The Widow (23 page)

And on they went.

It was fascinating, like watching a dramatization of his investigation with actors playing the detectives. ‘Like sitting in the stalls,' he told Kate when she called.

‘Who's playing you? Robert de Niro? Oh, no, I forgot, Helen Mirren.' She laughed.

But perching on the edge of his seat as a member of the audience instead of being in the bubble of the investigation gave him a view he'd never had before. He could survey the hunt, Godlike, and that was when he began to notice the cracks and false starts.

‘We focused on Taylor too quickly,' he told DS Salmond. It had cost him a lot to admit it to himself, but it had to be done. ‘Let's look at the day Bella disappeared again. Quietly.'

Secretly, they started to rebuild 2 October 2006 from the moment the child woke, using the inside surfaces of a hastily emptied metal cabinet in the corner of Sparkes' office to paste up their montage. ‘Looks like an art project,' Salmond joked. ‘Just need a bit of sticky-backed plastic and we'll get a
Blue Peter
badge.'

She'd wanted to do the timeline on the computer, but Sparkes was worried it would be clocked. ‘This way, we can get rid of it and leave no trace, if we have to.'

He hadn't been sure when Salmond asked to help him. She didn't tease him like Matthews did – he missed it, the intimacy and release of a shared joke, but it felt inappropriate with a woman. Flirtatious rather than comradely. Anyway, he didn't miss Matthews' disgusting ketchup-slathered sausage sandwiches and the glimpses of his belly as his shirt came adrift.

DS Salmond was very bright, but Sparkes didn't really know her or whether he could trust her. He'd have to. He needed her unemotional clear-sightedness to stop him veering off into the undergrowth again.

Bella woke at 7.15, according to Dawn. A bit later than usual, but she was late to bed the night before. ‘Why late to bed?' Salmond asked. They scrolled through Dawn's statements.

‘They went to McDonald's and had to wait for the bus home,' Sparkes said.

‘Why? Was it a treat?' asked Salmond. ‘Not her birthday – that's in April. I thought Dawn was permanently short of money? About five hundred quid owing on her credit card and the neighbour said she rarely went out.'

‘We didn't ask, according to this paperwork,' Sparkes said. It went on Salmond's list. She's a girl who likes a list, Sparkes thought. Woman. Sorry.

‘And then sweets at the newsagent's. More treats. Wonder what was happening in their lives?'

Salmond wrote SMARTIES on a new piece of paper and pasted it up in the cabinet.

They sat on opposite sides of his desk with Salmond in the boss's chair. Between them was a printout of the master file, acquired by Matthews as a parting gift. Sparkes began to feel he was under interrogation, but his new sergeant was teasing out the missed questions and he focused.

‘Did she have a new bloke in her life? What about this Matt that got her pregnant? Did we ever talk to him?'

The holes in the investigation began to gape at Sparkes accusingly.

‘Let's do that now,' Salmond said quickly, seeing the gloom descending on her boss.

Bella's birth certificate had no father's name – as an unmarried mother, Dawn had no right to record a father unless he was present at the registration – but she'd told the police his name was Matt White and he lived in the Birmingham area and said he worked for a drugs company. ‘He could get his hands on Viagra whenever he wanted,' she told Sparkes.

An initial search had failed to find a Matthew White in Birmingham who fitted the bill and then Taylor had entered the picture and everyone else was shoved into a drawer.

‘Matt might be a nickname. And I wonder if he gave her a false name? Married men often do – stops the new girlfriend getting in touch unexpectedly, especially after it's over,' Salmond mused.

She fitted in her new inquiries around her other work with a calm efficiency that left Sparkes feeling soothed and slightly inadequate. She had a way of swishing into and out of his office in minutes with the right document, question answered and action agreed, barely rippling the surface of his concentration.

He began to believe they would find a new lead. But this new feeling of hope distracted him, made him reckless and relaxed his guard. Discovery of his parallel investigation was probably inevitable.

He'd left the door of the cabinet propped open while he made a call when DI Downing put her head round his door without knocking. Her invitation to share a sandwich never came. She found herself confronted with the alternative Bella Elliott case, pasted up like something from a serial killer's lair.

‘Jude, it's just something left over from the original case,' he said, seeing the hardening of his colleague's eyes. It sounded feeble even to him and there was nothing to be done to head off the disaster.

There was sympathy rather than a tirade and that was worse somehow.

‘You need some time off, Bob,' Chief Superintendent Parker told him firmly at their formal interview the following day. ‘And some help. We would recommend counselling. We've some excellent people.'

Sparkes tried not to laugh. He took the printed sheet of names and two weeks' leave, calling Salmond from his car to tell her.

‘Don't go near the case again, Salmond. They know you're not going barmy and won't be so gentle next time. We have to leave it with the new team.'

‘Understood,' she said curtly.

She was obviously in with someone senior, he thought. ‘Call me when you can talk,' he said.

D
AWN HAD MADE
an effort. She'd bought an expensive jacket and put on a pair of heels with new tights and a skirt. The editor made a huge fuss of her, meeting her at the lift and walking her through the newsroom in front of all the reporters. They smiled and nodded from behind their computer terminals and the man who had sat in court every day put down his phone and came over to shake her hand.

The editor's secretary, an impossibly elegant woman with magazine-standard hair and make-up, followed them into the inner sanctum and asked if she wanted a tea or coffee. ‘Tea, please. No sugar.'

A tray arrived and the small talk ended. The editor was a busy man.

‘Now then, Dawn, let's talk about our campaign to bring Taylor to justice. We'll need a big interview with you to launch it. And a new angle.'

Dawn Elliott knew exactly what the editor wanted. Almost two years of media exposure had toughened her up. A new angle meant more space on the front page, follow-ups in all the other papers, Breakfast TV interviews, Radio 5 Live,
Woman's Hour
, magazines. Like night follows day. It was exhausting, but she had to keep going because most days she knew, really knew, deep inside her, that her baby was still alive. And on the other days, she hoped.

But sitting on a sky-blue foam cube – a corporate decorator's attempt to humanize the space – becalmed in the air-conditioned office, she also knew that this newspaper wanted her to say for the first time that Bella had been murdered. It would be the ‘belter of a story' the editor required to go after Glen Taylor.

‘I'm not saying Bella is dead, Mark,' she said. ‘Because she isn't.'

Mark Perry nodded, his faux sympathy stiffening his face, and pressed on. ‘Look, I completely understand, but it's difficult to accuse someone of murder, Dawn, if we're saying that his victim is still alive. I know how hard this must be, but the police believe Bella is dead, don't they?'

‘Bob Sparkes doesn't,' she replied.

‘He does, Dawn. Everybody does.'

In the silence that followed, Dawn struggled with her options: please the papers or go it alone. She'd talked to the PR advising the campaign on pro bono terms earlier that morning and he'd warned she'd face ‘Sophie's Choice'. ‘Once you say that Bella is dead, there's no going back and the danger is that the search for her will stop.'

That couldn't happen.

‘I think we should keep the question open,' Dawn said. ‘Why don't we stick with accusing him of the kidnap, because when I find her, you won't want to be the paper that said she was dead, will you? Everyone will say that you stopped people looking for her.'

Perry walked to his desk and came back with one of the A3 sheets of paper covering it. He shifted the tray to another cube and laid the sheet on the table. It was the mock-up of a front page – one of several drawn to sell the
Herald
's exclusive. There were no stories cluttering the page, just seven words screaming: ‘THIS IS THE MAN WHO STOLE BELLA' and a photograph of Glen Taylor.

Perry had favoured the headline ‘KILLER!' but that would have its day when they had nailed the bastard.

‘What about this?' he asked and Dawn picked it up and scrutinized it like a pro.

In the beginning, she could hardly bear to look at Taylor's face, seeing it beside the face of her baby in every paper, but she'd forced herself. She looked at his eyes, searching for guilt; looked at his mouth, searching for weakness or lust. But there was nothing there. He looked like a man she might sit next to on a bus or stand behind in a supermarket queue and she wondered if she ever had. Was that why he'd picked her child?

It was the question that reverberated through every waking minute. Her dreams were full of Bella: glimpses of her just out of reach; being unable to move or make any progress towards her child, no matter how hard she ran, and, on waking, realizing as if for the first time that she was gone.

At first, she had been unable to take part in any sort of life, she was so overwhelmed by failure and helplessness. But when, eventually, she'd surfaced from the sedatives, her mum had persuaded her to fill her days with practical things. ‘You need to get up, get dressed every day and do something, Dawn. Even something small.'

It was the same advice she'd given when Bella was born, when Dawn had struggled to cope with the sleep deprivation and the colicky screaming of her new baby.

And she'd got up and got dressed. She'd walked down the path to the gate. She'd stood in the garden like Bella had and looked out at the world passing by.

The Find Bella campaign had begun on Dawn's Facebook page with her posting something about Bella or how she was feeling most days. The response was like a tidal wave, swamping her and then buoying her up. She gathered thousands, then hundreds of thousands, of Friends and Likes as mothers and fathers all over the world reached out to her. It had given her something to focus on, and when people with money contacted her to offer cash to help find her little girl, she'd said yes.

Bob Sparkes had admitted he had reservations about some of the directions taken by the Find Bella campaign, but said it was OK as long as his officers weren't being diverted from the task in hand. ‘Still, you never know,' he'd told her. ‘The campaign might shame someone into coming forward.'

‘Kate will go mad when she sees I've gone with the
Herald
– “The Enemy”,' she'd told herself when first approached. ‘But her lot didn't match the offer on the table. She'll see the sense.'

In truth, she wished it was going to be Kate and Terry handling the story, but the
Daily Post
had passed on the opportunity.

It was hard because she'd got close to Kate over the months. They'd talked most weeks and met up every so often for lunch and a gossip. Sometimes the paper would send a car to bring Dawn to London for the day. And in return, Dawn told Kate everything first.

But the
Post'
s coverage had petered out recently. ‘Is the paper bored with me?' she'd asked Kate at their last meeting, when an interview had failed to appear.

‘Don't be daft,' the reporter had said. ‘There's just quite a lot of other stuff happening at the moment.' But Kate hadn't been able to meet her eye.

Dawn was no longer the lost girl on the sofa. She understood.

And when the
Herald
called her to propose a campaign to bring Taylor to justice and a generous donation to the Find Bella fund, she'd accepted it.

She'd rung Kate to let her know her decision – she owed her that. The call sent the reporter into a blind panic. ‘Christ, Dawn, are you serious? Have you signed anything?'

‘No, I'm going to see them this afternoon.'

‘OK. Give me twenty minutes.'

‘Well …'

‘Please, Dawn.'

When the reporter rang back, Dawn knew immediately that Kate was empty-handed.

‘I'm sorry, Dawn. They won't do it. They think it's too risky to accuse Taylor. And they're right. It's a stunt, Dawn, and could blow up in your face. Don't do it.'

Dawn sighed. ‘I'm sorry, too, Kate. You know it's not personal – you've been brilliant – but I can't stop now just because one paper has lost interest. Better go or I'll be late. Let's speak soon.'

And here she was, looking through the contract and re-checking the sub-clauses for loopholes. Her lawyer had already read it but had advised her to take another look ‘in case they slip something new in'.

Mark Perry watched her, nodding encouragingly whenever she spoke and smiling broadly when she signed and dated the document.

‘OK, let's get started,' he said, standing and propelling her out of the office to the waiting feature writer who would do ‘The Big Interview'.

The paper had thousands of words already written, prepared for the expected guilty verdict. Before Glen Taylor's trial, they'd interviewed his former colleagues from the bank and delivery firm, collected the sordid tales of the chat-room women and had the child porn nailed from an off-the-record briefing by a detective on the team. They'd also bought up a neighbour of the Taylors' and her exclusive photos of Taylor with her kids – one of them a little blonde girl.