, you know.”

Roz lifted an eyebrow.

“Who’s paying, then? I assumed she was on Legal Aid.”

He adjusted his yellow hat.

“Her father paid, though, frankly, I’m not sure what the position would be now. He’s dead, you know.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Heart attack a year ago. It was three days before anyone found him.

Messy business. We’re still trying to sort out the estate.” He lit a cigarette and then abandoned it on the edge of an overflowing ashtray.

Roz pencilled a doodle on her notepad.

“Does Olive know her father’s dead?”

He was surprised.

“Of course she does.”

“Who told her? Obviously, your firm didn’t write.”

He eyed her with the sudden suspicion of an unwary rambler coming upon a snake in the grass.

“I telephoned the prison and spoke to the Governor. I thought it would be less upsetting for Olive if the news was given personally.” He became alarmed.

“Are you saying she’s never been told?”

“No. I just wondered why, if her father had money to leave, there’s been no correspondence with Olive. Who’s the beneficiary?”

Mr. Crew shook his head.

“I can’t reveal that. It’s not Olive, naturally.”

“Why naturally?”

He tut-tutted crossly.

“Why do you think, young woman? She murdered his wife and younger daughter and condemned the poor man to live out his last years in the house where it happened. It was completely un saleable Have you any idea how tragic his life became? He was a recluse, never went out, never received visitors. It was only because there were milk bottles on the doorstep that anyone realised there was something wrong. As I say, he’d been dead for three days. Of course he wasn’t going to leave money to Olive.”

Roz shrugged.

“Then why did he pay her legal bills? That’s hardly consistent, is it?”

He ignored the question.

“There would have been difficulties, in any case. Olive would not have been allowed to benefit financially from the murder of her mother and her sister.”

Roz conceded the point.

“Did he leave much?”

“Surprisingly, yes. He made a tidy sum on the stock market.”

His eyes held a wistful regret as he scratched vigorously under his toupee.

“Whether through luck or good judgement he sold everything just before Black Monday. The estate is now valued at half a million pounds.”

“My God!” She was silent for a moment.

“Does Olive know?”

“Certainly, if she reads the newspapers. The amount has been published and, because of the murders, it found its way into the tabloids.”

“Has it gone to the beneficiary yet?”

He frowned heavily, his brows jutting.

“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss that. The terms of the will preclude it.”

Roz shrugged and tapped her teeth with her pencil.

“Black Monday was October eighty-seven. The murders happened on September ninth, eighty-seven. That’s odd, don’t you think?”

“In what way?”

“I’d expect him to be so shell-shocked that stocks and shares would be the last thing he’d worry about.”

“Conversely,” said Mr. Crew reasonably, ‘that very fact would demand that he find something to occupy his mind. He was semi-retired after the murders. Perhaps the financial pages were his only remaining interest.” He looked at his watch.

“Time presses. Was there anything else?”

It was on the tip of Roz’s tongue to ask why, if Robert Martin had made a killing on the stock exchange, he had chosen to live out his days in an un saleable house. Surely a man worth half a million could have afforded to move, irrespective of what his property was worth? What, she wondered, was in that house to make Martin sacrifice himself to it?

But she sensed Crew’s hostility to her and decided that discretion was the better part of valour. This man was one of the few sources of corroborative information open to her and she would need him again, even though his sympathies clearly lay more with the father than the daughter.

“Just one or two more questions this morning.” She smiled pleasantly, a studied use of charm as insincere as his.

“I’m still feeling my way on this, Mr. Crew. To tell you the truth, I’m not yet convinced there’s a book in it.” And what an understatement that was. She wasn’t intending to write anything. Or was she?

He steepled his fingers and tapped them together impatiently.

“If you remember, Miss Leigh, I made that very point in my letter to you.”

She nodded gravely, pandering to his ego.

“And as I told you, I don’t want to write Olive’s story simply to cover the pages with lurid details of what she did. But one part of your letter implied an angle that might be worth pursuing. You advised her to plead not guilty to murder on the grounds of diminished responsibility. Had that succeeded, you suggested, she would have been found guilty of manslaughter and would, in all probability, have been sentenced to indefinite detention. I think you went on to estimate ten to fifteen years in a secure unit if she had been given psychiatric treatment and had responded favourably to it.”

“That is correct,” he agreed.

“And I think it was a reasonable estimate. Certainly she would have served nothing like the twenty-five year sentence the judge recommended she serve.”

“But she rejected your advice. Do you know why?”

“Yes. She had a morbid fear of being locked up with mad people and she misunderstood the nature of indefinite detention.

She was convinced that it meant endless, and, try as we might, we could not persuade her otherwise.”

“In that case, why didn’t you lodge a not guilty plea on her behalf?

The very fact that she couldn’t grasp what you were telling her implies that she wasn’t capable of pleading for herself. You must have thought she had a defence or you wouldn’t have suggested it.”

He smiled grimly.

“I don’t quite understand why, Miss Leigh, but you seem to have decided that we failed Olive in some way.”

He scribbled a name and address on a piece of paper.

“I suggest you talk to this man before you come to any more erroneous conclusions.” He flicked the paper in her direction.

“He’s the barrister we briefed for her defence.

Graham Deedes. In the event, she out manoeuvred us and he was never called to defend her.”

“But why? How could she out manoeuvre you?” She frowned.

“I’m sorry if I sound critical, Mr. Crew, and please believe me, you are wrong in assuming I have reached any unfavourable conclusions.” But was that really true? she wondered.

“I am simply a perplexed onlooker asking questions. If this Deedes was in a position to raise serious doubts over her quote sanity unquote, then surely he should have insisted that the court hear her defence whether she wanted it or not. Not to put too fine a point on it, if she was bonkers then the system had a duty to recognise the fact, even if she herself thought she was sane. He relented a little.

“You’re using very emotive language, Miss Leigh there was never a question of pleading insanity, only diminished responsibility but I do take your point. I used the word out manoeuvred advisedly. The simple truth is that a few weeks before the scheduled date of her trial, Olive wrote to the Home Secretary demanding to know whether she had the right to plead guilty or whether, under British law, this right was denied her. She claimed that undue pressure was being brought to bear to force a lengthy trial that would do nothing to help her but only prolong the agony for her father. The trial date was postponed while tests were carried out to discover if she was fit to plead. She was ruled eminently fit and was allowed to plead guilty.”

“Good Lord!” Roz chewed her lower lip.

“Good Lord!” she said again.

“Were they right?”

“Of course.” He noticed the forgotten cigarette with a curl of ash dripping from its end and, with a gesture of annoyance, stubbed it out.

“She knew exactly what the consequences would be. They even told her what sort of sentence to expect.

Nor would prison have come as any surprise to her. She spent four months on remand before the trial. Frankly, even had she agreed to defend herself the result would still have been the same. The evidence for a plea of diminished responsibility was very flimsy. I doubt we could have swung a jury.”

“And yet in your letter you said that, in spite of everything, you are still convinced she’s a psychopath. Why?”

He fingered the file on his desk.

“I saw the photographs of Gwen and Amber’s bodies, taken before their removal from the kitchen. It was a slaughterhouse running with blood, the most horrifying scene I have ever witnessed. Nothing will ever convince me that a psychologically stable personality could wreak such atrocity on anyone, let alone on a mother and sister.”

He rubbed his eyes.

“No, despite what the psychiatrists say and you must remember, Miss Leigh, that whether or not psychopathy is a diagnosable disease is under constant debate Olive Martin is a dangerous woman. I advise you to be extremely wary in your dealings with her.”

Roz switched off her tape-recorder and reached for her briefcase.

“I suppose there’s no doubt that she did it.”

He stared at her as if she had said something dirty.

“None at all,” he snapped.

“What are you implying?”

“It just occurs to me that a simple explanation for the discrepancy between the psychiatric evidence of Olive’s normality and the quite abnormal nature of the crime is that she didn’t do it but is covering for whoever did.” She stood up and gave a small shrug in face of his tight-lipped expression.

“It was just a thought. I agree it makes little sense, but nothing about this case makes much sense. I mean, if she really is a psychopathic murderess she wouldn’t have cared tuppence about putting her father through the mill of a trial. Thank you for your time, Mr.

Crew. I can see myself out.”

He held up a hand to hold her back.

“Have you read her statement, Miss Leigh?”

“Not yet. Your office promised to send it tome.”

He sorted through the file and took out some stapled sheets of paper.

“This is a copy you may keep,” he told her, passing the pages across the desk.

“I urge you to read it before you go any further. It will persuade you, I think, as it persuaded me, of Olive’s guilt.”

Roz picked up the papers.

“You really don’t like her, do you?”

His eyes hardened.

“I have no feelings for her, one way or the other. I merely question society’s rationale in keeping her alive. She kills people. Don’t forget that, Miss Leigh. Good day to you.”

It took Roz an hour and a half to drive back to her flat in London and for most of that time Crew’s words She kills people obscured all other thoughts. She took them out of context and wrote them large across the screen of her mind, dwelling on them with a kind of grim satisfaction.

It was later, curled up in an armchair, that she realised the journey home was a complete blank. She had no recollection, even, of leaving Southampton, a city she wasn’t familiar with.

She could have killed someone, crushing them under the wheels of her car, and she wouldn’t have been able to remember when or how it happened. She stared out of her sitting-room window at the dismal grey facades opposite, and she wondered quite seriously about the nature of diminished responsibility.

STATEMENT MADE BY OLIVE MARTIN 9.9.87 9.30 P.M.

PRESENT: VS HAWK5LEY, VS WYATT, E.P. CREW (SOLICITOR)

My name is Olive Martin. I was born on 8th September, 1964.1 live at 22 Leven Road, Dawlington, Southampton.

I am employed as a clerk in the Department of Health and Social Security in Dawlington High Street. Yesterday was my birthday. I am twenty-three years old. I have always lived at home. My relation ship with my mother and sister has never been close. I get on well with my father. I weigh eighteen and a half stone and my mother and sister have always teased me about it.

Their nickname for me was FattieHattie, after Hattie Jacques, the actress. I am sensitive to being laughed at for my size.

Nothing was planned for my birthday and that upset me. My mother said I wasn’t a child any more and that I must organise my own treats. I decided to show her I was capable of doing something on my own. I arranged to have today off work with the idea of taking the train to London and spending the day sight-seeing. I did not organise the treat for yesterday, my birthday, in case she had planned a surprise for the evening which is what she did for my sister’s twenty-first birthday in July. She did not. We all spent the evening quietly watching television. I went to bed feeling very upset. My parents gave me a pale pink jumper for my birthday present. It was very unflattering and I didn’t like it. My sister gave me some new slippers which I did like.