Sculptress

by Minette Walters

  “I still have reservations there’s no point in pretending I don’t but I need to understand what happened that day before I can make up my mind.” She fingered the stem of her wine glass.

  “I think I may very well be naive but I’d need convincing that that is a bad thing. I could argue, with considerable justification, that anyone delving regularly in sewers must come up jaundiced.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” He was amused.

  She looked at him again.

  “That what Olive did shocks you but doesn’t surprise you. You’ve known, or known of, other people who’ve done similar things before.”

  “So?”

  “So you never established why she did it. Whereas I, being naive’ she held his gaze ‘am surprised as well as shocked and I want to know why.”

  He frowned.

  “It’s all in her statement. I can’t remember the exact details now, but she resented not being given a birthday party, I think, and then blew a fuse when her mother got angry with her for persuading the sister to ring in sick the next day.

  Domestic violence erupts over the most trivial things. Olive’s motives were rather more substantial than some I’ve known.”

  Roz bent down to open her briefcase.

  “I’ve a copy of her statement here.” She handed it across and waited while he read it through.

  “I can’t see your problem,” he said at last.

  “She makes it dear as crystal why she did it. She got angry, hit them, and then didn’t know how to dispose of the bodies.”

  “That’s what she says, I agree, but it doesn’t mean it’s true.

  There’s at least one blatant lie in that statement and possibly two.”

  She tapped her pencil on the table.

  “In the first paragraph she says that her relationship with her mother and sister had never been close but that’s been flatly contradicted by everyone I’ve spoken to. They all say she was devoted to Amber.”

  He frowned again.

  “What’s the other lie?”

  She leaned over with her pencil and put a line by one of the middle paragraphs.

  “She says she held a mirror to their lips to see if there was any mist.

  According to her, there wasn’t, so she proceeded to dismember the bodies.” She turned the pages over.

  “But here, according to the pathologist, Mrs. Martin put up a struggle to defend herself before her throat was cut. Olive makes no mention of that in her statement.”

  He shook his head.

  “That doesn’t mean a damn thing. Either she decided to put a gloss on the whole affair out of belated shame, or shock simply blotted the less acceptable bits out of her memory.”

  “And the lie about not getting on with Amber? How do you explain that away?”

  “Do I need to? The confession was completely voluntary. We even made her wait until her solicitor arrived to avoid any hint of police pressure.” He drained his glass.

  “And you’re not going to try and argue that an innocent woman would confess to a crime like this?”

  “It’s happened before.”

  “Only after days of police interrogation and then, when it comes to the trial, they plead not guilty and deny their statement.

  Olive did neither.” He looked amused.

  “Take it from me, she was so damned relieved to get it all off her chest she couldn’t confess fast enough.”

  “How? Did she deliver a monologue or did you have to ask questions?”

  He clasped his hands behind his neck.

  “Unless she’s changed a great deal I should imagine you’ve already discovered that Olive doesn’t volunteer information easily.” He cocked his head enquiringly.

  “We had to ask questions but she answered them readily enough.” He looked thoughtful.

  “For most of the time she sat and stared at us as if she were trying to engrave our faces on her memory. To be honest, I live in terror of her getting out and doing to me what she did to her family.”

  “Five minutes ago you described her as comparatively pleasant.”

  He rubbed his jaw.

  “Comparatively pleasant as far as you were concerned,” he corrected her.

  “But you were expecting something inhuman, which is why you find it difficult to be objective.”

  Roz refused to be drawn again down this blind alley. Instead she took her recorder from her briefcase and put it on the table.

  “Can I tape this conversation?”

  “I haven’t agreed to talk to you yet.” He stood up abruptly and filled a kettle with water. You’d do better,” he said after a moment, ‘to ring Detective Sergeant Wyatt. He was there when she gave her statement, and he’s still on the Force. Coffee?”

  “Please.” She watched him select a dark Arabica and spoon the grounds into a cafetiere.

  “I really would rather talk to you,” she said evenly.

  “Policemen are notoriously difficult to pin down. It could take me weeks to get an interview with him. I won’t quote you, I won’t even name you, if you’d rather I didn’t, and you can read the final draught before it goes to print.” She gave a hollow laugh.

  “Assuming it ever gets that far. What you say may persuade me not to write it.”

  He looked at her, absentmindedly scratching his chest through his shirt, then made up his mind.

  “All right. I’ll tell you as much as I can remember but you’ll have to double check everything. It’s a long time ago and I can’t vouch for my memory. Where do I start?”

  “With her telephone call to the police.”

  He waited for the kettle to boil, then filled the cafetiere and placed it on the table.

  “It wasn’t a 999 call. She looked up the number in the book and dialled the desk.” He shook his head, remembering.

  “It started out as a farce because the sergeant on duty couldn’t make head or tail of what she was saying.”

  He was shrugging into his jacket at the end of his shift when the desk sergeant came in and handed him a piece of paper with an address on it.

  “Do me a favour, Hal, and check this out on your way home. It’s Leven Road. You virtually pass it. Some madwoman’s been bawling down the phone about chicken legs on her kitchen floor.” He pulled a face.

  “Wants a policeman to take them away.” He grinned.

  “Presumably she’s a vegetarian.

  You’re the cookery expert. Sort it out, there’s a good chap.”

  Hawksley eyed him suspiciously.

  “Is this a wind-up?”

  “No. Scout’s honour.” He chuckled.

  “Look, she’s obviously a mental case. They’re all over the place, poor sods, since the Government chucked ‘em on to the streets. Just do as she asks or we’ll have her phoning all night. It’ll take you five minutes out of your way.”

  Olive Martin, red eyed from weeping, opened the door to him. She smelt strongly of B. O. and her bulky shoulders were hunched in unattractive despair. So much blood was smeared over her baggy T-shirt and trousers that it took on the property of an abstract pattern and his eyes hardly registered it. And why should they? He had no premonition of the horror in store.

  “DS.

  Hawksley,” he said with an encouraging smile, showing her his card.

  “You rang the police station.”

  She stepped back, holding the door open.

  “They’re in the kitchen.” She pointed down the corridor.

  “On the floor.”

  “OK. We’ll go down and have a look. What’s your name, love?”

  “Olive.”

  “Right, Olive, you lead the way. Let’s see what’s upset you.”

  Would it have been better to know what was in there?

  Probably not. He often thought afterwards that he could never have entered the room at all if he’d been told in advance that he was about to step into a human abattoir. He stared in horror at the butchered bodies, the axe, the blood that ran
in rivers across the floor, and his shock was so great that he could hardly breathe for the iron fist that thrust against his diaphragm and squeezed the breath from his lungs.

  The room reeked of blood.

  He leant against the door jamb and sucked desperately at the sickly, cloying air, before bolting down the corridor and retching over and over again into the tiny patch of front garden.

  Olive sat on the stairs and watched him, her fat moon face as white and pasty as his.

  “You should have brought a friend,” she told him miserably.

  “It wouldn’t have been so bad if there’d been two of you.”

  He held a handkerchief to his lips as he used his radio to summon assistance. While he spoke he eyed her warily, registering the blood all over her clothes. Nausea choked him.

  Jesus JESUS! How mad was she? Mad enough to take the axe to him?

  “For God’s sake, make it quick,” he shouted into the mouthpiece.

  “This is an emergency.” He stayed outside, too frightened to go back in.

  She looked at him stolidly.

  “I won’t hurt you. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  He mopped at his forehead.

  “Who are they, Olive?”

  “My mother and sister.” Her eyes slid to her hands.

  “We had a row.”

  His mouth was dry with shock and fear.

  “Best not talk about it,” he said.

  Tears rolled down her fat cheeks.

  “I didn’t mean it to happen.

  We had a row. My mother got so angry with me. Should I give my statement now?”

  He shook his head.

  “There’s no hurry.”

  She stared at him without blinking, her tears drying in dirty streaks down her face.

  “Will you be able to take them away before my father comes home?” she asked him after a minute or two.

  “I think it would be better.”

  Bile rose in his throat.

  “When do you expect him back?”

  “He leaves work at three o’clock. He’s part-time.”

  Hal glanced at his watch, an automatic gesture. His mind was numb.

  “It’s twenty to now.”

  She was very composed.

  “Then perhaps a policeman could go there and explain what’s happened.

  It would be better,” she said again. They heard the wail of approaching sirens.

  “Please,” she said urgently.

  He nodded.

  “I’ll arrange it. Where does he work?”

  “Carters Haulage. It’s in the Docks.”

  He was passing the message on as two cars, sirens shrieking, swept round the corner and bore down on number 22. Doors flew open all along the road and curious faces peered out. Hal switched off the radio and looked at her.

  “All done,” he said.

  “You can stop worrying about your father.”

  A large tear slipped down her blotchy face.

  “Should I make a pot of tea?”

  Hal thought of the kitchen.

  “Better not.”

  The sirens stilled as policemen erupted from the cars.

  “I’m sorry to cause so much bother,” she said into the silence.

  She spoke very little after that, but only, thought Hal on reflection, because nobody spoke to her. She was packed into the living room, under the eye of a shocked W. P. C.” and sat in bovine immobility watching the comings and goings through the open door. If she was aware of the mounting horror that was gathering about her, she didn’t show it. Nor, as time passed and the signs of emotion faded from her face, did she display any further grief or remorse for what she had done. Faced with such complete indifference, the consensus view was that she was mad.

  “But she wept in front of you,” interrupted Roz.

  “Did you think she was mad?”

  “I spent two hours in that kitchen with the pathologist, trying to work out the order of events from the blood splashes over the floor, the table, the kitchen units. And then, after the photographs had been taken, we embarked on the grisly jigsaw of deciding which bit belonged to which woman. Of course I thought she was mad. No normal person could have done it.”

  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 recognise 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.

  Isaidldid.”

  “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.