“Can you remember what your wife was wearing the morning of the murders?”
He stared at Hal, surprised by the sudden switch.
“Why do you ask?”
“We’ve had a report that a woman was seen walking down past the Martins’ garage.” The lie rolled glibly off his tongue.
“From the description it was too small for Olive but whoever it was was dressed in what looked like a smart black suit. We’d like to trace her. Could it have been your wife?”
The man’s relief was palpable.
“No. She never had a black suit.”
“Was she wearing anything black that morning?”
“No. She wore a floral overall.”
“You’re very certain.”
“She always wore it, every morning, to do the housework.
She used to get dressed after she’d finished. Except Sundays.
She didn’t do housework on Sundays.”
Hal nodded.
“The same overall every morning? What happened when it got dirty?”
Clarke frowned, puzzled by the line of questioning.
“She had another one, a plain blue one. But she was definitely wearing the floral one on the day of the murders.”
“Which one was she wearing the day after the murders?”
He licked his lips nervously.
“I can’t remember.”
“It was the blue one, wasn’t it? And she went on wearing the blue one, I suspect, until you or she bought a spare.”
“I can’t remember.”
Hal smiled unpleasantly.
“Does she still have her floral overall, Mr. Clarke?”
“No,” he whispered.
“It’s a long time since she did any housework.”
“What happened to it?”
“I can’t remember. We threw out a lot of things before we moved.”
“How did you find the time to do that?” asked Roz.
“Mr.
Hayes said you upped and left one morning and a removal company turned up three days later to pack your stuff for you.”
“Perhaps I sorted through everything when it came here,” he said rather wildly.
“I can’t remember the precise order of things so long afterwards.”
Hal scratched his jaw.
“Did you know,” he murmured evenly, ‘that your wife identified some charred remains of a floral overall, found in the incinerator in the Martins’ garden, as being part of the clothing that Gwen was wearing the day she was murdered?”
Colour drained from Clarke’s face, leaving it an unhealthy grey.
“No, I didn’t.” The words were barely audible.
“And those remains were carefully photographed and carefully stored, ready to be produced at a future date if there was ever any dispute over their ownership. Mr. Hayes, I’m sure, will be able to tell us whether it was your wife’s overall or Gwen’s.”
Clarke raised his hands in helpless surrender.
“She told me she’d thrown it away,” he pleaded, ‘because the iron had scorched a hole through the front. I believed her. She often did things like that.”
Hal hardly seemed to hear him but went on in the same unemotional voice.
“I very much hope, Mr. Clarke, that we will find a way of proving that you knew all along that it was your wife who killed Gwen and Amber. I should like to see you tried and convicted of allowing an innocent girl to go to prison for a crime you knew she hadn’t committed, particularly a girl whom you used and abused so shamelessly.”
They could never prove it, of course, but he drew considerable satisfaction from the fear that set Clarke’s face working convulsively.
“How could I know? I wondered’ his voice rose ‘of course I wondered, but Olive confessed.” His eyes strayed beseechingly to Roz.
“Why did Olive confess?”
“Because she was in deep shock, because she was frightened, because she didn’t know what else to do, because her mother was dead, and because she had been brought up to keep secrets. She thought her father would save her, but he didn’t, because he thought she had done it. You could have saved her, but you didn’t, because you were afraid of what people would say. The woman at Wells-Fargo could have saved her, but she didn’t, because she didn’t want to be involved. Her solicitor could have saved her if he had been a kinder man.” She flicked a glance at Hal.
“The police could have saved her if they’d questioned, just once, the value of confession evidence. But it (was six years ago, and six years ago, confessions’ she made a ring with her thumb and forefinger ‘were A-OK. But I don’t blame them, Mr. Clarke. I blame you. For everything. You played at being a homosexual because you were bored with your wife and then you seduced your lover’s daughter to prove you weren’t the pervert you thought he was.” She stared at him with disdain.
“And that’s how I’m going to portray you in the book that will get Olive out of prison. I really despise people like you.”
“You’ll destroy me.”
“Yes.”
“Is that what Olive wants? My destruction?”
“I don’t know what Olive wants. I only know what I want, which is to get her released. If it means your destruction, then sobe it.”
He sat for some moments in silence, his fingers plucking shakily at the creases in his trousers. Then, as if reaching a sudden decision, he looked at Roz.
“I would have spoken if Olive hadn’t confessed. But she did, and I assumed like everyone else that she was telling the truth. Presumably you have no desire to prolong her stay in prison? Her release in advance of your book’s publication would improve your sales considerably, wouldn’t it?”
“Maybe. What are you suggesting?”
His eyes narrowed.
“If I give you the evidence now that will hasten her release, will you in return promise not to divulge my real name or address in the book?
You could refer to me by the name Olive called me, Mr. Lewis. Do you agree?”
She smiled faintly. What an unbelievable shit he was. He could never hold her to it, of course, but he didn’t seem to realise that. And the police would release his name, anyway, if only as Mrs. Clarke’s husband.
“I agree. As long as it gets Olive out.”
He stood up, taking some keys out of his pocket, and walked over to an ornate Chinese box on the sideboard. He unlocked it and raised the lid, removing something wrapped in tissue paper and handing it to Hal.
“I found it when we moved,” he said.
“She’d hidden it at the bottom of one of her drawers. I swear I never knew how she got it, but I’ve always been afraid that Amber must have taunted her with it. She talks about Amber a lot.” He washed his hands in mimicry of Pontius Pilate.
“She calls her the Devil.”
Hal peeled away the tissue paper and looked at what was revealed. A silver bracelet with a tiny silver-chair charm and a tag on which U. R. N. A. R. N. I. A. was barely discernible through a welter of deep angry scratches.
It was almost Christmas before the scales of justice had tipped enough in Olive’s favour to allow her to leave the confines of her prison.
There would always be doubters, of course, people who would call her the Sculptress till the day she died. After six years the evidence in support of her story was desperately thin. A silver bracelet where it shouldn’t have been. Tiny fragments of a burnt floral overall, identified by a senile woman’s bitter husband. And, finally, the painstaking reappraisal of the photographic evidence, using sophisticated computer enhancement, which had revealed a smaller, daintier shoe print in the blood beneath a huge ribbed rubber sole mark left by Olive’s trainer.
No one would ever know what really happened that day because the truth was locked inside a brain that no longer functioned, and Edward Clarke could not, or would not, shed any light from statements his wife had made in the past. He maintained his complete ignorance of the whole affair. asserting that any qualms he might have had had been put to rest by Olive’s confession and that the onus for any mistakes lay with her and with the police. The most probabable scenario and the one generally accepted, was that Amber waited until Edward and Robert had left for work and then invited Mrs. Clarke into the house to taunt her with the bracelet and the abortion. What happened then was a matter for guesswork but Roz, at least, believed that Mrs. Clarke had set about the murders in cold blood and with a dear mind. There was something very calculating about the way she must have donned gloves to perform her butchery and by carefully stepping around the blood to avoid leaving footprints. But most calculating of all was the clever burning of her bloodstained overall amidst Gwen and Amber’s clothes and her cool identification of the pieces afterwards as the overall worn by Gwen that morning. Roz even woondered sometimes if the intention all along had been to implicate Olive. There was no telling now why Mrs. Clarke had drawn attention to herself outside the kitchen window, but Roz culdn’t help feeling that, had she not done so, Olive might heve had enough presence of mind to phone the police before she ran amok in the kitchen and obliterated the evidence that might have exonerated her. There were to be no disciplinary charges against the police team involved. The chief constable issued a press release, pointing to the recent tightening of police procedure, partiailarly in relation to confession evidence, but he stressed that as far as Olive’s case was concerned the police had taken all available steps to ensure her rights were fully protected. In the circumstances it had been reasonable to assume that her confession was genuine. He took the opportunity to reiterate forcefully the duty imperative on the public never to disturb evidence at the scene of a crime.