Fiona Barton - The Widow

He stopped. “Will everyone know I got it wrong?” he asked, his eyes pleading with the officers.

“That’s not really our main concern at the moment,” Sparkes snapped. “We’ll need to search your house.”

As members of his team began sifting through the Spencers’ life, he and Matthews let themselves out of the house, leaving the couple to contemplate their new role in the spotlight.

Matthews rubbed his jaw. “I’m going to talk to the neighbors about him, boss.”

At the Tredwells’ house, they had nothing but praise for “Stan the Man” and his patrols.

“He chased off some hooligan who broke into my van last year. Saved my tools from being nicked. Fair play to him,” Mr. Tredwell said. “I park it in a lockup now. Better security.”

“But your van was parked in Manor Road on the day Bella Elliott was taken. Mr. Spencer noted it down.”

“No, it wasn’t. I was using it for work and then put it in the lockup. Do the same thing every day.”

Matthews quickly took the details and stood up to go.

Sparkes was still standing outside the Spencers’ bungalow.

“There’s a blue van in the road unaccounted for at the material time, boss. It wasn’t Mr. Tredwell’s.”

“For Christ’s sake. What else has Spencer got wrong?” Sparkes asked. “Get the team looking back through the witness statements and CCTV in the area. And see which of our perverts owns a blue van.”

Neither man spoke again. They didn’t need to. They knew they were thinking the same thing. They’d wasted a whole month. The papers would crucify them.

Sparkes fished out his phone and rang the press office to try to limit the damage. “We’ll tell the reporters that we have a new piece of evidence,” he said. “And steer them away from the long-haired man. Soft-pedal on that front and focus on the hunt for the blue van. Okay?”

The media, hungry for any new detail, put it on the front pages. This time there were no quotes from their favorite source. Mr. Spencer was no longer answering his door.

TWELVE

The Detective

SATURDAY, APRIL 7, 2007

It took another six months of donkeywork, tracing every blue van in the country, for a breakthrough to come.

It was the day before Easter when the incident room took a call from a delivery firm in South London. One of their vehicles, a blue van, had been making drops on the south coast the day Bella disappeared.

An old hand answered the call and went straight through to Sparkes.

“Think this is one for you, sir,” he said, putting the information sheet down on the desk.

Sparkes rang Qwik Delivery back immediately to confirm the details. The manager, Alan Johnstone, started by apologizing for wasting police time, but he’d only recently joined the company and his wife had made him call in.

“She talks about the Bella case all the time. And when I talked about the cost of respraying the vans the other day, she said to me, ‘What color were they before?’ She nearly shouted the house down when I said they were originally blue. They’re silver now. Anyway, she asked if they’d been checked by the police. She kept on and on at me, so I went through the paperwork and found that one was in Hampshire. Didn’t go to Southampton, so that’s probably why the old management didn’t contact you at the time—probably didn’t think it was worth bothering you with. Sorry, but my wife made me promise.”

“Don’t you worry, Mr. Johnstone. No information is a waste of our time,” Sparkes coaxed, his fingers crossing. “We’re very grateful that you took the time to call. Now, tell me about the van, the driver, and the journey it took.”

“The driver was Mike Doonan, a regular of ours. Well, he’s left now—wasn’t due to retire for another couple of years, but he had a terrible back problem and could hardly walk, let alone drive and lug parcels about.

“Anyway, Mike had drops in Portsmouth and Winchester on October the second. Spare parts for a chain of garages.”

Sparkes was scribbling it all down, phone under his chin, and entering the name and details into his computer with his left hand.

The driver was within a twenty-mile radius of Manor Road to make his drops and, potentially, fit the time frame.

“Mike left the depot just before lunchtime—it’s a one-and-a-half-to-two-hour journey if the M25 doesn’t come to a standstill,” Mr. Johnstone said.

“What time did he deliver the parcel?” Sparkes asked.

“Hold on. I’ll have to call you back when I’ve got the paperwork in front of me.”

As he hung up, Sparkes shouted: “Matthews. In here now!” and handed over the computer search to his sergeant as his phone rang again.

“He dropped first at two oh five,” Johnstone said. “Signed for and everything. The second drop time doesn’t seem to figure on this sheet. Not sure why. Anyway, they didn’t see him come back. The office staff clock out at five and, according to this, the van was left on the forecourt, clean and hoovered out for the next day’s work.”

“Okay, that’s great. We’ll need to talk to him, just in case. He might’ve seen something helpful to us. Where does he live, your driver?” Sparkes asked, fighting to quell a note of excitement in his voice. He wrote down an address in southeast London on his notepad.

“You’ve been very helpful, Mr. Johnstone. Thanks very much for phoning in.” He ended the call.

An hour later he and Matthews were on their way up the M3.

At first glance the driver’s profile on the police computer hadn’t contained anything to make their pulses race. Mike Doonan was in his late fifties, lived alone, had been a driver for years, and was reluctant to pay his parking fines. But Matthews’s scan of the police database had pulled him up as “of interest” to the boys on the Operation Gold team. “Of interest” meant there was a possible link to child sex abuse websites. The Operation Gold team was working its way through a list of hundreds of men in the UK whose credit cards appeared to have been used to visit specific sites. They were concentrating on those with access to kiddies first—the teachers, social workers, care staff, Scout leaders—then moving on to the rest. They hadn’t yet reached Doonan (DOB 04/05/56; profession: driver; status: council tenant, divorced, three children) and, at the current pace of the investigation, were not due to knock on his door for another year.

“I’ve got a good feeling about this,” Sparkes told his sergeant. Everything was in position. Met officers had been discreetly placed to watch the address, but no one was to move until the Hampshire officers arrived.

The DI’s mobile buzzed in his hand.

“We’re on. He’s at home,” he said when he hung up.

Mike Doonan was marking his race card in the Daily Star when he heard his doorbell.

Swinging his bulk forward to stand out of his armchair, he groaned. The pain shot down his left leg, and he had to stand for a moment, to catch his breath.

“Hang on. I’m coming,” he shouted.

When he cracked open the door onto the walkway, it was not his Good Samaritan neighbor with his Saturday delivery of lager and sliced bread but two men in suits.

“If you’re Mormons, I’ve already got enough ex-wives,” he said, and made to close the door.

“Mr. Michael Doonan?” Sparkes said. “We’re police officers, and we’d like to talk to you for a moment.”

“Bloody hell, it isn’t about a parking ticket, is it? I thought I’d cleared them all. Come in, then.”

In the tiny sitting room of his council flat, he lowered himself into his chair slowly. “Back’s buggered,” he said, gasping from a spasm of pain.

At the mention of Bella Elliott, he stopped wincing.