The Widow (28 page)

‘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.

D
AWN
E
LLIOTT 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?'

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.

T
HE 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.