“Loving it. She’s the only thing that makes this hideous flat worth coming back to.”
“You’re mad,” said Iris, whose contempt for cats was matched only by her contempt for authors.
“I can’t think why you wanted to rent it in the first place. Use the money from the divorce and get something decent.
Why might Olive refuse to see you?”
“She’s unpredidable. Got very angry with me suddenly and called a halt to the interview.”
She heard Iris’s indrawn gasp.
“Roz, you wretch!
You haven’t blown it, I hope.”
Roz grinned into the receiver.
“I’m not sure. We’ll just have to wait and see. Got to go now.
Bye-ee.” She hung up smartly on Iris’s angry squeaking and went into the kitchen to feed Mrs. Antrobus. When the phone rang again, she picked up her gin, moved into her bedroom, and started typing.
Olive took the pencil she had stolen from Roz and stood it carefully alongside the small clay figure of a woman that was propped up at the back of her chest of drawers. Her moist lips worked involuntarily, chewing, sucking, as she studied the figijre critically.
It was crudely executed, a lump of dried grey clay, unfired and unglazed but, like a fertility symbol from a less sophisticated age, its femininity was powerful.
She selected a red marker from a jar and carefully coloured in the slab of hair about the face, then, changing to a green marker, filled in on the torso a rough representation of the silk shirtwaisted dress that Roz had been wearing.
To an observer her actions would have appeared childish. She cradled the figure in her hands like a tiny doll, crooning over it, before replacing it beside the pencil which, too faintly for the human nose, still carried the scent of Rosalind Leigh.
TWO
Peter Crew’s office was in the centre of Southampton, in a street where estate agents predominated. It was a sign of the times, thought Roz, as she walked past them, that they were largely empty. Depression had settled on them, as on everything else, like a dark immovable cloud.
Peter Crew was a gangling man of indeterminate age, with faded eyes and a blond toupee parted at the side. His own hair, a yellowish white, hung beneath it like a dirty net curtain. Every so often, he lifted the edge of the hair-piece and poked a finger underneath to scratch his scalp. The inevitable result of so much ill-considered stretching was that the toupee gaped perpetually in a small peak above his nose. It looked, Roz thought, like a large chicken perched on top of his head.
She rather sympathised with Olive’s contempt for him.
He smiled at her request to tape their conversation, a studied lift of the lips which lacked sincerity.
“As you please.” He folded his hands on his desk.
“So, Miss Leigh, you’ve already seen my client. How was she?”
“She was surprised to hear she still had a solicitor.”
“I don’t follow,”
“According to Olive, she hasn’t heard from you in four years.
Are you still representing her?”
His face assumed a look of comical dismay but, like his smile, it lacked conviction.
“Good Heavens. Is it as long as that? Surely not. Didn’t I write to her last year?”
“You tell me, Mr. Crew.”
He fussed to a cabinet in the corner and flicked through the files.
“Here we are. Olive Martin. Dear me, you’re right.
Four years. Mind you,” he said sharply, ‘there’s been no communication from her either.” He pulled out the file and brought it across to his desk.
“The law is a costly business, Miss Leigh. We don’t send letters for fun, you know.”
Roz lifted an eyebrow.
“Who’s paying, then? I assumed she was on Legal Aid.”
He adjusted his yellow hat.
“Her father paid, though, frankly, I’m not sure what the position would be now. He’s dead, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Heart attack a year ago. It was three days before anyone found him.
Messy business. We’re still trying to sort out the estate.” He lit a cigarette and then abandoned it on the edge of an overflowing ashtray.
