Creeping Ivy (28 page)
‘Hello, Trish,’ said Willow Worth’s voice on the answering machine. ‘Mrs Rusham said you’d rung. I fear you must be chasing me for the stuff on Holland Park Helpers. I’m sorry I haven’t rung before, but I’ve been round at Emma’s rather a lot. What a shit Hal is! She says you’ve been wonderful. Thank you for that. I’ll try you again later. It was good to see you the other night. Bye.’
After that message there was just a beep; nothing yet from George Henton. Trish rang Emma to find out how she was. Hearing only her recorded voice, Trish scrambled out an affectionate message after the beep.
‘Emma, how’s it going? I’ve made up your bed here ready for when you want it. But it doesn’t matter if you decide you don’t. Whatever. Up to you, as you know. Things are looking grimmer and grimmer for Charlotte. As soon as I’ve got any real news, I’ll ring. But if you feel like a chat – or a meal or something – in the meantime, let me know. I hope you’re coping.’
Trish put the receiver back on the telephone, wishing that she’d organised her thoughts into a more effective message, and then made some coffee. She took a mugful to her desk. There she sat, watching the coffee cool and thinking about Charlotte’s nightmare worms and the ease with which anyone could fall into child-abuse hysteria if they knew enough and feared enough.
Anyone involved in protecting children was at risk of exaggerating the significance of what they heard. It was a tricky balancing act. If they ignored hints of real abuse, children could suffer terribly and even die, but if they gave in to hysteria, it could bring disaster on everyone involved. A client of Trish’s had once been accused of sexually abusing his three-year-old daughter, even though the police surgeon could find no physical evidence. The social workers who suspected him refused to say why they were suspicious, for months interviewing and re-interviewing his daughter and her two older brothers about how Daddy played with them and what he said to them, and whether he touched them or asked them to touch any bits of him. His marriage broke up under the strain and the children were traumatised.
When the social workers eventually produced their ‘evidence’, it turned out to be no more than a report from his daughter’s playgroup leader of an involved story she had told him about Daddy’s special rocket that she could only touch when he said and that she wasn’t to be frightened of even when he made it go up and burst.
The absurd story was easily explained. The family had had a Guy Fawkes-night party the previous November, when it had rained so much that they had decided to save some of the fireworks for a drier evening. The biggest and best was a rocket, which they kept until Trish’s client’s birthday. Then the family trooped out into the garden for a ceremonial launch.
Remembering how scared his daughter had been of the bangs at Guy Fawkes, he had taken great trouble to show the rocket to her before it was lit. He let her touch it and look at the pictures on it, saying firmly that once it had been taken away to be lit she mustn’t go anywhere near it. Then he told her that he knew exactly what he was doing with it, and that she didn’t need to be frightened even when he made it whizz up and explode.
The disproportionate damage that the social workers’ well-meaning but over-excited interpretation had done could still make Trish angry, and she did not want to make the same mistake herself. Even so, the more she thought about the huge wiggly pink worms, the more significant the words seemed.
She was still uncertain what to do and who to tell when there was a knock at the front door. It was a much gentler, less peremptory kind of summons than the police had achieved.
‘George,’ she said as she opened the door and saw the Great Bear waiting for her, not looking at all ferocious. ‘How wonderful! Come on in and tell me how it went. Would you like some tea? Or coffee?’
‘Cup of tea would be great. Thanks.’ He was opening his briefcase as he walked in and did not look up until he was standing in the middle of the main room, ‘Golly, Trish, this is a magnificent flat.’
Golly, she repeated to herself on her way to the kitchen. Golly? Can a man of forty with a brain as sharp as guillotine really use a word like that except as a joke? She looked back over her shoulder to see him gazing around at the flat, and she smiled at his awed expression.
‘Haven’t you seen it before? I thought … Oh no, of course – you wimped out of my party last Christmas, didn’t you?’
‘As you know perfectly well,’ he said, his tone answering the gleam in her dark eyes rather than the words, ‘I had the ‘flu, and I was furious about it. I … You know, I’d always assumed you lived in a dark’ book-lined basement. I can’t think why.’
I can, she replied silently. You thought I was a kind of troglodyte, burrowing my way through mountains of work and never looking up at anything – or anyone – else. Charming. No wonder I went a bit mad.
‘It’s stunning,’ he went on. ‘So light and huge. Yes, perhaps it is a likely place for you, after all. A kind of eyrie from which to soar.’
‘Thanks, George,’ she said, pleased that he hadn’t seen the flat as her departed and unlamented lover had done. His parting words had been that the place was ‘as cold and empty as you, Trish. I should’ve known you couldn’t give anyone anything as soon as I saw it. You’re the most soulless woman I’ve ever met.’
‘Ordinary tea or something herbal or Chinese?’ she said brightly, banishing the memories of Jack’s voice. Perhaps the police had somehow got on to him and dug all their spiteful innuendos out of his many resentments. Perhaps their information had had nothing to do with Ben or even Robert. In some ways that would be a comfort, except that she’d hate Jack – of all people – to know anything about the police’s accusations. ‘I’ve got most things for once.’
‘Ordinary, please. And as strong as you can get it.’
She squished the tea-bag against the side of the mug until the liquid was the colour of dark mahogany, flipped the bag into the bin, added a little milk to turn the brown liquid orange, and brought it back, collecting her cooling coffee on the way.
‘Here, George. Look, do stop prowling and sit down.’
‘I can’t get over this place,’ he said, moving from her books to the long desk and then standing in front of a big painting she had bought one year at the Royal Academy Schools Degree Show. It had surprised a lot of people at the time, but she had loved it as soon as she saw it.
Smoothly painted in a mixture of buffs and greys, it was a bleak urban landscape, showing nothing but the space under a motorway junction. But it had something that had spoken to her as soon as she saw it, a kind of speed and space that gave her a much-needed sense of freedom.
‘You’re a bit of a mystery in some ways, Trish. Intriguing.’
‘Me? Nonsense. Clear as mud.’ She could not think why she was suddenly enjoying herself and tried to concentrate on what mattered. ‘But, look, this is about Nicky Bagshot, not me. What happened at the police station?’
‘Trish,’ he said seriously, putting his mug on the floor as he stretched his long legs luxuriously on her deep-seated sofa, ‘listen to me.’
‘I am. What’s the matter?’
‘I know how upset you can get when people you believe in turn out to have been stringing you along.’
‘So?’ she said, surprised that he had noticed.
‘So I want to warn you that Nicky’s innocence may not be quite as clear-cut as you thought.’
‘Why not?’ she asked after a long silence, thinking about the bruises and the worms and the various reasons why Nicky might have covered up for what Robert had been doing. The most obvious was that they had been having an affair, but she found it hard to believe that anyone as young as Nicky would really want to bonk Robert, a man nearly twenty years her senior.
‘Two quite different reasons,’ George was saying. ‘They don’t have anything to do with each other but, in their separate ways, both are worrying.’
‘OK. Now you’ve warned me. I can take it. What are the reasons?’
‘The first is that she’s admitted she’s epileptic.’
‘Well, I don’t see how that makes her either a paedophile or a murderer,’ said Trish, almost relieved.
‘Has she said anything to you about paedophilia?’ he asked with sharp suspicion.
‘Nicky? To me? No, of course not. Why should she?’
‘So why did you mention it?’
‘Oh, come on, George! What are you being so peculiar about? It’s what all of us have been afraid of all along. And anyway, it was entirely clear from the way the police questioned me yesterday that they’re convinced there’s a paedophile involved.’
‘They questioned you?’ He sounded so outraged that Trish had to smile, in spite of everything. She pushed both hands through her hair, making it stand up even more tuftily than usual.
‘Why shouldn’t they? I hated it, but I can see they had to.’
‘Trish,’ he said as he reached for his tea, ‘you were prepared to wheel me in for someone you hardly know. Why didn’t you call me when they started in on you?’
‘Because, unlike poor Nicky, I know how these things work and what my rights are and where to make a stand. Anyway, I wasn’t arrested. If I had been, I’d probably have rung you.’
‘I should hope so.’ He drank some tea and then put the mug down on the floor beside his feet. As he straightened up and looked at her again, he smiled. It was a different smile from the hard polite version he had always offered during conferences in her chambers. ‘I hate the idea of you having to deal with all that on your own.’
‘I was fine.’
‘OK. But if it happens again – ever – call me at once. Anyway, this bombshell about the epilepsy puts a different complexion on Nicky’s possible responsibility for what happened.’
‘I still don’t see why.’
‘Don’t go cold on me, Trish,’ he said, watching her as though she were a dangerous and ill-maintained machine that might explode at any moment. ‘It’s stupid to ignore facts. First of all, she’s kept her condition secret from everyone.’
‘Except you. How did you get it out of her?’
‘It’s my job, Trish. It was obvious from the minute I saw her that she was terrified of something and longing to make a confession. I thought I’d better find out what it was before the police picked up on it. Even they usually get on to that sort of thing in the end. I made it clear I was completely on her side, whatever she’d done, and that anything she said was sacrosanct. I’m not sure she believed me, but she poured out everything about her fits, poor little devil,’ He paused for a moment and then added: ‘You were right, Trish – she is very much on her own.’
‘I know.’ She looked at him and saw how comforting he must have seemed to Nicky with his size and the warmth he could offer so freely when he chose. ‘But why does her epilepsy make you think she did something to Charlotte?’
‘I don’t think she did anything deliberately. But there could have been an accident. I don’t know enough about it yet but, as I understand it, when someone has a
grand mal
seizure, their whole body becomes rigid and they fall heavily to the ground. They often damage themselves – cut their scalps open, bruise themselves severely, that sort of thing – which means it must be possible for them to hurt someone they happen to hit.’
‘Ah. I see. And did Nicky have a fit on Saturday?’
‘She swears not. In fact, she says she hardly ever has them, hasn’t had any for more than five years. But she could be lying. She looked terrified enough for that.’
‘But could she have done serious damage even in a fit? She’s so tiny.’
‘I’d have thought so if Charlotte hit her head, broke her neck perhaps. Or she could have been suffocated. There must be lots of ways it could have happened.’
‘OK. Say she did have a fit and damaged Charlotte – killed her – what then?’ Trish remembered Nicky’s strange, greenish pallor on Sunday and began to wonder whether that was what people looked like twenty-four hours after a major seizure. ‘She would have had to get rid of the body somehow. Oh, Christ!’
‘What is it, Trish?’
‘The pram. The doll’s pram the police took away on Sunday. I’d forgotten it. Is that how they think she got the body out of the house?’
Trish stared at the wall, trying to remember the size of the pram and work out whether any child’s body would have fitted into it. Only by thinking about straightforward things like the pram’s dimensions could she stop herself seeing pictures of Charlotte dying, and imagining what she might have felt.
‘It’s what their questions suggested, yes,’ said George, unaware of what her imagination was doing to her. ‘They think Nicky put the body in the pram and wheeled it to the park, where she took an opportunity to make herself noticed by a large bunch of potential witnesses, before pretending to discover that Charlotte had disappeared. After that the police scenario meshes with everything Nicky’s always claimed. She rushed about the park like a mad thing, pushing the pram as she went.’
Trish thought of everything she had seen and heard of Nicky and tried to dredge up something – anything – that might make George’s suggestion seem as unreal as she wanted it to be.
‘What about surveillance cameras? There must be millions in that area of London. Haven’t the police looked at the films? There could easily be one that shows Nicky with Charlotte alive on the way to the park. That would knock this theory on the head straight off.’
‘It would. But unfortunately there are no cameras on the route Nicky and Charlotte always took from the house to the park. Although there is film of Nicky rushing about the park with the pram later, there’s no record of her arriving with or without Charlotte.’
‘Shit.’
‘As you say. It’s seriously inconvenient.’
‘But look, I can’t believe Nicky would have thought up something as clever – no, not clever – as devious as getting the body away like that. I don’t mean she’s stupid, but I think she’s too straight for that kind of pantomime.’
‘She could have been working to someone else’s script, Trish, and persuaded by … him that the risk was worth taking.’
‘Robert Hithe, you mean?’
‘He seems the likeliest from everything I’ve read about the case and what I heard behind the questions the police were asking Nicky. You must know him quite well, Trish. D’you think he could have dreamed up a script like that?’