Creeping Ivy Read Online Free PDF

clothes, it was the most expensive version available and it fitted beautifully, but there was no getting away from the fact that it was a tracksuit. Her highlighted hair was tousled and needed washing, too, and yesterday’s mascara was smudged down the sides of her nose.
    But anyone would have agreed that she was a good-looking woman, bigger in every way than Trish. Her face, which was long and dominated by her direct grey eyes and firm chin, suited her better at thirty-four than it had done a decade earlier, before her achievements had caught up with her confidence. She usually held herself well and spoke firmly in a voice that had become rounder and plummier with each new success, but that morning she sounded vulnerable and looked as though the connections between her vertebrae had loosened in some way, allowing her whole body to collapse in on itself.
    She was sitting hunched over hey waistband and clutching her knees, tightening her hands whenever she had to say anything about Charlotte. The movement made her rings flash, accentuating the size and brilliance of the matching hoops of diamonds she wore on each hand.
    They looked absurd with the tracksuit, but Trish knew that Antonia was so used to wearing them that it would never have crossed her mind to take them off. To her they were neither status symbols nor an advertisement of her latest bonus; they were merely toys she liked and felt she deserved after all her hard work.
    She was trying to explain to the two plain-clothed detectives why Charlotte could not possibly have been kidnapped for ransom. Trish wished she had got to the house earlier and been able to hear everything they’d had to say from the start. As it was she had no idea whether the kidnap idea was a longshot or something they were taking seriously. She assumed they’d already discussed the possibility that Ben, Antonia’s ex-husband, might have Charlotte with him. He could never have harmed her, Trish was certain, but the police wouldn’t have known that, and his house must have been one of the first places they’d thought to look.
    Although DCI Blake was watching Antonia’s face as she talked so earnestly, Trish noticed that the much younger woman officer was staring at the rings and apparently trying to assess their worth. Constable Jenny Derring’s expression suggested that she thought Antonia’s wealth was quite enough to make the kidnap theory feasible.
    ‘Anyway,’ Antonia said as though she was summing up a meeting, ‘if they were after a ransom, they’d have been in touch by now.’ Then her certainty wavered and she sounded like any terrified mother. ‘Wouldn’t they?’
    ‘Not necessarily,’ said the chief inspector gently.
    He was about the same age as Antonia and he was treating her carefully. Trish had been impressed to see that although he was visibly sympathetic, he was not allowing his own emotions to leak into his voice and he had not offered any reassurance. That in itself would have made her trust him. There could be no honest reassurance for anyone until Charlotte was found.
    ‘They could be trying to soften you up, Ms Weblock, to make you more receptive to their demands. Or you could be right and her disappearance has nothing to do with any ransom demand. What—’
    He did not have time to put his question before Antonia had covered her face with her hands, muttering into them. Eventually Trish worked out that the words were: ‘I feel so guilty.’
    She ached to help, but there was nothing she could say or do. She could not even ask questions or offer advice until the police had gone. This was their interview and she was here only to be Antonia’s silent support.
    ‘Guilty?’ repeated the chief inspector with no less gentleness. He had an attractive voice, deep and seductive. It would make confession almost easy, Trish thought.
    ‘Why do you say that, Ms Weblock?’
    ‘Well, it’s all my fault. It has to be. If I … Oh, Christ!’ Antonia must have been on