Creeping Ivy (15 page)

‘No,’ said Pink Hair. ‘He couldn’t. He was only ever here on Wednesdays.’

‘But then none of you are around at the weekends,’ Trish reminded her. ‘He might have come back then. What did he look like?’

Tall, they agreed, tall and quite old – in his forties probably. No, Pink Hair thought, he was more than that. Not very good-looking, they said, and shabbily dressed.

‘A tramp?’ suggested Trish hopefully, trying hard not to recognise the man they were describing.

‘No, just shabby. You know, old brown corduroy trousers and a tatty waxed jacket and desert boots. A long face with lots of lines and those round glasses. Tortoiseshell.’

‘What about the dog? What was that like?’

‘Mad and noisy,’ said Pink Hair. ‘It was a big black thing and it hated waiting around and always made a noise. That’s why I don’t think he was odd. If he’d been a perve, he’d have left the dog behind. It always made people look at him. He just liked watching kids. People can do that without being weird.’

‘Yes, it sounds like it,’ said Trish, fairly sure of the dog’s identity. ‘Was it plain black, the dog?’

‘No. It had one of those orangey noses, you know?’

‘Yes, I do know. Well, thanks. You’ve all been very helpful.’

‘D’you think we should have told the police?’ asked Susan, looking worried. ‘About the Wednesday man and the dog?’

‘Probably,’ said Trish, quite glad they had not. Everything they had said made him sound like Ben, but there must be other men in London who would fit the description – and even be walking a dog like Daisy. Trish wanted to get more evidence before the full horror of a police investigation was unleashed over Ben’s head. ‘It’s generally a good idea to tell them everything they ask.’

‘That’s all right then,’ said Pink Hair. ‘They didn’t ask. They just wanted to know about Nicky – like the journalists – and if we’d been here on Saturday. And if anyone had ever been seen approaching any of the children. The guy with the dog never approached anyone.’

‘Well, you’d probably better tell them if they do come back and ask,’ said Trish, wondering what on earth Ben could have been playing at – if it had been him – and how she was going to get him on his own to ask without risking Bella’s intervention.

She said goodbye to the nannies and found a telephone box on her way back to the parking meter. Dialling Ben’s number, she noticed that her hands were sweating.

‘He couldn’t have had anything to do with it,’ she said aloud as she listened to the clicks on the line as the number registered with the exchange’s software. ‘He couldn’t have. He’s honest, I know he is. He’s not my father; even though he kicked Antonia out and wouldn’t have anything to do with Charlotte, he’s nothing like my father. He couldn’t have hurt her. But if he isn’t involved, why has he been lying? Why didn’t he tell me he came to the park to watch her? What the hell’s going on?’

‘Hello, this is Ben and Bella Weblock’s number. Neither of us can come to the phone right now, but if you leave a message we’ll get back to you. Or if it’s urgent you could try Ben at school or Bella at her consulting rooms. The numbers are …’

Trish listened, planning her message with care. When she heard the beep, she said clearly: ‘Ben, this is Trish. I need to talk to you. It’s very urgent. Could you ring me at the flat as soon as you get in? If you’re not back before I have to go out, will you leave a message saying when I can get you tomorrow? I really need to talk to you. Thanks. Bye.’

Chapter Eleven

‘How’s Hal?’ asked Tom Worth as he poured more white wine into Emma’s glass.

Trish, who had noticed that Emma was getting through the wine much more quickly than usual, watched her friend with interest mixed with a certain amount of pity. It seemed that Willow had been watching, too, for she held out her own glass, which was still half-full and said meaningfully, ‘Don’t be stingy, Tom. I want more as well.’

He looked at her in surprise and then, tactlessly, back at Emma.

‘It’s all right, Tom. There’s no mystery. I just don’t talk about it much. Hal’s playing silly buggers at the moment, and I’m not quite sure where I stand.’

Oh hell, thought Trish. And I’ve been so worried about Charlotte that I didn’t even notice she was upset. No wonder Hal was aggressive in the playground. He must have thought I was about to savage him for whatever he’s doing.

‘Put my size twelves in it there, didn’t I, Em?’ said Tom. ‘Sorry.’

‘Smack in the middle of it, Tom, but don’t worry – I’ll live. After all, we’ve had three good years and a lot of fun. Not many people get more than that – or as much. And anyway, it’s nothing to what Trish is going through.’

‘No,’ agreed Willow, a tall stylish woman with a smooth bell of dark-red hair and wonderfully simple clothes. ‘It must be unspeakable, Trish. She’s your goddaughter, isn’t she, Charlotte Weblock?’

‘No. Second cousin once removed. That sounds more distant than it is. She … she means a lot to me.’

‘I’m sorry. Tom said there’s been no news since she disappeared.’

‘None,’ said Trish, wishing that she had not allowed herself to spend the afternoon fantasising about what it would feel like to arrive at the Worths’ pretty mews house to be greeted with some good news of Charlotte that the police had been keeping secret from everyone else. It had been a silly thing to do; now she was feeling worse than ever. ‘And I don’t see how there can be, not now, after so long. Do you, Tom?’

‘It’s a tough one, Trish. Previous cases would suggest it’s unlikely that she’s still alive, but it has happened. You know they’ve been stepping up the house-to-house enquiries all round the park?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ said Trish. ‘I haven’t any line to the police, and I can’t keep ringing poor Antonia for news. We did speak this afternoon, and she told me then that all the known paedophiles in the area have been checked and cleared. Why are they doing more house-to-house interviews?’

‘Apparently your cousin said that Charlotte gets bored very easily and the current theory, as I understand it, is that as the playground was so full and the queue for the slide so long, she got fed up waiting for her turn, wandered out of the playground and got lost.’

‘But then what?’ asked Willow as they moved into the dining room and sat down.

Tom shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

‘Have the house-to-house enquiries turned anything up?’ Trish asked.

‘Not by the time I left the office this evening. I checked because I knew you’d want to know.’

‘You are kind, Tom.’ Trish thought again of the suggestion she had made to Hal and wondered whether she and everyone else had been getting so hysterical over what might have happened to Charlotte that they had missed something obvious. ‘Do you know what they think happened after Charlote wandered off, if she did?’

‘Not in detail. They’ve decided she couldn’t have run into the road and been knocked down. All the casualty departments have been checked.’

‘And anyway, it was the middle of a busy Saturday afternoon. Wouldn’t that kind of road accident have been witnessed?’ said Willow.

‘You’d have thought so, yes. At the moment they’re working on the possibility that she pottered out of the park and was picked up so unobtrusively that no one noticed.’

‘In a car, presumably?’ Once again it was Willow who asked the question.

‘Probably, Will. Hence the interviews with everyone who lives or works on the park’s perimeter. And of course the searches of all the films from the CCTV cameras. There are lots of cameras round there, and I understand all the films have been collected.’

‘That sounds as though they’ve given up suspecting the nanny,’ said Emma, obviously thinking about her polygraph test.

Tom piled the soup bowls together and stood up. ‘Let’s say that they’re still keeping an open mind.’

‘Presumably on both the nanny and the stepfather,’ Emma went on, as though she knew how hard it was for Trish to talk and yet how much she wanted to know everything Tom could tell them about the police investigation. He did not answer, just smiled slightly and carried the soup plates out to the kitchen.

‘Your poor cousin,’ said Willow, looking at Trish. ‘She must be going through hell worrying whether her boyfriend could be involved and thinking about all the signs she might have missed, the hints that he was interfering with the child, or hurting her.’

Trish thought of the bruises, but she said nothing.

‘She must be having to weigh up her own past happiness with him against what he may have done to her child and realising that they couldn’t ever balance.’

‘Steady on, Will,’ said Tom, returning and reaching for the wine bottle. ‘There’s no evidence he’s been doing anything whatsoever.’

‘No,’ she said, crunching the last of the hot salty biscuit that had been served with the cold pea soup. Trish was pleased to see that in spite of Willow’s style and her riches, she talked with her mouth full. She probably said ‘shit’, too, and maybe even worse. It would be interesting to see how she would deal with Bella Weblock.

‘But it must be him, mustn’t it? It’s silly to pretend otherwise.’

‘Antonia told me on the phone this afternoon that he’s got an alibi,’ said Trish. ‘It must have checked out or the police would have arrested him by now. They’re not stupid.’

‘It’s always good to hear a spontaneous tribute,’ said Tom, making her laugh unhappily. ‘Will, shall I get the meat?’

‘No. It’s OK, I’ll do it.’

‘D’you know the officers doing the investigation?’ Trish asked him as Emma got up to help Willow.

‘Not personally, no. But the whole force is aware of the case. Everyone gets in a state where children are concerned. They’re working round the clock, Trish,’ he said, touching the back of her hand in a surprisingly comforting gesture. ‘They know what may have happened. They’re not fools, and they want her found as much as anyone.’

She nodded, too surprised by his touch and moved by his concern to trust her voice.

‘What about your cousin’s ex-husband, Charlotte’s father?’ Willow asked, returning with a charger edged with roasted artichoke hearts and filled with sliced lamb fillets cooked with olive oil, lemon and garlic and covered with green olives and faggots of fresh thyme. ‘Could he be involved?’

‘Not possibly,’ said Emma so firmly that Trish did not have to say anything, which was a relief.

Until she had heard why Ben had lied about not knowing Charlotte and found out what he was doing in the park, she could not bear to talk about him.

‘We should really be drinking retsina with this,’ said Willow, handing the plate of lamb to Trish.

‘Over my dead body,’ said Tom. He closed his eyes briefly as the inappropriateness of the image struck him.

‘Help yourself, Trish,’ Willow said. ‘Weren’t the papers awful, the way they reported what’s happened to Charlotte?’

‘Yes,’ Trish said as she obediently spooned a tiny slice of meat and two olives on to the hot plate Emma had slid on to the table in front of her. ‘As I said to … as I was saying to a journalist this morning, there’s nothing like a child-abduction case to get everybody tickled up.’

‘It’s vile,’ said Willow, clearly understanding exactly what she meant. A kind of collective wallow in excitingly delicious outrage.’

‘Isn’t that just because it’s the worst thing they can imagine?’ said Tom quietly. ‘They’re terrified for their own children and they can also remember the complete powerlessness they felt at that age. It doesn’t take much imagination to go that one step further. Couldn’t it be that?’

‘Partly,’ said Emma, who had been so badly bullied by her elder half-brother that she still had vivid memories of the horrible powerlessness of childhood. ‘But don’t you think there’s also an element of … not so much
Schadenfreude
, because they’re not actually enjoying other people’s distress, but a feeling of: If it’s happened to someone else’s child, then it’s less likely to happen to mine?’

‘That’s very charitable,’ said Willow in a voice that made it clear that in that instance she did not much value charity. ‘No, I’m with Trish; I think people like it. And that is revolting. What’s your view of the nanny, Trish? You must know her.’

‘Will,’ said Tom severely.

‘I’m interested,’ said his wife, smiling at Trish. ‘But we can talk about something else if you’d rather.’

‘To tell you the truth, I can’t really think about anything else at the moment.’

Willow shot a triumphant smile at her husband.

‘I don’t know the nanny well. But I do know that Charlotte loved her, and I quite liked her myself when we met yesterday. I can’t see her as guilty. I really can’t.’

‘How did Antonia find her in the first place? Recommendation, advertisement, what?’

‘Through Holland Park Helpers, apparently.’

‘But they’re good,’ said Willow, sounding surprised. ‘One of the few agencies that make thorough checks in the girls’ backgrounds: police, medical and all that. That’s why I get our temps from them when Mrs Rusham’s on holiday. You know, it always amazes me that childminders have to be licensed before they can look after children, but there’s no regulation of nannies at all.’

‘Really?’ said Emma, putting down her knife and fork. ‘That seems almost incredible.’

‘I know. Anyone can claim to be trained and some of the agencies don’t even check that much, let alone the references or any criminal record they might have. They must—’

She stopped talking as she saw the slow, silent opening of the dining-room door. She nodded to Tom and, ignoring the door, started to talk loudly about the holiday they had planned near a Finnish lake later in the year.

Trish watched the door, waiting to see what would happen. When it was fully open she saw six-year-old Lucinda Worth, dressed in a pristine long, white nightgown edged with blue gingham. There was not a single crease in the fine cotton and her golden-brown hair was very smooth and obviously freshly brushed. She had blue velvet slippers on her feet. Although she had her thumb in her mouth, she looked in charge, assured and ready to join the party.

‘Yes?’ said Tom as severely as he could. Lucinda took her thumb out of her mouth and smiled at him, the large gaps in her front teeth adding considerably to the charm of her appearance.