splashes over the floor, the table, the kitchen units. And then, after the photographs had been taken, we embarked on the grisly jigsaw of deciding which bit belonged to which woman. Of course I thought she was mad. No normal person could have done it.”
Roz chewed her pencil.
“That’s begging the question, you know. All you’re really saying is that the act itself was one of madness. I asked you if, from your experience of her, you thought Olive was mad.”
“And you’re splitting hairs. As far as I could see, the two were inextricably linked. Yes, I thought Olive was mad. That’s why we were so careful to make sure her solicitor was there when she made her statement. The idea of her getting off on a technicality and spending twelve months in hospital before some idiot psychiatrist decided she was responding well enough to treatment to be allowed out scared us rigid.”
“So did it surprise you when she was judged fit to plead guilty?”
“Yes,” he admitted, ‘it did.”
At around six o’clock attention switched to Olive. Areas of dried blood were lifted carefully from her arms and each fingernail was minutely scraped before she was taken upstairs to bathe herself and change into clean clothes. Everything she had been wearing was packed into individual polythene bags and loaded into a police van. An inspector drew Hal to one side.
“I gather she’s already admitted she did it.” Hal nodded.
“More or less.”
Roz interrupted again.
“Less is right. If what you said earlier is correct, she did not admit anything. She said they’d had a row, that her mother got angry, and she didn’t mean it to happen. She didn’t say she had killed them.”
Hal agreed.
“I accept that. But the implication was there which is why I told her not to talk about it. I didn’t want her claiming afterwards that she hadn’t been properly cautioned.”
He sipped his coffee.
“By the same token, she didn’t deny killing them, which is the first thing an innocent person would have done, especially as she had their blood all over her.”
“But the point is, you assumed her guilt before you knew it for a fact.”
“She was certainly our prime suspect,” he said drily.
The inspector ordered Hal to take Olive down to the station.
“But don’t let her say anything until we can get hold of a solicitor.
We’ll do it by the book. OK?”
Hal nodded again.
“There’s a father. He’ll be at the nick by now. I sent a car to pick him up from work but I don’t know what he’s been told.”
“You’d better find out then, and, for Christ’s sake, Sergeant, if he doesn’t know, then break it to him gently or you’ll give the poor sod a heart attack. Find out if he’s got a solicitor and if he’s willing to have him or her represent his daughter.”
They put a blanket over Olive’s head when they took her out to the car.
A crowd had gathered, lured by rumours of a hideous crime, and cameramen jostled for a photograph. Boos greeted her appearance and a woman laughed.
“What good’s a blanket, boys? You’d need a bloody marquee to cover that fat cow. I’d recognise her legs anywhere. What you done, Olive?”
Roz interrupted again when he jumped the story on to his meeting with Robert Martin at the police station.
“Hang on. Did she say anything in the car?”
He thought for a moment.
“She asked me if I liked her dress.
Isaidldid.”
“Were you being polite?”
“No. It was a vast improvement on the T-shirt and trousers.”
“Because they had blood on them?”
“Probably. No,” he contradicted himself, ruffling his hair, ‘because the dress gave her a bit of shape, I suppose, made her look more feminine. Does it matter?”
Roz ignored this.
“Did she say anything else?”
“I think she said something like: “That’s good. It’s my favourite.”
“But in her statement, she said she was going to London. Why wasn’t she wearing the dress when she committed the murders?”
He looked puzzled.
