Creeping Ivy (30 page)
‘Ah, George. But look, let’s be sensible for a minute: what is it they think they’ve got on me?’
‘I’m not sure in detail, but the questions they were asking Nicky made it clear they think she had a partner, and that it was either Robert or you. It sounded to me as though they’ve got no evidence against you and are hoping that Nicky will give them something.’
‘So obviously it can’t have helped that it was me she asked to have informed of her arrest.’
‘Precisely.’
‘I should have seen that coming after the things Sergeant Lacie said to me. But at the time the only thing that struck me was the sadness of Nicky’s having no one else,’ Trish frowned. ‘Although it would’ve been more logical for her to use Robert. I can see why she might have balked at giving Antonia’s name, but why not Robert? Particularly as they’re so friendly.’
‘But perhaps she was clever enough to see how that would look and decided to protect him. Trish?’
‘Yes, George?’
‘It’s not late. Would you like me to come round?’
She stood holding the receiver to her cheek, thinking about the possibility and the temptation, but after a moment she said, ‘No. I think … I think, as we said, we ought to get all this out of the way. If you came tonight, I might … we might … No. George, I can’t mix us and Charlotte.’
There was a long pause, as though he was trying to decide whether to argue.
‘No. I can see that. OK, darling,’ he said at last. ‘But I’m here if you want me.’
‘Thank you, George.’ She probably shouldn’t have been surprised by the endearment, but she was.
When he had gone, she put the receiver back and thought how vast the flat seemed and how empty, and how stupid she had been to tell him not to come.
‘What have you got for me, Blake?’ The superintendent looked perfectly calm as he sat behind his ugly desk, but Blake had known him for years and understood all the frustration he was feeling.
‘Nothing like enough, sir. I’m sorry.’
‘You’ve had the nanny … what’s her name?’
‘Nicky Bagshot,’ said Blake irritably, knowing that the superintendent knew her name as well as he did.
‘That’s the one. You told me Bagshot was the key and demanded a free hand. I gave it to you. You’ve had her in here thirty-three hours already, and you’ve still got nothing to charge her with?’
‘No, sir. I was sure she’d crack. She has to have had something to do with it. Nothing makes any sense unless she’s involved. But she’s a tougher little nut than she looks. Even so, if it hadn’t been for her brief, I’m sure we’d have had her. George Henton of all people!’
‘Yes, how the hell did she know to get him? And why did he come for a little thing like her? Has she had dealings with the law before?’
‘Not so far as we’ve discovered, sir. It was Trish Maguire sent him.’
‘Did she now? How deep
is
she in all this?’
‘I’m still not sure, sir. She keeps cropping up all over the place. I know she’s involved somehow.’
‘Well, of course she is. She’s Antonia Weblock’s cousin.’
‘Yeah, but none of the other relatives have been behaving like that. And some of the prints on the doll’s pram – the ones inside the hood and on the bottom of the mattress – are hers.’
‘Maguire agreed to be printed?’ The superintendent sounded astonished.
‘We didn’t even bother to ask. We knew she wouldn’t. So we lifted her prints off the computer disks she handed Lacie and Derring,’ said Blake with some satisfaction. ‘I know it’s not enough, but it’s another oddity that adds to all the rest.’
‘It certainly isn’t enough,’ the superintendent said coldly. ‘Nothing like. If she’s involved, she’ll have thought up a story to explain the prints away. It wouldn’t be hard. She’s probably in and out of that house all the time; she’ll claim she tidied the toys one day and left her prints on the pram then, or something similar. It could even be true. Anything else?’
‘Only the circumstantial stuff you’ve already heard – her breakdown, the fact that so many small children who’ve been in her charge have had injuries of one sort or another …’
‘Minor injuries, John.’
‘True. But still injuries. Then there’s her interest in child abuse and pornography. I know she claims it’s for this book she’s writing – and Lacie’s got the publishers to confirm they have commissioned it – but that could be a very handy excuse for someone who knows their progress over the Internet can be monitored. And Maguire would know that. She could have provided the stuff we found under Bagshot’s floorboards. As you know, there are no identifiable prints on any of the magazines, which suggests someone pretty knowledgeable put them there.’
‘That’s ridiculous. You don’t need to be “knowledgeable” to be fingerprint-conscious. Everyone watches
The Bill
these days. And aren’t you forgetting Maguire’s alibi?’
‘She’s involved somewhere. I’m sure of that.’
‘You could be right, but it’s hard to see how we’re going to get any evidence,’ said the superintendent.
‘Unless we put her under surveillance, sir.’
‘We could do that, but why should it turn anything up? She’s hardly likely to lead us to the body, and that’s the only thing I can see that would tie her to the case.’
Blake couldn’t think why the superintendent had been able to impress promotion boards so much better than he had. They’d started in the job at the same time and he had a much more substantial arrest record. Why should that shit on the other side of the desk have forged ahead of him like this?
‘We might find her interfering with someone else’s child, sir,’ he said, holding on to his dislike. ‘That would be strong corroboration. I’m sure she’s involved.’
‘So you keep saying. But you haven’t convinced me.’
‘She sits there so quiet, watching all the time, waiting. When she does speak, even when she’s angry, she sounds reasonable. But she’s … There’s something sharp about her, dangerous almost. It’s hard to put a finger on it, but I know there’s fury in her somewhere. It’s tightly controlled, too tightly perhaps, but it’s there.’ Blake gritted his teeth in frustration. He couldn’t even hold the idea long enough to find words to express it, although he knew exactly what he meant.
‘And she enjoyed making an arse of me when I showed too clearly that I assumed she’d come in to confess,’ he added.
‘Wouldn’t anyone who’d been a suspect, especially in a case like this? Come on, Blake, I think you’re letting your ego get in the way of your judgement on this one. Why d’you dislike her so much?’
‘I don’t, sir. Quite the reverse. I thought she was great at first – until she started to make me so damned suspicious. Look at the way she’s behaved the last couple of days: refusing to answer reasonable questions and then tipping up all cool and innocent-like an hour or two later to say she couldn’t have had anything to do with the case because she was eating in a trendy restaurant you and I couldn’t afford in a month of Sundays, and being well and truly noticed by all sorts of influential people.’
‘But it was true, wasn’t it?’
‘Oh, sure. But it’s too pat. And then she turns up as Bagshot’s only friend and provides a top-flight solicitor for her. It’s all wrong, sir. There’s something about it that stinks.’
‘Maybe, but it’s flimsy stuff. If you were a woman I’d accuse you of an overdose of intuition.’
Christ, what an insult! thought Blake.
‘Come on, John, you must admit you’ve got nothing on her that would stand up in court. What about the rest of your suspects? Got anything on any of them yet? Robert Hithe, for instance?’
‘Not enough. There is one missing hour, though. He and Bagshot left McDonald’s just before one-thirty and went back to the house. He stayed there until two-thirty when he left to go to his office. Bagshot claims she took the child to the park a few minutes later.’
‘And what does she say they were all doing during that hour?’
‘She claims – as he did each time we asked him – that she put the child down for a rest because she’s always tired after her swimming lesson, that Hithe read the papers for his meeting in the drawing room, and that she herself read a book on her bed. It could be true.’
‘Unless they were having sex.’
‘As you say, sir. If so, they’re both keeping that very quiet. They both say that Hithe didn’t see the child between getting back after McDonald’s and leaving for his meeting.’
‘You’ve got bugger all, Blake. You must see that. It’s a random snatch by a stranger like I always said, and we’re not going to get any further now until someone stumbles on the body or we get something through
Crimestoppers
or one of the TV appeals.’
‘If there’d been a forcible abduction, someone would’ve seen something,’ said Blake, as he had done so often before. ‘That park was a circus on Saturday, stuffed with potential witnesses.’
‘You never heard of strange men offering little girls sweets, Blake? Come on.’
‘It’s got to be either Hithe or Maguire with Bagshot,’ Blake said obstinately, as though it was the mantra that was going to get him to heaven. ‘It’s got to be.’
‘Maybe you’re right, but without a witness or a cough from Bagshot we haven’t a thing. And now you’re going to have to let her go. It’s not good enough, John. It’ll—’
‘I know you’re being leaned on, sir,’ said Blake, all the muscles in his throat tightening with the effort of not yelling at the man.
‘All we need is a nice juicy body we can get to work on and then we’ll be fine.’
Christ! You really don’t care, thought Blake. You really have no feelings whatsoever for that poor kid. She’s just a case to you, something that’ll help the clear-up rate look good if we get a result or pull us down if we don’t. You are a shit.
‘Don’t look at me like that, John. Face it, she can’t be alive. Not after this long and all the searches we’ve done. There isn’t anywhere else she could be.’
‘Unless someone’s got her in a cellar, pending a purchaser, like in that Belgian case.’
‘There is that, but I doubt it. And even if you’re right, the only thing that’s going to turn that up now is accidental or direct information from a member of the public. We’ve done all we can, checking out the locals.’
‘We can’t give up. Not yet.’
‘Of course not. But we need some new lines of enquiry. Or a body. Something for the lab. boys to work on. Pity that toy pram didn’t give them more.’
‘Only the fingerprints and the two kinds of blood, sir; one matching the boy with the scraped knees and one that’s almost certainly Charlotte’s. There’s nothing in the sample we took from her mother to rule that out.’
‘Well maybe we had better get a costing for surveillance. Sort something out and bring it to the briefing tomorrow morning and we’ll take it from there. But limited, straightforward surveillance, mind. I’m not having officers cosying up to Bagshot in clubs all over London or trying to take Maguire out dancing to seduce her into a confession. Understood?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Blake turned to go, but the superintendent’s voice stopped him as he stood with his hand reaching for the door. ‘Now, on to something else: how’s Kath Lacie shaping up?’ Blake stood facing the door for a second that felt like minutes before getting his face in order. Then he turned.
‘Well enough, sir. She has a knack of getting witnesses to talk and she’s an efficient officer.’
‘Not putting it about, is she, John? Inside the station?’
‘No, sir. Not as far as I know.’
‘Glad to hear it. When they look like that, and talk so sweetly, they can be useful enough for getting round suspects and pleasing juries, but they’re a damn nuisance if they can’t be trusted to keep their legs together. But then maybe it’s less their fault than the idiots’ who risk good promotion prospects for a quick tickle. You know that as well as I do, don’t you, John?’
Blake did not answer.
‘OK. Get on with it.’
With the fury making his eyes feel like hot corn about to pop, John Blake left the superintendent’s office for his own. He’d probably deserved the warning, but coming from that jumped-up prat, it left him wanting to hit someone.
He was still furious more than two and a half hours later when Sam Herrick put his head round the door.
‘Yes?’ he snarled as Sam opened his mouth to ask a question. ‘What do
you
want?’
‘The custody sergeant sent me to find you, sir. We’ve got to get Bagshot out of here in fifteen minutes. Twelve and a half now. And that Henton creep’s been on the phone again to remind us of the time.’
‘I know, I know. I’m on my way.’
He walked down to the cells, sorted the necessary bits of paper, and stood by while the custody sergeant went to unlock Bagshot. He could have let her go without seeing her again, but he wanted her to know that he hadn’t finished with her.
She came slowly up the sick-coloured corridor between the closed doors, looking very small and very stubborn. He knew she’d been holding out on him about something, but he hadn’t been able to work out what. He thought again of the neighbour who insisted she was certain she’d seen Bagshot and the child setting off for the park on Saturday afternoon. Bagshot had had the doll’s pram with her, but the neighbour was convinced she’d seen the child, too. Howling and shouting and very much alive as they walked along the pavement. Blake knew how easy it was for old biddies like his witness to muddle one day with another, but he couldn’t get her to see that. It was a pain in the arse he hadn’t managed to shake her and get her to admit she might have seen Bagshot and the pram, but
not
the child. He’d tried hard enough.
He also thought of the gay swimming teacher who’d been so jumpy when they interviewed him until it became clear they were asking about Bagshot and her treatment of the child, not about his own activities. The jumpiness had made Blake highly suspicious until he’d probed a bit further. Then the bloke had broken down and admitted he had a record for drug dealing and had done time in Feltham as a juvenile. Blake had sent an officer to check it out and the reasons for the jumpiness had become entirely clear. It wasn’t only anabolic steroids they were dealing in the health club he belonged to; it was smack and coke and amyl nitrate and God knows what besides. He’d passed the information over to the Drugs Squad. The swimming teacher was probably already up on a charge, but that wasn’t Blake’s concern.