She was, presumably, in the High Street and the road to the left she squinted at the sign was Ainsley Street. She ran her finger across the grid.
“Ainsley Street,” she muttered.
“Come on, you bugger, where are you? OK. Leven Road. First right, second left.” With a glance in her driving mirror, she pulled out into the traffic and turned right.
Olive’s story, she thought, grew odder by the minute, as she studied number twenty-two, Leven Road, from her parked car. Mr. Crew had said the house was un saleable She had imagined something out of a Gothic novel, twelve months of dereliction and decay since the death of Robert Martin, a house condemned by the haunting horror in its kitchen.
Instead, the reality was a cheerful little semi, freshly painted, with pink, white, and red geraniums nodding in boxes beneath its windows.
Who, she wondered, had bought it? Who was brave enough (or ghoulish enough?) to live with the ghosts of that tragic family?
She double-checked the address from press cuttings she had put together that morning in the archives basement of the local newspaper. There was no mistake. A black and white photograph of “The House of Horror’ showed this same neat semi, but without its window-boxes.
She climbed out of the car and crossed the road.
The house remained stubbornly silent to her ring on the doorbell, so she went next door and tried there. A young woman answered with a sleepy toddler clinging round her neck.
“Yes?”
“Hello,” said Roz, “I’m sorry to bother you.” She indicated towards her right.
“It’s your neighbours I really want to talk to but there’s no one in.
Have you any idea when they might be back?”
The young woman thrust out a hip to support the child more easily and subjected Roz to a penetrating glare.
“There’s nothing to see, you know. You’re wasting your time.”
“I’m sorry?”
“They pulled the innards out of the house and revamped the whole of the inside. They’ve done it up nice. There’s nothing to see, no blood stains, no spirits roaming about, nothing.” She pressed the child’s head against her shoulder, a casual, proprietary gesture, a statement of tender motherhood at odds with the hostility in her voice.
“You want to know what I think? You should see a psychiatrist. It’s the likes of you who’re the real sick people of society.” She prepared to close the door.
Roz raised her palms in a gesture of surrender.
She smiled sheepishly.
“I haven’t come to gawp,” she said.
“My name is Rosalind Leigh and I’m working in co-operation with the late Mr. Martin’s solicitor.”
The woman eyed her suspiciously.
“Oh, yeah? What’s his name?”
“Peter Crew.”
“You could of got it from the paper.”
“I have a letter from him. May I show it to you? It will prove Iamwholsaylam.”
“Go on then.”
“It’s in the car. I’ll fetch it.” She retrieved her briefcase hurriedly from the boot, but when she got back, the door was closed.
She rang several times and waited for ten minutes on the doorstep, but it was obvious the young woman had no intention of answering. From a room above came the wail of a baby. Roz listened to the mother’s soothing tones as she climbed the stairs, then, thoroughly annoyed with herself, she retreated to the car and pondered her next step.
The press cuttings were disappointing. It was names she wanted, names of friends or neighbours, even old school teachers, who could give her background detail. But the local newspaper had, like the nationals, sensationalised the crime’s horror without uncovering any details about Olive’s life or why she might have done it. There were the usual quotes from ‘neighbours’ all anonymous and all wise after the event but they were so uniformly un enlightening that Roz suspected imaginative journalism at work.
“No, I’m not surprised,” said a neighbour, ‘shocked and appalled, yes, but not surprised. She was a strange girl, unfriendly, kept herself to herself. Not like the sister. She was the attractive, outgoing one.
We all liked Amber.”
“The parents found her very difficult. She wouldn’t mix or make friends. She was shy, I suppose, because of her size but she had a way of looking at you that wasn’t normal.”
Beyond the sensationalism, there had been nothing to write about. There was no police investigation to report Olive had phoned them herself, had confessed to the crime in the presence of her solicitor, and had been charged with murder.
Because she had pleaded guilty there had been no salacious details from a lengthy trial, no names of friends or associates to draw on, and her sentencing had rated a single paragraph under the headline: TWBNTY-FIVE YEARS FOR BRUTAL MURDERS. A conspiracy of journalistic apathy seemed to surround the whole event. Of the five cardinal his of the journalist’s creed Where?” When?” What?” Who?” and Why? the first four had been amply covered. Everyone knew what had happened, who had done it, where, and when.
But no one, it seemed, knew why. Nor, and this was the real puzzle, had anyone actually asked. Could teasing alone really drive a young woman to such a pitch of anger that she would hack her family to pieces?
With a sigh, Roz switched on the radio and fed Pavarotti into the tape-deck. Bad choice, she thought, as “Nessun Dorma’ flooded the car and brought back bitter memories of a summer she would rather forget.
Strange how a piece of music could be so evocative, but then the path to separation had been choreographed around the television screen with “Nessun Dorma’ triggering the stops and starts of their rows. She could remember every detail of every World Cup football match. They were the only peaceful periods in a summer of war. How much better, she thought wearily, if she had called a halt then instead of dragging the misery out to its far more terrible conclusion.
A net curtain, in the semi to the right, number 24, twitched behind a Neighbourhood Watch sticker which proclaimed itself loudly against the glass. A case, Roz wondered, of locking the stable door after the horse had bolted? Or was that Same net curtain twitching the day Olive wielded her chopper? Two garages filled the gap between the houses, but it was possible the occupants had heard something.
“Olive Martin took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks…” The words circled in her brain as they had done, on and off, for days.
She resumed her contemplation of number 22, but watched the net curtain out of the corner of her eye. It moved again, plucked by prying fingers, and she felt unreasonably irritated by the busybody spying on her. It was an empty, wasted life that had time to stand and stare.
What sort of interfering old bitch inhabited there, she wondered? The frustrated spinster who got off on voyeurism? Or the bored and boring wife with nothing better to do than find fault? Then something clicked inside her head, a realignment of thought like the points on a railway line.
Just the sort of busybody she wanted, of course, but why had that not occurred to her immediately? Really, she worried about herself. She spent so much time in neutral now, just listening to the footfalls, leading nowhere, that echoed in her memory.
A frail old man opened the door, a small, shrunken person with transparent skin and bowed shoulders.
“Come in, come in,” he said, standing back and ushering her into his corridor.
“I heard what you said to Mrs. Blair. She won’t talk to you, and I’ll tell you something else, it wouldn’t help you if she did. They only came four years ago when the first youngster was on the way.
Didn’t know the family at all and, as far as I know, never spoke to poor old Bob. What shall I say? She’s got a nerve. Typical of today’s youngsters. Always wanting something for nothing.” He muttered on, leading the way into his living room.