“Tell me what happened.”
Olive took another cigarette and lit it from the old one.
“They arrested me.”
“No. I mean before that.”
“I called the police station, gave my address, and said the bodies were in the kitchen.”
“And before that?”
Olive didn’t answer.
Roz tried a different tack.
“The ninth of September, eighty seven was a Wednesday. According to your statement you killed and dismembered Amber and your mother in the morning and early afternoon.” She watched the woman closely.
“Did none of the neighbours hear anything, come and investigate?”
There was a tiny movement at the corner of one eye, a tic, hardly noticeable amidst the fat.
“It’s a man, isn’t it?” said Olive gently.
Roz was puzzled.
“What’s a man?”
Sympathy peeped out from between the puffy, bald lids.
“It’s one of the few advantages of being in a place like this. No men to make your life a misery. You get the odd bit of bother, of course, husbands and boyfriends playing up on the outside, but you don’t get the anguish of a daily relationship.” She pursed her lips in recollection.
“I always envied the nuns, you know.
It’s so much easier when you don’t have to compete.”
Roz played with her pencil. Olive was too canny to discuss a man in her own life, she thought, assuming there had ever been one. Had she told the truth about her abortion?
“But less rewarding,” she said.
A rumble issued from the other side of the table.
“Some reward you’re getting. You know what my father’s favourite expression was? The game is not worth the candle. He used to drive my mother mad with it. But it’s true in your case.
Whoever it is you’re after, he’s not doing you any good.”
Roz drew a doodle on her pad, a fat cherub inside a balloon.
Was the abortion a fantasy, a perverted link in Olive’s mind with Amber’s unwanted son? There was a long silence. She pencilled in the cherub’s smile and spoke without thinking.
“Not whoever,” she said, ‘whatever. It’s what I want, not who I want.”
She regretted it as soon as she’d said it.
“It’s not important.”
Again there was no response and she began to find Olive’s silences oppressive. It was a waiting game, a trap to make her speak. And then what? The toe-curling embarrassment of stammered apologies.
She bent her head.
“Let’s go back to the day of the murders,” she suggested.
A meaty hand suddenly covered hers and stroked the fingers affectionately.
“I know about despair.
I’ve felt it often. If you keep it bottled up, it feeds on itself like a cancer.”
There was no insistence in Olive’s touch. It was a display of friendship, supportive, undemanding.
Roz squeezed the fat, warm fingers in acknowledgement then withdrew her hand. It’s not despair, she was going to say, just overwork and tiredness.
“I’d like to do what you did,” she said in a monotone, ‘and kill someone.” There was a long silence. Her own statement had shocked her.
“I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Why not? It’s the truth.”
“I doubt it. I haven’t the guts to kill anyone.”
Olive stared at her.
“That doesn’t stop you wanting to,” she said reasonably.
“No. But if you can’t summon the guts then I don’t think the will is really there.” She smiled distantly.
“I can’t even find the guts to kill myself and sometimes I see that as the only sensible option.”
“Why?”
