“That’s a long way off. We’ve years yet.”
But she shook her head and mashed the clay into a ball with the dog end in the middle.
“You never asked me who Eve was.”
The game again, he thought.
“I didn’t need to, Olive. I knew.”
She smiled scornfully to herself.
“Yes, you would.” She examined him out of the corner of her eye.
“Did you work it out for yourself?” she asked.
“Or did God tell you? Look, my son, Olive strikes her reflection in the clay. Now help her to come to terms with her own duplicity. Well, don’t worry, either way I shall remember what you did for me when I get out.”
What did she want from him? Encouragement that she would get out, or rescuing from her lies? He sighed inwardly. Really, it would all be so much easier if he liked her, but he didn’t.
And that was his wickedness.
NINETEEN
Olive regarded Roz with deep suspicion. Contentment had brought a glow to the other woman’s usually pale cheeks.
“You look different,” she said in an accusing tone as if what she saw displeased her.
Roz shook her head.
“No. Everything’s the same.” Lies were safer sometimes. She was afraid Olive would regard her moving in with the police officer who arrested her as a betrayal.
“Did you get my message last Monday night?”
Olive was at her most unattractive, unwashed hair hanging limply about her colourless face, a smear of tomato ketchup ground into the front of her shift, the smell of her sweat almost unbearable in the small room.
She vibrated with irritation, her forehead set in a permanent scowl, ready, it seemed to Roz, to reject anything that was said to her. She didn’t answer.
“Is something wrong?” Roz asked evenly.
“I don’t want to see you any more.”
Roz turned her pencil in her fingers.
“Why not?”
“I don’t have to give a reason.”
“It would be polite,” said Roz in the same even tone.
“I’ve invested a great deal of time, energy, and affection in you. I thought we were friends.”
Olive’s lip curled.
“Friends,” she hissed scathingly.
“We’re not friends. You’re Miss Wonderful making money out of doing her Lady Muck bit and I’m the poor sap who’s being exploited.”
She splayed her hands across the table top and tried to get up.
“I don’t want you to write your book.”
“Because you’d rather be treated with awe in here than laughed at outside.” Roz shook her head.
“You’re a fool, Olive.
And a coward as well. I thought you had more guts.”
Olive pursed her fat lips as she struggled to rise.
“I’m not listening,” she said childishly.
“You’re trying to make me change my mind.”
“Of course I am.” She rested her cheek against one raised hand.
“I shall write the book whether you want me to or not. I’m not afraid of you, you see. You can instruct a solicitor to take out an injunction to stop me, but he won’t succeed because I shall argue that you’re innocent, and a court will uphold my right to publish in the interests of natural justice.”
Olive slumped back on to her chair.
“I’ll write to a Civil Liberties group. They’ll support me.”
“Not when they find out I’m trying to get you released, they won’t.
They’ll support me.”
“The Court of Human Rights, then. I’ll say what you’re doing is an invasion of my privacy.”
