“Sure, baas. Don’t mind me, baas. I’se just de paid help, baas.”
Roz laughed.
“Sorry. Yes, thank you, I’d love some more coffee. Look, if you can just bear with me for a moment, I’ve a few questions to ask and I’m trying to jot them down while the thing’s still fresh.”
He watched her while she wrote. Botticelli’s Venus, he had thought the first time he saw her, but she was too thin for his liking, hardly more than seven stone and a good five feet six.
She made a fabulous clothes’-horse, of course, but there was no softness to hug, no comfort in the tautly strung body. He wondered if her slenderness was a deliberate thing or if she lived on her nerves.
The latter, he thought. She was clearly a woman of obsessions if her crusade for Olive was anything to go by. He put a fresh cup of coffee in front of her but stayed standing, cradling his own coffee cup between his hands.
“OK,” she said, sorting out the pages, ‘let’s start with the kitchen.
You say the forensic evidence supported Olive’s statement that she acted alone. How?”
He thought back.
“You have to picture that place. It was a slaughter house, and every time she moved she left footprints in the congealing blood. We photographed each one separately and they were all hers, including the bloody prints that her shoes left on the carpet in the hall.” He shrugged.
“There were also bloody palm-prints and fingerprints over most of the surfaces where she had rested her hands. Again all hers. We did raise other fingerprints, admittedly, including about three, I think, which we were never able to match with any of the Martins or their neighbours, but you’d expect that in a kitchen. The gas man, the electricity man, a plumber maybe. There was no blood on them so we inclined to the view that they had been left in the days prior to the murder.”
Roz chewed her pencil.
“And the axe and the knife? I suppose they had only her fingerprints.”
“Actually no. The cutting weapons were so smeared that we couldn’t get anything off them at all.” He chuckled at her immediate interest.
“You’re chasing red herrings. Wet blood is slippery stuff. It would have been very surprising if we had found some perfect prints. The rolling pin had three damn good ones, all hers.”
She made a note.
“I didn’t know you could take them off unpolished wood.”
“It was solid glass, two feet long, a massive thing. I suppose if we were surprised by anything it was that the blows she struck with it hadn’t killed Gwen and Amber. They were both tiny women. By rights she should have smashed their skulls with it.” He sipped his coffee.
“It leant some credence to her story, in fact, that she only tapped them lightly in the first instance to make them shut up. We were afraid she might use that in her defence to get the charge reduced to manslaughter, the argument being that she slit their throats only because she believed they were already dead and she was trying to dismember them in panic. If she could then go on to show that the initial blows with the rolling pin were struck with very little force well, she might almost have persuaded a jury that the whole thing was a macabre accident. Which is one good reason, by the way, why she never mentioned the fight with her mother. We did push her on that, but she kept insisting that no mist on the mirror meant they were dead.”
He pulled a face.
“So I spent a very unpleasant two days working with the pathologist and the bodies, going step by step through what actually happened. We ended up with enough evidence of the fight Gwen put up to save her life to press a murder charge. Poor woman. Her hands and arms were literally cut to ribbons where she had tried to ward off the blows.”
Roz stared into her coffee for some minutes.
“Olive was very kind to me the other day. I can’t imagine her doing something like that.”
“You’ve never seen her in a rage. You might think differently if you had.”
“Have you seen her in a rage?”
“No,” he admitted.
“Well, I find it difficult even to imagine that. I accept she’s put on a lot of weight in the last six years but she’s a heavy, stolid type.
It’s highly strung, impatient people who lose their tempers.” She saw his scepticism and laughed.
“I know, I know, amateur psychology of the worst kind. Just two more questions then I’ll leave you in peace. What happened to Gwen and Amber’s clothes?”
“She burnt them in one of those square wire incinerators in the garden.
We retrieved some scraps from the ashes which matched the descriptions that Martin gave of the clothes the two women had been wearing that morning.”
“Why did she do that?”
“To get rid of them, presumably.”
“You didn’t ask her?”
He frowned.
“I’m sure we must have done. I can’t remember now.”
“There’s nothing in her statement about burning clothes.”
