The Sculptress
by
Minette Walters
For Roland and Philip
“Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense.
HENRY ST JOHN, VISCOUNT BOLINGBROKE
“It was the feeling that the great, deadly, pointing forefinger of society was pointing at me and the great voice of millions chanting, “Shame.Shame. Shame.” It’s society’s way of dealing with someone different.”
KEN KESEY, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
“Wax Sculpture Malice and superstition were also expressed in the formation of wax images of hated persons, into the bodies of which long pins were thrust in the hope that deadly injury would be induced in the person represented. Belief in this form of black magic never died out completely.”
PROLOGUE
Dawlington Evening Herald, January, 1988
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS FOR BRUTAL MURDERS
At Winchester Crown Court yesterday, Olive Martin, 23, of 22 Leven Road, Dawlington, was sentenced to life imprisonment for the brutal murders of her mother and sister, with a recommendation that she serve twenty-five years. The judge, who referred to Martin as ‘a monster without a grain of humanity’, said that nothing could excuse the savagery she had shown to two defenceless women. The murder of a mother by her daughter was the most unnatural of crimes and demanded the strongest penalty that the law could impose. The murder of a sister by a sister was no less heinous.
“Martin’s butchery of the bodies,” he went on, ‘was an unforgivable and barbarous desecration that will rank in the annals of crime as an act of supreme evil.” Martin showed no emotion as sentence was passed…
ONE
It was impossible to see her approach without a shudder of distaste.
She was a grotesque parody of a woman, so fat that her feet and hands and head protruded absurdly from the huge slab of her body like tiny disproportionate afterthoughts. Dirty blonde hair clung damp and thin to her scalp, black patches of sweat spread beneath her armpits.
Clearly, walking was painful. She shuffled forward on the insides of her feet, legs forced apart by the thrust of one gigantic thigh against another, balance precarious. And with every movement, however small, the fabric of her dress strained ominously as the weight of her flesh shifted. She had, it seemed, no redeeming features. Even her eyes, a deep blue, were all but lost in the ugly folds of pitted white lard.
Strange that after so long she was still an object of curiosity. People who saw her every day watched her progress down that corridor as if for the first time. What was it that fascinated them? The sheer size of a woman who stood five feet eleven and weighed over twenty-six stones?
Her reputation? Disgust? There were no smiles. Most watched impassively as she passed, fearful perhaps of attracting her attention.
She had carved her mother and sister into little pieces and rearranged the bits in bloody abstract on her kitchen floor. Few who saw her could forget it. In view of the horrific nature of the crime and the fear that her huge brooding figure had instilled in everyone who had sat in the courtroom she had been sentenced to life with a recommendation that she serve a minimum of twenty-five years. What made her unusual, apart from the crime itself, was that she had pleaded guilty and refused to offer a defence.
She was known inside the prison walls as the Sculptress. Her real name was Olive Martin.
Rosalind Leigh, waiting by the door of the interview room, ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth. Her revulsion was immediate as if Olive’s evil had reached out and touched her. My God, she was thinking, and the thought alarmed her, I can’t go through with this.
But she had, of course, no choice. The gates of the prison were locked on her, as a visitor, just as securely as they were locked on the inmates. She pressed a shaking hand to her thigh where the muscles were jumping uncontrollably. Behind her, her all but empty briefcase, a testament to her lack of preparation for this meeting, screamed derision at her if I-considered assumption that conversation with Olive could develop like any other. It had never occurred to her, not for one moment, that fear might stifle her inventiveness.
Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one. The rhyme churned in her brain, over and over, numbingly repetitive. Olive Martin took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done she gave her sister forty-one… Roz stepped away from the door and forced herself to smile.
“Hello, Olive. I’m Rosalind Leigh. Nice to meet you at last.” She held out her hand and shook the other’s warmly, in the hope, perhaps, that by demonstrating an unprejudiced friendliness she could quell her dislike. Olive’s touch was token only, a brief brush of unresponsive fingers.
“Thank you.” Roz spoke to the hovering prison officer briskly.
“I’ll take it from here. We have the Governor’s permission to talk for an hour.” Lizzie Borden took an axe… Tell her you’ve changed your mind. Olive Martin took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks… I can’t go through with this!
The uniformed woman shrugged.
“OK.” She dropped the welded metal chair she was carrying carelessly on to the floor and steadied it against her knee.
“You’ll need this. Anything else in there will collapse the minute she sits on it.” She laughed amiably. An attractive woman.
“She got wedged in the flaming toilet last year and it took four men to pull her out again.
You’d never get her up on your own.”
Roz manoeuvred the chair awkwardly through the doorway.
She felt at a disadvantage, like the friend of warring partners being pressured into taking sides. But Olive intimidated her in a way the prison officer never could.
“You will see me using a tape-recorder during this interview,” she snapped, nervousness clipping the words brusquely.
“The Governor has agreed to it. I trust that’s in order.”
There was a short silence. The prison officer raised an eyebrow.
“If you say so. Presumably someone’s taken the trouble to get the Sculptress’s agreement. Any problems, like, for example, she objects violently’ she drew a finger across her throat before tapping the pane of glass beside the door which allowed the officers a clear view of the room ‘then bang on the window. Assuming she lets you, of course.” She smiled coolly.
“You’ve read the rules, I hope. You bring nothing in for her, you take nothing out. She can smoke your cigarettes in the interview room but she can’t take any away with her. You do not pass messages for her, in or out, without the Governor’s permission. If in doubt about anything, you refer it to one of the officers. Clear?”
Bitch, thought Roz angrily.
“Yes, thank you.” But it wasn’t anger she felt, of course, it was fear. Fear of being shut up in a confined space with this monstrous creature who stank of fat woman’s sweat and showed no emotion in her grotesquely bloated face.
“Good.” The officer walked away with a broad wink at a colleague.
Roz stared after her.
“Come in, Olive.” She chose the chair furthest from the door deliberately. It was a statement of confidence. She was so damn nervous she needed a wee.
The idea for the book had been delivered as an ultimatum by her agent.
“Your publisher is about to wash his hands of you, Roz. His precise words were, “She has a week to commit herself to something that will sell or I shall remove her from our lists.” And, though I hate to rub your nose in it, I am within a whisker of doing the same thing.” Iris’s face softened a little.