The Sculptress Part 2

"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 impa.s.sively 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 baulked at the mention of justification?

Roz felt unreasonably cheated it was one of the few questions she had wanted an answer to and yeta Like the first stirrings of long dormant sap, her curiosity began to reawaken. G.o.d 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 answer phone "Ring me with all the dopea 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 myselfa"

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 relations.h.i.+p 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 gla.s.s.

"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 G.o.d! 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 unpredidable. 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 figijre 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 s.h.i.+rtwaisted 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 edge 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 sympathised 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 a.s.sumed 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 a.s.sumed 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 gra.s.s.

"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 un saleable 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 realised 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 G.o.d!" She was silent for a moment.

"Does Olive know?"