The Sculptress (23 page)

Olive shook her head. ‘There’s no one. Both my
parents were only children. And he couldn’t leave it
to me, could me?’ She slammed her fist on the table,
her voice rising furiously. ‘Otherwise everyone would
kill their fucking families!’ The great ugly face leered at Roz. YOU WANTED TO, mouthed the sausage
lips.

‘Keep the volume down, Sculptress,’ said Mr
Allenby mildly, ‘or the visit finishes now.’

Roz pressed a finger and thumb to her eyelids
where she could feel her headache coming back.
Olive
Martin took an axe
– she tried to thrust the thought
away, but it wouldn’t go –
and gave her mother forty
whacks
. ‘I don’t understand why the will makes you
so angry,’ she said, forcing her voice to sound steady.
‘If family was important to him who else is there
except his grandson?’

Olive stared at the table, her jaw jutting aggressively.
‘It’s the principle,’ she muttered. ‘Dad’s dead.
What does it matter now what people think?’

Roz recalled something Mrs Hopwood had said.
‘I’ve always assumed he must have had an affair . . .’
She took a shot in the dark. ‘Do you have a half-brother
or sister somewhere? Is that what you’re
trying to tell me?’

Olive found this amusing. ‘Hardly. He’d have to
have had a mistress for that and he didn’t like women.’
She gave a sardonic laugh. ‘He did like MEN though.’
Again the strange emphasis on the word.

Roz was very taken aback. ‘Are you saying he was
a homosexual?’

‘I’m saying,’ said Olive with exaggerated patience,
‘that the only person I ever saw make Dad’s face light
up was our next-door neighbour, Mr Clarke. Dad used to get quite skittish whenever he was around.’
She lit another cigarette. ‘I thought it was rather sweet
at the time, but only because I was too bloody thick
to recognize a couple of queens when I saw them.
Now I just think it was sick. It’s no wonder my mother
hated the Clarkes.’

‘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 tuttutted
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
naïve as everyone keeps accusing me of being.’
Most
criminals are pleasant most of the time
, Hal had said.

‘I think you probably are naïve,’ agreed Sister
Bridget, ‘which is why you’ve ferreted out information
that none of the cynical professionals thought
worth bothering with. Naïvety 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 disinclined 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.’