“Oh, yes,” said Roz with feeling.
“Hatred has as strong a body language as love.”
“It was she, I think, who was the instigator of it all. I’ve always assumed he must have had an affair which she found out about, though I must stress I don’t know that. He was a nice looking man, very easy to talk to, and, of course, he got out and about with his job. Whereas she, as far as I could see, had no friends at all, a few acquaintances perhaps, but one never came across her socially. She was a very controlled woman, cold and unemotional. Really rather unpleasant.
Certainly not the type one could ever grow fond of.” She was silent for a moment.
“Olive was very much her daughter, of Course, both in looks and personality, and Amber his. Poor Olive,” she said with genuine compassion.
“She did have very little going for her.”
Mrs. Hopwood looked at Roz and sighed heavily.
“You asked me earlier where I was while all this was going on. I was bringing up my own children, my dear, and if you have any yourself you will know it’s hard enough to cope with them, let alone interfere with someone else’s. I do regret now that I didn’t say anything at the time, but, really, what could I have done? In any case, I felt it was the school’s responsibility.” She spread her hands.
“But there you are, it’s so easy with hindsight, and who could possibly have guessed that Olive would do what she did? I don’t suppose anyone realised just how disturbed she was.” She dropped her hands to her lap and looked helplessly at her husband.
Mr. Hopwood pondered for a moment.
“Still,” he said slowly, ‘there’s no point pretending we’ve ever believed she killed Amber. I went to the police about that, you know, told them I thought it was very unlikely. They said my disquiet was based on out-of-date information.” He sucked his teeth.
“Which of course waA true. It was five years or so since we’d had any dealings with the family, and in five years the sisters could well have learned to dislike each other.” He fell silent.
“But if Olive didn’t kill Amber,” Roz prompted, ‘then who did?”
“Gwen,” he said with surprise, as if it went without saying.
He smoothed his white hair.
“We think Olive walked in on her mother battering Amber. That would have been quite enough to send her berserk, assuming she had retained her fondness for the girl.”
“Was Gwen capable of doing such a thing?”
They looked at each other.
“We’ve always thought so,” said Mr. Hopwood.
“She was very hostile towards Amber, probably because Amber was so like her father.”
“What did the police say?” asked Roz.
“I gather Robert Martin had already suggested the same thing.
They put it to Olive and she denied it.”
Roz stared at him.
“You’re saying Olive’s father told the police that he thought his wife had battered his younger daughter to death and that Olive then killed her mother?”
He nodded.
“God!” she breathed.
“His solicitor never said a word about that.” She thought for a moment.
“It implies, you know, that Gwen had battered the child before. No man would make an accusation like that unless he had grounds for it, would he?”
“Perhaps he just shared our disbelief that Olive could kill her sister.”
Roz chewed her thumbnail and stared at the carpet.
“She claimed in her statement that her relationship with her sister had never been close. Now, I might go along with that if I accept that in the years after school they drifted apart, but I can’t go along with it if her own father thought they were still so close that Olive would kill to revenge her.” She shook her head.
“I’m damn sure Olive’s barrister never got to hear about this. The poor man was trying to conjure a defence out of thin air.” She looked up.
“Why did Robert Martin give up on it? Why did he let her plead guilty?
According to her she did it to spare him the anguish of a trial.”
Mr. Hopwood shook his head.
“I really couldn’t say. We never saw him again. Presumably, he somehow became convinced of her guilt.” He massaged arthritic fingers.
“The problem for all of us is trying to accept that a person we know is capable of doing something so horrible, perhaps because it shows up the fallibility of our judgement. We knew her before it happened. You, I imagine, have met her since. In both cases, we have failed to see the flaw in her character that led her to murder her mother and sister, and we look for excuses. In the end, though, I don’t think there are any.
