Olive snorted.
“I’m saying, why use Amber’s baby to whitewash himself?”
“What had he done that needed whitewashing?”
But Olive didn’t answer.
Roz waited a moment, then tried a different tack.
“You said your father would always leave money to family if he could.
Does that mean there’s other family he could have left it to? Or did you hope he’d leave it to you?”
Olive shook her head.
“There’s no one. Both my parents were only children. And he couldn’t leave it to me, could me?”
She slammed her fist on the table, her voice rising furiously.
“Otherwise everyone would kill their fucking families!” The great ugly face leered at Roz. YOU WANTED TO, mouthed the sausage lips.
“Keep the volume down, Sculptress,” said Mr. Allenby mildly, ‘or the visit finishes now.”
Roz pressed a finger and thumb to her eyelids where she could feel her headache coming back. Olive Martin took an axe she tried to thrust the thought away, but it wouldn’t go -and gave her mother forty whacks.
“I don’t understand why the will makes you so angry,” she said, forcing her voice to sound steady.
“If family was important to him who else is there except his grandson?”
Olive stared at the table, her jaw jutting aggressively.
“It’s the principle,” she muttered.
“Dad’s dead. What does it matter now what people think?”
Roz recalled something Mrs. Hopwood had said.
“I’ve always assumed he must have had an affair…” She took a shot in the dark.
“Do you have a half-brother or sister somewhere? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
Olive found this amusing.
“Hardly. He’d have to have had a mistress for that and he didn’t like women.” She gave a sardonic laugh.
“He did like MEN though.” Again the strange emphasis on the word.
Roz was very taken aback.
“Are you saying he was a homosexual?”
“I’m saying,” said Olive with exaggerated patience, ‘that the only person I ever saw make Dad’s face light up was our nextdoor neighbour, Mr. Clarke. Dad used to get quite skittish whenever he was around.”
She lit another cigarette.
“I thought it was rather sweet at the time, but only because I was too bloody thick to recognise a couple of queens when I saw them. Now I just think it was sick. It’s no wonder my mother hated the Clarkes.”
“They moved after the murders,” said Roz thoughtfully.
“Vanished one morning without leaving a forwarding address.
No one knows what happened to them or where they went.”
“Doesn’t surprise me. I expect she was behind it.”
“Mrs. Clarke?”
“She never liked him coming round to our house. He used to hop across the fence at the back and he and Dad would shut themselves in Dad’s room and not come out for hours. I should think it must have worried her sick after the murders when Dad was all alone in the house.”
Images, gleaned from things people had said, chased themselves across Roz’s mind. Robert Martin’s vanity and his Peter Pan looks; he and Ted Clarke being as close as brothers; the room at the back with the bed in it; Gwen’s keeping up appearances; her frigid flinching from her husband; the secret that needed hiding. It all made sense, she thought, but did it affect anything if Olive hadn’t known it at the time?
“Was Mr. Clarke his only lover, do you think?”
“How would I know? Probably not,” she went on, contradicting herself immediately.
“He had his own back door in that room he used. He could have been out after rent-boys every night for all any of us would have known about it. I hate him.”
She looked as if she were about to erupt again but Roz’s look of alarm gave her pause.
“I hated him,” she repeated, before lapsing into silence.
“Because he killed Gwen and Amber?” asked Roz for the second time.
But Olive was dismissive: “He was at work all day. Everyone knows that.”
Olive Martin took an axe… Are you raising her expectations by telling her your book will get her out?
“Did your lover kill them?” She felt she was being clumsy, asking the wrong questions, in the wrong way, at the
