Creeping Ivy (2 page)

Antonia herself shrugged and at the same time shook her head, momentarily covering her eyes with her left hand. As she leaned closer to the man whose arm she was holding, the camera moved sideways, too. Trish, trying to think through all the implications of what had happened, was relieved to see that Robert was there.

A slight man with expressive dark eyes and flamboyantly ruffled black hair, he held up his free hand in a gesture of surprising authority. The buzz of questions quietened at once and soon died completely.

‘There isn’t anything more to say,’ he announced in the light voice that had lost its malicious edge but still seemed quite inadequate to the scene.

The mass of journalists started muttering discontentedly to each other and occasionally shouting questions at Antonia, who flinched and whispered something to Robert. He raised his hand again, and his voice, to say with more authority than before: ‘We’re desperately anxious about Charlotte. As you can imagine, neither of us has had much sleep. We’d like to get home now.’

He urged Antonia forwards, directly into the crowd. After a moment’s resistance it parted, allowing them to walk through unimpeded. Dozens of cameras flashed again. All it needed, thought Trish unhappily, was confetti. As the two of them left the terminal buildings, the television screen changed to show a line of police and civilians moving slowly but with dogged purpose across the manicured lawns, little copses and flat asphalt paths of a public park, obviously searching for clues.

‘That was Antonia Weblock, mother of four-year-old Charlotte, who disappeared yesterday afternoon from the park near their Kensington home, where she had gone with her nanny,’ said the newsreader dispassionately. The police say there are fears for the child’s safety.’

Trish put both hands flat on top of the television and bent down until her forehead touched her knuckles. The hardness of her own bones began to help as she worked to dim the pictures her imagination was projecting in her mind. She reached for the telephone and tapped in Antonia’s number.

Four rings later she heard the familiar message, dictated in Antonia’s queenliest voice. It made not the slightest concession to anyone who might expect to be thanked for wanting to get in touch with her, and in the circumstances it seemed chillingly inappropriate.

‘This machine can take messages for Antonia Weblock and Robert Hithe – oh, and for Nicky Bagshot. Keep your message as short as possible. Speak clearly after the long tone.’

This is Trish, Antonia, on Sunday morning at … at eight-thirty. I’ve just seen the news and heard about Charlotte. I am so, so sorry. Look, I’m here all day so if there’s any help you need – anything – I want you to ring. Just ring.
Please
.’

The newsreader had switched to the latest crisis in Africa, where there were millions of children at risk of death by starvation, disease, war, crime and genocide. Trish knew none of them and had no skills or knowledge that were relevant to their lives – or deaths. However terrible their fate might be, she could not help them. But she might be able to help Antonia; and she would do anything in her power. Anything.

They had not known each other as children, even though their grandmothers had been sisters, because the family was neither geographically nor emotionally close. But when Trish’s mother had run into Antonia’s at a family funeral and heard that she, too, was going to the Inns of Court School of Law after university, she had arranged for them to meet.

Their characters and preoccupations were so different that they would probably not have made friends even then if they had not quickly discovered just how exclusive legal London was and how lonely outsiders could be. Most of their fellow students seemed to have had High Court judges for godparents and come to consciousness with their cots propped up on out-of-date editions of
Archbold.
Neither Trish nor Antonia had any legal connections, and they needed all the support they could give each other. The resulting alliance had eventually turned into a friendship that had flourished and survived even Trish’s consistently better results.

Throughout all the adrenaline-driven years since then – and the inevitable spats – Trish had never forgotten the generosity of Antonia’s reaction to her success. However regal Antonia had become as she earned more and more in the merchant bank to which she had retreated after she failed to get any offers of pupillage, Trish had always tried to be as generous in return. In fact, that had not been nearly as difficult as accepting some of the things Antonia had done to Ben, the quiet teacher she had so surprisingly married, or the way she had behaved since her divorce.

Trish reached behind her for her mug and drank, only to discover that the coffee was still disgusting. There seemed no point making any more. She tipped it down the sink, switched off the television and went up the black spiral stairs to the shower, pulling off the oversized T-shirt she wore in bed as she went. The shirt was one of several with slogans that had made her laugh when she first bought them but which by then she noticed only when someone else blinked in surprise.

Recently the only other person to see any of them had been her mother, an intelligently gentle woman who found the aggression of some of the slogans as worrying as Trish’s inability to keep her fridge stocked with food within its sell-by dates or to put any kind of limit on the hours she worked or the emotion she expended on her clients.

Reaching her bedroom, Trish turned on the radio and thought about how differently her life had turned out from Antonia’s.

As one of only two women tenants in her set of chambers, Trish had quickly found herself working in one capacity or other on most of the cases that involved children. They took up all her time and she had seen no way of getting any experience on the big fraud cases that were the reason she had chosen those particular chambers out of the three sets that had offered her pupillage. At first she had tried to protest to her clerk, saying that she did not want to be typecast as taking only ‘girlie’ briefs. He had stared at her, unregenerate misogynist and scourge of naive young barristers that he was, and started to tell her some of the facts of legal life.

When lowly devilling on matters of custody and access eventually gave way to advocacy in cases of neglect, cruelty and abuse, Trish had ceased to see her work as any kind of soft option and became passionately devoted to the cause of the damaged children whose miseries provided her living.

Memories of their sufferings latched on to everything she feared for Charlotte. She tried not to imagine the worst that could have happened as she dropped her T-shirt on the bathroom floor and turned the shower to its most powerful setting. As she rounded her spine to the water, she felt the stinging jets hit her body and did her best to concentrate on the pleasure she usually felt as the water needled her skin, collected in the hollows of her spine and then cascaded down her sides, clinging to her breasts and dripping off her hardened nipples.

After a while she gave up trying to feel any of it and reached for the shampoo. She rubbed a generous puddle into her short dark hair. Foam seeped into her eyes, burning, and she turned her face up to the water. It streamed over her head and face. With her eyes stinging and her throat closing against the soapy water, she could not keep out the thoughts of all the children she had encountered who had been suffocated and starved, raped, beaten, or simply bullied and denied affection all their short lives. She wondered whether she would ever find a way of caring less.

Clean again, but unrefreshed, Trish emerged from the shower and wrapped herself in the biggest of the scarlet towels that hung over the hot rail. The whole bathroom was fogged with condensation, the mirrors already dripping so that she could not see her face in any detail. That did not matter; the blurred outlines were quite enough for her.

Her face, which had variously been described as beaky, predatory and magnificent at different stages of her last love affair, was all right, she had decided long ago, but it would never be beautiful. When she had rubbed the worst of the wet out of her hair, she ran her fingers through it to mould it roughly over her well-shaped head and left it at that.

Enough of the condensation had cleared by then to give her a glimpse of her dark eyes in the mirror, and she saw that they were full of all the fears she was doing her best to ignore.

‘Oh, Charlotte.’

Grabbing the tail of her self-control as it whisked past her, Trish wondered aloud whether there was any point trying to go on working. She would never be able to concentrate, so she might as well do something else. The trouble was that she couldn’t think of anything except Charlotte.

Having, as her mother had always said, worked far too hard for eleven years, Trish had begun to realise that she had become too involved with her clients, but she had not known how to free herself. Their anguish was so real to her, and her inability to change much for them so obvious, that she had been in danger of getting completely bogged down.

A series of minor but recurrent illnesses had kept getting in the way of her work and she had eventually gone to the doctor. Recalling their encounter, Trish was amazed at how patient and good-humoured he had been. At the time, all she had felt was outrage when he told her she was suffering from stress and advised her to find a way of managing it better.

Later, little by little, she had begun to see her resistance to his advice for what it was and had tried to do as he had suggested. She had learned how to snap less at people who did not understand her instantly, or asked stupid questions about the instructions she had given them, to eat more sensibly and drink in moderation, to take life a scrap more lightly and even – occasionally – to sleep the night through without pills.

It had been difficult because there was always another case, another ten- or eleven-year-old who, never properly fed since birth, had taken to stealing money as well as food and become uncontrollable by anyone; or perhaps a child who had been sunny and eager to learn until the age of six or seven, when she had suddenly changed – and only later told her teacher about what her uncle, or her stepfather, or her elder brother was making her do. With clients like those needing her to win them the protection of the law or defend them against cruelty or vengeance, Trish had not been able to take life much more easily.

Dry at last, she let the towel fall off her body on to the floor by her bed and rummaged in the cupboard for clean underclothes to wear under the crumpled jeans she had pulled off the previous night, and a daytime sloganless T-shirt. She shoved her feet into a pair of suede moccasins that had long ago lost whatever shape they had once had, and had turned from bright red to a kind of mud colour. They were supremely comfortable and she did not mind the slapping noise they made on the hard rubber and wood floors of her flat. And luckily there was no one else to object any longer.

Her salvation had appeared in chambers in the form of an invitation from the managing director of a small, progressive publishing house, who wanted her to write about children and the law. At first the letter had seemed to be just one more problem she had to deal with; but after it had lain in her in-tray for a couple of weeks she had begun to see that it might offer an honourable way out. If she accepted the commission, she could at least retreat for a time.

One of her most tormenting cases had caught the attention of the tabloids. As Trish battled in court to make the state provide appropriate care for a seriously disturbed eight-year-old who had been discovered trying to kill her six-year-old sister, she found herself more famous than most other barristers in their early thirties. She assumed that was what had interested the publisher in the first place. As far as she could see, there was no other reason for his approach and she was sure they had never met.

Eventually, when there had been a tiny gap in her diary, she had rung him up, agreed to meet for lunch in the Oxo Tower, and discovered that he shared her passion for justice for children and detestation of the way some of them were demonised in the popular press. Before they had finished their first course, Trish had agreed to write his book and gulped at the size of the advance he offered, which made even legal-aid rates seem princely.

She could afford to accept the commission, having earned well for the previous four years and spent comparatively little. For ages her only regular expenses had been her big mortgage, the bills, and the annual subscription to the gym she had begun to use as part of her stress-management campaign. She ate out with friends, drank in El Vino’s after court, and occasionally gave parties at the flat, but there was rarely time for anything else. She could not remember when she had last been to the theatre; films often seemed alluring until the moment came, when there was almost always more work to be done; and concerts were something she did not even contemplate.

Back in the kitchen, she had just switched on the kettle for a fresh mug of instant coffee, which she hoped might taste better than the first, when she saw that her answering machine was winking. She pressed its buttons, assuming that Antonia must have rung back while she was in the shower, but it was a quite different voice she heard, lighter, younger and infinitely kinder.

‘Hi, Trish? It’s Emma. I was just wondering if you felt like meeting up for some food, or a drink or something – a walk, maybe. It’s been days since we spoke, and it would be good to see you and hear how the work’s going. I’ve got a great new case to tell you about – quite funny, too, for a change. Ring if you feel like it. But don’t bother if you’re busy. Lots of love. Bye.’

Trish smiled as she thought of Emma Gnatche, a specialist in lie detection and the psychology of false confessions, who was one of her closest friends. If it had not been for what had happened to Charlotte, Trish would have rung her straight back and arranged to meet at once. As it was, she thought she would have to wait in case Antonia had phoned.

With the television on again so that she could catch any news there might be, Trish sat down and tried to read the papers. She did not have long to wait.