The Widow (15 page)

She looks anxious and starts to try and explain the legal terms. ‘It really is very simple,' she says. She really wants me to sign it. She must be getting grief from her boss, but I put the contract down and shake my head and she sighs.

‘Would you like a lawyer to have a look at it for you?' she asks. I nod. ‘Do you know one?' she says and I nod again. I call Tom Payne. Glen's lawyer. It's been a while – must be two years – but I still have his number on my mobile.

‘Jean! How are you? I was sorry to hear about Glen's accident,' he says when the secretary finally puts me through.

‘Thank you, Tom, that's kind of you. Look, I need your help. The
Daily Post
wants me to do an exclusive interview with them and they want me to sign a contract. Will you look at it for me?'

There is a pause and I can imagine the surprise on his face.

‘An interview?' he says. ‘Are you sure you're doing the right thing, Jean? Have you thought this through?'

His real questions remain unasked and I'm grateful to him for that. I tell him I've thought about it and this is the only way to get the press off my doorstep. I'm starting to sound like Kate. I don't really need the money. Glen got a quarter of a million in compensation for the trick the police pulled – dirty money we put away in a building society – and there'll be the insurance money from his death. But I might as well take the fifty thousand pounds the paper wants to pay me.

Tom sounds unconvinced, but he agrees to read the contract and Kate emails it over to him. We sit and wait and she tries to persuade me to have a facial or something. I don't want to be fiddled with again so I say no and just sit there.

Tom and I have had a special bond since the day Glen's case ended.

We stood together waiting for him to be released from the dock and Tom couldn't look at me. I think he was scared of what he'd see in my eyes.

I can see us standing there. The end of the ordeal, but not the end really. I'd been so grateful for the order that the court case had given my life. Every day planned out. Every day setting out from home at 8 a.m., dressed smartly, like I was going to work in an office. Every day, home at five thirty. My job was to be supportive and say nothing.

The court was like a sanctuary. I liked the echoing halls and the breezes wafting the notices on the boards and the canteen chatter.

Tom had taken me there before Glen was due to appear, to be committed for trial, so I could see what it was like. I'd seen the Old Bailey on the telly – on the news with a reporter standing on the pavement in front of it, talking about a murder or terrorist or something, and the inside, in police dramas. But it was still nothing like I expected. Dim, smaller than it looked on TV, dusty-smelling like a classroom, old-fashioned with lots of dark wood.

It was lovely and quiet when we went for a look round before business began for the day. Hardly anyone else there. Bit different when Glen appeared so they could set a date for his trial. It was packed. People had queued to see him. They brought sandwiches and flasks like it was the sales or something. And the reporters crammed into the press seats behind me. I sat with my head down, pretending to look for something in my handbag, until Glen was brought into the box by the prison warders. He looked small. I'd brought in his best suit for the appearance and he'd had a shave, but he still looked small. He looked over and winked. Like it was nothing. I tried to smile at him but my mouth was too dry, my lips got stuck to my teeth.

It was over so quickly I hardly had time to look at him again before he disappeared down the stairs. I was allowed to see him later. He'd changed out of his suit into his prison stuff, a sort of tracksuit, and taken off his best shoes. ‘Hello, Jeanie love. Well, that was a bit of a farce, wasn't it? The whole thing is a farce, my solicitor says,' he said.

Well, he would, I wanted to say. You're paying him to say just that.

The trial was set for February, four months away, and Glen was sure it would be thrown out before then. ‘It's all nonsense, Jeanie,' he said. ‘You know that. The police are lying to make themselves look good. They need an arrest and I was one of the poor sods who was driving a blue van in the area that day.' He gave my hand a squeeze and I squeezed back. He was right. It was nonsense.

I went home and pretended everything was normal.

Inside the house it was. My little world stayed exactly the same – same walls, same cups, same furniture. But outside, everything had shifted. The pavement in front of the house was like a soap opera with people coming and going and sitting looking at my house. Hoping to get a glimpse of me.

I had to come out sometimes, and when I did I dressed anonymously, covering myself completely, and I steeled myself in the hall before leaving suddenly and quickly. It was impossible to avoid the cameras but I hoped they'd get tired of the same shots of me walking down the path. And I learned to hum a song in my head so I could blank out the remarks and questions.

The visits to the prison were the worst part. It meant catching a bus and the press would follow me to the stop and photograph me and the other passengers as we waited together. Everyone got upset with them and then me. It wasn't my fault, but they blamed me. For being the wife.

I tried walking to different bus stops, but I got fed up with playing their games, and in the end I just put up with it and waited for them to get bored.

I'd sit on the 380 bus to Belmarsh with a plastic carrier bag on my knee, pretending to be on a shopping trip. I'd wait to see if someone else would press the bell before the prison stop and then get off quickly. Other women would get off as well, with a tangle of crying kids and pushchairs, and I'd walk a long way behind them to the visitors' centre so people wouldn't think I was like them.

Glen was on remand so there weren't so many rules about visits, but the one I liked best was that I couldn't wear high heels, short skirts or see-through clothes. It made me laugh. The first time, I wore trousers and a jumper instead. Nice and safe.

Glen didn't like it. ‘I hope you're not letting yourself go, Jean,' he said, so I put lipstick on next time.

He could have three visits a week, but we agreed I'd only come twice so I didn't have to deal with the reporters too often. Mondays and Fridays. ‘It'll give my week a shape,' he said.

The room was noisy and brightly lit and it hurt my eyes and ears. We'd sit across from each other and when I'd told him my news and he'd told me his, we'd listen to the other conversations going on around us and talk about them instead.

I thought my job was to comfort him and reassure him that I was standing by him, but he seemed to have that covered already.

‘We can weather this, Jeanie. We know the truth and so will everyone else soon. Don't you worry,' he'd say at least once a visit. I tried not to, but I felt like our life was slipping away.

‘What if the truth doesn't come out?' I asked him once and he looked disappointed that I would even suggest it.

‘It will,' he insisted. ‘My lawyer says the police have screwed up royally.'

When Glen's case wasn't thrown out before the trial, he said the police ‘want their day in court'. He looked smaller every time I saw him, as if he was shrinking inside himself.

‘Don't worry love,' I heard myself say. ‘All over soon.'

He looked grateful.

S
PARKES WAS REVIEWING
the situation. It had been two months since he'd first knocked on Glen Taylor's door and they were not making any progress. It wasn't that they hadn't been looking. His colleagues had been examining every detail of his life – and the lives of Mike Doonan and Lee Chambers – but they had little to show for it so far.

Doonan appeared to have led a pretty grey existence, with even his divorces failing to provide a splash of colour. The only point of interest was that the two ex-wives had become close friends and chimed in with each other when discussing Mike's faults. ‘He's a bit selfish, I suppose,' Marie Doonan said. ‘Yeah, selfish,' Sarah Doonan chorused. ‘We're better off without him.'

Even his children were uninterested in his involvement with the police. ‘Never see him,' his eldest said. ‘He was gone before I realized he was there.'

Matthews dug on, dogged in his pursuit. His blood pressure flickered when he discovered that Doonan had not arrived for his doctor's appointment on the day Bella vanished, but the driver said his spine had been so painful he couldn't leave the flat. And the GP backed him up. ‘He can barely stand at times,' he said. ‘Poor man.'

He still couldn't be ruled out, but Sparkes was becoming impatient with Matthews, demanding that he turn his attention to Taylor.

‘Doonan is crippled – he can hardly walk, so how the hell could he kidnap a child?' Sparkes asked. ‘We've got nothing beyond the fact that he was driving a blue van to link him to the case, have we?'

Matthews shook his head. ‘No, Boss, but there's the Operation Gold stuff.'

‘Where's the evidence he looked at those images? There isn't any. Taylor has got child porn on his computer. He's the one we should be concentrating on. I need you on this, Matthews.'

The sergeant was not convinced it was time to close the book on Doonan, but he knew that his boss had made up his mind.

The real problem for Sparkes was that he couldn't let go of his first instinct that they'd already found their man and he was afraid that, unless they stopped him, he would go looking for another Bella.

Sparkes had begun to notice every child of Bella's age – in the street, in shops, in cars and cafés – and then he'd scan for predators. It was beginning to affect his appetite, but not his focus. He knew it was taking over his life, but there was nothing else he could do.

‘You are obsessed with this case, Bob,' Eileen had said the other night. ‘Can't we just go out for a drink without you disappearing back inside your head? You need to relax.'

He had wanted to scream, ‘Do you want another child to be taken while I'm off having a glass of wine?' But didn't. It wasn't Eileen's fault. She didn't understand. He knew he couldn't protect every little girl in the city, but he couldn't stop trying.

There had been many other cases involving children during his career – little Laura Simpson; Baby W, shaken to death by his stepfather; the Voules boy, who'd drowned in a park paddling pool surrounded by other kids; traffic accidents and runaways – but he had not known them the way he knew Bella.

He remembered the feeling of helplessness when he had first held his son James, the thought that he alone was responsible for his child's well-being and safety in a world full of danger and bad people. That's how he felt about Bella.

He'd begun dreaming about her. That was never a good sign.

He wondered if the blue van was distracting them from other lines. But then why had the man in the blue van never come forward? Everyone wanted to help find this child. If it had just been a bloke visiting a house, he would've rung in, wouldn't he?

Unless it was Glen Taylor, he thought.

The search had been thorough, fragment by fragment pored over by the team. A discarded T-shirt in a hedge, a single shoe, a blonde child spotted in a shopping centre trying to get away from an adult. The detectives were on a hair trigger as the hours, then days, then weeks passed with no results. They were all exhausted, but no one could call it over.

Every morning, the update meeting got shorter and gloomier. The T-shirt was for an eight-year-old, the shoe wasn't Bella's, and the blonde screamer was a toddler having a tantrum. Leads evaporated as soon as they were examined.

Sparkes kept his despair to himself. Once his head went down, the team would give up. Each morning he gave himself a pep talk in his office, sometimes standing in front of the mirror in the toilets, making sure no one could read failure in his increasingly pouchy eyes. Then he'd stride in, energy high, and galvanize his men and women.

‘Let's go back to basics,' he said that morning. And they did, following him from photos to maps to names to lists. ‘What are we missing?' he challenged them. Tired faces. ‘Who would take a child? What do we know from other cases?'

‘A paedophile.'

‘A paedophile ring.'

‘Kidnapper for money.'

‘Or revenge.'

‘A woman who's lost a baby.'

‘Or can't have a baby.'

‘A fantasist who needs a child to fulfil a scenario.'

Sparkes nodded. ‘Let's split into two-man – sorry, person – teams and look at our witnesses and persons of interest again, to see if any fit those categories.'

The room began to buzz and he left Ian Matthews to it.

He wondered how quickly Jean Taylor's name would come up and wanted time to think it through himself. Jean was an odd one. He remembered the first time he'd seen her, the shock on her face, the tricky interviews, the unshakable answers. He felt certain she was covering for Glen and had put this down to blind loyalty, but was it because she was involved somehow?

Women who killed children were rare, and those who did almost exclusively killed their own, according to the stats. But they did steal children occasionally.

He knew infertility could be a powerfully motivating force. It burned within some women, sending them mad with grief and longing. The neighbour and colleagues at the salon had said Jean was devastated when she couldn't have a baby. Used to cry in the back room if a customer talked about being pregnant. But nobody had placed Jean in Southampton on the day Bella was taken.

Sparkes doodled as he thought, drawing spiders on the pad in front of him.

If Jean loved children so much, why would she stay with a man who looks at child abuse on the computer? he thought. Why would she be loyal to a man like that? He was certain Eileen would be out of the door instantly. And he wouldn't blame her. So what was Glen's hold over his wife?