Little Face

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘So we were supposed to find him so that he could tell us all this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right.’ Simon seems to deflate. ‘I should have known that, I suppose. And Mandy?’

  I shrug, embarrassed. ‘If I was going to insist someone had swapped my baby for another baby, I had to produce a few possible theories, didn’t I? I panicked. Things got a bit . . . cluttered in my mind at that point.’

  ‘You made yourself appear less plausible, coming out with all that shit. It’s part of the reason . . .’ He stops, colours slightly.

  ‘Part of why you didn’t wholly believe me?’ I feel vindicated. ‘Simon, will you try not to be angry with me? Will you try to understand?’

  I am still trying to understand myself. It is going to be difficult, to produce a coherent narrative out of all this. All I know is that for a while there was a baby called Little Face. She had a perfectly round head, blue eyes, milk spots on her nose. Nobody was sure who she belonged to.

  Simon stands up. ‘I can protect you from some things, but not from everything,’ he says. ‘Even with the extenuating circumstances taken into account, you abducted David’s daughter and wasted a lot of police time. Postnatal depression might be considered a mitigating factor, but . . . I can’t guarantee it won’t be taken further.’ He is hiding behind an official vocabulary. Not Simon Waterhouse but a representative of the police force.

  ‘What about our friendship?’ I ask, wondering even as I say it whether we have one. Perhaps this connection between us will evaporate as soon as our shared business is concluded. But Simon got inside my head in a way that no-one else ever has. It will be hard, I think, to get him out. ‘Will our friendship be taken further?’

  He doesn’t reply. We look at one another. I don’t know what he is thinking. I am thinking that the time will never come, for any of us, when the last question is answered. There will always be loose ends, threads dangling from all our lives – the unresolved, the unsatisfactory. Florence has been born into an untidy world, and a time will come when I’ll have to explain to her that I won’t always be able to give her an explanation, that she won’t always be able to find one for herself. But we’ll stumble on, she and I, into our messy future. And we’ll have each other.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the following people, all of whom helped significantly: Carolyn Mays, Kate Howard, Karen Geary, Peter Straus, Rowan Routh, Lisanne Radice, Nat Jansz, Chris Gribble, Hilary Johnson, Rachel Hoare, Adele Geras, Jenny Geras, Norman Geras, Dan Jones, Kate Jones, Michael Schmidt, Katie Fforde, Morag Joss, Alan Parker, Marcella Edwards, Anne Grey, Wendy Wootton, Lisa Newman, Debbie Copland, Lindsey Robinson, Susan Richardson, Suzie Crookes.