“Comparatively pleasant as far as you were concerned,” he corrected her.
“But you were expecting something inhuman, which is why you find it difficult to be objective.”
Roz refused to be drawn again down this blind alley. Instead she took her recorder from her briefcase and put it on the table.
“Can I tape this conversation?”
“I haven’t agreed to talk to you yet.” He stood up abruptly and filled a kettle with water. You’d do better,” he said after a moment, ‘to ring Detective Sergeant Wyatt. He was there when she gave her statement, and he’s still on the Force. Coffee?”
“Please.” She watched him select a dark Arabica and spoon the grounds into a cafetiere.
“I really would rather talk to you,” she said evenly.
“Policemen are notoriously difficult to pin down. It could take me weeks to get an interview with him. I won’t quote you, I won’t even name you, if you’d rather I didn’t, and you can read the final draught before it goes to print.” She gave a hollow laugh.
“Assuming it ever gets that far. What you say may persuade me not to write it.”
He looked at her, absentmindedly scratching his chest through his shirt, then made up his mind.
“All right. I’ll tell you as much as I can remember but you’ll have to double check everything. It’s a long time ago and I can’t vouch for my memory. Where do I start?”
“With her telephone call to the police.”
He waited for the kettle to boil, then filled the cafetiere and placed it on the table.
“It wasn’t a 999 call. She looked up the number in the book and dialled the desk.” He shook his head, remembering.
“It started out as a farce because the sergeant on duty couldn’t make head or tail of what she was saying.”
He was shrugging into his jacket at the end of his shift when the desk sergeant came in and handed him a piece of paper with an address on it.
“Do me a favour, Hal, and check this out on your way home. It’s Leven Road. You virtually pass it. Some madwoman’s been bawling down the phone about chicken legs on her kitchen floor.” He pulled a face.
“Wants a policeman to take them away.” He grinned.
“Presumably she’s a vegetarian.
You’re the cookery expert. Sort it out, there’s a good chap.”
Hawksley eyed him suspiciously.
“Is this a wind-up?”
“No. Scout’s honour.” He chuckled.
“Look, she’s obviously a mental case. They’re all over the place, poor sods, since the Government chucked ‘em on to the streets. Just do as she asks or we’ll have her phoning all night. It’ll take you five minutes out of your way.”
Olive Martin, red eyed from weeping, opened the door to him. She smelt strongly of B. O. and her bulky shoulders were hunched in unattractive despair. So much blood was smeared over her baggy T-shirt and trousers that it took on the property of an abstract pattern and his eyes hardly registered it. And why should they? He had no premonition of the horror in store.
“DS.
Hawksley,” he said with an encouraging smile, showing her his card.
“You rang the police station.”
She stepped back, holding the door open.
“They’re in the kitchen.” She pointed down the corridor.
“On the floor.”
“OK. We’ll go down and have a look. What’s your name, love?”
“Olive.”
“Right, Olive, you lead the way. Let’s see what’s upset you.”
Would it have been better to know what was in there?
Probably not. He often thought afterwards that he could never have entered the room at all if he’d been told in advance that he was about to step into a human abattoir. He stared in horror at the butchered bodies, the axe, the blood that ran in rivers across the floor, and his shock was so great that he could hardly breathe for the iron fist that thrust against his diaphragm and squeezed the breath from his lungs.
The room reeked of blood.
He leant against the door jamb and sucked desperately at the sickly, cloying air, before bolting down the corridor and retching over and over again into the tiny patch of front garden.
Olive sat on the stairs and watched him, her fat moon face as white and pasty as his.
“You should have brought a friend,” she told him miserably.
