Fiona Barton - The Widow

Tom sounds unconvinced, but he agrees to read the contract, and Kate e-mails it over to him. We sit and wait, and she tries to persuade me to have a facial or something. I don’t want to be fiddled with again, so I say no and just sit there.

Tom and I have had a special bond since the day Glen’s case ended.

We stood together waiting for him to be released by the court, and Tom couldn’t look at me. I think he was scared what he’d see in my eyes.

I can see us standing there. The end of the ordeal but not the end really. I’d been so grateful for the order that the court case had given my life. Every day planned out. Every day setting out from home at eight a.m., dressed smartly, like I was going to work in an office. Every day, home at five thirty. My job was to be supportive and say nothing.

The court was like a sanctuary. I liked the echoing halls and the breezes wafting the notices on the boards and the canteen chatter.

Tom had taken me before Glen was due to appear there, to be committed for trial, so I could see what it was like. I’d seen the Old Bailey on the telly—on the news with a reporter standing on the pavement in front of it, talking about a murderer or a terrorist or something, and the inside, in police dramas. But it was still nothing like I expected. Dim, smaller than it looked on TV, dusty-smelling like a classroom, old-fashioned with lots of dark wood.

It was lovely and quiet when we went for a look around before business began for the day, hardly anyone else there. Bit different when Glen appeared so they could set a date for his trial. It was packed. People had queued to see him. They brought sandwiches and flasks like it was the Harrods sale or something. And the reporters crammed into the press seats behind me. I sat with my head down, pretending to look for something in my handbag until Glen was brought into the box by the prison warders. He looked small. I’d brought in his best suit for the appearance and he’d had a shave, but he still looked small. He looked over and winked. Like it was nothing. I tried to smile at him, but my mouth was too dry. My lips got stuck to my teeth.

It was over so quickly I hardly had time to look at him again before he disappeared down the stairs. I was allowed to see him later. He’d changed out of his suit into his prison stuff, a sort of tracksuit, and taken off his best shoes. “Hello, Jeanie love,” he said. “Well, that was a bit of a farce, wasn’t it? The whole thing is a farce, my lawyer says,” he said. Well, he would, I wanted to say. You’re paying him to say just that.

The trial was set for February, four months away, and Glen was sure it would be thrown out before then. “It’s all nonsense, Jeanie,” he said. “You know that. The police are lying to make themselves look good. They need an arrest, and I was one of the poor sods who was driving a blue van in the area that day.” He gave my hand a squeeze, and I squeezed back. He was right. It was nonsense.

I went home and pretended everything was normal.

Inside the house it was. My little world stayed exactly the same—same walls, same cups, same furniture. But outside, everything had shifted. The pavement in front of the house was like a soap opera with people coming and going and sitting looking at my house. Hoping to get a glimpse of me.

I had to come out sometimes, and when I did, I dressed anonymously, covering myself completely, and I steeled myself in the hall before leaving suddenly and quickly. It was impossible to avoid the cameras, but I hoped they’d get tired of the same shots of me walking down the path. And I learned to hum a song in my head so I could blank out the remarks and questions.

The visits to the prison were the worst part. It meant catching a bus, and the press followed me to the stop and photographed me and the other passengers as we waited together. Everyone got upset with them and then me. It wasn’t my fault, but they blamed me. For being the wife.

I tried walking to different bus stops, but I got fed up with playing their games and, in the end, I just put up with it and waited for them to get bored.

I’d sit on the 380 bus to Belmarsh with a plastic carrier bag on my knee, pretending to be on a shopping trip. I’d wait to see if someone else pressed the bell before the prison stop and then got off quickly. Other women got off as well, with a tangle of crying kids and strollers, and I walked a long way behind them to the visitors’ center so people wouldn’t think I was like them.

Glen was on remand, so there weren’t many rules about visits, but the one I liked best was that I couldn’t wear high heels, short skirts, or see-through clothes. It made me laugh. The first time, I wore trousers and a jumper instead. Nice and safe.

Glen didn’t like it. “I hope you’re not letting yourself go, Jean,” he said, so I put lipstick on the next time.

He could have three visits a week, but we agreed I’d come only twice so I didn’t have to deal with the reporters too often. Mondays and Fridays. “It’ll give my week a shape,” he said.

The room was noisy and brightly lit, and it hurt my eyes and ears. We sat across from each other, and when I’d told him my news and he’d told me his, we listened to the other conversations going on around us and talked about them instead.

I thought my job was to comfort him and reassure him that I was standing by him, but he seemed to have that covered already.

“We can weather this, Jeanie. We know the truth, and so will everyone else soon. Don’t you worry,” he said at least once a visit. I tried not to, but I felt like our life was slipping away.

“What if it doesn’t work out?” I asked him once, and he looked disappointed I would even suggest that. “It will,” he insisted. “My lawyer says the police have screwed up royally.”

When Glen’s case wasn’t thrown out before the trial, he said the police “want their day in court.” He looked smaller every time I saw him, like he was shrinking inside himself.

“Don’t worry, love,” I heard myself say. “All over soon.” He looked grateful.

TWENTY-ONE

The Detective

MONDAY, JUNE 11, 2007

Sparkes was reviewing the situation. It had been two months since he’d first knocked on Glen Taylor’s door, and they were not making any progress. It wasn’t that they hadn’t been looking. His colleagues had been examining every detail of Taylor’s life—and the lives of Mike Doonan and Lee Chambers—but had little to show for it so far.

Doonan appeared to have led a pretty gray existence with even his divorces failing to provide a splash of color. The only point of interest was that the two ex–Mrs. Doonans had become close friends and chimed in with each other when discussing Mike’s faults. “He’s a bit selfish, I suppose,” Marie Doonan said. “Yeah, selfish,” Sarah Doonan chorused. “We’re better off without him.”

Even his children were uninterested in his involvement with the police. “Never see him,” his eldest said. “He was gone before I realized he was there.”

Matthews dug on, dogged in his pursuit. His blood pressure flickered when he discovered Doonan had not arrived for his doctor’s appointment the day Bella vanished, but the driver said his spine had been so painful, he couldn’t leave the flat. And the GP backed him up. “He can barely stand at times,” he said. “Poor man.”

He still couldn’t be ruled in or out, but Sparkes was becoming impatient with Matthews, demanding that he turn his attention to Taylor.

“The man is crippled—he can hardly walk, so how the hell could he kidnap a child?” Sparkes asked. “We haven’t got anything beyond the fact he was driving a blue van to link him to the case, have we?”

Matthews shook his head. “No, boss, but there’s the Operation Gold stuff.”