Creeping Ivy

  Natasha Cooper

  CREEPING

  IVY

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  For Douglas Mc Williams

  As Creeping Ivy clings to wood or stone

  And hides the ruin that it feeds upon.

  William Cowper

  Prologue

  She was sitting in front of a plate of slimy green stuff. She knew she was never going to get it down her throat. And she knew she would have to.

  Her arms were sore under the blue and white dress. It was a pretty dress and she looked pretty in it. People said so. Some of them said she was good, too. But that didn’t stop it.

  Somehow she was going to have to get the slimy stuff down – and without spilling any on the dress – and she knew she wouldn’t be able to do it. She knew. Tears started making her eyes all wet, and she tried to stop them because crying always made it worse.

  The door opened. With the tears showing, she didn’t dare look up. She just stared at her plate and waited.

  ‘Pick up your spoon,’ came the voice.

  Her hands were shaking, but she did as she was told. She always did try to do what she was told, always. It was just sometimes she couldn’t, however much she tried.

  ‘Put in some spinach.’

  She scooped some up and got it near her mouth. The smell made her feel sick and she knew her throat would get shut like it always did. Even if she tried she wouldn’t be able to swallow and it would be worse for her if she spat it out; it always was.

  ‘Put it in your mouth.’

  The voice was the most frightening thing that had ever happened to her, much worse than the sore arms. She still didn’t look up. And she couldn’t make herself put the spoon in her mouth.

  ‘Put it in. You know what’ll happen if you don’t. Open your mouth. Open your mouth at once!’

  At the sound of the voice getting louder and louder so it was nearly a shout, she got her mouth a little bit open and put the thin shiny spoon in. But her teeth bit shut on it. There’d be even more marks on the spoon after. She couldn’t help it. She couldn’t eat the slimy stuff. The voice was right: she did know what was going to happen, but she couldn’t eat it. She waited in dumb terror.

  Chapter One

  The coffee was too hot. As soon as it hit her mouth, Trish knew what she was in for: little tassels of skin and a tongue like sacking, which wouldn’t be able to taste anything more subtle than the local takeaway’s prawn curry for at least two days.

  ‘Bugger.’

  She had been so keen to clear the night’s thoughts out of her head that she had poured boiling water over the granules and taken a great slurp, without even bothering to stir the bitty liquid. But she had burned herself for nothing: memories of the cases she had been working on were still there, as vivid and unbearable as ever.

  As she bent to drink some cold water from the tap, she half-saw a familiar face on the small television in the corner of the kitchen worktop. Straightening up, with the cool water held in her mouth to soothe the burn, she wiped stray drops from her chin with the back of her hand and looked more carefully at the screen.

  Her cousin Antonia Weblock did occasionally figure on the news, but it was odd to see her on a Sunday morning when there couldn’t possibly have been an announcement from the City or the Bank of England that might have needed one of her magisterial comments. And she seemed to be wearing a tracksuit under her long overcoat, which was even odder.

  Trish moved towards the television to turn up the sound. Her bare feet spread a little as the soles touched the tacky coolness of the industrial-strength emerald-coloured studded rubber that covered her kitchen floor. It was a sensation she had come to dislike as soon as she had had time to notice it, just as she had begun to feel aggressed by the hard-edged, brightly coloured, echoing flat that sucked such enormous amounts of money out of her bank account every month.

  ‘Antonia, this way – over here,’ Trish heard in several different voices as she adjusted the volume.

  The sight of aeroplanes landing and taking off in the distance behind Antonia solved one small mystery. She must have been at Heathrow, after a trip to New York or Tokyo, perhaps dealing with a crisis generated by unexpected movements of the Dow Jones or the Nikkei. Trish smiled as dozens of cameras flashed on the screen because she knew how much Antonia enjoyed her growing fame, but then her lips stiffened. Instead of turning her head this way and that to give all the photographers a fair chance of getting a good shot as she usually did, Antonia kept wincing as though the flashes that hit her eyes were hard enough to hurt. Or perhaps she just had a headache. Her face was tight enough for that. Trish licked her lips and felt the burn on her tongue again.

  ‘When did you first hear about your daughter?’ asked a male voice as a microphone like a long, dirty grey mop was shoved over the heads of the avid journalists towards Antonia.

  ‘Charlotte?’ said Trish.

  ‘I got the message at seven yesterday evening.’ Antonia’s voice came breathily out of the television. ‘New York time. They couldn’t reach me any earlier.’

  ‘And is there really no news?’ asked a woman with an absurdly old-fashioned notebook in her hands instead of the much smaller cassette recorders everyone else was waving.

  ‘None,’ said Antonia, looking up at last and staring directly into the particular camera that fed Trish’s television, almost as though she knew her cousin would be there, watching. Antonia’s strong-featured face was grey and there was a heavy, defensive expression in her eyes, but she was still in control. Just.

  ‘Charlotte was last seen in the playground of our local park yesterday afternoon with her nanny,’ she said bleakly. ‘She disappeared at about three-thirty. The families of her friends have all been contacted and none of them have seen her. The police are still searching.’

  ‘No,’ whispered Trish into the echoing spaces of her flat. ‘Oh, please, God! No.’

  She knew too much – that was the trouble – and understood exactly what an announcement like that could mean. Pictures from her own cases and other people’s ran through her mind like a private horror film.

  There was the six-year-old boy who had been kidnapped almost directly outside his parents’ house, then found sodomised and dead months later; there was a girl, too, a year or two older than Charlotte, who had been raped by her stepfather and then murdered and buried in a nearby wood a couple of days before he went on television with his wife to plead for her return; and another, only a baby, so badly beaten by both her parents, and burned with cigarettes, that even though the social workers had found her while she was still alive, she had not made it.

  Trish’s eyes focused on the real screen again. Anxiety for Charlotte and pity for Antonia started choking her until she remembered to breathe. It felt strange, working her lungs like bellows, forcing herself to breathe in through her nose and out through her mouth as though it was a s
kill she had only just learned.

  Charlotte was Antonia’s only child – a small, confiding, funny four-year-old with a terrible temper, utterly defenceless and far too young to be adrift in London.

  ‘Is it true they’ve dragged the pond and found nothing?’ shouted one of the journalists jostling Antonia on the screen.

  She nodded without speaking, once more looking out of the television straight at Trish, who stared back, still breathing doggedly, as though Charlotte’s safety might depend on that steady, rhythmic sucking in and exhaling of air that tasted as horrible as the burn in her mouth.

  The thought of any child in such danger was unbearable, but that it should be Charlotte made Trish aware of layers of anguish that went far beyond anything she had experienced. She had only recently come to know Charlotte as a person, rather than simply Antonia’s noisy, difficult daughter, and for a selfish instant she wished she had kept her distance.

  It had happened about six weeks earlier, when Charlotte had appeared in the middle of one of the excruciatingly formal dinners to which Antonia still occasionally summoned Trish. Charlotte said she’d been woken by bad dreams and had a tummy ache and couldn’t go back to sleep. Her jumbled dark curls and scarlet pyjamas had seemed wildly out of place in the over-furnished dining room. The sight of her had made her mother’s face tighten in irritation, but to Trish it had brought a welcome hint of normality.

  Bored with the grandeur of the food and plumb out of things to say to either of the pompous men sitting beside her, she had volunteered to take the child back to bed. Antonia had looked surprised by the offer but had accepted it at once. Robert, her current boyfriend, seemed to have hardly noticed either Charlotte’s appearance or Trish’s intervention. He was far too interested in explaining to the bored banker’s wife on his right just how megasuccessful his latest advertising campaign had been.

  On the way upstairs, Charlotte had insinuated her warm little hand into Trish’s and told her a long story about the huge wiggly pink worms that kept coming out from under her bed and waking her up so that it wasn’t her fault she’d gone downstairs. Trish had enjoyed the inventiveness of the excuse and later indulged Charlotte to the extent of making a thorough search under the bed, the mattress and the bright yellow-and-blue cotton rug, as well as through all her bigger toys, to prove that there were no worms, wiggly or otherwise, waiting to threaten her.

  Charlotte had eventually pronounced herself satisfied but she begged for a story before Trish abandoned her to the dark. Touched and amused as well as glad of an excuse to avoid the diners downstairs, Trish had obliged, sitting on the bed and reading from My Naughty Little Sister, a book that had given her much gleeful enjoyment in her own past.

  The child’s head had felt extraordinarily hard and her little body very soft as she pressed herself along Trish’s thigh and wriggled in pleasure at the climax of her chosen story. Her highly original comments on the characters and their antics had made Trish laugh and kiss her silky black curls, wondering why Charlotte had such a reputation for obstinacy and tantrums. She seemed sweet and vulnerable behind the mask of sassy cleverness; and rather lonely, too.

  ‘Could it be a kidnap? Have there been any ransom demands?’ asked another of the journalists, a man who did not appear on the screen. His voice was nastier than the first and loaded with resentment. Trish remembered the announcement of Antonia’s latest bonus a month or so earlier.

  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.