The Sculptress

by Minette Walters

  ‘And what do you think now?’

  ‘You learn, don’t you? We get some real nut cases in here before they’re transferred on. They’re not so bad. Most of them can see the funny side.’ She balanced a second dog-end next to her first. ‘And I’ll tell you something else, they’re a damn sight less critical than the sane ones. When you look like me, you appreciate that.’ She scrutinized Roz from between sparse blonde eyelashes. ‘That’s not to say I’d have pleaded differently had I been more au fait with the system. I still think it would have been immoral to claim I didn’t know what I was doing when I knew perfectly well.’

  Roz made no comment. What can you say to a woman who dismembers her mother and sister and then calmly splits hairs over the morality of special pleading?

  Olive guessed what she was thinking and gave her wheezy laugh. ‘It makes sense to me. By my own standards, I’ve done nothing wrong. It’s only the law, those standards set by society, that I’ve transgressed.’

  There was a certain biblical flourish about that last phrase, and Roz remembered that today was Easter Monday. ‘Do you believe in God?’

  ‘No. I’m a pagan. I believe in natural forces. Worshipping the sun makes sense. Worshipping an invisible entity doesn’t.’

  ‘What about Jesus Christ? He wasn’t invisible.’

  ‘But he wasn’t God either.’ Olive shrugged. ‘He was a prophet, like Billy Graham. Can you swallow the garbage of the Trinity? I mean, either there’s one God or there’s a mountainful of them. It just depends on how imaginative you feel. I, for one, have no cause to celebrate that Christ is Risen.’

  Roz, whose faith was dead, could sympathize with Olive’s cynicism. ‘So, if I understand you correctly, you’re saying there is no absolute right or wrong, only individual conscience and the law.’ Olive nodded. ‘And your conscience isn’t troubling you because you don’t think you’ve done anything wrong.’

  Olive looked at her with approval. ‘That’s it.’

  Roz chewed her bottom lip in thought. ‘Which means you believe your mother and sister deserved to die.’ She frowned. ‘Well, I don’t understand, then. Why didn’t you put up a defence at your trial?’

  ‘I had no defence.’

  ‘Provocation. Mental cruelty. Neglect. They must have done something if you felt you were justified in killing them.’

  Olive took another cigarette from the pack but didn’t answer.

  ‘Well?’

  The intense scrutiny again. This time Roz held her gaze.

  ‘Well?’ she persisted.

  Abruptly, Olive rapped the window pane with the back of her hand. ‘I’m ready now, Miss Henderson,’ she called out.

  Roz looked at her in surprise. ‘We’ve forty minutes yet.’

  ‘I’ve talked enough.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’ve obviously upset you.’ She waited. ‘It was unintentional.’

  Olive still didn’t answer but sat impassively until the Officer came in. Then she grasped the edge of the table and, with a shove from behind, heaved herself to her feet. The cigarette, unlit, clung to her lower lip like a string of cotton wool. ‘I’ll see you next week,’ she said, easing crabwise through the door and shambling off down the corridor with Miss Henderson and the metal chair in tow.

  Roz sat on for several minutes, watching them through the window. Why had Olive balked at the mention of justification? Roz felt unreasonably cheated – it was one of the few questions she had wanted an answer to – and yet . . . Like the first stirrings of long dormant sap, her curiosity began to reawaken. God knows, there was no sense to it – she and Olive were as different as two women could be – but she had to admit an odd liking for the woman.

  She snapped her briefcase closed and never noticed that her pencil was missing.

  Iris had left a breathy message on the answerphone. ‘Ring me with all the dirt . . . Is she perfectly ghastly? If she’s as mad and as fat as her solicitor said, she must be terrifying. I’m agog to hear the gory details. If you don’t phone, I shall come round to the flat and make a nuisance of myself . . .’

  Roz poured herself a gin and tonic and wondered if Iris’s insensitivity was inherited or acquired. She dialled her number. ‘I’m phoning because it’s the lesser of two evils. If I had to watch you drooling your disgusting prurience all over my carpet, I should be sick.’ Mrs Antrobus, her bossy white cat, slithered round her legs, stiff tailed and purring. Roz winked down at her. She and Mrs Antrobus had a relationship of long standing, in which Mrs Antrobus wore the trousers and Roz knew her place. There was no persuading Mrs A. to do anything she didn’t want.

  ‘Oh, goody. You liked her, then?’

  ‘What a revolting woman you are.’ She took a sip from her glass. ‘I’m not sure that like is quite the word I would use.’

  ‘How fat is she?’

  ‘Grotesque. And it’s sad, not funny.’

  ‘Did she talk?’

  ‘Yes. She has a very pukka accent and she’s a bit of an intellectual. Not at all what I expected. Very sane, by the way.’

  ‘I thought the solicitor said she was a psychopath.’

  ‘He did. I’m going to see him tomorrow. I want to know who gave him that idea. According to Olive, five psychiatrists have diagnosed her normal.’

  ‘She might be lying.’

  ‘She’s not. I checked with the Governor afterwards.’ Roz reached down to scoop Mrs Antrobus against her chest. The cat, purring noisily, licked her nose. It was only cupboard love. She was hungry. ‘Still, I wouldn’t get too excited about this, if I were you. Olive may refuse to see me again.’

  ‘Why, and what’s that awful row?’ demanded Iris.

  ‘Mrs Antrobus.’

  ‘Oh God! The mangy cat.’ Iris was diverted. ‘It sounds as if you’ve got the builders in. What on earth are you doing to it?’

  ‘Loving it. She’s the only thing that makes this hideous flat worth coming back to.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ said Iris, whose contempt for cats was matched only by her contempt for authors. ‘I can’t think why you wanted to rent it in the first place. Use the money from the divorce and get something decent. Why might Olive refuse to see you?’

  ‘She’s unpredictable. Got very angry with me suddenly and called a halt to the interview.’

  She heard Iris’s indrawn gasp. ‘Roz, you wretch! You haven’t blown it, I hope.’

  Roz grinned into the receiver. ‘I’m not sure. We’ll just have to wait and see. Got to go now. Bye-ee.’ She hung up smartly on Iris’s angry squeaking and went into the kitchen to feed Mrs Antrobus. When the phone rang again, she picked up her gin, moved into her bedroom, and started typing.

  Olive took the pencil she had stolen from Roz and stood it carefully alongside the small clay figure of a woman that was propped up at the back of her chest of drawers. Her moist lips worked involuntarily, chewing, sucking, as she studied the figure critically. It was crudely executed, a lump of dried grey clay, unfired and unglazed but, like a fertility symbol from a less sophisticated age, its femininity was powerful. She selected a red marker from a jar and carefully coloured in the slab of hair about the face, then, changing to a green marker, filled in on the torso a rough representation of the silk shirtwaisted dress that Roz had been wearing.

  To an observer her actions would have appeared childish. She cradled the figure in her hands like a tiny doll, crooning over it, before replacing it beside the pencil which, too faintly for the human nose, still carried the scent of Rosalind Leigh.

  Two

  PETER CREW’S OFFICE was in the centre of Southampton, in a street where estate agents predominated. It was a sign of the times, thought Roz, as she walked past them, that they were largely empty. Depression had settled on them, as on everything else, like a dark immovable cloud.

  Peter Crew was a gangling man of indeterminate age, with faded eyes and a blond toupee parted at the side. His own hair, a yellowish white, hung beneath it like a dirty net curtain. Every so often, he lifted the e
dge of the hair-piece and poked a finger underneath to scratch his scalp. The inevitable result of so much ill-considered stretching was that the toupee gaped perpetually in a small peak above his nose. It looked, Roz thought, like a large chicken perched on top of his head. She rather sympathized with Olive’s contempt for him.

  He smiled at her request to tape their conversation, a studied lift of the lips which lacked sincerity. ‘As you please.’ He folded his hands on his desk. ‘So, Miss Leigh, you’ve already seen my client. How was she?’

  ‘She was surprised to hear she still had a solicitor.’

  ‘I don’t follow,’

  ‘According to Olive, she hasn’t heard from you in four years. Are you still representing her?’

  His face assumed a look of comical dismay but, like his smile, it lacked conviction. ‘Good Heavens. Is it as long as that? Surely not. Didn’t I write to her last year?’

  ‘You tell me, Mr Crew.’

  He fussed to a cabinet in the corner and flicked through the files. ‘Here we are. Olive Martin. Dear me, you’re right. Four years. Mind you,’ he said sharply, ‘there’s been no communication from her either.’ He pulled out the file and brought it across to his desk. ‘The law is a costly business, Miss Leigh. We don’t send letters for fun, you know.’

  Roz lifted an eyebrow. ‘Who’s paying, then? I assumed she was on Legal Aid.’

  He adjusted his yellow hat. ‘Her father paid, though, frankly, I’m not sure what the position would be now. He’s dead, you know.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Heart attack a year ago. It was three days before anyone found him. Messy business. We’re still trying to sort out the estate.’ He lit a cigarette and then abandoned it on the edge of an overflowing ashtray.

  Roz pencilled a doodle on her notepad. ‘Does Olive know her father’s dead?’

  He was surprised. ‘Of course she does.’

  ‘Who told her? Obviously, your firm didn’t write.’

  He eyed her with the sudden suspicion of an unwary rambler coming upon a snake in the grass. ‘I telephoned the prison and spoke to the Governor. I thought it would be less upsetting for Olive if the news was given personally.’ He became alarmed. ‘Are you saying she’s never been told?’

  ‘No. I just wondered why, if her father had money to leave, there’s been no correspondence with Olive. Who’s the beneficiary?’

  Mr Crew shook his head. ‘I can’t reveal that. It’s not Olive, naturally.’

  ‘Why naturally?’

  He tut-tutted crossly. ‘Why do you think, young woman? She murdered his wife and younger daughter and condemned the poor man to live out his last years in the house where it happened. It was completely unsaleable. Have you any idea how tragic his life became? He was a recluse, never went out, never received visitors. It was only because there were milk bottles on the doorstep that anyone realized there was something wrong. As I say, he’d been dead for three days. Of course he wasn’t going to leave money to Olive.’

  Roz shrugged. ‘Then why did he pay her legal bills? That’s hardly consistent, is it?’

  He ignored the question. ‘There would have been difficulties, in any case. Olive would not have been allowed to benefit financially from the murder of her mother and her sister.’

  Roz conceded the point. ‘Did he leave much?’

  ‘Surprisingly, yes. He made a tidy sum on the stock market.’ His eyes held a wistful regret as he scratched vigorously under his toupee. ‘Whether through luck or good judgement he sold everything just before Black Monday. The estate is now valued at half a million pounds.’

  ‘My God!’ She was silent for a moment. ‘Does Olive know?’

  ‘Certainly, if she reads the newspapers. The amount has been published and, because of the murders, it found its way into the tabloids.’

  ‘Has it gone to the beneficiary yet?’

  He frowned heavily, his brows jutting. ‘I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss that. The terms of the will preclude it.’

  Roz shrugged and tapped her teeth with her pencil. ‘Black Monday was October eighty-seven. The murders happened on September ninth, eighty-seven. That’s odd, don’t you think?’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I’d expect him to be so shell-shocked that stocks and shares would be the last thing he’d worry about.’

  ‘Conversely,’ said Mr Crew reasonably, ‘that very fact would demand that he find something to occupy his mind. He was semi-retired after the murders. Perhaps the financial pages were his only remaining interest.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Time presses. Was there anything else?’

  It was on the tip of Roz’s tongue to ask why, if Robert Martin had made a killing on the stock exchange, he had chosen to live out his days in an unsaleable house. Surely a man worth half a million could have afforded to move, irrespective of what his property was worth? What, she wondered, was in that house to make Martin sacrifice himself to it? But she sensed Crew’s hostility to her and decided that discretion was the better part of valour. This man was one of the few sources of corroborative information open to her and she would need him again, even though his sympathies clearly lay more with the father than the daughter. ‘Just one or two more questions this morning.’ She smiled pleasantly, a studied use of charm as insincere as his. ‘I’m still feeling my way on this, Mr Crew. To tell you the truth, I’m not yet convinced there’s a book in it.’ And what an understatement that was. She wasn’t intending to write anything. Or was she?

  He steepled his fingers and tapped them together impatiently. ‘If you remember, Miss Leigh, I made that very point in my letter to you.’

  She nodded gravely, pandering to his ego. ‘And as I told you, I don’t want to write Olive’s story simply to cover the pages with lurid details of what she did. But one part of your letter implied an angle that might be worth pursuing. You advised her to plead not guilty to murder on the grounds of diminished responsibility. Had that succeeded, you suggested, she would have been found guilty of manslaughter and would, in all probability, have been sentenced to indefinite detention. I think you went on to estimate ten to fifteen years in a secure unit if she had been given psychiatric treatment and had responded favourably to it.’

  ‘That is correct,’ he agreed. ‘And I think it was a reasonable estimate. Certainly she would have served nothing like the twenty-five year sentence the judge recommended she serve.’

  ‘But she rejected your advice. Do you know why?’

  ‘Yes. She had a morbid fear of being locked up with mad people and she misunderstood the nature of indefinite detention. She was convinced that it meant endless, and, try as we might, we could not persuade her otherwise.’

  ‘In that case, why didn’t you lodge a not guilty plea on her behalf? The very fact that she couldn’t grasp what you were telling her implies that she wasn’t capable of pleading for herself. You must have thought she had a defence or you wouldn’t have suggested it.’

  He smiled grimly. ‘I don’t quite understand why, Miss Leigh, but you seem to have decided that we failed Olive in some way.’ He scribbled a name and address on a piece of paper. ‘I suggest you talk to this man before you come to any more erroneous conclusions.’ He flicked the paper in her direction. ‘He’s the barrister we briefed for her defence. Graham Deedes. In the event, she outmanoeuvred us and he was never called to defend her.’

  ‘But why? How could she outmanoeuvre you?’ She frowned. ‘I’m sorry if I sound critical, Mr Crew, and please believe me, you are wrong in assuming I have reached any unfavourable conclusions.’ But was that really true? she wondered. ‘I am simply a perplexed onlooker asking questions. If this Deedes was in a position to raise serious doubts over her quote sanity unquote, then surely he should have insisted that the court hear her defence whether she wanted it or not. Not to put too fine a point on it, if she was bonkers then the system had a duty to recognize the fact, even if she herself thought she was sane.’

  He relented a little. �
��You’re using very emotive language, Miss Leigh – there was never a question of pleading insanity, only diminished responsibility – but I do take your point. I used the word outmanoeuvred advisedly. The simple truth is that a few weeks before the scheduled date of her trial, Olive wrote to the Home Secretary demanding to know whether she had the right to plead guilty or whether, under British law, this right was denied her. She claimed that undue pressure was being brought to bear to force a lengthy trial that would do nothing to help her but only prolong the agony for her father. The trial date was postponed while tests were carried out to discover if she was fit to plead. She was ruled eminently fit and was allowed to plead guilty.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ Roz chewed her lower lip. ‘Good Lord!’ she said again. ‘Were they right?’

  ‘Of course.’ He noticed the forgotten cigarette with a curl of ash dripping from its end and, with a gesture of annoyance, stubbed it out. ‘She knew exactly what the consequences would be. They even told her what sort of sentence to expect. Nor would prison have come as any surprise to her. She spent four months on remand before the trial. Frankly, even had she agreed to defend herself the result would still have been the same. The evidence for a plea of diminished responsibility was very flimsy. I doubt we could have swung a jury.’

  ‘And yet in your letter you said that, in spite of everything, you are still convinced she’s a psychopath. Why?’

  He fingered the file on his desk. ‘I saw the photographs of Gwen and Amber’s bodies, taken before their removal from the kitchen. It was a slaughterhouse running with blood, the most horrifying scene I have ever witnessed. Nothing will ever convince me that a psychologically stable personality could wreak such atrocity on anyone, let alone on a mother and sister.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘No, despite what the psychiatrists say – and you must remember, Miss Leigh, that whether or not psychopathy is a diagnosable disease is under constant debate – Olive Martin is a dangerous woman. I advise you to be extremely wary in your dealings with her.’