Читать книгу Am I Guilty?: The gripping, emotional domestic thriller debut filled with suspense, mystery and surprises! - Jackie Kabler - Страница 17

‘No, that’s all right, I understand. Thank you so much anyway.’

I put the phone down and sighed, raking my fingers through my unwashed hair, wiping a bead of perspiration from my forehead, suddenly feeling sweaty even though the room was chilly. Another child modelling agency, another polite refusal to help me. I desperately needed to organize a photo shoot, needed pictures of my new spring stock for the website, but since Zander died, since all the publicity, it was proving nigh on impossible to hire any models at all. The refusals from the places I’d used previously were always gentle, always diplomatic, but the meaning was clear.

‘It’s just, Mrs Ashfield, in the light of events, you know …’, and ‘It’s a little tricky, you see, Thea, to persuade parents to allow it, you understand, after …’

That kind of thing. Parents didn’t trust me around their children anymore, and why on earth would they? I asked myself for the hundredth time why I was so determined to keep doing this, why I didn’t just close the company, questions that so many people, some I knew, many I didn’t, had asked in recent months.

‘Who’s going to buy clothes for their kids from a woman who killed her baby?’

‘You’re probably going to be in prison soon anyway. Why bother? Give it up, Thea.’

‘Don’t you have enough to worry about with the trial coming up? You need time to prepare your defence. You don’t have to close it down for ever, just take a break.’

This last comment was from Isla, and I knew she was probably right, but something in me just didn’t want to let it go, not now, not unless I really had to. I needed my work, needed the distraction, something other than alcohol to fill the long days when Nell was with Rupert. Something to make me feel that I wasn’t just a sick woman who had done something unspeakably evil, that I could still do something good, support myself and my child. And maybe, in some small way, forcing myself to keep the business afloat was another way of punishing myself. I deserved the abuse I got, understood it completely. I wouldn’t let someone like me, someone who’d done what I’d done, near my child.

I was disgusting, a monster. A child killer. A vile excuse for a mother. A woman who was on police bail, awaiting trial, after being charged with the manslaughter of her own baby. I mean, who the hell would want to even talk to me, never mind work with me? I was amazed the modelling agencies were so civil. I doubt I would have been, in their position.

I ran my fingers over the soft alpaca wool of the poncho that was folded on the table in front of me, a sample just in from Bolivia, trying to calm myself down, then pushed my chair back from the table and walked to the window, staring out at the wet, dull morning. On the pavement outside my front gate, two elderly ladies, one clutching a red umbrella, the other wearing one of those transparent, plastic headscarves, were chatting animatedly. I wondered if they were talking about me, if they realized whose home they were standing outside. The worst mother in Britain. The woman who drank so much champagne she forgot about her baby and left him to die in a hot car.