The Widow

by Fiona Barton

  Sanderson, who was well into his stride, looked almost regretful when his victim finally stepped down from the witness box, diminished and exhausted.

  The defence immediately called for an adjournment and, with the jurors safely tucked away in the jury room, made the case that the trial should be halted.

  ‘This whole case rests on circumstantial evidence and an entrapment. It cannot continue,’ Sanderson said. ‘The Goldilocks evidence must be ruled as inadmissible.’

  The judge tapped her pencil impatiently as she listened to the prosecution’s response.

  ‘The police acted entirely properly in every respect. They followed procedure to the letter. They believed they had proper cause. That this was the only way to get the final piece of evidence,’ the prosecutor said and sat down.

  The judge put down her pencil and looked at her notes in silence. ‘I will retire,’ she said finally and the court rose as she walked back to her chambers.

  Twenty minutes later, the clerk called ‘All rise’ and the judge delivered her verdict. She ruled out the Goldilocks evidence, criticizing Fry’s encouragement and prompting and the exposure of such a junior officer. ‘The evidence is unsafe and cannot be relied upon,’ she said.

  Sparkes knew it was simply a formality for the prosecution team to throw in the towel and offer no further evidence and began packing his briefcase.

  In the dock, Taylor listened to the judge carefully, the reality slowly dawning on him that he was about to be freed. Below him, Jean Taylor looked stunned. ‘I wonder what she’s thinking,’ Sparkes muttered to Matthews. ‘She’s got to go home with a porn addict who has cyber sex with strangers dressed as children. And a child-killer.’

  Suddenly it was over. The judge ordered the jury to return a formal verdict of not guilty and Taylor was taken down to the cells to prepare for freedom. In the courtroom, a press free-for-all began, with Jean Taylor the main prize.

  She half stood, surrounded by reporters, white-faced and silent as Tom Payne tried to extricate her from the pew in the well of the court. Finally, the press parted and she struggled sideways like a fleeing crab, her legs knocking against the bench in front and her bag strap catching on edges.

  Chapter 27

  Monday, 11 February 2008

  The Widow

  SHE GIVES EVIDENCE, of course. Her big moment. She wears a black dress and a Find Bella badge. I try to avoid her stare but she’s determined and in the end our eyes meet. I feel hot and the flush rises up my face, so I look away. It doesn’t happen again. She keeps staring at Glen, but he’s wise to her game and looks straight ahead.

  I find my attention wandering as she tells the story I’ve read and heard a hundred times since she lost her baby – a nap, then playtime while she cooks tea, Bella laughing as she chases Timmy the cat out of the front door into the garden. Then realizing she can’t hear her any more. The silence.

  The court goes completely quiet, too. We can all hear that silence. The moment when Bella vanished.

  Then she sobs and has to sit down with a glass of water. Very effective. The jury look worried and one or two of the older women look like they might cry as well. It’s all going wrong. They must see this is all her fault. That’s what Glen and I think. She let her baby out of her sight. She didn’t care enough.

  Glen sits quietly and lets it all wash over him, like it’s happening to someone else. When the mum is ready, the judge lets her stay sitting down to finish her evidence and Glen cocks his head to listen to her story of running to neighbours, ringing the police and waiting for news as the hunt went on.

  The prosecutor uses this special tone of voice with her, treating her like she’s made of glass. ‘Thank you very much, Miss Elliott. You’ve been very brave.’

  I want to shout, ‘You’ve been a very bad mother.’ But I know I can’t, not here.

  Our barrister, a scary old bloke who had shaken my hand firmly at each meeting but gave no other sign that he knew who I was, finally gets his turn.

  The mother begins sobbing when the questions get hard, but our barrister doesn’t put on the understanding voice.

  Dawn Elliott keeps saying her little girl was only out of her sight for a few minutes. But we all know now she wasn’t.

  The jury is beginning to look at her a bit harder now. About time.

  ‘You believe that Bella is still alive, don’t you?’ the barrister asks.

  There is a rustle in the court and the mum starts sniffling again. He points out that she’s been selling her story to the press and she looks really angry and says the money is for her campaign.

  One of the reporters gets up and goes out quickly, clutching his notebook. ‘He’s going to file that line to his news desk,’ Tom whispers and winks.

  It’s a goal for us, he means.

  When it’s all over, when the police have been told off for tricking Glen and he’s been freed, I feel completely numb. My turn to feel like this is happening to someone else.

  Tom Payne finally lets go of my arm when we get into one of the witness rooms and we stand, catching our breath. Neither of us speaks for a moment. ‘Can he come home now?’ I ask him, my voice sounding strange and flat after all that noise in the courtroom. Tom nods and busies himself with his briefcase. Then he takes me downstairs to the cells to see Glen. My Glen.

  ‘I always said the truth would come out,’ he says triumphantly when he spots me. ‘We’ve done it, Jean. We’ve bloody well done it.’

  I hug him when I get to him. It’s been a long time since I’ve held him and it means I don’t have to say anything because I don’t know what to say to him. He’s so happy – like a little boy. Pink and laughing. A bit out of control. All I keep thinking is that I’ve got to go home with him. Be on my own with him. What will it be like when we shut the door? I know too much about this other man I’m married to for it to be like before.

  He tries to pick me up and whirl me round like he used to when we were younger, but there are too many people in the room: the lawyers, the barristers, the prison officers. They’re all around me and I can’t breathe. Tom notices and takes me out into a cool hall and sits me down with a glass of water.

  ‘It’s a lot to take in, Jean,’ he says kindly. ‘All a bit sudden, but it’s what we all hoped would happen, isn’t it? You’ve waited a long time for this moment.’

  I raise my head, but he doesn’t look me in the eye. We don’t speak again.

  I keep thinking about that poor young officer, pretending to be a woman to try and get to the truth. I’d thought he’d acted like a prostitute when Tom told us about the evidence, but when I watched him in the witness box with everyone laughing at his act, I felt sorry for him. He would’ve done anything to find Bella.

  When Glen comes out, Tom goes to him and shakes his hand again. Then we leave. On the pavement, Dawn Elliott is weeping for the cameras. ‘She’ll have to be careful what she says,’ Tom says as we hover by the doors at the back of the mob. She’s bathed in light from the TV cameras and the reporters are tripping over power cables, trying to get near her. She’s saying she’ll never give up looking for her little girl, that she’s out there somewhere and she’ll find out the truth about what happened to her. When she finishes, she’s led away by friends to a waiting car and is gone.

  Then it’s our turn. Glen’s decided to let Tom read his statement. Well, Tom advised it. He wrote it. We step into the spotlight and there’s a noise that physically shakes me. The noise of a hundred voices shouting at once, firing questions without waiting for answers, demanding attention. ‘Over here, Jean,’ a voice near me hollers. I turn to find out who it is and the flash goes off in my face. ‘Give him a hug,’ another says. I recognize some of them from the pavement in front of the house. I go to smile, then realize they’re not friends. They’re something else. They’re the press.

  Tom is all serious and quietens everything down. ‘I’m going to read Mr Taylor’s statement. He’s not going to be answering any questions.’ A forest of ta
pe recorders rises above heads.

  ‘I am an innocent man who has been hounded by police and deprived of my liberty for a crime I never committed. I’m very grateful to the court for their decision. But today, I’m not celebrating my acquittal. Bella Elliott is still missing and the person who took her is still out there. I hope the police will now get back to finding the guilty person. I would like to thank my family for standing by me and I would like to pay a special tribute to my wonderful wife, Jeanie. Thank you for listening. I would ask you to respect our privacy now as we try to rebuild our lives.’

  I look at my shoes throughout, filling in the gaps in my head. Wonderful wife. This is my role now. The Wonderful Wife who stood by her husband.

  There’s a single silent beat, then the noise deafens again. ‘Who do you think took Bella?’, ‘What do you think of the police tactics, Glen?’ Then a passer-by shouts, ‘Well done, mate!’ and Glen grins in response. It is the picture everyone uses the next day.

  An arm snakes through the cameramen and hands me a card. It has ‘Congratulations’ on it and a picture of a bottle of champagne with a cork popping. I try to see who the arm belongs to but it’s been swallowed up, so I slide the card in my bag and am guided forward with Glen and Tom and some of the security people. The press come too. It’s like a swarm of bees moving in a cartoon.

  That journey home is a taste of what is to come. The reporters and photographers block the way to the taxi Tom has got waiting for us and we can’t move forward. People are pushing each other and us, shouting their stupid questions into our faces, shoving their cameras everywhere. Glen has my hand and he suddenly makes a break for it, dragging me behind him. Tom has the door of the taxi open and we throw ourselves on to the back seat.

  Cameras are slammed against the windows, flashing and banging, metal on glass. And we just sit there, like fish in an aquarium. The driver is sweating but you can see he’s enjoying it. ‘Bloody hell,’ he says. ‘What a circus!’

  The journalists are still shouting: ‘What does it feel like to be a free man, Glen?’, ‘What do you want to say to Bella’s mother?’, ‘Do you blame the police?’

  Of course he does blame them. He stews over it, the humiliation and the baby-doll pyjamas. Funny how he can think about that when he’s been accused of killing a little girl, but getting even with the police becomes his new addiction.

  Chapter 28

  Wednesday, 2 April 2008

  The Widow

  I’VE ALWAYS WONDERED what it would feel like if I let out the secret. Sometimes I daydream about it and can hear myself saying, ‘My husband saw Bella the day she was taken.’ And I feel the physical release, like a rush to the head.

  But I can’t, can I? I’m as guilty as he is. It’s a strange feeling, owning a secret. It’s like a stone in my stomach, crushing my insides and making me feel sick every time I think of it. My friend Lisa used to talk about being pregnant like that – the baby pushing everything out of its way. Overwhelming her body. My secret does that. When it gets too much, I switch to being Jeanie for a while and pretend the secret belongs to someone else.

  But that didn’t help when Bob Sparkes was questioning me the first time, after Glen’s arrest. I felt heat rising through my body, my face red and my scalp pinpricked with sweat.

  Bob Sparkes was trespassing in my lie. ‘So what did you say you did on the day Bella disappeared?’

  My breathing became shallow and I tried to catch and control it. But my voice betrayed me. It became a breathless squeak, a deafening dry gulp as I swallowed mid-sentence. I’m lying, my treacherous body was saying.

  ‘Oh, in the morning, work, you know. I had a couple of highlights to do,’ I said, hoping the truths in my lie would convince. I was at work, after all. Justify, justify, deny, deny. It ought to get easier, but it doesn’t as each lie feels sourer and tighter, like an unripe apple. Unyielding and mouth-drying.

  The simple lies are the hardest, funnily enough. The big ones seem to just fall off the tongue: ‘Glen? Oh, he left the bank because he has other ambitions. He wants to start his own transport company. Wants to be his own boss.’ Easy.

  But the little ones – ‘I can’t come out for a coffee because I’ve got to go to my mum’s’ – stick and stutter, making me flush. Lisa didn’t seem to notice in the beginning, or if she did, she hid it well. We were all living in my lie now.

  I was never a liar as a child. My mum and dad would’ve been able to tell immediately and I didn’t have a brother or sister to share a secret with. With Glen, it turned out, it was easy. We were a team, he’d say, after the police came round.

  Funny that. I hadn’t thought of us as a team for a long time before that. We each had our departments. But Bella’s disappearance brought us together. Made us a real couple. I always said we needed a child.

  Ironic really. You see, I was going to leave him. After he was released by the court. After I knew all about his online stuff. His ‘sexcursions’, as he called them, in the chat rooms. The stuff that he was going to put behind him.

  You see, Glen likes to put things behind him. When he says it, it means we’ll never talk about it again. He can do that, just cut off a part of his life and let it drift away. ‘We need to be thinking of the future, Jeanie, not the past’, he’d explain patiently, drawing me closer, kissing my head.

  It made sense when he said it like that and I learned never to go back to the things we’d put behind us. It didn’t mean I didn’t think about them, but it was understood that I wouldn’t mention them again to him.

  Not Being Able to Have a Baby was one of the things. And Losing His Job. And then the Chat Rooms and all the awful things with the police. ‘Let’s put it behind us, love,’ he said the day after the court case ended. We were lying in bed; it was so early the street lights were still on, shining through a gap in the curtains. Neither of us had slept much – ‘Too much excitement,’ Glen said.

  He’d made some plans, he said. He’d decided to get back to a normal life – to our life – as quickly as possible, to make things like they were before.

  It sounded so simple when he said it and I tried to put all the things I’d heard out of my mind, but they wouldn’t go. They kept hiding in corners and leering at me. I stewed for a few weeks before I made a decision. In the end, it was the pictures of children that made me pack a bag.

  I’d stood by him from the day he was accused of Bella’s murder because I believed in him. I knew my Glen couldn’t do something so awful. But that was over now, thank God. He’d been found Not Guilty.

  Now I had to look at the other stuff that he did do.

  He denied it all when I said I couldn’t live with a man who looked at pictures like that.

  ‘It’s not real, Jeanie. Our experts said in court that they’re not really kids in those pictures. They’re women who look really young and dress up as kids for a living. Some of them are really in their thirties.’

  ‘But they looked like children,’ I shouted. ‘They do it for people who want to see children and men doing those things.’

  He started to cry. ‘You can’t leave me, Jeanie,’ he said. ‘I need you.’

  I shook my head and went and got my bag. I was shaking because I’d never seen Glen like this before. He was the one who was always in control. The strong one.

  And when I came downstairs, he was waiting to trap me with his confession.

  You see, he told me he’d done something for me. He said he loved me. He knew I wanted a child so badly it was killing me, and that was killing him, and when he saw her, he knew he could make me happy. It was for me.

  He said it was like a dream. He stopped to eat his lunch and look at his paper in a side street and saw her at a garden gate, looking at him. She was alone. He couldn’t help himself. When he told me, he put his arms round me and I couldn’t move.

  ‘I wanted to bring her home for you. She was standing there and I smiled at her and she put her arms up to me. She wanted me to pick her up. I got out of the va
n, but I don’t remember anything else. Next thing I was driving the van home to you.

  ‘I didn’t hurt her, Jeanie,’ he said. ‘It was like a dream. Do you think it was a dream, Jeanie?’

  His story is so shocking, I’m choking on its details.

  We’re standing in our hallway and I can see our reflection in the mirror. It’s like seeing it happening in a film. Glen is bending down so our heads touch, sobbing on my shoulder, with me deathly pale. I’m patting his hair and shushing him. But I don’t want him to stop crying. I’m afraid of the silence that will follow. There is so much I want to ask, but so much I don’t want to know.

  Glen stops after a while and we sit on the sofa together.

  ‘Shouldn’t we tell the police? Tell them you saw her that day?’ I ask. I have to say it out loud or my head will burst. He stiffens beside me. ‘They’ll say I took her and killed her, Jeanie. And you know I didn’t. Even seeing her will make me the guilty man, the man they put in prison. We can’t say anything. To anyone.’

  I sit, unable to speak. He is right, though. Seeing Bella would be as good as taking her as far as Bob Sparkes is concerned.

  I just keep thinking Glen can’t have taken her.

  He just saw her. That’s it. He just saw her. He didn’t do anything wrong.

  He’s still gulping from the sobs and his face is red and wet. ‘I keep thinking maybe I did dream it. It didn’t feel real and you know I wouldn’t hurt a child,’ he says and I nod. I think I know, but really I don’t know anything about this man that I’ve lived with all these years. He’s a stranger, but we’re bound together tighter than we’ve ever been. He knows me. He knows my weakness.

  He knows that I would’ve wanted him to take her and bring her home.

  I know that I caused all this trouble with my obsession.

  Afterwards, when I’m in the kitchen making him a cup of tea, I realize he didn’t use Bella’s name, as though she isn’t real to him. I take my bag back upstairs and unpack my things while Glen lies on the sofa watching football on the telly. Like normal. Like nothing has happened.