wrong time.
Olive sniggered.
“What makes you think I had a lover?”
“Someone made you pregnant.”
“Oh, that.” She was scornful.
“I lied about the abortion. I wanted the girls here to think I was attractive once.” She spoke loudly as if intent on the officers hearing everything.
A cold fist of certainty squeezed at Roz’s heart. Deedes had warned her of this four weeks ago.
“Then who was the man who sent you letters via Gary O’Brien?” she asked.
“Wasn’t he your lover?”
Olive’s eyes glittered like snakes’ eyes.
“He was Amber’s lover.”
Roz stared at her.
“But why would he send letters to you?”
“Because Amber was too frightened to receive them herself.
She was a coward.” There was a brief pause.
“Like my father.”
“What was she frightened of?”
“My mother.”
“What was your father frightened of?”
“My mother.”
“And were you frightened of your mother?”
“No.”
“Who was Amber’s lover?”
“I don’t know. She never told me.”
“What was in his letters?”
“Love, I expect. Everyone loved Amber.”
“Including you?”
“Oh, yes.”
“And your mother. Did she love Amber?”
“Of course.”
“That’s not what Mrs. Hopwood says.”
Olive shrugged.
“What would she know about it? She hardly knew us. She was always fussing over her precious Geraldine.”
A sly smile crept about her mouth, making her ugly.
“What does anybody know about it now except me?”
Roz could feel the scales peeling from her eyes in slow and terrible disillusionment.
“Is that why you waited till your father died before you would talk to anyone? So that there’d be no one left to contradict you?”
Olive stared at her with undisguised dislike then, with a careless gesture hidden from the officers’ eyes but all too visible to Roz she removed a tiny clay doll from her pocket and turned the long pin that was piercing the doll’s head. Red hair. Green dress. It required little imagination on Roz’s part to endow the clay with a personality.
She gave a hollow laugh.
“I’m a sceptic, Olive. It’s like religion. It only works if you believe in it.”
“I believe in it.”
“Then more fool you.” She stood up abruptly and walked to the door, nodding to Mr. Allenby to let her out. What had induced her to believe the woman innocent in the first place?
And why, for Christ’s sake, had she picked on a bloody murderess to fill the void that Alice had left in her heart?
She stopped at a payphone and dialled St. Angela’s Convent. It was Sister Bridget herself who answered.
“How may I help?” asked her comfortable lilting voice.
Roz smiled weakly into the receiver.
