"Did she say anything else?"

"I think she said something like: "That's good. It's my favourite."

"But in her statement, she said she was going to London. Why wasn't she wearing the dress when she committed the murders?"

He looked puzzled.

"Because she was going to London in trousers, presumably."

"No," said Roz stubbornly.

"If the dress was her favourite, then that's what she would have worn for her trip to town.

London was her birthday treat to herself. She probably had dreams of b.u.mping into Mr. Right on Waterloo station. It simply wouldn't occur to her to wear anything but her best. You need to be a woman to understand that."

He was amused.

"But I see hundreds of girls walking around in shapeless trousers and baggy T-shirts, particularly the fat ones. I think they look grotesque but they seem to like it.

Presumably they're making a statement about their refusal to pander to conventional standards of beauty. Why should Olive have been any different?"

"Because she wasn't the rebellious type. She lived at home under her mother's thumb, took the job her mother wanted her to take, and was apparently so unused to going out alone for the day that she had to beg her sister to go with her." She drummed her fingers impatiently on the table.

"I'm right. I know I am. If she wasn't lying about the trip to London then she should have been wearing her dress."

He was not impressed.

"She was rebellious enough to kill her mother and sister," he remarked.

"If she could do that, she could certainly go to London in trousers.

You're splitting hairs again. Anyway, she might have changed to keep the dress clean."

"But she definitely intended to go to London? Did you check that?"

"She certainly booked the day off work. We accepted that London was where she was going because, as far as we could establish, she hadn't mentioned her plans to anyone else."

"Not even to her father?"

"If she did, he didn't remember it."

Olive waited in an interview room while Hal spoke to her father. It was a difficult conversation. Whether he had schooled himself to it, or whether it was a natural trick of behaviour, Robert Martin reacted little to anything that was said to him. He was a handsome man but, in the way that a Greek sculpture is handsome, he invited admiration but lacked warmth or attraction. His curiously impa.s.sive face had an unlined and ageless quality, and only his hands, knotted with arthritis, gave any indication that he had pa.s.sed his middle years.

Once or twice he smoothed his blond hair with the flat of his hand or touched his fingers to his tie, but for all the expression on his plastic features Hal might have been pa.s.sing the time of day. It was impossible to gauge from his expression how deeply he was shocked or whether, indeed, he was shocked at all.

"Did you like him?" asked Roz.

"Not much. He reminded me of Olive. I don't know where I am with people who hide their feelings. It makes me uncomfortable."

Roz could identify with that.

Hal kept detail to a minimum, informing him only that the bodies of his wife and one of his daughters had been discovered that afternoon in the kitchen of his house, and that his other daughter, Olive, had given the police reason to believe she had killed them.

Robert Martin crossed his legs and folded his hands calmly in his lap.

"Have you charged her with anything?"

"No. We haven't questioned her either." He watched the other man closely.

"Frankly, sir, in view of the serious nature of the possible charges we think she should have a solicitor with her."

"Of course. I'm sure my man, Peter Crew, will come." Mild enquiry twitched his brows.

"What's the procedure? Should I telephone him?"

Hal was puzzled by the man's composure. He wiped a hand across his face.

"Are you sure you understand what's happened, sir?"

"I believe so. Gwen and Amber are dead and you think Olive murdered them."

"That's not quite accurate. Olive has implied that she was responsible for their deaths but, until we take a statement from her, I can't say what the charges will be." He paused for a moment.

"I want you to be quite clear on this, Mr. Martin. The Home Office pathologist who examined the scene had no doubts that considerable ferocity was used both before and after death.

In due course, I'm afraid to say, we will have to ask you to identify the bodies and you may, when you see them, feel less charitably inclined towards any possible suspect. On that basis, do you have any reservations about your solicitor representing Olive?"

Martin shook his head.

"I would be happier dealing with someone I know."

"There may be a conflict of interests. Have you considered that?"

"In what way?"

"At the risk of labouring the point, sir," said Hal coldly, *your wife and daughter have been brutally murdered. I imagine you will want the perpetrator prosecuted?" He lifted an eyebrow in enquiry and Martin nodded.

"Then you may well want a solicitor yourself to ensure that the prosecution proceeds to your satisfaction, but if your own solicitor is already representing your daughter, he will be unable to a.s.sist you because your interests will conflict with your daughter's."

"Not if she's innocent." Martin pinched the crease in his trousers, aligning it with the centre of his knee.

"I am really not concerned with what Olive may have implied, Sergeant Hawksley. There is no conflict of interest in my mind. Establishing her innocence and representing me in pressing for a prosecution can be done by the same solicitor. Now, if you could lend me the use of a telephone, I will ring Peter Crew, and afterwards, perhaps you will allow me to talk to my daughter."

Hal shook his head.

"I'm sorry, sir, but that won't be possible, not until we've taken a statement from her. You will also be required to make a statement. You may be allowed to speak to her afterwards, but at the moment I can't guarantee it."

"And that," he said, recalling the incident, *was the one and only time he showed any emotion. He looked quite upset, but whether because I'd denied him access to Olive or because I'd told him he'd have to make a statement, I don't know." He considered for a moment.

"It must have been the denial of access. We went through every minute of that man's day and he came out whiter than white. He worked in an open-plan office with five other people and, apart from the odd trip to the lavatory, he was under someone's eye the whole day. There just wasn't time for him to go home."

"But you did suspect him?"

"Yes."

Roz looked interested.

"In spite of Olive's confession?"

He nodded.

"He was so d.a.m.n cold blooded about it all. Even identifying the bodies didn't faze him."

Roz thought for a moment.

"There was another conflict of interest which you don't seem to have considered." She chewed her pencil.

"If Robert Martin was the murderer, he could have used his solicitor to manipulate Olive into confessing. Peter Crew makes no secret of his dislike of her, you know. I think he regrets the abolition of capital punishment."

Hal folded his arms, then smiled in amus.e.m.e.nt.

"You'll have to be very careful if you intend to make statements like that in your book. Miss Leigh. Solicitors are not required to like their clients, they merely have to represent them. In any case, Robert Martin dropped out of the frame very rapidly. We toyed with the idea that he killed Gwen and Amber before he went to work and Olive then set about disposing the bodies to protect him, but the numbers didn't add up. He had an alibi even for that. There was a neighbour who saw her husband off to work a few minutes before Martin himself left. Amber and Gwen were alive then because she spoke to them on their doorstep.

She remembered asking Amber how she was getting on at Glitzy.

They waved as Martin drove away."

"He could have gone round the corner and come back again."

"He left home at eight-thirty and arrived at work at nine. We tested the drive and it took half an hour." He shrugged.

"As I said, he was whiter than white."

"What about lunch? Could he have gone back then?"

"He had a pint and a sandwich in the local pub with two men from the office."

"OK. Go on."

There was little more to tell. In spite of Crew's advice to remain silent, Olive agreed to answer police questions, and at nine-thirty, expressing relief to have got the whole thing off her chest, she signed her statement and was formally charged with the murder of her mother and sister.

Following her remand into custody on the morning of the next day, Hal and Geof Wyatt were given the task of detailing the police case against her. It was a straightforward collating of pathological, forensic, and police evidence, all of which, upon examination, supported the facts given in Olive's statement.

Namely that, acting alone, she had, on the morning of the ninth of September, 1987, murdered her mother and sister by cutting their throats with a carving knife.

SEVEN.

There was a lengthy silence. Hal splayed his hands on the scrubbed deal table and pushed himself to his feet.

"How about some more coffee?" He watched her industrious pen scribbling across a page of her notebook.

"More coffee?" he repeated.

"Mm. Black, no sugar." She didn't look up but went on writing.

"Sure, baas. Don't mind me, baas. I'se just de paid help, baas."

Roz laughed.

"Sorry. Yes, thank you, I'd love some more coffee. Look, if you can just bear with me for a moment, I've a few questions to ask and I'm trying to jot them down while the thing's still fresh."

He watched her while she wrote. Botticelli's Venus, he had thought the first time he saw her, but she was too thin for his liking, hardly more than seven stone and a good five feet six.

She made a fabulous clothes'-horse, of course, but there was no softness to hug, no comfort in the tautly strung body. He wondered if her slenderness was a deliberate thing or if she lived on her nerves.

The latter, he thought. She was clearly a woman of obsessions if her crusade for Olive was anything to go by. He put a fresh cup of coffee in front of her but stayed standing, cradling his own coffee cup between his hands.

"OK," she said, sorting out the pages, *let's start with the kitchen.

You say the forensic evidence supported Olive's statement that she acted alone. How?"

He thought back.

"You have to picture that place. It was a slaughter house, and every time she moved she left footprints in the congealing blood. We photographed each one separately and they were all hers, including the b.l.o.o.d.y prints that her shoes left on the carpet in the hall." He shrugged.

"There were also b.l.o.o.d.y palm-prints and fingerprints over most of the surfaces where she had rested her hands. Again all hers. We did raise other fingerprints, admittedly, including about three, I think, which we were never able to match with any of the Martins or their neighbours, but you'd expect that in a kitchen. The gas man, the electricity man, a plumber maybe. There was no blood on them so we inclined to the view that they had been left in the days prior to the murder."

Roz chewed her pencil.

"And the axe and the knife? I suppose they had only her fingerprints."

"Actually no. The cutting weapons were so smeared that we couldn't get anything off them at all." He chuckled at her immediate interest.

"You're chasing red herrings. Wet blood is slippery stuff. It would have been very surprising if we had found some perfect prints. The rolling pin had three d.a.m.n good ones, all hers."

She made a note.

"I didn't know you could take them off unpolished wood."

"It was solid gla.s.s, two feet long, a ma.s.sive thing. I suppose if we were surprised by anything it was that the blows she struck with it hadn't killed Gwen and Amber. They were both tiny women. By rights she should have smashed their skulls with it." He sipped his coffee.