Creeping Ivy, page 11
With the book, she had only one chance to say everything as she meant it and, which was even more difficult, to work out exactly what it was she did mean. All the questions she hoped she would have been able to answer as she researched other people’s cases and drew on her own seemed to get more difficult with every extra hour she spent on them.
Would it have been better for a maltreated child to have been aborted? Were there some people who were so inadequate or perverse that they should never be allowed to have children? And if so, who should decide? The courts, obviously, but who should bring the cases and would there ever be enough court time to deal with them? And how could the prospective parents be prevented from having children, short of forcible sterilisation, which was not an option in a civilised state?
What should you do with a woman in her very early twenties who had five children already, none of whom she fed properly or was able to control? Would they be better off in so-called care? Should they be taken by social workers for adoption by intelligent, well-meaning, wholesome infertile couples who longed for children and would give them everything the more fortunate took for granted? Was parental love (and in that particular case, it had been very clear that the mother did love her children even though she could not look after them) better than clean clothes and regular meals? And were any adopted children truly happy?
Should children who had been physically or sexually abused by a parent be removed from the family home or should the abuser be exiled? And if you forcibly removed a parent, how could you make the child believe that it was not his or her fault that the family had been smashed and probably driven into poverty?
How could you stop parents resenting their children, ill-treating them, corrupting them, exploiting them, or simply hurting them? Who should draw the lines between what was unpleasant but no business of the state’s and what was intolerable in any civilised society? And how should the lines be policed? And how could you ensure that children taken into care were given absolute safety as well as all the things their families had not been able to provide, and later sent gently into the world instead of being hurled without resources into a jobless, hopeless, homeless existence, in which they were prey to the worst sort of exploiters?
Trish knew by then that the questions were not answerable. Very few of the suggestions thrown up by what had happened to her clients or by her own memories, needs and ideas were usable. However much her instincts might scream at her that no woman should be allowed to give birth unless she was self-aware and intelligent enough to avoid punishing the child for her own frustrations and shortcomings, or that all men should have their fertility controlled until they were in an emotional and financial position to be adequate fathers to their children, she knew they were wrong.
Trish was going to have to come to terms with that if she were ever to produce a book that would be worth anything to anyone. If she did not get down to it soon, she would have to give up and get back to her real work. Perhaps Christopher’s letter would force her to finish the sixty-odd pages she had chewed over for so long. Or perhaps it would not. Until Charlotte was found, it was going to be hard to concentrate on anything else.
Even so, Trish leafed through the pile of printout Christopher had sent and saw that it was the report of a particularly difficult Australian case, which only confirmed her own doubts about allowing the inadequate to bear and care for children.
Pushing the printout to one side and trying not to think about the two maltreated children it described, she went back to her newspapers. One of them had a large photograph of Antonia and Charlotte on the front. Antonia was wearing a severely tailored black suit, with her hair newly highlighted, and her makeup discreet. Charlotte was wearing dungarees; there seemed to be chocolate around her mouth, and she was brandishing a sticky-looking spoon.
Trish recognised the photograph as one that had originally been published in an article about high-flying businesswomen who manage to keep their humanity and care deeply for their children. To anyone who knew Antonia it was obvious that the photograph had been carefully posed. In ordinary circumstances she would never have risked holding such a messy child anywhere near her suit – or allowed the child to eat chocolate in the first place. Antonia had always had unrealistically high standards of both cleanliness and nutrition where Charlotte was concerned.
Beside the double portrait was a shot of the playground. There was a tall row of swings for older children hanging from a gibbet-like wooden structure and a smaller set of bucket-seated ones for toddlers. The big slide for which Charlotte had waited reared up in the background of the photograph like a surfacing sea monster. There were no children in the picture, which must have been taken at dawn before the park opened, but it was clear enough that the queue for the slide would have stretched along the fenced side of the playground at the opposite side from the entrance.
The height of the fence was about half that of the slide. Without any humans in the shot for scale it was difficult to estimate its exact height, but it did seem too high for someone to reach over and pluck a child from the other side. That must mean that whoever had taken Charlotte had persuaded her to leave the queue and walk the whole width of the playground to the gate.
‘The dog that didn’t bark in the night,’ Trish said, with a vague memory of a Sherlock Holmes story her mother had read aloud during one of their shared crazes. The Sherlock Holmes one had lasted for nearly three months when Trish was nine or ten, some time after her father had left.
Thinking about the people Charlotte might have trusted enough to let them take her out of the queue without protesting, Trish realised that her bare legs were covered with goose pimples and she was beginning to shiver. She abandoned the newspapers to shower in very hot water and dress.
That afternoon she drove across the river, up through the City and then west to Kensington, where she miraculously found an empty parking meter close to the park. Having collected her camera and locked the car, she went to see the playground for herself. On the way she noticed several yellow signs asking for information about a child abducted on Saturday and, later, she was stopped by a uniformed constable with a clipboard who wanted to ask a long series of questions. She answered them as fully as possible, giving her name and address and explaining her connection to the case; then she left him.
The newspaper’s picture had given a fairly accurate impression of the playground, she saw as she soon as she got there. Pacing the distance between the slide and the gate, she decided that it was at least thirty yards. She also discovered that the fence was far too high to allow any child to be lifted over without a ladder on both sides. But the slide was nowhere near as tall as she had expected. Surprised at herself, she realised that she had been remembering the big slides of her childhood and picturing it from the perspective of someone of three-feet-six.
‘Trish! What are you doing here?’
She turned from her contemplation of the fence to see Hal Marstall, Emma Gnatche’s boyfriend. Liking Emma so much, Trish had always tried to warm to Hal, but she had not succeeded so far. He was attractive enough and good company, but Trish didn’t feel at ease with men of such conspicuous charm and good looks. His job got in the way, too, and she had the feeling that he was never off-duty and would sacrifice any friend for a scoop.
To Trish, it had always seemed that journalists like Hal, working for newspapers like the Daily Mercury, used crimes against children to whip up and focus the frustrations of not very clever people who did not have enough to do or think about. When they were roused to outrage, the damage they could do was appalling. That the outrage was often wholly reasonable did not affect Trish’s disapproval; in her view, lynching was never right, whatever the provocation.
‘Much the same as you, I imagine, unless you’ve changed jobs, Hal.’
‘Me? No, I’m still with the Mercury.’
She saw that he was about to ask another question and hurried to get her own in first. ‘Why are you on this? I thought you were doing some local-government corruption story.’
Hal raised an elegant dark eyebrow. ‘Is that what Emma told you? Yes, I see she did. Odd. I’d have thought she’d know better by now. I don’t go round tattling about her work.’
‘She knows I’m trustworthy, Hal, and she didn’t give me any clues about which local authority,’ she said, noticing that his attitude to Emma seemed to have changed considerably since she had first seen them together, when he had treated Emma as a cross between a goddess and a particularly delicious meal. Even more wary of him than before, Trish asked what he believed had happened to Charlotte.
Hal looked back over his shoulder so that he could survey the whole playground. ‘It was someone she knew.’
‘Unless she just grew bored and wandered off and got lost – or run over. Perhaps her body was trapped under a lorry and dragged. It’s possible that no one would have noticed.’ She saw an expression of derision in Hal’s dark eyes, and added slowly enough to keep her dignity: ‘Unlikely, but possible.’
‘Hardly. No, I’m sure she was nabbed and by someone she trusted.’
‘That’s what it looks like,’ Trish agreed, ‘unless there was some kind of invisible pulley that whisked her up over the fence.’
‘So that’s what you were staring at so beadily. I thought you must have seen something on the ground outside. My money’s on the nanny.’
‘I’ll bet it is.’ A lot of the pent-up anger sounded in Trish’s voice. It seemed to amuse Hal. ‘It would make a good story, wouldn’t it? “Nanny from Hell strikes in Kensington”.’
Hal grinned engagingly and pushed back his soft dark hair as though he had seen too many charming English actors being winsomely self-deprecating on the big screen.
‘Not half as a good as “Selfish Superwoman Abandons Child to Psychopath”.’
‘Don’t, Hal. Even as a joke. Antonia’s in agony. Don’t twist the knife just to get a few extra readers.’
‘She’s news, Trish, and she made herself into that deliberately. She uses us when she wants to stir up a profile-raising bout of controversy to boost her career; she can’t complain when we go after her over something like this.’
‘Oh, I expect she can,’ said Trish as she thought with satisfaction about how much and how powerfully Antonia would probably complain. ‘It’s a game to you, isn’t it, trying to catch celebrities out? You all want photographs of famous beauties looking like dogs and pieces about the ultra-successful getting their comeuppance. It’s a good way to feed the jealousy of people who are never going to be successful, isn’t it? Why can’t you leave them alone in their misery?’
‘I don’t make the rules about what sells newspapers, Trish. I just report crime.’
‘But only crime that affects the rich and famous or titillates your readers.’
Hal shrugged, looking rather less charming but more interested.
‘And there’s nothing so titillating to the British people as the abduction or seduction of a child, is there?’ said Trish, disliking him more than usual.
‘Is that a quote from your so-far invisible book?’ he asked with a sneer.
‘Part of what I’m writing covers the reasons why people get so excited when there are crimes against children, yes,’ she answered steadily, ‘and crimes committed by children, too. It’s a strange contradiction that reading about both should give people so much pleasure.’
‘Hal!’ A shout from the far side of the playground from a man with a selection of cameras slung across his chest made Hal wave and yell something about ‘being right with you’. He turned back to Trish.
‘I think you’re misinterpreting the excitement. It’s not sexual, but—’
‘I never said it was. I said it was titillating. It gives people a frisson. It may be a frisson of horror, but there’s enjoyment in it, too. Admit it.’
‘I still think you’re wrong. Look, Trish, if you hear anything, will you—’
‘No, Hal. I’m sorry, but I won’t tell you anything.’
‘The interest the press stirs up will probably be what gets her back – if she’s still alive.’
‘I doubt it. The press has never saved any other abducted child, has it?’
‘You’ve been getting cynical, Trish, these last few months. You want to watch that. It’s a right turn-off. Good to run into you.’
‘And you,’ she said automatically as she watched him lope off to the other side of the playground to collect his photographer. She wondered what exactly Emma saw in him, and then caught herself up as she recognised a familiar reaction. When not doing his job, Hal was probably as sensitive as he was undoubtedly intelligent, and with luck he valued Emma as she deserved to be valued. That was a great deal.
‘Aren’t they awful?’ said a voice from some way off.
Trish looked quickly to her left and saw a pleasant-looking young woman coming towards her with a scarlet ball in one hand and a tricycle in the other. Releasing the frown between her eyes, Trish smiled politely.
‘Awful,’ she agreed when the woman reached her side. ‘Had he been asking you questions, too?’
‘Yeah, about a friend of mine. What did he want from you?’
‘Anything I knew about the child who was abducted here on Saturday,’ said Trish, assuming Nicky was the friend in question. ‘I’ve met him before and he knows I’m close to the family, so I suppose he thought it was worth trying to pump me. Is your friend Nicky Bagshot?’
‘Yeah. Poor Nicky,’ said the young woman. ‘He told us she’s getting all the blame for what happened to Charlotte. That’s not right, you know. It wasn’t her fault.’
‘How d’you know? Were you here on Saturday?’
‘No,’ she said obstinately. ‘It’s my half day, but I know she couldn’t have anything to do with it. She’s a good nanny, responsible, and lovely with Charlotte. And she can be very difficult, you know.’
‘I know she can. And I know she’s fond of Nicky. She told me so. Look, my name’s Trish Maguire.’ She held out her hand.
‘Susan Jacks,’ said the young woman, putting down the trike to shake hands. ‘Nicky’s a good friend of mine, and I don’t like what they’re saying. It’s too easy to blame the nanny and we don’t have any protection, none of us. We had the police here first and now all those journalists. We thought you must be one of them till we saw you looking so cross at that man.’
‘No,’ said Trish, still smiling. ‘I’m not a journalist. I’m a lawyer. But I did come to see how it could have happened, so that I could understand.’
‘Do you think it was Nicky’s fault?’
‘No. From everything I’ve heard, I think she was just unlucky. It must’ve happened because she wasn’t watching, but I think that was a horrible chance. I don’t think she was responsible for it.’
‘Great,’ said Susan energetically. ‘That’s just great. D’you want to come and meet the others, then?’
‘Others?’ said Trish, looking in the direction of Susan’s pointing hand. She saw a group of young women sitting on benches arranged around a large sandpit in the corner of the playground furthest from the slide. ‘Yes, I’d like that.’
Susan introduced her to six or seven nannies, all of whom in the intervals of calling instructions to their charges, breaking up fights, and picking up the children when they fell, reiterated their belief in Nicky’s innocence of anything and everything.
‘Susan said Charlotte can be difficult,’ said Trish impartially to all of them when they had stopped telling her what a brilliant nanny Nicky was and how gentle with Charlotte. ‘D’you agree with that?’
‘Can’t they all?’ said a strapping New Zealander with a mop of black curls and a big pretty face. ‘But Lottie gets it from her mother. Have you ever met her?’
‘Once or twice,’ said Trish, smiling. The friendly atmosphere cooled distinctly.
‘Oh,’ said the New Zealander, having exchanged glances with some of the others. ‘You’ll know about the hereditary temper then.’
‘Yes,’ Trish admitted in the interests of regaining their confidence. She knew all about it, and hated it. ‘But what about Robert, Charlotte’s stepfather? Have any of you ever met him?’
It seemed they had all seen him quite often, because he made a habit of collecting Nicky and Charlotte from the playground whenever he could. That seemed odd to Trish, considering how busy he was supposed to be.
‘What’s he like?’ she asked.
‘He’s all right,’ said the New Zealander. ‘And much nicer to Nicky than Antonia ever was. Not that we saw much of her, except when she was checking up on Nicky. Honestly, that poor girl. Nothing was good enough for Antonia, not the way Nicky made Lottie’s bed nor the food she gave her for lunch nor the stories she told her or the toys she let her play with. They always had to come here in the afternoons although Lottie liked Holland Park better.’
‘I know,’ said Susan. ‘Antonia even used to check up on that – where Nicky’d brought her in the afternoons. I ask you!’
‘She was a right cow,’ said the New Zealander. ‘It must’ve been a hard job keeping her sweet, but Nicky did it as well as anyone could have. Rupie!’ she shouted suddenly. ‘Stop it. Give it back.’
Trish looked behind her to see a small boy with bright brown hair dragging a large, beautifully dressed doll round and round the edge of a puddle while a small girl pleaded tearfully for its return. As his nanny reached his side, he deliberately flung the doll into the middle of the water and then started to howl as though he was being tortured, although she had not even touched him by then.
As the little group around the sandpit watched Rupie and his victim being sorted out with a firm hand, Trish asked the other nannies whether they had ever noticed anyone odd hanging about the playground.
‘No one,’ said Susan, who seemed to be their unofficial leader. ‘Not that I noticed anyway. There are always people about, and sometimes tramps wander in and scare the children, but no one regular.’
