Olive blew a smoke ring into the air.
“I’d have liked children. I got pregnant once but my mother persuaded me to get rid of it. I wish I hadn’t now. I keep wondering what sex it was.
I dream about my baby sometimes.” She gazed at the ceiling for a moment, following the wisp of smoke.
“Poor little thing. I was told by a woman in here that they wash them down the sink you know, when they’ve vacuumed them out of you.”
Roz watched the big lips suck wetly on the tiny cigarette and thought of foetuses being vacuumed out of wombs.
“I didn’t know that.”
“About the sink?”
“No. That you’d had an abortion.”
Olive’s face was impassive.
“Do you know anything about me?”
“Not much.”
“Who’ve you asked?”
“Your solicitor.”
Another wheeze rumbled up through the caverns of her chest.
“I didn’t know I had one.”
“Peter Crew,” said Roz with a frown, pulling a letter from her briefcase.
“Oh, him.” Olive’s tone was contemptuous.
“He’s a creep.”
She spoke with undisguised venom.
“He says here he’s your solicitor.”
“So? Governments say they care. I haven’t heard a word from him in four years. I told him to get stuffed when he came up with his wonderful idea to get me an indefinite stay at Broadmoor.
Slimy little sod. He didn’t like me. He’d have wet himself with excitement if he could have got me certified.”
“He says’ - Roz skimmed through the letter without thinking ‘ah, yes, here it is.
“Unfortunately Olive failed to grasp that a plea of diminished responsibility would have ensured her receiving the sort of help in a secure psychiatric unit that would, in all probability, have meant her release into society within, at the most, fifteen years. It has always been obvious to me-“’ She came to an abrupt stop as sweat broke out across her back.
Any problems like, for example, she objects violently… Was she completely out of her mind? She smiled weakly.
“Frankly, the rest is irrelevant.”
‘“It has always been obvious to me that Olive is psychologically disturbed, possibly to the point of paranoid schizophrenia or psychopathy.” Is that what it says?” Olive stood the glowing butt of her cigarette on the table and took another from the packet.
“I don’t say I wasn’t tempted. Assuming I could have got the court to accept that I was temporarily insane when I did it, I would almost certainly be a free woman by now. Have you seen my psychological reports?” Roz shook her head.
“Apart from an unremitting compulsion to eat, which is generally considered abnormal one psychiatrist dubbed it a tendency to severe self-abuse I am classified “normal”.” She blew out the match with a gust of amusement.
“Whatever normal means.
You’ve probably got more hangups than I have but I assume you fall into a “normal” psychological profile.”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Roz, fascinated.
“I’ve never been analysed.” I’m too frightened of what they might find.
“You get used to it in a place like this. I reckon they do it to keep their hand in and it’s probably more fun talking to a mother-hacker than a boring old depressive. I’ve had five different psychiatrists put me through the hoops. They love labels. It makes the filing system easier when they’re trying to sort out what to do with us. I create problems for them. I’m sane but dangerous, so where the hell do they put me? An open prison’s out of the question in case I get out and do it again. The public wouldn’t like that.”
Roz held up the letter.
“You say you were tempted. Why didn’t you go along with it if you thought there was a chance of getting out earlier?”
Olive didn’t answer immediately but smoothed the shapeless dress across her thighs.
“We make choices. They’re not always right but, once made, we have to live with them. I Was very ignorant before I came here. Now I’m streetwise.” She inhaled a lungful of smoke.
“Psychologists, policemen, Prison officers, judges, they were all out of the same mould.
Men in authority with complete control of my life. Supposing I’d pleaded diminished responsibility and they’d said this girl can never get better. Lock the door and throw away the key.
Twenty-five years amongst sane people was so much more attractive to me than a whole life with mad ones.”
“And what do you think now?”
“You learn, don’t you? We get some real nut cases in here before they’re transferred on. They’re not so bad. Most of them can see the funny side.” She balanced a second dog-end next to her first.
“And I’ll tell you something else, they’re a damn sight less critical than the sane ones. When you look like me, you appreciate that.” She scrutinised Roz from between sparse blonde eyelashes.
“That’s not to say I’d have pleaded differently had I been more aufait with the system. I still think it would have been immoral to claim I didn’t know what I was doing when I knew perfectly well.”
Roz made no comment. What can you say to a woman who dismembers her mother and sister and then calmly splits hairs over the morality of special pleading?
Olive guessed what she was thinking and gave her wheezy laugh.
“It makes sense to me. By my own standards, I’ve done nothing wrong.
It’s only the law, those standards set by society, that I’ve transgressed.”
There was a certain biblical flourish about that last phrase, and Roz remembered that today was Easter Monday.
“Do you believe in God?”
“No. I’m a pagan. I believe in natural forces. Worshipping the sun makes sense. Worshipping an invisible entity doesn’t.”
“What about Jesus Christ? He wasn’t invisible.”
“But he wasn’t God either.” Olive shrugged.
“He was a prophet, like Billy Graham. Can you swallow the garbage of the Trinity? I mean, either there’s one God or there’s a mountainful of them. It just depends on how imaginative you feel. I, for one, have no cause to celebrate that Christ is Risen.”
Roz, whose faith was dead, could sympathise with Olive’s cynicism.
“So, if I understand you correctly, you’re saying there is no absolute right or wrong, only individual conscience and the law.” Olive nodded.
“And your conscience isn’t troubling you because you don’t think you’ve done anything wrong.”
Olive looked at her with approval.
“That’s it.”
Roz chewed her bottom lip in thought.
“Which means you believe your mother and sister deserved to die.” She frowned.
“Well. I don’t understand, then. Why didn’t you put up a defence at your trial?”
“I had no defence.”
“Provocation. Mental cruelty. Neglect. They must have done something if you felt you were justified in killing them.”
Olive took another cigarette from the pack but didn’t answer.
“Well?”
The intense scrutiny again. This time Roz held her gaze.
“Well?” she persisted.
Abruptly, Olive rapped the window pane with the back of her hand.
“I’m ready now, Miss Henderson,” she called out.
Roz looked at her in surprise.
“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 impassively 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?