Creeping Ivy (23 page)

‘Well, that’s something. You’re sure you haven’t seen her since the dinner party?’

‘How many more times? Yes, I’m sure.’

When pressed, Trish impatiently repeated the whole story of Charlotte’s appearance and added all the details of how she had persuaded the child back to bed, and denied all knowledge of the bruises Antonia said she saw the following evening.

‘You have a certain amount of experience of caring for little children, haven’t you?’ said Sergeant Lacie suddenly.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Trish, puzzled. ‘Unless you’re talking about my legal experience.’

‘No.’ Sergeant Lacie was talking as quietly as ever but with rather less gentleness. ‘I’m talking about the babysitting you used to do and your experience with your godchildren. You have four, I understand, three girls and a boy.’

Trish said nothing, wondering where Lacie had got her information and why she had bothered.

‘Is that right?’

‘Certainly, Sergeant Lacie. But I do not see how it is relevant.’

‘You were taking care of your godson …’ she looked down at her notebook, ‘your godson, Philip Clark, when he suffered a serious cut in his head. Isn’t that right?’

‘Yes,’ said Trish, the cleft between her eyebrows deepening. ‘Nearly five years ago. He fell from the climbing frame in his parents’ garden and caught his head on the edge of a toy lorry he had left there earlier.’

‘He needed stitches, didn’t he?’

‘Yes.’ Trish could not imagine how the police had got hold of the story. Unfortunately she could see exactly where they were planning to go with it. She remembered his screams, rhythmic bursts of shattering sound that had frightened both of them even more than the blood and pain. ‘I took him to the local casualty unit and they stitched him there. He was fine then.’

‘And your goddaughter, Patricia Smith-Cunningham, suffered a burn when she was here in this flat, two years ago, didn’t she?’

‘A tiny little burn, yes.’ The memories of that incident were much less worrying. ‘We were cooking toffee and she got over-excited and dropped a smidgeon of boiling syrup on her hand. It scared her and she howled, but I had some Acriflex in the kitchen cupboard and she calmed down as soon as I’d put it on.’

‘You’ve never been married, have you?’ said Sergeant Lacie, switching subjects with an abruptness that would have told Trish exactly what she was trying to do if there had ever been any doubt about it.

‘That’s enough,’ she said. ‘I do not know what it is you are trying to suggest, but whatever it is, you’d better stop.’

‘You have had a series of affairs with men, have you not?’ pursued the sergeant, not looking as though she were enjoying her job. ‘But each one lasts less time than the one before.’

She waited but Trish said nothing. Her rights were clear: she had no need to answer anything.

‘Each one becomes less satisfactory than the one before,’ the sergeant went on. ‘Perhaps because, as I believe you once announced at a party, the trouble with men is that they tend to behave like children given half a chance, and yet have none of the charm of children and are not nearly as attractive.’

Trish controlled her impulse to fling up her hands in frustration. There seemed no point trying to explain the circumstances in which she had made that frivolous remark or exactly what she had meant by it. Lacie sounded so convinced by her fantastic theory that she probably wouldn’t listen. ‘May I ask where you’ve got this extraordinary picture from?’

‘You know better than that, Ms Maguire,’ said Sergeant Lacie with what was beginning to look like pity mixed in with the disgust in her eyes. That was almost the worst of it all: the pity. It suggested that someone had managed to convince her that Trish was capable of that most dreadful crime: damaging a child.

‘You said, I believe, on another occasion, that there is no physical sensation as satisfying as holding a newly bathed child on your knee.’ That was a remark Trish could not remember making, but she could well believe that she had said it to someone, the mother of one of her godchildren, probably, or to one of the women for whom she had done babysitting in the days before she had earned any real money at the Bar. It was the kind of spontaneous comment anyone might make, she thought. And it
was
a charming sensation – a firm, wriggly body wrapped in its towel sitting on your knee and a cajoling young voice begging for a story or for another game.

Trish could feel the blood thumping in her cheeks, making her teeth ache, and wished she could control her reactions better.

‘You find it hard to get satisfaction from sex with adults, don’t you? So do you find it easier with children?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Emotion had affected the nerves that controlled Trish’s voice and made it sound almost violent.

‘Children are easy to control, aren’t they, when they’re a little frightened? Do you hurt them a bit first to show what power you have over them and then make them—’

‘That’s enough,’ said Trish passionately as her fingers curled into the palms of her hands. ‘You must know that what you’re saying is rubbish.’

‘Perhaps you didn’t let yourself go all the way to begin with. Perhaps you stuck for a while at the point of teasing yourself with it; you’d do the hurting and then you’d hold back: the cut in Philip’s head, the burn on Patricia’s hand, the bruises on Charlotte’s arms. Perhaps you hadn’t ever tried anything else until last Saturday. Perhaps until then you’d managed to get all the satisfaction you need from pornography. Was that it? You’d excite yourself first with real children and then avoid the worst risks by letting them go at that point and switching to pictures on your screen. And then when you did let yourself go on Saturday, you found yourself going further than you meant.’

As Sergeant Lacie went on making her fantastic, appalling allegations, it became clear that she and her colleagues had been searching through the whole of Trish’s past, talking to her friends and relations, building up a picture of her as a wildly dysfunctional, dangerously obsessive woman, weirdly interested in the damage done to little children and capable of mind-numbing cruelty.

Trish stood, and kept the sergeant standing, while the tide of innuendo, accusation, and misinterpreted fact flowed over like a stinking mud slide. She felt filthy and degraded and bitterly humiliated. In a way, she thought as she listened to it all going on and on, it would have been less terrible coming from the constable who had been so unpleasant that morning. At least he would have made it easier to dismiss the accusations as the ravings of a lunatic. Spoken in Kath Lacie’s pleasant, educated voice, issuing from her calm, attractive face, they sounded almost credible.

When Sergeant Lacie eventually ceased to speak and stood waiting for a comment, Trish dashed the back of her hand across her eyes. There were no tears there, she told herself, just the scalding pain of fury.

‘You can’t possibly believe any of that,’ she said, her voice shaking with the effort of control. ‘Look, I pity you for what they’ve made you do. I have no comment except to say that it is all completely ludicrous. I have no idea what has happened to Charlotte. If I had, I should have told you as soon as I heard she was missing.’

As Trish spoke, she remembered Ben saying something very similar and the sensation of standing under a stream of shit changed to one of dreadful cold. There were very few people who could have told the police so much about her. But one of them was Ben. She remembered threatening to tell the police about his expeditions to Charlotte’s playground if he did not confess them first.

‘What is it, Ms Maguire?’

‘What?’

‘What are you thinking? You look …’

‘Yes? How exactly do I look?’ asked Trish with far more aggression than she usually allowed to escape into her voice. The harshness of it shocked her, but she was damned if she was going to apologise to anyone who had said such things to her, however reluctantly.

‘As though you might pass out. Is that perhaps because we have come so near to something you thought you would be able to hide from us?’

‘Oh, stop it!’ Trish had stemmed most of her anger by then and felt merely tired of the whole idiotic situation. ‘You must know this is all rubbish. Look, if you’re not going to arrest me, get out. If you are, get on with it.’ She held out both hands as though to allow the sergeant to clap handcuffs on her.

‘You don’t seem to understand how serious this is. We are trying to trace a very young, very vulnerable child.’

‘Of course I understand. Christ Almighty! Do you think I haven’t spent the last four days and nights in constant terror for Charlotte? I just wish I knew who hated me enough to have tried to make you believe this crap about me.’

It was Sergeant Lacie’s turn to stand in silence, an obstructive expression in her eyes.

‘Who was it, Sergeant?’

‘You can’t expect me to answer that – even if I knew, which I do not.’

‘Sarge?’ The constable who had been riffling through the papers on Trish’s desk and the files beneath it, was standing straight up again. There was a large pile of computer printout in front of her and a box of floppies.

‘Yes, Jenny?’

‘I’m ready.’

‘Fine. We can leave you in peace now, Ms Maguire, but if …’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Trish. ‘In that case, I should be grateful if you would give me a detailed receipt of everything you are planning to remove and then leave me alone.’

Kath Lacie made no protest and
Constable Derring
sat down at the desk and laboriously wrote out on two pieces of lined paper sandwiched around a creased and patchy sheet of carbon paper provided by Trish a list of all the papers, disks and photographs that had been packed in the black bag for transport to the police station.

Trish watched in silence and then at the end, as first she and then Kath signed both copies, she said, ‘I should like to make it clear that if anything is mislaid or damaged in any way I shall sue. And if anything quoted from the material you have taken, or any of the ludicrous allegations you have made against me, reaches the newspapers I shall sue over that, too.’

‘How can you say that?’ asked Sergeant Lacie, looking hurt. Trish knew perfectly well that the pain was synthetic.

‘That, Sergeant, is as nothing to the allegations you have been making against me. Even if you yourself have never given the press any information, you must admit that other members of your force have done so in the past. Goodbye.’

They went, carrying the black bin bag, without another word. Trish was left feeling scoured by fury, misery and a shame she did not deserve. She felt useless and sick. She did not think she would ever again be as she had been before Sergeant Lacie’s visit, and she could not believe that none of their suspicions would leak out of the police station.

If they did she was in for a bad time. Ben’s earlier comment only underlined what she already knew of the gullibility of the public. The thought of the shock – and distress – her friends and relations would suffer if they came to hear even the most minor of the accusations was vile.

Trish thought of her mother, too, and reached for the telephone. She would have preferred to get herself under some kind of control before they spoke, but she could not bear to wait. The telephone rang in the Beaconsfield cottage until the machine cut in.

‘Hello, this is Meg Maguire. Thank you for ringing. I’m sorry I haven’t answered your call myself, but if you will leave a message, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.’

‘Mum? It’s me, Trish. Can you ring me back? I need to talk. I’ll be here when you ring. Bye.’

She put down the telephone and saw the devastation of her desk all over again. With tears prickling in her eyes, she shook her head and went upstairs, hoping to wash away some of the filth that still seemed to cling to her.

After fifteen minutes of standing under the hot, needle-like jets, she felt very little better. She rubbed the water out of her eyes, wondering why they were stinging so much more than usual, and reached for a towel. It was then, as she was standing with one foot in the shower cabinet and one on the floor outside that she became aware of the one huge omission in the questions Sergeant Lacie had asked. Not once had she suggested that she wanted to know where Trish had been on Saturday afternoon, or with whom. During the first interrogation of the day Constable Herrick had asked for an account of her movements, but Trish had been too angry to answer. Kath Lacie had forgotten to ask. It was an extraordinary mistake and could have been made only, Trish thought, because she had, after all, hated what she had been sent to do.

Catching sight of herself in the mirror and smiling for the first time that day, Trish understood the reason for her stinging eyes. She had completely forgotten the eyeliner and mascara she had put on that morning and had been laboriously rubbing them into her eyes. Looking more like a drunken panda than ever, she tore a bunch of cotton wool off the thick roll, soaked it in oil-free eye-makeup remover and set about wiping off all the marks. When it was done, her face was pale and undefended but also, she thought, marked by the accusations they had made.

Tempted though she was to let the police run with their suspicions and make serious fools of themselves, she knew she could not do anything so irresponsible. Charlotte still had to be found.

Dressed again in the same clothes as before but with the addition of bra, socks and shoes, Trish fetched a jacket and drove to the Kensington Church Street police station. She did not want to risk any telephone message being incorrectly relayed.

‘Yes, miss?’ said the officer at the desk with a fine disregard for political correctness.

‘I’d like to see Sergeant Lacie, please.’

‘In connection with what, may I ask?’

‘The Charlotte Weblock case.’

‘If you have information, miss, you can give it to me and I’ll see the sergeant gets it.’

‘Constable,’ said Trish, having checked his uniform, ‘will you please call up to Sergeant Lacie at once and tell her that Trish Maguire is here and would appreciate a word. If she is not here or is busy, please tell Chief Inspector …’ for a moment she could not remember the name of the man who had treated Antonia so sensibly on Monday morning, and then it came back to her. ‘Chief Inspector Blake instead.’