Creeping Ivy, page 18
‘Yes, Martin?’ he said coldly.
‘The superintendent wants a word, sir.’
‘OK. I’ll go straight up. You’d better go ahead then, Kath, and get a warrant to search Maguire’s place – and her car. There’s no real evidence yet, but somehow I don’t think the magistrate will cavil at a search warrant, at least not in the circumstances. The way she’s been trawling the Net for paedophile pornography could be enough in itself. Some of the stuff she’s been looking at is … it’s the worst, Kath. There’s something very odd about her. You must accept that.’
‘The pornography could be for the book she’s writing, though, sir,’ said Kath, hoping that she was right. ‘I thought I’d get on to her publishers to find out what they know about the work she’s done so far.’
‘OK. Not a bad idea.’ Then, as though sensing DC Martin’s impatience, Blake put both hands flat on the desk and pushed himself quickly into a standing position.
He’d hated the case from the beginning and it looked as though it was about to get very nasty indeed. He found himself wishing he could have kept Kath out of it and then realised he was on the point of losing it completely. She was a police officer, heading for a good few promotions yet; if she couldn’t take something like this, she shouldn’t be in the job.
Oh, fuck it! Somehow he was going to have to get her out of his mind, her and the gloomily atmospheric Leonard Cohen songs that kept running through his head whenever he tried to sleep at night and found her image sliding into bed between him and Lydia. He’d even bought himself a thin green candle in an access of sentimentality the previous lunchtime and then had to chuck it away in a street litter bin before anyone saw it and decided he’d flipped.
‘OK, Martin, I’m with you. Get on with it, Kath. Bring back everything that might have any relevance at all, and we’ll see if we can get enough to have Maguire in and start interviewing her. Don’t take Sam with you this time. That was an error on my part. You’re right – Maguire obviously responds better to women. Take Derring. Between you, the pair of you may be able to get what we need out of her.’
‘Will do, sir.’
Blake checked to make sure her eyes were calm enough and then nodded to her and went up to answer to the superintendent for his part in the failure to turn up a body. It was a pig of a case.
Chapter Eighteen
And so it is essential that the emphasis of any punishment is weighted towards rehabilitation and away from retribution. Education is what is needed; not revenge, Trish typed carefully. It is necessary … important … crucial that offenders be made aware of the effect they have had on their victims. That is of infinitely greater importance than adding to their sense of being unfairly persecuted for something that, in their minds, ‘doesn’t matter all that much’.
She re-read the paragraph, saw all its imperfections, and then realised that her brain had gone fuzzy and was not going to allow her to improve anything she had written just then. When she had saved a copy of the edited document, she put both hands behind her to stretch away the aches in her back and arms, but she got that wrong, too, and set up a screaming pain down the back of her neck. Long experience had told her that she would have to hold it in both hands, breathing deeply, until it was bearable again.
About halfway through the process, she heard more knocking at the front door.
‘Hang on a sec!’ she called through the pain and then, still holding her neck with her left hand, the arm pressed in a V-shape between her breasts, she got up to open the door.
At the sight of the good-looking sergeant, this time accompanied by a second woman instead of the unpleasant constable of the morning’s visit, Trish let go of her neck.
‘I thought I told you that I had nothing more to say, Sergeant Lacie,’ she said coldly, standing in the narrow gap between the door and the jamb to guard the way into her flat.
‘We have a warrant, Ms Maguire.’
‘A warrant? What kind of warrant?’ Trish put out her right hand and received the familiar-looking piece of paper. She read it with care. After a moment she looked up at the police in astonishment.
‘You suspect that I have Charlotte Weblock here? Why didn’t you say so this morning, instead of letting that oaf you brought with you get up my nose so badly. You’re mad if you think I’ve got her, but you’re at liberty to look wherever you want. You didn’t need a warrant for that. I’d have let you in.’
‘But I asked you to let us look,’ Sergeant Lacie said in surprise. ‘This morning.’
‘Did you?’ Trish remembered the shameful surge of temper that had overtaken her in the morning and eased her conscience with the knowledge that there had been provocation. ‘Sorry. But you should have asked first instead of setting him on to accuse me.’
She opened the door wide without another word and stood back to let the two women into her flat. As they moved past her, Trish added quickly, ‘But I should like to file the document I’ve been working on. I don’t want to risk losing a day’s work if one of you hits the wrong button.’
‘We’d like you to print it out first. Constable Derring will come with you,’ said Kath Lacie calmly.
‘I don’t see,’ said Trish out of principle rather than any kind of anxiety, ‘anything in your warrant to justify that. You’re not allowed to ransack the place, you know. You have permission to search for a child. That’s all.’
Kath Lacie took a second warrant out of her bag and handed it to Trish. It was as she read that one that she began to worry. The warrant gave Sergeant Kathleen Lacie the power to search for and remove indecent photographs or pseudophotographs of a child under Section 4 of the Protection of Children Act, 1978.
Nothing that Trish planned to use in her book came anywhere near the definition of such material – she would have hated to publish any such thing – but she had searched the Internet for examples of the indescribably degrading pornography she was convinced was the cause of some of the cruellest crimes against children. She had downloaded some of it, too, for use as examples if she had to persuade doubters in the publishing house of the seriousness of the material that was so easily available.
‘Very well,’ said Trish, moving to her desk.
As the printer clunked its way through twenty-five pages of the still inadequately written third chapter, Trish watched the women moving through her flat in search of Charlotte. They went through her cupboards, touching her clothes; they probed for loose floorboards and false panels in the walls; they insisted on pulling down the loft ladder that led up into the roofspace so that they could check there, too. They opened every door and lid; they touched everything they saw.
Trish stood and watched them and knew that it was irrational to think she’d have to scour the place before she could bear to live in it once they’d gone. After a while, leaving Constable Derring to her work, Sergeant Lacie came back to Trish’s desk, where the printer was chattering out the last page of her chapter.
‘Thank you,’ Lacie said when Trish silently handed her the pages and turned away to file the document. ‘When did you last see Charlotte Weblock?’
‘I’ve already told you that. I have nothing to add to what I said this morning. I have not seen Charlotte Weblock since her mother’s dinner party six weeks ago. That’s all you need to know. Now do please get on with your job and find her. It’s been nearly four days. You know what that means as well as I do. But she could still be alive. If she is and you’re fiddling about here while she’s being …’ Trish breathed with extreme care to keep everything working normally. ‘You won’t be able to live with yourself if that’s the case.’
‘That cuts both ways, Ms Maguire. If you have nothing to hide, you have no reason to object to any of our questions. We need your answers if we’re to find her.’
‘You’re wasting time. Can’t you see that? I’ve told you I haven’t seen her for six weeks,’ said Trish, wondering how she was ever going to get through to them. She could feel the anger beginning to tighten at the base of her brain.
‘Every citizen has a duty to help the police in their enquiries.’
‘Only a moral duty,’ Trish reminded her automatically. ‘There’s no law that says I have to talk to you. But, as you must know, if there was anything helpful I could tell you, I’d have done it days ago. I want Charlotte back more than anyone.’
‘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.’
