The Sculptress by Minette Walters Read Free Book Online

be back?’
    The young woman thrust out a hip to support the
child more easily and subjected Roz to a penetrating
glare. ‘There’s nothing to see, you know. You’re wasting
your time.’
    ‘I’m sorry?’
    ‘They pulled the innards out of the house and
revamped the whole of the inside. They’ve done it up
nice. There’s nothing to see, no blood stains, no spirits
roaming about, nothing.’ She pressed the child’s
head against her shoulder, a casual, proprietary gesture,
a statement of tender motherhood at odds with
the hostility in her voice. ‘You want to know what I
think? You should see a psychiatrist. It’s the likes of
you who’re the real sick people of society.’ She prepared
to close the door.
    Roz raised her palms in a gesture of surrender. She
smiled sheepishly. ‘I haven’t come to gawp,’ she said.
‘My name is Rosalind Leigh and I’m working in cooperation
with the late Mr Martin’s solicitor.’
    The woman eyed her suspiciously. ‘Oh, yeah?
What’s his name?’
    ‘Peter Crew.’
    ‘You could of got it from the paper.’
    ‘I have a letter from him. May I show it to you? It
will prove I am who I say I am.’
    ‘Go on then.’
    ‘It’s in the car. I’ll fetch it.’ She retrieved her briefcase
hurriedly from the boot, but when she got back,
the door was closed. She rang several times and waited
for ten minutes on the doorstep, but it was obvious
the young woman had no intention of answering.
From a room above came the wail of a baby. Roz
listened to the mother’s soothing tones as she climbed
the stairs, then, thoroughly annoyed with herself, she
retreated to the car and pondered her next step.
    The press cuttings were disappointing. It was
names she wanted, names of friends or neighbours,
even old school teachers, who could give her background
detail. But the local newspaper had, like the
nationals, sensationalized the crime’s horror without
uncovering any details about Olive’s life or why she
might have done it. There were the usual quotes from
‘neighbours’ – all anonymous and all wise after the
event – but they were so uniformly unenlightening
that Roz suspected imaginative journalism at work.

    ‘No, I’m not surprised,’ said a neighbour, ‘shocked
and appalled, yes, but not surprised. She was a
strange girl, unfriendly, kept herself to herself. Not
like the sister. She was the attractive, outgoing one.
We all liked Amber.’ ‘The parents found her very difficult. She wouldn’t mix or make friends. She
was shy, I suppose, because of her size but she had
a way of looking at you that wasn’t normal.’

    Beyond the sensationalism, there had been nothing
to write about. There was no police investigation to
report – Olive had phoned them herself, had confessed
to the crime in the presence of her solicitor,
and had been charged with murder. Because she had
pleaded guilty there had been no salacious details from
a lengthy trial, no names of friends or associates to
draw on, and her sentencing had rated a single paragraph
under the headline: twenty-five years for brutal
murders. A conspiracy of journalistic apathy seemed
to surround the whole event. Of the five cardinal Ws
of the journalist’s creed – Where?, When?, What?,
Who?, and Why? – the first four had been amply
covered. Everyone knew what had happened, who
had done it, where, and when. But no one, it seemed,
knew why. Nor, and this was the real puzzle, had
anyone actually asked. Could teasing alone really drive
a young woman to such a pitch of anger that she
would hack her family to pieces?
    With a sigh, Roz switched on the radio and
fed Pavarotti into the tape-deck. Bad choice, she
thought, as ‘Nessun Dorma’ flooded the car and
brought back bitter memories of a summer she would
rather forget. Strange how a piece of music could be
so evocative, but then the path to separation had been choreographed around the television screen with