I’ve got those photographs for you. Do you still want them?”
“Yes.”
“Are you brave enough to collect them or do you want me to post them?”
“It’s not bravery that’s required, Hawksley, it’s thick bloody skin.
I’m tired of being needled.” She smiled to herself at the pun.
“Which reminds me, was it Mrs. Clarke who said Gwen and Amber were alive after Robert went to work?”
There was a slight pause while he tried to see a connection.
He couldn’t.
“Yes, if she was the one in the attached semi.”
“She was lying. She says now that she didn’t see them, which means Robert Martin’s alibi is worthless. He could have done it before he went to work.”
“Why would she give Robert Martin an alibi?”
“I don’t know. I’m trying to work it out. I thought at first she was alibiing her own husband, but that doesn’t hold water.
Apart from anything else, Olive tells me he was already retired so he wouldn’t have gone to work anyway. Can you remember checking Mrs.
Clarke’s statement?”
“Was Clarke the accountant? Yes?” He thought for a moment.
“OK, he ran most of his business from home but he also looked after the books of several small firms in the area. That week he was doing the accounts of a central heating contractor in Portswood. He was there all day. We checked. He didn’t get home until after we had the place barricaded. I remember the fuss he made about having to park his car at the other end of the road. Elderly man, bald, with glasses. That the one?”
“Yes,” she said, ‘but what he and Robert did during the day is irrelevant if Gwen and Amber were dead before either of the men left for work.”
“How reliable is Mrs. Clarke?”
“Not very,” she admitted.
“What was the earliest estimate of death according to your pathologist?”
He was unusually evasive.
“I can’t remember now.”
“Try,” she pressed him.
“You suspected Robert enough to check his alibi so he can’t have been ruled out immediately on the forensic evidence.”
“I can’t remember,” he said again.
“But if Robert did it, then why didn’t he kill Olive as well? And why didn’t she try and stop him? There must have been a hell of a row going on. She couldn’t possibly have avoided hearing something. It’s not that big a house.”
“Perhaps she wasn’t there.
The Chaplain made his weekly visit to Olive’s room.
“That’s good,” he said, watching her bring curl to the mother’s hair with the point of a matchstick.
“Is it Mary and Jesus?”
She looked at him with amusement.
“The mother is suffocating her baby,” she said baldly.
“Is it likely to be Mary and Jesus?”
He shrugged.
“I’ve seen many stranger things that pass for religious art. Who is it?”
“It’s Woman,” said Olive.
“Eve with all her faces.”
He was interested.
“But you haven’t given her a face.”
Olive twisted the sculpture on its base and he saw that what he had taken to be curls at the side of the mother’s hair was in fact a crude delineation of eyes, nose and mouth. She twisted it the other way and the same rough representation stared out from that side as well.
“Two-faced,” said Olive, ‘and quite unable to look you in the eye.” She picked up a pencil and shoved it between the mother’s thighs.
“But it doesn’t matter. Not to MAN.” She leered unpleasantly.
“MAN doesn’t look at the mantelpiece when he’s poking the fire.”
