Fiona Barton - The Widow

“Where’s the evidence he looked at those images? There isn’t any. Taylor has got child porn on his computer. He’s the one we should be concentrating on. I need you on this, Matthews.”

The sergeant was not convinced it was time to close the book on Doonan, but he knew that his boss had made up his mind.

The real problem for Sparkes was that he couldn’t let go of his first instinct that they’d already found their man and his fear that, unless they stopped him, he would go looking for another Bella.

Sparkes had begun to notice every child of Bella’s age—in the street, in shops, in cars and cafés—and then he’d scan for the predator. It was beginning to affect his appetite but not his focus. He knew it was taking over his life, but there was nothing else he could do.

“You are obsessed with this case, Bob,” Eileen had said the other night. “Can’t we just go out for a drink without you disappearing back inside your head? You need to relax.”

He had wanted to scream: “Do you want another child to be taken while I’m off having a glass of wine?” But he didn’t. It wasn’t Eileen’s fault. She didn’t understand. He knew he couldn’t protect every little girl in the city, but he couldn’t stop trying.

There had been many other cases involving children during his career—little Laura Simpson; Baby W, shaken to death by his stepfather; the Voules boy, who’d drowned in a park paddling pool surrounded by other kids; traffic accidents and runaways—but he had not known them the way he knew Bella.

He remembered the feeling of helplessness when he had first held his son, James, the thought that he alone was responsible for his child’s well-being and safety in a world full of danger and bad people. That’s how he felt about Bella.

He’d begun dreaming about her. That was never a good sign.

He wondered if the blue van was distracting them from other lines. But then why had the man in the blue van never come forward? Everyone wanted to help find this child. If it was just a bloke visiting a house, he would’ve rung in, wouldn’t he?

Unless it was Glen Taylor, he thought.

The search had been thorough, fragment by fragment pored over by the team. A discarded T-shirt in a hedge, a single shoe, a blond child spotted in a shopping center trying to get away from an adult. The detectives were on a hair trigger as the hours, then days, then weeks passed with no results. They were all exhausted, but no one could call it over.

Every morning the update meeting got shorter and gloomier. The T-shirt was for an eight-year-old, the shoe wasn’t Bella’s, and the blond screamer was a toddler having a tantrum. Leads evaporated as soon as they were examined.

Sparkes kept his despair to himself. Once his head went down, the team would give up. Each morning he gave himself a pep talk in his office, sometimes standing in front of a mirror in the gents’ toilets, making sure no one could read failure in his increasingly pouchy eyes. Then he’d stride in, energy high, and galvanize his men and women. “Let’s go back to basics,” he said that morning. And they did, following him from photos to maps to names to lists.

“What are we missing?” he challenged them. Tired faces. “Who would take a child? What do we know from other cases?”

“A pedophile.”

“A pedophile ring.”

“Kidnapper for money.”

“Or revenge.”

“Woman who’s lost a baby.”

“Or can’t have a baby.”

“A fantasist who needs a child to fulfill a scenario.”

Sparkes nodded. “Let’s split into two-man—sorry, person—teams and look at our witnesses and persons of interest to see if any fit those categories.”

The room began to buzz, and he left Ian Matthews to it.

He wondered how quickly Jean Taylor would be named and wanted time to think it through himself. Jean was an odd one. He remembered the first time he’d seen her, the shock on her face, the tricky interviews, the unshakable answers. He felt certain she was covering for Glen and had put it down to blind loyalty, but was it because she was involved somehow?

Women who killed children were rare, and those who did almost exclusively killed their own, according to the stats, but they did steal them occasionally.

He knew infertility could be a powerfully motivating force. It burned within some women, sending them mad with grief and longing. The neighbor and colleagues at the salon said Jean was devastated that she couldn’t have a baby. Used to cry in the back room if a customer talked about being pregnant. But nobody had placed Jean in Southampton the day Bella was taken.

Sparkes doodled as he thought, drawing spiders on the pad in front of him.

If Jean loved children so much, why would she stay with a man who looks at child abuse on the computer? he thought. Why would she be loyal to a man like that? He was certain Eileen would be out the door instantly. And he wouldn’t blame her, so what was Glen’s hold over his wife?

“Perhaps we’ve been looking at it from the wrong angle,” he told his reflection as he washed his hands in the gents’. “Maybe it’s her hold over Glen? Perhaps Jean put him up to it?”

Sure enough, Jean’s name was scrawled on a whiteboard in the incident room when he returned. The officers looking at “women who can’t have babies” were discussing previous cases. “Thing is, sir,” one of the team said, “it’s usually a woman acting on her own who takes the child, and they don’t go for toddlers. Some pretend to their partners or family that they are pregnant, wearing maternity clothes and padding, and then take babies from maternity wards or strollers outside shops to fulfill the pretense. Taking a toddler is high risk. Little kids can put up quite a fight if they are frightened, and a crying child attracts attention.”

Dan Fry, one of the force’s new graduate recruits lurking around the incident room, raised his hand, and Matthews nodded at him to add his piece. He was young, barely out of college, and stood to speak to the group, unaware that the culture was to stay seated and address the desktop.

Fry cleared his throat. “Then there’s keeping an older child out of sight. It’s a lot harder to explain a two-year-old suddenly appearing to friends and family. If you were snatching a child of that age to raise as your own, you’d have to disappear, too. And the Taylors haven’t budged.”

“Quite right, um, Fry, is it?” Sparkes said, waving him to sit down.

The other teams had ruled out kidnap for cash or revenge. Dawn Elliott didn’t have any money of her own; they’d trawled back through her teenage years for previous boyfriends and evidence of drugs or prostitution in case there was an organized crime connection. But there was nothing. She was a small-town girl who’d worked in an office until she’d fallen for a married man and become pregnant.

They still hadn’t found Bella’s father—the name he gave Dawn looked like it was false, and the mobile phone number was for a pay-as-you-go that no longer rang.

“He’s a chancer, boss,” Matthews said. “Just out for a bit of extramarital and then disappears. The life of a thousand traveling salesmen, a shag in every town.” “Pedophiles” was all that was left on the board.

The energy leached out of the room. “Meanwhile, back to Glen Taylor,” Sparkes said.

“And Mike Doonan,” Matthews muttered. “What about Operation Gold?”

But his superior officer appeared not to hear him. He was listening to his own fears.

Personally, Sparkes was certain Glen Taylor was already thinking about his next victim, fueling his thoughts with Internet porn. Looking at these images becomes an addiction—as hard to kick as a drug, according to psychologists.