by Fiona Barton
She shook her head, tears sliding down her face. ‘Was it him that took her?’ she said. ‘Was it him who took my baby?’
Chapter 6
Wednesday, 9 June 2010
The Widow
MORE FEET ON the gravel. This time Kate’s phone rings twice and stops. Must be some sort of signal because she immediately opens the front door and lets in a man with a big bag over his shoulder.
‘This is Mick,’ she says to me. ‘My photographer.’
Mick grins at me and sticks out his hand. ‘Hello, Mrs Taylor,’ he says. He’s come to pick us up and take us to a hotel – ‘Somewhere nice and quiet,’ he says and I begin to protest. Everything’s moving so fast.
‘Wait a minute,’ I say. But no one is listening.
Kate and Mick are discussing getting past the reporters who’ve gathered at the gate. The man from the telly must’ve told people I had someone in the house and they’re taking turns in knocking on the door and opening the letterbox to shout to me. It’s awful, like a nightmare. Like it was at the beginning.
Then they were shouting at Glen, accusing him of all sorts.
‘What’ve you done, Mr Taylor?’ one shouted.
‘Have you got blood on your hands, you pervert?’ the man from the Sun said as Glen took the bin out. Right in front of people walking by. Glen said one of them spat on the pavement.
He was shaking when he came in.
My poor Glen. But he had me to help him then – I would stroke his hand and tell him to pay no attention. But there’s just me now and I don’t know if I can cope on my own.
A voice is yelling horrible things through the door: ‘I know you’re there, Mrs Taylor. Are you being paid to talk? What do you think people will say if you take this blood money?’
I feel like I’ve been hit. And Kate turns and strokes my hand and tells me to ignore it, that she can make it all go away.
I want to trust her but it’s hard to think straight. What does making it all go away mean? Hiding has been the only way to deal with it, according to Glen.
‘We have to wait it out,’ he would say.
But Kate’s way is to go at it head on. Stand up and say my piece to shut them up. I would like to shut them up but it means being in the spotlight. The thought is so terrifying I can’t move.
‘Come on, Jean,’ Kate says, finally noticing me still sitting in the chair. ‘We can do this together. One step at a time. It’ll all be over in five minutes and then no one will be able to find you.’
Apart from her, of course.
I can’t face more abuse from those animals outside, so I obediently start to get my things together. I pick up my handbag and stuff some knickers into it from the tumble drier in the kitchen. Upstairs to get my toothbrush. Where are my keys?
‘Just the essentials,’ Kate says. She will buy me anything I need when we get there. ‘Get where?’ I want to ask, but Kate has turned away again. She’s busy on her mobile, talking to ‘the office’.
She has a different voice when she talks to the office. Tense. A bit breathless, like she’s just walked upstairs.
‘OK, Terry,’ she says. ‘No, Jean is with us … I’ll give you a call later.’ She doesn’t want to talk in front of me. I wonder what the office wants to know. How much money she’s promised? What will I look like in the pictures?
I bet she wanted to say, ‘She’s a bit of a mess but we can make her look presentable.’ I feel panicky and go to say I’ve changed my mind but everything’s moving too fast.
She says she’s going to distract ‘them’. She’ll go out of the front door and pretend to get her car ready for us while Mick and I slip down the garden and over the fence at the back. I can’t really believe I’m doing this. I start to say ‘Hang on’ again, but Kate is pushing me towards the back door.
We wait while she goes out. The noise is suddenly deafening. Like a flock of birds taking off by my front door.
‘Snappers,’ Mick says. I guess he means photographers. Then he throws his jacket over my head, grabs my hand and pulls me along behind him out of the back door into the garden. I can’t see much because of the jacket and I’ve got stupid shoes on. My feet are sliding out of them but I try to run. This is ridiculous. The jacket keeps slipping off. Oh God, there’s Lisa next door, looking out of her top window, mouth open. I wave my hand limply. God knows why. We haven’t spoken for ages.
At the back fence, Mick helps me over. It’s not high, really. More for show than security. I’ve got trousers on but it’s still a bit of a struggle. He’s parked his car round the corner, he says and we creep slowly to the end of the alley at the back of the houses, in case one of the reporters is there. I suddenly want to cry. I’m about to get into a car with people I don’t know and head off to God knows where. It’s probably the craziest thing I’ve ever done.
Glen would’ve had a fit. Even before all the police stuff, he liked to keep things private. We’ve lived in this house for years – all our married life – but, as the neighbours were only too glad to tell the press, we kept ourselves to ourselves. It’s what neighbours always say, isn’t it, when dead bodies or mistreated children are found next door? But in our case, it was true. One of them – it could’ve been Mrs Grange opposite – described Glen to a reporter as having ‘evil eyes’. He had nice eyes, actually. Blue with longish lashes. Little-boy eyes. His eyes could turn me over inside.
Anyway, he used to say to me, ‘Nobody’s business but ours, Jeanie.’ That was why it was so hard when our business became everyone else’s.
Mick the photographer’s van is filthy. You can’t see the floor for burger boxes, crisp packets and old newspapers. There’s an electric razor plugged into the lighter thing and a big bottle of coke rolling around in the foot well.
‘Sorry about the mess,’ he says. ‘I practically live in this van.’
Anyway, I’m not getting in the front. Mick takes me round the back and opens the doors. ‘In here,’ he says, grasping my arm and guiding me in. He puts his hand on my head and ducks me down so I don’t bang my head. ‘Keep down when we drive off and I’ll give you the all-clear.’
‘But—’ I start to say, but he’s slammed the doors and I’m sitting in semi-darkness among camera gear and dustbin bags.
Chapter 7
Thursday, 5 October 2006
The Detective
BOB SPARKES YAWNED loudly, stretching his arms above his head and arching his aching back in his office chair. He tried not to look at the clock on the desk but it winked at him until he focused. It was 2 a.m. Day three of the hunt for Bella over and they were getting nowhere.
Dozens of calls about long-haired, scruffy men and other leads were being checked in an ever-widening circle from the locus, but it was meticulous, slow work.
He tried not to think about what was happening to Bella Elliott – or, if he was honest, what had already happened. He had to find her.
‘Where are you, Bella?’ he asked the photo on his desk. The child’s face was everywhere he looked – the incident room had a dozen photographs of her, smiling down at the deskbound detectives like a small religious icon giving a blessing to their work. The papers were full of pictures of ‘Baby Bella’.
Sparkes ran his hand over his head, registering the growing bald patch. ‘Come on, think!’ he told himself, leaning into the computer screen. He read once more through the statements and reports from the trawl of the local sex offenders, searching for the tiniest weakness in their individual stories, but he could see no real leads.
He scanned through the profiles one last time: pathetic creatures, most of them. Solitary blokes with body odour and bad teeth, living in a fantasy online universe and occasionally straying into the real world to try their luck.
Then there were the persistent offenders. His officers had gone to Paul Silver’s house – he’d abused his kids over the years and done time for it – but his wife – His third? he wondered. Or is it still Diane? – confirmed wearily that her old man was ins
ide, doing five years for burglary. Diversifying, apparently, Bob Sparkes had said to his sergeant.
Naturally, there’d been sightings of Bella reported all over the country in the first forty-eight hours. Officers had rushed off to check and some calls had got his heart racing.
A woman from just outside Newark had rung to say a new neighbour had been playing in the garden with a child. ‘She’s a little blonde girl. I’ve never seen a child in the garden before. I thought she didn’t have kids,’ she said. Sparkes sent the local force round immediately and waited at his desk for the phone to ring.
‘It’s the neighbour’s niece, visiting from Scotland,’ the local DI had told him, as disappointed as he was. ‘Sorry. Maybe next time.’
Maybe. His problem was that most of the calls to the incident room were always going to be from chancers and attention-seekers, desperate to be part of the drama.
The bottom line was that the last sighting of Bella by anyone other than Dawn was at the newsagent’s shop down the road. The owner, a mouthy grandmother, remembered mother and child coming into the shop around eleven thirty. They were regulars. Dawn went in most days to buy cigarettes and this visit, Bella’s last, was recorded in the grainy stop-start images of the shop’s cheap security camera.
Here, little Bella holding her mother’s hand at the counter; cut to Bella, face blurred and indistinct as if she were already disappearing, with a paper bag in her hand; cut to shop door closing behind her.
Dawn’s mum had phoned the house after lunch – 2.17 according to her phone records – and told the police she’d heard her granddaughter shouting along to ‘Bob the Builder’ in the background and had asked to speak to her. Dawn had called Bella but apparently she had run off to fetch a toy.
The timeline of the next sixty-eight minutes was Dawn’s. It was vague, punctuated by her household chores. The detectives had got her to re-enact the cooking, washing up and folding of Bella’s clothes from the tumble drier to try and get a sense of the minutes that passed after Dawn said she saw Bella wander into the garden to play, just after three o’clock.
Margaret Emerson, who lived next door, had gone to fetch something from her car at 3.25 p.m. and was sure the front garden was empty then. ‘Bella always shouted “Peepo” to me. It was a bit of a game for her, poor little thing. She loved attention. Her mum wasn’t always interested in what she was doing,’ Mrs Emerson said carefully. ‘Bella used to play on her own a lot, carting her dolly round and chasing Timmy, the cat. You know what kids get up to.’
‘Did Bella cry a lot?’ Sparkes had asked.
The question had given Mrs Emerson pause for thought, but then she’d shaken her head and said briskly, ‘No, she was a happy little thing.’
The family doctor and health visitor agreed. ‘Lovely child … little poppet,’ they chorused. ‘Mum struggled a bit on her own – it’s hard bringing up a child alone, isn’t it?’ the doctor said and Sparkes nodded as if he understood. All of this was logged in the now bulging files of evidence and statements, proof of the effort his blokes were making, but he knew it was all surface chatter. They were making no progress.
The long-haired man was the key, he concluded, switching off his computer and carefully stacking the files on his desk before heading for the door and five hours’ sleep.
‘Maybe tomorrow we’ll find her,’ he whispered to his sleeping wife when he got home.
A week later, with no news, Kate Waters was on the phone.
‘Hi Bob, the editor has decided to offer a reward for any information that leads to Bella being found. He’s putting up twenty grand. Not too shabby.’
Sparkes groaned inwardly. ‘Bloody rewards,’ he cursed to Matthews later. ‘The papers get all the publicity and we’ll get every nutter and conman in the country on the phone.’
‘That’s very generous, Kate,’ he said. ‘But do you think this is the right moment? We’re working on a number …’
‘It’s going on the front page tomorrow, Bob,’ she interrupted. ‘Look, I know the police usually hate the idea of a reward, but people who see or hear things and are worried about ringing the police will see twenty grand and pick up the phone.’
He sighed. ‘I’ll go and tell Dawn,’ he said. ‘I need to prepare her.’
‘Right,’ Kate said. ‘Look, what are the chances of getting a sit-down chat with Dawn, Bob? The poor woman could barely speak at the press conference – this would be a proper chance for her to talk about Bella. I’ll be very gentle with her. What do you think?’
He thought he wished he hadn’t answered her call. He liked Kate – and there weren’t many reporters he could say that about – but he knew she was like a terrier with a bone when she was after something. He knew she wouldn’t let up until she got what she wanted, but he wasn’t sure he and Dawn were ready for this sort of grilling.
Dawn was still a largely unknown quantity; she was an emotional mess, drugged against her terror and unable to focus on anything for more than thirty seconds. Bob Sparkes had spent hours with her and he felt he’d only scratched the surface. Could he really let Kate Waters loose on her?
‘It might help her to talk to someone who isn’t a police officer, Bob. Might help her remember something …’
‘I’ll ask her, Kate, but I’m not sure she’s up to it. She’s on tranquillizers and sleeping pills and is finding it hard to concentrate on anything.’
‘Brilliant. Thanks Bob.’ He could hear the smile in the reporter’s voice.
‘Hold on, it’s not a done deal yet. Let me talk to her this morning and I’ll give you a ring back.’
When he arrived, he found Dawn sitting in exactly the same spot as when he had first met her, on the sofa that had become her ark, among Bella’s toys, crushed empty cigarette packs and pages torn from newspapers, cards from well-wishers and letters on lined notepaper from the mad and angry.
‘Have you been to bed, love?’ he asked her.
Sue Blackman, a young woman in uniform acting as family liaison officer, shook her head silently and raised her eyebrows.
‘Can’t sleep,’ Dawn said. ‘Need to be awake for when she comes home.’
Sparkes took PC Blackman into the hall. ‘She needs some rest or she’s going to end up in hospital,’ he hissed.
‘I know, Sir. She’s dozing on the sofa during the day but she hates it when it gets dark. She says Bella is afraid of the dark.’
Chapter 8
Wednesday, 11 October 2006
The Reporter
KATE WATERS ARRIVED AT the house at lunchtime with a photographer and a bunch of ostentatious supermarket lilies. She’d parked down the road, away from the pack, so she could get out of the car without attracting attention. She rang Bob Sparkes to let him know she was there and swept past the journalists sitting outside the house in their cars, Big Macs in their fists. By the time they’d leapt from their vehicles, she was inside. She heard a couple of them swearing loudly, warning each other that they were about to be shafted, and tried not to grin.
As Bob Sparkes led the way, Kate took it all in, the shambles and stasis created by grief: in the hall, Bella’s blue anorak with a fur-lined hood and teddy-bear backpack hanging on the bannister; her tiny, shiny red wellies by the door.
‘Get a photo of those, Mick,’ she whispered to the photographer following her as they made their way into the front room. There were toys and baby photos everywhere; the scene took Kate straight back to her own early days of motherhood, struggling against the tide of chaos. She had sat and cried the day she brought Jake home from the hospital, lost in the postnatal hormonal wash and sudden sense of responsibility. She remembered she’d asked the nurse if she could pick him up, the morning after he was born, as if he belonged to the hospital.
The mother looked up, her young face creased and made old by weeping, and Kate smiled and took her hand. She was going to shake it, but simply squeezed it instead.
‘Hello, Dawn,’ she said. ‘Thank you so much for agreeing to talk to
me. I know how hard it must be for you, but we hope it will help the police find Bella.’
Dawn nodded as if in slow motion.
Bloody hell, Bob wasn’t kidding, Kate thought.
She picked up a red Teletubby doll from the sofa – ‘Is this Po? My boys preferred Power Rangers,’ she said.
Dawn looked at her, interested. ‘Bella loves Po,’ she said. ‘She likes blowing bubbles, chases after them, trying to catch them.’
Kate had noticed a photo on a table of the toddler doing exactly that and got up to bring it to Dawn. ‘Here she is,’ she said and Dawn took the frame in her hands. ‘She’s beautiful,’ Kate said. ‘Full of mischief, I bet.’
Dawn smiled gratefully. The two women had found their common ground – motherhood – and Dawn started to talk about her baby.
First time she’s been able to talk about Bella as a child, not a crime victim, Bob Sparkes thought.
‘She’s good, Kate. You have to give her that. She can get inside your head quicker than a lot of my coppers,’ he had told his wife later. Eileen had shrugged and returned to the Telegraph crossword. Police work took place on a different planet, as far as she was concerned.
Kate fetched more photos and toys to keep the conversation flowing, letting Dawn tell her story about each item with barely a question needed. She used a discreet tape recorder, slipped quickly on to the cushion between them, to capture every word. Notebooks were a bad idea in a situation like this – it would be too much like a police interview. She just wanted Dawn to talk. She wanted to hear about the ordinary pleasures and everyday struggles of being a mum. Of getting Bella ready for nursery, bathtime games, the child’s delight at choosing her new wellies.
‘She loves animals. We went to the zoo once and she wanted to stay watching the monkeys. She laughed and laughed,’ Dawn told her, taking temporary shelter in memories of a previous life.
The glimpses of Bella and Dawn would bring the reader straight into the nightmare the young mother was enduring, Kate knew, writing the intro in her head.