Little Face (30 page)

I type `Laura' and press return. The sign-in box disappears and the
screen turns blue. In the bottom right-hand corner an hour-glass symbol appears as the computer begins again to whir gently. I am dizzy
with shock. David only bought this machine six months ago. As
recently as that, he chose the name of his hated ex-wife as his password. Why? You were always second-best after Laura. Did you know
that? No, it can't be true. I am absolutely positive that David only said
that to hurt me.

But I haven't got time to think about it any more, not now. I get in
to Hotmail as quickly as I can and set up a new account. The process
takes longer than I thought it would, and I begin to sweat as I go
through the seemingly endless stages. After what feels like hours, I have
a hotmail account and address: [email protected].

I hear David's voice again. `Anyway,' he says. Something about the
tone of that one word makes me panic. There is an end-of-conversation
edge to his voice, an air of someone who wants to wind things up. Perhaps he is wondering what I am doing up here. I have been left unattended for too long.

I press the `off' button on the computer and the screen immediately
turns black. I run from David's study into our bedroom, leaving the
door slightly ajar and standing behind it.

`No, I'll ring you at the weekend,' says David. `Oh. When will you
be back? No, all right, then. Read me their letter, if you've got it there.'

I intended to send an e-mail to Briony thanking her for the cuddly
toy she'd sent Florence and saying it would be nice to meet up in a few
weeks, once things are on the way to being back to normal. I have to
believe things will get back to normal. If I'd had time, I could have
gone on to describe the awfulness of the past week, told Briony all
about Florence vanishing and Little Face appearing. I am desperate to
tell her these things-she, I know, would believe me without
question-but I decide I can't risk going back to the computer. In my
state of heightened tension, I cannot work out how much it matters
that I did not succeed in sending this message.

Laura. How many times have I heard Vivienne call her a monster,
a despot, a horror, a harpy, both before and after her death? I have lost
count. I always assumed David felt the same way, but now, for the first
time, it dawns on me that even if he disagreed with his mother, he
wouldn't have the courage to say so in public. After everything that he
has done to me, I cannot believe that I feel like crying because, six
months ago, he chose Laura's name as his computer password instead
of mine.

`Hang on, hang on,' I hear him say to Russell. `They've totally
missed the point. We had a perfectly adequate supplier, and they
offered us terms which ... '

I stare at my mobile phone. To go back into David's study would be
tempting fate, but when I try to think of an alternative hiding placeone in the bedroom, say-my mind is a giant blank. I decide to risk the
study, mainly because I know it would never occur to either David or
Vivienne that I would go in there, under any circumstances, let alone
hide something there.

I insert my hand into the gap between the nearest filing cabinet and
the wall. It might be wide enough, but only just. My fingers hit a corner of some kind. It feels like cardboard, but the space is not big
enough for me to be able to get a grip on it.

I stand up and, as gently as possible, nudge the filing cabinet forward a little. A navy blue envelope file that was trapped in a vertical position falls on to its side against the wall. I pick it up and
open it. It contains three pornographic magazines. I open one and
recoil when I see a picture of a naked woman tied to a table. I
freeze, my face a cartoon of shock, not knowing what to make of
this anomaly. David wouldn't find this sort of thing erotic. What is
it doing in his study? It simply isn't possible, and yet here it is, in
my hands.

I notice a couple of sheets of paper on the floor that have fallen out
of one of the magazines. One is a letter, on watermarked blue notepaper. `Dear David,' it begins. I look at the bottom of the page. The letter is signed, `Your loving father, Richard Fancourt'.

My eyes widen. At last, a name. And proof that David's father
exists. At least this explains the magazines. They are there to act as a
distraction from what David really wants to hide. He must have reasoned that, in the event of me or Vivienne finding the folder and
opening it, we would not investigate too closely once we had seen a few
of those horrible pictures.

With half my mind standing guard, monitoring David's continuing
conversation with Russell, I skim-read the letter, trying to take in the
crucial points. David's father is remarried. He is sending this letter to
The Elms because he has heard that David still lives there. He is sorry
he was not a better father. He is sorry he has not been in touch all these
years, but it was probably for the best. The letter is frustratingly long.
I try to take in all the words at the same time: wife pregnant ... little
brother or sister ... if not for my sake then for his or hers ... hope we
can re-establish contact ... baby due in September ... retired from
academia ... taken up bridge ...

`Alice! What are you doing?'

`Getting dressed,' I call back, nauseous with sudden terror. I stuff the
letters and pornographic magazines back into the file and replace it,
pushing the cabinet against the wall. I am so afraid of being caught that I lose my balance and stagger back, crushing something small and hard
with my right foot. I grab it, and my phone, and run from the study to
the bathroom, locking the door when I get there. David is still talking
to Russell. He interrupted his call to check on me. That is how little he
trusts me.

Once I am safe, I examine what I am holding. It is a little dictaphone with a tape inside it. There is probably nothing on the tape
apart from David's notes about some computer game or other, but I
want to listen to it anyway. I glance at the thin wooden bathroom
door and decide it isn't safe to do so now. It is all too easy to imagine an immobile presence on the other side. The Elms is a house in
which the cracks of light under doors are often interrupted by dark
patches the size of feet.

I bury my mobile phone under a pile of clean towels in the bathroom
cupboard. It ought to be safe there for a while. Then I slide the dictaphone with the tape inside it into my trouser pocket where it will be
completely covered by my baggy jumper, and walk downstairs with
forced casualness, like a woman who is concealing nothing.

ENTRY FROM DC SIMON WATERHOUSE'S POCKET BOOK

(Written 10/5/03, 4 AM)

10/2/03, 11.15 AM

Area: Chompers Cafe Bar at Waterfront Health Club, 27 Saltney Road,
Spilling. I arrived fifteen minutes late and met Alice Fancourt (see index)
who was already there. She was standing by the bar when I arrived, with
her hand on the pay-phone. I asked her if she wanted to make a call and
she said she had been about to telephone me on my mobile phone, to see
if I was on my way.

We sat down at a table. We did not order drinks. Mrs Fancourt looked
tired. Her eyes were puffy and bloodshot. She was not crying when I
arrived, but as soon as she saw me approaching she began to cry. She told
me, in a tone of voice that struck me as hysterical, that I needed to get a
team of police officers 'out there, right now' to look for her daughter, and
that every day I failed to do this made it less likely that Florence (see index)
would be found safe and well.

I told Mrs Fancourt that it was not within my power to authorise such
activity, but she ignored this and said, 'There must be something you can
do, you're the officer in charge of the case. I can't believe you're not helping me when you easily could.'

I asked her about the theft of her mobile phone to which she had
referred at our previous meeting (see index). She said the phone had not
been stolen. She had misplaced it and her mother-in-law (see index) had
found it. I asked her why, in that case, had she been about to use a payphone, and she said that she had left her mobile phone in the house. She said she had hidden it, so that it could not be stolen again. When she said
this, she had apparently forgotten that, a few moments earlier, she had told
me no-one had stolen her phone but that she had misplaced it. I brought
up this inconsistency and she became defensive. She said she did not want
to discuss this any further.

/ then asked her if her husband David Fancourt (see index) was mistreating her in any way. She looked distressed but refused to confirm or
deny. My impression was that she was either afraid or embarrassed to
answer my question.

Still crying, Mrs Fancourt asked me if I believed an entire family could be
jinxed. I replied that I did not. She told me that the Fancourt family has a history of'severed' (as she put it) parent-child relationships. She listed the following (see index for all): Richard Fancourt abandoning David Fancourt
when he was a child, Laura Cryer and Felix Fancourt (separated by Cryer's
death), and now, she claimed, herself and her daughter Florence were apart.

She expressed the view that the whole Fancourt family was cursed. She
said that she was doomed from the day she married into the Fancourt fam-
il y, and she further claimed that she had been specifically selected for this
unhappy fate because her own parents had died in a car crash.

/ asked her by whom had she been selected in the manner she had
described, and she replied, 'God, destiny, whatever you want to call it' /
told her that in my opinion this was superstitious and had no basis in fact.

Mrs Fancourt went on to tell me that she had another theory about what
might have happened to Florence, or, as she put it, 'an avenue of investigation you could pursue, if you can be bothered, that is'She said that perhaps
David Fancourt had a mistress, whom he had impregnated at roughly the
same time that he had impregnated Mrs Fancourt. She suggested that he and
his mistress might have swapped the two babies, and that Florence might be
in the house of David Fancourt's mistress at the moment. She argued that this
would explain why no baby/babies had been reported missing.

/ asked her why Mr Fancourt should wish to do this. She said that perhaps he and his mistress wanted her (Alice Fancourt) out of the way so that
they could live happily ever after with the two babies, but that David knew that if he divorced his wife, she would probably get custody of Florence,
which would be intolerable to him, having previously lost custody of his
son Felix to his first wife Laura.

Her theory, she said, was that David and his mistress decided instead to
swap the babies, make everybody believe that she, Alice Fancourt, had
gone mad, and then either get custody on grounds of madness and/or her
rejection of the baby, or, 'worst case scenario; as Mrs Fancourt put it, the
plan might have been to murder her and make it look like suicide, which
would be plausible if everybody had previously been made to believe that
she was suffering from post-natal hysteria.

I told Mrs Fancourt that this hypothesis was extremely unlikely and had
no evidential basis. She shrugged and said, 'It's the only thing I can think
of.'She added that what had happened was so out of the ordinary that the
true explanation was bound to be an unlikely one, rather than the sort of
thing that happens every day. I reminded her that she had previously
believed that a woman who had been on the same labour ward as her
might have swapped her own baby with Florence Fancourt because she
feared her boyfriend might harm her child and wanted to give her a better chance in life.

I told Mrs Fancourt that I would pass on both theories to Sergeant Zailer,
who could then decide whether or not she wished to take it further, but I
said that I thought this would be most unlikely. I added that it would be an
improbable coincidence for Mr Fancourt to have impregnated two women
who then gave birth at almost exactly the same time. I also said that Mr
Fancourt would never imagine he could get away with such a plan, not
with DNA tests as readily available as they are today.

Mrs Fancourt told me she had found a letter the previous day, addressed
to her husband. The letter was from his father, Richard, and informed David
Fancourt that Richard's new wife was expecting a baby, a half-brother or
sister for David Fancourt. Mrs Fancourt asked me what I thought about the
fact that her husband has a sibling he has never told her, his own wife,
about. And he's the one you and your sergeant believe over me, she said,
in a tone that I took to convey anger.

She was very concerned by the fact that she had not noticed whether
the letter was dated. 'What if Little Face is Richard's child, David's half-
sister?'she said. 'I'm sure he said the baby was due in September. Florence
was born on the twelfth of September! You have to do something!'