“You’re late. I was afraid you wouldn’t come.” She sucked down the smoke.
“I’ve been dying for a bloody fag.” Her hands and shift were ifithy with what looked like dried clay.
“Aren’t you allowed cigarettes?”
“Only what you can buy with your earnings. I always run out before the end of the week.” She rubbed the backs of her hands vigorously and showered the table with small grey flakes.
“What is that?” Roz asked.
“Clay.” Olive left the cigarette in her mouth and set to work, plucking the smears from her bosom.
“Why do you think they call me the Sculptress?”
Roz was about to say something tactless, but thought better of it.
“What do you make?”
“People.”
“What sort of people? Imaginary people or people you know?”
There was a brief hesitation.
“Both.” She held Roz’s gaze.
“I made one of you.”
Roz watched her for a moment.
“Well, I just hope you don’t decide to stick pins into it,” she said with a faint smile.
“Judging by the way I feel today, somebody else is at that already.”
A flicker of amusement crossed Olive’s face. She abandoned the smears and fixed Roz with her penetrating stare.
“So what’s wrong with you.”
Roz had spent a weekend in limbo, analysing and re analysing until her brain was on fire.
“Nothing. Just a head ache, that’s all.” And that was true as far as it went.
Her situation hadn’t altered. She was still a prisoner.
Olive screwed her eyes against the smoke.
“Changed your mind about the book?”
“No.”
“OK. Fire away.”
Roz switched on the tape-recorder.
“Second conversation with Olive Martin. Date: Monday, April nineteen.
Tell me about Sergeant Hawksley, Olive, the policeman who arrested you.
Did you get to know him well? How did he treat you?”
If the big woman was surprised by the question, she didn’t show it, but then she didn’t show anything very much. She thought for some moments.
“Was he the dark-haired one? Hal, I think they called him.”
Roz nodded.
“He was all right.”
“Did he bully you?”
“He was all right.” She drew on her cigarette and stared stolidly across the table.
“Have you spoken to him?”
“Yes.”
“Did he tell you he threw up when he saw the bodies?” There was an edge to her voice. Of amusement? Roz wondered. Somehow, amusement didn’t quite square.
“No,” she said.
“He didn’t mention that.”
“He wasn’t the only one.” A short silence.
“I offered to make them a pot of tea but the kettle was in the kitchen.”
She transferred her gaze to the ceiling, aware, perhaps, of having said something tasteless.
“Matter of fact, I liked him. He was the only one who talked to me. I might have been deaf and dumb for all the interest the others showed.
He gave me a sandwich at the police station. He was all right.”
Roz nodded.
