“Which means you believe your mother and sister deserved to die.” She frowned.
“Well. I don’t understand, then. Why didn’t you put up a defence at your trial?”
“I had no defence.”
“Provocation. Mental cruelty. Neglect. They must have done something if you felt you were justified in killing them.”
Olive took another cigarette from the pack but didn’t answer.
“Well?”
The intense scrutiny again. This time Roz held her gaze.
“Well?” she persisted.
Abruptly, Olive rapped the window pane with the back of her hand.
“I’m ready now, Miss Henderson,” she called out.
Roz looked at her in surprise.
“We’ve forty minutes yet.”
“I’ve talked enough.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve obviously upset you.” She waited.
“It was unintentional.”
Olive still didn’t answer but sat impassively until the Officer came in. Then she grasped the edge of the table and, with a shove from behind, heaved herself to her feet. The cigarette, unlit, clung to her lower lip like a string of cotton wool.
“I’ll see you next week,” she said, easing crabwise through the door and shambling off down the corridor with Miss Henderson and the metal chair in tow.
Roz sat on for several minutes, watching them through the window. Why had Olive baulked at the mention of justification?
Roz felt unreasonably cheated it was one of the few questions she had wanted an answer to and yet… Like the first stirrings of long dormant sap, her curiosity began to reawaken. God knows, there was no sense to it she and Olive were as different as two women could be but she had to admit an odd liking for the woman.
She snapped her briefcase closed and never noticed that her pencil was missing.
Iris had left a breathy message on the answer phone “Ring me with all the dope… Is she perfectly ghastly? If she’s as mad and as fat as her solicitor said, she must be terrifying. I’m agog to hear the gory details. If you don’t phone, I shall come round to the flat and make a nuisance of myself…”
Roz poured herself a gin and tonic and wondered if Iris’s insensitivity was inherited or acquired. She dialled her number.
“I’m phoning because it’s the lesser of two evils. If I had to watch you drooling your disgusting prurience all over my carpet, I should be sick.” Mrs. Antrobus, her bossy white cat, slithered round her legs, stiff tailed and purring. Roz winked down at her. She and Mrs.
Antrobus had a relationship of long standing, in which Mrs. Antrobus wore the trousers and Roz knew her place. There was no persuading Mrs.
A. to do anything she didn’t want.
“Oh, goody. You liked her, then?”
“What a revolting woman you are.” She took a sip from her glass.
“I’m not sure that like is quite the word I would use.”
“How fat is she?”
“Grotesque. And it’s sad, not funny.”
“Did she talk?”
“Yes. She has a very pukka accent and she’s a bit of an intellectual.
Not at all what I expected. Very sane, by the way. “I thought the solicitor said she was a psychopath.”
“He did. I’m going to see him tomorrow. I want to know who gave him that idea. According to Olive, five psychiatrists have diagnosed her normal.”
“She might be lying.”
“She’s not. I checked with the Governor afterwards.” Roz reached down to scoop Mrs. Antrobus against her chest. The cat, purring noisily, licked her nose. It was only cupboard love.
She was hungry.
“Still, I wouldn’t get too excited about this, if I were you. Olive may refuse to see me again.”
“Why, and what’s that awful row?” demanded Iris.
“Mrs. Antrobus.”
“Oh God! The mangy cat.” Iris was diverted.
“It sounds as if you’ve got the builders in. What on earth are you doing to it?”
