Authors: Minette Walters
‘But did he ever
talk
to her?’
He shook his head. ‘There wasn’t time and she
wouldn’t have seen him anyway. She was quite determined
to plead guilty. I assume Mr Crew told you
that she wrote to the Home Office demanding an
independent psychiatric report to prove that she was
competent to plead?’ Roz nodded. ‘After that there
was really nothing we could do. It was an extraordinary
business,’ he mused. ‘Most defendants fall
over themselves to come up with excuses.’
‘Mr Crew seems convinced she’s a psychopath.’
‘I think I’d agree with him.’
‘Because of what she did to Amber and her mother?
You don’t have any other evidence?’
‘No. Isn’t that enough?’
‘Then how do you explain that five psychiatrists have all diagnosed her normal?’ Roz looked up. ‘She’s
had several sessions, as far as I can gather, in the
prison.’
‘Who told you this? Olive?’ He looked sceptical.
‘Yes, but I spoke to the Governor afterwards and
she verified it.’
He shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t place too much reliance
on it. You’d have to see the reports. It depends who
wrote them and why they were testing her.’
‘Still, it’s odd, don’t you think?’
‘In what way?’
‘You’d expect some measurable level of sociopathic
behaviour over a period of time if she was a
psychopath.’
‘Not necessarily. Prison may be the sort of controlled
environment that suits her. Or perhaps her
particular psychopathy was directed against her family.
Something brought it on that day and once rid of
them, she settled down.’ He shrugged again. ‘Who
knows? Psychiatry is hardly an exact science.’ He was
silent for a moment. ‘In my experience, well-adjusted
people don’t hack their mothers and their sisters to
death. You do know they were still alive when she set
to with the axe?’ He smiled grimly. ‘She knew it, too.
Don’t imagine she didn’t.’
Roz frowned. ‘There is another explanation,’ she
said slowly, ‘but the trouble is, while it fits the facts,
it’s too absurd to be credible.’
He waited. ‘Well?’ he asked at last.
‘Olive didn’t do it.’ She saw his amused disbelief
and hurried on. ‘I’m not saying I go along with it,
I’m just saying that it fits the facts.’
‘
Your
facts,’ he pointed out gently. ‘It seems to me
you’re being a little selective in what you choose to
believe.’
‘Maybe.’ Roz remembered her extremes of mood
of the previous evening.
He watched her for a moment. ‘She knew a great
deal about the murders for someone who wasn’t responsible
for them.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Of course. Don’t you?’
‘She doesn’t say anything about her mother trying
to ward off the axe and the carving knife. But that
must have been the most frightening part. Why didn’t
she mention it?’
‘Shame. Embarrassment. Traumatic amnesia. You’d
be surprised how many murderers blot what they’ve
done from their memories. Sometimes it’s years
before they come to terms with their guilt. In any
case, I doubt the struggle with her mother was as
frightening for Olive as you suggest. Gwen Martin
was a tiny woman, five feet at the most, I would think.
Physically, Olive took after her father, so containing
her mother would have been easy for her.’ He saw
the hesitation in Roz’s eyes. ‘Let me put a question
to
you
. Why would Olive confess to two murders she
didn’t commit?’
‘Because people do.’
‘Not when they have their lawyers present, Miss
Leigh. I accept that it happened, which is why new
rules were introduced governing the taking of evidence,
but Olive did not fall into the category of
either forced confession or having her confession subsequently
tampered with. She had legal representation
throughout. So I repeat, why would she confess to
something she didn’t do?’
‘To protect someone else?’ She was relieved they
weren’t in court. He was a bruising cross-examiner.
‘Who?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’
‘There was no one else except her father, and he
was at work. The police had him thoroughly checked
and his alibi was unbreakable.’
‘There was Olive’s lover.’
He stared at her.
‘She told me she’d had an abortion. Presumably,
then, she must have had a lover.’
He found that very entertaining. ‘Poor Olive.’ He
laughed. ‘Well, I guess an abortion is as good a way
as any of keeping her end up. Especially’ – he laughed
again – ‘if everyone believes her. I shouldn’t be too
gullible, if I were you.’
She smiled coldly. ‘Perhaps it’s you who is being
gullible by subscribing to the cheap male view that a
woman like Olive could not attract a lover.’
Deedes studied her set face and wondered what was driving her. ‘You’re right, Miss Leigh, it was
cheap, and I apologise.’ He raised his hands briefly,
then dropped them again. ‘But this is the first I have
heard about an abortion. Let’s just say it strikes me
as a little unlikely. And somewhat convenient, perhaps?
It’s not something you can ever really check, is
it, not without Olive’s permission. If laymen were
allowed to browse through other people’s medical
records some very delicate secrets might be exposed.’
Roz regretted her waspish remark. Deedes was a
nicer man than Crew and hadn’t deserved it. ‘Olive
mentioned an abortion.
I
assumed the lover. But perhaps
she was raped. Babies can be conceived as easily
in hate as in love.’
He shrugged. ‘Beware of being used, Miss Leigh.
Olive Martin dominated the court the day she
appeared in it. I had the impression then, and still
have it, that it was
we
who were dancing to
her
tune
not she to ours.’
Dawlington was a small eastern suburb of Southampton,
once an isolated village, now swallowed up
in the great urban expansion of the twentieth century.
It maintained an identity of a sort by the busy trunk-roads
that gave it tarmac boundaries but, even so, the
place was easy to miss. Only a tired peeling shop sign,
advertising
Dawlington Newsagents
, alerted Roz to
the fact that she had left one suburb and entered another. She drew into the kerb before a left-hand
turning and consulted her map. She was, presumably,
in the High Street and the road to the left – she
squinted at the sign – was Ainsley Street. She ran her
finger across the grid. ‘Ainsley Street,’ she muttered.
‘Come on, you bugger, where are you? OK. Leven
Road. First right, second left.’ With a glance in her
driving mirror, she pulled out into the traffic and
turned right.
Olive’s story, she thought, grew odder by the
minute, as she studied number twenty-two, Leven
Road, from her parked car. Mr Crew had said the
house was unsaleable. She had imagined something
out of a Gothic novel, twelve months of dereliction
and decay since the death of Robert Martin, a house
condemned by the haunting horror in its kitchen.
Instead, the reality was a cheerful little semi, freshly
painted, with pink, white, and red geraniums nodding
in boxes beneath its windows. Who, she wondered,
had bought it? Who was brave enough (or ghoulish
enough?) to live with the ghosts of that tragic family?
She double-checked the address from press cuttings
she had put together that morning in the archives
basement of the local newspaper. There was no mistake.
A black and white photograph of ‘The House
of Horror’ showed this same neat semi, but without
its window-boxes.
She climbed out of the car and crossed the road.
The house remained stubbornly silent to her ring on the doorbell, so she went next door and tried there. A
young woman answered with a sleepy toddler clinging
round her neck. ‘Yes?’
‘Hello,’ said Roz, ‘I’m sorry to bother you.’ She
indicated towards her right. ‘It’s your neighbours I
really want to talk to but there’s no one in. Have you
any idea when they might be back?’
The young woman thrust out a hip to support the
child more easily and subjected Roz to a penetrating
glare. ‘There’s nothing to see, you know. You’re wasting
your time.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘They pulled the innards out of the house and
revamped the whole of the inside. They’ve done it up
nice. There’s nothing to see, no blood stains, no spirits
roaming about, nothing.’ She pressed the child’s
head against her shoulder, a casual, proprietary gesture,
a statement of tender motherhood at odds with
the hostility in her voice. ‘You want to know what I
think? You should see a psychiatrist. It’s the likes of
you who’re the real sick people of society.’ She prepared
to close the door.
Roz raised her palms in a gesture of surrender. She
smiled sheepishly. ‘I haven’t come to gawp,’ she said.
‘My name is Rosalind Leigh and I’m working in cooperation
with the late Mr Martin’s solicitor.’
The woman eyed her suspiciously. ‘Oh, yeah?
What’s his name?’
‘Peter Crew.’
‘You could of got it from the paper.’
‘I have a letter from him. May I show it to you? It
will prove I am who I say I am.’
‘Go on then.’
‘It’s in the car. I’ll fetch it.’ She retrieved her briefcase
hurriedly from the boot, but when she got back,
the door was closed. She rang several times and waited
for ten minutes on the doorstep, but it was obvious
the young woman had no intention of answering.
From a room above came the wail of a baby. Roz
listened to the mother’s soothing tones as she climbed
the stairs, then, thoroughly annoyed with herself, she
retreated to the car and pondered her next step.
The press cuttings were disappointing. It was
names she wanted, names of friends or neighbours,
even old school teachers, who could give her background
detail. But the local newspaper had, like the
nationals, sensationalized the crime’s horror without
uncovering any details about Olive’s life or why she
might have done it. There were the usual quotes from
‘neighbours’ – all anonymous and all wise after the
event – but they were so uniformly unenlightening
that Roz suspected imaginative journalism at work.
‘No, I’m not surprised,’ said a neighbour, ‘shocked
and appalled, yes, but not surprised. She was a
strange girl, unfriendly, kept herself to herself. Not
like the sister. She was the attractive, outgoing one.
We all liked Amber.’ ‘The parents found her very difficult. She wouldn’t mix or make friends. She
was shy, I suppose, because of her size but she had
a way of looking at you that wasn’t normal.’
Beyond the sensationalism, there had been nothing
to write about. There was no police investigation to
report – Olive had phoned them herself, had confessed
to the crime in the presence of her solicitor,
and had been charged with murder. Because she had
pleaded guilty there had been no salacious details from
a lengthy trial, no names of friends or associates to
draw on, and her sentencing had rated a single paragraph
under the headline: twenty-five years for brutal
murders. A conspiracy of journalistic apathy seemed
to surround the whole event. Of the five cardinal Ws
of the journalist’s creed – Where?, When?, What?,
Who?, and Why? – the first four had been amply
covered. Everyone knew what had happened, who
had done it, where, and when. But no one, it seemed,
knew why. Nor, and this was the real puzzle, had
anyone actually asked. Could teasing alone really drive
a young woman to such a pitch of anger that she
would hack her family to pieces?
With a sigh, Roz switched on the radio and
fed Pavarotti into the tape-deck. Bad choice, she
thought, as ‘Nessun Dorma’ flooded the car and
brought back bitter memories of a summer she would
rather forget. Strange how a piece of music could be
so evocative, but then the path to separation had been choreographed around the television screen with
‘Nessun Dorma’ triggering the stops and starts of
their rows. She could remember every detail of every
World Cup football match. They were the only peaceful
periods in a summer of war. How much better,
she thought wearily, if she had called a halt then
instead of dragging the misery out to its far more
terrible conclusion.
A net curtain, in the semi to the right, number
24, twitched behind a Neighbourhood Watch sticker
which proclaimed itself loudly against the glass. A
case, Roz wondered, of locking the stable door after
the horse had bolted? Or was that same net curtain
twitching the day Olive wielded her chopper? Two
garages filled the gap between the houses, but it was
possible the occupants had heard something. ‘
Olive
Martin took an axe and gave her mother forty
whacks
. . .’ The words circled in her brain as they had
done, on and off, for days.
She resumed her contemplation of number 22, but
watched the net curtain out of the corner of her eye.
It moved again, plucked by prying fingers, and she
felt unreasonably irritated by the busybody spying on
her. It was an empty, wasted life that had time to
stand and stare. What sort of interfering old bitch
inhabited there, she wondered? The frustrated spinster
who got off on voyeurism? Or the bored and boring
wife with nothing better to do than find fault? Then
something clicked inside her head, a realignment of thought like the points on a railway line. Just the sort
of busybody she wanted, of course, but why had that
not occurred to her immediately? Really, she worried
about herself. She spent so much time in neutral now,
just listening to the footfalls, leading nowhere, that
echoed in her memory.
A frail old man opened the door, a small, shrunken
person with transparent skin and bowed shoulders.
‘Come in, come in,’ he said, standing back and ushering
her into his corridor. ‘I heard what you said to
Mrs Blair. She won’t talk to you, and I’ll tell you
something else, it wouldn’t help you if she did. They
only came four years ago when the first youngster was
on the way. Didn’t know the family at all and, as far
as I know, never spoke to poor old Bob. What shall I
say? She’s got a nerve. Typical of today’s youngsters.
Always wanting something for nothing.’ He muttered
on, leading the way into his living room. ‘Resents
living in a goldfish bowl but forgets that they got the
house for a pittance just because it
was
a goldfish
bowl. Ted and Dorothy Clarke virtually gave the place
away because they couldn’t stand it any longer. What
shall I say? Ungrateful girl. Imagine what it’s like for
those of us who’ve always lived here. No bargains
for us. We have to put up with it, don’t we? Sit down.
Sit down.’