The Widow (16 page)

‘Perhaps we've been looking at it from the wrong angle,' he told his reflection as he washed his hands in the Gents'. ‘Maybe it's her hold over Glen? Perhaps Jean put him up to it?'

Sure enough, Jean's name was scrawled on the whiteboard in the incident room when he returned. The officers looking at ‘women who can't have babies' were discussing previous cases. ‘Thing is, Sir,' one of the team said, ‘it's usually a woman acting on her own who takes a child and they don't go for toddlers. Some pretend to their partners or family that they are pregnant, wearing maternity clothes and padding, and then take babies from maternity units or prams outside shops to fulfil the pretence. Taking a toddler is high risk. Little kids can put up quite fight if they are frightened and a crying child attracts attention.'

Dan Fry, one of the force's new graduate recruits, raised his hand and Matthews nodded at him to add his piece. He was young, barely out of the Student Union bar, and stood to speak to the group, unaware that the culture was to stay seated and address the desktop.

Fry cleared his throat. ‘Then there's keeping an older child out of sight. It's a lot harder to explain the sudden appearance of a two-year-old to friends and family. If you were snatching a child of that age to bring up as your own, you'd have to disappear too. And the Taylors haven't budged.'

‘Quite right, um, Fry, is it?' Sparkes said, waving him to sit down.

The other teams had ruled out kidnap for cash or revenge. Dawn Elliott didn't have any money of her own and they'd trawled back through her teenage years for previous boyfriends and evidence of drugs or prostitution, in case there was an organized-crime connection. But there was nothing. She was a small-town girl who'd worked in an office until she'd fallen for a married man and become pregnant.

They still hadn't found Bella's father – the name he had given Dawn seemed to be false and the mobile phone number was a pay-as-you-go that no longer rang.

‘He's a chancer, Boss,' Matthews said. ‘Just out for a bit of extramarital and then disappears. The life of a thousand reps. A shag in every town.'

‘Paedophiles' was all that was left on the board.

The energy leached out of the room. ‘Meanwhile, back at Glen Taylor,' Sparkes said.

‘And Mike Doonan,' Matthews muttered. ‘What about Operation Gold?'

But his superior officer appeared not to hear him. He was listening to his own fears.

Sparkes was certain that Glen Taylor was already thinking about his next victim. Fuelling his thoughts with internet porn. Looking at those images became an addiction – as hard to kick as a drug – according to psychologists.

Sparkes had been told the reasons why blokes became dependent on internet porn – depression, anxiety, money troubles, work problems – and some of the theories about the ‘chemical payoff' – the thrill produced by adrenalin, dopamine and serotonin. One report he read as homework compared viewing porn to ‘the rush of first-time sex' for some men, leading them to chase a repetition of the same high with more and more extreme images. ‘A bit like how cocaine addicts describe their experience,' it had added.

Surfing on the net was a safe fantasy world full of excitement, a way of creating a private space in which to offend.

‘Interestingly,' Sparkes told Matthews later, as they sat in the canteen, ‘not all porn addicts get erections.'

Ian Matthews raised an eyebrow as he rested his sausage sandwich on the Formica table. ‘Do you mind, Boss? I'm eating. What are you reading there? Sounds like complete bollocks.'

‘Thank you, professor,' he snapped. ‘I'm trying to get inside Glen Taylor's murky little world. We're not getting in there through interviews, but he won't be able to break his habit and I'll be waiting for him. We'll find him and catch him.'

The sergeant sat back heavily and resumed chewing on his lunch. ‘Go on then, tell me how.'

‘Fry, one of the clever kids they've sent us to knock into shape, came to see me yesterday. He says we've missed a potential trick. Chat rooms. That's where porn addicts and sexual predators look for friends and lose their inhibitions.'

DC Fry had paid a visit to his senior officer's office, pulling up a chair without being invited and treating the conversation like a university tutorial.

‘The problem, as I see it, is we need disclosure from Glen Taylor.'

No shit, Sherlock, Sparkes thought. ‘Go on, Fry.'

‘Well, perhaps we need to enter his world and catch him at his most vulnerable.'

‘I'm sorry, Fry, can we cut to the chase? What are you on about – “his world”?'

‘I bet he's on the prowl in chat rooms – probably looking for new prospects – and he could disclose some key evidence to us if we pose as punters. We could put in a CHIS.'

Sparkes raised an eyebrow. ‘Sorry?'

‘A Covert Human Intelligence Source, Sir, to watch him at work. We covered it at college and I think it's well worth a try,' he finished, uncrossing his long legs and leaning on Sparkes' desk.

Sparkes had automatically leaned back – physically and mentally. It wasn't that Fry was cleverer than him. It was the confidence the younger man had that he was right that needled him. That's what university does for you, he thought.

Bloody university education
, he could hear his dad say.
Waste of bloody time. It's for people with money and nothing to do.

Not you
, was the message to the seventeen-year-old with an application form in his hand.

There'd been no further discussion on the subject. His dad was a clerk at the district council and preferred his world small and known. ‘Security' was his watchword and he urged his son to have the same lower-middle-class mindset.

‘Get your A levels and get a nice office job, Robert. Job for life.'

Bob had kept his application to the police secret from both his parents – funny, he always thought of them as one person, mumanddad – and presented it as a fait accompli when he was accepted. He didn't use the words ‘fait accompli'. His mumanddad didn't hold with foreign stuff.

He'd done well with the police but his rise had not been meteoric. That wasn't how things were done in his day; it was words like ‘committed', ‘insightful' and ‘methodical' that had punctuated his appraisals and recommendations.

The new breed of graduates on fast-track entry would cringe if they were described in the same way, Sparkes thought.

‘Tell me about chat rooms,' Sparkes said, and Fry, who looked like he barely shaved, let alone went looking for sex on the internet, told him he had written a dissertation on the subject.

‘My Psychology tutor is researching the effects of pornography on personality. I'm sure she'd help us,' he'd said.

By the end of the week, Sparkes, Matthews and Fry were on their way to the young officer's alma mater in the Midlands. Dr Fleur Jones greeted the men at the lift door and looked so young Sparkes thought she must be a student.

‘We're here to talk to Dr Jones,' Matthews said and Fleur laughed, used to – and secretly enjoying – the confusion created by her dyed red hair, pierced nose and short skirt.

‘That's me. You must be DI Sparkes and Sergeant Matthews. Nice to meet you. Hello, Dan.'

The three men squeezed their joint bulk into the utilitarian booth that served as Fleur Jones's workspace and Sparkes and Matthews began scrutinizing the walls out of habit. The message board was covered in childish drawings, but when they focused in on the detail, they realized they were looking at pornographic images.

‘Good grief,' Bob Sparkes said. ‘Who the hell did these? Not your usual kindergarten artworks.'

Dr Jones smiled patiently and Fry smirked. ‘Part of my research,' she said. ‘Getting habitual pornography users to draw what they witness online can reveal personality traits and lets them see things differently, perhaps enabling them to see the human beings behind the sexual objects they seek out.'

‘Right,' said Sparkes, wondering what the sex offenders on his patch would produce given crayons. ‘Well, Dr Jones, we don't want to take too much of your valuable time, so shall we get down to the reason we're here?'

The psychologist crossed her bare legs and nodded intently, eye contact unwavering. Sparkes tried to mirror her body language but he couldn't cross his legs without kicking Matthews and he started to feel a bit hot.

Dr Jones rose and opened her window. ‘Getting a bit stuffy in here – sorry, it's a small room.'

Sparkes cleared his throat and began: ‘We're investigating the disappearance of Bella Elliott, as DC Fry has told you. We have a suspect, but we're looking for new approaches to find out if he took the child. He has an extensive interest in sexual images of children and adults dressed as children. There are images on his computer. He says he didn't download them intentionally,'

Dr Jones allowed herself a twitch of a smile of recognition.

‘He's very manipulative and is turning our interviews into a masterclass in evasion.'

‘Addicts are brilliant liars, Inspector. They lie to themselves and then to everyone else. They're in denial about their problem and they are experts at finding excuses and other people to blame,' Dr Jones said. ‘Dan tells me you are interested in trying to interact with the suspect in sex chat rooms?'

She can't be more than thirty, Sparkes thought.

The psychologist clocked the pause and smiled knowingly.

‘Er, yes, yes, that's right. But we need to understand much more about these chat rooms and how to approach our man,' he said quickly.

There followed a lecture on finding sexual partners online, with the older detectives following with difficulty. It wasn't that they were computer illiterates, it was that the close proximity of Dr Jones and her restless legs was far too distracting to allow full concentration. In the end, Dan Fry took over, using the psychologist's computer to take his bosses into a cyber-fantasy world.

‘As I'm sure you know, it's basically instant messaging, Sir,' he explained. ‘You sign into a chat room that advertises itself as for singles, say, or teenagers, use a nickname to hide your real identity, and you can communicate with everyone else in that ‘room' or just one person. You just start chatting by writing texts.'

‘They can't see each other so they can be anyone. That's the attraction for predators. They can assume a new identity, or gender, or age group. Wolf in sheep's clothing,' Fry said.

Once contact was established with a likely individual – a young teen, perhaps – the predator might persuade her to give her email address so grooming could go on in private.

‘Once they have one-to-one contact, anything is possible. For consenting adults, that isn't a problem, but some youngsters have been tricked or manipulated into posing for explicit photographs, using a webcam. The predator can then blackmail them into other acts. Young lives ruined,' Fry added.

Recap over, Sparkes had a go in an over-eighteens chat room. Matthews had suggested Superstud as his nickname and snorted when his boss opted instead for Mr Darcy – Eileen's favourite. But Mr Darcy was greeted by a flurry of flirty messages from would-be Elizabeth Bennets that quickly escalated into direct sexual propositions.

‘Bloody hell,' he said as the explicit messages scrolled up the screen. ‘A bit in-your-face for Jane Austen, isn't it?'

Dr Jones laughed from behind him. He signed himself out and turned to face her.

‘But how do we find Glen Taylor?' he asked. ‘There must be hundreds of these chat rooms.'

Fry had his plan ready.

‘Yes, but we've got his computer so we know where he's been. Taylor's clever and when Operation Gold started to bite he probably deleted files and data, but it's all still there on the hard drive, invisible to him but very visible to the blokes in the forensic lab. They've dug out all sorts of information and we know where he hangs out.'

Sparkes found himself nodding, seduced by the mental picture of Taylor's face when he arrested him. He could almost smell the fox-like stench of Taylor's guilt. He tried to focus on the practicalities.

‘“We” being who, exactly?' he asked.

‘Fleur and I would work out a character, a back story and a script with some trigger words to use,' DC Fry said, pink with excitement at the prospect of real detective work, and Dr Jones murmured her assent.

‘It could be very valuable for my research.'

It felt signed and sealed, but Matthews piped up with the question no one had asked. ‘Is it legal?'

The others in the room looked at him.

‘Will it stand up as evidence in court, Sir? It could be seen as entrapment,' he pressed.

Sparkes wondered if Matthews was reacting to the new boy's clever-dickery. He didn't know the answers, but Fry gave him a possible way out.

‘We don't have a case to destroy, from what I've seen, Sir. Why don't we see how far we get first? Then we can revisit this question,' he said.

Matthews looked unhappy, but Sparkes nodded his agreement.

F
UNNY THINGS, BIRTHDAYS
. Everyone seems to love them, but I dread them – the build-up, the pressure to be happy, to have a good time, the disappointment when I don't. I'm thirty-seven today and Glen is downstairs doing a tray of breakfast. It's still early and I'm not hungry yet so the food will be like sawdust in my mouth, but I'll have to tell him I love it. Love him. I do. I do. He's my world, but every birthday, I wonder if maybe this year there'll be a miracle and we'll have a baby.

I try not to think about it, but birthdays are difficult. It's that moment when you realize another year's gone past, isn't it? I know there's everything else going on, but I can't help it.