The Widow

by Fiona Barton

  She didn’t know at first, putting off any decision in case Matt reappeared like a knight on a white horse to whisk her away to a new life. And when he didn’t, she read glossy baby magazines and sleepwalked into motherhood.

  She didn’t regret going ahead with the pregnancy – well, not often – only when Bella woke up every hour from 3 a.m. or was teething and screaming, or filling a nappy. The baby years turned out not to be as advertised in the magazines, but they had survived them together and things got better as Bella became a person and a bit of company for Dawn.

  She’d tell her daughter all her secrets and thoughts, safe in the knowledge that Bella wouldn’t judge her. The little girl laughed along with her when she was happy and cuddled into her lap when Dawn cried.

  But hours spent watching CBeebies and playing video games on her phone didn’t fill her life. Dawn was lonely. She was only twenty-six. She shouldn’t be on her own, but who would be interested in a single mum?

  She was attracted to married men – she’d read somewhere that the older man represented a father figure and the excitement of forbidden fruit. She hadn’t got the biblical allusion but understood the mixture of danger and safety all too well. She wanted to find another Matt, but couldn’t afford babysitters and her mum disapproved of her going out until late.

  ‘What are you doing? Night clubs? For goodness’ sake, Dawn, look where that got you last time. You are a mother now. Why don’t you go out for a meal with one of your friends?’

  So she did. Sharing a Hawaiian pizza with Carole, an old school friend, was nice, but she didn’t return home buzzing with music and vodka shots.

  She found the chat room through a magazine in the doctor’s waiting room. Bella had a temperature and a rash and Dawn knew that Dr John, as he liked to be known, would chat to her, give her some attention – fancies me a bit, she told herself, deciding to put on make-up at the last minute. She needed to be fancied. Every woman did.

  Flipping through the pages of a teen mag, grimy from dozens of fingers and thumbs, she had read about the new dating scene online. She was so engrossed she missed her number being called. The receptionist had to shout her name and she got up quickly, grabbing Bella from the Lego pit and stuffing the magazine in her bag for later.

  Her laptop was old and battered, not helped by the fact that she kept it on top of the wardrobe, away from Bella’s sticky fingers. A bloke at work had given it to her when he got a new one. She’d used it at first, but when the charger stopped working and she didn’t have the money to get another one, she’d lost interest.

  On the way home from the doctor’s, she used her emergency credit card to buy a new charger.

  The chat room was brilliant. She basked in the attention of her new friends: the men who wanted to know all about her, who asked about her life and her dreams, and wanted her photo, who weren’t put off by her having a child. Some even wanted to know about her little girl.

  She didn’t tell anyone else. No one outside the laptop. This was her thing.

  Chapter 39

  Thursday, 21 January 2010

  The Detective

  THE HOUSE IN Manor Road looked cleaner and tidier. Bella’s toys were stacked in a box by the television and the front room had been turned into the Find Bella campaign headquarters. Volunteers were sitting at a table going through the post – ‘We get a hundred letters on a good day,’ Dawn said proudly – and sorting them into three piles: possible sightings, well-wishers and nutters. The nutters pile looked a lot bigger than the others, but Sparkes didn’t comment.

  ‘Lots of people are sending money to help us look for Bella,’ Dawn said. The fund was putting adverts in newspapers all over the world and paying for the occasional private investigator to check out a lead.

  ‘Let’s go somewhere quiet, Dawn,’ he said and guided her by her elbow to the kitchen, closing the door behind them.

  At the mention of Matt, she burst into tears. ‘How did you find him? What did he say about me? About Bella?’

  ‘He said he thought he was her father. We’re waiting for the DNA results.’

  ‘Has he got other children?’

  ‘Yes, Dawn.’

  ‘Do they look like her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She cried harder.

  ‘Come on, Dawn, we need to talk about something else Matt Evans told us. About seeing you in an online chat room.’

  That stopped the tears. ‘Matt saw me in a chat room? I didn’t see him.’

  ‘But you went in chat rooms?’

  ‘Yes, but not like the places you talked about in the trial. It wasn’t nasty or about sex.’

  Sparkes paused. ‘Why didn’t you say you had used chat rooms?’

  Dawn reddened. ‘I was embarrassed. I never told anyone when I was doing it because I thought people would think I used them to find sex. I didn’t, Inspector Sparkes. I was just lonely. It was just chatting. Stuff about what happened on EastEnders or I’m a Celebrity … I never met anyone in real life. I honestly didn’t think it was worth mentioning.’

  Sparkes leaned forward to pat her hand on the kitchen table. ‘Did you talk about Bella in the chat rooms, Dawn?’

  She looked at him and struggled to speak. ‘No. Well, yes, a bit. To other girls. But just, you know, stuff like if Bella had kept me up or funny things she’d done. We were just talking.’

  ‘But other people can hear you, can’t they?’

  Dawn looked like she might faint and Sparkes moved round to her side of the table, easing her chair back and gently pushing her head down into her lap for a moment. She was still deathly pale when she sat back up.

  ‘Him, you mean?’ she said. ‘Did he hear me talk about Bella? Is that how he found her?’

  There was no need for names, they both knew who ‘him’ was.

  ‘We can’t be sure, Dawn, but we need you to think back, to try to remember who you talked to online. We’ll look on your laptop, too.’

  A volunteer came in to ask Dawn a question and, seeing her tearful face, immediately started to back out.

  ‘No, please stay,’ Sparkes said. ‘Can you look after Dawn for a minute? She’s had a shock and could probably do with a cup of tea.’

  He went outside and phoned Salmond.

  He bagged Dawn’s battered computer and brought it back to HQ while his sergeant took a statement from the devastated mother. Sparkes wanted to be in on the hunt through the sites. He wanted to be there when BigBear, or whatever sick nursery allusion Taylor had used, popped up.

  The atmosphere in the lab was fetid, a mixture of locker room and abandoned pizzas, and the technicians looked weary as they took away the computer for cataloguing and mining. They were grateful there was only a fraction of the activity to plough through this time, but it would still take hours to produce a list of chat-room sites and contacts.

  The list, when it came, was the familiar jumble of fantasy and lurid names and Sparkes ran through them quickly to rule out the known Taylor avatars. ‘He must have used another name,’ he told Fry.

  ‘We got all the identities he used from his laptop, Sir.’

  ‘Are we sure he only had one laptop?’

  ‘No sign of any others, but he was definitely using at least one internet café. Maybe others on his travels.’

  The technician sighed. ‘We’ll have to rule out all the ones we can and then narrow the field a bit.’

  Sparkes picked up the list and drove back to Dawn Elliott’s kitchen.

  She was still crying. Salmond was holding her hand and talking in a low voice. ‘Let’s carry on, Dawn. You’re doing brilliantly.

  ‘She’s doing brilliantly, Sir.’

  Dawn looked up at him standing in the doorway like he had on the day Bella had gone. The sense of déjà vu was uncanny.

  ‘I’ve got a list of the people you encountered here. Let’s look at it together to see if you remember anything.’

  The rest of the house was silent. The volunteers had long gone, chased out by the
sense of doom and Dawn’s distress.

  She ran her finger down the names, page after page. ‘I didn’t know I talked to so many people,’ she said.

  ‘You probably didn’t, Dawn. People can just join a chat room and say hello and then listen.’

  She paused several times, making Sparkes’ pulse jump, telling Salmond some small remembered detail – ‘Seagull – she lived in Brighton and wanted to know about house prices here … BillieJean was a big Michael Jackson fan – was always telling us about him … Redhead100 was looking for love. Wonder if she found it’ – but most of the chat had been so mundane, Dawn had little recollection.

  When she reached TallDarkStranger she stopped. ‘TaI do remember him. It made me laugh when I saw his name. Such a cliché. I think we emailed once or twice outside the chat room. There was nothing romantic. He was nice to talk to when I felt low once, but we didn’t stay in touch.’

  Sparkes went out of the room and phoned Fry. ‘Look for TallDarkStranger. Could be him. They emailed outside the chat room. Text if you find anything.’

  It took a while, but finally his phone beeped. ‘Found him’ was the message.

  One of the Forensics team was waiting to see Sparkes when he arrived for work. ‘We’ve found the email contact between Dawn Elliott and TallDarkStranger – just three emails, but there is mention of Bella in them.’ Sparkes wasn’t a punching-the-air kind of man, but at that moment he came close. ‘Next step is linking the email address to Taylor, Sir.’

  They were also all over Dawn’s Facebook site. There were hundreds of photos of Bella on it, but Dan Fry had been brought back to the team and was helping search for the images available before the kidnap and working his way through the friends for signs of their man.

  It’s the new version of footslogging, Sparkes thought as he watched the team at work.

  A weary-looking techie came to see him later that day. ‘Problem, Sir. Dawn Elliott didn’t put any security on her Facebook page until after the little girl went missing, so anyone could have looked at her info and photos without becoming a friend.’

  ‘Christ. Have we looked anyway?’

  ‘Of course. Neither Glen Taylor nor any of the identities we know about appear. The odd thing is that Jean Taylor is there. She’s a friend of the Find Bella campaign.’

  ‘Jean? Are you sure it is her?’

  ‘Yes, security was put on the page by then. She not only ‘liked’ the page, she posted a couple of messages.’

  ‘Messages?’

  ‘Yes, she told Dawn she was praying for Bella’s safe return, and later sent a message on Bella’s fourth birthday.’

  Sparkes was mystified. Why would Jean Taylor befriend Dawn Elliott? ‘Are we sure it’s her, not someone posing as her?’

  ‘The email address is one she uses, and the IP address matches her area of London. We can’t be rock solid, but it certainly points that way.’

  Sparkes considered the possibilities. It could be her husband posing as her, but it was after the kidnap. Maybe he was just making sure he heard all the info about the hunt.

  ‘Great work. Let’s keep digging,’ he told the technician and closed his office door to get some thinking space.

  He needed to talk to Glen and Jean. Separately.

  Chapter 40

  Friday, 22 January 2010

  The Widow

  I WAS DOING some hand washing in the sink when Bob Sparkes knocked. I stuck my hands under the tap to rinse off the soap and then shook them dry as I walked to the door. I wasn’t expecting anyone, but Glen had put in a little camera so we could see who was on the doorstep on a video screen. ‘Saves us wasting our time opening the door to the press, Jeanie,’ he said, putting the last screw in the bracket.

  I didn’t like it. It made everyone look like criminals, all distorted like in the back of a spoon, even his mum. But he insisted. I looked and saw DI Sparkes, his nose filling the screen. I pressed the intercom and asked, ‘Who is it?’ No point making it easy for him. He sort of smiled. He knew it was a game and said, ‘It’s DI Bob Sparkes, Mrs Taylor. Can we have a quick word?’

  I opened the door and he was there, his face restored to normal proportions – a nice face, really. ‘I didn’t think I’d see you again, after the compensation settlement and everything else,’ I said.

  ‘Well, here I am. It’s been a while. How are you both?’ he said, bold as brass.

  ‘Fine, no thanks to you, but I’m afraid Glen isn’t here, Inspector. Maybe you should call ahead next time, if you want to come back.’

  ‘No, that’s fine. I just want to ask you a couple of questions.’

  ‘Me? What can you possibly have to ask me? The case against Glen is closed.’

  ‘I know, I know, but there is something I need to ask you, Jean.’

  The intimacy of using my first name threw me off guard and I told him to wipe his feet.

  When he came in, he went straight into the living room – like he was family. He sat down in his usual place and I stood in the door. I wasn’t going to get comfortable with him. He shouldn’t have come. It wasn’t right.

  He didn’t look sorry for coming, harassing us after the courts had said it was all over. I suddenly felt frightened. Having him here was like it starting all over again. The questions starting again. And I was afraid. Afraid he’d found something new to hound us with.

  ‘Jean, I want to ask you why you became Dawn Elliott’s friend on Facebook.’

  I hadn’t expected that. I didn’t know what to say. I’d started using the internet after Glen was charged and taken away. I wanted to understand how it worked – put myself in Glen’s shoes, maybe – so I bought a little laptop and the man in the shop helped me set it up with an email address and Facebook. It took a while to get the hang of it, but I bought an idiot’s guide to help me and I had lots of time to spend figuring it out. It whiled away my evenings and was a change from the telly. I didn’t tell Glen while he was in Belmarsh. I was worried he’d think I was doing it to try and catch him out. He might think I was being disloyal.

  I didn’t use it much, anyway, and when he came out he was surprised, but not in an angry way. I suppose there was too much going on for anything I did to matter much.

  But he certainly didn’t know that I was a Facebook friend of Dawn’s, and now Bob Sparkes was here to make trouble about it. It was stupid of me – ‘reckless’, Glen would say if he knew. I did it one night after I saw Dawn on the news. I just wanted to be part of the campaign to find Bella, to do something to help, because I believed she was alive.

  I didn’t think the police would see me in the middle of all those hundreds of names, but of course they see everything. ‘You never think, Jean,’ Glen would say if he was here now. I shouldn’t have done it, though, because it’s going to make the police look at us all over again. It’s going to cause Glen problems. DI Sparkes is looking at me, but I think I should say nothing and look stupid and let him blunder on.

  And on he goes. ‘Did you sign up to the campaign, Jean, or did someone use your identity?’

  I suppose he means Glen.

  ‘How would I know, Inspector Sparkes?’ Need to keep my distance. No first names. Where’s Glen? He said he’d only be ten minutes. Finally, I hear his key in the lock.

  ‘We’re in here, Glen,’ I call. ‘DI Sparkes is here.’

  Glen looks in, his coat still on, and nods to the inspector. Bob Sparkes stands and goes into the hall to talk to him on his own. I sit, petrified that Glen will explode about the Facebook thing, but there are no raised voices and then I hear the door click.

  ‘He’s gone,’ Glen says from the hall. ‘He shouldn’t have come. I told him it’s police harassment and he left. What did he say to you?’

  ‘Nothing. He wanted to know when you’d be back.’ Well, he did.

  I go upstairs to put my rinsed tights on the airer over the bath, then get my laptop out to see if I can delete myself from Bella’s Facebook page. Bit pointless really as the police have alr
eady seen it, but Glen hasn’t. I don’t think Inspector Sparkes said anything to him. That was good of him.

  I expect he’ll be back, though.

  Glen is rummaging in the fridge for something to put in a sandwich when I come downstairs and I jokily push him aside so I can do it for him. ‘What do you fancy? Cheese or tuna?’

  ‘Tuna, please. Have we got any crisps to go with it?’

  I fix up a plate of food with a bit of lettuce and tomato. He needs to eat more fresh veg. He’s looking pasty and putting on weight with all this sitting around indoors.

  ‘Where did you go?’ I say as I put the plate in front of him. ‘Just now?’

  Glen puts on that face, the one when I’m irritating him. ‘Down to the paper shop, Jean. Stop checking up on me.’

  ‘I’m just interested, that’s all. How’s your sandwich? Can I have a look at the paper?’

  ‘I forgot to buy one. Now let me eat in peace.’

  I go off into the other room and try not to worry, but I think it’s all starting again. His nonsense. He has begun doing his disappearing act again. Not in the house – I’d know. But he sometimes goes out for an hour or two and comes back unable to say what he’s been doing and gets cross if I ask too many questions.

  I don’t really want to know, but I need to. If I’m honest, I thought that was why Bob Sparkes came today. I thought Glen had been caught doing something on a computer again.

  I try so hard not to doubt him, but some days, like today, I struggle. I start imagining what could happen. No point thinking the worst, my dad says to my mum when she gets in a state, but it’s hard not to. Hard when the worst is just out there. Just outside the door.