“Thank you.” Roz spoke to the hovering prison officer briskly.
“I’ll take it from here. We have the Governor’s permission to talk for an hour.” Lizzie Borden took an axe… Tell her you’ve changed your mind. Olive Martin took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks… I can’t go through with this!
The uniformed woman shrugged.
“OK.” She dropped the welded metal chair she was carrying carelessly on to the floor and steadied it against her knee.
“You’ll need this. Anything else in there will collapse the minute she sits on it.” She laughed amiably. An attractive woman.
“She got wedged in the flaming toilet last year and it took four men to pull her out again.
You’d never get her up on your own.”
Roz manoeuvred the chair awkwardly through the doorway.
She felt at a disadvantage, like the friend of warring partners being pressured into taking sides. But Olive intimidated her in a way the prison officer never could.
“You will see me using a tape-recorder during this interview,” she snapped, nervousness clipping the words brusquely.
“The Governor has agreed to it. I trust that’s in order.”
There was a short silence. The prison officer raised an eyebrow.
“If you say so. Presumably someone’s taken the trouble to get the Sculptress’s agreement. Any problems, like, for example, she objects violently’ she drew a finger across her throat before tapping the pane of glass beside the door which allowed the officers a clear view of the room ‘then bang on the window. Assuming she lets you, of course.” She smiled coolly.
“You’ve read the rules, I hope. You bring nothing in for her, you take nothing out. She can smoke your cigarettes in the interview room but she can’t take any away with her. You do not pass messages for her, in or out, without the Governor’s permission. If in doubt about anything, you refer it to one of the officers. Clear?”
Bitch, thought Roz angrily.
“Yes, thank you.” But it wasn’t anger she felt, of course, it was fear. Fear of being shut up in a confined space with this monstrous creature who stank of fat woman’s sweat and showed no emotion in her grotesquely bloated face.
“Good.” The officer walked away with a broad wink at a colleague.
Roz stared after her.
“Come in, Olive.” She chose the chair furthest from the door deliberately. It was a statement of confidence. She was so damn nervous she needed a wee.
The idea for the book had been delivered as an ultimatum by her agent.
“Your publisher is about to wash his hands of you, Roz. His precise words were, “She has a week to commit herself to something that will sell or I shall remove her from our lists.” And, though I hate to rub your nose in it, I am within a whisker of doing the same thing.” Iris’s face softened a little.
Berating Roz, she felt, was like beating your head against a brick wall, painful and completely ineffective. She was, she knew, the woman’s best friend her only friend, she thought sometimes. The barrier of barbed wire that Roz had erected around herself had deterred all but the most determined. People rarely even asked after her these days. With an inward sigh, Iris threw caution to the winds.
“Look, sweetheart, you really can’t go on like this. It’s unhealthy to shut yourself away and brood.
Did you think about what I suggested last time?”
Roz wasn’t listening.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, her eyes maddeningly vacant. She saw the irritation on Iris’s face and forced herself to concentrate. Iris, she thought, had been lecturing again. But really, Roz wondered, why did she bother?
Other people’s concern was so exhausting, for her and for them.
“Did you ring that psychiatrist I recommended?” Iris demanded bluntly.
“No, there’s no need. I’m fine.” She studied the immaculately made-up face, which had changed very little in fifteen years.
Someone had once told Iris Fielding that she looked like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.
“A week’s too short,” Roz said, referring to her publisher.
“Tell him a month.”
Iris flicked a piece of paper across her desk.
“You’ve run out of room to manoeuvre, I’m afraid. He’s not even prepared to give you a choice of subject. He wants Olive Martin.
Here’s the name and address of her solicitor. Find out why she wasn’t sent to Broadmoor or Rampton. Find out why she refused to offer a defence. And find out what made her commit the murders in the first place. There’s a story there somewhere.” She watched the frown on Roz’s face deepen and shrugged.
“I know. It’s not your sort of thing, but you’ve brought this on yourself. I’ve been pressing you for months to produce an outline. Now it’s this or nothing. To tell you the truth, I think he’s done it on purpose. If you write it, it will sell, if you refuse to write it because it’s pure sensationalism, then he’s found a good excuse to drop you.”
Roz’s reaction surprised her.
