You have to rely on what other people tell you, and just as their perceptions at the time were not always accurate, neither are their memories now.” She sighed.
“I still have reservations there’s no point in pretending I don’t but I need to understand what happened that day before I can make up my mind.” She fingered the stem of her wine glass.
“I think I may very well be naive but I’d need convincing that that is a bad thing. I could argue, with considerable justification, that anyone delving regularly in sewers must come up jaundiced.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” He was amused.
She looked at him again.
“That what Olive did shocks you but doesn’t surprise you. You’ve known, or known of, other people who’ve done similar things before.”
“So?”
“So you never established why she did it. Whereas I, being naive’ she held his gaze ‘am surprised as well as shocked and I want to know why.”
He frowned.
“It’s all in her statement. I can’t remember the exact details now, but she resented not being given a birthday party, I think, and then blew a fuse when her mother got angry with her for persuading the sister to ring in sick the next day.
Domestic violence erupts over the most trivial things. Olive’s motives were rather more substantial than some I’ve known.”
Roz bent down to open her briefcase.
“I’ve a copy of her statement here.” She handed it across and waited while he read it through.
“I can’t see your problem,” he said at last.
“She makes it dear as crystal why she did it. She got angry, hit them, and then didn’t know how to dispose of the bodies.”
“That’s what she says, I agree, but it doesn’t mean it’s true.
There’s at least one blatant lie in that statement and possibly two.”
She tapped her pencil on the table.
“In the first paragraph she says that her relationship with her mother and sister had never been close but that’s been flatly contradicted by everyone I’ve spoken to. They all say she was devoted to Amber.”
He frowned again.
“What’s the other lie?”
She leaned over with her pencil and put a line by one of the middle paragraphs.
“She says she held a mirror to their lips to see if there was any mist.
According to her, there wasn’t, so she proceeded to dismember the bodies.” She turned the pages over.
“But here, according to the pathologist, Mrs. Martin put up a struggle to defend herself before her throat was cut. Olive makes no mention of that in her statement.”
He shook his head.
“That doesn’t mean a damn thing. Either she decided to put a gloss on the whole affair out of belated shame, or shock simply blotted the less acceptable bits out of her memory.”
“And the lie about not getting on with Amber? How do you explain that away?”
“Do I need to? The confession was completely voluntary. We even made her wait until her solicitor arrived to avoid any hint of police pressure.” He drained his glass.
“And you’re not going to try and argue that an innocent woman would confess to a crime like this?”
“It’s happened before.”
“Only after days of police interrogation and then, when it comes to the trial, they plead not guilty and deny their statement.
Olive did neither.” He looked amused.
“Take it from me, she was so damned relieved to get it all off her chest she couldn’t confess fast enough.”
“How? Did she deliver a monologue or did you have to ask questions?”
He clasped his hands behind his neck.
“Unless she’s changed a great deal I should imagine you’ve already discovered that Olive doesn’t volunteer information easily.” He cocked his head enquiringly.
“We had to ask questions but she answered them readily enough.” He looked thoughtful.
“For most of the time she sat and stared at us as if she were trying to engrave our faces on her memory. To be honest, I live in terror of her getting out and doing to me what she did to her family.”
“Five minutes ago you described her as comparatively pleasant.”
He rubbed his jaw.
