Little Face

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘So, apart from Vivienne Fancourt, who’s seen Florence?’

  ‘Nobody. Oh, Cheryl Dixon – she’s my midwife. She’s been round three times. And she was on duty at the hospital when Florence was born. Why didn’t I think of that before?’ I wonder aloud. ‘Cheryl’ll back me up, talk to Cheryl.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be talking to everyone, Mrs . . .’

  ‘Alice,’ I insist.

  ‘Alice,’ he repeats awkwardly, trapped in a familiarity that he is clearly uncomfortable with.

  ‘What about a search?’ I ask. I still have not had a satisfactory answer to this question. ‘Someone might have seen something. You need to appeal for witnesses. I can give you precise times. I went out at five to two . . .’

  Simon shakes his head. ‘I can’t get a search started just like that,’ he says. ‘That’s not the way it works. I’d need to get approval from my sergeant, but first I’ll need to talk to everyone and anyone who could corroborate your story. I’ll need to talk to your neighbours, for example, see if anyone saw anything unusual. Because your husband . . .’

  ‘Isn’t corroborating. I know. I’ve noticed,’ I say bitterly. ‘There aren’t any neighbours.’ Vivienne told me proudly, the first time David brought me to The Elms, that the only people with whom she shares a postcode are those she welcomes into her home. She smiled, to make it clear that I was included in this category. I felt privileged and protected. When my parents died and I realised there was no-one in the world who truly loved me, I lost a lot of my self-esteem. I couldn’t shake off the conviction that my tragedy was a punishment of some kind. To be so warmly accepted by a woman like Vivienne, who took for granted her own value and importance and had absolute confidence in her every opinion, made me feel that I must be worth more than I’d imagined.

  ‘I can’t get a search started or do anything on your say-so alone,’ says Simon apologetically.

  I sink into a chair and rest my aching head on my arms. When I close my eyes, I see strange shifting spots of light. Nausea rocks my stomach. For the first time in my life, I understand the people who lose the will to fight. It is so hard to try and try to make yourself heard when the whole world seems to have its fingers in its ears, when what you have to say sounds so unlikely – impossible, almost.

  I’m not a fighter, not by nature. I’ve never thought of myself as strong; at times I’ve been downright weak. But I am a mother now. I have Florence to think of as well of myself. Instead of myself. Giving up isn’t an option.

  8

  3/10/03, 2pm

  Ten minutes after the conclusion of his interview with Proust and Simon was back in the canteen. The one-armed bandit machine was mercifully, unusually silent, as if out of respect for the gravity of his mood. The inspector had treated his hypothesis with contempt, called him paranoid and ordered him to go and get his head together. ‘I don’t want you working in this state. You’ll only make an irritation of yourself and ruin everything,’ he’d said – Proust’s equivalent of compassionate leave.

  What was wrong with everybody today? Why couldn’t they see what seemed to Simon to be glaringly obvious? Was it because Proust and Charlie had both been involved in putting Darryl Beer away? Was that why they were so keen to cast Simon as the unstable eccentric who let his personal agenda get in the way of the facts? Meanwhile, the possible personal agenda of David Fancourt was ignored by all. First wife dead, second wife missing. Fact.

  Simon got himself a cup of tea and fantasised about beating the truth out of Fancourt. Some things were worth doing time for. What had the bastard done to Alice? What had he told Proust about Simon? It had to be him who’d said something, not Charlie. These questions were a torment that brought Simon no closer to any sort of answer. He heard a cough behind him and turned.

  ‘Proust said I’d find you here. I’ve just spoken to him. Correction: I’ve just listened to him. At length. He’s not happy with you, not happy at all.’

  ‘Charlie!’ Seeing her made him feel that perhaps there was hope, perhaps doom could be warded off for a while longer. ‘Did you manage to calm him down? You’re the only one who can.’

  ‘Don’t put me in a foul mood again straight away,’ she said grimly, sitting down opposite him. It was impossible for Simon to give Charlie a compliment without her getting cross. There was only one sort of compliment she wanted, one that Simon couldn’t give her. She seemed determined to dismiss all lesser endorsements from him as pity or charity. Sometimes he wondered how she could even look at him. How could she see him as anything but pathetic after Sellers’ fortieth birthday party last year? Simon pushed the horrific memory away, as he did whenever it rose to the surface.

  ‘What did The Snowman say?’ he asked.

  ‘That you were babbling like a fool. He thinks you’ve got a thing about Alice Fancourt. Her husband thinks so too. Anyone with eyes and a brain can spot it a mile off. You get that slobbering idiot look on your face when you talk about her.’

  Her words stung. Simon didn’t bother to argue.

  ‘He also says you denied that any inappropriate behaviour had taken place.’

  ‘Does he believe me?’

  ‘I very much doubt it. So you’d better make damn sure he never finds out, if you’re lying. Anyway, my instructions are to treat mother and baby’s disappearance as a misper if they don’t turn up within twenty-four hours.’

  Simon’s eyes widened. ‘You? Does that mean . . .’

  ‘Proust’s assigned it to me, yes. To our team. Because of our extensive experience of the Fancourt family,’ she added sarcastically.

  ‘I thought there was no way he’d let me near this one. Thank you!’ Simon cast his eyes towards the ceiling’s buzzing strip-lights. He believed strongly in something unspecific. His mother had always hoped he would become a priest. Maybe she still did. Simon had inherited her need to cling to something, but not her conviction that God was that thing. He hated the idea that he had anything in common with his mother.

  ‘Proust’s full of surprises, I’ll give him that,’ said Charlie. ‘He told me he thinks you might get a result simply because you care so much. He reckons you want to find Alice Fancourt a fuck of a lot more than anyone else round here does.’ Her tone suggested she was part of the anyone else.

  Simon put his head in his hands. ‘If I get the chance to start looking.’ He groaned. ‘Charlie, this business could really fuck me up. I’ve met Alice twice, unofficially. She . . . she told me things that I’m going to have to come clean about, once the investigation starts. You know I don’t deserve to lose my job, you know how good I am . . .’

  ‘As do you,’ she said flatly, raising an eyebrow. ‘How could I forget? Without you, we’d all be scratching our ears and picking our teeth, incapable of closing a single case.’

  ‘Yeah, well. When you’re as shit as I am at most things, it’s hard to miss when, surprise fucking surprise, you find you can actually do something well. And this – being a detective – is something I do well.’

  ‘Oh, really? So how come you never mention it? You should have said.’

  ‘Fuck off!’

  Charlie laughed. ‘Only you could boast outrageously and sound like a victim at the same time.’

  And only you could patronise me in that particular fond, proprietorial, sneery way that makes me want to give you a good hard slap, thought Simon. He said, ‘I know I’ve got no right to ask you but . . . any ideas about how I get myself out of this mess?’

  Charlie looked unsurprised. She shook a set of car keys in front of his face. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Somewhere we can’t be overheard.’ The canteen was a breeding ground for gossip. They pushed their way through the tables, chairs and loud graphic jokes and headed out of the building.

  Charlie drove like a man, steering with two fingers, or sometimes with her wrist, ignoring speed limits, swearing at other drivers. They left Spilling on the Silsford road, with Radio Two blaring. Simon only ever
listened to Radio Four by choice, but had long ago given up trying to persuade Charlie to compromise. Radio One in the morning, Radio Two from one o’clock onwards, that was her rule. Which meant Steve Wright in the afternoon, factoids, songs that should only be played in lifts or hotel lobbies, everything bland that Simon hated.

  He focused instead on the flat, orderly landscape that was passing too quickly. Normally he found it calming but today it looked empty. It was missing something. Simon realised with a rush of embarrassment that he was hoping to see Alice. Every face, every figure he saw that wasn’t hers was a disappointment. Desperate panic had given way to a sort of mournful wallowing.

  What was it that he had seen in Alice that seemed to speak to something similar in him? She was pretty, but Simon’s feelings for her had nothing to do with the way she looked. It was something in her manner, a hint of unease, a sense that she was not in her element, that she was negotiating unseen obstacles. It was how Simon felt all the time. Some people knew how to glide effortlessly through life. He didn’t, and he guessed Alice didn’t either. She was too sensitive, too complicated. Though he’d only seen her in a state of extreme distress. He had no idea what she was like before last week.

  Charlie would call him a fantasist, inventing Alice’s character on the basis of so little evidence. But weren’t all perceptions of other people based on such inventions? Wasn’t it crazy to assume that one’s family, friends and acquaintances added up to coherent wholes whose natures could be summarised and fixed? Most of the time Simon felt more like a collection of random behaviours, each driven by an insane, anarchic compulsion he didn’t entirely understand.

  He shook his head when he heard Sheryl Crow’s mediocre voice. Typical. Charlie sang along: something about days being winding roads. Simon thought it was bollocks.

  Charlie slammed on the brakes just before they got to the Red Lion pub, about five miles from town, and swan-necked into its car park. ‘I’m not in the mood,’ said Simon, his stomach protesting at the prospect of alcohol.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’re not going in. I just didn’t want to give you this anywhere near the station.’ She rummaged in her large black suede handbag and produced a standard issue police pocket book, the sort that every officer carried. Every incident of every shift, significant or insignificant, had to be recorded, along with details of the weather and the conditions on the roads. Simon had his in his inside jacket pocket.

  Charlie threw the book into his lap. It was brown, seven inches by five, and, like all pocket books, had an issue number on the cover next to a sergeant’s signature, in this case Charlie’s.

  ‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’

  ‘It’s your only option, isn’t it? Make your unofficial meetings with Alice Fancourt official. Your chance to rewrite history.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have to lie for me.’ He was pissed off that she’d had the book ready and waiting. She’d known he’d come running to her for help sooner or later. Embarrassingly predictable.

  ‘Yeah, well.’ Charlie grimaced. ‘It’s still a risk. If anyone looks too closely at the serial numbers . . . It goes without saying that if you get rumbled, you didn’t get that book from me.’

  ‘I’ll have to write everything out again.’ Simon closed his eyes, tired by the mere thought of the effort involved.

  ‘You’re not the first and you won’t be the last. Look, I’m not thrilled about this, but I can’t bear to stand back and watch you fuck up your entire life. I’m too much of a control freak. And . . . you’re the cleverest, most inspired and inspiring person I’ve ever worked with – and don’t agree with me or I’ll bloody strangle you – and it’d be a tragedy if this one fuck-up ruined everything. If anyone asks, I’ll say I knew about the meetings and gave you the go-ahead.’

  Her careful deliberate compliments made Simon feel belittled. She was incapable of treating him as an equal, and he was pretty sure it wasn’t just because she was a sergeant. He wondered what precisely it would take to satisfy him. ‘That won’t work, will it? Doesn’t everyone know you were all for cuffing the swapped baby allegation? Why would you authorise me to conduct further interviews?’

  Charlie shrugged. ‘I pride myself on my thorough approach,’ she said drily.

  They sat in silence for a while, watching people enter and leave the pub.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Simon eventually. ‘I shouldn’t have lied to you. I hated it. But you never believed Alice’s story. You thought she was wasting our time. That’s why I didn’t tell you. I was worried about her and . . . look, I’m not saying I believed her about the baby, but . . . well, I felt I couldn’t just abandon her.’

  Charlie’s face twitched, tightened. Simon regretted his use of the word ‘abandon’. They were talking about work, a clash of his professional judgement and hers, but that didn’t change the fact that he’d lied to Charlie, that his lie had involved another woman.

  ‘I take it that, in your eyes at least, I’m not a suspect.’

  ‘A fool, yes. A suspect, no. They say it’s blind, though, don’t they?’ Charlie looked out of the car window so that he couldn’t see her face. ‘We’d better shift our arses, much as I’m enjoying this romantic interlude,’ she said. Again, Simon pushed the image of himself and Charlie at Sellers’ fortieth birthday party out of his mind. He closed his eyes, craving unconsciousness. Today was proving to be more than he could handle. He tried to banish all thoughts from his head.

  Immediately, something clicked inside his brain. He had it. He knew what it was that had been stuck like a piece of grit in his mind’s eye. ‘The night Laura Cryer was killed,’ he began. ‘When Beer tried to mug her . . . ?’

  ‘Not that again.’

  ‘She was alone, right? You said she went back to the car alone.’

  Charlie turned to face him. ‘Yes.’ She frowned. ‘Why?’

  ‘She didn’t have her son Felix with her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He was at The Elms that night with his grandmother, because Cryer was working late,’ Simon persisted.

  ‘Yeah? So?’ Impatience crept into Charlie’s voice.

  ‘Why didn’t she pick up her son and take him home? He lived with her, presumably?’

  A flicker of uncertainty passed across Charlie’s face. ‘Well, because . . . because he was staying over at his gran’s house, maybe.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Simon, ‘why did Laura Cryer go to The Elms at all that night?’

  9

  Friday September 26, 2003

  My midwife, Cheryl Dixon, has arrived. She is in her late forties, a tall, buxom woman with strawberry blonde straight hair, cut in that short, feathery style that is fashionable at the moment, and pale, freckly skin. Today she is wearing trousers that are slightly too tight and a velour V-necked jumper that highlights her substantial cleavage. Cheryl’s passion in life is amateur dramatics. She is currently appearing in a production of The Mikado at Spilling Little Theatre. The first night of the show’s two-week run was two Saturdays ago. I had to apologise for missing it on account of having had a baby the day before. I got the impression that she didn’t think it was a wholly satisfactory excuse.

  Cheryl nicknamed Florence ‘Flipper’ when her position in my stomach changed from week to week. When I asked silly questions, she called me a ‘funny onion’. Sometimes she got exasperated with me, when I became neurotic and requested unnecessary monitoring. ‘Cheese on bread!’ she would say, or ‘Flipping Ada!’

  She was on duty at Culver Valley Hospital the night Florence was born. It was she who told me to bring Florence into bed with me when she wouldn’t stop crying. ‘Nothing like a cuddle with Mummy in a nice warm bed to make baby feel better,’ she’d said, swaddling Florence in a hospital blanket and tucking her under my arm.

  Tears prick the backs of my eyelids. It will do me no good to think about that now.

  ‘When did you last see Florence Fancourt?’ Simon asks Cheryl. ‘Before today, that is.’ He glances
apologetically in my direction. I refuse to meet his eye.

  We are in the room that is known as the little lounge, although it is not little by anyone’s standards. This is where evenings are spent at The Elms, watching television and talking. Vivienne will not allow any television until after Felix has gone to bed. Even then, she is only prepared to watch the news or documentaries. Occasionally she catches an accidental glimpse of a reality TV programme and mutters, ‘How ghastly!’ or ‘How different from the home life of our own dear Queen.’

  Sofas and chairs line the walls – too many, as if a party of twenty people is expected at any moment. A long, rectangular, glass-topped coffee table is the room’s centrepiece, a family heirloom. Its base is bronze, a thick S-shape on its side. I have always thought it hideous, the sort of thing an ostentatious Pharaoh might have in his palace. At the moment there is no coffee on the table, only a Moses basket that contains a baby in a Bear Hug babygro, sleeping under a yellow fleece blanket.

  I sit in an armchair in the corner, knees pulled up to my chest, arms wrapped round my legs. This position hurts my Caesarian wound. The physical pain is almost comforting. I haven’t taken my hypericum pill today. Soon they will run out and I’ll have to go to my office to get more or switch to gelsemium. I felt sorry for a woman who was in the bed next to mine on the labour ward, and gave her most of my hypericum tablets. Mandy. She’d also had a Caesarian and her wound had developed a haematoma. She had bad acne scars and was tiny, tooth-pick thin. She looked too small to have ever contained a baby. Her boyfriend harangued her in front of the whole ward about when she’d be home and able to look after him again. They argued endlessly about what to call their child. Her voice sounded tired and hopeless as she suggested name after name. The boyfriend kept insisting on Chloe, swearing at her.