Little Face (24 page)

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, seething 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.

Monday, October 6, 2003, 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.'

Charlie had never felt like a bigger fool. Of course the matter of the
handbag strap was peculiar. She was furious with herself for not having thought of it at the time. She was supposed to be good at her job.
Not just good-excellent. That was her strong point, her ego's compensation for an often unsatisfactory personal life. She couldn't bear
the prospect of losing her one source of pride.

`Sergeant, I was satisfied at the time, and I still am, that you and
your team did everything correctly,' said Proust. `As you say, I supervised the case myself and it didn't occur to me either. There was the
DNA evidence, the guilty plea, the lack of a solid alibi, Darryl Beer's
character and record-I know all that, all right?' Charlie nodded, feeling worse rather than better. Proust was being kind to her. For the first
time in all the years she had worked for him, there was pity in his
voice, which made this exchange all the more mortifying. `But now
that the family's come to our attention again and Waterhouse has
raised a few ... niggles, shall we say, we need to start from scratch, go
over every piece of paper, every alibi, even more thoroughly this time.
According to Waterhouse, before Alice Fancourt went missing she
seemed to be suspicious and afraid of her husband. She believed that
he knew his daughter had been swapped for another baby and was
deliberately lying about it.'