Creeping Ivy (25 page)

‘Now, darling, why don’t you go and have a shower and change? Wash off all the memories of the beastly police, while I cook some of those chicken breasts you’ve got in your fridge before they go off. I saw you’ve got grapes and shallots and crême fraiche, too, so we can have quite a nice sauce with them.’

‘And some wine. There’s a good dry German white at the back of the fridge. We could have that.’

‘Fine. I’ll open it while you’re having your shower. Go on, Trish. Off with you.’

Trish felt all her muscles softening as she smiled. Her mother’s face, so different from her own, so much rounder and kinder and more tolerant, looked back with the old steadfast affection.

‘Thank you, Mum. You don’t know how much I owe you, but I do.’

Chapter Nineteen

‘Miss Nicky! Miss Nicky!’

Maria’s hoarse, clotted shriek reached Nicky from one flight below her attic bedroom. She was lying fully dressed on her bed, looking up at the ceiling, thinking about Charlotte, and trying hard not to cry any more. Crying didn’t help. It made her feel ill and stopped her breathing properly. And the signs of it made Antonia even crosser on the few occasions when they couldn’t not look at each other.

‘Miss Nicky! Miss Nicky! Come!’

What’s the point? she thought. Maria and I can’t tell each other anything. I can’t even pass on Antonia’s orders or make Maria read the notes Antonia leaves her, but still I get into trouble when she doesn’t. It’s not fair.

‘How extraordinary!’ Antonia had said at the first interview. ‘I didn’t know anyone left school these days unable to speak at least
one
other language. Well, it’ll be a nice project for your days off: you can learn Spanish and it’ll be useful to us both. It’ll look good on your cv, too.’

‘I bloody won’t,’ Nicky had not said it then, but she said it loudly in her own bedroom with Maria bellowing away downstairs. If it hadn’t been for Lottie and how sweet she’d been at that first interview, Nicky wouldn’t ever have agreed to do the job. She’d known straight off that Antonia would be a cow. And she was. But even Nicky’d never thought she could be so awful as she’d been since Lottie was lost.

‘Miss Nicky! Come!’

She could hear a heavy tread on the last flight up to the attic and rolled off the bed. There was no way she wanted Maria coming in and seeing her on the bed. Every bit of her ached and all she wanted to do was crawl back under the duvet and not think or even see anything.

She hated looking at her room. It had always been bleak, and Antonia had said she wasn’t ever to put up any posters or stick anything to the white walls. But she’d got her books with her and photos of Charlotte in frames and there was usually a vase of flowers, so it wasn’t too bad. But now, since she’d noticed signs that people had been in her room whenever she left the house, looking through all her things and moving them around, she’d detested it. But there was nowhere else to go. And anyway she couldn’t have gone until Lottie was found. She couldn’t.

Suddenly she realised the footsteps weren’t Maria’s at all. And they were more than just one person’s. She stumbled over to the white-painted chipboard dressing table to look at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were squidgy and swollen and her nose was all red again. She pulled a comb through the tangles in her hair and stuffed it all into a scrunchy just in time to turn to face the door when someone knocked on it.

‘Come in.’

‘Nicolette Bagshot?’ said a strange woman Nicky had never seen before. ‘I am Sergeant Kathleen Lacie.’

Nicky stared at her. She couldn’t have been more different from the officers Nicky had seen each time she went to the police station, and she seemed much grander than that Constable Derring who’d made her go down to the kitchen to answer all those questions on Sunday morning.

‘This is Constable Sam Herrick. We have a warrant to arrest you on suspicion of the murder of Charlotte Weblock. You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand?’

‘No,’ said Nicky, holding her stomach as though someone had punched her. She thought she was going to be sick. When she dared open her mouth again, she said, ‘No, I don’t understand. Have you found her? I mean, her … her body?’

‘No.’

‘Then why did you say about suspicion of … I can’t say it. What have you found?’

‘I want you to come down to the station now. Bring what you need with you: underclothes, washing things, but no belts or sharp objects. OK? You don’t have to bring anything with you, but you might be more comfortable if you did. Tampax if you need them – that sort of thing.’

‘No.’

‘Come on now, Nicolette. Don’t make a silly fuss. You have to come with us and you might as well make it as easy for yourself as you can. You’ll be able to ask all the questions you like when you’re down at the station. Have you ever been arrested before?’

‘No,’ Her voice was still dull, she realised, not outraged like it should’ve been.

‘Well, come along now then. It won’t be nearly as frightening as you think.’

How do you know? Nicky asked silently. She had had far too much experience in the past of hiding her hopes and terrors to say anything aloud. There was sweat creeping coldly about behind her knees like wet little worms, and down her armpits, too. Her throat felt rasped, as though she had swallowed a whole carrot wrapped in sandpaper, and there was a whining sound in her head.

‘Come along now, Nicolette.’ The sergeant’s voice was brisk but kind, quite different from the expression on the man’s face. He looked snotty and hard, too, as though he’d like to hit someone, Nicky thought, specially her. ‘Get your things together quickly, please.’

Nicky had turned away to scuffle in the drawer where she kept her underclothes before she realised she was obeying the order. She’d like to have rebelled, but she nearly always did obey orders; it was safer. Even when they were wrong.

She fetched her toothbrush and flannel from the basin in the corner and stuffed them into her red nylon washbag. As she hesitated, planning to ask a question, the sergeant told her to hurry up again. She sounded less kind; more like Antonia.

‘I’ll have to leave a note.’

‘Very well, but I shall have to read it,’ said the sergeant.

‘OK.’ Nicky stuffed her few things into a small rucksack and then sat at the table in the window to write.

‘Please be quick.’

Dear Robert,

The police have arrested me for murdering Lottie. I didn’t. You know I didn’t. They’re taking me to the police station. Will you tell Antonia?

Nicky.

She folded the sheet of plain paper in half and wrote
Robert Hithe
on the front, before handing it to Sergeant Lacie, who unfolded it, looked interested as she read it, and then said brightly, ‘We’ll just leave this downstairs then, shall we? Come along; bring your bag.’

With the silent but snotty constable leading the way and Sergeant Lacie blocking off any exit, Nicky went down the four flights of stairs to the ground floor. It was funny she could manage the stairs, that her legs and feet still worked properly in spite of feeling so weird.

Maria was waiting at the bottom, leaning on the Hoover. There was an excited look in her nasty little black eyes.

‘You go out, Miss Nicky?’

‘Yes. Please give this to Mr Hithe,’ Nicky said, handing her the note.

‘Come on,’ said the sergeant, applying the lightest pressure to Nicky’s back. She stumbled and for a moment thought she’d fall, but she managed not to.

As soon as the front door opened, people started shouting and flashing cameras. Nicky put her arm over her eyes, ignoring all the questions, and heard the sergeant asking politely to be ‘let through’. Two minutes later Nicky was being helped into the back seat of an unmarked, dark-blue car. The sergeant got in beside her and the constable sat at the wheel.

Nicky looked back at the house to see some of the journalists clustering round the open front door, talking to Maria. They probably couldn’t speak Spanish. She hoped they couldn’t. Maria hated her and would’ve said anything.

Nicky sat quiet in the car, hating Maria back, and Antonia, and the police. She could not think of anything else except the questions they were likely to ask her once they got going. She should have been thinking of Charlotte and the reasons why they were sure enough she was dead to start arresting people, but she couldn’t. All she could think about was what was going to happen to her. She tried to think of George Smiley and what he would’ve done.

It would be better if the questions got asked by the sergeant. Women were easier to talk to than men. Not Antonia, of course. But other women.

The car turned into a gap between the police station and the row of shops and pulled up outside a barred doorway. Sergeant Lacie got out and pulled Nicky after her. Again with the constable leading the way, they walked up to the barred door, waited while he tapped a number into the keypad beside the door and watched the heavy bars rise, and then walked through into the station.

The smell hit the back of Nicky’s nose and made her cough. It wasn’t disgusting or anything – just disinfectant and floor polish – but it frightened her. She thought of the men who had been digging in Antonia’s back garden and of the nightmares she had had ever since of being pushed face down into wet soil and held there till she suffocated.

She was told to stop in front of a desk, where a man in uniform was standing. She tried to stop coughing so she could listen properly.

‘This is Nicolette Bagshot,’ Sergeant Lacie was saying to him, still speaking in the same briskly kind voice she had used to Nicky herself. ‘She has been arrested on suspicion of the murder of Charlotte Weblock.’

‘I see. Now, Nicolette, would you turn out your pockets and give me that bag of yours.’

While Nicky laid her few possessions on the table in front of the custody sergeant, surprised by the ordinariness of his voice, he wrote a list of them all. Then he gave her back everything except the money and the spare tights she had brought with her. He also told her to take off her snake belt and give it to him. And he asked whether she was wearing tights under her jeans. She told him she had socks on, but he didn’t believe her and told her to pull up her jeans so that he could see. She should’ve shaved her legs. It was embarrassing to see how hairy they were. He didn’t say so; he just seemed puzzled that she had brought clean tights with her. She tried to explain that she hadn’t been thinking straight when Sergeant Lacie told her to bring some things and she’d taken what was on top of her drawer. Just the first handful of clothes.

Then she realised: they were expecting her to hang herself. They thought she’d killed Lottie and now they thought she’d kill herself. She stared at the floor, so scared she couldn’t bear to let them see her eyes.

When the custody sergeant had folded up the tights and the belt and put them in a plastic bag tagged with her name, he told her that she had the right to have one person informed of her arrest and asked who it should be.

Then, for the first time since Sergeant Lacie had come into her bedroom, Nicky felt her eyes go prickly and wet again. She blinked several times, hating the thought of crying in front of all these people who could think her capable of killing anyone, anyone at all, let alone the one person she’d ever been allowed to love. The tears spilled out and she had to start sniffling and wiping her sore eyes. But the more she tried to stop crying the worse it got and then the sobs started choking her. She couldn’t stop them, or her voice going’ on and on: ‘I didn’t. I didn’t. I didn’t. I didn’t.’

The custody sergeant fetched some paper tissues in the end and a plastic cup of water and they helped a bit. She managed to stop howling in the end and sipped some water. Then the suffocating feeling started up again and she had to give the cup to the sergeant so she could blow her nose. When it was clear again, she took back the cup and finished the soapy-tasting water. Then she saw Constable Herrick watching her with a nasty look in his sneery eyes and knew she had to stop crying altogether.

‘Sorry,’ she muttered to the custody sergeant.

‘That’s OK, love. It happens. Now, who would you like us to call for you?’

Nicky shook her head, still unable to think of anyone. She couldn’t disturb Robert, not with the trouble in his office, and anyway, she’d left him a note. She didn’t know anyone else. The other girls from the park wouldn’t be able to help. They were just like her and not nearly important enough. The principal of her college would’ve been all right, and she’d always been kind and given her a really good reference, but Nicky couldn’t bother her. Anyway, it was more than two years since they’d met. She’d probably forgotten who Nicky was.

‘What about one of your parents, love?’

‘I haven’t got any,’ she said, having to use the snotty tissue again. She thought of Renie Brooks, who’d been good to her while she lived up there in Buxton, the nearest she’d ever got to a real mother, but that was even longer ago. Renie’d never even tried to get in touch after the social workers had moved her, so perhaps she hadn’t been much like a real mother after all. There wasn’t anyone she could think of who’d help. Antonia would be awful, and with her being accused of murdering Charlotte, Antonia wouldn’t come anyway. Why should she?

Seeing pity in the custody sergeant’s face, mixed with growing impatience, Nicky tried to think. There was the woman at the nanny agency, but she wouldn’t come. She’d probably be furious, and anyway she was the last person in the world Nicky would have wanted anywhere near her if there were questions going to be asked. Remembering what those questions might include somehow sharpened Nicky’s brain and she thought of the only person with a bit of authority who had been kind to her since Charlotte had been lost.

‘There’s Trish Maguire,’ she said shyly. ‘Could you tell her, d’you think?’

‘I expect so. Who is she?’

‘She’s a cousin of my boss.’

‘Of Antonia Weblock?’ asked the custody sergeant in surprise. He obviously knew more about the case than Nicky had realised.