Little Face (20 page)

Sunday, October 5, 2003, 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 guilty 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 post-natal 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 daugh ter. 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 fiance 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 as 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.

Of all the inconvenient people to love, I had to bloody go and
choose him, she thought. Though it hadn't been a choice, not really.
Simon was nothing like anybody Charlie had ever met before. She
would have found it impossible to lie to herself, to pretend that he was
one of many similar fish in the sea. Who else would be nostalgic, as
Simon had once told Charlie he was, for a time when there was a danger that, as a Catholic, he might be burned at the stake?

`You want to be burnt?' she'd asked, thinking he had to be taking
the piss.

`No, of course not,' he'd said. `But in those days, beliefs meant something. They were seen as dangerous. Thoughts and ideas should matter, that's all I'm saying. It's right that people should be scared of them,
that men should be willing to die for things. Nothing seems to matter
to anyone any more.' And Charlie had fought the urge to tell him how
much he mattered to her.

`I was relieved when Laura died,' Vivienne broke the silence. That
got Charlie's attention. `Not happy, you understand, but relieved. It
was a dream come true when Felix came to live with us. I don't care
if that sounds heartless. Although ...

`What?'

`Some time after Laura's death, I realised I had never asked her,
directly, why she was so determined to keep me away from Felix. Now
I'll never know. She can't have thought I'd harm him. I adore him.'
Vivienne frowned at her hands. Her mouth twitched, as if she were trying to stop herself from saying something. But it came out in spite of
her efforts. `I wish, every day of my life, that I'd asked her. You know,
in a funny sort of way, losing an enemy is as hard to bear as losing a
loved one. You're left with the same strong feelings you always had,
but no-one to attach them to. It makes one feel ... cheated, I suppose.'

`I know this might not seem immediately relevant,' Charlie began
gently, `but there is one line of enquiry that might prove worthwhile ... '

`Yes?' For the first time since the interview began there was hope in
David Fancourt's eyes.

`Alice talked to DC Waterhouse about your father. I know you're
'
not in touch with him, but. . .

`What?' Creases of disgust appeared all over his face. `She talked to
him about ... ?'

Vivienne's mouth pulled in tightly at the sides. She looked angry.
`Why on earth would she be interested in Richard?'

`I don't know. Any ideas?'

`None. She didn't say anything about it to me.' There was irritation
in her voice. Charlie had the impression that Vivienne was not a
woman who took kindly to being left out of the loop.

`Do you know how we could contact Richard Fancourt?'

`No. I'm sorry. I don't remember him with much fondness, and I'd
rather not talk about him.'