Sculptress

by Minette Walters

  Once or twice he smoothed his blond hair with the flat of his hand or touched his fingers to his tie, but for all the expression on his plastic features Hal might have been passing the time of day. It was impossible to gauge from his expression how deeply he was shocked or whether, indeed, he was shocked at all.

  “Did you like him?” asked Roz.

  “Not much. He reminded me of Olive. I don’t know where I am with people who hide their feelings. It makes me uncomfortable.”

  Roz could identify with that.

  Hal kept detail to a minimum, informing him only that the bodies of his wife and one of his daughters had been discovered that afternoon in the kitchen of his house, and that his other daughter, Olive, had given the police reason to believe she had killed them.

  Robert Martin crossed his legs and folded his hands calmly in his lap.

  “Have you charged her with anything?”

  “No. We haven’t questioned her either.” He watched the other man closely.

  “Frankly, sir, in view of the serious nature of the possible charges we think she should have a solicitor with her.”

  “Of course. I’m sure my man, Peter Crew, will come.” Mild enquiry twitched his brows.

  “What’s the procedure? Should I telephone him?”

  Hal was puzzled by the man’s composure. He wiped a hand across his face.

  “Are you sure you understand what’s happened, sir?”

  “I believe so. Gwen and Amber are dead and you think Olive murdered them.”

  “That’s not quite accurate. Olive has implied that she was responsible for their deaths but, until we take a statement from her, I can’t say what the charges will be.” He paused for a moment.

  “I want you to be quite clear on this, Mr. Martin. The Home Office pathologist who examined the scene had no doubts that considerable ferocity was used both before and after death.

  In due course, I’m afraid to say, we will have to ask you to identify the bodies and you may, when you see them, feel less charitably inclined towards any possible suspect. On that basis, do you have any reservations about your solicitor representing Olive?”

  Martin shook his head.

  “I would be happier dealing with someone I know.”

  “There may be a conflict of interests. Have you considered that?”

  “In what way?”

  “At the risk of labouring the point, sir,” said Hal coldly, ‘your wife and daughter have been brutally murdered. I imagine you will want the perpetrator prosecuted?” He lifted an eyebrow in enquiry and Martin nodded.

  “Then you may well want a solicitor yourself to ensure that the prosecution proceeds to your satisfaction, but if your own solicitor is already representing your daughter, he will be unable to assist you because your interests will conflict with your daughter’s.”

  “Not if she’s innocent.” Martin pinched the crease in his trousers, aligning it with the centre of his knee.

  “I am really not concerned with what Olive may have implied, Sergeant Hawksley. There is no conflict of interest in my mind. Establishing her innocence and representing me in pressing for a prosecution can be done by the same solicitor. Now, if you could lend me the use of a telephone, I will ring Peter Crew, and afterwards, perhaps you will allow me to talk to my daughter.”

  Hal shook his head.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but that won’t be possible, not until we’ve taken a statement from her. You will also be required to make a statement. You may be allowed to speak to her afterwards, but at the moment I can’t guarantee it.”

  “And that,” he said, recalling the incident, ‘was the one and only time he showed any emotion. He looked quite upset, but whether because I’d denied him access to Olive or because I’d told him he’d have to make a statement, I don’t know.” He considered for a moment.

  “It must have been the denial of access. We went through every minute of that man’s day and he came out whiter than white. He worked in an open-plan office with five other people and, apart from the odd trip to the lavatory, he was under someone’s eye the whole day. There just wasn’t time for him to go home.”

  “But you did suspect him?”

  “Yes.”

  Roz looked interested.

  “In spite of Olive’s confession?”

  He nodded.

  “He was so damn cold blooded about it all. Even identifying the bodies didn’t faze him.”

  Roz thought for a moment.

  “There was another conflict of interest which you don’t seem to have considered.” She chewed her pencil.

  “If Robert Martin was the murderer, he could have used his solicitor to manipulate Olive into confessing. Peter Crew makes no secret of his dislike of her, you know. I think he regrets the abolition of capital punishment.”

  Hal folded his arms, then smiled in amusement.

  “You’ll have to be very careful if you intend to make statements like that in your book. Miss Leigh. Solicitors are not required to like their clients, they merely have to represent them. In any case, Robert Martin dropped out of the frame very rapidly. We toyed with the idea that he killed Gwen and Amber before he went to work and Olive then set about disposing the bodies to protect him, but the numbers didn’t add up. He had an alibi even for that. There was a neighbour who saw her husband off to work a few minutes before Martin himself left. Amber and Gwen were alive then because she spoke to them on their doorstep.

  She remembered asking Amber how she was getting on at Glitzy.

  They waved as Martin drove away.”

  “He could have gone round the corner and come back again.”

  “He left home at eight-thirty and arrived at work at nine. We tested the drive and it took half an hour.” He shrugged.

  “As I said, he was whiter than white.”

  “What about lunch? Could he have gone back then?”

  “He had a pint and a sandwich in the local pub with two men from the office.”

  “OK. Go on.”

  There was little more to tell. In spite of Crew’s advice to remain silent, Olive agreed to answer police questions, and at nine-thirty, expressing relief to have got the whole thing off her chest, she signed her statement and was formally charged with the murder of her mother and sister.

  Following her remand into custody on the morning of the next day, Hal and Geof Wyatt were given the task of detailing the police case against her. It was a straightforward collating of pathological, forensic, and police evidence, all of which, upon examination, supported the facts given in Olive’s statement.

  Namely that, acting alone, she had, on the morning of the ninth of September, 1987, murdered her mother and sister by cutting their throats with a carving knife.

  SEVEN

  There was a lengthy silence. Hal splayed his hands on the scrubbed deal table and pushed himself to his feet.

  “How about some more coffee?” He watched her industrious pen scribbling across a page of her notebook.

  “More coffee?” he repeated.

  “Mm. Black, no sugar.” She didn’t look up but went on writing.

  “Sure, baas. Don’t mind me, baas. I’se just de paid help, baas.”

  Roz laughed.

  “Sorry. Yes, thank you, I’d love some more coffee. Look, if you can just bear with me for a moment, I’ve a few questions to ask and I’m trying to jot them down while the thing’s still fresh.”

  He watched her while she wrote. Botticelli’s Venus, he had thought the first time he saw her, but she was too thin for his liking, hardly more than seven stone and a good five feet six.

  She made a fabulous clothes’-horse, of course, but there was no softness to hug, no comfort in the tautly strung body. He wondered if her slenderness was a deliberate thing or if she lived on her nerves.

  The latter, he thought. She was clearly a woman of obsessions if her crusade for Olive was anything to go by. He put a fresh cup of coffee in front of her but stayed standing, cradling his own coffee cup be
tween his hands.

  “OK,” she said, sorting out the pages, ‘let’s start with the kitchen.

  You say the forensic evidence supported Olive’s statement that she acted alone. How?”

  He thought back.

  “You have to picture that place. It was a slaughter house, and every time she moved she left footprints in the congealing blood. We photographed each one separately and they were all hers, including the bloody prints that her shoes left on the carpet in the hall.” He shrugged.

  “There were also bloody palm-prints and fingerprints over most of the surfaces where she had rested her hands. Again all hers. We did raise other fingerprints, admittedly, including about three, I think, which we were never able to match with any of the Martins or their neighbours, but you’d expect that in a kitchen. The gas man, the electricity man, a plumber maybe. There was no blood on them so we inclined to the view that they had been left in the days prior to the murder.”

  Roz chewed her pencil.

  “And the axe and the knife? I suppose they had only her fingerprints.”

  “Actually no. The cutting weapons were so smeared that we couldn’t get anything off them at all.” He chuckled at her immediate interest.

  “You’re chasing red herrings. Wet blood is slippery stuff. It would have been very surprising if we had found some perfect prints. The rolling pin had three damn good ones, all hers.”

  She made a note.

  “I didn’t know you could take them off unpolished wood.”

  “It was solid glass, two feet long, a massive thing. I suppose if we were surprised by anything it was that the blows she struck with it hadn’t killed Gwen and Amber. They were both tiny women. By rights she should have smashed their skulls with it.” He sipped his coffee.

  “It leant some credence to her story, in fact, that she only tapped them lightly in the first instance to make them shut up. We were afraid she might use that in her defence to get the charge reduced to manslaughter, the argument being that she slit their throats only because she believed they were already dead and she was trying to dismember them in panic. If she could then go on to show that the initial blows with the rolling pin were struck with very little force well, she might almost have persuaded a jury that the whole thing was a macabre accident. Which is one good reason, by the way, why she never mentioned the fight with her mother. We did push her on that, but she kept insisting that no mist on the mirror meant they were dead.”

  He pulled a face.

  “So I spent a very unpleasant two days working with the pathologist and the bodies, going step by step through what actually happened. We ended up with enough evidence of the fight Gwen put up to save her life to press a murder charge. Poor woman. Her hands and arms were literally cut to ribbons where she had tried to ward off the blows.”

  Roz stared into her coffee for some minutes.

  “Olive was very kind to me the other day. I can’t imagine her doing something like that.”

  “You’ve never seen her in a rage. You might think differently if you had.”

  “Have you seen her in a rage?”

  “No,” he admitted.

  “Well, I find it difficult even to imagine that. I accept she’s put on a lot of weight in the last six years but she’s a heavy, stolid type.

  It’s highly strung, impatient people who lose their tempers.” She saw his scepticism and laughed.

  “I know, I know, amateur psychology of the worst kind. Just two more questions then I’ll leave you in peace. What happened to Gwen and Amber’s clothes?”

  “She burnt them in one of those square wire incinerators in the garden.

  We retrieved some scraps from the ashes which matched the descriptions that Martin gave of the clothes the two women had been wearing that morning.”

  “Why did she do that?”

  “To get rid of them, presumably.”

  “You didn’t ask her?”

  He frowned.

  “I’m sure we must have done. I can’t remember now.”

  “There’s nothing in her statement about burning clothes.”

  He lowered his head in reflection and pressed a thumb and forefinger to his eyelids.

  “We asked her why she took their clothes off,” he murmured, ‘and she said they had to be naked or she couldn’t see where to make the cuts through the joints. I think Geof then asked her what she had done with the clothes.”

  He fell silent.

  “And?”

  He looked up and rubbed his jaw pensively.

  “I don’t think she gave an answer. If she did, I can’t remember it. I have a feeling the information about the scraps in the incinerator came in the next morning when we made a thorough search of the garden.”

  “So you asked her then?”

  He shook his head.

  “I didn’t, though I suppose Geof may have done. Gwen had a floral nylon overall that had melted over a lump of wool and cotton. We had to peel it apart into its constituent elements but there was enough there that was recognisable. Martin ID’d the bits and so did the neighbour.” He stabbed a finger in the air.

  “There were some buttons, too.

  Martin recognised those straightaway as being from the dress his wife had been wearing.”

  “But didn’t you wonder why Olive took time out to burn the clothes? She could have put them in the suitcases with the bodies and dumped the whole lot in the sea.”

  “The incinerator certainly wasn’t burning at five o’clock that night or we’d have noticed it; therefore disposing of the clothes must have been one of the first things she did. She wouldn’t have seen it as taking time out because at that stage she probably still thought dismembering two bodies would be comparatively easy. Look, she was trying to get rid of evidence.

  The only reason she panicked and called us in was because her father was coming home. If it had been just the three women living in that house she could have gone through with her plan, and we’d have had the job of trying to identify some bits and pieces of mutilated flesh found floating in the sea off Southampton. She might even have got away with it.”

  “I doubt it. The neighbours weren’t stupid. They’d have wondered why Gwen and Amber were missing.”

  “True,” he conceded.

  “What was the other question?”

  “Did Olive’s hands and arms have a lot of scratches on them from her fight with Gwen?”

  He shook his head.

  “None. She had some bruising but no scratches.”

  Roz stared at him.

  “Didn’t that strike you as odd? You said Gwen was fighting for her life.”

  “She had nothing to scratch with,” he said almost apologetically.

  “Her fingernails were bitten to the quick. It was rather pathetic in a woman of her age. All she could do was grip Olive’s wrists to try and keep the knife away. That’s what the bruises were. Deep finger-marks.

  We took photographs of them.”

  With an abrupt movement Roz squared her papers and dropped them into her briefcase.

  “Not much room for doubt then, is there?” she said, picking up her coffee cup.

  “None at all. And it wouldn’t have made any difference, you know, if she’d kept her mouth shut or pleaded not guilty. She would still have been convicted. The evidence against her was overwhelming. In the end, even her father had to accept that. I felt quite sorry for him then. He became an old man overnight.”

  Roz glanced at the tape, which was still running.

  “Was he very fond of her?”

  “I don’t know. He was the most undemonstrative person I’ve ever met. I got the impression he wasn’t fond of any of them but’ he shrugged ‘he certainly took Olive’s guilt very badly.”

  She drank her coffee.

  “Presumably the post-mortem revealed that Amber had had a baby when she was thirteen?”

  He nodded.

  “Did you pursue that at all? Try and trace the child?”

  �
�We didn’t see the need. It had happened eight years before.

  It was hardly likely to have any bearing on the case.” He waited, but she didn’t say anything.

  “So? Will you go on with the book?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said.

  He looked surprised.

  “Why?”

  “Because there are more inconsistencies now than there were before.”

  She held up her fingers and ticked them off point by point.

  “Why was she crying so much when she telephoned the police station that the desk sergeant couldn’t understand what she was saying? Why wasn’t she wearing her best dress for London? Why did she burn the clothes?

  Why did her father think she was innocent? Why wasn’t he shocked by Gwen and Amber’s deaths? Why did she say she didn’t like Amber? Why didn’t she mention the fight with her mother if she intended to plead guilty? Why were the blows from the rolling pin so comparatively light? Why? Why? Why?” She dropped her hands to the table with a wry smile.

  “They may very well be red herrings but I can’t get rid of a gut feeling that there’s something wrong. Ultimately, perhaps, I cannot square your and her solicitor’s conviction that Olive was mad with the assessments of five psychiatrists who all say she’s normal.”

  He studied her for some minutes in silence.

  “You accused me of assuming her guilt before I knew it for a fact, but you’re doing something rather worse. You’re assuming her innocence in spite of the facts. Supposing you manage to whip up support for her through this book of yours and in view of the way the judicial system is reeling at the moment, that’s not as unlikely as it should be have you no qualms about releasing someone like her back into society?”

  “None at all, if she’s innocent.”

  “And if she isn’t, but you get her out anyway?”

  “Then the law is an ass.”

  “All right, if she didn’t do it, who did?”

  “Someone she cared about.” She finished her coffee and switched off the tape.

  “Anything else just doesn’t make sense.”

  She shut the recorder into her briefcase and stood up.