“Assuming it ever gets that far. What you say may persuade me not to write it.”
He looked at her, absentmindedly scratching his chest through his shirt, then made up his mind.
“All right. I’ll tell you as much as I can remember but you’ll have to double check everything. It’s a long time ago and I can’t vouch for my memory. Where do I start?”
“With her telephone call to the police.”
He waited for the kettle to boil, then filled the cafetiere and placed it on the table.
“It wasn’t a 999 call. She looked up the number in the book and dialled the desk.” He shook his head, remembering.
“It started out as a farce because the sergeant on duty couldn’t make head or tail of what she was saying.”
He was shrugging into his jacket at the end of his shift when the desk sergeant came in and handed him a piece of paper with an address on it.
“Do me a favour, Hal, and check this out on your way home. It’s Leven Road. You virtually pass it. Some madwoman’s been bawling down the phone about chicken legs on her kitchen floor.” He pulled a face.
“Wants a policeman to take them away.” He grinned.
“Presumably she’s a vegetarian.
You’re the cookery expert. Sort it out, there’s a good chap.”
Hawksley eyed him suspiciously.
“Is this a wind-up?”
“No. Scout’s honour.” He chuckled.
“Look, she’s obviously a mental case. They’re all over the place, poor sods, since the Government chucked ‘em on to the streets. Just do as she asks or we’ll have her phoning all night. It’ll take you five minutes out of your way.”
Olive Martin, red eyed from weeping, opened the door to him. She smelt strongly of B. O. and her bulky shoulders were hunched in unattractive despair. So much blood was smeared over her baggy T-shirt and trousers that it took on the property of an abstract pattern and his eyes hardly registered it. And why should they? He had no premonition of the horror in store.
“DS.
Hawksley,” he said with an encouraging smile, showing her his card.
“You rang the police station.”
She stepped back, holding the door open.
“They’re in the kitchen.” She pointed down the corridor.
“On the floor.”
“OK. We’ll go down and have a look. What’s your name, love?”
“Olive.”
“Right, Olive, you lead the way. Let’s see what’s upset you.”
Would it have been better to know what was in there?
Probably not. He often thought afterwards that he could never have entered the room at all if he’d been told in advance that he was about to step into a human abattoir. He stared in horror at the butchered bodies, the axe, the blood that ran in rivers across the floor, and his shock was so great that he could hardly breathe for the iron fist that thrust against his diaphragm and squeezed the breath from his lungs.
The room reeked of blood.
He leant against the door jamb and sucked desperately at the sickly, cloying air, before bolting down the corridor and retching over and over again into the tiny patch of front garden.
Olive sat on the stairs and watched him, her fat moon face as white and pasty as his.
“You should have brought a friend,” she told him miserably.
“It wouldn’t have been so bad if there’d been two of you.”
He held a handkerchief to his lips as he used his radio to summon assistance. While he spoke he eyed her warily, registering the blood all over her clothes. Nausea choked him.
Jesus JESUS! How mad was she? Mad enough to take the axe to him?
“For God’s sake, make it quick,” he shouted into the mouthpiece.
“This is an emergency.” He stayed outside, too frightened to go back in.
She looked at him stolidly.
“I won’t hurt you. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
He mopped at his forehead.
“Who are they, Olive?”
“My mother and sister.” Her eyes slid to her hands.
“We had a row.”
His mouth was dry with shock and fear.
“Best not talk about it,” he said.
Tears rolled down her fat cheeks.
“I didn’t mean it to happen.
We had a row. My mother got so angry with me. Should I give my statement now?”
He shook his head.
“There’s no hurry.”
She stared at him without blinking, her tears drying in dirty streaks down her face.
“Will you be able to take them away before my father comes home?” she asked him after a minute or two.
“I think it would be better.”
Bile rose in his throat.
“When do you expect him back?”
“He leaves work at three o’clock. He’s part-time.”
Hal glanced at his watch, an automatic gesture. His mind was numb.
“It’s twenty to now.”
She was very composed.
“Then perhaps a policeman could go there and explain what’s happened.
It would be better,” she said again. They heard the wail of approaching sirens.
“Please,” she said urgently.
He nodded.
“I’ll arrange it. Where does he work?”
“Carters Haulage. It’s in the Docks.”
He was passing the message on as two cars, sirens shrieking, swept round the corner and bore down on number 22. Doors flew open all along the road and curious faces peered out. Hal switched off the radio and looked at her.
“All done,” he said.
“You can stop worrying about your father.”
A large tear slipped down her blotchy face.
“Should I make a pot of tea?”
Hal thought of the kitchen.
“Better not.”
The sirens stilled as policemen erupted from the cars.
“I’m sorry to cause so much bother,” she said into the silence.
She spoke very little after that, but only, thought Hal on reflection, because nobody spoke to her. She was packed into the living room, under the eye of a shocked W. P. C.” and sat in bovine immobility watching the comings and goings through the open door. If she was aware of the mounting horror that was gathering about her, she didn’t show it. Nor, as time passed and the signs of emotion faded from her face, did she display any further grief or remorse for what she had done. Faced with such complete indifference, the consensus view was that she was mad.
“But she wept in front of you,” interrupted Roz.
“Did you think she was mad?”
“I spent two hours in that kitchen with the pathologist, trying to work out the order of events from the blood splashes over the floor, the table, the kitchen units. And then, after the photographs had been taken, we embarked on the grisly jigsaw of deciding which bit belonged to which woman. Of course I thought she was mad. No normal person could have done it.”
Roz chewed her pencil.
“That’s begging the question, you know. All you’re really saying is that the act itself was one of madness. I asked you if, from your experience of her, you thought Olive was mad.”
“And you’re splitting hairs. As far as I could see, the two were inextricably linked. Yes, I thought Olive was mad. That’s why we were so careful to make sure her solicitor was there when she made her statement. The idea of her getting off on a technicality and spending twelve months in hospital before some idiot psychiatrist decided she was responding well enough to treatment to be allowed out scared us rigid.”
“So did it surprise you when she was judged fit to plead guilty?”
“Yes,” he admitted, ‘it did.”
At around six o’clock attention switched to Olive. Areas of dried blood were lifted carefully from her arms and each fingernail was minutely scraped before she was taken upstairs to bathe herself and change into clean clothes. Everything she had been wearing was packed into individual polythene bags and loaded into a police van. An inspector drew Hal to one side.
“I gather she’s already admitted she did it.” Hal nodded.