The Sculptress (26 page)

‘You’re a real sweetheart, Hawksley. Didn’t your
mother teach you any manners along with her little
aphorisms about women and life?’

‘Don’t push your luck,’ he growled. ‘I’m on a very
short fuse at the moment and it doesn’t take much
to rile me. I spent five years of marriage being criticized
for every damn thing I did. I’m not about to
repeat the experience.’ He drew up in front of the
station. ‘Go home,’ he told her, wiping a weary hand
across his damp face. ‘I’m doing you a favour.’

She put the twenty-pound note on the dashboard
and reached for her handbag. ‘Yes,’ she agreed mildly,
‘I think you probably are. If your wife stuck it out for five years, she must have been a saint.’ She pushed
the door open on its screaming hinges and eased
round it, then bent down to look through the
window, thrusting her middle finger into the air. ‘Go
screw yourself, Sergeant. Presumably it’s the only
thing that gives you any pleasure. Let’s face it, no one
else could ever be good enough.’

‘Got it in one, Miss Leigh.’ He nodded a curt
farewell, then spun the wheel in a U-turn. As he drove
away the twenty-pound note whipped like a bitter
recrimination from the window and fell with the rain
into the gutter.

Hal was cold and wet by the time he reached Dawlington,
and his already evil temper was not improved to
find her car still parked at the end of the alleyway
where she had left it. He glanced past it, between the
buildings, and saw that the back door of the Poacher
stood ajar, the wood in splinters where a crowbar had
been used to wrench it free of its frame. OH,
Jesus
!
She
had
set him up. He knew a moment of total
desolation – he was not as immune as he thought
himself – before the need to act took over.

He was too angry for common sense, too angry to
take even elementary precautions. He ran on light
feet, thrust the door wide and weighed in with flailing
fists, punching, kicking, gouging, oblivious to the
blows that landed on his arms and shoulders, intent only on causing maximum damage to the bastards
who were destroying him.

Roz, arriving thirty minutes later with Hal’s sodden
twenty-pound note clutched in one hand and a blistering
letter of denunciation in the other, stared in disbelief
at what she saw. The kitchen looked like a scene
from Beirut in the aftermath of war. Deserted and
destroyed. The table, up-ended, leant drunkenly
against the oven, two of its legs wrenched free. Chairs,
in pieces, lay amongst shards of broken crockery and
jagged glass. And the fridge, tilted forward and balanced
precariously on its open door, had poured its
contents across the quarry tiling in streams of milk
and congealed stock. She held a trembling hand to
her lips. Here and there, splashes of bright red blood
had tinged the spreading milk pink.

She looked wildly up the alleyway, but there was
no one in sight.
What to do?
‘Hal!’ she called, but her
voice was little more than a whisper. ‘Hal!’ This time
it rose out of control and, in the silence that followed,
she thought she heard a sound from the other side of
the swing doors into the restaurant. She stuffed the
letter and the money into her pockets and reached
inside the door for one of the table legs. ‘I’ve called
the police,’ she shouted, croaky with fear. ‘They’re on
their way.’

The door swung open and Hal emerged with a bottle of wine. He nodded at the table leg. ‘What are
you planning to do with that?’

She let her arm fall. ‘Have you gone mad? Did you
do all this?’

‘Am I likely to have done it?’

‘Olive did.’ She stared about her. ‘This is just
what Olive did. Lost her temper and destroyed her
room. She had all her privileges taken away.’

‘You’re babbling.’ He found a couple of glasses in
an intact wall cupboard and filled them from the
bottle. ‘Here.’ His dark eyes watched her closely.
‘
Have
you called the police?’

‘No.’ Her teeth chattered against the wine glass. ‘I
thought if you were a burglar you’d run away. Your
hand’s bleeding.’

‘I know.’ He took the table leg away from her and
put it on top of the oven, then pulled forward the
only intact chair from behind the back door and
pressed her into it. ‘What were you going to do if the
burglar ran out this way?’

‘Hit him, I suppose.’ Her fear was beginning to
subside. ‘Is this what you thought I’d set you up for?’

‘Yes.’

‘God!’ She didn’t know what else to say. She
watched while he found a broom and started to sweep
the mess towards one corner. ‘Shouldn’t you leave
that?’

‘What for?’

‘The police.’

He eyed her curiously. ‘You said you hadn’t called
them.’

She digested this in silence for several seconds, then
put her glass on the floor beside her. ‘This is all a bit
heavy for me.’ She took the twenty-pound note from
her pocket, but left the letter where it was. ‘I only
came back to give you this.’ She held it out as she
stood up. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said with an apologetic
smile.

‘What for?’

‘Making you angry. I seem to have a knack for
making people angry at the moment.’ He moved
towards her to take the money, but stopped abruptly
at her look of alarm.

‘Goddamnit, woman, do you think
I
did this?’

But he was speaking to thin air. Roz had taken to
her heels down the alleyway and the twenty-pound
note, once again, fluttered to the ground.

ROZ’S SLEEP THAT
night was intermittent, fitful
dozing between turbulent dreams. Olive with an axe,
hacking kitchen tables to pieces.
I didn’t think
you would . . . it’s not as easy as it looks on the
telly . . .
Hal’s fingers on her wrist, but his face the
gleeful face of her brother as he gave her Chinese
burns as a child.
Goddamnit, woman, do you think I
did this . . .
Olive hanging from the gallows, her face
the slimy grey of wet clay.
Have you no qualms about
releasing someone like her back into society . . .
A priest with the eyes of Sister Bridget.
It’s a pity
you’re not a Catholic . . . You could go to confession
and feel better immediately . . . You keep offering me
money . . . The law is an ass . . . Have you called the
police . . .

She woke in the morning to the sound of the phone
ringing in her sitting room. Her head was splitting.
She snatched up the receiver to shut off the noise.
‘Who is it?’

‘Well, that’s a nice welcome, I must say,’ remarked
Iris. ‘What’s eating you?’

‘Nothing. What do you want?’

‘Shall I phone off,’ said Iris sweetly, ‘and call you
back again in half an hour when you’ve remembered
that I’m your friend and not some piece of dog’s
dirt that you’ve just scraped off your shoe?’

‘Sorry. You woke me. I didn’t sleep very well.’

‘M’m, well, I’ve just had your editor on the phone
pressing me for a date – and I don’t mean an invitation
to dinner. He wants a rough idea of when the book
will be ready.’

Roz made a face into the receiver. ‘I haven’t started
writing it yet.’

‘Then you’d better get a move on, my darling,
because I’ve told him it will be finished by Christmas.’

‘Oh, Iris, for Heaven’s sake. That’s only six months
away and I’m no further forward than the last time I
spoke to you. Olive clams up every time we get to
the murders. In fact I—’

‘Seven months,’ Iris cut in. ‘Go and grill that dodgy
policeman again. He sounds absolutely frightful and
I’ll bet you anything you like he framed her. They
all do it. It boosts their quotas. The buzz word is
productivity, darling, something that is temporarily
absent from your vocabulary.’

*

Mrs Clarke listened to Roz’s introductory speech
about her book on Olive with an expression of complete
horror. ‘How did you find us?’ she asked in a
quavering voice. For no particular reason, Roz had
pictured her in her fifties or early sixties. She was
unprepared for this old woman, closer in age to Mr
Hayes than to the age Robert and Gwen Martin
would have been if they were still alive.

‘It wasn’t difficult,’ she hedged.

‘I’ve been so afraid.’

It was an odd reaction but Roz let it pass. ‘Can
I come in? I won’t take up much of your time, I
promise.’

‘I couldn’t possibly speak to you. I’m alone.
Edward is shopping.’

‘Please, Mrs Clarke,’ she begged, her voice catching
under the strain of her tiredness. It had taken two
and a half hours to drive to Salisbury and locate their
house. ‘I’ve come such a long way to see you.’

The woman smiled suddenly and held the door
wide. ‘Come in. Come in. Edward made some cakes
specially. He’ll be so thrilled you found us.’

With a puzzled frown, Roz stepped inside. ‘Thank
you.’

‘You remember Pussy, of course’ – she waved at
an ancient cat curled beneath a radiator – ‘or was
she after your time? I forget things, you know.
We’ll sit in the lounge. Edward,’ she called, ‘Mary’s
here.’

There was no response. ‘Edward’s gone shopping,’
said Roz.

‘Oh, yes.’ She looked at Roz in confusion. ‘Do I
know you?’

‘I’m a friend of Olive’s.’

‘I’m a friend of Olive’s,’ mimicked the old lady.
‘I’m a friend of Olive’s.’ She lowered herself on to the
sofa. ‘Sit down. Edward’s made some cakes specially. I
remember Olive. We were at school together. She had
long pigtails which the boys used to pull. Such wicked
boys. I wonder what happened to them.’ She looked
at Roz again. ‘Do I know you?’

Roz sat awkwardly in an armchair, weighing the
ethics of questioning a vulnerable old woman with
senile dementia. ‘I’m a friend of Olive Martin,’ she
prompted. ‘Gwen and Robert’s daughter.’ She studied
the vacant blue eyes but there was no reaction. She
was relieved. Ethics became irrelevant when asking
questions was a nonsense. She smiled encouragingly.
‘Tell me about Salisbury. Do you like living here?’

Their conversation was an exhausting one, filled
with silences, chanting repetition, and strange inconsequential
references that left Roz struggling to follow
the thread. Twice, she had to divert Mrs Clarke from
a sudden realization that she was a stranger, fearing
that if she left she would find it impossible to get back
in to talk to Edward. With part of her mind she
wondered how he coped. Could you go on loving an
empty shell when your love was neither reciprocated nor appreciated? Could there ever be enough flashes
of lucidity to make the loneliness of caring
worthwhile?

Her eye was drawn again and again to the wedding
photograph above the mantelpiece. They had married
comparatively late, she thought, judging by their ages.
He looked to be in his forties, with most of his hair
already missing. She looked a little older. But they
stood shoulder to shoulder, laughing together out of
the frame, two happy, healthy people, with not a care
in the world, unaware – and how could they be? –
that she carried the seeds of dementia. It was cruel to
make a comparison but Roz couldn’t help herself.
Beside the celluloid woman, so alive, so vivid, so substantial,
the real Mrs Clarke was a colourless, trembling
shadow. Was this, Roz wondered, why Edward
and Robert Martin had become lovers? She found the
whole experience immensely depressing and when, at
last, the sound of a key grated in the lock, it came
like the welcome patter of rain on drought-hardened
earth.

‘Mary’s come to see us,’ said Mrs Clarke brightly
as her husband entered the room. ‘We’ve been waiting
for cakes.’

Roz stood up and handed Mr Clarke one of her
cards. ‘I did tell her who I was,’ she said quietly, ‘but
it seemed kinder to be Mary.’

He was old, like his wife, and entirely bald, but he
still carried himself erect with shoulders squared. He towered above the woman on the sofa who shrank
away from him in sudden fear, muttering to herself.
Roz wondered if he ever lost his temper with her.

‘I really don’t leave her alone very often,’ he
answered defensively, as if she had accused him of it,
‘but the shopping has to be done. Everyone’s so busy
and it’s not fair to keep asking the neighbours.’ He
ran a hand across his bald head and read the card. ‘I
thought you were Social Services,’ he said, this time
accusing
her
. ‘Author? We don’t want an author. What
good would an author be to us?’

‘I was hoping you could help me.’

‘I don’t know the first thing about writing. Who
gave you my name?’

‘Olive did,’ said Mrs Clarke. ‘She’s a friend of
Olive’s.’

He was shocked. ‘Oh, no!’ he said. ‘No, no, no!
You’ll have to leave. I’m not having that dragged up
again. It’s an outrage. How did you get hold of this
address?’

‘No, no, no!’ chanted his wife. ‘It’s an outrage.
No, no, no!’

Roz held her breath and counted to ten, not sure
if her sanity or her control would slip first. ‘How
on earth do you cope?’ The words tumbled out as
involuntarily as Mrs Clarke’s did. ‘I’m sorry.’ She
saw the strain in his face. ‘That was unforgivably
rude.’

‘It’s not so bad when we’re alone. I just switch off.’ He sighed. ‘Why have you come? I thought we’d
put all that behind us. There’s nothing I can do for
Olive. Robert tried to help her at the time but it was all
thrown back in his face. Why has she sent you here?’

‘It’s an outrage,’ muttered the old woman.

‘She hasn’t. I’m here off my own bat. Look,’ she
said, glancing at Mrs Clarke, ‘is there somewhere we
can talk privately?’

‘There’s nothing to talk about.’

‘But there is,’ she said. ‘You were a friend of Robert’s.
You must have known the family better than
anyone. I’m writing a book’ – she remembered belatedly
that her explanations had been given to Mrs
Clarke – ‘and I can’t do it if no one will tell me about
Gwen and Robert.’