The Widow (32 page)

Everyone looked grave as the technicians began the online search, and the mounting tension chased Sparkes into the corridor. He was looking for Ian Matthews' number when Salmond put her head round the door. ‘You'd better come and look, Sir.'

Sparkes sat in front of the grainy image on the screen.

‘It's him. He's there at the boot of Chambers' car, picking through the magazines. Bending over. Back obviously feeling a lot better,' Salmond said.

‘Date, Salmond? Was he there on the day Bella went?'

Zara Salmond paused. ‘Yes, it's the day she was taken.' Sparkes almost rose out of his chair, but his sergeant put up a warning hand. ‘But it rules him out of our investigation.'

‘What do you mean? We've got Doonan in the area of the abduction, lying to us about his movements and the extent of his disability and buying extreme pornography on the route home.'

‘Yes, but he was recorded on film doing a deal with Chambers while Bella was being snatched. 15.02. The times don't add up – he can't have taken her.'

Sparkes closed his eyes, hoping the relief didn't show on his face.

‘OK, good work to pin it down. On we go,' he said without raising his eyelids.

Back in the privacy of his office, he slammed his fist down on his desk, then went for a walk outside to clear his head.

When he returned, he went back to Day One and his gut feelings about the case. They – he – had always treated Bella's abduction as an opportunistic crime. The kidnapper saw the child and lifted her. Nothing else had made sense. No link had been found between Dawn and Taylor and, once Stan Spencer's invented long-haired man had been discounted, there had been no reports of anyone hanging around the street or acting suspiciously in the area before Bella vanished. No flashers or sexual crimes reported.

And there had been no real pattern of behaviour for a predator to follow. The child went to and from nursery with Dawn, but not every day, and she only played outside occasionally. If someone had planned to take her, they would've gone in at night when they knew where she was at a given time. No one would have sat in a residential street on the off-chance that she might come out to play. He would've been spotted.

The police case was that the child had been taken in a twenty-five-minute, random window of opportunity. At the time, on the evidence in front of them, they'd been right to discount a planned kidnap.

But, in the cold light of day, three and a half years later, Sparkes thought that maybe they'd been too quick to rule it out and he suddenly wanted to revisit that possibility.

‘I'm going down to the control room,' he told Salmond. ‘To pull in a favour.'

Russell Lynes, his closest friend in the force – a bloke he'd joined up with – was on duty.

‘Hello, Russ, fancy a coffee?'

They sat in the canteen, stirring the brown liquid in front of them with little intention of drinking it.

‘How are you holding up, Bob?'

‘All right. Being back to some real work makes a big difference. And this new lead's giving me something to concentrate on.'

‘Hmm. It made you ill last time, Bob. Just be careful.'

‘I will. I wasn't ill, Russ. Just tired. Look, I want to look at one thing I may have missed first time.'

‘You're the boss. Anyway, why're you down here pulling favours? Get someone from the team to look at it.'

‘They've got enough to do and they might not get to it for weeks. If you give me a quiet hand, I can rule it in or out in a couple of days.'

‘OK, what sort of quiet hand?' Russell Lynes asked, pushing the coffee away, slopping it on to the table.

‘Thanks, mate. I knew I could count on you.'

The two men went and sat in Sparkes' office with the spreadsheet of Taylor's deliveries and plotted his visits to Southampton and the surrounding towns. ‘We looked at every frame of CCTV footage in the area round Dawn Elliott's address on the day of the snatch,' Sparkes said. ‘But the only time we saw Taylor's van was at the delivery address in Winchester and at the junction of the M3 and M25. I wore my eyes out looking, but there was nothing to place his van at the scene.'

He could recall vividly the sense of expectation every time they loaded a new piece of footage, and the bitter disappointment when it ended without a glimpse of a blue van.

‘I want to look at other dates,' he said. ‘The dates Taylor had other deliveries in Hampshire. Remind me, where are the cameras in the Manor Road area?'

Lynes highlighted the locations on the maps in neon green – a petrol station a couple of streets away had one on the forecourt for absconders; a camera to catch jumpers at the traffic lights on the big junction; and some of the shops, including the newsagents, had installed cheap, tinny versions to discourage shoplifters.

‘And Bella's nursery school has got a camera outside, but she wasn't at nursery that day. We looked at footage from all of these cameras but there was nothing of interest.'

‘Well, let's have a look again. We must have missed something.'

Four days later, Sparkes' phone rang and he knew as soon as he heard Lynes' voice that he'd found that something. ‘I'm on my way,' he said.

‘There it is,' Lynes said, pointing at the vehicle crossing the frame. Sparkes squinted at the screen, trying to retune his eyes to the film's grainy resolution.

It was there. The van was there. The two men looked at each other triumphantly and then back at the screen to enjoy the moment again.

‘Are we sure it's him?' Sparkes asked.

‘It matches the date and time of a delivery to Fareham on his work sheets and Forensics have got a partial number plate that includes three letters that match Taylor's vehicle.'

Lynes pushed the Play button. ‘Now watch.'

The van stopped just within the camera's range, pointing away from the nursery school. As if on cue, Dawn and Bella appeared at the school gate at the back of the throng of children and parents, the mother fussing with her daughter's coat zip and the child clutching a huge piece of paper. The pair walked past the van and round the corner, safe in their routine. Within seconds, the van moved off in the same direction.

Sparkes knew he was watching the moment Glen Taylor had made his decision and his eyes filled with tears. He muttered that he was going to get a notepad and went to his office for a moment's privacy. ‘We're so close,' he told himself. ‘Now don't mess it up. No rushing; get everything in order.'

He looked at Taylor grinning at him from the wall and grinned back. ‘I hope you haven't booked a holiday, Glen.'

Back in the lab, Lynes was writing on a whiteboard. ‘This film was taken on Thursday, 28 September, four days before Bella was taken,' he said.

Sparkes closed his eyes before trusting himself to speak. ‘He planned it, Russ. This wasn't some chance snatch. He was watching. Any other sightings of the van that day?'

‘At the services at Hook, filling up on the way home. Timeline fits.'

‘Let's get the work done on the images and get as much detail as we can. Then I'm going to knock on Glen Taylor's door,' Sparkes said.

The two men sat back down at the monitor as a technician wheeled back and forth over the van images, zooming in on the windscreen.

‘It's blurred to buggery but we're pretty confident it is a white male with short dark hair, no glasses and no facial hair,' the technician told them.

The face at the windscreen hovered into sight. A white oval with dark patches for eyes.

G
LEN
T
AYLOR HAD
first caught sight of Bella Elliott on Facebook after meeting Dawn (aka Little Miss Sunshine) in a chat room. She was telling a group of strangers about her daughter and a trip to the zoo.

One of her new friends asked if there was a picture of Bella from the trip – one with the monkeys she had loved. Glen had eavesdropped idly on the conversation and when Dawn had referred everyone to her Facebook page, he'd looked. There was no security on the page and he flicked through Dawn's photos.

When the image of Bella appeared, he looked at that small, confident face and committed it to memory, to be retrieved at will in his dark fantasies. Bella joined his gallery, but she wouldn't stay there like the others. He found himself looking for her whenever he saw a blonde child in the street or in the parks where he sometimes ate his lunch when he was on the road.

It was the first time his fantasies had moved off the screen into real life and it frightened and thrilled him in equal measure. He wanted to do something. He wasn't sure what at first, but during the hours at the wheel of his van, he started to plan a way to meet Bella.

Little Miss Sunshine was the key and he adopted a new avatar especially for encounters with her. Operation Gold had taught him that there must be no trail, so he'd stop at the internet café near the depot on his way back from jobs to enter Dawn's world. He'd draw her into his.

He called himself TallDarkStranger and approached Little Miss Sunshine quietly, joining group chats when he knew she was in the room and saying little. He did not want to draw the wrong kind of attention to himself so he asked occasional insightful questions, flattering her, and gradually he became one of her regulars. Little Miss Sunshine sent her first private Instant Message to TallDarkStranger within two weeks.

Little Miss Sunshine
: Hi, How you?

TallDarkStranger
: Good. You? Doing much?

Little Miss Sunshine
: Stuck at home today with my little girl.

TallDarkStranger
: Could be worse. She sounds lovely.

Little Miss Sunshine
: She is. Lucky really.

He wasn't there every day. He couldn't be, what with Jean and his job, but he managed to keep in contact for a while, using a quiet internet place Mike Doonan had taken him to once, when they were still speaking. Still visiting the same chat rooms and forums. Before Glen told the boss about the disability scam Doonan was pulling. He'd seen him jump out of his van outside Internet Inc. like a man half his age and felt it was his duty to expose his lie. It was what any right-minded person would do, he'd told Jean. And she'd agreed.

It was in the club that he built up the details of Dawn's life. He had known her real name and Bella's birthday from her Facebook page, and found out they lived somewhere in Southampton from a chat about child-friendly restaurants. Dawn favoured McDonald's because ‘no one tuts when your kid cries – and it's cheap' and made special mention of her local one.

He called in the next time he was making a delivery down there. Just looking, he told himself, as he unwrapped a burger and watched the families around him.

When he left, he had a drive round. Just looking.

It took a while, but Dawn finally let slip the name of Bella's nursery school as she chatted to another mother in the careless way she had developed online. Dawn treated every exchange like a private conversation – like the people on buses who talk on their mobile phones about the break-up of their marriage or genital warts. Glen mouthed a silent
Yes
and hugged the information to himself.

Later, sitting across from Jean over a chicken casserole, he asked about her day.

‘Lesley said I did a lovely job on Eve's hair today. She wanted a Keira Knightley bob with red flashes. I knew it wouldn't suit her – she looks nothing like Keira Knightley with that great round face – but she loved it.'

‘Well done, love.'

‘I wonder what her husband said when she got home. Do you want this last piece of chicken? Go on or it'll go to waste.'

‘OK. Don't know why I'm so hungry – I had a great big sandwich at lunchtime – but this is delicious. What's on the box tonight? Isn't it
Top Gear
? Let's get the washing-up done quickly and go and have a look.'

‘Go on, you go. I'll see to the dishes.'

He kissed the top of her head as he squeezed past her at the sink. While it filled with hot water, she put the kettle on.

Only when he was sitting in front of the television did he let himself take out the new information and examine it minutely. He knew where to find Dawn and Bella. He could go and wait outside the nursery and follow them. But what then? What was he thinking of? He didn't want to think about it here, in his sitting room with his wife curled up on the sofa.

He'd think about it when he was on his own. Figure something out. He just wanted to see them.

Just wanted a look.

He wouldn't speak to Dawn. He'd been careful to make sure she didn't know what he looked like, but he couldn't risk speaking to her. He had to keep her at arm's length. Keep her behind the screen.

His next south-coast delivery was the following week, the day after his and Jean's fifteenth wedding anniversary. It was crystal, according to Jean, and he'd made a big fuss of her with flowers and a meal out. But he hadn't really been there at the table in their favourite Italian. Jean hadn't seemed to notice. He hoped she hadn't.

He felt sick with anticipation as he drove down the motorway. He'd looked up the nursery school in the internet club and had an address. He'd sit down the road and watch.

Glen arrived as the children were beginning to trickle out of the building, clutching pictures nubbled with painted pasta with one hand, their mums with the other. He worried he might have arrived too late, but parked so he could watch in his rear-view mirror and no one would be able to see his face.

He almost missed them. Dawn looked older and scruffier than in her Facebook photos, with her hair tied back and an old jumper swamping her. It was Bella he recognized first. Skipping along the pavement. Glen followed them in the mirror until they passed his van and he got his first direct sight. Close enough to see the smudged make-up under Dawn's eyes and the golden glint of Bella's hair.