“Would you recognise him from a photograph?”
“I’ll try. I can usually remember a face when I see it.”
“Visitor for you, Sculptress.” The officer was in the room before Olive had time to hide what she was doing.
“Come on. Get a move on.”
Olive swept her wax figures into one hand and crushed them together in her palm.
“Who is it?”
“The nun.” She looked at Olive’s closed fist.
“What have you got there?”
“Just plasticine.” She uncurled her fingers. The wax figures, carefully painted and clothed in coloured scraps, had merged into a multi-coloured mash, unidentifiable now as the altar candle they had sprung from.
“Well, leave it there. The nun’s come to talk to you, not watch you play with plasticine.”
Hal was asleep at the kitchen table, body rigidly upright, arms resting on the table, head nodding towards his chest. Roz watched him for a moment through the window, then tapped lightly on the glass. His eyes, red-rimmed with exhaustion, snapped open to look at her and she was shocked by the extent of his relief when he saw who it was.
He let her in.
“I hoped you wouldn’t come back,” he said, his face drawn with fatigue.
“What are you so frightened of?” she asked.
He looked at her with something like despair.
“Go home,” he said, ‘this is none of your business.” He went to the sink and ran the cold-water tap, dowsing his head and gasping as the icy stream hit the back of his neck.
From the floor above came a sudden violent hammering.
Roz leapt a foot in the air.
“Oh, my God! What was that?”
He reached out and gripped her arm, pushing her towards the door.
“Go home,” he ordered.
“Now! I don’t want to have to force you, Roz.”
But she stood her ground.
“What’s going on? What was that noise?”
“So help me,” he said grimly, “I will do you some damage if you don’t leave now.” But in outright contradiction to the words, he suddenly put his hands on either side of her face and kissed her.
“Oh, God!” he groaned, smoothing the tumbled hair from her eyes.
“I do not want you involved, Roz. I do not want you involved.”
She was about to say something when over his shoulder she saw the door into the restaurant swing open.
“Too late,” she said, turning him round.
“We’ve got company.”
Hal, horribly unprepared, showed his teeth in a wolfish grin.
“I’ve been expecting you,” he drawled. With a proprietary arm he eased Roz behind him and prepared to defend what was his.
There were four of them, large anonymous men in ski-masks.
They said nothing, just weighed in indiscriminately with baseball bats, using Hal as a human target. It happened so fast that Roz was a spectator to their grisly sport almost before she realised it. She, it seemed, was too insignificant to concern them.
Her first angry impulse was to catch out at a flailing arm but the battering she had had at the hands of Rupert two weeks before persuaded her to use her brain instead. With trembling fingers she opened her handbag and removed the three-inch hat ping she had taken to carrying with her, thrusting it upwards into the buttock of the man nearest her.
It drove in up to its ornate jade head and a soft groan issued from his mouth as he stood, completely paralysed with shock, the baseball bat slipping to the floor from his slackening fingers. No one noticed, except her.
With an exclamation of triumph she dived on it and brought it up in a swinging arc to smash against the man’s balls. He sat on the floor and started to scream.
“I’ve got one. Hal,” she panted.
“I’ve got a bat.”
“Then use it, for Christ’s sake,” he bellowed, going down under a rain of blows.
“Oh God!” Legs, she thought. She knelt on one knee, swiped at the nearest pair of trousers and crowed with hiumph when she made contact.
She took another swipe only to have her head jerked up as a hand seized her by the hair and started to pull it
