The Sculptress

by Minette Walters

  ‘But you felt no responsibility for it?’

  He stared at the carpet, unable to look at either of them. ‘I assumed she had always been unstable,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Her sister was. I thought it was a genetic thing.’

  ‘So she behaved oddly before the murders?’

  ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘As I say, I wouldn’t have pursued’ – he paused – ‘the – relationship – if I had known the kind of person she was.’

  Hal changed tack. ‘What exactly was your relationship with Olive’s father?’

  He clamped his knees tighter about his hands. ‘Friendly.’

  ‘How friendly?’

  Mr Clarke sighed. ‘Does it matter now? It was a long time ago and Robert is dead.’ His eyes drifted towards the window.

  ‘It matters,’ said Hal brusquely.

  ‘We were very friendly.’

  ‘Did you have a sexual relationship?’

  ‘Briefly.’ His hands struggled from between his knees and he buried his face in them. ‘It sounds so sordid now, but it really wasn’t. You have to understand how lonely I was. God knows it’s not her fault, but my wife has never been much in the way of a companion. We married late, no children, and her mind has never been strong. I became her nurse and keeper before we’d been married five years, imprisoned in my own house with someone I could barely communicate with.’ He swallowed painfully. ‘Robert’s friendship was all I had and he, as you obviously know, was homosexual. His marriage was as much a prison as mine, though for different reasons.’ He pressed the bridge of his nose with a finger and thumb. ‘The sexual nature of the relationship was simply a by-product of our dependence on each other. It mattered a great deal to Robert and very much less to me, though I admit that at the time – a period of three or four months only – I genuinely believed myself to be a homosexual.’

  ‘Then you fell in love with Olive?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Clarke simply. ‘She was very like her father, of course, intelligent, sensitive, really quite charming when she wanted to be, and extraordinarily sympathetic. She made so few demands, unlike my wife.’ He sighed. ‘It seems strange to say it, in view of what happened later, but she was a very comfortable person to be with.’

  ‘Did Olive know about your relationship with her father?’

  ‘Not from me. She was very naïve in many respects.’

  ‘And Robert didn’t know about you and Olive.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You were playing with fire, Mr Clarke.’

  ‘I didn’t plan it, Sergeant. It happened. All I can say in my defence is that I ceased being’ – he sought for the right word – ‘intimate with Robert the minute I recognized my feelings for Olive. We did not stop being friends, however. That would have been cruel.’

  ‘Bullshit!’ said Hal with calculated anger. ‘You didn’t want to be found out. My guess is you were shafting both of them at the same time and loving every exciting minute of it. And you have the bloody gall to say you don’t feel responsible!’

  ‘Why should I?’ Clarke said with a flash of spirit. ‘My name was never mentioned by either of them. Do you imagine it wouldn’t have been if I had unwittingly precipitated the tragedy?’

  Roz smiled contemptuously. ‘Did you never wonder why Robert Martin wouldn’t speak to you after the murders?’

  ‘I assumed he was too distressed.’

  ‘I think you feel a little more than simple distress when you discover that your lover has seduced your daughter,’ she said ironically. ‘Of course you precipitated it, Mr Clarke, and you knew it. But, by God, you weren’t going to say anything. You’d rather see the entire Martin family destroy itself than prejudice your own position.’

  ‘Was that so unreasonable?’ he protested. ‘They were free to name me. They didn’t. How would it have helped if I had spoken out? Gwen and Amber would still have been dead. Olive would still have gone to prison.’ He turned to Hal. ‘I regret intensely my involvement with the family but I really can’t be held responsible if my connection with them led to tragedy. There was nothing illegal about what I did.’

  Hal looked out of the window again. ‘Tell us why you moved, Mr Clarke. Was it your decision or your wife’s?’

  He clamped his hands between his knees again. ‘It was a joint decision. Life there became unbearable for both of us. We saw ghosts everywhere. A change of environment seemed the only sensible course.’

  ‘Why were you so keen to keep your forwarding address secret?’

  Clarke raised haunted eyes. ‘To avoid the past catching up with me. I’ve lived in constant dread of this.’ He looked at Roz. ‘It’s almost a relief to have it out in the open at last. You probably won’t believe that.’

  She gave a tight smile. ‘The police took a statement from your wife on the day of the murders, saying that she saw Gwen and Amber on the doorstep that morning after you and Robert left for work. But when I came here the other day, she said she had lied about it.’

  ‘I can only repeat what I said to you then,’ he answered wearily. ‘Dorothy’s senile. You can’t put any reliance on anything she says. She doesn’t even know what day it is most of the time.’

  ‘Was she telling the truth five years ago?’

  He nodded. ‘In so far as saying they were alive when I left for work, yes, she was. Amber was at the window, watching. I saw her myself. She ducked behind the curtain when I waved at her. I remember thinking how odd that was.’ He paused. ‘As to whether Dorothy saw Robert leave,’ he resumed after a moment, ‘I don’t know. She said she did and I’ve always understood that Robert had a cast-iron alibi.’

  ‘Has your wife ever mentioned seeing the bodies, Mr Clarke?’ asked Hal casually.

  ‘Good God, no.’ He sounded genuinely shocked.

  ‘I just wondered why she saw ghosts. She wasn’t particularly friendly with Gwen or Amber, was she? Rather the reverse, I’d have thought, in view of the amount of time you spent at the Martins’ house.’

  ‘Everyone in that road saw ghosts,’ he said bleakly. ‘We all knew what Olive had done to those wretched women. It would have required a very dull imagination not to see ghosts.’

  ‘Can you remember what your wife was wearing the morning of the murders?’

  He stared at Hal, surprised by the sudden switch. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘We’ve had a report that a woman was seen walking down past the Martins’ garage.’ The lie rolled glibly off his tongue. ‘From the description it was too small for Olive but whoever it was was dressed in what looked like a smart black suit. We’d like to trace her. Could it have been your wife?’

  The man’s relief was palpable. ‘No. She never had a black suit.’

  ‘Was she wearing anything black that morning?’

  ‘No. She wore a floral overall.’

  ‘You’re very certain.’

  ‘She always wore it, every morning, to do the housework. She used to get dressed after she’d finished. Except Sundays. She didn’t do housework on Sundays.’

  Hal nodded. ‘The same overall every morning? What happened when it got dirty?’

  Clarke frowned, puzzled by the line of questioning. ‘She had another one, a plain blue one. But she was definitely wearing the floral one on the day of the murders.’

  ‘Which one was she wearing the day after the murders?’

  He licked his lips nervously. ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘It was the blue one, wasn’t it? And she went on wearing the blue one, I suspect, until you or she bought a spare.’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  Hal smiled unpleasantly. ‘Does she still have her floral overall, Mr Clarke?’

  ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘It’s a long time since she did any housework.’

  ‘What happened to it?’

  ‘I can’t remember. We threw out a lot of things before we moved.’

  ‘How did you find the time to do that?’ asked Roz. ‘Mr Hayes said you upped and l
eft one morning and a removal company turned up three days later to pack your stuff for you.’

  ‘Perhaps I sorted through everything when it came here,’ he said rather wildly. ‘I can’t remember the precise order of things so long afterwards.’

  Hal scratched his jaw. ‘Did you know,’ he murmured evenly, ‘that your wife identified some charred remains of a floral overall, found in the incinerator in the Martins’ garden, as being part of the clothing that Gwen was wearing the day she was murdered?’

  Colour drained from Clarke’s face, leaving it an unhealthy grey. ‘No, I didn’t.’ The words were barely audible.

  ‘And those remains were carefully photographed and carefully stored, ready to be produced at a future date if there was ever any dispute over their ownership. Mr Hayes, I’m sure, will be able to tell us whether it was your wife’s overall or Gwen’s.’

  Clarke raised his hands in helpless surrender. ‘She told me she’d thrown it away,’ he pleaded, ‘because the iron had scorched a hole through the front. I believed her. She often did things like that.’

  Hal hardly seemed to hear him but went on in the same unemotional voice. ‘I very much hope, Mr Clarke, that we will find a way of proving that you knew all along that it was your wife who killed Gwen and Amber. I should like to see you tried and convicted of allowing an innocent girl to go to prison for a crime you knew she hadn’t committed, particularly a girl whom you used and abused so shamelessly.’

  They could never prove it, of course, but he drew considerable satisfaction from the fear that set Clarke’s face working convulsively.

  ‘How could I know? I wondered’ – his voice rose – ‘of course I wondered, but Olive confessed.’ His eyes strayed beseechingly to Roz. ‘Why did Olive confess?’

  ‘Because she was in deep shock, because she was frightened, because she didn’t know what else to do, because her mother was dead, and because she had been brought up to keep secrets. She thought her father would save her, but he didn’t, because he thought she had done it. You could have saved her, but you didn’t, because you were afraid of what people would say. The woman at Wells-Fargo could have saved her, but she didn’t, because she didn’t want to be involved. Her solicitor could have saved her if he had been a kinder man.’ She flicked a glance at Hal. ‘The police could have saved her if they’d questioned, just once, the value of confession evidence. But it was six years ago, and six years ago, confessions’ – she made a ring with her thumb and forefinger – ‘were A-OK. But I don’t blame them, Mr Clarke. I blame you. For everything. You played at being a homosexual because you were bored with your wife and then you seduced your lover’s daughter to prove you weren’t the pervert you thought he was.’ She stared at him with disdain. ‘And that’s how I’m going to portray you in the book that will get Olive out of prison. I really despise people like you.’

  ‘You’ll destroy me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that what Olive wants? My destruction?’

  ‘I don’t know what Olive wants. I only know what I want, which is to get her released. If it means your destruction, then so be it.’

  He sat for some moments in silence, his fingers plucking shakily at the creases in his trousers. Then, as if reaching a sudden decision, he looked at Roz. ‘I would have spoken if Olive hadn’t confessed. But she did, and I assumed like everyone else that she was telling the truth. Presumably you have no desire to prolong her stay in prison? Her release in advance of your book’s publication would improve your sales considerably, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe. What are you suggesting?’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘If I give you the evidence now that will hasten her release, will you in return promise not to divulge my real name or address in the book? You could refer to me by the name Olive called me, Mr Lewis. Do you agree?’

  She smiled faintly. What an unbelievable shit he was. He could never hold her to it, of course, but he didn’t seem to realize that. And the police would release his name, anyway, if only as Mrs Clarke’s husband. ‘I agree. As long as it gets Olive out.’

  He stood up, taking some keys out of his pocket, and walked over to an ornate Chinese box on the sideboard. He unlocked it and raised the lid, removing something wrapped in tissue paper and handing it to Hal. ‘I found it when we moved,’ he said. ‘She’d hidden it at the bottom of one of her drawers. I swear I never knew how she got it, but I’ve always been afraid that Amber must have taunted her with it. She talks about Amber a lot.’ He washed his hands in mimicry of Pontius Pilate. ‘She calls her the Devil.’

  Hal peeled away the tissue paper and looked at what was revealed. A silver bracelet with a tiny silver-chair charm and a tag on which U.R.N.A.R.N.I.A. was barely discernible through a welter of deep angry scratches.

  It was almost Christmas before the scales of justice had tipped enough in Olive’s favour to allow her to leave the confines of her prison. There would always be doubters, of course, people who would call her the Sculptress till the day she died. After six years the evidence in support of her story was desperately thin. A silver bracelet where it shouldn’t have been. Tiny fragments of a burnt floral overall, identified by a senile woman’s bitter husband. And, finally, the painstaking reappraisal of the photographic evidence, using sophisticated computer enhancement, which had revealed a smaller, daintier shoe print in the blood beneath a huge ribbed rubber sole mark left by Olive’s trainer.

  No one would ever know what really happened that day because the truth was locked inside a brain that no longer functioned, and Edward Clarke could not, or would not, shed any light from statements his wife had made in the past. He maintained his complete ignorance of the whole affair, saying that any qualms he might have had had been put to rest by Olive’s confession and that the onus for mistakes must lie with her and with the police. The most probable scenario, and the one generally accepted, was that Amber waited until Edward and Robert had left for work and then invited Mrs Clarke into the house to taunt her with the bracelet and the abortion. What happened then was a matter for guesswork but Roz, at least, believed that Mrs Clarke had set about the murders in cold blood and with a clear mind. There was something very calculating about the way she must have donned gloves to perform her butchery and her careful stepping around the blood to avoid leaving too many traces. But most calculating of all was the clever burning of her blood-stained overall amidst Gwen and Amber’s clothes and her cool identification of the pieces afterwards as being the overall worn by Gwen that morning. Roz even wondered sometimes if the intention all along had been to implicate Olive. There was no telling now why Mrs Clarke had drawn attention to herself outside the kitchen window, but Roz couldn’t help feeling that, had she not done so, Olive might have had enough presence of mind to phone the police immediately before she ran amok in the kitchen and obliterated the evidence that might have exonerated her.

  There were to be no disciplinary charges against the police team involved. The chief constable issued a press release, pointing to the recent tightening of police procedure, particularly in relation to confession evidence, but he stressed that as far as Olive’s case was concerned the police had taken all available steps to ensure her rights were fully protected. In the circumstances it had been reasonable to assume that her confession was genuine. He took the opportunity to reiterate forcefully the duty imperative on the public never to disturb evidence at the scene of a crime.

  Peter Crew’s association with the case, particularly in view of his subsequent mishandling of Robert Martin’s estate, had attracted considerable and unwelcome interest. At worst he was accused of deliberately engineering Olive’s conviction in order to gain access to unlimited funds, and, at best, of bullying an emotionally disturbed young woman at a time when he had a responsibility to safeguard her interests. He denied both accusations strenuously, arguing that he could not have foreseen Robert Martin’s success on the stock exchange nor his early death; and claiming that because Olive’s story had been remarkably consiste
nt with the forensic evidence he, in the absence of any denials on her part, had, like the police, accepted it as a true statement of fact. He had advised her to say nothing and could not be held liable for her confession. Meanwhile, he remained at liberty on bail, facing the sort of charges that for most of his clients would have resulted in a remand to prison, bullishly declaring his innocence on all counts.

  Roz, when she heard what he was saying, was angry enough to waylay him in the street with a local journalist in tow. ‘We could argue about liability for ever, Mr Crew, but just explain this to me. If Olive’s statement was as consistent with the forensic evidence as you maintain, then why did she claim there was no mist on the mirror at a time when Gwen and Amber were still alive?’ She caught his arm as he tried to walk away. ‘Why didn’t she mention that the axe was too blunt to cut off Amber’s head? Why didn’t she say she had struck her four times before resorting to the carving knife? Why didn’t she describe her fight with her mother and the stabbing incisions she’d made in her mother’s throat before cutting it? Why didn’t she mention burning the clothes? In fact, try quoting me one detail from Olive’s statement that does accord fully with the forensic evidence.’

  He shook her off angrily. ‘She said she used the axe and the carving knife,’ he snapped.

  ‘Neither of which had her fingerprints on them. The forensic evidence did not support her statement.’

  ‘She had their blood all over her.’

  ‘All over is right, Mr Crew. But where does it say in her statement that she rolled in it?’

  He tried to walk away but found the journalist blocking his path. ‘Footprints,’ he said. ‘At the time, there were only her footprints.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Roz. ‘And on that one piece of evidence, which was at odds with all the rest, you made up your mind she was a psychopath and prepared a defence on the grounds of diminished responsibility. Why did you never brief Graham Deedes on the lifelines her poor father was trying to throw her? Why didn’t you question your own judgement when she was pronounced fit to plead guilty? Why the hell didn’t you treat her like a human being, Mr Crew, instead of a monster?’