Hal shook his head.
“I’m sorry, sir, but that won’t be possible, not until we’ve taken a statement from her. You will also be required to make a statement. You may be allowed to speak to her afterwards, but at the moment I can’t guarantee it.”
“And that,” he said, recalling the incident, ‘was the one and only time he showed any emotion. He looked quite upset, but whether because I’d denied him access to Olive or because I’d told him he’d have to make a statement, I don’t know.” He considered for a moment.
“It must have been the denial of access. We went through every minute of that man’s day and he came out whiter than white. He worked in an open-plan office with five other people and, apart from the odd trip to the lavatory, he was under someone’s eye the whole day. There just wasn’t time for him to go home.”
“But you did suspect him?”
“Yes.”
Roz looked interested.
“In spite of Olive’s confession?”
He nodded.
“He was so damn cold blooded about it all. Even identifying the bodies didn’t faze him.”
Roz thought for a moment.
“There was another conflict of interest which you don’t seem to have considered.” She chewed her pencil.
“If Robert Martin was the murderer, he could have used his solicitor to manipulate Olive into confessing. Peter Crew makes no secret of his dislike of her, you know. I think he regrets the abolition of capital punishment.”
Hal folded his arms, then smiled in amusement.
“You’ll have to be very careful if you intend to make statements like that in your book. Miss Leigh. Solicitors are not required to like their clients, they merely have to represent them. In any case, Robert Martin dropped out of the frame very rapidly. We toyed with the idea that he killed Gwen and Amber before he went to work and Olive then set about disposing the bodies to protect him, but the numbers didn’t add up. He had an alibi even for that. There was a neighbour who saw her husband off to work a few minutes before Martin himself left. Amber and Gwen were alive then because she spoke to them on their doorstep.
She remembered asking Amber how she was getting on at Glitzy.
They waved as Martin drove away.”
“He could have gone round the corner and come back again.”
“He left home at eight-thirty and arrived at work at nine. We tested the drive and it took half an hour.” He shrugged.
“As I said, he was whiter than white.”
“What about lunch? Could he have gone back then?”
“He had a pint and a sandwich in the local pub with two men from the office.”
“OK. Go on.”
There was little more to tell. In spite of Crew’s advice to remain silent, Olive agreed to answer police questions, and at nine-thirty, expressing relief to have got the whole thing off her chest, she signed her statement and was formally charged with the murder of her mother and sister.
Following her remand into custody on the morning of the next day, Hal and Geof Wyatt were given the task of detailing the police case against her. It was a straightforward collating of pathological, forensic, and police evidence, all of which, upon examination, supported the facts given in Olive’s statement.
Namely that, acting alone, she had, on the morning of the ninth of September, 1987, murdered her mother and sister by cutting their throats with a carving knife.
SEVEN
There was a lengthy silence. Hal splayed his hands on the scrubbed deal table and pushed himself to his feet.
“How about some more coffee?” He watched her industrious pen scribbling across a page of her notebook.
“More coffee?” he repeated.
“Mm. Black, no sugar.” She didn’t look up but went on writing.
“Sure, baas. Don’t mind me, baas. I’se just de paid help, baas.”
Roz laughed.
“Sorry. Yes, thank you, I’d love some more coffee. Look, if you can just bear with me for a moment, I’ve a few questions to ask and I’m trying to jot them down while the thing’s still fresh.”
He watched her while she wrote. Botticelli’s Venus, he had thought the first time he saw her, but she was too thin for his liking, hardly more than seven stone and a good five feet six.
She made a fabulous clothes’-horse, of course, but there was no softness to hug, no comfort in the tautly strung body. He wondered if her slenderness was a deliberate thing or if she lived on her nerves.
The latter, he thought. She was clearly a woman of obsessions if her crusade for Olive was anything to go by. He put a fresh cup of coffee in front of her but stayed standing, cradling his own coffee cup between his hands.
“OK,” she said, sorting out the pages, ‘let’s start with the kitchen.
You say the forensic evidence supported Olive’s statement that she acted alone. How?”
He thought back.
“You have to picture that place. It was a slaughter house, and every time she moved she left footprints in the congealing blood. We photographed each one separately and they were all hers, including the bloody prints that her shoes left on the carpet in the hall.” He shrugged.
“There were also bloody palm-prints and fingerprints over most of the surfaces where she had rested her hands. Again all hers. We did raise other fingerprints, admittedly, including about three, I think, which we were never able to match with any of the Martins or their neighbours, but you’d expect that in a kitchen. The gas man, the electricity man, a plumber maybe. There was no blood on them so we inclined to the view that they had been left in the days prior to the murder.”
Roz chewed her pencil.
“And the axe and the knife? I suppose they had only her fingerprints.”
“Actually no. The cutting weapons were so smeared that we couldn’t get anything off them at all.” He chuckled at her immediate interest.
“You’re chasing red herrings. Wet blood is slippery stuff. It would have been very surprising if we had found some perfect prints. The rolling pin had three damn good ones, all hers.”
She made a note.
“I didn’t know you could take them off unpolished wood.”
“It was solid glass, two feet long, a massive thing. I suppose if we were surprised by anything it was that the blows she struck with it hadn’t killed Gwen and Amber. They were both tiny women. By rights she should have smashed their skulls with it.” He sipped his coffee.
“It leant some credence to her story, in fact, that she only tapped them lightly in the first instance to make them shut up. We were afraid she might use that in her defence to get the charge reduced to manslaughter, the argument being that she slit their throats only because she believed they were already dead and she was trying to dismember them in panic. If she could then go on to show that the initial blows with the rolling pin were struck with very little force well, she might almost have persuaded a jury that the whole thing was a macabre accident. Which is one good reason, by the way, why she never mentioned the fight with her mother. We did push her on that, but she kept insisting that no mist on the mirror meant they were dead.”
He pulled a face.
“So I spent a very unpleasant two days working with the pathologist and the bodies, going step by step through what actually happened. We ended up with enough evidence of the fight Gwen put up to save her life to press a murder charge. Poor woman. Her hands and arms were literally cut to ribbons where she had tried to ward off the blows.”
Roz stared into her coffee for some minutes.
“Olive was very kind to me the other day. I can’t imagine her doing something like that.”