The Sculptress Part 24

"You can become obsessed by hatred, I think. I could have moved a long time ago but, instead, I stay here waiting for Rupert to make me angry.

That's how I'm dependent on him. It's a prison of sorts."

Iris wiped her cigarette end round the rim of an ashtray. Roz was telling her nothing she hadn't worked out for herself a long time ago, but she had never been able to put it into words for the simple reason that Roz had never let her. She wondered what had happened to bring the barbed wire down. Clearly, it was nothing to do with Rupert, however much Roz might like to think it was.

"So how are you going to break out of this prison? Have you decided?"

"Not yet."

"Perhaps you should do what Olive has done," said Iris mildly.

"And what's that?"

"Let someone else in."

Olive waited by her cell door for two hours. One of the officers, wondering why, paused to talk to her.

"Everything all right, Sculptress?"

The fat woman's eyes fixed on her.

"What day is it?" she demanded.

"Monday.

"That's what I thought." She sounded angry.

The officer frowned.

"Are you sure there's nothing wrong?"

"There's nothing."

"Were you expecting a visitor?"

"No. I'm hungry. What's for tea?"

"Pizza." Rea.s.sured, the officer moved on. It made sense.

There were few hours in the day when Olive wasn't hungry, and the threat of withholding her meals was often the only way to control her.

A medical officer had tried to persuade her once of the benefits of dieting. He had come away very shaken and never tried again. Olive craved food in the way others craved heroin.

In the end Iris stayed for a week and filled the sterile waiting room of Roz's life with the raucous baggage of hers. She ran up a colossal telephone bill phoning her clients and customers at home and abroad, piled the tables with magazines, dropped ash all over the floor, imported armfuls of flowers which she abandoned in the sink when she couldn't find a vase, left the washing-up in tottering stacks on the kitchen work-tops, and regaled Roz, when she wasn't doing something else, with her seemingly inexhaustible flow of anecdotes.

Roz said her farewells on the following Thursday afternoon with some relief and rather more regret. If nothing else, Iris had shown her that a solitary life was emotionally, mentally, and spiritually deadening. There was, after all, only so much that one mind could encompa.s.s, and obsessions grew when ideas went unchallenged.

Olive's destruction of her cell that night took the prison by surprise.

It was ten minutes before the duty governor was alerted and another ten before a response was possible. It required eight officers to restrain her. They forced her to the ground and brought their combined weight to bear on her, but as one remarked later: "It was like trying to contain a bull elephant."

She had wreaked complete havoc on everything. Even the lavatory bowl had shattered under a mighty blow from her welded metal chair which, bent and buckled, had been discarded amongst the shards of porcelain.

The few possessions which had adorned her chest of drawers lay broken across the floor and anything that could be lifted had been hurled in fury against the walls. A poster of Madonna, ripped limb from limb, lay butchered on the floor.

Her rage, even under sedation, continued long into the night from the confines of an unfurnished cell, designed to cool the tempers of ungovernable inmates.

"What the h.e.l.l's got into her?" demanded the duty governor.

"G.o.d knows," said a shaken officer.

"I've always said she should be in Broadmoor. I don't care what the psychiatrists say, she's completely mad. They've no business to leave her here and expect us to look after her."

They listened to the m.u.f.fled bellowings from behind the locked door.

"N-ITCH! el-ITCH! BI-ITCH!"

The duty governor frowned.

"Who's she talking about?"

The officer winced.

"One of us, I should think. I wish we could get her transferred. She puts the wind up me, she really does."

"She'll be fine again tomorrow."

"Which is why she puts the wind up me. You never know where you are with her." She tucked her hair back into place.

"You noticed none of her day figures were touched except the ones she's already mutilated?" She smiled cynically.

"And have you seen that mother and child she's working on? The mother's only smothering her baby, for G.o.d's sake. It's obscene.

Presumably it's supposed to be Mary and Jesus." She sighed.

"What do I tell her? No breakfast if she doesn't calm down?"

"It's always worked in the past. Let's hope nothing's changed."

NINE.

The following morning, a week later than planned, Roz was shown through to a clerical supervisor at the Social Security office in Dawlington.

He regarded her scabby lip and dark gla.s.ses with only mild curiosity and she realised that for him her appearance was nothing unusual. She introduced herself and sat down.

"I telephoned yesterday," she reminded him.

He nodded.

"Some problem that goes back over six years, you said." He tapped his forefingers on the desk.

"I should stress we're unlikely to be able to help. We've enough trouble chasing current cases, let alone delving into old records."

"But you were here six years ago?"

"Seven years in June," he said without enthusiasm.

"It won't help, I'm afraid. I don't remember you or your circ.u.mstances."

"You wouldn't." She smiled apologetically.

"I was a little economical with the truth on the telephone. I'm not a consumer.

I'm an author. I'm writing a book about Olive Martin. I need to talk to someone who knew her when she worked here and I didn't want a straight refusal down the phone."

He looked amused, glad perhaps that he was spared an impossible search for lost benefits.

"She was the fat girl down the corridor. I didn't even know what her name was until it appeared in the paper. As far as I remember, I never exchanged more than a dozen words with her. You probably know more about her than I do." He crossed his arms.

"You should have said what you wanted. You could have saved yourself a drive."

Roz took out her notebook.

"That doesn't matter. It's names I need. People who did speak to her. Is there anyone else who's been here as long as you?"

"A few, but no one who was friendly with Olive. A couple of reporters came round at the time of the murders and there wasn't a soul who admitted to pa.s.sing anything more than the time of day with her."

Roz felt his distrust.

"And who can blame them?" she said cheerfully.

"Presumably it was the gutter press looking for a juicy headline. i HELD THE HAND OF A MONSTER or something equally tasteless. Only publicity seekers or idiots allow themselves to be used by Wapping to boost their grubby profits."

"And your book won't make a profit?" There was a dry inflexion in his voice.

She smiled.

"A very modest one by newspaper standards."

She pushed her dark gla.s.ses to the top of her head, revealing her eyes and the yellow rings around them.

"I'll be honest with you. I was dragooned into this research by an irritable agent demanding copy. I found the subject distasteful and was prepared to abandon it after a token meeting with Olive." She looked at him, turning her pencil between her fingers.

"Then I discovered that Olive was human and very likeable, so I kept going. And almost everyone I've spoken to has given a similar answer to you. They hardly knew her, they never talked to her, she was just the fat girl down the corridor. Now, I could write my book on that theme alone, how social ostracism led a lonely, unloved girl to turn in a fit of frenzied anger on her teasing family. But I'm not going to because I don't think it's true. I believe there's been a miscarriage of justice. I believe Olive is innocent."

Surprised, he rea.s.sessed her.

"It shocked us rigid when we heard what she'd done," he admitted.

"Because you thought it out of character?"

"Totally out of character." He thought back.

"She was a good worker, brighter than most, and she didn't clock-watch like some of them. OK, she was never going to set the world alight, but she was reliable and willing and she didn't make waves or get involved in office politics. She was here about eighteen months and while no one would have claimed her as a bosom friend she made no enemies either. She was one of those people you only think about when you want something done and then you remember them with relief because you know they'll do it. You know the type?"

She nodded.

"Boring but dependable."

"In a nutsh.e.l.l, yes."

"Did she tell you anything about her private life?"

He shook his head again.

"It was true what I said at the beginning. Our paths rarely crossed.

Any contact we had was work related and even that was minimal. Most of what I've just told you was synthesised from the amazed reactions of the few who did know her."

"Can you give me their names?"

"I'm not sure I can remember." He looked doubtful.

"Olive would know them better than I do. Why don't you ask her?"

Because she won't tell me. She won't tell me anything.

"Because," she said instead, "I don't want to hurt her." She saw his look of puzzlement and sighed.

"Supposing doors get slammed in my face and I'm given the cold shoulder by Olive's so-called friends. She's bound to ask me how I got on, and how would I answer her? Sorry, Olive, as far as they're concerned you're dead and buried. I couldn't do that."

He accepted this.

"All right, there is someone who might be willing to help you but I'm not prepared to give you her name without her permission. She's elderly, retired now, and she may not want to be involved. If you give me five minutes, I'll telephone and see how she feels about talking to you."

"Was she fond of Olive?"

"As much as anyone was."

"Then will you tell her that I don't believe Olive murdered her mother and sister and that's why I'm writing the book." She stood up.