Creeping Ivy (22 page)
‘What was it the mother said about Charlotte’s bruises, sir?’
‘What? Not a lot more than I’ve already told you, Kath. She was reluctant to say anything much on Sunday. That’s partly what worried me when I started to think about it, but even when I got her on her own she wasn’t very forthcoming. When pressed, she had to admit that she did first see the bruises on the day after Maguire’d been there in the house, and alone with the child in her bedroom.’
‘Still. It could be coincidence, couldn’t it? And Bagshot did provide an explanation for the bruising that had nothing to do with Maguire.’
‘I know. And I believed it for a while, until I’d heard all the rest and discovered how long Maguire had had up there alone with Charlotte. They were up in that room together for nearly twenty minutes, which is a long time in the middle of someone else’s dinner party, don’t you think?’
Kath shrugged. Her face was unhappy.
‘I can’t get this picture out of my head,’ said Blake, wishing he could, ‘of the child terrorised into silence, not daring to call out for help because she couldn’t be sure that Maguire had gone. After all, she must’ve thought her mother had handed her to Maguire.’
Kath frowned, shaking her head. ‘Any news from the lab. yet about the pram, sir?’
Blake nodded and handed her the report. Kath read it, her tender mouth tightening and her eyes anxious.
‘So there
are
two sorts of blood in the pram: one lot belongs to the boy with the scraped knees; but the other is quite different.’ She looked up. ‘Did the GP have any samples of Charlotte’s blood?’
‘No. Antonia was right about that. But the hair in the pram matches that on Charlotte’s brush and the soil
is
from the garden.’
‘But they didn’t find anything when they dug up the garden, did they?’ said Kath.
‘Only that piece of thick plastic. But it seems to be irrelevant. It looks as if it’s been there for a while, probably ever since the landscaping was done. I don’t think it’s got anything to do with Charlotte. But there had been recent digging near it. It looks as though someone started off by trying to bury the body in the garden and then panicked when they heard something, and decided it would be safer to get it right away from the house.’
‘Then Maguire couldn’t have had anything to do with it, sir. There’s been no suggestion that she was anywhere near Kensington on Saturday, has there? None of what you’ve got on her is more than gossip – and the coincidence that Antonia saw the bruises the day after Maguire was with the child in her bedroom. It’s not enough to hang a cat on.’
He looked at her and then, without answering her question, said, ‘There is more. Nothing helpful like hard evidence, but one or two suggestive things. I know you liked Maguire, but we’ve been checking up on her and it’s clear she’s unstable. She’s even had to leave chambers for a spell because they were afraid she was cracking up. And there are serious questions over her sexuality, too. We have to pursue it, Kath.
Someone
took Charlotte Weblock. We’ve got to explore every possible suspect, however unlikely.’
‘Yes, I know. But no one saw Maguire anywhere near the house at any time on Saturday, did they?’ she said doggedly.
‘Nope. But then Bagshot was here, crying all over the desk sergeant, telling him the kid had gone missing; the stepfather was in his meeting; the cleaner’s never there on Saturday; and all the neighbours were in their country cottages. It’s entirely possible that Maguire snatched the kid from the park and then seized her chance to bury the body in Antonia’s garden when the rest of them were safely out of the way.’
‘I don’t believe it, sir. I just don’t believe it. And it doesn’t fit anyway. If it was Maguire, then the pram and the blood and the hairs are all irrelevant because Nicky had the pram with her when she came to make her first report here, didn’t she?’
‘True,’ said Blake, annoyed that Kath was determined to make complications for their own sake. ‘But they could be in it together. I’ve always thought it unlikely that Bagshot was the whole answer. At first I assumed she was in cahoots with Robert Hithe. Since I heard about Maguire’s background, she’s seemed an even likelier accomplice. Nothing makes sense unless there was a conspiracy between at least two of them. Bagshot must be in it and either – or possibly both – of the others. We’ve got to find out which.’
Kath took a moment to think about it.
‘Maybe. But I find it hard to believe. You know the hairs in the pram, sir? They’ve been worrying me, too. Couldn’t they have got there naturally? I mean, little girls do bend right into their toy prams when they’re laying dolls to sleep. I’ve seen them do it.’ She smiled. ‘I even did it myself. It would be easy to get one’s hair caught and tug some out as one pulled away. Couldn’t it be that?’
‘Possibly, but the lab. boys don’t think so.’ The thought of her playing with her dolls and the smile had taken the edge off his irritation for the moment. He smiled back. ‘The suggestion was made quite early on and dismissed. And then there’s the blood, which must be Charlotte’s: not quite enough of it for us to be sure, but it’s rubbed into the creases and seams of the mattress, as though someone had cleaned the rest off.’
‘What about prints?’
‘Several all over the pram, of course. Antonia’s, Charlotte’s, Nicky’s. None of Robert Hithe’s, but quite a few still unidentified. I’d like to print Maguire, but I can’t see her giving her consent, and we’re not going to get an arrest warrant without more evidence. You’ll—’
‘Sir?’
At the sound of a third voice from the doorway, Kath and Blake looked away from each other with difficulty. Blake saw from the newcomer’s – face that he’d heard all the gossip about them in the nick, and he wished he’d hidden his feelings better. It wasn’t fair on Kath. He could see that. He didn’t want them to start treating her like the relief bicycle. He’d seen what that did to women.
‘Yes, Martin?’ he said coldly.
‘The superintendent wants a word, sir.’
‘OK. I’ll go straight up. You’d better go ahead then, Kath, and get a warrant to search Maguire’s place – and her car. There’s no real evidence yet, but somehow I don’t think the magistrate will cavil at a search warrant, at least not in the circumstances. The way she’s been trawling the Net for paedophile pornography could be enough in itself. Some of the stuff she’s been looking at is … it’s the worst, Kath. There’s something very odd about her. You must accept that.’
‘The pornography could be for the book she’s writing, though, sir,’ said Kath, hoping that she was right. ‘I thought I’d get on to her publishers to find out what they know about the work she’s done so far.’
‘OK. Not a bad idea.’ Then, as though sensing DC Martin’s impatience, Blake put both hands flat on the desk and pushed himself quickly into a standing position.
He’d hated the case from the beginning and it looked as though it was about to get very nasty indeed. He found himself wishing he could have kept Kath out of it and then realised he was on the point of losing it completely. She was a police officer, heading for a good few promotions yet; if she couldn’t take something like this, she shouldn’t be in the job.
Oh, fuck it! Somehow he was going to have to get her out of his mind, her and the gloomily atmospheric Leonard Cohen songs that kept running through his head whenever he tried to sleep at night and found her image sliding into bed between him and Lydia. He’d even bought himself a thin green candle in an access of sentimentality the previous lunchtime and then had to chuck it away in a street litter bin before anyone saw it and decided he’d flipped.
‘OK, Martin, I’m with you. Get on with it, Kath. Bring back everything that might have any relevance at all, and we’ll see if we can get enough to have Maguire in and start interviewing her. Don’t take Sam with you this time. That was an error on my part. You’re right – Maguire obviously responds better to women. Take Derring. Between you, the pair of you may be able to get what we need out of her.’
‘Will do, sir.’
Blake checked to make sure her eyes were calm enough and then nodded to her and went up to answer to the superintendent for his part in the failure to turn up a body. It was a pig of a case.
And so it is essential that the emphasis of any punishment is weighted towards rehabilitation and away from retribution. Education is what is needed; not revenge
, Trish typed carefully.
It is necessary … important … crucial that offenders be made aware of the effect they have had on their victims. That is of infinitely greater importance than adding to their sense of being unfairly persecuted for something that, in their minds, ‘doesn’t matter all that much’.
She re-read the paragraph, saw all its imperfections, and then realised that her brain had gone fuzzy and was not going to allow her to improve anything she had written just then. When she had saved a copy of the edited document, she put both hands behind her to stretch away the aches in her back and arms, but she got that wrong, too, and set up a screaming pain down the back of her neck. Long experience had told her that she would have to hold it in both hands, breathing deeply, until it was bearable again.
About halfway through the process, she heard more knocking at the front door.
‘Hang on a sec!’ she called through the pain and then, still holding her neck with her left hand, the arm pressed in a V-shape between her breasts, she got up to open the door.
At the sight of the good-looking sergeant, this time accompanied by a second woman instead of the unpleasant constable of the morning’s visit, Trish let go of her neck.
‘I thought I told you that I had nothing more to say, Sergeant Lacie,’ she said coldly, standing in the narrow gap between the door and the jamb to guard the way into her flat.
‘We have a warrant, Ms Maguire.’
‘A warrant? What kind of warrant?’ Trish put out her right hand and received the familiar-looking piece of paper. She read it with care. After a moment she looked up at the police in astonishment.
‘You suspect that
I
have Charlotte Weblock
here?
Why didn’t you say so this morning, instead of letting that oaf you brought with you get up my nose so badly. You’re mad if you think I’ve got her, but you’re at liberty to look wherever you want. You didn’t need a warrant for that. I’d have let you in.’
‘But I asked you to let us look,’ Sergeant Lacie said in surprise. ‘This morning.’
‘Did you?’ Trish remembered the shameful surge of temper that had overtaken her in the morning and eased her conscience with the knowledge that there had been provocation. ‘Sorry. But you should have asked first instead of setting him on to accuse me.’
She opened the door wide without another word and stood back to let the two women into her flat. As they moved past her, Trish added quickly, ‘But I should like to file the document I’ve been working on. I don’t want to risk losing a day’s work if one of you hits the wrong button.’
‘We’d like you to print it out first. Constable Derring will come with you,’ said Kath Lacie calmly.
‘I don’t see,’ said Trish out of principle rather than any kind of anxiety, ‘anything in your warrant to justify that. You’re not allowed to ransack the place, you know. You have permission to search for a child. That’s all.’
Kath Lacie took a second warrant out of her bag and handed it to Trish. It was as she read that one that she began to worry. The warrant gave Sergeant Kathleen Lacie the power to search for and remove indecent photographs or pseudophotographs of a child under Section 4 of the Protection of Children Act, 1978.
Nothing that Trish planned to use in her book came anywhere near the definition of such material – she would have hated to publish any such thing – but she had searched the Internet for examples of the indescribably degrading pornography she was convinced was the cause of some of the cruellest crimes against children. She had downloaded some of it, too, for use as examples if she had to persuade doubters in the publishing house of the seriousness of the material that was so easily available.
‘Very well,’ said Trish, moving to her desk.
As the printer clunked its way through twenty-five pages of the still inadequately written third chapter, Trish watched the women moving through her flat in search of Charlotte. They went through her cupboards, touching her clothes; they probed for loose floorboards and false panels in the walls; they insisted on pulling down the loft ladder that led up into the roofspace so that they could check there, too. They opened every door and lid; they touched everything they saw.
Trish stood and watched them and knew that it was irrational to think she’d have to scour the place before she could bear to live in it once they’d gone. After a while, leaving Constable Derring to her work, Sergeant Lacie came back to Trish’s desk, where the printer was chattering out the last page of her chapter.
‘Thank you,’ Lacie said when Trish silently handed her the pages and turned away to file the document. ‘When did you last see Charlotte Weblock?’
‘I’ve already told you that. I have nothing to add to what I said this morning. I have not seen Charlotte Weblock since her mother’s dinner party six weeks ago. That’s all you need to know. Now do please get on with your job and find her. It’s been nearly four days. You know what that means as well as I do. But she could still be alive. If she is and you’re fiddling about here while she’s being …’ Trish breathed with extreme care to keep everything working normally. ‘You won’t be able to live with yourself if that’s the case.’
‘That cuts both ways, Ms Maguire. If you have nothing to hide, you have no reason to object to any of our questions. We need your answers if we’re to find her.’
‘You’re wasting time. Can’t you see that? I’ve told you I haven’t seen her for six weeks,’ said Trish, wondering how she was ever going to get through to them. She could feel the anger beginning to tighten at the base of her brain.
‘Every citizen has a duty to help the police in their enquiries.’
‘Only a moral duty,’ Trish reminded her automatically. ‘There’s no law that says I
have
to talk to you. But, as you must know, if there was anything helpful I could tell you, I’d have done it days ago. I want Charlotte back more than anyone.’