Little Face

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘Simon,’ David mutters under his breath. His sole contribution.

  ‘Alice, can you hear how irrational you sound?’ says Vivienne gently. ‘You misplace an object, and your immediate thought is to involve the police. I found your phone in your room, just after you went out. No-one took it anywhere.’

  ‘Where’s Little Face?’ I ask again.

  ‘One thing at a time.’ Vivienne has never believed in the natural ebb and flow of a dialogue. As a child, one of her hobbies was to produce a written agenda for every family dinner. Vivienne, her mother and her father would take it in turn to speak, to deliver their ‘daily report’, as Vivienne called it. Her turn always came first, and she took the minutes as well, in a notebook.

  ‘All right, then. Where’s my phone? Can I have it? Give it to me!’

  Vivienne sighs. ‘Alice, what’s got into you? I’ve put it in the kitchen. The baby is sleeping. There’s no conspiracy against you. David and I are both very concerned about you. Why did you lie to us?’ Any impartial observer would see a kind middle-aged woman trying in vain to reason with a dishevelled, shaking maniac in an ill-fitting green dress.

  Exhaustion scratches at my brain. The insides of my eyelids feel grainy and the tendons in both my hands ache, as they always do when I am deprived of sleep. I do not want to talk any more. I push past Vivienne and run upstairs.

  When I get to the nursery, I throw open the door, more violently than I intended to. It thuds against the wall. I hear footsteps mount the stairs behind me. Little Face is not in the cot. I swing round, hoping to see her in the Moses basket or her bouncy chair, but she is nowhere in the room.

  I turn to leave, but as I get to it the door is pulled shut from the outside. A key turns in the lock. ‘Where is she?’ I scream. ‘You said she was sleeping! Let me at least see her, please!’ I hear my words crash into each other. I am frighteningly out-of-control.

  ‘Alice.’ Vivienne is on the landing, a bodiless voice. ‘Please try to calm down. The baby is sleeping in the little lounge. She’s perfectly all right. You’re behaving like a maniac, Alice. I can’t allow you to rampage around the house in your present condition. I’m worried about what you might do to yourself and the baby.’

  I sink to my knees and rest my head against the door. ‘Let me out,’ I groan, knowing it is pointless. An image of Laura appears in my mind. If she could only see me now she would laugh and laugh.

  I curl into a ball and cry, not bothering to wipe away my tears. I sob until the top of the vile green dress is sopping wet. It occurs to me that this was what I was wearing the only time I met Laura, and that I cried my eyes out on that occasion as well, once Laura had gone and I realised what a fool she’d made of me. Maybe that’s why I hate the dress so much.

  It was when I still worked in London, before I moved in with David. Laura booked an appointment with me using an alias, Maggie Royle. I later found out that that was her mother’s name before she married Roger Cryer. I met Laura’s parents at the funeral, and was naïve and presumptuous enough to feel slighted when they were frosty towards me.

  David and I didn’t want to go to Laura’s funeral. Vivienne insisted. She said something odd: ‘You should want to go.’ Most people would have said only, ‘You should go.’ I assumed Vivienne was talking about the importance of doing one’s duty willingly rather than grudgingly.

  Maggie Royle was my first appointment that day. She insisted on seeing me early in the morning because she had to be at work for a ten o’clock meeting. Over the telephone I asked her, in the way that I would show an interest in any new patient, what she did for a living. She said ‘research’, which I suppose was true. Laura was a scientist who worked on gene therapy, but she was careful not to mention science.

  She arrived at my office in Ealing wearing full but subtle make-up and a navy blue Yves St Laurent suit, the same one in which she was found murdered. Vivienne told me that. ‘It was caked in blood,’ she said. Then, as an afterthought: ‘Blood is quite thick, you know. Like oil paint.’ Vivienne makes no secret of how delighted she was when Felix moved into The Elms. ‘And he’s been so happy here,’ she says. ‘He adores me.’ I believe Vivienne is genuinely unable to distinguish between the best possible outcome for all concerned and what she personally wants.

  Laura was petite, with tiny hands and feet like a child’s, but her high-heeled, square-toed suede shoes made her almost as tall as me. I was struck by her colouring. Her skin was olive but her irises were a vivid blue and the whites around them so bright they made her complexion look sallow. Her hair was long, almost black and very curly. She had a wide, full mouth and a slight overbite, but the overall effect was not unattractive. I remember thinking she looked powerful and confident, and feeling flattered that she should have come to me for help. I was eager – more so than I usually am – to know what had brought her to my office. Many of my patients looked shabby and defeated; she looked the opposite.

  We shook hands and smiled at one another, and I asked her to take a seat. She arranged herself on the sofa opposite me, crossing her legs twice, at the knees and ankles, and folding her hands in her lap.

  I asked her, as I do all my patients at the first meeting, to tell me as much about herself as she could, whatever she felt was most important. It is easier to treat the talkers because they reveal so much more of themselves, and Laura was a talker. As she spoke, I felt sure that I would be able to help her.

  I am embarrassed, now, to think that I sat there and nodded and made notes, and all the time she must have been thinking I was a gullible idiot. I didn’t even know what David’s wife looked like. Laura must have counted on that, must have known David would destroy all photographic evidence of her and of their marriage as soon as things went wrong.

  Her voice was deep and serious. I thought I might like her if I knew her better. ‘My husband and I have recently split up,’ she said. ‘We’re in the process of getting a divorce.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. I’m far better off out of it. But divorce isn’t good enough for me.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘I wish there was some way of getting an annulment, some certificate or official document to say that we were never married. Wash off the taint, pretend it never happened. Maybe I should be a Catholic.’

  ‘How long were you together?’ I wondered if her husband was violent.

  ‘A pitiful eleven months. We were dating, I got pregnant, he proposed, you can imagine the rest. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I believe we’d been man and wife – or woman and husband, should I say – for two months when I left him.’

  ‘So you have a child together?’

  Laura nodded.

  ‘And . . . why did you leave?’

  ‘I discovered that my husband was possessed.’

  People say strange things to me all the time in my line of work. My next appointment after Maggie Royle was with a patient who became uncontrollably angry whenever he heard a stranger say his name, even if that person was talking about someone altogether different who happened to have the same name. More than once, he had started fights in pubs as a result of this phobia.

  Still, I was surprised to hear Maggie Royle use the word ‘possessed’. She looked so rational, so professional, in her smart suit. Not at all the sort of person you’d expect to believe in ghosts.

  ‘I allow him access to our child, the bare minimum, and always supervised by me,’ she went on. ‘I’d like to deny him access altogether but I’m not sure I can. Don’t worry, I know this isn’t your speciality; you’re a homeopath, not a lawyer. I have a good lawyer.’

  ‘When you say possessed . . .’ I began tentatively.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you mean what I think you mean?’

  Laura stared at me expressionlessly. ‘I don’t know what you think I mean,’ she said after a while.

  ‘Can you define possessed?’

  ‘Taken over by the spirit of another.’

  ‘A malign spirit?’ I
asked.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ She flicked her hair out of her eyes. ‘The malignest.’

  Some of the most disturbed people appear normal until you talk to them at length. I decided to play along, find out as much as I could about Maggie Royle’s delusions. If I discovered, as I suspected I would, that she was too severely mentally ill for me to treat her effectively, I would refer her to a psychiatrist. ‘Is it the spirit of a dead person?’ I asked.

  ‘A dead person?’ She laughed. ‘You mean, like, a ghost?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She sat forward, on the attack now. ‘You believe in ghosts?’ Her tone was patronising.

  ‘Let’s concentrate on what you believe, for the time being.’

  ‘I’m a scientist. I believe in the material world.’ I’d like to say that at this point a warning signal started to flash inside my brain, but it didn’t. I had no reason to believe that the woman sitting in front of me was anyone other than Maggie Royle. ‘I’m not sure I believe in homeopathy,’ she said. ‘You’re going to give me some sort of remedy at the end of this session, right?’

  ‘Yes, but we don’t need to think about that now. Let’s just focus on . . .’

  ‘And what will this remedy consist of? What will be in it?’

  ‘That depends on what I decide you need, based on the information you give me.’ I smiled sympathetically. ‘It’s too early to say.’

  ‘I read somewhere that homeopathic remedies are nothing more than pills of sugar dissolved in water. That if you did a chemical analysis of them, there would be no trace of any other substance.’ She smiled, pleased with herself. ‘As I said, I’m a scientist.’

  I wasn’t happy that she had diverted our conversation so aggressively, or by the more general anger that emanated from her, but it was her session. She was paying me forty pounds an hour. I had to let her talk about whatever was most important to her. I told myself not to worry; some patients needed to be reassured about the validity of homeopathy before they could relax.

  ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘The substances that we dissolve in water to make up homeopathic remedies have been diluted so many times that there is no longer any chemical trace of the original substance, whether it’s caffeine or snake venom or arsenic . . .’

  ‘Arsenic?’ Laura raised two thin arches of immaculately plucked eyebrow. ‘Charming.’

  ‘What happens is that the more it’s diluted, the stronger the effect becomes. I know it sounds unlikely, but experts are only just now beginning to understand exactly how homeopathy works. It’s something to do with the original substance imprinting its molecular structure on the water. It has more to do with quantum physics than with chemistry.’

  ‘Isn’t that a load of bollocks?’ said Laura, as if she were asking a question that would be sure to enthral me, rather than simply being rude. ‘Isn’t it true that what’s really going on here this morning is that I’m going to hand over my hard-earned cash in exchange for a bottle of water?’

  ‘Maggie . . .’ I was about to say something about her hostility, which I thought might make it impossible for me to treat her effectively.

  ‘That’s not my name.’ She smiled calmly, folding her arms.

  ‘Pardon?’ Even then I didn’t guess her true identity.

  ‘I’m not Maggie Royle.’

  ‘Are you a journalist?’ I asked, fearing I had been set up by one of the tabloids. They never miss an opportunity to attack the alternative health industry.

  ‘I told you, I’m a scientist. The question is, what are you? Do you really believe in this bullshit that you peddle, or are you secretly laughing at all the poor mugs you exploit? Must be a nice little earner. You must be wodged. Go on, tell me. I promise I won’t tell anyone. Are you a charlatan?’

  I stood up. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave,’ I said, gesturing towards the door.

  ‘No advice for me, then? About how to reconcile myself to the fact that I allowed a passing twinge of lust for David to fuck up my life?’

  ‘David?’ I heard myself say. It wasn’t the name that put me on my guard. It isn’t an unusual name. It was the way Laura said it. As if I knew him.

  ‘Don’t marry him, Alice. Save yourself while you still can. And for God’s sake, don’t have any children with him.’

  My eyes must have widened with horror. I felt dizzy. My cosy little world shook.

  ‘You’re not a charlatan, are you?’ Laura sighed wearily. ‘Just a mug. Good news for David, very bad news for you.’

  Confrontational behaviour does not come easily to me, but I was determined to demonstrate my loyalty. ‘Get out. You’ve lied to me and taken advantage of my good nature . . .’

  ‘And I see it’s easily done. I promise you, the stunt I’ve just pulled is nothing compared to what David and that creature of a mother of his will do to you.’

  ‘David loves me. So does Vivienne,’ I told her, twisting my diamond and ruby engagement ring on my finger, the one that had belonged to Vivienne’s mother. When Vivienne gave it to me, I was so touched, I burst into tears. She hadn’t wanted to give it to Laura, she said. But she wanted to give it to me. ‘I feel sorry for you. I don’t even recognise your versions of them . . .’

  ‘Give it time.’ She laughed scornfully. ‘You will.’ We were both standing now, facing one another.

  ‘You make them sound like caricatures from a Victorian melodrama. What have David and Vivienne ever done to deserve the way you’re treating them, keeping Felix away from them? Vivienne would be a brilliant grandmother and you’re determined not to let her. Is that fair to Felix?’

  ‘Don’t dare to bandy my son’s name around!’ Laura’s face contorted with rage.

  ‘Maybe that’s what you’re scared of, that she’d be closer to your own son than you are.’ Awful though this episode with Laura was, I remember thinking that I was glad of the opportunity to defend Vivienne against her chief detractor. She had defended me when one of my patients accused me, in a letter, of giving him false hope of recovery. Vivienne drafted a reply that demolished his case, piece by piece, in language that was both courteous and deadly. The patient wrote to me again a few weeks later, apologising unreservedly.

  ‘Did Vivienne, by any chance, feed you that line?’ Laura sneered. ‘Let me guess – I’m missing out on being a proper mother and forging a deep bond with Felix because I haven’t given up work, and I can’t stand the thought of anyone else filling the gaping void that I’ve left in his life.’

  Staphisagria, I thought: the perfect remedy for somebody as bitter as this poor, deluded woman clearly was. ‘Do you really think David and Vivienne are such monsters? I mean, why? Have they murdered anybody, tortured anybody? Committed genocide?’

  ‘Alice, wake up.’ Laura actually seized me by the shoulders and shook me. I felt the skin on my face wobble and was furious that she’d touched me without permission. ‘There is no David. The person you know as David Fancourt isn’t a human being, he’s Vivienne’s puppet. Vivienne says no exercise during pregnancy, David agrees. Vivienne says a comprehensive school education is out of the question, David agrees. His personality consists of a few half-formed instincts, compulsions and fears rattling around in a great big vacuum.’

  I opened the door of my office, leaning against it for support. ‘Please leave,’ I said, frightened by the extremity of her description. I didn’t believe her, but neither could I flush her words out of my mind.

  ‘I will.’ She sighed, straightened her jacket and walked out, her square heels leaving indentations in my office carpet. ‘Only, when it’s too late, don’t come crying to me.’

  That was the last thing she ever said to me, the first and only time I saw her alive.

  After she died, quite a long time after, I started to have dreams in which I saw her grave. The words ‘Don’t come crying to me’ were chiselled on to the square, grey-green stone. But, in my dreams, night after night, people did go crying to her. Friends, family, colleagues; big, dense, s
eething crowds of mourners went to the cemetery every day, and wept and wept until their faces were swollen. Not me, though. I never went and I didn’t cry. I was the only one who obeyed.

  20

  6/10/03, 9.45 am

  Charlie closed Proust’s office door behind her, the blood roaring in her ears. She was so angry, she didn’t trust herself to speak. Instead, she counted to ten very fast, over and over again, and told herself what she always did at times like these, that it wouldn’t always seem as bad as it did now.

  ‘Sit down, Sergeant,’ said Proust wearily. ‘I don’t want to make a meal of this, so I’ll get straight to the point. You’re allowing your personal feelings to affect your work. I want it to stop.’

  Charlie stared at the inspector’s tie pin. She did not sit. What Proust described as her personal feelings were, at present, an artillery of white-hot murderous impulses, each one more lethal and explosive than the next. She felt exactly as she had after Sellers’ party last year: pure, mind-contorting disbelief at what Simon had done to her. Yet again he had hurt, betrayed and publicly humiliated her. It would have cost him nothing – absolutely nothing – to tell her in private first what he had just told Proust and the rest of the team. Instead, he had gone over her head, put her in the position of having to stand there and gawp like a bemused goldfish while he came out with his impressive theories.

  ‘Sir, you supervised my team’s work on the Laura Cryer case. You know as well as I do that Darryl Beer did it.’ Charlie paused to breathe. It was important to sound calm, confident. She wanted Proust to understand that she was not pleading with him, merely reminding him of certain historical facts. ‘He admitted it.’

  ‘And he’s probably guilty.’ Proust sighed. ‘All the more reason for us to double check. Waterhouse made some good points. The business with the handbag strap, in particular, seems to me to be a discrepancy that requires careful consideration.’