Fiona Barton - The Widow

EIGHTEEN

The Detective

SUNDAY, APRIL 8, 2007

Glen Taylor was proving to be a man with an answer for everything. He had a quick brain and, once the shock of his arrest wore off, he seemed almost to be enjoying the challenge, Sparkes told his wife.

“Arrogant little sod. Not sure I’d be so confident in his position.” Eileen squeezed his arm as she passed him his evening glass of red wine.

“No, you’d confess everything immediately. You’d be a terrible criminal. Chops or fish tonight?”

Sparkes perched on one of the high stools Eileen had insisted on when breakfast bars were de rigueur and helped himself to shards of raw carrot from the pan on the counter. He smiled at Eileen, relishing the entente cordiale in the kitchen that evening. Their marriage had been through the usual peaks and troughs of a shared life but, although neither would admit it out loud, the children leaving home had put it under unexpected strain. They had talked before about all the things they would be able to do, the places they’d see, the money they could spend on themselves, but when it happened, they found their new freedom forced them to look at each other properly for the first time in years. And, Bob suspected, Eileen found him wanting.

She’d been ambitious for him when they were going out and then married, urging him to study for his sergeant’s exams and bringing him endless cups of coffee and sandwiches to fuel his concentration.

And he carried on, bringing home his triumphs and disasters, as small promotions and anniversaries passed. But he suspected she was now seeing what he’d actually achieved in the cold light of late middle age and was wondering, Is that it?

Eileen squeezed by with some frozen chops and ordered him to leave the veg alone.

“Hard day, love?” she asked.

It had been an exhausting day, combing through Taylor’s statements for gaps and inconsistencies.

Images of children being sexually abused found on his computer were, according to the suspect, “downloaded by mistake—the Internet’s fault” or without his knowledge; use of his credit card to buy porn was done by someone who had cloned his card. “Don’t you know how rife credit card fraud is?” he’d asked scornfully.

“Jean reported our card stolen last year. She’ll tell you. There’s a police report somewhere.” And there was.

Interesting that it was around the time the papers started writing about the link between credit cards and online child sex abuse, Sparkes mused, going over the interview transcript at his desk later. But it was circumstantial.

He can see daylight , Sparkes thought during a coffee break. He thinks his story is solid, but we haven’t finished yet.

Nothing seemed to get through to Taylor until they interviewed him again and showed him a scrapbook of children’s pictures, torn from magazines and newspapers, found behind the hot water tank at his home.

There was no pantomime this time. It was clear he’d never seen it before; his mouth fell open as he leafed through the pages of images of little cherubs in cute outfits and fancy dress costumes.

“What is this?” he asked.

“We thought you might tell us, Glen.”

They were on first-name terms with the suspect now. Glen hadn’t protested. But he called the detective “Mr. Sparkes” to preserve a distance between them.

“This isn’t mine,” he said. “Are you sure you found it at my house?”

Sparkes nodded.

“It must belong to the previous owners,” Glen said. He crossed his arms and tapped his feet as Sparkes closed the book and pushed it to one side.

“Hardly, Glen. You’ve lived there how many years? We think it belongs to you, Glen.”

“Well, it isn’t mine.”

“Perhaps it is Jean’s, then? Why would she keep a book like this?”

“I don’t know—ask her,” Taylor snapped. “She’s obsessed with babies. You know we couldn’t have any, and she used to cry all the time about it. I had to tell her to stop it—it was ruining our lives. And, anyway, we’ve got each other. We’re lucky in a way.”

Sparkes nodded along, considering Jean Taylor’s luck to have a husband like Glen.

Poor woman, he thought.

A forensic psychologist they were consulting on the case had already warned him that it was very unlikely the scrapbook belonged to a pedophile.

“This isn’t a predator’s book,” he’d said. “There’s nothing sexual in the images—it’s a fantasy collection but not made by someone who objectifies children. It is more like a wish list—the sort of thing a teenage girl might make.”

Or a childless woman , Sparkes had mused.

Jean’s secret fantasy life had rattled Taylor. That much was clear to the detectives. He was lost in thought, perhaps wondering what else he didn’t know about his wife. It had, Sparkes and Matthews agreed afterward, created a hairline crack in his certainty that he had her under control. Secrets were dangerous things.

But at the case review meeting with his bosses, as the thirty-six-hour deadline loomed, Sparkes felt defeated. They had crawled over everything. The van had yielded nothing, and they had nothing to charge Taylor with apart from the Internet stuff, and that wouldn’t keep him in custody.

Two hours later, Glen Taylor was bailed and walked out of the police station, already on his mobile phone.

Bob Sparkes watched him go through a window in the stairwell. “Don’t get too comfortable at home. We’ll be back,” he told the retreating figure.

The next day, Taylor was back at work, according to the team assigned to watch him around the clock.

Sparkes wondered what Taylor’s boss was making of it all.

“Bet they let him go by the end of the month,” he said to Matthews.

“Good,” his sergeant said. “It’ll give him time to make some mistakes, if he’s hanging around the house all day. Bound to get up to mischief.”

The detectives looked at each other.

“Why don’t we give Alan Johnstone a call and ask if we can come and look at his driver records again? Might give him a nudge in the right direction,” Matthews said.

Mr. Johnstone welcomed them into his office, sweeping paperwork off threadbare office chairs.

“Hello, Inspector. Back again? Glen said it’d all been cleared up, as far as he’s concerned.”

The detectives pored over the work sheets, noting the mileage all over again while Johnstone hovered uneasily.

“Are these yours?” Sparkes said, picking up a picture of two small boys in football shirts from the desk. “Lovely kids.” He let that hang in the air as Johnstone took the picture back.

“See you again,” Matthews said cheerily.

Glen Taylor was asked to leave later that week. Alan Johnstone rang Sparkes to let him know.

“It was freaking out the other drivers. Most of us have children. He didn’t make a fuss when I paid him off, just shrugged and emptied his locker.”

Matthews grinned. “Let’s see what he does now.”

NINETEEN

The Widow

SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 2007

Glen’s mum and dad came around the weekend after he was sacked. We hadn’t seen them for a while, and they stood at the door while the press tried to talk to them and took their pictures. George was furious and started swearing at them, and Mary was in tears when I opened the door. I hugged her in the hall and led her through to the kitchen.

George and Glen went into the living room. We sat at the table, and Mary carried on crying.

“What’s going on, Jean? How could anyone think my Glen could do such a thing? He couldn’t have done something so wicked. He was a lovely little boy. So sweet, so clever.”

I tried to calm her down and explain, but she kept talking over me, saying, “Not my Glen,” over and over. In the end, I made a cup of tea to give myself something to do and took a tray through to the men.