by Fiona Barton
‘Mr Taylor, I’d like to talk to you about the disappearance of Bella Elliott,’ DI Sparkes said. And I opened my mouth to say something, to make the policeman stop saying these things, but I couldn’t. And Glen’s face went blank.
He never looked at me once the whole time. Never put his arm round me or touched my hand. He said later he was in shock. He and the policemen carried on talking, but I can’t remember hearing what they were saying. I watched their mouths moving but I couldn’t take it in. What had Glen got to do with Bella? He wouldn’t harm a hair on a child’s head. He loves children.
Then they left, Glen and the policemen. Glen told me later that he said goodbye and told me not to worry, it was just a stupid mix-up he’d sort out. But I don’t remember that. Other policemen stayed at the house to ask me questions, to root around in our lives, but through it all, going round and round in my brain, I kept thinking about his face and how for a second I didn’t know him.
He told me later someone had said he’d been making a delivery near where Bella disappeared, but that didn’t mean anything. Just coincidence, he said. There must’ve been hundreds of people in the area that day.
He’d been nowhere near the scene of the crime – his delivery was miles away, he said. But the police were going through everyone, to check if they had seen anything.
He’d started as a delivery driver after he got laid off by the bank. They were looking for redundancies, he told people, and he fancied a change. He’d always dreamed of having the chance to start his own business, be his own boss.
The night I discovered the real reason was a Wednesday. Aerobics for me and late supper for us. He shouted at me about why I was later than usual, horrible tight words spat out, angry and dirty. Words he never used normally. Everything was wrong. He was crowding the kitchen with his accusations, his anger. His eyes were dead, as if he didn’t know me. I thought he was going to hit me. I watched his fists clench and unclench at his sides, frozen at the cooker, spatula in my hand.
My kitchen, my rules, we used to joke. But not that Wednesday. Wednesday’s child is full of woe.
The row ended with a slammed door as he marched off to bed – to sleep in the spare room on the sofa bed, cut off from me. I remember standing at the foot of the stairs, numb. What was this about? What had happened? I didn’t want to think about what it meant for us.
‘Stop it,’ I told myself. ‘It’ll be all right. He must’ve had a bad day. Let him sleep it off.’
I started tidying, picking up his scarf and jacket from where he’d hung them on the bannister and putting them on the coat hooks by the door. I felt something stiff in one pocket, a letter. A white envelope with a see-through panel, with his name and our address showing. From the bank. The words were official and as stiff as the envelope: ‘inquiry … unprofessional behaviour … inappropriate … termination, forthwith’. I was lost in the formal language but I knew this meant disgrace. The end of our dreams. Our future. Clutching the letter in my hand, I ran up the stairs. I marched into the spare room and flicked on the light. He must’ve heard me coming but pretended to be asleep until I heard myself screech, ‘What is this about?’
He looked at me like I was nothing. ‘I’ve been fired,’ he said and rolled back over to pretend to sleep.
The next morning, Glen came into our bedroom with a cup of tea in my favourite cup. He looked like he’d hardly slept and said he was sorry. He sat down on the bed and said he was under a lot of pressure and it was all a misunderstanding at work and that he’d never got on with the boss. He said he’d been set up and blamed for something. Some mistake, he said. He’d done nothing wrong. His boss was jealous. Glen said he had big plans for his future, but that didn’t matter if I wasn’t beside him.
‘You are the centre of my world, Jeanie,’ he said and held me close, and I hugged him back and let go of my fear.
Mike, a friend he said he met on the internet, told him about the driving job – ‘just while I work out what business I want to get into it, Jeanie,’ he said. It was cash in hand at first and then they took him on permanently. He stopped talking about being his own boss.
He had to wear a uniform, quite smart: pale-blue shirt with the company logo on the pocket and navy trousers. Glen didn’t like wearing a uniform – ‘It’s demeaning, Jeanie, like being back at school’ – but he got used to it and seemed happy enough. He’d go out in the morning and wave as he drove off to pick up the van. Off on his travels, he’d say.
I only went with him once. A special job for the boss on a Sunday just before Christmas one year. Must’ve been the Christmas before he was arrested. It was only down to Canterbury and I fancied a run out. We sat in total silence on the way down. I had a root through his glove box. Just stuff. Some sweets. I helped myself and offered one to Glen to cheer him up. He didn’t want it and told me to put them back.
The van was lovely and clean. Spotless. I never normally saw it. It was kept at the depot and he took his car to pick it up in the morning. ‘Nice van,’ I said, but he just grunted.
‘What’s in the back?’
‘Nothing,’ he said and turned up the radio.
And he was right. I had a look when he was talking to the customer. The back was as clean as a whistle. Well, almost. There was a corner torn from a sweet packet poking out from under one edge of the mat. I got it out with my fingernail. It was a bit fuzzy and dusty but I put it in my coat pocket. To be tidy.
It all seems so long ago. Us going for a drive like normal people.
‘Glen Taylor?’ the nurse is saying to me, startling me out of my thoughts and frowning as she writes his name on a form. Trying to remember. I wait for the inevitable.
The penny drops.
‘Glen Taylor? The one accused of taking that little girl, Bella?’ she says quietly to one of the paramedics and I pretend not to hear. When she turns back to me, her face is harder. ‘I see,’ she says and walks away. She must’ve made a phone call because half an hour later the press are there, hanging around Casualty trying to look like patients. I can spot them a mile off.
I keep my head down and refuse to speak to any of them. What sort of people are they, hounding a woman who’s just seen her husband die?
The police are there, too. Because of the accident. They’re not the ones we usually see. They’re the local police, the Met, not the Hampshire officers. Just doing routine work, taking statements from the witnesses, from me, from the bus driver. He’s here, too. Apparently he got a nasty knock to the head when he braked and says he didn’t even see Glen step out.
He probably didn’t, it was that fast.
Then DI Bob Sparkes shows up. I knew he’d turn up eventually, like a bad penny, but he must’ve driven like the wind to get here from Southampton so quickly. He’s all sad face and condolences for me, but he’s even sadder for himself. He certainly didn’t want Glen dead. Him gone means that the case will never be closed. Poor Bob. He’ll be stuck with that failure all his life.
He sits down beside me on a plastic chair and reaches for my hand. I’m so embarrassed I let him. He has never touched me before like this. Like he cares for me. He holds my hand and speaks in a soft, low voice. I know what he’s saying but I don’t hear it, if you know what I mean. He’s asking me if I know what Glen did with Bella. He’s saying it nicely, telling me I can let go of the secret now. Everything can be told. I was as much a victim as Bella was.
‘I don’t know anything about Bella, Bob. Neither did Glen,’ I say and pull my hand away, pretending I need it to wipe away a tear. Later I’m sick in the hospital toilets. I clean myself up and sit on the loo with my forehead resting on the lovely cool tiles on the wall.
Chapter 10
Thursday, 12 October 2006
The Detective
DI BOB SPARKES was standing in the incident room scanning the boards for emerging patterns and links. He took off his glasses and narrowed his eyes in case a change of focus might reveal something.
There was a maelstrom
of activity all around the Elliotts’ garden, but, at the epicenter, Bella remained the missing piece.
All that information but no sign of her, he thought. She’s here somewhere. We’re missing something.
The Forensics team had dusted and swabbed every inch of the brick garden wall and painted metal gate; the garden had been the subject of a fingertip search by a line of police officers, making religious progress on their knees, and fibres from her clothes, golden hairs from her head, dismembered toy parts and discarded sweet wrappers had been preserved in plastic bags like holy relics. But of the abductor, nothing.
‘I think the bastard must have reached over the wall and lifted her straight over and into his vehicle,’ Sparkes said. ‘It would only have taken seconds. She was there and then she wasn’t.’
The team had found a half-sucked blue sweet on Bella’s side of the wall. ‘Maybe it fell out of her mouth when he picked her up?’ Sparkes said. ‘Is it a Smartie?’
‘I’m not exactly an expert on Smarties, Boss, but I’ll get someone to check,’ Sergeant Matthews said.
When it came back from Forensics, it had been identified as a Skittle. Bella’s saliva was on the sweet, matched with the comforter she sucked at night.
‘She never had Skittles,’ Dawn said.
He gave her one to keep her quiet, Sparkes thought. How old-fashioned. He remembered his mum telling him as a boy, ‘Never take sweets from a stranger.’ That and something about men with puppies.
He was reviewing the list of evidence and his energy was dipping. It didn’t look good. There were no CCTV cameras watching over the street – only good old Mr Spencer – and no images collected from the nearest camera sites so far of a scruffy man.
‘Maybe he was just lucky,’ Sparkes said.
‘Luck of the devil, then.’
‘Get on the phone, Matthews, and see when we can get on Crimewatch. Tell them it’s urgent.’
The television reconstruction seemed to take forever to organize, although it was only eight days. A Bella lookalike had to be found from a nursery school in another town because no parent living near the Westland estate would let their child take part.
‘Can’t blame them, really,’ Sparkes told the exasperated director. ‘They don’t want to see their kid as a kidnap victim. Even a pretend one.’
They were waiting at the end of Manor Road for the film crew to set up, discussing what Sparkes would say in his appeal for information.
‘It’ll be live in the studio, Bob,’ the director said, ‘so make sure you have everything sorted in your head before you speak. You’ll know what questions you’re going to get.’
Sparkes was too distracted to take it all in. He had just been putting Dawn Elliott in a police car to her mum’s as the actress playing her arrived.
‘She looks like me,’ she’d whispered to him. She hadn’t been able to look at the child playing Bella. She had laid out a set of her daughter’s clothes, a little headband and Bella’s spare glasses on the sofa, stroking each item and saying her child’s name. Sparkes had helped her up and she had walked, dry-eyed and holding his arm, to the car. She got in beside Sue Blackman and didn’t look back.
The street was now quiet, deserted, as it must have been that day. Sparkes watched as the re-enactment took shape, the director gently coaching ‘Bella’ to chase a borrowed grey cat into the garden. Her mother stood just off camera, with emergency chocolate buttons in case bribes were needed, smiling at her little girl and trying not to cry.
Mrs Emerson volunteered to play her own small role, walking stiffly down her garden path, pretending to look for her little friend next door, and then responding to Dawn’s cries for help. Across the road, Mr Spencer acted out spotting the actor in a long wig strolling past his house, his mimed puzzlement filmed through the bay window by a cameraman standing on Mrs Spencer’s French marigolds.
The ‘abduction’ took only minutes but it was three hours before the director was satisfied and everyone crowded round the monitor in the film truck to watch the end product. No one spoke as they watched ‘Bella’ playing in the garden and only Mr Spencer stayed to mull over the events with the crew.
Afterwards, one of the older officers took Sparkes aside. ‘Have you noticed that our Mr Spencer is always hanging around the investigation team and giving interviews to the reporters? Telling them he saw the man who took her. Bit of a glory-seeker, if you ask me.’
Sparkes smiled sympathetically. ‘There’s always one, isn’t there? He’s probably lonely and bored. I’ll get Matthews to keep an eye on him.’
As expected, the broadcast, twenty-three days after Bella vanished, triggered hundreds of phone calls to the studio and incident room, the film igniting public emotion and a fresh outpouring of variations on ‘My heart goes out to …’ and ‘Why, oh why?’ messages on the show’s website.
About a dozen callers claimed to have seen Bella, many of them sure they had spotted her in a café, on a beach, in a playground. Each call was acted upon immediately, but Sparkes’ optimism began to fade as he took his turn answering the phones at the back of the studio.
The following week, a sudden buzz of voices from the incident room reached Sparkes as he walked down the corridor.
‘Got a flasher in a kids’ playground, Sir,’ the duty officer told him. ‘About twenty-five minutes from the Elliott house.’
‘Who is he? Is he known to us?’
Lee Chambers was a middle-aged, divorced minicab driver who’d been questioned six months earlier for exposing himself to two female passengers. He’d claimed he was just having a quick pee and they’d caught a glimpse as he zipped himself up. Completely unintentional. The women didn’t want to take it further, didn’t want the attention, and the police sent him on his way.
Today, he’d been in bushes beside the swings and slides at Royal Park as children played nearby.
‘I was just having a quick pee,’ he told the police officer called by a horrified mother.
‘Do you normally have an erection while peeing, Sir? That must be inconvenient,’ the officer said as he led him to a waiting car.
Chambers arrived at Southampton Central police station and was put in an interview room.
Peering through the toughened glass panel in the door, Sparkes saw a skinny man in tracksuit bottoms and a Southampton FC shirt, with long greasy hair in a ponytail.
‘Scruffy, long hair,’ Matthews said.
Did you take Bella? Sparkes thought automatically. Have you got her somewhere?
The suspect looked up expectantly as Sparkes and Matthews entered.
‘This is all a mistake,’ he said.
‘If I had a quid …’ Matthews muttered. ‘Why don’t you tell us all about it, then?’ he said as the officers dragged their chairs closer to the table.
Chambers told his lies and they listened. Just a quick pee. Didn’t choose a playground deliberately. Didn’t see the children. Didn’t talk to the children. Completely innocent mistake.
‘Tell me, Mr Chambers, where were you on Monday, October the second?’ Sparkes asked.
‘God, I don’t know. Working, probably. Monday is one of my regular days. The cab controller would know. Why d’you ask?’
The question hung in the air for a beat and then Chambers was all eyes. Sparkes almost expected an audible ding.
‘That’s when that little girl went missing, isn’t it? You don’t think I had anything to do with that? Oh God, you can’t think that.’
They left him to stew for a bit while they went to join their colleagues already searching his address, a bedsit in a converted Victorian house in the city’s rundown red-light area near the docks.
Leafing through the extreme porn magazines beside Chambers’ bed, Matthews sighed. ‘This is all about hating women, not wanting sex with kids. What’ve you got?’
Sparkes was silent. Photos of Dawn and Bella had been cut from newspapers and slipped into a clear plastic folder on the floor of the wardrobe.
The
minicab controller was a bored-looking woman in her fifties, bundled up against the cold of her unheated office in a green cable-knit cardigan and fingerless mittens.
‘Lee Chambers? What’s he been up to? More of his accidental flashing?’ She laughed and slurped a Red Bull. ‘He’s a nasty little man,’ she said as she flicked through the records. ‘Everyone thinks so, but he knows a friend of the boss.’
She was interrupted by the fizz of static and a voice rendered robotic by the tinny speakers, and gave some incomprehensible instructions back.
‘Right, where were we?
‘Monday, 2 October. Here we are. Lee was in Fareham early on – hospital run for a regular customer. All quiet until lunch, then he picked up a couple from the airport at Eastleigh to go to Portsmouth. Dropped about 14.00. Last job of the day.’
She printed out the details for them and turned back to the microphone as they left without saying goodbye.
‘They call this firm Rapists’ Cabs in the nightclubs,’ Sergeant Matthews said. ‘I’ve told my girls never to use them.’
The team was all over Chambers’ life. His ex-wife was already waiting for a chat with Sparkes and Matthews, and his colleagues and landlord were being questioned.
Donna Chambers, hard-faced with thick, homemade highlights, hated her former husband, but she didn’t think he would hurt a child. ‘He’s just a wanker who can’t keep it in his trousers,’ she said.
Neither of the detectives dared catch the other’s eye. ‘Bit of a Romeo, then?’
The list was long – almost impressive – as she detailed how Lee Chambers had worked his way through her friends, work colleagues, even her hairdresser.
‘Every time he said it would never happen again,’ the wronged wife said. ‘He had a high sex drive, he said. Anyway, he was very bitter when I finally left him and threatened to come after any bloke I saw, but nothing came of it. All talk. The thing is he’s a born liar. He can’t tell the truth.’
‘What about the indecent exposure? Is that a new thing?’