Fiona Barton - The Widow

Sparkes was too distracted to take it all in. He had just put Dawn Elliott in a police car to her mum’s as the actress playing her arrived.

“She looks like me,” she’d whispered to him. She hadn’t been able to look at the child playing Bella. She had laid out a set of her daughter’s clothes, a little headband and Bella’s spare glasses on the sofa, stroking each item and saying her child’s name. Sparkes had helped her up, and she had walked, dry-eyed and holding his arm, to the car. She got in beside Sue Blackman and didn’t look back.

The street was now quiet, deserted as it must have been that day. Sparkes watched as the reenactment took shape, the director gently coaching “Bella” to chase a borrowed gray cat into the garden. Her mother stood just off camera, with emergency Chocolate Buttons in case bribes were needed, smiling at her little girl and trying not to cry.

Mrs. Emerson volunteered to play her own small role, walking stiffly down her garden path, pretending to look for her little friend next door and then responding to “Dawn’s” cries for help. Across the road, Mr. Spencer acted out spotting the actor in a long wig strolling past his house, his mimed puzzlement filmed through the bay window by a cameraman standing on Mrs. Spencer’s French marigolds.

The abduction took only minutes, but it was three hours later that the director was satisfied and everyone crowded around the monitor in the film truck to watch the end product. No one spoke as they watched “Bella” playing in the garden, and only Mr. Spencer remained to mull over the events.

Afterward, one of the older officers took Sparkes aside: “Have you noticed that our Mr. Spencer is always hanging around the investigation team and giving interviews to the reporters? Telling them he saw the man who took her? Bit of a glory seeker if you ask me.”

Sparkes smiled sympathetically. “There’s always one, isn’t there? He’s probably lonely and bored. I’ll get Matthews to keep an eye on him.”

As expected, the broadcast, twenty-three days after Bella vanished, triggered hundreds of phone calls to the studio and incident room, the film igniting public emotion and a fresh outpouring of variations on “My heart goes out to . . .” and “Why? Oh why?” messages on the show’s website.

About a dozen callers claimed to have seen Bella, many of whom were sure they had spotted her in a café, on a beach, in a playground. Each call was acted upon immediately, but Sparkes’s optimism began to fade as he took his turn answering the phones at the back of the Crimewatch television studio.

The following week, a sudden buzz of voices from the incident room reached Sparkes as he walked down the corridor.

“Got a flasher in a kids’ playground, sir,” the duty officer told him. “About twenty-five minutes from the Elliott house.”

“Who is he? Is he known to us?”

Lee Chambers was a middle-aged, divorced minicab driver who’d been questioned six months earlier for exposing himself to two female passengers. He’d claimed he was just having a quick pee and they caught a glimpse as he zipped himself up. Completely unintentional. The women didn’t want to take it further, didn’t want the attention, and the police sent him on his way.

Today he’d been in bushes beside the swings and slides at Royal Park as children played nearby.

“I was just having a quick pee,” he told the police officer called by a horrified mother.

“Do you normally have an erection while peeing, sir? That must be inconvenient,” the officer said as he led him to a waiting car.

Chambers arrived at Southampton Central Police Station and was put in an interview room.

Peering through the toughened glass panel in the door, Sparkes saw a skinny man in tracksuit bottoms and a Southampton FC shirt, with long, greasy hair in a ponytail.

“Scruffy, long hair,” Matthews said.

Did you take Bella? Sparkes thought automatically. Have you got her somewhere?

The suspect looked up expectantly as Sparkes and Matthews entered. “This is all a mistake,” he said.

“If I had a quid . . .” Matthews muttered. “Why don’t you tell us all about it, then?” he said as the officers squeaked their chairs closer to the table.

Chambers told his lies and they listened. Just a quick pee. Didn’t choose a playground deliberately. Didn’t see the children. Didn’t talk to the children. Completely innocent mistake.

“Tell me, Mr. Chambers, where were you on Monday, October the second?” Sparkes asked.

“God, I don’t know. Working probably. Monday is one of my regular days. The cab controller would know. Why’d you ask?”

The question hung in the air for a beat, and then Chambers was all eyes. Sparkes almost expected an audible ding.

“That’s when that little girl went missing, isn’t it? You don’t think I had anything to do with that? Oh God, you can’t think that.”

They left him to stew for a bit while they joined their colleagues already searching his address, a bedsit in a converted Victorian house in the city’s run-down red-light area near the docks.

Leafing through the extreme porn magazines beside Chambers’s bed, Matthews sighed. “This is all about hating women, not wanting sex with kids. What’ve you got?”

Sparkes was silent. Photos of Dawn and Bella had been cut from newspapers and slipped into a clear plastic folder on the floor of the wardrobe.

The minicab controller was a bored-looking woman in her fifties, bundled up against the cold of her unheated office in a cable-knit green cardigan and fingerless mittens.

“Lee Chambers? What’s he been up to? More of his accidental flashing?” She laughed and slurped a Red Bull.

“He’s a nasty little man,” she said as she flicked through the records. “Everyone thinks so, but he knows a friend of the boss.” She was interrupted by the fizz of static and a voice rendered robotic by the tinny speakers and gave some incomprehensible instructions back.

“Right, where were we . . . ? Monday, October second. Here we are. Lee was in Fareham early on—hospital run for a regular customer. All quiet until lunch, and then he picked up a couple from the airport at Eastleigh to go to Portsmouth. Dropped about fourteen hundred. Last job of the day.”

She printed out the details for them and turned back to the microphone as they left without saying good-bye.

“They call this firm Rapists’ Cabs in the nightclubs,” Sergeant Matthews said. “I’ve told my girls never to use them.”

The team was all over Chambers’s life; his former wife was already waiting for a chat with Sparkes and Matthews, and his colleagues and landlord were being questioned.

Donna Chambers, hard-faced with thick, homemade highlights, hated her former husband, but she didn’t think he would hurt a child.

“He’s just a wanker who can’t keep it in his trousers,” she said.

Neither of the detectives dared catch the other’s eye. “Bit of a Romeo, then?”

The list was long—almost impressive—as she detailed how Lee Chambers had worked his way through her friends, work colleagues, and even her hairdresser.

“Every time he said it would never happen again,” the wronged wife said. “He had a high sex drive, he said. Anyway, he was very bitter when I finally left him and threatened to come after any bloke I saw, but nothing came of it. All talk. The thing is, he’s a born liar. He can’t tell the truth.”

“What about the indecent exposure? Is that a new thing?”

Mrs. Chambers shrugged. “Well, he didn’t do it when we were married. Maybe he ran out of women who fell for his lines. Sounds desperate, doesn’t it? Horrible thing to do, but he is a horrible man.”