“Money up front.”
She took out her wallet and emptied it.
“Two hundred pounds.” She counted it on to his palm.
“I knew you wasn’t from the television,” said Ma in disgust.
“I bloody knew it.”
“Well?” Roz demanded of Gary.
“It was on for Sunday at the Belvedere Hotel in Farraday Street.
“All my love, P.” That’s the Farraday Street in Southampton, in case you didn’t know.”
The route to Southampton took Roz along Dawlington High Street. She had passed Glitzy boutique before the name registered, and nearly caused a pile-up by standing on her brakes in the middle of the road.
With a cheerful wave to the furious man behind her, who was mouthing imprecations against women drivers, she drew into a side street and found a parking space.
Glitzy was something of a misnomer, she thought, as she pushed open the door. She had expected designer wear or, at the very least, clothes from the more expensive end of the market. But then, she was used to London boutiques. Glitzy catered very definitely for the cheaper end of the market, wisely recognising that their customers would be predominantly teenage girls without the wherewithal or the transport to go shopping in the more stylish parts of Southampton.
Roz sought out the manager, a woman in her thirties with a splendid hairdo back combed into a blonde beehive on top of her head. Roz handed her one of her cards and ran through her spiel about her book on Olive Martin.
“I’m trying to find someone who knew the sister, Amber,” she said, ‘and I’m told she worked here during the month before she was murdered. Were you here then? Or do you know anyone who was?”
“No, love, sorry. Staff turns over very quickly in a place like this, young girls normally, doing a short stint till something better comes up. I don’t even know who was manager then.
You’ll have to get on to the owners. I can give you their address,” she finished helpfully.
“Thank you. It’s worth a shot, I suppose.”
The woman took her over to the cash desk and sorted through a card index.
“Funny, I remember those murders, but I never put two and two together.
You know, that the sister had worked here.”
“She wasn’t here very long and I’m not sure it was even reported. The press was more interested in Olive than in Amber.”
“Yeah.” She took out a card.
“Amber. It’s not that common a name, is it?”
“I suppose not. It was a nickname, anyway. Her real name was Alison.”
The woman nodded.
“I’ve been here three years and for three years I’ve been pressing to have the staff toilet redecorated. The recession’s their excuse for not doing it, same as it’s their excuse for any wretched thing, from cuts in wages to cheap imported stock that’s not even stitched properly. Anyway, the toilet’s tiled and that’s an expensive job, apparently, chipping off the old ones to put up new.” Roz smiled politely.
“Don’t worry, love, it’s to the point and I’m getting there. The reason I want new tiles is that someone took a chisel or something similar to the old ones. They scratched graffiti into the surface and then filled in the scratches with some sort of indelible ink. I’ve tried everything to get it out, bleach, oven cleaner, paint remover, you name it, love, I’ve tried it.” She shook her head.
“It can’t be shifted. And why? Because whoever did it gouged so deep they cut right through the ceramic, and the china clay underneath just goes on absorbing dirt and stains. Every time I look at it, it gives me the shivers.
Pure hate, that’s what it was done with.”
“What does the graffiti say?”
“I’ll show you. It’s at the back.” She negotiated a couple of doors, then pushed open another and stood aside to let Roz pass.
“There. It sucks, doesn’t it? And, you know, I’ve always wondered who Amber was. But it must be the sister, mustn’t it?
Like I say, Amber’s not that common a name.”
It was the same two words, repeated ten or eleven times across the tiles, a violent inversion of the hearts and arrows that more usually adorned lavatory walls. HATES ER… HATES BER… HATES AMBER.
“I wonder who did it?” murmured Roz.
“Someone very sick, I should think. They certainly didn’t want her to know, seeing how they’ve left their name off the front.”
“It depends how you read it,” said Roz thoughtfully.
“If it were set out neatly for you in a circle it would say Amber hates Amber hates Amber ad infinitum.”
The Belvedere was a typical back-street hotel, two substantial semis knocked together and entered via a flight of steps and a pillared front door. The place had an air of neglect as if its customers sales reps for the main part had deserted it. Roz rang the bell at the reception desk and waited.
A woman in her fifties emerged from a room at the back, all smiles.
“Good afternoon, madam. Welcome to the Belvedere.”
She pulled the registration book towards her.
“Is it a room you’re after?”
What terrible things recessions were, thought Roz. How long could people maintain this sad veneer of confident optimism when the reality was empty order books?
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I’m afraid it isn’t.” She handed over one of her cards.
“I’m a freelance journalist and I think someone I’m writing about may have stayed here. I was hoping you could identify her photograph for me.”
The woman tapped a finger on the book then pushed it away.
“Will what you write be published?”
Roz nodded.
“And will the Belvedere be mentioned if whoever it is did stay here?”
“Not if you’d rather it wasn’t.”
“My dear, how little you know about the hotel trade. Any publicity would be welcome at the moment.”
Roz laughed as she placed the photograph of Olive on the desk.
“If she came it would have been during the summer of eighty-seven. Were you here then?”
“We were.” The woman spoke with regret.
“We bought in eighty-six when the economy was booming.” She took a pair of glasses from her pocket and popped them on her nose, leaning forward to examine the photograph.
“Oh, yes, I remember her very well. Big girl. She and her husband came most Sundays during that summer. Used to book the room for the day and go home in the evening.” She sighed.
“It was a wonderful arrangement. We were always able to let the room again for the Sunday night. Double pay for one twenty-four-hour period.” She heaved another sigh.
“Chance’d be a fine thing now. I wish we could sell, I really do, but what with so many of the small hotels going bankrupt we wouldn’t even get what we paid for it.
Soldier on, that’s all we can do.”
Roz brought her back to Olive by tapping the photograph.
“What did she and her husband call themselves?”
The woman was amused.
“The usual, I should think. Smith or Brown.”
“Did they sign in?”
“Oh, yes. We’re very particular about our register.”
“Could I take a look?”
“Don’t see why not.” She opened a cupboard under the desk and sorted out the register for 1987. “Now, let me see. Ah, here we are. Mr. and Mrs. Lewis. Well, well, they were more imaginative than most.”
She twisted the book so that Roz could look at it.
She gazed at the neat script and thought: Got you, you bastard.
“This is the man’s handwriting.” She knew already.
“Oh, yes,” said the woman.
“He always signed. She was a lot younger than he was and very shy, particularly at the beginning.
She gained in confidence as time passed, they always do, but she never put herself forward. Who is she?”
Roz wondered if
the woman would be so keen to help once she knew, but there was no point in keeping it from her. She would learn all the details the minute the book appeared.
“Her name’s Olive Martin.”
“Never heard of her.”
“She’s serving a life sentence for murdering her mother and sister.”
“Good lord! Is she the one who-‘ She made chopping motions with her hands. Roz nodded.
“Good Lord!”
“Do you still want the Belvedere mentioned?”
“Do I heck!” She beamed broadly.
“Of course I do! A murderess in our hotel. Fancy! We’ll have a plaque put up in the bedroom. What are you writing exactly? A book? A magazine article? We’ll provide photographs of the hotel and the room she stayed in. Well, well, I must say. How exciting! If only I’d known.”
Roz laughed. It was a coldbloodedly ghoulish display of pleasure at another’s misfortune but she couldn’t find it in her heart to criticise. Only a fool would look a gift horse in the mouth.
“Before you get too excited,” she warned, ‘the book probably won’t be published for another year and it will be an exoneration of Olive, not a further condemnation. Yeu see, I believe she’s innocent.”
“Better and better. We’ll have the book on sale in the foyer. I knew our luck had to turn eventually.” She beamed at Roz.
“Tell Olive she can stay here free of charge for as long as she likes the minute she gets out of prison. We always look after our regulars.
Now, my dear, anything else I can help you with?”
“Do you have a photocopying machine?”
“We do. Every mod. con. here, you know.”
“Then may I have a copy of this entry in the register? And perhaps you could also give me a description of Mr. Lewis.”
She pursed her lips.
“He wasn’t very memorable. Early fifties. Blond, always wore a dark suit, a smoker. Any good?”
“Maybe. Did his hair look natural? Can you remember?” The woman chuckled.
“There now, I’d forgotten. It never occurred to me till I took them in some tea one day and surprised him adjusting his wig in the mirror. I laughed afterwards, I can tell you. But it was a good one. I wouldn’t have guessed just by looking at him. You know him then?”
Roz nodded.
“Would you recognise him from a photograph?”
“I’ll try. I can usually remember a face when I see it.”
“Visitor for you, Sculptress.” The officer was in the room before Olive had time to hide what she was doing.
“Come on. Get a move on.”
Olive swept her wax figures into one hand and crushed them together in her palm.
“Who is it?”
“The nun.” She looked at Olive’s closed fist.
“What have you got there?”
“Just plasticine.” She uncurled her fingers. The wax figures, carefully painted and clothed in coloured scraps, had merged into a multi-coloured mash, unidentifiable now as the altar candle they had sprung from.
“Well, leave it there. The nun’s come to talk to you, not watch you play with plasticine.”
Hal was asleep at the kitchen table, body rigidly upright, arms resting on the table, head nodding towards his chest. Roz watched him for a moment through the window, then tapped lightly on the glass. His eyes, red-rimmed with exhaustion, snapped open to look at her and she was shocked by the extent of his relief when he saw who it was.
He let her in.
“I hoped you wouldn’t come back,” he said, his face drawn with fatigue.
“What are you so frightened of?” she asked.
He looked at her with something like despair.
“Go home,” he said, ‘this is none of your business.” He went to the sink and ran the cold-water tap, dowsing his head and gasping as the icy stream hit the back of his neck.
From the floor above came a sudden violent hammering.
Roz leapt a foot in the air.
“Oh, my God! What was that?”
He reached out and gripped her arm, pushing her towards the door.
“Go home,” he ordered.
“Now! I don’t want to have to force you, Roz.”
But she stood her ground.
“What’s going on? What was that noise?”
“So help me,” he said grimly, “I will do you some damage if you don’t leave now.” But in outright contradiction to the words, he suddenly put his hands on either side of her face and kissed her.
“Oh, God!” he groaned, smoothing the tumbled hair from her eyes.
“I do not want you involved, Roz. I do not want you involved.”
She was about to say something when over his shoulder she saw the door into the restaurant swing open.
“Too late,” she said, turning him round.
“We’ve got company.”
Hal, horribly unprepared, showed his teeth in a wolfish grin.
“I’ve been expecting you,” he drawled. With a proprietary arm he eased Roz behind him and prepared to defend what was his.
There were four of them, large anonymous men in ski-masks.
They said nothing, just weighed in indiscriminately with baseball bats, using Hal as a human target. It happened so fast that Roz was a spectator to their grisly sport almost before she realised it. She, it seemed, was too insignificant to concern them.
Her first angry impulse was to catch out at a flailing arm but the battering she had had at the hands of Rupert two weeks before persuaded her to use her brain instead. With trembling fingers she opened her handbag and removed the three-inch hat ping she had taken to carrying with her, thrusting it upwards into the buttock of the man nearest her.
It drove in up to its ornate jade head and a soft groan issued from his mouth as he stood, completely paralysed with shock, the baseball bat slipping to the floor from his slackening fingers. No one noticed, except her.
With an exclamation of triumph she dived on it and brought it up in a swinging arc to smash against the man’s balls. He sat on the floor and started to scream.
“I’ve got one. Hal,” she panted.
“I’ve got a bat.”
“Then use it, for Christ’s sake,” he bellowed, going down under a rain of blows.
“Oh God!” Legs, she thought. She knelt on one knee, swiped at the nearest pair of trousers and crowed with hiumph when she made contact.
She took another swipe only to have her head jerked up as a hand seized her by the hair and started to pull it out by the roots. Shock and pain flooded her eyes with stinging tears.
Hal, on his hands and knees on the floor, his head protected by his shoulders, was only vaguely aware that the rapidity of the blows beating against his back had lessened. His brain was concentrated on the high-pitched screaming which he thought was coming from Roz. His anger was colossal, triggering such a surge of adrenalin that he exploded to his feet in an all consuming fury and threw himself at the first man he saw, bearing him back against the gleaming ovens where a saucepan of fish stock bubbled gently. Oblivious to the blow which crashed with the force of a bus between his shoulder blades he bent his victim in an arc over the rings, grabbed the saucepan and upended the boiling liquid over the masked head.
He swung round to face the fourth man and fended off another blow with his forearm before smashing the cast-iron base of the saucepan into the side of an unprotected jaw. The eyes behind the mask registered the briefest glimmer of surprise before rolling helplessly into their sockets. The man was unconscious before he hit the floor.
Exhausted, Hal looked about for Roz. It was a moment or two before he found her, so disorientated was he by the noise of screaming which seemed to be filling the kitchen from every side. He shook his head to clear the fog and looked towards the door. He saw her almost immediately, her neck trapped in the hooked arm of the only man left with any fight in him. Her eyes were closed and her head lolled alarmingly to one side.
“If you make a move,”
the man told Hal between jerky breaths, “I’ll break her neck.”
A hatred, so primeval that he couldn’t control it, erupted like hot lava in Hal’s brain. His actions were instinctive. He lowered his head and charged.
FIFTEEN
Roz swam up to a strange twilight world between oblivion and consciousness. She knew she was there in the oom but she felt apart from it as if she were watching what was going on from behind thickened glass. Sound was muted. She had a vague memory of fingers clamping round her throat. And afterwards? She wasn’t sure. It had, she thought, been very peaceful.
Hal’s face loomed over her.
“Are you all right?” he asked from a great distance.
“Fine,” she murmured happily.
He smacked her on the cheek with the flat of his hand.
“That’s my girl,” he told her, his voice muffled by cotton wool.
“Come on, now. Snap out of it. I need some help.”
She glared at him.
“I’ll be up in a minute,” she said with dignity.
He hauled her to her feet.
“Now,” he said firmly, ‘or we’ll be back where we started.” He thrust a baseball bat into her hand.
“I am going to tie them up but you’ve got to protect my back while I’m doing it. I don’t want one of these bastards surprising me.” He looked into her dazed eyes.
“Come on, Roz,” he said savagely, shaking her.
“Pull yourself together and show a bit of character.”
She took a deep breath.
“Has anyone ever told you what a complete and utter turd you are? I nearly died.”
“You fainted,” he said unemotionally, but his eyes were twinkling.
“Hit anything that moves,” he instructed her, except the one with his head under the tap. He’s in enough agony already.”
Reality came rushing in on wings of sound. Moans and groans and running water. There was a man with his head under the tap. She caught a movement out of the corner of her eye and swung the baseball bat in terrified reaction, ramming home the hat ping that its unfortunate recipient was gingerly plucking from his bottom. His screams of reawakened agony were pitiful.
? “Oh God!” she cried.
“I’ve done something awful.” Tears sprang into her eyes.
Hal finished trussing her putative killer, who had been knocked cold by his frenzied charge, and moved on to the other unconscious figure, winding twine expertly about the wrists and ankles.
Sculptress Page 24
