The Widow

by Fiona Barton

  Glen was on remand so there weren’t so many rules about visits, but the one I liked best was that I couldn’t wear high heels, short skirts or see-through clothes. It made me laugh. The first time, I wore trousers and a jumper instead. Nice and safe.

  Glen didn’t like it. ‘I hope you’re not letting yourself go, Jean,’ he said, so I put lipstick on next time.

  He could have three visits a week, but we agreed I’d only come twice so I didn’t have to deal with the reporters too often. Mondays and Fridays. ‘It’ll give my week a shape,’ he said.

  The room was noisy and brightly lit and it hurt my eyes and ears. We’d sit across from each other and when I’d told him my news and he’d told me his, we’d listen to the other conversations going on around us and talk about them instead.

  I thought my job was to comfort him and reassure him that I was standing by him, but he seemed to have that covered already.

  ‘We can weather this, Jeanie. We know the truth and so will everyone else soon. Don’t you worry,’ he’d say at least once a visit. I tried not to, but I felt like our life was slipping away.

  ‘What if the truth doesn’t come out?’ I asked him once and he looked disappointed that I would even suggest it.

  ‘It will,’ he insisted. ‘My lawyer says the police have screwed up royally.’

  When Glen’s case wasn’t thrown out before the trial, he said the police ‘want their day in court’. He looked smaller every time I saw him, as if he was shrinking inside himself.

  ‘Don’t worry love,’ I heard myself say. ‘All over soon.’

  He looked grateful.

  Chapter 21

  Monday, 11 June 2007

  The Detective

  SPARKES WAS REVIEWING the situation. It had been two months since he’d first knocked on Glen Taylor’s door and they were not making any progress. It wasn’t that they hadn’t been looking. His colleagues had been examining every detail of his life – and the lives of Mike Doonan and Lee Chambers – but they had little to show for it so far.

  Doonan appeared to have led a pretty grey existence, with even his divorces failing to provide a splash of colour. The only point of interest was that the two ex-wives had become close friends and chimed in with each other when discussing Mike’s faults. ‘He’s a bit selfish, I suppose,’ Marie Doonan said. ‘Yeah, selfish,’ Sarah Doonan chorused. ‘We’re better off without him.’

  Even his children were uninterested in his involvement with the police. ‘Never see him,’ his eldest said. ‘He was gone before I realized he was there.’

  Matthews dug on, dogged in his pursuit. His blood pressure flickered when he discovered that Doonan had not arrived for his doctor’s appointment on the day Bella vanished, but the driver said his spine had been so painful he couldn’t leave the flat. And the GP backed him up. ‘He can barely stand at times,’ he said. ‘Poor man.’

  He still couldn’t be ruled out, but Sparkes was becoming impatient with Matthews, demanding that he turn his attention to Taylor.

  ‘Doonan is crippled – he can hardly walk, so how the hell could he kidnap a child?’ Sparkes asked. ‘We’ve got nothing beyond the fact that he was driving a blue van to link him to the case, have we?’

  Matthews shook his head. ‘No, Boss, but there’s the Operation Gold stuff.’

  ‘Where’s the evidence he looked at those images? There isn’t any. Taylor has got child porn on his computer. He’s the one we should be concentrating on. I need you on this, Matthews.’

  The sergeant was not convinced it was time to close the book on Doonan, but he knew that his boss had made up his mind.

  The real problem for Sparkes was that he couldn’t let go of his first instinct that they’d already found their man and he was afraid that, unless they stopped him, he would go looking for another Bella.

  Sparkes had begun to notice every child of Bella’s age – in the street, in shops, in cars and cafés – and then he’d scan for predators. It was beginning to affect his appetite, but not his focus. He knew it was taking over his life, but there was nothing else he could do.

  ‘You are obsessed with this case, Bob,’ Eileen had said the other night. ‘Can’t we just go out for a drink without you disappearing back inside your head? You need to relax.’

  He had wanted to scream, ‘Do you want another child to be taken while I’m off having a glass of wine?’ But didn’t. It wasn’t Eileen’s fault. She didn’t understand. He knew he couldn’t protect every little girl in the city, but he couldn’t stop trying.

  There had been many other cases involving children during his career – little Laura Simpson; Baby W, shaken to death by his stepfather; the Voules boy, who’d drowned in a park paddling pool surrounded by other kids; traffic accidents and runaways – but he had not known them the way he knew Bella.

  He remembered the feeling of helplessness when he had first held his son James, the thought that he alone was responsible for his child’s well-being and safety in a world full of danger and bad people. That’s how he felt about Bella.

  He’d begun dreaming about her. That was never a good sign.

  He wondered if the blue van was distracting them from other lines. But then why had the man in the blue van never come forward? Everyone wanted to help find this child. If it had just been a bloke visiting a house, he would’ve rung in, wouldn’t he?

  Unless it was Glen Taylor, he thought.

  The search had been thorough, fragment by fragment pored over by the team. A discarded T-shirt in a hedge, a single shoe, a blonde child spotted in a shopping centre trying to get away from an adult. The detectives were on a hair trigger as the hours, then days, then weeks passed with no results. They were all exhausted, but no one could call it over.

  Every morning, the update meeting got shorter and gloomier. The T-shirt was for an eight-year-old, the shoe wasn’t Bella’s, and the blonde screamer was a toddler having a tantrum. Leads evaporated as soon as they were examined.

  Sparkes kept his despair to himself. Once his head went down, the team would give up. Each morning he gave himself a pep talk in his office, sometimes standing in front of the mirror in the toilets, making sure no one could read failure in his increasingly pouchy eyes. Then he’d stride in, energy high, and galvanize his men and women.

  ‘Let’s go back to basics,’ he said that morning. And they did, following him from photos to maps to names to lists. ‘What are we missing?’ he challenged them. Tired faces. ‘Who would take a child? What do we know from other cases?’

  ‘A paedophile.’

  ‘A paedophile ring.’

  ‘Kidnapper for money.’

  ‘Or revenge.’

  ‘A woman who’s lost a baby.’

  ‘Or can’t have a baby.’

  ‘A fantasist who needs a child to fulfil a scenario.’

  Sparkes nodded. ‘Let’s split into two-man – sorry, person – teams and look at our witnesses and persons of interest again, to see if any fit those categories.’

  The room began to buzz and he left Ian Matthews to it.

  He wondered how quickly Jean Taylor’s name would come up and wanted time to think it through himself. Jean was an odd one. He remembered the first time he’d seen her, the shock on her face, the tricky interviews, the unshakable answers. He felt certain she was covering for Glen and had put this down to blind loyalty, but was it because she was involved somehow?

  Women who killed children were rare, and those who did almost exclusively killed their own, according to the stats. But they did steal children occasionally.

  He knew infertility could be a powerfully motivating force. It burned within some women, sending them mad with grief and longing. The neighbour and colleagues at the salon had said Jean was devastated when she couldn’t have a baby. Used to cry in the back room if a customer talked about being pregnant. But nobody had placed Jean in Southampton on the day Bella was taken.

  Sparkes doodled as he thought, drawing spiders on the pad in front of him.r />
  If Jean loved children so much, why would she stay with a man who looks at child abuse on the computer? he thought. Why would she be loyal to a man like that? He was certain Eileen would be out of the door instantly. And he wouldn’t blame her. So what was Glen’s hold over his wife?

  ‘Perhaps we’ve been looking at it from the wrong angle,’ he told his reflection as he washed his hands in the Gents’. ‘Maybe it’s her hold over Glen? Perhaps Jean put him up to it?’

  Sure enough, Jean’s name was scrawled on the whiteboard in the incident room when he returned. The officers looking at ‘women who can’t have babies’ were discussing previous cases. ‘Thing is, Sir,’ one of the team said, ‘it’s usually a woman acting on her own who takes a child and they don’t go for toddlers. Some pretend to their partners or family that they are pregnant, wearing maternity clothes and padding, and then take babies from maternity units or prams outside shops to fulfil the pretence. Taking a toddler is high risk. Little kids can put up quite fight if they are frightened and a crying child attracts attention.’

  Dan Fry, one of the force’s new graduate recruits, raised his hand and Matthews nodded at him to add his piece. He was young, barely out of the Student Union bar, and stood to speak to the group, unaware that the culture was to stay seated and address the desktop.

  Fry cleared his throat. ‘Then there’s keeping an older child out of sight. It’s a lot harder to explain the sudden appearance of a two-year-old to friends and family. If you were snatching a child of that age to bring up as your own, you’d have to disappear too. And the Taylors haven’t budged.’

  ‘Quite right, um, Fry, is it?’ Sparkes said, waving him to sit down.

  The other teams had ruled out kidnap for cash or revenge. Dawn Elliott didn’t have any money of her own and they’d trawled back through her teenage years for previous boyfriends and evidence of drugs or prostitution, in case there was an organized-crime connection. But there was nothing. She was a small-town girl who’d worked in an office until she’d fallen for a married man and become pregnant.

  They still hadn’t found Bella’s father – the name he had given Dawn seemed to be false and the mobile phone number was a pay-as-you-go that no longer rang.

  ‘He’s a chancer, Boss,’ Matthews said. ‘Just out for a bit of extramarital and then disappears. The life of a thousand reps. A shag in every town.’

  ‘Paedophiles’ was all that was left on the board.

  The energy leached out of the room. ‘Meanwhile, back at Glen Taylor,’ Sparkes said.

  ‘And Mike Doonan,’ Matthews muttered. ‘What about Operation Gold?’

  But his superior officer appeared not to hear him. He was listening to his own fears.

  Sparkes was certain that Glen Taylor was already thinking about his next victim. Fuelling his thoughts with internet porn. Looking at those images became an addiction – as hard to kick as a drug – according to psychologists.

  Sparkes had been told the reasons why blokes became dependent on internet porn – depression, anxiety, money troubles, work problems – and some of the theories about the ‘chemical payoff’ – the thrill produced by adrenalin, dopamine and serotonin. One report he read as homework compared viewing porn to ‘the rush of first-time sex’ for some men, leading them to chase a repetition of the same high with more and more extreme images. ‘A bit like how cocaine addicts describe their experience,’ it had added.

  Surfing on the net was a safe fantasy world full of excitement, a way of creating a private space in which to offend.

  ‘Interestingly,’ Sparkes told Matthews later, as they sat in the canteen, ‘not all porn addicts get erections.’

  Ian Matthews raised an eyebrow as he rested his sausage sandwich on the Formica table. ‘Do you mind, Boss? I’m eating. What are you reading there? Sounds like complete bollocks.’

  ‘Thank you, professor,’ he snapped. ‘I’m trying to get inside Glen Taylor’s murky little world. We’re not getting in there through interviews, but he won’t be able to break his habit and I’ll be waiting for him. We’ll find him and catch him.’

  The sergeant sat back heavily and resumed chewing on his lunch. ‘Go on then, tell me how.’

  ‘Fry, one of the clever kids they’ve sent us to knock into shape, came to see me yesterday. He says we’ve missed a potential trick. Chat rooms. That’s where porn addicts and sexual predators look for friends and lose their inhibitions.’

  DC Fry had paid a visit to his senior officer’s office, pulling up a chair without being invited and treating the conversation like a university tutorial.

  ‘The problem, as I see it, is we need disclosure from Glen Taylor.’

  No shit, Sherlock, Sparkes thought. ‘Go on, Fry.’

  ‘Well, perhaps we need to enter his world and catch him at his most vulnerable.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Fry, can we cut to the chase? What are you on about – “his world”?’

  ‘I bet he’s on the prowl in chat rooms – probably looking for new prospects – and he could disclose some key evidence to us if we pose as punters. We could put in a CHIS.’

  Sparkes raised an eyebrow. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘A Covert Human Intelligence Source, Sir, to watch him at work. We covered it at college and I think it’s well worth a try,’ he finished, uncrossing his long legs and leaning on Sparkes’ desk.

  Sparkes had automatically leaned back – physically and mentally. It wasn’t that Fry was cleverer than him. It was the confidence the younger man had that he was right that needled him. That’s what university does for you, he thought.

  Bloody university education, he could hear his dad say. Waste of bloody time. It’s for people with money and nothing to do.

  Not you, was the message to the seventeen-year-old with an application form in his hand.

  There’d been no further discussion on the subject. His dad was a clerk at the district council and preferred his world small and known. ‘Security’ was his watchword and he urged his son to have the same lower-middle-class mindset.

  ‘Get your A levels and get a nice office job, Robert. Job for life.’

  Bob had kept his application to the police secret from both his parents – funny, he always thought of them as one person, mumanddad – and presented it as a fait accompli when he was accepted. He didn’t use the words ‘fait accompli’. His mumanddad didn’t hold with foreign stuff.

  He’d done well with the police but his rise had not been meteoric. That wasn’t how things were done in his day; it was words like ‘committed’, ‘insightful’ and ‘methodical’ that had punctuated his appraisals and recommendations.

  The new breed of graduates on fast-track entry would cringe if they were described in the same way, Sparkes thought.

  ‘Tell me about chat rooms,’ Sparkes said, and Fry, who looked like he barely shaved, let alone went looking for sex on the internet, told him he had written a dissertation on the subject.

  ‘My Psychology tutor is researching the effects of pornography on personality. I’m sure she’d help us,’ he’d said.

  By the end of the week, Sparkes, Matthews and Fry were on their way to the young officer’s alma mater in the Midlands. Dr Fleur Jones greeted the men at the lift door and looked so young Sparkes thought she must be a student.

  ‘We’re here to talk to Dr Jones,’ Matthews said and Fleur laughed, used to – and secretly enjoying – the confusion created by her dyed red hair, pierced nose and short skirt.

  ‘That’s me. You must be DI Sparkes and Sergeant Matthews. Nice to meet you. Hello, Dan.’

  The three men squeezed their joint bulk into the utilitarian booth that served as Fleur Jones’s workspace and Sparkes and Matthews began scrutinizing the walls out of habit. The message board was covered in childish drawings, but when they focused in on the detail, they realized they were looking at pornographic images.

  ‘Good grief,’ Bob Sparkes said. ‘Who the hell did these? Not your usual kindergarten artworks.’

&nbs
p; Dr Jones smiled patiently and Fry smirked. ‘Part of my research,’ she said. ‘Getting habitual pornography users to draw what they witness online can reveal personality traits and lets them see things differently, perhaps enabling them to see the human beings behind the sexual objects they seek out.’

  ‘Right,’ said Sparkes, wondering what the sex offenders on his patch would produce given crayons. ‘Well, Dr Jones, we don’t want to take too much of your valuable time, so shall we get down to the reason we’re here?’

  The psychologist crossed her bare legs and nodded intently, eye contact unwavering. Sparkes tried to mirror her body language but he couldn’t cross his legs without kicking Matthews and he started to feel a bit hot.

  Dr Jones rose and opened her window. ‘Getting a bit stuffy in here – sorry, it’s a small room.’

  Sparkes cleared his throat and began: ‘We’re investigating the disappearance of Bella Elliott, as DC Fry has told you. We have a suspect, but we’re looking for new approaches to find out if he took the child. He has an extensive interest in sexual images of children and adults dressed as children. There are images on his computer. He says he didn’t download them intentionally,’

  Dr Jones allowed herself a twitch of a smile of recognition.

  ‘He’s very manipulative and is turning our interviews into a masterclass in evasion.’

  ‘Addicts are brilliant liars, Inspector. They lie to themselves and then to everyone else. They’re in denial about their problem and they are experts at finding excuses and other people to blame,’ Dr Jones said. ‘Dan tells me you are interested in trying to interact with the suspect in sex chat rooms?’

  She can’t be more than thirty, Sparkes thought.

  The psychologist clocked the pause and smiled knowingly.

  ‘Er, yes, yes, that’s right. But we need to understand much more about these chat rooms and how to approach our man,’ he said quickly.