Free Creeping Ivy by Natasha Cooper Page B

babies playing with hand-carved bone rattles on a hearthrug woven by his devoted wife during long winter evenings while he did manly work in the fresh air somewhere else. There’d be apple pies in the oven, smelling of cinnamon, and me being plump and aproned, smiling adoringly whenever he chose to come home to pay my bills and keep me safe and tell me what to do. Ugh!’
    Trish had never seen evidence of so much imagination from Antonia before and hoped she was not goggling in astonishment.
    ‘Robert would detest all that as much as I do. He likes decent restaurants and adult company and a much more sophisticated kind of life altogether. And he’s not in the least threatened by my success. Ben couldn’t ever hack that. It was weird, you know; I’d always earned infinitely more than him even at the beginning, but he insisted on paying for everything. I suppose it was some kind of power trip, but it drove me mad. Robert’s completely different. He loves the fact that I make such a lot and positively encourages me to lavish money on him.’
    ‘And that’s a good thing?’
    ‘Sure. Can’t you see why? He’s confident enough to take, which Ben never was. And it’s a hell of a lot easier to live with a confident man than a dribbling wimp.’
    ‘Oh. Good,’ Trish said, thinking, Poor Ben. What a life you led him.
    ‘And then Robert likes me as I am. Ben was always trying to make me different, less than I am, so that he wouldn’t feel inferior.’
    Did he? Trish asked herself, looking back into the past. Surely not. Didn’t he just want you to go on caring about him in the way that you seemed to at the beginning? Wasn’t that all it was?
    ‘Well, I’m really glad it’s working,’ she said aloud. ‘By the way, what was Robert’s reaction to the bruises you saw on Charlotte’s arms?’
    ‘He didn’t know anything about them.’
    Trish stared. She would never understand Antonia. In her position, Trish would have told everyone anywhere near so that she could involve them all in policing Charlotte’s life.
    Was it possible that at some level Antonia had always known that Nicky was unlikely to have made the marks? Could she have been afraid it was Robert? So afraid that she hadn’t been able to admit it to anyone, even the police?
    ‘Why didn’t you tell him?’ Trish asked as gently as possible.
    Antonia shrugged. ‘He’s not all that good at pretending, and I didn’t trust him not to alert Nicky before I’d got some evidence one way or the other.’
    ‘Right. I see – at least I think I do. Antonia?’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Did the police give you any idea of who saw Charlotte last yesterday?’
    ‘Nicky, of course.’ Antonia looked at Trish as though she was a complete fool. ‘And before that Robert when he left for the office at two-thirty. And before that Mike, her swimming teacher. But they will have left the pool at about twelve as usual, so he can’t have seen anything useful. Who’s that out there?’
    They’d both heard the journalists coming to life outside the closed windows.
    ‘It must be Nicky,’ said Trish, hearing an anxious female voice amid the reporters’ aggressively excited babble. ‘Shall I rescue Constable Derring from the kitchen and let her get started?’
    ‘Not yet. I want a word with Nicky first.’
    ‘But the inspector specifically said …’
    ‘Sod that. There are things I need to know before they get their hands on her.’
    Antonia left the room, to return a moment later with a slight fair-haired young woman at her side.
    Trish looked at her with interest. She had never met the nanny before and knew of her only from Antonia’s impatient descriptions and Charlotte’s affectionate prattle on the night of the wiggly worms. It seemed from her account then that Nicky, too, had been pretty good at proving that they didn’t exist.
    She was said to be twenty-one, but Trish thought she looked younger, possibly because she was so small. Barely five feet two, she was slim