Little Face

by Sophie Hannah

  Eventually, physical discomfort forces me to move. I make sure I leave the door ajar at the right angle, exactly as I found it. Then it occurs to me that no-one has explicitly said I am not allowed in here. Am I becoming paranoid? ‘Hello!’ I call out from the landing. ‘David?’ There is no reply. Panic grips me. They have all gone for good. I am alone. I have always been alone.

  ‘David?’ I call again, louder this time. He is not in the bathroom. I am about to lift the lid of the toilet when I notice that the bath tub is already full. No bubbles or oil, only water. Both Vivienne and I add scented things from bottles to our bathwater, though her additions are considerably more expensive than mine. This bath used to be my favourite in the world. It’s a big, old enamel one, a creamy off-white, like the colour of healthy teeth. Two people can fit into it easily. David and I do occasionally, when Vivienne is guaranteed to be out for at least an hour. Did, I correct myself.

  I frown, puzzled. I have never known David to have a bath and then fail to empty it and rinse out the tub. Vivienne would regard that as the epitome of bad manners. I touch the water with my hand. It is cold. Then I notice that it is also completely clear. No soap has touched it, I am sure of that. Why would David have a bath, not use soap, then leave the water in?

  I hear a loud bang behind me. I gasp and spin round. David grins at me. He has slammed the door and is leaning against it with his hands in his jeans pockets. I see from the expression on his face that I have walked straight into his trap. He must have been waiting behind the door to ambush me for some time. ‘Morning, dear,’ he says sarcastically. ‘I’ve run you a bath. Nice of me, I think, under the circumstances.’

  I am frightened. There is a comic casualness about his cruelty that has replaced the driven bitterness of previous days. Whatever this means, it has to be bad. Either he cares less about me than ever, or he has found, quite by accident, that the desperate sadism born out of his misery and confusion is something he has a taste for.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ I say. ‘Don’t hurt me.’

  ‘Don’t hurt me’ He mimics me. ‘Charming! All I’ve done is run you a bath, so that you can have a nice, long, relaxing soak.’

  ‘It’s freezing cold.’

  ‘Get into the bath, Alice.’ His voice is laced with menace.

  ‘No! I need to go to the toilet.’ I realise, as I speak, how urgent this need is.

  ‘I’m not stopping you.’

  ‘I’m not going while you’re here. Just get out, leave me alone.’

  David stays where he is. We stare at one another. My eyes are totally dry, my mind numb and empty.

  ‘Well?’ says David. ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘Fuck you!’ It is all I can think of.

  ‘Oh, very ladylike.’

  I have no choice, since I am not strong enough to eject him from the room physically. The contents of my bowels have turned to water. I start to walk towards the lavatory. David moves unexpectedly fast. He leaps in front of me, stopping my progress. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘You had your chance.’

  ‘What?’ I cannot believe that his behaviour is spontaneous. He must have planned every stage of this horror, every word. No-one could improvise such abuse.

  ‘You swore at me. So you can get straight into the bath.’

  ‘No.’ I dig my fingernails into my palms. ‘I won’t! Move out of the way and let me go to the toilet.’

  ‘You know, I could take steps to ensure that you never see Florence again,’ he says calmly. ‘It wouldn’t be hard. Not hard at all.’

  ‘No! Please, you can’t. Promise you won’t do that!’ Dread courses through my veins, spreading to every cell in my body. He sounds as if he means it.

  ‘I can and will do you more harm than you can do me, Alice. A lot more. Remember that. I can and I will.’

  ‘So you admit you know where Florence is, then? Where is she, David? Please, tell me. Is she safe? Where are you hiding her? Who’s she with?’

  He examines his fingernails in silence. I want to scream and bash my head against the wall. My husband’s personality has solidified in this monstrous new incarnation. He has settled into the role of torturer and is enjoying it. Perhaps this is how it happens. I think of all the atrocities in the world and those who perpetrate them. There has to be some sort of explanation. There always is, for everything.

  Even now, I cannot stop myself from hoping that things will improve. Maybe I really am crazy. I picture David, looking like the sole survivor of a natural disaster, saying ‘I don’t know what got into me.’ If he put it like that, in terms of an aberration, a temporary possession by some destructive force, I could possibly forgive him. All the love I have ever felt for him is still in me, rippling under the surface, subtly influencing the texture of my thoughts, like bumpy old wallpaper under new paint.

  I only have to hold on until Friday. Now that David has made his awful threat, I will take no risks until then. I must sacrifice my pride and dignity if that is the only way to protect Florence. My legs are shaking. Adrenaline rampages through my body. I am in agony from the strain on my bladder and bowels. ‘All right,’ I say. ‘Don’t hurt Florence. I’ll do anything you want.’

  David wrinkles his nose in disgust. ‘Hurt her? Are you suggesting I would hurt my own daughter?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything. Tell me what you want me to do.’

  He appears to be mollified for the time being. ‘Take off your night clothes and get into the bath,’ he says slowly and with deliberate patience, as if I am an imbecile. ‘And you’ll stay in it for as long as I say.’

  I obey his instructions, singing a song in my head to distract me from what is happening: ‘Second-Hand Rose’, one of the songs my mother used to sing to me when I was a child. My feet, ankles and calves ache with cold as I step into the water. David tells me to sit down. I do, and my heart jolts with the shock. The freezing water has the effect I knew it would – that David must have known it would – on my body. The feelings of pain and humiliation that overwhelm me are so excruciating that for a moment I cannot breathe. For the first time in my life, I understand why people sometimes wish themselves dead.

  When I hear David’s voice again, it sounds as if it is coming from a great distance. ‘You’re disgusting,’ he says. ‘Look at you. Look what you’ve done. I’ve never seen anything so foul in my life. What have you got to say for yourself?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I stammer, my teeth chattering violently.

  He stands above me with his arms folded, looking down at me, shaking his head and tutting, revelling in my shame. ‘I should never have married you. You were always second best, after Laura. Did you know that?’

  ‘Please let me get out,’ I whisper, shaking convulsively. ‘I’m freezing. It hurts.’

  ‘I want you to admit that you’re lying about Florence,’ David orders. ‘I want you to tell Mum and the police that you made up the whole story. Will you do that?’

  I bury my face in my knees. He is asking me to do the one thing I cannot do, but I am terrified to say no in case he devises worse punishments for me than this, in case he makes good his threat about ensuring that I never see Florence again. I suspect that, for David, all the pleasure is in the threats themselves, in the psychological leverage they afford him, but I can’t take any chances.

  He sighs and sits down on the closed toilet lid. ‘I’m not a violent man, Alice. Have I ever laid a finger on you? Violently, I mean?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No. And I’m not an unreasonable man. I don’t want to have to do this to you, but you’ve left me with no choice.’ He continues in this vein for some time, justifying his actions, interrupting his justifications every now and then to insult me and jeer at me. When I pull my knees up to my chest, he tells me I am not allowed to. I must lay my legs flat against the bottom of the tub. I must not cover my chest with my arms. I do as I am told, but apart from that I try not to listen to him. I hear only the compassionless, hectoring drone of a man who,
for years, has been dominated by his mother. In my mind I see the image of a flower tied to a stick, so that it will grow in a prescribed direction. That is David. And now he is overdosing on power, gorging on it, like a starving person who fears this might be his only opportunity to eat.

  I do not know how long he makes me sit in the icy, filthy water. Until I can hardly feel any sensation below my waist and my legs are a sort of ghostly blue colour. I feel like an animal, worse than an animal. I am a disgrace. It is my fault that this has happened to me. It doesn’t happen to most people, to anybody else. I am the lowest of the low. I can’t protect my own daughter.

  Eventually David sighs, unlocks the bathroom door and says, ‘Well, I hope you’ve learned something from this experience. You’d better clean yourself up. And the bath. Remember, you’re a guest in my mother’s house.’ He leaves the room, whistling.

  24

  8/10/03, 2.40 pm

  Simon drove out of Spilling on the Silsford Road, and from Silsford he followed the white, wooden, black-lettered signs and winding lanes all the way to Hamblesford, the village where Laura Cryer’s parents lived. He’d left the CID room half an hour earlier than he’d needed to. He preferred to wait outside the Cryers’ house, if necessary, rather than spend another minute in Charlie’s company.

  She’d been trying to bait him all morning. ‘I bet she’s got huge norks and a nice tight fanny,’ she’d speculated about Suki Kitson, Sellers’ bit on the side. ‘And, let’s face it, Stacey’s had two kids. Sellers probably flails around inside her like a pickled gherkin in a postman’s sack.’ Simon recognised the menace in Charlie’s voice. When her conversation turned anatomical, it was time to get out of her way. Charlie mentioned parts of the female body as a way of getting at Simon, which made him angry and nervous. He feared it was her way of trying to remind him, obliquely, of his undignified cowardice at Sellers’ party.

  If she didn’t start to behave more normally soon, he would have to have a word with Proust. Charlie was supposed to be his skipper, yet her anger and sarcasm were making it impossible for him to concentrate on his work. He kept having to think of that bloody fire extinguisher and its wet foam to stop himself from giving Charlie a mouthful, or a slap across the face. But it can’t have come to this, he thought, can it? And why now? Simon didn’t understand what had caused this sudden, rapid deterioration in his relationship with Charlie. Until recently, and in spite of whatever tensions existed between them, they had been good friends. Charlie was pretty much Simon’s only real friend, now that he came to think of it. He didn’t want to lose her. Who would he have left? Sellers and Gibbs? How bothered would they be if they never saw him again?

  Charlie had openly crowed over Simon’s inability to get anything out of Darryl Beer. ‘Aw, diddums. There you were trying to put right a miscarriage of justice and the nasty scrote ruined it for you. You know how people say “I hate to say I told you so”? Well, not me. I fucking love saying it.’

  Simon didn’t care that his first visit to Brimley had been unproductive. He hadn’t given up hope that Beer would talk eventually, once he’d satisfied himself by exercising what little power he had, making Simon sweat.

  David Fancourt’s alibi was solid. He and Alice had been in London, watching ‘The Mousetrap’. Several witnesses had given statements confirming that both of them were in the theatre all evening. It struck Simon as almost too good an alibi, once he started to think seriously about it. He even caught himself wondering, as he parked in a space beside the war memorial opposite Hamblesford’s village-green, whether that play had been specially selected for its symbolic significance. David Fancourt was a clever man. He designed intricate computer games for a living. He could also be vindictive, as Simon had seen with his own eyes. It might have struck him as an ironic touch, to take his fiancée to see a famous murder mystery on the same night that he had arranged for somebody to kill his wife.

  Could that somebody have been Darryl Beer? Could both Beer and Fancourt be guilty? He’d have tried the theory out on Charlie if relations between them hadn’t been so strained. Instead, he attempted to communicate telepathically with Alice. He didn’t believe in all that bollocks, but still . . . Sometimes he was aware of Alice, unseen, quietly watching him, wondering how long it would take him to save her and her daughter. Alice believed Simon was powerful, or at least she had at first. All he had to do was find her, find Florence, and she would see she hadn’t underestimated him. The thought of what he might say to her, if and when he found her, made him feel agitated, caught out.

  Laura’s parents lived in a small white cottage next to a butcher’s shop. They had no front garden. Only a narrow pavement separated the front of their house from the main road through the village. The cottage’s thatched roof wore something that looked like a hair-net. Simon banged the black wooden knocker against the door and waited. He always felt shy at moments like this, slightly afraid of introducing himself to people he didn’t know. His upbringing had not encouraged sociability. Simon had grown up watching his mother stiffen with tension every time the doorbell rang, unless the priest or a close relative was expected. ‘Who could that be, now?’ she would gasp, eyes wide with fear of the unknown.

  Simon had never been allowed, when he lived with his parents, to invite friends back for tea. His mother believed that eating was too personal an activity to engage in while company was present. Too young to think strategically, Simon hadn’t thought to keep this information from his classmates, who had taken the piss mercilessly as soon as they found out. Now, as an adult, he understood that Kathleen had done him a disservice by enforcing this rule, but he couldn’t bring himself to be angry. She had always seemed to him to be too frail for censure. As a teenager, Simon had stifled his frustration and made allowances for his mother, though it was a time in his life when an unwelcome look or remark from anyone else turned him rabid with fury, led to breakages and bloodshed, suspension after suspension from school. If he hadn’t been the brightest in his year, they’d have booted him out, Simon was sure of it.

  Kathleen had phoned him on his mobile again this morning, wanting to know if he was coming for Sunday dinner. That he’d made it last week counted for nothing. There was no respite. The pressure was never off.

  After a few seconds the Cryers’ front door was opened by a middle-aged man with a barrel chest, wearing bi-focal glasses, a navy jumper with a golfer emblem, navy trousers and slippers. ‘Detective Constable Waterhouse? Roger Cryer.’

  Simon shook his hand.

  ‘Please come through,’ said Cryer. ‘My wife’s just making some tea. Ah, here she is!’ He had a strong Lancashire accent.

  Maggie Cryer looked twenty years older than her husband. Simon would have guessed sixty for him, eighty for her. Impossible to ask, of course. Laura’s mother was no taller than five foot, thin, with misshapen, arthritic hands in which the tea tray wobbled. She was wearing a green nylon housecoat, tan tights and blue slippers.

  ‘Help yourself to a cup of tea,’ she said, lowering the tray unsteadily on to the small table in front of her. She perched beside her husband on a small wicker sofa opposite Simon, whose chair, also made of wicker, was creaky and uncomfortable. ‘I hope this won’t take long,’ she said. ‘It’s an ordeal for us, even after all this time. A phone call from the police . . .’

  ‘I understand, Mrs Cryer. I’m sorry. But it’s necessary, I’m afraid.’

  A log fire blazed, making the lounge unbearably hot. Like a lot of cottages, the Cryers’ home had small windows and was gloomy even in daylight. The combination of the darkness and the flickering flames made Simon feel as if he were in a cave. There were three framed photographs of Laura on the mantelpiece. None of Felix.

  ‘We saw on the news about his new wife being missing.’

  ‘Roger,’ Maggie Cryer cautioned.

  ‘And the little baby. Is that why you’re here?’

  ‘Yes. We’re going over Laura’s case again,’ Simon told them.

  �
�But I thought there was no doubt,’ said Mrs Cryer. ‘That’s what they told us at the time, the police. That . . . Beer person definitely did it. That’s what they told us.’ Her swollen fingers plucked at her sleeves.

  ‘If I could just ask you a couple of questions,’ Simon said in an appropriately soothing tone. This was how he would have interviewed his own mother, even though the gentle approach was probably a waste of time. There would be no calming Maggie Cryer, no reassuring her. Simon would have bet any amount of money that Laura’s mother existed in a state of permanent agitation. Since the murder or always?

  ‘Don’t you want tea?’ she asked him.

  ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

  ‘You forgot the milk, love,’ said her husband.

  ‘Really, I’m all right,’ Simon insisted. ‘Don’t go to any trouble.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a spot of milk,’ said Cryer.

  ‘It’s no trouble.’ Maggie leapt up and scurried out of the room.

  Once she had gone, her husband leaned forward. ‘Just between you, me and the gatepost,’ he said to Simon. ‘I can’t talk about this in front of the wife, she gets upset. It’s David Fancourt you want to be looking at. First Laura gets killed and now his second wife and new baby are missing. It’s too much of a coincidence, isn’t it? And why would Darryl Beer kill our Laura? Why? She’d have just given him her bloody handbag if he’d attacked her, she wouldn’t have let it get that far. She’s a sensible girl.’

  ‘Did you say any of this to the police at the time?’

  ‘The wife wouldn’t let me. She said we could get in trouble, you know, legally, if we said things that weren’t true. But nine times out of ten, it’s someone known to the victim. Nine times out of ten – I heard an expert say that on television.’

  ‘Why would David Fancourt have wanted to kill Laura?’ asked Simon, hoping to hear his own theory repeated back to him.