Berating Roz, she felt, was like beating your head against a brick wall, painful and completely ineffective. She was, she knew, the woman’s best friend her only friend, she thought sometimes. The barrier of barbed wire that Roz had erected around herself had deterred all but the most determined. People rarely even asked after her these days. With an inward sigh, Iris threw caution to the winds.
“Look, sweetheart, you really can’t go on like this. It’s unhealthy to shut yourself away and brood.
Did you think about what I suggested last time?”
Roz wasn’t listening.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, her eyes maddeningly vacant. She saw the irritation on Iris’s face and forced herself to concentrate. Iris, she thought, had been lecturing again. But really, Roz wondered, why did she bother?
Other people’s concern was so exhausting, for her and for them.
“Did you ring that psychiatrist I recommended?” Iris demanded bluntly.
“No, there’s no need. I’m fine.” She studied the immaculately made-up face, which had changed very little in fifteen years.
Someone had once told Iris Fielding that she looked like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.
“A week’s too short,” Roz said, referring to her publisher.
“Tell him a month.”
Iris flicked a piece of paper across her desk.
“You’ve run out of room to manoeuvre, I’m afraid. He’s not even prepared to give you a choice of subject. He wants Olive Martin.
Here’s the name and address of her solicitor. Find out why she wasn’t sent to Broadmoor or Rampton. Find out why she refused to offer a defence. And find out what made her commit the murders in the first place. There’s a story there somewhere.” She watched the frown on Roz’s face deepen and shrugged.
“I know. It’s not your sort of thing, but you’ve brought this on yourself. I’ve been pressing you for months to produce an outline. Now it’s this or nothing. To tell you the truth, I think he’s done it on purpose. If you write it, it will sell, if you refuse to write it because it’s pure sensationalism, then he’s found a good excuse to drop you.”
Roz’s reaction surprised her.
“OK,” she said mildly, taking the piece of paper and tucking it into her handbag.
“I thought you’d refuse.”
“Why?”
“Because of the way the tabloids sensationalised what happened to you.”
Roz shrugged.
“Maybe it’s time someone showed them how to handle human tragedy with dignity.” She wouldn’t write it, of course she had no intention of writing anything any more but she gave Iris an encouraging smile.
“I’ve never met a murderess before.”
Roz’s application to visit Olive Martin for the purposes of research was passed on by the Prison Governor to the Home Office. It was several weeks before permission was given in a grudging processed letter from a civil servant. While Martin had consented to the visits, she reserved the right at any time to withdraw consent, without reason and without prejudice. It was emphasised that the visits had been authorised only on the understanding that there would be no breaches of the prison regulations, that the Governor’s word would be final in all circumstances, and that Ms Leigh would be held liable should she contribute in any way to an undermining of prison discipline.
Roz found it hard to look at Olive. Good manners and the Woman’s ugliness precluded staring and the monstrous face was so flat, so unresponsive, that her eyes kept sliding off it like butter off a baked potato. Olive, for her part, watched Roz greedily. Attractive looks put no such limitations on staring quite the reverse, they invite it and Roz was, in any case, a novelty. Visitors were rare in Olive’s life, particularly ones who came without the reforming baggage of missionary zeal.
After the cumbersome business of getting her seated, Roz gestured towards the tape-recorder.
“If you remember, I mentioned in my second letter that I’d like to record our chats. I presumed when the Governor gave permission for it that you’d agreed.” Her voice was pitched too high.
Olive shrugged a kind of acquiescence.
“You’ve no objections, then?”
A shake of the head.
“Fine. I’m switching on now. Date, Monday, April twelve.
Conversation with Olive Martin.” She consulted her all too sketchy list of questions.
“Let’s start with some factual details.
When were you born?”
No answer.
Roz looked up with an encouraging smile, only to be confronted by the woman’s unblinking scrutiny.
“Well,” she said, “I think I have that detail already. Let’s see.
Eighth of September, nineteen sixty-four, which makes you twenty-eight.
Am I right?”
No response.
“And you were born in Southampton General, the first of Gwen and Robert Martin’s two daughters. Your sister, Amber, came along two years later on the fifteenth of July, nineteen sixty-six. Were you pleased about that? Or would you rather have had a brother?” Nothing.
Roz did not look up this time. She could feel the weight of the woman’s eyes upon her.
“Your parents liked colours, obviously. I wonder what they would have called Amber if she’d been a boy?” She gave a nervous giggle.
“Red? Ginger?
Perhaps it was a good thing the baby was another girl.” She listened to herself in disgust. Goddamnit, why the hell did I agree to this!
Her bladder was hurting.
A fat finger reached out and switched off the tape-recorder.
Roz watched it with a horrible fascination.
“There’s no need to be so frightened,” said a deep, surprisingly cultured voice.
“Miss Henderson was teasing you. They all know I’m completely harmless. If I wasn’t, I’d be in Broadmoor.” A strange rumbling noise vibrated the air. A laugh? Roz wondered.
“Stands to reason, really.” The finger hovered over the switches.
“You see, I do what normal people do when I have objections to something. I express them.” The finger moved to Record and gently pushed the button.
“Had Amber been a boy they would have called him Jeremy after my mother’s father.
Colour didn’t come into it. In actual fact, Amber was christened Alison. I called her Amber because, at the age of two, I couldn’t get my tongue round the “1” or the “s”. It suited her. She had lovely honey-blonde hair, and as she grew up she always answered to Amber and never to Alison. She was very pretty.”
Roz waited a moment until she was sure she had her voice under control.
“Sorry.”
“That’s all right. I’m used to it. Everyone is afraid at first.”
“Does that upset you?”
A ificker of amusement twitched the fatness round her eyes.
“Would it upset you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then. Have you got a cigarette?”
“Sure.” Roz took an unopened pack from her briefcase and pushed it across the table with a box of matches.
“Help yourself.
I don’t smoke.”
“You would if you were in here. Everyone smokes inhere.”
She fumbled her way into the cigarette packet and lit up with a sigh of contentment.
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-six.”
“Married?”
“Divorced.”
“Children?”
Roz shook her head.
“I’m not the maternal type.”
“Is that why you got divorced?”
“Probably. I was more interested in my career. We went our separate ways very amicably.” Absurd, she thought, to bother with pain management in front of Olive but the trouble was that if you told a lie often enough it became a truth, and the hurt only returned occasionally, in those strange, disorientating moments of wakening when she thought she was still at home with a warm body wrapped in her arms, hugging, loving, laughing.