Little Face Read online

  He looks as if he is considering ignoring me, but then thinks better of it. He turns to face me. ‘Alice, I think you ought to calm down so that we can discuss this rationally.’

  ‘Just because I’m upset doesn’t mean I’m not being rational. I’m as rational as you are!’

  ‘Good,’ says David patiently. ‘In that case, we should be able to clear this up. If you’re seriously suggesting this baby isn’t our daughter, convince me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I am confused.

  ‘Well, in what way is she different? Florence hasn’t got any hair. She’s got milk spots on her nose. She’s got blue eyes. You’d agree with all that, presumably?’

  ‘Look at her!’ I scream. ‘She’s got a different face! It isn’t Florence!’

  David stares at me as if he has never seen me before. He thinks I am a lunatic. He doesn’t recognise me as his wife. I can see him drawing a line, mentally. David is defensive, as emotionally immature as a teenage boy. I wonder if this is because his mother has always looked after him. He has never needed to think his way through a complex adult situation on his own. He would rather cut you out of his life, shut you out of his mind, than deal with the less-than-perfect reality that you represent. Problematic people such as his father and Laura are never mentioned. How long before I too am condemned?

  ‘David, you must know it isn’t her. That is not the baby I kissed goodbye a couple of hours ago. The one we brought home from the hospital. The one who wriggled and cried when I put that babygro on her. Take it off!’ I yell suddenly, startling myself as much as David. ‘It’s Florence’s! I don’t want that baby wearing it. Take it off her!’ I back away into the hall.

  ‘You’re acting as if you’re scared of her.’ I have never seen David look so disgusted. ‘Alice, what’s wrong with you? There’s only one baby. Florence. This is her.’

  ‘David, look at her!’ I yell. I have become a creature, wild and uncivilised, some sort of beast. ‘Look at her face. It’s a different face, can’t you see that? Yes, she’s got blue eyes and milk spots, but so have hundreds of newborns. I’m calling Vivienne.’ I run from the room. In the hall, my eyes dart from left to right. My vision blurs. Adrenaline makes me pant. I am so confused and upset, I momentarily forget what I am doing here, what I am looking for. Then I remember. The phone.

  David follows me into the hall. I see that he is alone. ‘What have you done with the baby?’ I ask. I felt uneasy when I could see her. I feel even more so now that I can’t. David pulls the phone out of my hand and slams it down. ‘Don’t dare to interrupt Mum and Felix’s holiday with this rubbish! Mum’ll think you’ve lost it. Alice, you’ve got to get a grip. Listen to yourself.’

  Vivienne has taken Felix to Florida for a treat, to celebrate the new baby. I would have preferred him to stay, but Vivienne insisted that this was the best way of ensuring that he doesn’t resent the arrival of Florence. It is apparently a successful tactic for avoiding jealousy. Vivienne is an only child and always hated the idea of siblings. She asked her parents not to have another child, as soon as she was old enough to understand the concept. What is perhaps more surprising is that they obeyed her.

  David’s father wanted a big family. He himself was one of six. ‘I told him on no account,’ said Vivienne. ‘A child should grow up feeling special. How can you feel special if there are six of you?’ She was careful to wait until David was out of the house to tell me this story. His father is never mentioned in front of him.

  I am not accustomed to forcing my husband to confront unwelcome truths. I have always tried to protect him.

  ‘The front door was open,’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘When I got back. The front door was open. You were asleep. Someone must have come in and taken Florence and . . . and left that baby instead! We’ve got to phone the police, David. Oh, God, Florence! Where is she? What if she’s not all right? What if something awful’s happened to her?’ I am pulling at my hair, howling.

  There are tears in David’s eyes. When he speaks his voice is quiet. ‘Alice, you’re scaring me. Don’t do this, please. You’re really scaring me, okay. Please, calm down. I want you to walk into the kitchen, take a good look at the baby in the bouncy chair and I want you to realise that it is Florence. It is. Okay?’ There is a flicker of hope in his eyes. He is softening, giving me a final chance. I know how significant an admission of fear is from David. He must really love me, I think. And now I have to crush his hopes.

  ‘But it isn’t!’ I insist. ‘Listen to her crying! Listen!’ Poor, poor baby, confused, screaming for her mother. ‘That’s not Florence’s cry. Give me the phone.’

  ‘No! Alice, please, this is mad. Let me phone Dr Dhossajee. You need a sedative, or . . . some sort of help. I should phone the doctor.’

  ‘David, give me the phone right now or I swear I will get a kitchen knife and stab you.’

  He winces. I cannot believe I said that. Why couldn’t I have threatened to strangle him instead? I didn’t say it deliberately to hurt him, but he must think I did.

  ‘David, someone’s got our daughter! We’ve got to do something, quickly!’

  He lets me pick up the phone. ‘Who are you ringing?’ he asks.

  ‘The police. And then Vivienne. She’ll believe me, even if you don’t.’

  ‘Ring the police if you insist, but not Mum, please.’

  ‘Because you know she’ll back me up. That’s why, isn’t it?’

  ‘Alice, if it isn’t Florence, who is it? Babies don’t just drop out of the sky, you know. I was only asleep for ten minutes . . .’

  ‘That’s long enough.’

  ‘There are tests we can do, DNA tests, to prove it’s Florence. We can sort it all out before Mum gets back. Look, she’s my mother, not yours. It’s up to me whether we ring her or not, and we’re not ringing her.’ David is babbling desperately. He cannot bear the thought of being observed in a situation of personal difficulty. I think he regards any sort of unhappiness as a shameful and absolutely private matter. For Vivienne to see him like this, tangled up in this awful mess, would be his worst nightmare.

  ‘Well, I haven’t got a mother, have I?’ My voice cracks. ‘Vivienne’s the closest I’ve got and I’m damn well phoning her. Police, please,’ I say into the telephone. ‘I should never have agreed to move in here. This house is jinxed!’ I snap. ‘If we lived somewhere else, this would never have happened.’

  ‘That’s rubbish!’ David looks as if I’ve slapped him across the face. I have insulted his beloved family home. ‘You can’t expect me to leave my son.’

  ‘Of course I don’t! We’d take Felix with us.’ This is the most direct exchange David and I have ever had on the matter of where we ought to live.

  ‘Yes, great, we’ll just take him away from Mum, who’s been like a mother to him since Laura died! I can’t believe you’d even suggest it!’

  ‘Police, please. I need to report an . . . I’ve just been on hold!’

  ‘This whole thing will blow over. It will blow over,’ David mumbles to himself. He sits down on the stairs and puts his head in his hands. Despite his efforts at self-control, his misery and shock overtake him. He has never cried in front of me before. He must be wondering if he could be wrong, no matter how sure he feels. I realise he will not forgive me for having witnessed this display of emotion.

  ‘Go and comfort the baby. David, listen to me. Please. The baby’s scared.’ The helpless, baffled cry pierces my heart. It is all I can do to remain upright.

  Poor, poor Florence. I cannot bear to think about how badly she might be suffering. All I want is to be able to hug her close to me, feel her soft, squashy cheek against mine.

  A moan rises from David’s throat. ‘What are you saying? Listen to yourself – “the baby”. She’s our daughter, our Florence. How can you do this? Put the phone down! You go and comfort her.’ He is furious with me, but also angry with himself for believing so wholeheartedly in his second chance, his new li
fe with me and Florence. He must feel shamed now, taunted by the elation that he has felt in the past two weeks. It makes me sad to think that I understand his pain better than he will ever understand mine.

  ‘Help me, help me, need to report a . . . sorry, sorry.’ A woman’s voice is telling me to calm down. I am crying so hard that she cannot tell what I am saying. ‘I need to report an abduction.’ I have to repeat this twice. The misery of three people echoes around the house. ‘My baby daughter, Florence. Yes. My name is Alice Fancourt.’

  4

  3/10/03, 12.10 pm

  ‘Run that one by me again,’ said Charlie. ‘You’re suggesting that David Fancourt killed Laura Cryer?’

  ‘It’s remedial fucking logic! Anyone with a brain would say the same, now that Alice and the kid have disappeared. And there’s something about him. I thought so as soon as I met him.’ Simon tried to put the reason for his mistrust into words. ‘There’s no real person behind his eyes. I looked at him and all I saw was a blank. Remember that Billy Idol song, ‘Eyes Without a Face’?’

  ‘Call me slow,’ said Charlie, knowing Simon would never be foolish enough to do so, ‘but I could have sworn I headed the team that worked on that case myself, and I could further have sworn that we got someone for it.’

  ‘I know all that,’ said Simon distractedly. He’d still been in uniform in those days. Charlie was the expert. Still, he couldn’t silence the voice in his head, the one that was shouting Alice’s name in the dark. And underneath that, the same question, over and over: would she have run away without telling him? Would she know that her disappearance would worry him personally as well as professionally? He hadn’t really said anything. He hadn’t said or done nearly enough.

  Simon’s parents were the only two people in the world whose behaviour he could predict with absolute accuracy: their tea at six o’clock, church on Sunday morning, straight to bed after the ten o’clock news. He came from a stable background, all right. Most people seemed to think stable equalled happy.

  Behind Simon’s back, a spotty bobby was playing Pokey. Every so often he hissed ‘Yesss!’ and banged into the back of Simon’s chair. The one-armed bandit machine, the canteen’s only asset. Simon hated it, regarded it as the mark of an uncivilised society. He disapproved of everything that he perceived as being in that category: noisy, beeping machine entertainment. If he ever had children – unlikely, yes, but not impossible – he would ban all computer games from the house. He’d make his kids read the classics, just as he had as a child. The lyrics of another eighties song, The Smiths this time, sprang to mind: ‘There’s more to life than books, you know, but not much more’.

  Morrissey had it right. Sport was pointless, socialising too stressful. Simon loved the careful, deliberate nature of books. They gave shape to things, trained you to look for a pattern. Like a man’s second wife going missing after his first wife’s been murdered. When an author took the time and trouble to choose exactly the right words and arrange them in the right order, there was a possibility of genuine communication taking place, the thoughtful writer reaching the thoughtful reader. The opposite of what happened when two people opened their mouths and simply let their half-formed, incoherent thoughts spill out. Speak for yourself, Charlie would have said.

  ‘I assume it was the lovely Alice who put these suspicions about Fancourt into your mind. What’s been going on between you and her, Simon? As soon as this becomes a misper, you’ll have to tell me, so why not get it over with?’

  Simon shook his head. When he had to, he’d tell her, not a moment before. As yet, no case file had been opened. He didn’t want to hurt Charlie, less still to admit how badly he’d fucked up. I hope I don’t need to remind you how much trouble you’ll be in if you’ve been seeing Alice Fancourt in your own time. You’ll be a suspect, you bloody idiot. How was he supposed to know that Alice and the baby would go missing? ‘Tell me about Laura Cryer,’ he said. Listening would be a distraction; speaking at any length would be an ordeal.

  ‘What, over a cream tea? We’ve got a shitload of work to get on with. And you haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘Work?’ He stared at her, outraged. ‘You mean the paperwork I thoughtlessly created by coming up with the evidence we needed to secure convictions in two major cases?’

  He felt the fierceness of his own stare, wielded it like a drill. Eventually Charlie looked away. Sometimes, when Simon least expected it, she backed down. ‘This’ll have to be quick,’ she said gruffly. ‘Darryl Beer, one of the many bloody scourges of our green and pleasant land, killed Laura Cryer. He pleaded guilty, he’s banged up. End of story.’

  ‘That was quick,’ Simon agreed. ‘I know Beer. I arrested him a couple of times.’ Just another piece of Winstanley estate scum, streets cleaner without him. Once you’d met enough characters like Beer, you fell into using cliches, the ones you were sick of hearing other cops use, the ones you swore you’d never resort to.

  ‘We’ve all arrested him a couple of times. Anyway, you wanted the story so here it is: December 2000. I can’t remember the exact date, but it was a Friday night. Laura Cryer left work late – she was a scientist, worked at Rawndesley Science park for a company called BioDiverse. She went straight from the lab to her mother-in-law Vivienne Fancourt’s house, where her son Felix was. She parked just inside the gate, on that paved bit, you know?’

  Simon nodded. He had set himself the task of sitting still for as long as it took Charlie to fill him in. He thought he could do it.

  ‘When she walked back to her car ten minutes later, Beer tried to mug her. He stabbed her with a bog-standard kitchen knife – one clean slice – and left her to bleed to death. Ran off with her Gucci handbag, minus the strap, which we found by her body. Cut by the same knife. Vivienne Fancourt found the body the next morning. Anyway, we struck lucky on the DNA front. Beer left so much hair at the scene, we could have made a wig out of it. We ran the DNA profile and there was a match. Step forward, Darryl Beer.’

  Charlie smiled, remembering the satisfaction she’d felt at the time. ‘We were glad to be able to bang him up, useless junkie scrote that he is.’ She noticed Simon’s frown. ‘Oh, come on! In the two weeks before Cryer’s death, Vivienne Fancourt had phoned the station twice to report a young man loitering on her property. She gave us a description that was Darryl Beer to a tee – dyed pony-tail, tattoos. He was questioned at the time and denied it. Said it was her word against his, the cocky little shit.’

  ‘What was he doing there?’ asked Simon. ‘The Elms is in the middle of nowhere. It’s not as if there’s a pub or even an all-night garage nearby.’

  ‘How should I know?’ Charlie shrugged.

  ‘I’m not saying you should know. I’m saying it should bother you that you don’t.’ Simon was regularly amazed by the lack of curiosity displayed by other detectives. All too often there were aspects of cases about which Charlie and the others seemed happy to say, ‘I guess that’ll have to remain an open question.’ Not Simon. He had to know, always, everything. Not knowing made him feel helpless, which made him lash out.

  ‘Did Vivienne Fancourt see Darryl Beer on the night of the murder?’ he asked Charlie.

  She shook her head.

  ‘The two times she saw him, where in the grounds . . .’

  ‘Behind the house, on the river side.’ She had seen that one coming. ‘Nowhere near the scene of the murder. And most of the physical evidence we found was on the body itself, on Laura Cryer’s clothes. Beer couldn’t possibly have left it during a previous visit. Because, obviously, that possibility occurred to us just as it occurred to you.’ There was a bitter edge to her voice. ‘So you can stop thinking of yourself as the lone genius amid a cluster of morons.’

  ‘What the fuck is that supposed to mean?’ Simon wouldn’t be told what to think, not by anybody.

  ‘I would have thought it was unambiguous.’ Charlie sighed. ‘Simon, we all know how good you are, okay? Sometimes I think you’d actually prefer it if
we didn’t. You need to have something to grate against, don’t you?’

  ‘Why was there so much hair? Did Cryer pull it out? Did she struggle?’ Fuck all that psychological bullshit. Simon was interested in Laura Cryer and Darryl Beer. Really interested now. He wasn’t just asking in order to avoid an explosion. He still had that twitch in his right knee.

  ‘Or else the fucker’s got alopecia. No, he tried to snatch her handbag. She fought for it, probably more than he’d anticipated. She must have done, or it wouldn’t have ended in a stabbing, would it?’

  ‘You mentioned tattoos.’

  ‘Love and hate on his knuckles.’ Charlie mimed a yawn. ‘Not very original.’

  ‘So, you arrested him,’ Simon prompted. As if by speeding up her account he could find Alice quicker.

  ‘Sellers and Gibbs did. As soon as they heard about Vivienne Fancourt’s intruder, they picked him up. The lab put a rush on the DNA, and let’s just say we weren’t exactly surprised to get the result we got.’

  ‘You knew where you wanted the evidence to take you, and lo and behold . . .’

  ‘Simon, I’m not in the mood for one man’s struggle against the system today, I’m really not. This isn’t a Greek tragedy, it’s Spilling fucking nick, okay? Shut the fuck up and listen!’ Charlie paused, to compose herself. ‘Beer protested his innocence, predictably. Made up some shite alibi which didn’t really stand up. Claimed he was in his flat, watching telly with his mate, who appeared to be marginally less trustworthy than Beer himself. He didn’t have a brief, so he got the duty solicitor. We kept at him for a while, trying to trip him up. He didn’t know we had a trump card up our sleeve, of course.’

  ‘And you didn’t tell him,’ Simon guessed aloud.

  ‘Phase disclosure, all above board,’ said Charlie smugly. ‘We did our best to twirl him and it didn’t work. Once we were sure we weren’t going to get anything out of him, we pulled the DNA match out of the hat. His solicitor went mental.’