The Widow

by Fiona Barton

It took ages for the meeting to end and then we had to discuss how we were going to get out without the press seeing us. In the end, we went out the back, down an alleyway where they put the bins and bikes. ‘They won’t be hanging around now, but there’s no point taking chances,’ Tom said. ‘It’ll be on their website by now and all over the paper tomorrow. It’ll put up the damages – just keep thinking about the money.’

  Glen shook his hand and I just sort of waved. I don’t want the money. I want it to stop.

  He was extra nice to me when we got in, taking my coat off and making me sit with my feet up while he put the kettle on.

  It’s the anniversary today. I’d marked it in my diary with a dot. A little dot that could be a slip of the pen so no one else would know if they looked.

  Two years since she was taken. They’ll never find her now – the people who took her must have persuaded everyone by now that she is theirs and she must think they are her mum and dad. She’s little and she probably hardly remembers her real mother. I hope she’s happy and they love her as much as I would if she was here with me.

  For a moment, I can see her sitting on our stairs, bumping down on her bottom and laughing. Calling for me to come and watch her. She could’ve been here if Glen had brought her home to me.

  Glen hasn’t said much since we got back. He’s got his computer on his knee and closes it quickly when I go to sit next to him. ‘What were you looking at, love?’ I ask.

  ‘Just flicking through the sports pages,’ he says and then goes to put petrol in the car.

  I pick up the computer and open it. It says it’s locked and I sit and stare at the screen, at the photo of me Glen has put on it. There I am, locked like the computer.

  When he comes home, I try to talk to him about the future. ‘Why don’t we move, Glen? Have the fresh start we keep talking about? We’re never going to escape this unless we do.’

  ‘We’re not moving, Jean,’ he snaps at me. ‘This is our home and I won’t be driven out of it. We’re going to weather this. Together. The press will forget about us in the end and move on to some other poor sod.’

  ‘They won’t,’ I want to say. Every anniversary of Bella’s disappearance, every time a child goes missing, every time there is a quiet news day, they’ll come back. And we’ll just be sitting here, waiting.

  ‘There are so many nice places to live, Glen. We’ve talked about living by the sea one day. We could do that now. We could even move abroad.’

  ‘Abroad? What the hell are you talking about? I don’t want to live somewhere I can’t speak the language. I’m staying put.’

  So we do. We might as well have moved to a desert island in the end as we are completely isolated in our little house. Just the sharks circling occasionally. We keep each other company, doing the crossword together in the kitchen – him reading out the clues and writing the answers in while I’m still guessing, watching films together in the living room, me learning to knit, him chewing his nails. Like an old retired couple. I’m not even forty yet.

  ‘I think the Mannings’ poodle must’ve died. It’s been weeks since any dog shit has been left on the doorstep,’ Glen says conversationally. ‘It was very old.’

  The graffiti persists. That paint is terrible to get off and neither of us want to stand there in full view, scrubbing at it, so it stays. ‘SCUM’ and ‘PEEDOFILE’ in big red letters on the garden wall. ‘Kids,’ Glen says. ‘From the local comprehensive, if the spelling’s anything to go by.’

  There are letters from the ‘green biro brigade’ most weeks, but we’ve started putting them straight in the bin. You can tell them a mile off. I never see those tiny envelopes or the green pens they use for sale – the poisonous people must have their own source of them and the rough, lined notepaper they prefer. I suppose it must be cheap.

  I used to look at the handwriting to try and guess what sort of person had sent it. Some are all loops and swirls – the sort of writing on a wedding invitation – and I think they must be written by old people. No one else writes like that any more.

  They’re not all anonymous. Some write their address in spidery writing on the top – lovely names like ‘Rose Cottage’ or ‘The Willows’ – and then spew out their bile underneath. I’m so tempted to write back and tell them what I think of them – give them a dose of their own medicine. I write the replies in my head when I’m pretending to watch the television, but I don’t take it any further. It would cause trouble.

  ‘They’re just sick, Jeanie,’ Glen says each time one plops through the letterbox. ‘We should feel sorry for them, really.’

  Sometimes I wonder who they are and then I think they are probably people like me and Glen. Lonely people. People on the edge of things. Prisoners in their own homes.

  I buy a big jigsaw at the local charity shop. It’s a picture of a beach with cliffs and seagulls. It’ll give me something to do in the afternoons. It’s going to be a long winter.

  Chapter 35

  Friday, 18 December 2009

  The Reporter

  IT HAD BEEN a quietish week – Christmas, fast approaching, had filled the paper with festive nonsense and warming stories of adversity overcome. Kate flicked through her notebook, more from habit than hope, but there was nothing to pick at. The paper was already full of Saturday reads – long features, shrieking columnists, pages of cheffy Christmas fare and post-festivity diets. Terry looked happy, anyway.

  Unlike the Crime man, who, passing her desk on his way to the Gents’, paused to vent his anger. ‘My Christmas anniversary piece has been chucked out,’ he said.

  ‘Poor you. Which one?’ Kate asked. He was notorious for recycling stories – ‘The green bin of news,’ he called it cheerfully.

  ‘Bella. It’s Dawn’s third one without her. How about a drink at lunchtime?’

  ‘Bella. Oh my God, I forgot you,’ she told the child’s picture stuck on her filing cabinet. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  The Herald’s campaign had gone quiet once the threat of a libel action had become a reality, and both camps had drawn back behind their battlelines.

  Kate heard on the grapevine that the legal director of the Herald had had a stand-up row with the editor over the initial coverage, and she persuaded Tim, her oppo on the Herald and an old friend, to tell her all about it over a glass or three of wine. He’d been cautious about the details at first, but the story was too good not to tell properly. He propped up the bar in a pub opposite the High Court and told her how the house lawyer had accused Mark Perry of ignoring his advice and using ‘lurid comments’ and allegations in the copy.

  ‘I expect ‘Taylor’s killer eyes’ was one of them,’ Kate laughed. ‘I thought you were on pretty shaky ground there.’

  ‘Yes, one of Perry’s choicer phrases. Anyway, the lawyer said Mark was ramping up the potential damages every time he pulled a stunt like that.’

  ‘And Taylor’s got money to fund a case. All that compensation from the police,’ Kate said.

  ‘The editor’s agreed to pull back from the direct accusations and harassment. Soft-pedal while the libel case is pending.’

  ‘But he’s not going to give up the campaign, is he?’ Kate asked. ‘He’ll definitely have to pay up if he does that. Its tantamount to admitting he’s in the wrong.’

  Tim grimaced into his Merlot. ‘He’s not happy. He hit his monitor with his fist, then crashed back into the newsroom to tell everyone they were ‘fucking amateurs’. He likes to spread the pain. Calls it inclusivity.’

  Kate had patted his arm sympathetically and headed for home.

  As Tim had predicted, the Herald had quietened down and the libel action appeared to have stalled in the chambers of both sides.

  But Kate was ready to have another go. She needed to find her notebook from a year ago. There, scribbled on the cover, was an address in Peckham for one Mike Doonan.

  ‘Slipping out to knock a door on a tip,’ she told Terry. ‘On my mobile if you need me.’

  It took an
age to cross Westminster Bridge and crawl down the Old Kent Road, but the cabbie finally pulled up in the shadow of a grim relic of 1960s cutting-edge architecture. A grey concrete box, studded with filthy windows and satellite dishes.

  Kate went to the door and pressed the bell. She knew what she was going to say – she’d had plenty of time in the taxi to plan – but there was no answer. The flat echoed with the bell ringing, but it was the only sound.

  ‘He’s out,’ a voice called from next door. A woman’s voice.

  ‘Bugger, I hoped I’d catch him in. I thought he was housebound,’ she replied.

  A head appeared out of the door. Ancient, tight perm and a pinny.

  ‘He’s down at the bookies’. Doesn’t go out much now, with his back, poor Mike. But he tries to get out once a day. Was he expecting you?’

  Kate smiled at the neighbour. ‘Not really. It was on the off-chance. I’m doing a story about a man he used to work with when he was a driver. Glen Taylor. The Bella case.’

  The neighbour opened her door wider. ‘The Bella case? Did he work with that bloke? He never said. Do you want to come in and wait?’

  Within the first five minutes, Mrs Meaden had told Kate about Doonan’s medical condition – ‘degenerative osteoarthritis, getting steadily worse’, his betting habit, ex-wives, kids and diet – ‘beans on toast practically every night, can’t be good for him’.

  ‘I do a bit of shopping for him every week and the kids on the estate run errands.’

  ‘That’s kind of you – he’s lucky to have a neighbour like you.’

  Mrs Meaden looked pleased. ‘It’s what any Christian would do,’ she said. ‘Tea?’

  Kate balanced the flowered cup and saucer on the arm of her chair and took a shop-bought mince pie out of the tin.

  ‘Funny he never mentioned he knew this Glen Taylor man, isn’t it?’ Mrs Meaden said, brushing crumbs off her lap.

  ‘They worked together. At Qwik Delivery,’ Kate prompted.

  ‘He drove for years. Says that’s what did it for his back. He doesn’t really have friends. Not what I call friends – people who come and see him. He used to go to a computer place round here – said it was sort of a club. Used to go regularly before he retired. Funny thing for a man of his age to be doing, I always thought. Still, he’s on his own so he must get bored.’

  ‘I didn’t know there was a computer club round here. Do you know what it’s called?’

  ‘It’s in Princess Street, I think. Shabby-looking place with blacked-out windows. Oh, there’s Mike now.’

  They could hear the heavy sound of dragging feet and the stabbing of a stick on the concrete walkway.

  ‘Hello, Mike,’ Mrs Meaden called as she opened her door. ‘Got a lady from the press here for you.’

  Doonan pulled a face as Kate emerged. ‘Sorry, love. My back is killing me. Can you come back another time?’

  Kate moved closer to him and took his arm. ‘Let me at least help you in,’ she said. And did.

  The smell in Doonan’s flat was nothing like the cabbage and Dettol permeating next door. It smelled of men. Sweat, old beer, old fags, feet.

  ‘What do you want to talk to me for? I told the police all I knew,’ Doonan said as Kate perched on a hard chair opposite him.

  ‘Glen Taylor,’ she said simply.

  ‘Oh, him.’

  ‘You used to work together.’

  Doonan nodded.

  ‘I’m writing a profile on him. Trying to get a better picture of who he really is.’

  ‘Then you’ve come to the wrong person. He was no friend of mine. I’ve told the police. Stuck-up little prick, if you want to know.’

  I do, she thought.

  ‘Always thought he was better than us. Slumming it until something better came along.’

  She had found his sore spot and scratched it. ‘Heard he was a bit arrogant.’

  ‘Arrogant? That’s an understatement. Lorded it over us in the canteen with his stories of when he ran a bank. And then he dropped me in it over my back problem. Told the boss I was having them on about how bad it was. Said I was faking.’

  ‘That must’ve caused trouble.’

  Doonan smiled bitterly. ‘Joke of it is that I helped him get the job at Qwik Delivery.’

  Kate pounced. ‘Really? So you knew him before. Where’d you come across him?’

  ‘On the net. On a forum or something.’ Doonan sounded less sure of himself.

  ‘And at the club in Princess Street?’

  Doonan flashed a look at Kate. ‘What club?’ he said. ‘Look, I need to take my pills. You’ll have to go.’

  She put her business card down beside him and shook his hand. ‘Thanks for talking to me, Mike. I really appreciate it. I’ll let myself out.’

  She headed straight for Princess Street.

  The sign for Internet Inc. was small and amateurish, the shop window painted black on the inside and there was a CCTV camera positioned over the door. Looks like a sex shop, Kate thought.

  The door was locked and there were no opening times posted. She walked back to the greengrocer’s at the top of the street and waited until an assistant in a Santa hat came out to serve her from the stall on the pavement.

  ‘Hi, I want to use the internet but the place down the street is closed. Do you know when it opens?’ she said.

  The young man laughed. ‘You don’t want to go in there, love. It’s for blokes.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Porn place, innit. They don’t let the public in. It’s a sort of club thing for dirty old men.’

  ‘Oh, right. Who runs it then?’

  ‘Dunno really. Manager is an Asian bloke called Lenny, but it’s open at night mainly so we don’t see him much.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll have four of those apples.’

  She’d come back later.

  Internet Inc. looked even less savoury in the dark. Kate had spent two and a half hours in a grimy pub, sipping a succession of warm fruit juices and listening to Perry Como work his magic on Frosty the Snowman. She was not in the mood for a brush-off.

  When she tried the door it was still locked, but knocking on the blackened glass produced a voice from within.

  ‘Hello. Who is it?’

  ‘I need to speak to Lenny,’ Kate said, looking up at the camera with her most winning smile.

  Silence.

  The door opened and a tall, muscular man in training vest and jeans appeared. ‘Do I know you?’ he asked.

  ‘Hi, you must be Lenny. I’m Kate. I wondered if I could have a quick word.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘About a story I’m writing.’

  ‘You’re a reporter?’ Lenny slid backwards into the shop. ‘We’ve got a licence. It’s all legit. There’s no story here.’

  ‘No, it’s not about you. It’s about Bella Elliott.’

  The name was like a magic talisman. It transfixed people. Drew them in.

  ‘Bella Elliott? Little Bella?’ he said. ‘Look, come on through to my office.’

  She entered a narrow, darkened room, lit only by the LED glow of a dozen computer screens. Each was in a booth with a chair. There was no other furniture, but, in a nod to the season, a piece of tinsel hung limply from the central light.

  ‘No customers yet. They usually come a bit later,’ Lenny explained as he led her to his cupboard of an office, the walls lined with stacks of DVDs and magazines. ‘Ignore those,’ he advised as he caught her looking at the titles.

  ‘Right,’ she said and sat.

  ‘You’ve come about Glen Taylor, haven’t you?’

  Kate couldn’t speak for a moment. He’d cut to the chase before she’d had a chance to ask her first question.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wondered when someone would finally knock on my door. Thought it’d be the police. But it’s you.’

  ‘Did he come here? Was Glen Taylor a member of your club?’

  Lenny considered the questions. ‘Look, I never talk a
bout members – no one would come if I did. But I’ve got kids …’

  Kate nodded. ‘I understand, but I’m not interested in anyone else. Just him. Will you help me? Please.’

  The manager’s struggle between the omertà of his sex shop and doing the right thing played out in the seconds of silence. He gnawed at a fingernail and Kate let him stew.

  Finally he looked up and said, ‘Yes, he came here occasionally. Started a couple of years ago. I looked up his card when I saw his face in the paper. We don’t use real names here – members prefer it that way. But I knew the face. It was 2006 he started coming. Another member brought him.’

  ‘Mike Doonan?’

  ‘You said you wouldn’t ask about anyone else. Anyway, as I said, no real names, but I think they worked together.’

  Kate smiled at him. ‘That’s so helpful, thanks. Can you remember the last time he came – are there any records?’

  ‘Hang on,’ Lenny said and unlocked an ancient filing cabinet. ‘007, he registered as. Very smooth. No visits registered after 6 September 2006 until August this year.’

  ‘This year? He’s come back?’

  ‘Yeah, just a few sessions, now and then.’

  ‘What was he doing here? Do you know, Lenny?’

  ‘That’s enough questions. It’s all confidential. But you don’t need to be a genius to guess. We don’t monitor sites visited – best not to, we decided. But basically, our members come to view adult sites.’

  ‘Sorry to be blunt, but you mean porn?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Weren’t you tempted to look to see after you realized it was him?’

  ‘It was months after he stopped coming in that I realized it was him, and he’d used different computers. It would’ve been a big job and we’re busy.’

  ‘Why didn’t you call the police about Glen Taylor?’

  Lenny looked away for a moment.

  ‘I thought about it, but would you invite the police in here? People come because it’s private. It would’ve closed the business. Anyway, they arrested him so I didn’t need to.’

  A loud knock on the shop door ended the conversation. ‘You’ve got to go. Got a customer.’