He shrugged.
“Beware of being used, Miss Leigh. Olive Martin dominated the court the day she appeared in it. I had the impression then, and still have it, that it was we who were dancing to her tune not she to ours.”
Dawlington was a small eastern suburb of Southampton, once an isolated village, now swallowed up in the great urban expansion of the twentieth century. It maintained an identity of a sort by the busy trunk-roads that gave it tarmac boundaries but, even so, the place was easy to miss. Only a tired peeling shop sign, advertising Dawlington Newsagents, alerted Roz to the fact that she had left one suburb and entered another. She drew into the kerb before a left-hand turning and consulted her map.
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.
