Little Face

by Sophie Hannah

  I pray that David will be asleep. He is awake, flat on his back in bed. There is a bottle of formula milk on his bedside table. I am exhausted, but if I force myself to stay awake, I might hear Little Face before he does. I might be able to give her her night-time bottle and see the shadow of her small, round head cast by the barn wall light against the fabric of her cot. Imagining the experience, I ache for it to be real.

  ‘Is there no limit to what you’re prepared to do?’ says David bitterly. ‘First you try to drive me mad, make me believe that Florence isn’t Florence, and now you want to try and stop me feeding her! What have I ever done to you, to deserve this?’

  ‘I don’t want to stop you feeding the baby.’ I begin to cry. ‘I just want to feed her too. Not all the time, just sometimes.’

  ‘Even though, according to you, she’s not your daughter.’

  ‘A mother’s maternal feelings don’t disappear just because her baby does,’ I sob.

  ‘Oh, very good, very convincing. How long did it take you to come up with that line?’

  ‘David, please . . .’

  ‘Who were you talking to on your mobile yesterday? That call that ended abruptly as soon as I came in?’

  I stare at the floor, cursing myself for my recklessness. I must be more careful in future.

  ‘No-one,’ I whisper. He doesn’t ask again. I pull my nightie out from under my top pillow and lay it on the bed in front of me. I decide, on the spot, not to try to leave the room to get changed. I have no doubt that David would stop me if I tried, so I will not give him the satisfaction. As I start to wriggle uncomfortably out of my clothes, David makes a point of averting his eyes, as if he can’t bear the sight of me. I thought nothing could be worse than the way he ogled me last night, but this is. The disgust on his face hurts me so much that I cannot accept it. I thought I had given up trying to argue with him, but I find myself saying, ‘David, please will you think about what you’re doing? I don’t believe that deep down you want to be cruel to me. Do you?’

  ‘I’m not doing anything,’ he says. ‘I’m just minding my own business.’

  ‘I know this is difficult, I know it’s horrible, but . . . this isn’t you. You don’t want to be like this. I know you. You’re not an unkind person. It’s well-known that in extreme situations, in moments of crisis, people are scared and disorientated and they lash out, they persecute people and do all sorts of awful things because they’re scared.’

  ‘Shut up!’ His ferocity startles me. He sits up in bed. ‘I’m not interested in anything you’ve got to say. You’re a liar. All that therapy language is just your way of obscuring the truth! You’re happy to talk feelings, but you won’t talk facts, will you?’

  ‘David, I’ll talk about anything you want. What facts?’

  ‘Facts! If Florence wasn’t Florence, why would I say she was? Don’t you think I’d want her found as much as you? Or are you suggesting I’m some kind of imbecile who can’t tell the difference between his own daughter and another baby? I mean, you need to get your story straight because, frankly, it doesn’t hold water. What exactly are you saying has happened here? That some intruder came into our house and swapped Florence for another baby? Why would they? Why? Or do you think it was me that did it? Again, why would I? I want my own daughter, not some random child.’

  I put my hands up to stop him. ‘I don’t know! I don’t know who’s taken Florence, or why, or who the other baby is, okay? I don’t know! And I don’t even know what you know, or what you think, or why you’re saying what you’re saying. You’re right! I haven’t got the story straight, because I’ve no idea what’s happened. I feel as if I don’t know anything any more and it’s terrifying. That’s what you can’t understand. And all I can do is cling on to the one thing I do know without the slightest shadow of a doubt: the baby in this house is not Florence!’

  David turns away. ‘Well, then,’ he says. ‘There’s nothing more we can say to each other.’

  ‘Don’t turn away!’ I beg him. ‘I could ask you the same question you asked me. Are you suggesting I’m an imbecile, that I can’t recognise my own daughter?’

  He says nothing. I want to wail with frustration. I want to scream I haven’t finished yet. I’m still talking to you. I cannot believe he is as certain as he claims he is. I must be getting through to him on some subliminal level; I have to cling to that belief.

  One by one, I drop my clothes on the bed. I reach for my nightie but David is too quick. He pulls it away, scrunching it into a ball in his hand. The sudden movement startles me and I cry out in shock. He laughs. Before I have a chance to anticipate his next move, he grabs the pile of my discarded clothes and gets out of bed. He opens the door of my wardrobe, throws my clothes and nightie inside, then closes and locks the door.

  Now he looks at my body. I feel his gaze as it crawls over my cold skin. ‘I doubt you’ll be going anywhere tonight,’ he sneers. ‘I wouldn’t, looking like that.’

  I consider my choices. I could call Vivienne, but by the time she got here, David would have given me back my nightie. He would pretend I made up the whole story. He is waiting for me to say that I need to use the bathroom, but I will not. Nor will I walk along the landing naked. I know exactly what would happen if I did. David would unlock my cupboard, put my nightie back on the bed and summon Vivienne, who would be out of her room in seconds. He wants to call my judgement and behaviour into question. I am not going to make it easy for him. I would rather be kept awake all night by the discomfort of a full bladder. I climb into bed and pull the duvet up to my chin.

  David does the same. I stiffen, but he doesn’t touch me. I wait for him to turn out his bedside light so that I can cry in private, about Florence, about the person my husband is turning into, and, yes, even now, about the pain I know he is in. David’s viciousness is aimed at himself as well as me. He has an all-or-nothing attitude: if things cannot be made to be all right, he might as well make them as bad as they can possibly be, as quickly as he can. At least then there will be nothing more to fear.

  My mother used to say that I was able to imagine and empathise with the suffering of others in a way that most people were not. She thought this was why I had so many unsuitable boyfriends as a teenager – ‘some right lulus’ was how she put it. It is true that once you try hard to see any situation through another person’s eyes, it becomes impossible to write that person off. That is the way in which I have always approached the world, with compassion. Evidently I was foolish to assume the world would reciprocate.

  I cannot keep making excuses for David, hoping he’ll change. I need to learn to respond to him as I would to an enemy if he continues to behave like one. I, who have told countless patients not to think in terms of good and evil, of allies and enemies. I should give them all their money back.

  I don’t know how early David will wake up tomorrow morning, how soon he will give me my clothes. Will he make me beg? The thought of what might happen is too awful to contemplate. Whatever it is, I must survive it. I have to hold on until tomorrow afternoon, until my meeting with Simon.

  16

  5/10/03, 11.10 am

  ‘What?’ demanded David Fancourt. ‘What do you want from me? Mum’s already told you everything. Alice and Florence were here on Thursday evening. They both went to bed as normal. By Friday morning, they’d gone. It’s your job to find them and you won’t find them here. If they were here, I’d never have reported them missing in the first place. So why don’t you go out and look for them?’ He perched, stiffly upright, on the edge of the least comfortable chair in the room, the narrow wooden one with a navy velvet seat and a cushionless back. Charlie could feel his anger almost as tangibly as if he’d punched her in the face. She felt sorry for him, didn’t blame him for being in a rage. Vivienne sat across the room, on a white sofa. She belonged to the old school: one did not show one’s feelings in public.

  ‘We fully intend to find Alice and Florence,’ said Charlie. David Fancourt was guilt
y only of rudeness; that was her gut feeling, based on the first half minute of the interview. Simon’s paranoid theories were ridiculous. Fancourt had a rock solid alibi. He and Alice were in London in a crowded theatre when Laura was killed. ‘We always start in the missing person’s home, even though obviously that’s the one place we know the person isn’t. I know it must seem confusing.’

  ‘I don’t care where you start as long as you find my daughter.’

  Charlie noticed that he didn’t mention Alice. ‘Try to calm down,’ she said. ‘I know this must be very upsetting for you, especially after what happened to Laura . . .’

  ‘No!’ David’s cheeks were flushed. ‘I’m perfectly all right, or I will be as soon as you’ve found Florence. I’m actually furious. First I nearly lost Felix, and now Alice has stolen Florence from me. Except that no-one believes me that it is Florence. Even . . .’ He mumbled something, glancing at his mother.

  ‘I’ve never said that I don’t believe you,’ said Vivienne coolly, raising her chin. Charlie wondered if this was how the Queen would behave in a similar situation. She vaguely remembered having been told, at the time of the Laura Cryer murder, where Vivienne’s father’s wealth had come from, but she couldn’t bring to mind the details. He had founded a big company of some sort, plastics or packaging. Vivienne was not old money, no matter how aristocratic her bearing.

  The sitting room looked smaller than it was because of all the furniture that was crammed into it. There were three sofas, seven chairs, a monstrosity of a coffee table, two large bookcases in alcoves on either side of a real fire, and a small television on a stand that was oddly positioned behind an armchair in one corner as if to make the point that in this house television was not an important part of daily life. Almost all the books on the shelves were hardbacks, Charlie noticed.

  Today she was here alone. Yesterday, there had been a team of officers at The Elms, turning the place upside down, methodically going through Alice Fancourt’s possessions. They’d found her handbag and keys in the kitchen and her Volvo outside. No clothes belonging to either Alice or Florence appeared to be missing, apart from the ones they were wearing. Vivienne had provided this information and seemed fairly sure. Charlie had to admit that this was a very bad sign. The most worrying thing of all was that Vivienne insisted Alice only owned three pairs of shoes, and they were all still in her wardrobe.

  On Thursday night, Vivienne had locked both front and back doors, as she always did before going to bed. By the morning, Alice and Florence had gone and the doors were still locked. There was no sign that anybody had broken in. Vivienne, David and Felix had slept soundly; no loud noises or scuffles had woken them, no baby cries. Charlie found these facts, viewed as a whole, extremely puzzling.

  Could someone have persuaded Alice to let them in and then abducted her and the baby? If so, they must have exited via the back door. The window beside it had a narrow top panel, about fifteen centimetres by forty, that had been left open, and Alice’s keys were on the kitchen work-surface beneath. The kidnapper would have had to get Alice and Florence outside in virtual silence, lock the back door again and drop the keys in through the window.

  Or else Alice herself had done this. Charlie wondered if she could possibly have been deranged enough, even in an advanced state of post-natal depression, to leave with none of her own or Florence’s possessions. Simon, when she had spoken to him this morning, had reiterated his certainty that Alice was alive and unharmed. ‘I’ll find her,’ he’d said, with a passionate determination in his voice and eyes that had made Charlie turn away.

  ‘Sergeant Zailer, David and I will help you in any way we can,’ said Vivienne Fancourt. ‘But that baby must be found. Do you understand? Florence is . . .’ She broke off, apparently to examine her skirt. When she looked up, her eyes were bright and piercing. ‘Excuse me,’ she muttered. ‘You have no idea how distressing this is for me. Not only is my darling granddaughter missing, but I don’t even know if she went missing last Friday or the Friday before. I don’t know whether I’ve only met her once, or . . .’ She pressed her lips together.

  ‘You hear of women who flip and murder their babies,’ David interrupted angrily. ‘Don’t you? Women with postnatal depression. They smother them, or throw them out of windows. What’s Alice likely to do? How often do these women bring back the babies unharmed? You must know.’ He covered his face with his hands. ‘Alice was unbalanced before she disappeared. She had an obsession with this woman from the hospital who she hardly even spoke to . . .’

  ‘Mr Fancourt, it’s not clear that your wife has abducted your daughter. She took nothing with her. We have to consider the possibility that Alice left here against her will.’

  David shook his head. ‘She ran away and took Florence,’ he said.

  ‘What did you mean when you said you nearly lost Felix?’

  There was an awkward pause. Then Vivienne said, ‘He meant that Laura did everything she could to keep Felix away from us. She allowed us to see him once a fortnight – can you imagine? – for two or three hours, and she made sure she was there to supervise every time. It was impossible to build a proper relationship under her awful scrutiny. And she’d never let Felix come here, or allow David and me into her house. We always had to meet in a neutral place.’ She paused to catch her breath. Two pink spots had appeared on her cheeks.

  Charlie frowned. ‘But on the night Laura was killed, Felix was here, alone with you. You were babysitting.’

  ‘Yes.’ Vivienne smiled sadly. ‘That was the one and only time it happened. Because she was desperate for a sitter, so that she could go off to some party in a nightclub.’ It was clear from Vivienne’s tone that she had never been inside such a place and had no wish to. Simon had said ‘a club?’ in the same way, yet his police work regularly took him to Spilling and Rawndesley’s dingy, strobe-lit night spots.

  ‘David and I put up with Laura’s rules for nearly three years,’ Vivienne went on. ‘We hoped that if we went along with her . . . monstrous regime, she’d relax and allow us to have a bit more contact with Felix. But we were deluding ourselves, I’m afraid. She showed no sign of changing her mind, or the rules. We were getting so desperate that we were on the point of consulting my lawyer about the problem, when . . . when she was killed.’

  ‘Leaving David as the sole parent,’ said Charlie. She felt a few grains of her certainty slipping away. She pictured Darryl Beer standing in the grounds of The Elms with a kitchen knife concealed somewhere in his clothing. For the first time, the image struck her as an unlikely one. Why come armed with a kitchen knife if the purpose of his visit was to see how the land lay for a future burglary?

  Once Laura was out of the way, David could marry his new girlfriend and have sole custody of Felix, with his mother conveniently on hand to do most of the child care. Convenient for David and Vivienne, convenient for Alice, thought Charlie. Mad Alice. What if it had taken the shine off her engagement, having a miserable fiancé who was preoccupied by his absent son?

  Behind David’s chair, on one of the shelves, there was a photograph of his second wedding. Alice wore a cream dress and a tiara, and beamed at her husband. Her blonde hair was shorter, chin-length, and had been curled for the occasion. It had been lank and straight last week when Charlie met her. David, a couple of inches taller than Alice, was smiling proudly down at his new wife. They were an attractive couple, thought Charlie, trying to ignore the jab of envy she felt. Why did this woman who was already married, already loved, deserve Simon’s attention more than she did? It wasn’t fair.

  Ever since Simon had rejected her so brutally at Sellers’ fortieth birthday party, Charlie had become almost pathologically frightened of indignity of any sort, which often made her needlessly brittle and aggressive. She was intelligent enough to recognise this, but not, sadly, to know how to begin to tackle the problem. A year after the hideous event, she still wasn’t anywhere near over it. Nothing in her life, before or since, had injured her psyche and ego a
s much as what Simon had done to her. The awful thing was, she knew he felt terrible about it and was genuinely sorry. That there was nothing planned or malicious about his actions made her pain worse. Charlie still thought as highly of Simon as she ever had. She was still in love with him, for Christ’s sake. And if there was nothing wrong with him, that had to mean there was something wrong with her.

  She’d gone over and over it in her mind. Simon had been enthusiastic at first. ‘This isn’t going to be just a fling,’ he whispered to her, as they made their way to Sellers’ spare bedroom. ‘This relationship is going to last a long time.’ No, there was no doubt he had wanted her at that stage. Charlie was able to identify only too easily the point at which Simon’s attitude changed, changed radically enough to make him push her off his lap so that she landed on the floor, and run from the room as if from a plague. He probably didn’t realise at the time, probably hadn’t since, that in his haste he had left the door wide open. Several faces, including that of Sellers’ wife Stacey, had appeared in the doorway while Charlie was frantically scrambling for her clothes.

  She had not told anyone afterwards, not even her sister Olivia. She doubted she ever would. The details were such agony to recall, even in the privacy of her own mind. The worst thing of all about the disaster (Charlie didn’t think it was over the top to call it this – it felt like an accurate description) was that it allowed no possibility of corrective action. It had happened. It would always have happened. It could never be undone, though she tried as hard as she could to erase it. In the past year, she’d had casual sex with, on average, a man a month. None of them had run away, but Charlie could see it wasn’t doing her any good. She still felt undesirable, and now she also felt cheap and easy. The behaviour had a compulsive element to it, though. Next time it would work. The next man would rub Simon out.