Little Face (28 page)

`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.5

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.

Wednesday, October 8, 2003, 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 fiancee 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 middleaged 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?