by Fiona Barton
‘OK, thanks for telling me all this. Here’s my card, in case you think of anything else. Can I use your loo quickly before I go?’
Lenny pointed at a door in the corner of the room. ‘It’s pretty grim, but help yourself.’
He left her to it and as soon as he’d gone she pulled out her phone and photographed the membership card still sitting on the desk, before pulling open the toilet door, holding her breath and flushing the toilet.
Lenny was waiting for her. He opened the door and stood to shield the cowering customer from Kate’s inquiring look.
In the street, she phoned Bob Sparkes.
‘Bob, it’s Kate. I think he’s at it again.’
Chapter 36
Friday, 18 December 2009
The Detective
SPARKES LISTENED IN silence as Kate told her story, casually noting the address and names but unable to comment or question. Beside him, his new boss worked on, crunching numbers of street-robbery victims by gender, age and race.
‘OK,’ he said when Kate drew a breath. ‘Bit busy at the moment. Can you send me the document you mentioned? Perhaps we could meet tomorrow?’
Kate understood the professional code. ‘Ten a.m. outside the pub at the end of the road, Bob. I’m emailing you the photo I took now.’
He returned to his computer screen, miming regret for the interruption to his colleague, and waited until they had finished their work to look at his phone.
Sparkes felt sick as he looked at the membership card. Taylor’s last visit was only three weeks earlier.
He called Zara Salmond as he walked to the tube station.
‘Sir? How are you doing?’
‘Fine, Salmond. We need to go back to the case.’ He didn’t need to say which. ‘We’ve got to look at every detail again to find a way to nail him.
‘Right. OK. Can you tell me why?’
He could imagine the look on his sergeant’s face.
‘Difficult at the moment, Salmond, but I’ve had information that he’s back on the porn trail again. Can’t say more than that, but I’ll be in touch when I’ve got more.’
Salmond sighed. He could hear her thought bubble Not again, and couldn’t blame her.
‘I’m off for Christmas, Sir. On leave. But back in on 2 January. Can it wait until then?’
‘Yes. Sorry to ring out of the blue, Salmond. And Happy Christmas.’
He put his phone in his overcoat pocket and trudged down the steps, his stomach knotted.
The force had scaled back the Bella Elliott case, after Downing’s lengthy review found no new leads, no van and no further suspects. DI Jude Downing had tidied her desk and gone back to her real job, and the Hampshire Police Force put out a press release saying that the investigation would continue. In reality, this meant leaving it to tick over with a team of two to check out the now occasional calls about possible sightings and pass them on. Nobody was saying it in public, but the trail had gone dead.
Even the appetite for Dawn Elliott’s emotional campaign was beginning to wane. There were only so many ways you could say, ‘I want my daughter back,’ Sparkes supposed. And the Herald had gone very quiet on the subject after its initial firestorm of publicity.
And when Sparkes went, it had removed the daily impetus for their hunt. DCI Wellington had also made sure Salmond was too busy with other work to take it up on her own initiative. She’d heard when Sparkes was brought back from sick leave, but he’d still not set foot in the office. But his call before Christmas had stirred up all sorts of feelings.
The day she went back to work, she pulled up her own Bella case file, filled with all the loose ends, and made a list while she waited for his call.
Leafing through, she found the query on Matt White. Unfinished business. She’d put it under ‘Priorities’ originally, but had been sidetracked by Sparkes’ latest idea. Not this time. She would chase it down. She went online to search the electoral register for the name. Dozens of Matthew Whites, but none matching Dawn’s information about age, marital status and area.
She missed Sparkes’ dry humour and determination more than she’d admit to her colleagues – ‘Can’t get sentimental if I’m to get anywhere in the police,’ she’d told him.
She needed to find Mr White’s true identity and went back to the basic information about Dawn’s relationship with him. It had taken place largely in the Tropicana nightclub and, once, in a hotel room.
‘Where would he have had to use his real name, Zara?’ she said out loud. ‘When he used his credit card,’ she finally answered. ‘I bet he paid by card at the hotel where he took Dawn.’
The hotel was part of a chain and Salmond mentally crossed her fingers as she dialled its number to ask if they still had records for the dates when Dawn was seeing Matt White.
Five days later, Salmond had another list. The hotel manager was a woman in the same efficient mould as the detective and had emailed the relevant data.
‘Matt White is here, Sir,’ she said confidently to Sparkes in a brief phone call and didn’t speak to anyone for the rest of the day.
Sparkes put down his phone and allowed himself a moment to examine the possibilities. His new boss was an impatient man and he’d a paper to finish on the impact of ethnicity and gender on community policing efficiency. Whatever that meant.
The last five months had been surreal.
As instructed by his superior officer and advised by his union rep, he’d contacted one of the counsellors on the list and spent sixty gruelling minutes with an overweight and under-qualified woman who was all about tackling demons. ‘They are sitting on your shoulder, Bob. Can you feel them?’ she said earnestly, sounding more like a psychic on Blackpool Pier than a professional. He listened to her politely but decided she had more demons than he did and never went back. Eileen would have to do.
His leave was extended piecemeal and as he waited to be recalled to duty, he toyed with the idea of signing up for an Open University course in Psychology; he printed out the reading list and began his studies quietly in his dining room.
When the recall finally came, he was to be sent zigzagging across a series of short-term assignments to other forces, plugging gaps and writing reports, while Hampshire worked out what to do with him. He was still seen as damaged goods as far as the Murder Investigation Unit was concerned, but he wasn’t ready to retire on a pension as they had hoped. He couldn’t leave yet. Things still to do.
It took Salmond a week to work through the dates and names, listing and relisting as she checked the electoral register, police computer records and social media to track down the guests. She loved this sort of work – the chase through data, knowing that if the information was there, she would find it and experience the moment of triumph when the name emerged.
It was a Thursday afternoon when she found him. Mr Matthew Evans, a married man living with his wife Shan in Walsall, and in Southampton on Dawn’s dates. Right age, right job.
She immediately went back to the helpful hotel manager to ask her to put the name back through their system to see if he’d been in the city on the day Bella went missing. ‘No, no Matthew Evans since December 2005. He stayed one night in a deluxe double and had room service,’ the manager reported.
‘Brilliant, thanks,’ she said, already texting Sparkes with the news. She took a breath and walked up the stairs to DCI Wellington’s office to tell her about the new lead. She’d barely registered Zara before, except as part of the Bob Sparkes problem, but that was about to change. Zara Salmond would be on the map.
But if she’d expected a ticker-tape parade, she was mistaken. Wellington listened carefully, muttered, ‘Good work, Sergeant. Write your report and get it to me immediately. And let’s send West Midlands round to see this Evans.’
Salmond walked back to her office, her disappointed feet heavy on the stairs.
Chapter 37
Saturday, 16 January 2010
The Detective
MATTHEW EVANS WAS not a happy man. The police ha
d come knocking on his door without warning and his wife, baby on hip and toddler at her side, had opened the door to them.
Bob Sparkes smiled politely with Salmond standing nervously at his side. The young officer had agreed to go with her old boss to knock on the door but knew she was putting herself on the line. She would have the book thrown at her if her superiors found out, but he’d persuaded her that they were doing the right thing.
‘I know I’m not on the case now.’
‘You were removed, Sir.’
‘Right, thank you for reminding me, Salmond. But I need to be there. I know the case inside out and I’ll be able to spot the lies,’ he’d said.
She knew he was right and called West Midlands police to let them know she’d be on their patch, but as soon as she put the phone down, she felt pressurized and sick.
Salmond drove, but Sparkes took the train north to avoid being seen by his former colleagues. When he spotted Salmond waiting for him outside the railway station, she looked grim and stressed.
‘Come on Salmond, it’ll be fine,’ he said quietly. ‘No one will know I was here. The invisible man, I promise.’
She’d given him a brave smile and the pair had trudged off to meet Matt Evans.
‘Matt, there’s two police officers here to see you,’ his wife had called to him. ‘What’s this about?’ she asked the officers on the doorstep, but Sparkes and Salmond waited until they had her husband in front of them before saying anything further. Fair’s fair, Sparkes thought.
Evans had a good idea why the police were there. The first time he saw Dawn and Bella on the television and did the maths, he knew the cops would appear one day. But as the weeks, months and then years passed, he had begun to hope.
‘She might not be mine,’ he’d told himself at the start. ‘Bet Dawn was sleeping with other blokes.’ But in his stomach – a much more reliable organ than his heart – he knew Bella was his. She looked so much like his ‘real’ daughter he was amazed people hadn’t seen it and rung into Crimewatch.
But they hadn’t and he’d continued his life, adding to his family and picking up new Dawns along the way. He never had sex without a condom again, though.
The senior officer suggested a quiet chat and he gratefully took them into the dining room they never used.
‘Mr Evans, do you know a Dawn Elliott?’ Salmond said.
Evans had considered lying – he was very good at it – but knew Dawn would identify him if it came to it. ‘Yes. We had a bit of a romance a few years ago, when I was repping down on the south coast. You know what it’s like when you’re working long hours, you need a bit of fun, a bit of relaxation …’
Salmond looked at him coolly, registering the floppy fringe, big brown eyes and cheeky, persuasive smile, and moved on.
‘And did you know that Dawn had a baby after your romance? Did she contact you?’
Evans swallowed hard. ‘No, I knew nothing about the baby. Look, I changed my mobile number because she was getting a bit clingy and—’
‘You didn’t want your wife to find out,’ Sparkes finished for him.
Matt looked grateful and turned on the man-to-man stuff. ‘Yeah. Look, Shan, my wife, doesn’t need to know about this, does she?’ The last time Shan Evans had been contacted by one of her husband’s conquests, she’d said there would be no more chances and demanded that they have another baby, their third. ‘It’ll bring us closer, Matt.’
It hadn’t. The sleepless nights and post-natal sex moratorium had sent him out looking for fun and relaxation again. There was a secretary in London at the moment. He couldn’t help himself.
‘That’s up to you, Sir,’ Sparkes said. ‘Has there ever been any contact between you since you changed your mobile?’
‘No, I steered well clear. Dangerous to go back – they think you have come back to marry them.’
Heartless bastard, Zara Salmond thought, writing HB in the margin of her notebook. Then amending it to FHB. She’d had her own teenage encounters with married men on the prowl.
Evans was fidgeting in his hard chair.
‘Actually, funny thing, I did spot her once in a chat room on the internet. I was just browsing through, like you do, and there she was. Seem to remember she was Little Miss Sunshine, like the children’s book – my eldest’s got that one – but she was using her own photo. Not the brightest spark, Dawn.’
‘Did you make yourself known to Little Miss Sunshine?’
‘Course not. The whole point of chat rooms is everyone is supposed to be anonymous. More fun that way.’
DS Salmond wrote it all down, asking him to spell out the names of the chat rooms he favoured and his own online identities. After twenty-five minutes, Evans began to rise to show them out, but Sparkes had not finished.
‘We need you to give some samples, Mr Evans.’
‘What for? I’m pretty sure Bella was mine – she looks just like my other kids.’
‘Well, that’s good to know. But we need to be sure and we need to be able to rule you out of our investigation.’
Evans looked aghast. ‘Investigation? I haven’t had anything to do with the disappearance of that little girl.’
‘Your little girl.’
‘Well, yes, OK, but why would I kidnap a child? I’ve got three of my own. Some days I’d pay someone to kidnap them.’
‘I’m sure,’ Sparkes said. ‘But we need to be thorough so we can rule you out. Why don’t you get your jacket and tell your wife you need to go out?’
The officers waited outside.
Salmond looked as if she might burst, she was so pleased with herself. ‘He saw Dawn in an over-eighteens chat room. She was a player – an amateur, but a player.’
Sparkes tried to remain calm, but the adrenalin was pumping through him too.
‘This could be the link, Salmond. The link between her and Glen Taylor.’ Sparkes laughed, despite himself.
Neither of them heard the exchange between husband and wife, but Salmond sensed there was unfinished business when Evans got into the car with them.
‘Let’s get this over with,’ he said and shut up.
At the local police station, Evans gave DNA samples, attempting laddish banter with the younger officers, but no one was charmed. Tougher audience than the pissed girls on the dance floor, Sparkes thought, as Salmond applied a little more force than was strictly necessary on Evans’ fingers in the ink.
‘Sorry, Sir, you have to press hard to get a good impression.’
Zara Salmond told Sparkes she was driving back to her HQ to tell her new boss the news, face to face. She needed time to put together her story without dropping Sparkes – and herself – in it.
‘I’ll say West Midlands didn’t have the manpower so I popped up here and found him, Bella Elliott’s father. He’s a serial shagger from Brum, like we thought – one Matthew Evans. Company rep, married with three children. What do you think, Sir?’
He’d smiled encouragement, adding, ‘And he may provide the link between Glen and Bella.’
Cue champagne corks, Sparkes thought, more in hope than in expectation.
In the end, she told him later, the significance of the breakthrough swept aside any questions about why she had taken it upon herself to visit Evans on her own.
‘We’ll talk about that later, Salmond,’ DCI Wellington said as she picked up the phone to Chief Superintendent Parker to claim her part of the glory.
Sparkes’ recall to the Hampshire squad came four days later. CS Parker was short and to the point. ‘We’ve got a fresh lead on the Bella case, Bob. No doubt you’ve heard. We want you to take it on. I’ve talked to the Met to clear it. How quickly can you come back?’
‘On my way, Sir.’
His return was typically low key. ‘Hello, Salmond. Let’s see where we are with Matthew Evans,’ he said as he took his coat off.
And he slipped back in, as if he’d just stepped out for a few minutes.
Salmond and the IT Forensics team did not have
encouraging news. They had gone steaming back through the data downloaded from Taylor’s original computer to hook out Little Miss Sunshine as soon as they got the information. But she wasn’t there.
‘No chats, no emails, Sir. We’ve looked under all the permutations but she doesn’t seem to figure.’
Sparkes, Salmond and DC Dan Fry stood in a ragged semi-circle behind the techie’s chair and stared at the screen as names rolled up, willing her to appear. It was the fourth time through the list and the mood in the room was bleak.
Sparkes went back to his office and picked up the phone. ‘Hello, Dawn, it’s Bob Sparkes. No, no news exactly, but I have a couple of questions. I need to talk to you, Dawn. Can I come now?’
She deserved to be handled carefully after all she’d been through, but this had to be addressed head on.
Chapter 38
Thursday, 13 July 2006
The Mother
DAWN ELLIOTT LIKED going out. She loved the ritual of a deep, perfumed bath, conditioning her hair and blow-drying it in front of the mirror. Putting on thick mascara with party music playing loudly. The final look in the full-length mirror on the wardrobe door and then clip-clopping to the taxi in high heels, the fizz of excitement rising in her chest. Going out felt like being seventeen forever.
Bella had stopped all that for a while. It had been bloody stupid getting pregnant, but it was her own fault. Too eager to please. He was so sexy – dancing to be close to her that first time they set eyes on each other. He’d taken her hand and twirled her round until she was dizzy and laughing. They’d taken their drinks outside with the smokers, to get some air. His name was Matt and he was already taken, but she didn’t care. He only visited Southampton once a month for work, but he phoned and texted every day in the beginning, when his wife thought he was fetching something from the car or taking the dog for a walk.
It had lasted six months; until he told her his office had moved him from the south coast to the north-east. Their last encounter had been so intense, she felt drunk on the experience afterwards. He’d begged her to have sex without a condom – ‘It’ll be more special, Dawn.’ And it was, she supposed, but he didn’t hang around to hear the result. ‘Married men don’t,’ her mother had told her, despairing of her naivety. ‘They’ve got wives and children, Dawn. They just want sex with stupid girls like you. What are you going to do about the baby?’