Fiona Barton - The Widow

“I’ve been fired,” he said, and rolled back over to pretend to sleep.

The next morning Glen came into our bedroom with a cup of tea in my favorite cup. He looked like he’d hardly slept and said he was sorry. He sat down on the bed and said he was under a lot of pressure and it was all a misunderstanding at work and that he’d never got on with the boss. He said he’d been set up and blamed for something. Some mistake, he said. He’d done nothing wrong. His boss was jealous. Glen said he had big plans for his future, but that didn’t matter if I wasn’t beside him.

“You are the center of my world, Jeanie,” he said, and held me close, and I hugged him back and let go of my fear.

Mike, a friend he said he met on the Internet, told him about the driving job—“Just while I work out what business I want to get into, Jeanie,” Glen said. It was cash in hand at first, and then they took him on permanently. He stopped talking about being his own boss.

He had to wear a uniform. It was quite smart: a pale blue shirt with the company logo on the pocket and navy trousers. Glen didn’t like wearing a uniform—“It’s demeaning, Jeanie, like being back at school”—but he got used to it and seemed happy enough. He’d go out in the morning and wave as he drove off to pick up the van. Off on his travels, he’d say.

I went with him only once. Special job for the boss on a Sunday just before Christmas one year. Must’ve been the Christmas before he was arrested. It was only down to Canterbury, and I fancied a run out. We sat in total silence on the way down. I rooted through his glove box. Just stuff. Some sweets. I helped myself and offered one to Glen to cheer him up. He didn’t want it and told me to put them back.

The van was lovely and clean. Spotless. I never really saw it normally. It was kept at the depot, and he took his car to pick it up in the mornings. “Nice van,” I said, but he just grunted.

“What’s in the back?”

“Nothing,” he said, and turned up the radio.

And he was right. I had a look when he was talking to the customer. The back was as clean as a whistle. Well, almost. There was a corner torn from a sweet packet poking out from under one edge of the mat. I got it out with my fingernail. It was a bit fuzzy and dusty, but I put it in my coat pocket. To be tidy.

• • •

It all seems so long ago. Us going for a drive like normal people. But it was only three years ago.

“Glen Taylor?” the nurse is saying to me, startling me out of my thoughts and frowning as she writes his name on a form. Trying to remember. I wait for the inevitable.

The penny drops.

“Glen Taylor? The one accused of taking that little girl Bella?” she says quietly to one of the paramedics, and I pretend not to hear. When she turns back to me, her face is harder. “I see,” she says, and walks away. She must’ve made a phone call, because half an hour later, the press is there, hanging around the casualty department, trying to look like patients. I could spot them a mile off.

I keep my head down and refuse to speak to any of them. What sort of people are they, hounding a woman who’s just seen her husband die?

The police are there, too. Because of the accident. They’re not the ones we usually see. They’re the local police, the Met, not the Hampshire officers. Just doing routine work, taking statements from the witnesses, from me, from the driver of the bus. He’s here, too. Apparently, he got a nasty knock to the head when he braked and says he didn’t even see Glen step out.

He probably didn’t—it was that fast.

Then DI Bob Sparkes shows up. I knew he’d turn up eventually, like a bad penny, but he must’ve driven like the wind to get here from Southampton so quickly. He’s all sad face and condolences for me, but he’s even sadder for himself. He certainly doesn’t want Glen dead. Him gone means that the case will never be closed. Poor Bob. He’ll be stuck with that failure all his life.

He sits down beside me on a plastic chair and reaches for my hand. I’m so embarrassed I let him. He has never touched me like this before. Like he cares for me. He holds my hand and speaks in a soft, low voice. I know what he’s saying, but I don’t hear it, if you know what I mean. He’s asking me if I know what Glen did with Bella. He’s saying it nicely, telling me I can let go of the secret now. Everything can be told. I was as much a victim as Bella was.

“I don’t know anything about Bella, Bob. Neither did Glen,” I say, and take my hand away, pretending I need it to wipe away a tear. Later I’m sick in the hospital toilets. I clean myself up and sit on the loo with my forehead resting on the lovely cool tiles on the wall.

TEN

The Detective

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2006

The detective was standing in the incident room, scanning the boards for emerging patterns and links, taking off his glasses and narrowing his eyes in case a change of focus might reveal something.

There was, apparently, a maelstrom of activity all around the Elliotts’ garden, but at the epicenter, Bella remained the missing piece.

All that information but not a sign of her , Sparkes thought. She’s here somewhere. We’re missing something.

The forensic team had dusted and swabbed every inch of the brick garden wall and painted metal gate; the garden had been the subject of a fingertip search by a line of police officers, making a religious progress on their knees and, like holy relics of the child, fibers from her clothes, golden hairs from her head, dismembered toy parts, and discarded sweet wrappings touched by her had been preserved in plastic bags. But of the abductor, nothing.

“I think the bastard must have reached over the wall and lifted her straight over and into his vehicle,” Sparkes said. “It would have taken only seconds. She was there and then she wasn’t.”

The team had found a half-sucked red sweet on Bella’s side of the wall. “Maybe it fell out of her mouth when he picked her up,” Sparkes said. “Is it a Smartie?”

“I’m not exactly an expert on Smarties, boss, but I’ll get someone to check,” Sergeant Matthews said.

When it came back from forensics, it had been identified as a Skittle. Bella’s saliva was on the sweet, matched with the comforter she sucked at night.

“She never had Skittles,” Dawn said.

He gave her one to keep her quiet, Sparkes thought. How old-fashioned. He remembered his mum telling him as a boy: “Never take sweets from a stranger.” That and something about men with puppies.

He was reviewing the list of evidence and his energy was dipping. It didn’t look good. There were no CCTV cameras watching over the street—only good old Mr. Spencer—and no images so far of a scruffy man collected from the nearest camera sites.

“Maybe he was just lucky,” Sparkes said.

“Luck of the devil, then.”

“Get on the phone, Matthews, and see when we can get on Crimewatch . Tell them it’s urgent.”

The television reconstruction seemed to take forever to organize although it was only eight days. A Bella look-alike had to be found from a nursery school in another town, because no parent living near the Westland estate would let their child take part.

“Can’t blame them, really,” Sparkes told the exasperated director. “They don’t want to see their kid as a kidnap victim. Even a pretend one.”

They were waiting at the end of Manor Road for the film crew to set up, discussing what Sparkes would say in his appeal for information.

“The appeal is live in the studio after we screen the reconstruction, Bob,” the director said. “So make sure you have everything sorted in your head before you speak. You’ll know what questions you’re going to get.”