The Sculptress Read Online Free PDF Page B

personalities who’ve all sunk to untold depths since gaining weight and being forced off camera. It’s disgustingly tasteless, of course, like all Jenny’s books, but it’ll sell. I think you should send all your gen sorry about the pun to her. Olive would make rather a dramatic conclusion, don’t you think, particularly if we can get a photograph of her in her cell.”
    “No chance.”
    “No chance of getting a photograph? Shame.”
    “No chance of my sending anything to Jenny Atherton.
    Honestly, Iris,” she stormed, losing her temper, ‘you really are beneath contempt. You should be working for the gutter press. You believe in exploiting anyone just as long as they bring in the cash.
    Jenny Atherton is the last person I’d allow near Olive.”
    “Can’t see why,” said Iris, now chewing heartily on something.
    “I mean if you don’t want to write about her and you’re refusing ever to visit her again because she makes you sick, why cavil at somebody else having a bash?”
    “It’s the principle.”
    “Can’t see it, old thing. Sounds more like dog in the manger to me.
    Listen, I can’t dally. We’ve got people in. At least let me tell Jenny that Olive’s up for grabs. She can start from scratch.
    It’s not as though you’ve got very far, is it?”
    “I’ve changed my mind,” Roz snapped.
    “I will do it. Goodbye.” She slammed the receiver down.
    At the other end of the line, Iris winked at her husband.
    “And you accuse me of not caring,” she murmured.
    “Now, what could have been more caring than that?”
    “Hobnailed boots,” Gerry Fielding suggested acidly.
    Roz read Olive’s statement again.
    “My relationship with my mother and sister was never close.” She reached for her tape recorder and rewound the tape, flicking to and fro till she found the piece she wanted.
    “I called her Amber because, at the age of two, I couldn’t get my tongue round the “1” or the “s”. It suited her. She had lovely honey-blonde hair, and as she grew up she always answered to Amber and never to Alison.
    She was very pretty…”
    It meant nothing of course, in itself. There was no unwritten law that said psychopaths were incapable of pretending. Rather the reverse, in fact. But there was a definite softening of the voice when she spoke about her sister, a tenderness which from anyone else Roz would have interpreted as love.
    And why hadn’t she mentioned the fight with her mother?
    Really, that was very odd. It could well have been her justification for what she did that day.
    The chaplain, quite unaware that Olive was behind him, started violently as a large hand fell on his shoulder. It wasn’t the first time she had crept up on him and he wondered again, as he had wondered before, how she managed to do it. Her normal gait was a painful shuffle which set his teeth on edge every time he heard its approach.
    He steeled himself and turned with a friendly smile.
    “Why, Olive, how nice to see you. What brings you to the chapel?”
    The bald eyes were amused.
    “Did I frighten you?”
    “You startled me. I didn’t hear you coming.”
    “Probably because you weren’t listening. You must listen first if you want to hear, Chaplain.
    Surely they taught you that much at theological college. God talks in a whisper at the best of times.”
    It would be easier, he thought sometimes, if he could despise Olive.
    But he had never been able to.
    He feared and disliked her but he did not despise her.
    “What can I do for you?”
    “You had some new diaries delivered this morning. I’d like one.
    “Are you sure, Olive? These are no different from the others. They still have a religious text for every day of the year and last time I gave you one you tore it up.”
    She shrugged.
    “But I need a diary so I’m prepared to tolerate the little homilies.”
    “They’re in the vestry.”
    “I know.”
    She had not come for a diary. That much he could guess. But what did she plan to steal from the