The Sculptress

by Minette Walters

  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 recognize 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. I said I did.’

  ‘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 Geoff 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. 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.

  Seven

  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 Geoff then asked her what she had done with the clothes.’ He fell silent.