Little Face

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘What did Beer say?’

  ‘He still denied it. It didn’t do him any good, though. We had the evidence we needed. Anyway, his brief must have talked some sense into him. After a few weeks as Her Majesty’s guest at Earlmount, Beer suddenly changed his story. He confessed. Not to murder, to aggravated assault. He turned Queen’s, shopped a couple of prominent local low-lifes, promised to go into rehab and counselling, and got himself a lighter sentence. Fucking disgrace, when you think about it. Twat’ll probably be out before we know it.’

  ‘Where is he now? Not still at Earlmount?’

  Charlie pursed her lips and glared at Simon. After a few seconds she said, grudgingly, ‘Brimley.’ A category A/B prison, about ten miles from Culver Ridge in the direction of the very unlovely town of Combingham. An iron grey sprawling concrete offence, it stood neglected among drab fields that looked, whenever Simon drove past them, as if they had been shorn by a particularly savage piece of machinery and doused with noxious chemicals.

  ‘Did Beer know the details of how Cryer was killed?’ he asked. ‘When he confessed, I mean.’

  ‘Only a hazy version. He claimed he’d been off his head on drugs and barely remembered anything. That was how he got the charge dropped to aggravated assault.’

  ‘He didn’t tell you robbery was the motive?’

  ‘What else could it have been?’ Charlie frowned. A question, thought Simon; an important question, yet she presented it as an answer. ‘Beer didn’t know Cryer. They didn’t exactly mix in the same circles. He’d obviously been hanging round The Elms in the weeks before, looking for opportunities to break in. It’s a fairly obvious target, let’s face it – biggest house in the area. He was probably having another scout round the place when he saw Cryer walking towards him with a Gucci handbag dangling from her shoulder. He ran off with the bag, he was a drug addict – yes, I’d say it’s a pretty safe bet that robbery was the motive.’

  Just occasionally, the expression on Charlie’s face when she said certain words reminded Simon of the class difference between them. There was a way of saying ‘drug addict’ as if you’d never met one, as if the flawed and the weak belonged in a different universe. That was how Charlie said it. And she’d met hundreds. ‘Did he give you the murder weapon? Or the bag?’

  ‘He couldn’t remember what he’d done with either, and we never found them. It happens, Simon,’ she added, defensively. ‘Doesn’t mean the scrote’s innocent.’ All male offenders were scrotes. Women were splits. The police’s secret language was a second uniform. It made everyone feel safe.

  ‘A kitchen knife, you said?’ That sounded wrong. ‘Wouldn’t Beer’s type be more likely to have a shooter?’

  ‘He might be more likely to, but he didn’t,’ Charlie said calmly. ‘He had a kitchen knife. Focus on the known, Simon. The DNA match. The knife wound in Laura Cryer’s chest.’ She was as vigilant in defending her certainties as Simon was in examining his doubts. The combination wasn’t always comfortable.

  ‘Did you interview the family? The Fancourts?’

  ‘God, if only we’d thought of that! Of course we bloody did. David Fancourt and Laura Cryer had been separated for several years by the time she was killed. They were in the process of getting a divorce and he was engaged to his second wife. He had no reason to want Cryer dead.’

  ‘Alimony? Custody?’ She’d avoided mentioning Alice by name. It could have been a coincidence.

  ‘Fancourt’s not exactly strapped for cash. You’ve seen the house. And why assume he’d have wanted full custody? He still got to see his son, and he had his new romance to think of. Having a kid around full-time might have been a bit of a passion-killer.’

  She had the air of somebody answering these questions for the first time, which worried Simon. ‘The family would have closed ranks,’ he said. ‘They always do, especially when there’s a prime suspect like Beer in the frame. It’s much easier to assume it’s the outsider.’

  ‘“The outsider!”’ Charlie sneered. ‘Aw, you make him sound all sweet and lonely. He’s a fucking drug addict piece of shit. Simon, come off it, for Christ’s sake. You know as well as I do that drugs are always involved. There are three kinds of murders: domestics blown up out of control, sex attacks, and drug-dealing scrotes with shooters waging turf wars. But basically, most of them usually boil down to drugs at some level.’

  ‘Usually that’s true. But not always.’ Simon’s body and mind felt numb, anaesthetised. What did he know now that he hadn’t before? There was a difference between facts and truth. Very fucking profound. It was too easy to hide behind words. Movement now seemed impossible. Talking to Charlie had trapped him in the cerebral, the theoretical. He was discussing a woman he had never met, either alive or dead. He might never get up out of his chair.

  ‘Okay, then, I’m listening. Why would David Fancourt want to kill Laura Cryer? Why?’ Charlie demanded.

  ‘They were separated. Did anyone ask why? Maybe the reason they split up was relevant. There might have been some animosity between them.’ Coward, said the voice in his head. Do something.

  Charlie chewed the inside of her lip. ‘True,’ she said. ‘And there equally might not. Plenty of people separate because they fall out of love, but they still like each other. Or so I’m told. Let’s face it, you and I know sod all about marriage. I’m sure the way we imagine it is nothing like the real thing.’ A knowing smile pulled at the corners of her mouth.

  Simon cast about for a plausible change of subject. Being single was something Charlie thought they had in common, but Simon preferred to think of himself as not yet attached. Single sounded too defensive. If you felt defensive, you really didn’t want to sound it.

  Charlie slept with a lot of men and was vocal about it at all the wrong times. Like now, when Simon had no space in his head for her comic flippancy. If she hadn’t mentioned sex yet, then she was about to. She made a point of turning her love life into entertainment for her team, which was enough to get Colin Sellers and Chris Gibbs in on time every day for the next instalment. Was there a new one, daily? It sometimes felt that way. And there was little love involved as far as Simon could tell.

  He didn’t like the thought of men mistreating Charlie. He couldn’t understand why she allowed so many to use and discard her. She deserved better. He’d raised it once, tentatively, and she had pounced on him, insisting that she was the one who did the using and discarding, the one in control.

  Simon shook his head. Charlie could distract him too easily. Alice was the one who was missing. She was still missing. Nobody had come to tell them it was a mistake.

  ‘You’re wasting your time and mine with all this, Simon. David Fancourt wasn’t anywhere near Spilling the night Laura Cryer was killed.’

  ‘He wasn’t? Where was he, then?’

  ‘In London, with his fiancée.’

  ‘You mean . . . ?’ Simon felt heat under his skin. Charlie had been sitting on Fancourt’s alibi all this time, saving her trump card. Phase fucking disclosure.

  ‘Yes. Alice was his alibi, although no-one really thought he needed one because – did I mention this? – the evidence against Darryl Beer was beyond doubt.’ Charlie leaned her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her hands. ‘So, if Alice Fancourt told you her husband killed Laura Cryer, she’s lying. Or else she was lying then. Either way, I’d say there’s quite a lot pointing to her being untrustworthy. If you remember, I said she was unhinged right from the start.’ Charlie’s expression darkened. ‘A mad bitch, I think was how I put it.’

  Simon knew that if he spoke now, he’d say something that would be difficult, later, to take back. He grabbed his jacket and got the hell away from Charlie as quickly as he could.

  5

  Friday September 26, 2003

  The worst things in life only strike once. I say this to my patients to help them move forward with their lives, to enable them to process the disasters that have befallen them. As soon as it is over, whatever it is, you can
begin to console yourself with the thought that it will never happen again.

  It worked for me when my parents died in a car crash eight years ago. I stood at their funeral, feeling as if the stitches that had held my soul together all these years were now slowly, painfully coming undone. I was a twenty-eight-year-old orphan. I didn’t have any siblings to turn to. I had friends, but friendship felt thin and inadequate, like a summer jacket in winter. I needed, craved, family. I carried my lost, beloved parents around with me like a hole in my heart.

  My friends and colleagues were surprised by how badly I was affected. People seemed to think that, having had twenty-eight years of love and security, I would be well-equipped to deal with my sudden loss. I quickly learned that I was expected to be somehow insulated against what might otherwise have been extreme pain by having had a secure, happy childhood. Everyone waited for me to bounce back, to start to focus on the good times, the fond memories. Their complacent assumptions were an insult to my grief and pushed me from a state of mourning into one of severe depression. I got the impression my friends were itching to say, ‘Oh, well, they had a good innings, didn’t they?’ But my parents were only in their early fifties when they died.

  I kept in touch with nobody when I left London. The company of my friends, when I’d really needed them, had made me feel lonelier than any amount of solitude ever could. It wasn’t their fault, of course. They tried their best to jolly me along. They weren’t to know that their forced and ever-so-slightly impatient cheerfulness was suffocating me like poison gas.

  I survived in the only way I could – by allowing myself to feel the worst feelings for as long as they needed to be felt. At my lowest point, I had only one consolation. I was able to say to myself, plausibly, that at least this would never happen to me again. I could not lose my parents twice. Whatever else my future might contain, there would be no lorry that would skid on a patch of ice and plough on to the wrong side of the Al near Newark, straight into my parents’ car, the new Audi they’d bought when they passed the trusty old Volvo on to me. That had already happened. It was over.

  But this nightmare, the one I’m living now, is not over. It is only just beginning. I see now that trouble doesn’t always strike, in a clean, wham-bam-thank-you-Ma’am kind of way. Sometimes it drifts into your vicinity like bad weather, creeps up on you and lingers, deepening with every day that goes by. I cannot see any way out of this despair because I still do not know how much worse things are going to get.

  I have locked myself in the bedroom. David has tried to reason with me through the door, to persuade me, feature by feature, that the baby in the house is so identical to Florence in every particular that she can only be Florence. He has given up now. I didn’t allow myself to hear him. I blocked out his words with a pair of foam earplugs. I keep these in the top drawer of my bedside cabinet at The Elms. Without them, David’s snoring would keep me awake. He is always indignant when I mention this. He says I snored while I was pregnant and he didn’t make a fuss about it, but then David could sleep through a rock concert. Nothing wakes him.

  This is one of the details I know about my husband. What else do I know? That he is excellent with machines of all kinds, anything electronic or mechanical. That his favourite meal is roast beef with all the trimmings. That he buys me flowers for my birthday and our anniversary and treats me to long weekends in five star hotels to celebrate these and other special occasions. That he calls women ladies.

  I have never opposed him before. I have always perceived him as being too fragile. When we first met, Laura had recently left him and he was dealing not only with the disintegration of his hopes for a happy family life but also with the agony of separation from Felix. Although he didn’t like to talk about how much this hurt him, I could imagine it all too easily. I handled him with extreme care, not wanting to add to his unhappiness in any way.

  When Laura died so suddenly and violently three years ago, David stopped confiding in me altogether. He became quiet and withdrawn, and I found myself being even more tactful and placatory around him. Felix came to live at The Elms, which must have made David happy, yet at the same time he is bound to have felt guilty and confused because the event that led to his reunion with his son was one which must have been terribly painful for him. I have learned from the counselling component of my homeopathy training that it is often much harder to deal with the death of somebody who is close to us if our feelings for that person are in any way unresolved or problematic.

  I thought that by respecting David’s emotional privacy and loving him as fiercely as I did, I would eventually convince him that it was safe to open up to me, but I was wrong. As he got used to life with Felix at The Elms, and as he came to terms with the idea that Laura was not around any more, David became, on the surface, his old, charming self, but the emotional distance between us remained, and he seemed so resistant to my attempts to close it that I began to wonder if he actively wanted a barrier in place. I was reluctant to force or rush him. I told myself that he probably still found the rawness deep down too painful to confront, that in order to believe in his façade of normality he might need to operate, for a while, on a more superficial level. Three years on, we have still not discussed Laura’s death, and I have never managed to shake off the feeling that I must be careful not to say anything that will disturb his mental equilibrium.

  Part of the reason I refused to open the door when he begged me to is that I cannot bear to confront the damage all this is doing to him. I worry that the nightmare we have embarked upon today will destroy him.

  Vivienne is coming home. She is cutting short her and Felix’s holiday, as I knew she would. How could she not? I don’t know what she will say to Felix, what any of us will say. Nothing, if the past is any kind of indicator. Neither Vivienne nor David talks to Felix about Laura, at least not in front of me. Her name is never mentioned.

  I wish I could spend more time alone with Felix. If things had been different, he and I might by now have become close. I might have been almost like a mum to him. I want to be a proper step-mother, but there is no room for such a figure in Felix’s life. Vivienne is his mother substitute. He even calls her Mum, because he is used to hearing David call her that.

  I’m not sure Felix realises that I am one of the grown-ups. He relates to me as if I am another child who happens to live in the same house as him.

  David is a conscientious father. He and Vivienne make sure that he spends at least one whole day each weekend with Felix. He regards his son as a test that he must pass, and would vehemently deny, if I were to suggest it, that Felix reminds him of Laura in any way, even though, with his shiny black hair and pale blue eyes, he is the image of her.

  David is good at denial. He will deny that he fell asleep and left the front door open. He is an exemplary father, he will insist. He wouldn’t let anyone abduct his beloved daughter, the child of his happy second marriage.

  I am impatient for Vivienne and the police to arrive. I sit here quietly, cross-legged on the bed, pressing my back, which still aches from the months of pregnancy, against the iron frame, and await these two very different authorities. I try to imagine the next hour, the next day or week, but my mind is one giant blank. I simply cannot envisage any future at all. I feel as if time stopped when I walked into Florence’s nursery and started to scream.

  I wish I had cuddled her more, breathed in more of her sweet, fresh baby smell while I could. Not to be able to hold her is torture, but worse than the pain, far worse, is the fear. There is a horribly uncertain future ahead, one that I’m not sure I can influence in any way.

  David will tell everybody that I am deluded. Who will the police believe? I have heard that they are, by and large, male chauvinists. What if they decide I’m an unfit mother and call in social services? I might not spend another night in this room, with its large sash windows and real fireplace, its view of the Silsford hills in the distance. David and I might never again sleep side by side, here or anywhere.
When we first met, I was so full of hope for our life together. To think of that now makes me ache with sadness.

  I will not speak to my husband again until there are witnesses present. How odd that only last night the two of us sat on Vivienne’s sofa drinking wine and watching a silly romantic comedy together, laughing and yawning, David’s arm round my shoulder. The speed of the way things have changed between us has left me dizzy with shock.

  I hear his voice downstairs. ‘Come on, Little Face,’ he says. That’s a new one. I make a mental note to mention this to the police when they arrive. David has called Florence ‘Mrs Tiggywinkle’ since the day she was born, apart from when he calls her ‘Mrs Tiggy’ for short. ‘Ten tiggy fingers, ten tiggy toes, two tiggy ears and one tiggy nose,’ he has sung to her every day, at least once. He did so this morning.

  I know that David loves Florence as much as I do. The urge to comfort him is so firmly embedded in me that it will be a struggle to fight it. I must, though, if he continues to insist that the baby downstairs is our daughter. I will have to learn to regard his pain with total detachment. This is what danger and fear do to a person, to a marriage.

  ‘Shall we lie you on your changing mat for a bit of a kickabout?’ he says now. His voice floats up from the little lounge, directly underneath our bedroom. He sounds calm and efficient, for my benefit, I suspect. He is playing the role of the rational one.

  A jolt of adrenaline shocks me into action. The camera. How could I have forgotten? I leap up off the bed, run to my wardrobe and throw open the door. There, on top of a pile of shoes, is my hospital bag, not yet unpacked. I rummage frantically and find my camera, a little black box with curved edges that contains the first photos of Florence. I open the back, stroke the smooth black cylinder of film with my thumb. Thank God, I murmur to myself. Now, surely, I have a chance of being believed.