by Fiona Barton
When she got back to the table, the detective was putting his credit card back in his wallet.
‘Bob, I invited you,’ she said.
He waved away her protest and smiled. ‘My pleasure. It’s been good to see you, Kate. Thanks for your pep talk.’
She deserved that, she thought as they walked out in single file. On the pavement, he shook her hand again and they both headed back to work.
Kate’s phone began vibrating as she hailed a taxi and she waved away the cab to take the call.
‘There’s a Michael Doonan in Peckham, according to the electoral roll – I’ll SMS the address and the names of the neighbours,’ the Crime man said.
‘You’re a star, thanks,’ she said, raising her hand for another taxi. Her phone rang again almost immediately.
‘Kate, where the hell are you? We’ve got a buy-up with the ex-wife of that footballer. It’s up near Leeds, so get on the next train and I’ll email you the background. Ring when you’re at the station.’
Chapter 32
Wednesday, 17 September 2008
The Widow
SOMEONE PUT THE Herald through the door today – they’ve accused Glen all over again and he put it straight in the bin. I got it out and hid it away behind the bleach under the sink for later. We knew what was coming because the Herald were banging on the door yesterday, shouting questions and pushing notes through the letter box. They said they were campaigning for a retrial so that Bella would get justice. ‘What about justice for me?’ Glen said.
It’s a blow, but Tom phoned to say the paper will have to have deep pockets to pay the costs and, most importantly, they have no evidence. He said to ‘batten down the hatches’, whatever that means. ‘The Herald are coming at us with all guns blazing, but it is all just sensationalism and tittle tattle,’ he told Glen, who repeated it line by line to me.
‘He talks like it is a war,’ I say and then shut up. The wait will be worse than the reality, Tom predicts, and I hope he’s right.
‘We’ve got to keep quiet, Jeanie,’ Glen explains. ‘Tom will start legal proceedings against the paper, but he thinks we should go on a bit of a holiday – “remove ourselves from the picture” – until this all blows over. I’ll go online and book something this morning.’
He hasn’t asked where I want to go and to be honest, I don’t care. My little helpers are beginning to have less effect and I feel so tired I could cry.
In the end he picks somewhere in France. In my other life, I would’ve been thrilled, but I’m not sure what I feel when he tells me he’s found a cottage in the countryside that’s miles from anywhere. ‘Our flight leaves at 7 a.m. tomorrow morning so we need to leave here at four, Jeanie. Let’s get packed up ready and we’ll take our car. Don’t want a taxi driver tipping off the press.’
He knows so much, my Glen. Thank God I’ve got him to look after me.
At the airport, we keep our heads down and sunglasses on and we wait until the queue is almost down to the last person before we head to the desk. The woman checking us in barely looks at us and sends our suitcase on to the conveyor belt before she’s managed to say, ‘Did you pack this bag yourself?’ let alone waited to hear the answer.
I’d forgotten how much queuing there is in airports and we’re so stressed by the time we get to the gate that I’m ready to go home to the press pack. ‘Come on, love,’ Glen says, holding my hand as we walk to the plane. ‘Nearly there.’
At Bergerac, he goes to get the hire car while I wait for the bag, mesmerized by the passing luggage. I miss our case – it is so long since we used it, I’ve forgotten what colour it is and have to wait until everyone else has lugged theirs off. I finally go out into the bright sunshine and spot Glen in a tiny red car. ‘Didn’t think it would be worth getting anything bigger,’ he says. ‘We’re not going to do much driving, are we?’
Funny, but being on our own in France is different from being on our own at home. Without a routine, we don’t know what to say to each other. So we say nothing. The silence should have been a rest from the constant noise and banging on our door at home, but it isn’t. It’s worse, somehow. I take to going for long walks in the lanes and woods around the cottage while Glen sits on a sun lounger and reads detective novels. I could’ve screamed when I saw what he’d packed. As if we haven’t had enough of police investigations.
I decide to leave him with his perfect murders and sit on the other side of the patio with some magazines. I find myself looking at Glen, watching him and thinking about him. If he looks up and catches me, I pretend I’m looking at something behind him. I am, I suppose.
I don’t really know what I’mlooking for. Some sign of something – his innocence, the toll taken by the ordeal, the real man, perhaps. I can’t really say.
The only time we leave the place is to drive to the nearest supermarket to get food and loo rolls. I can’t be bothered to shop for real meals. Finding the stuff to go into a spag bol is beyond me so we eat bread and ham and cheese at lunchtime and a cold roast chicken and coleslaw or more ham in the evenings. We’re not really hungry anyway. It It’s just something to push round our plates.
We’ve been here four days when I think I see someone walking along the lane at the bottom of the property. First person I’ve seen near the property. A car is an event.
I don’t think much of it, but the next morning there is a man walking up the drive.
‘Glen,’ I shout to him in the house. ‘There’s a bloke coming up.’
‘Get in here, Jean,’ he hisses and I hurry past him as he closes the door and begins drawing the curtains. We wait for the knock.
The Herald has found us. Found us and photographed us: ‘The kidnapper and his wife sunning themselves outside their exclusive hideaway in the Dordogne’ while Dawn Elliott ‘desperately continues her search for her child’. Tom reads us the headlines the next day over the phone. ‘We’re only here because we’re being hounded, Tom,’ I say. ‘And Glen has been cleared by the courts.’
‘I know, Jean, but the papers have convened their own court. It won’t be long before they’ll be on to the next thing – they’re like children, easily distracted.’
He says the Herald must have traced Glen’s credit card to find us.
‘Are they allowed to do that?’ I ask.
‘No. But that doesn’t stop them.’
I put down the phone and begin packing. The villains again.
When we get home, they are waiting and Glen rings Tom to talk about how to stop them saying these things.
‘It’s libel, Jeanie. Tom says we have to sue them – or threaten to sue them – or they’ll keep going, digging into our lives and putting us on the front page.’
I want it to stop so I agree. Glen knows best.
It takes a while for the solicitors to write their letter. They have to say why the stories are all wrong and that takes a bit of time. Glen and I go up to Holborn again, taking the same train I used to take when he was on trial. ‘Groundhog day,’ he says to me. He tries to keep my spirits up and I love him for it.
The barrister isn’t a Charles Sanderson, he’s a real smooth character. I bet his wig isn’t falling apart. He looks rich, as if he drives a sports car and has a country house, and his office is all shiny metal and glass. Libel is obviously the money-making end of the business. Wonder if Mr Sanderson knows.
This one is all business. He’s as bad as the prosecutor, asking all the questions again and again. I squeeze Glen’s hand to show him I’m on his side and he squeezes back.
The smoothie pushes and pushes on every detail.
‘I have to test our case, Mr Taylor, because this is basically a re-run of the Bella Elliott prosecution. That case was thrown out because of the police actions, but the Herald maintain you kidnapped the child. We say that is wrong and defamatory. However, the Herald will throw everything at you – from the case itself, and they can also use evidence they gathered that was not admissible in the criminal trial. Do you see?’
We must have looked a bit blank because Tom began to explain it in simple language while the smoothie looked out at the view.
‘They’ll have a lot of dirt, Glen. And they’ll throw all of it at you to get the libel jury on their side. We need to show that you’re innocent, Glen, to get the jury to find against the Herald.’
‘I am,’ he says, all fired up.
‘We know. But we need to show it and we need to be sure there are no surprises. Just saying, Glen. You need to go into this with your eyes open, because it’s a very expensive action to bring. It will cost thousands of pounds.’
Glen looks at me and I try to look brave, but inside I’m running for the door. I suppose we’ve got the dirty money we can use.
‘No surprises, Mr Taylor?’ the smoothie repeats.
‘None,’ my Glen says. I look at my lap.
The letter goes out the next day and the Herald shouts about it all over its pages and on the radio and television.
‘TAYLOR TRIES TO GAG HERALD’ is the headline. I hate the word ‘gag’.
Chapter 33
Friday, 26 September 2008
The Mother
THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF the Taylors in France made Dawn furious. ‘Is furious’ she wrote as her Facebook status, with a link to the main picture of Glen Taylor in shorts and bare-chested, lying on a lounger reading a thriller called The Book of the Dead.
The crassness of it made her want to go round and shake the truth out of him. The idea stewed in her head all morning; she played the scene over and over of her bringing Taylor to his knees and him crying and begging for forgiveness. She was so sure it would work, she rang Mark Perry at the Herald and demanded a confrontation between her and the kidnapper.
‘I could go to his house. I could look him in the eye. He might confess,’ she said, high on the fear and excitement of meeting her child’s abductor.
Perry hesitated. Not from any compunction about accusing Taylor – he was writing the headline in his head as he listened – but he wanted the dramatic confrontation to be exclusive and the doorstep was far too public.
‘He might not open the door, Dawn,’ he said. ‘And then we’ll be left standing there. We need to do it where he can’t hide. In the street when he’s not expecting us. We’ll find out when he’s next meeting with the lawyers and catch him as he goes in. Just us, Dawn.’
She understood and told no one. She knew her mum would try to dissuade her – ‘He’s scum, Dawn. He’s not going to confess in the street. It’ll just upset you and bring you down again. Let the courts get it out of him.’ But Dawn didn’t want to listen to sense, she didn’t want advice. She wanted to act. To do something for Bella.
She didn’t have to wait long. ‘You won’t believe this, Dawn. He’s got an early-morning appointment next Thursday – on the anniversary of Bella’s disappearance,’ Perry said on the phone. ‘It’ll be perfect.’
Dawn couldn’t speak for a moment. There was nothing perfect about the anniversary. It had been looming over the horizon and the terrible dreams had increased. She found herself re-enacting the days leading up to 2 October: shopping trips, walking to nursery, watching Bella’s DVDs. Two years without her little girl seemed like a lifetime.
Perry was still talking on the phone and she tuned back in, trying to reach back to her anger. ‘Taylor likes to go when no one else is around, apparently, so we’ll have him to ourselves.
‘Come in, Dawn, and we’ll plan our MO.’
‘What’s an MO?’
‘It’s Latin for how we’re going to get Glen Taylor.’
Every eventuality was covered during the conference in the editor’s office. Arrival by taxi, check. Arrival by public transport, check. Back entrances, check. Timings, check. Dawn’s hiding place, check.
Dawn sat and received her orders. She was to sit in a black cab down the street from the barrister’s chambers and jump out at a signal from the reporter. Two rings on his mobile, then out.
‘You’ll probably only have time for two questions, Dawn,’ Tim the chief reporter advised. ‘So make them short and to the point.’
‘I just want to ask “Where’s my daughter?” That’s all.’
The editor and assembled journalists exchanged glances. This was going to be fantastic.
On the day, Dawn was not dressed too smartly, as instructed. ‘You don’t want to look like a TV reporter in the photos,’ Tim had said. ‘You want to look like a grieving mother.’ He added quickly, ‘Like you, Dawn.’
She was collected by the office driver and delivered to the meeting point, a café in High Holborn. Tim, two other reporters, two photographers and a video journalist were already round a Formica table, smeared plates stacked in the middle.
‘All ready?’ Tim said, trying not to show too much excitement.
‘Yes, Tim. I’m ready.’
Sitting in the car with him later, her nerve began to fail, but he kept her talking about the campaign, keeping her anger ticking over. His mobile rang twice. ‘We’re on, Dawn,’ he said, picking up the copy of the Herald she would thrust in Taylor’s face and cracking open the door. She could see them coming down the street, Glen Taylor and Jean, his simpering wife, and she stepped clear of the cab, her legs shaking.
The street was quiet; the office staff who would eventually fill the buildings were still jammed together on the underground. Dawn stood in the middle of the pavement and watched them get nearer, her stomach knotted, but the couple failed to notice her until they were only a hundred yards away. Jean Taylor was fussing over her husband’s briefcase, trying to stuff documents back in, when she looked up and stopped dead. ‘Glen,’ she said loudly. ‘It’s her, Bella’s mother.’
Glen Taylor focused on the woman in the street. ‘Christ, Jean. It’s an ambush. You say nothing, no matter what she says,’ he hissed and took hold of her arm to propel her to the doorway.
But it was too late to escape.
‘Where is my daughter? Where’s Bella?’ Dawn screamed into his face, spittle landing near his mouth.
Taylor looked Dawn in the face for a fraction of a second and then was gone behind dead eyes.
‘Where is she, Glen?’ she repeated, trying to catch his arm and shake him. The cameramen had appeared and were capturing every second, circling the trio to get the best shots while the reporters barked questions, separating Jean Taylor from her husband and leaving her stranded like a stray sheep.
Dawn suddenly wheeled on her. ‘What has he done with my baby, Mrs Taylor? What has your husband done with her?’
‘He’s done nothing. He’s innocent. The court said so,’ Jean screamed back, shocked into a response by the violence of the attack.
‘Where’s my child?’ Dawn shouted again, unable to ask anything else.
‘We don’t know,’ Jean yelled back. ‘Why did you leave your little girl alone so someone could take her? That’s what people should be asking.’
‘That’s enough, Jean,’ Taylor said and pushed past the cameras, pulling her along in his wake as Tim comforted Dawn.
‘She said it was my fault,’ she breathed, her face ashen.
‘She’s a nasty bitch, Dawn. Only she and the nutters think it’s your fault. Come on, let’s get you back to the paper for the interview.’
This is going to look great, he thought as they travelled through the traffic to west London.
Dawn stood beside one of the pillars to watch as the photographs were laid out along the whole length of the back bench so the newsroom could look and admire. ‘Fucking brilliant shots of Glen Taylor. That look he gave Dawn is chilling,’ the picture editor said as he hawked his wares.
‘We’ll put it on the front,’ Perry said. ‘Page three, Dawn in tears and Jean Taylor shouting at her like a fishwife. Not the mousy little woman, after all. Look at the fury in that face. Now, where are the words?’
THE KIDNAPPER AND THE MOTHER blared out of the front page the next morning on trains, buses and at Britain’s breakfast tables.
Chapter 34
Thursday, 2 October 2008
The Widow
I WAS SHAKING when we got into the lawyer’s. Not sure if it was anger or nerves – a bit of both, probably, and even Mr Smoothie put his arm round me. ‘Bloody stunt merchants,’ he said to Tom Payne. ‘We should Press Council them or something.’
I kept replaying it in my head, from the moment I realized it was her. I should’ve recognized her straight away, I’ve seen her enough times on the telly and in court. But it’s different when you see someone in the street where you’re not expecting them to be. You don’t really look at people’s faces, I think, just their outlines. Of course, as soon as I really looked at her I knew it was her. Dawn Elliott. The mother. Standing there with the idiots from the Herald, egging her on, and accusing my Glen when he’s been found Not Guilty. It’s not right. It’s not fair.
I suppose it was the shock that made me shout at her like that.
Glen was angry that I told her what I thought. ‘It’ll just keep everyone going, Jean. She’ll feel she has to defend herself and keep giving interviews. I told you to keep quiet.’
I said I was sorry, but I wasn’t. I meant every word. I’ll do a phone-in tonight and say it again. It felt good to say it out loud, in public. People should know it’s all her fault. She was responsible for our little girl and she let her get taken.
They sat me down with a hot drink in the clerk’s room while they got on with the meeting. I wasn’t in the mood for legal stuff anyway, so I sat quietly in a corner, replaying the row in the street in my head and sort of listening to the secretaries’ chatter. Invisible again.