"Is this a wind-up?"

"No. Scout's honour." He chuckled.

"Look, she's obviously a mental case. They're all over the place, poor sods, since the Government chucked *em on to the streets. Just do as she asks or we'll have her phoning all night. It'll take you five minutes out of your way."

Olive Martin, red eyed from weeping, opened the door to him. She smelt strongly of B. O. and her bulky shoulders were hunched in unattractive despair. So much blood was smeared over her baggy T-shirt and trousers that it took on the property of an abstract pattern and his eyes hardly registered it. And why should they? He had no premonition of the horror in store.

"DS.

Hawksley," he said with an encouraging smile, showing her his card.

"You rang the police station."

She stepped back, holding the door open.

"They're in the kitchen." She pointed down the corridor.

"On the floor."

"OK. We'll go down and have a look. What's your name, love?"

"Olive."

"Right, Olive, you lead the way. Let's see what's upset you."

Would it have been better to know what was in there?

Probably not. He often thought afterwards that he could never have entered the room at all if he'd been told in advance that he was about to step into a human abattoir. He stared in horror at the butchered bodies, the axe, the blood that ran in rivers across the floor, and his shock was so great that he could hardly breathe for the iron fist that thrust against his diaphragm and squeezed the breath from his lungs.

The room reeked of blood.

He leant against the door jamb and sucked desperately at the sickly, cloying air, before bolting down the corridor and retching over and over again into the tiny patch of front garden.

Olive sat on the stairs and watched him, her fat moon face as white and pasty as his.

"You should have brought a friend," she told him miserably.

"It wouldn't have been so bad if there'd been two of you."

He held a handkerchief to his lips as he used his radio to summon a.s.sistance. While he spoke he eyed her warily, registering the blood all over her clothes. Nausea choked him.

Jesus JESUS! How mad was she? Mad enough to take the axe to him?

"For G.o.d's sake, make it quick," he shouted into the mouthpiece.

"This is an emergency." He stayed outside, too frightened to go back in.

She looked at him stolidly.

"I won't hurt you. There's nothing to be afraid of."

He mopped at his forehead.

"Who are they, Olive?"

"My mother and sister." Her eyes slid to her hands.

"We had a row."

His mouth was dry with shock and fear.

"Best not talk about it," he said.

Tears rolled down her fat cheeks.

"I didn't mean it to happen.

We had a row. My mother got so angry with me. Should I give my statement now?"

He shook his head.

"There's no hurry."

She stared at him without blinking, her tears drying in dirty streaks down her face.

"Will you be able to take them away before my father comes home?" she asked him after a minute or two.

"I think it would be better."

Bile rose in his throat.

"When do you expect him back?"

"He leaves work at three o'clock. He's part-time."

Hal glanced at his watch, an automatic gesture. His mind was numb.

"It's twenty to now."

She was very composed.

"Then perhaps a policeman could go there and explain what's happened.

It would be better," she said again. They heard the wail of approaching sirens.

"Please," she said urgently.

He nodded.

"I'll arrange it. Where does he work?"

"Carters Haulage. It's in the Docks."

He was pa.s.sing the message on as two cars, sirens shrieking, swept round the corner and bore down on number 22. Doors flew open all along the road and curious faces peered out. Hal switched off the radio and looked at her.

"All done," he said.

"You can stop worrying about your father."

A large tear slipped down her blotchy face.

"Should I make a pot of tea?"

Hal thought of the kitchen.

"Better not."

The sirens stilled as policemen erupted from the cars.

"I'm sorry to cause so much bother," she said into the silence.

She spoke very little after that, but only, thought Hal on reflection, because n.o.body spoke to her. She was packed into the living room, under the eye of a shocked W. P. C." and sat in bovine immobility watching the comings and goings through the open door. If she was aware of the mounting horror that was gathering about her, she didn't show it. Nor, as time pa.s.sed and the signs of emotion faded from her face, did she display any further grief or remorse for what she had done. Faced with such complete indifference, the consensus view was that she was mad.

"But she wept in front of you," interrupted Roz.

"Did you think she was mad?"

"I spent two hours in that kitchen with the pathologist, trying to work out the order of events from the blood splashes over the floor, the table, the kitchen units. And then, after the photographs had been taken, we embarked on the grisly jigsaw of deciding which bit belonged to which woman. Of course I thought she was mad. No normal person could have done it."

Roz chewed her pencil.

"That's begging the question, you know. All you're really saying is that the act itself was one of madness. I asked you if, from your experience of her, you thought Olive was mad."

"And you're splitting hairs. As far as I could see, the two were inextricably linked. Yes, I thought Olive was mad. That's why we were so careful to make sure her solicitor was there when she made her statement. The idea of her getting off on a technicality and spending twelve months in hospital before some idiot psychiatrist decided she was responding well enough to treatment to be allowed out scared us rigid."

"So did it surprise you when she was judged fit to plead guilty?"

"Yes," he admitted, *it did."

At around six o'clock attention switched to Olive. Areas of dried blood were lifted carefully from her arms and each fingernail was minutely sc.r.a.ped before she was taken upstairs to bathe herself and change into clean clothes. Everything she had been wearing was packed into individual polythene bags and loaded into a police van. An inspector drew Hal to one side.

"I gather she's already admitted she did it." Hal nodded.

"More or less."

Roz interrupted again.

"Less is right. If what you said earlier is correct, she did not admit anything. She said they'd had a row, that her mother got angry, and she didn't mean it to happen. She didn't say she had killed them."

Hal agreed.

"I accept that. But the implication was there which is why I told her not to talk about it. I didn't want her claiming afterwards that she hadn't been properly cautioned."

He sipped his coffee.

"By the same token, she didn't deny killing them, which is the first thing an innocent person would have done, especially as she had their blood all over her."

"But the point is, you a.s.sumed her guilt before you knew it for a fact."

"She was certainly our prime suspect," he said drily.

The inspector ordered Hal to take Olive down to the station.

"But don't let her say anything until we can get hold of a solicitor.

We'll do it by the book. OK?"

Hal nodded again.

"There's a father. He'll be at the nick by now. I sent a car to pick him up from work but I don't know what he's been told."

"You'd better find out then, and, for Christ's sake, Sergeant, if he doesn't know, then break it to him gently or you'll give the poor sod a heart attack. Find out if he's got a solicitor and if he's willing to have him or her represent his daughter."

They put a blanket over Olive's head when they took her out to the car.

A crowd had gathered, lured by rumours of a hideous crime, and cameramen jostled for a photograph. Boos greeted her appearance and a woman laughed.

"What good's a blanket, boys? You'd need a b.l.o.o.d.y marquee to cover that fat cow. I'd recognise her legs anywhere. What you done, Olive?"

Roz interrupted again when he jumped the story on to his meeting with Robert Martin at the police station.

"Hang on. Did she say anything in the car?"

He thought for a moment.

"She asked me if I liked her dress.

Isaidldid."

"Were you being polite?"

"No. It was a vast improvement on the T-shirt and trousers."

"Because they had blood on them?"

"Probably. No," he contradicted himself, ruffling his hair, *because the dress gave her a bit of shape, I suppose, made her look more feminine. Does it matter?"

Roz ignored this.