Roz pencilled a doodle on her notepad.
“Does Olive know her father’s dead?”
He was surprised.
“Of course she does.”
“Who told her? Obviously, your firm didn’t write.”
He eyed her with the sudden suspicion of an unwary rambler coming upon a snake in the grass.
“I telephoned the prison and spoke to the Governor. I thought it would be less upsetting for Olive if the news was given personally.” He became alarmed.
“Are you saying she’s never been told?”
“No. I just wondered why, if her father had money to leave, there’s been no correspondence with Olive. Who’s the beneficiary?”
Mr. Crew shook his head.
“I can’t reveal that. It’s not Olive, naturally.”
“Why naturally?”
He tut-tutted crossly.
“Why do you think, young woman? She murdered his wife and younger daughter and condemned the poor man to live out his last years in the house where it happened. It was completely un saleable Have you any idea how tragic his life became? He was a recluse, never went out, never received visitors. It was only because there were milk bottles on the doorstep that anyone realised there was something wrong. As I say, he’d been dead for three days. Of course he wasn’t going to leave money to Olive.”
Roz shrugged.
“Then why did he pay her legal bills? That’s hardly consistent, is it?”
He ignored the question.
“There would have been difficulties, in any case. Olive would not have been allowed to benefit financially from the murder of her mother and her sister.”
Roz conceded the point.
“Did he leave much?”
“Surprisingly, yes. He made a tidy sum on the stock market.”
His eyes held a wistful regret as he scratched vigorously under his toupee.
“Whether through luck or good judgement he sold everything just before Black Monday. The estate is now valued at half a million pounds.”
“My God!” She was silent for a moment.
“Does Olive know?”
“Certainly, if she reads the newspapers. The amount has been published and, because of the murders, it found its way into the tabloids.”
“Has it gone to the beneficiary yet?”
He frowned heavily, his brows jutting.
“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss that. The terms of the will preclude it.”
Roz shrugged and tapped her teeth with her pencil.
“Black Monday was October eighty-seven. The murders happened on September ninth, eighty-seven. That’s odd, don’t you think?”
“In what way?”
“I’d expect him to be so shell-shocked that stocks and shares would be the last thing he’d worry about.”
“Conversely,” said Mr. Crew reasonably, ‘that very fact would demand that he find something to occupy his mind. He was semi-retired after the murders. Perhaps the financial pages were his only remaining interest.” He looked at his watch.
“Time presses. Was there anything else?”
It was on the tip of Roz’s tongue to ask why, if Robert Martin had made a killing on the stock exchange, he had chosen to live out his days in an un saleable house. Surely a man worth half a million could have afforded to move, irrespective of what his property was worth? What, she wondered, was in that house to make Martin sacrifice himself to it?
But she sensed Crew’s hostility to her and decided that discretion was the better part of valour. This man was one of the few sources of corroborative information open to her and she would need him again, even though his sympathies clearly lay more with the father than the daughter.
“Just one or two more questions this morning.” She smiled pleasantly, a studied use of charm as insincere as his.
“I’m still feeling my way on this, Mr. Crew. To tell you the truth, I’m not yet convinced there’s a book in it.” And what an understatement that was. She wasn’t intending to write anything. Or was she?
He steepled his fingers and tapped them together impatiently.
