Fiona Barton - The Widow

The room nodded again.

“Do you believe he’s our man, Bob?” Brakespeare asked finally.

“Yes, I do,” Sparkes croaked, his mouth dried by anticipation.

“So do I. But we need more to nail it down. Fine-tooth comb, Bob. Do it all again while we’ve got him in. There must be something linking him to the scene.”

The team was sent back up the M3 to the South London suburb to start afresh. “Bring everything he has ever worn,” Sparkes said. “Everything. Just empty the cupboards.”

It was pure chance that they picked up Jean Taylor’s black Puffa jacket. It was wedged between her husband’s winter coat and a dress shirt and was bagged and tagged like everything else.

The technician who received the bags stacked them according to type and started the tests on outerwear, as it was likely to come into contact with the crime victim first.

The jacket pockets were emptied and contents bagged. There was only one item. A scrap of red paper, about as big as the technician’s thumbnail. In the hush of the laboratory, he went through the process of examining it for fingerprints and fibers, lifting any evidence with sticky tape and cataloging it meticulously.

No prints but dirt particles and what looked like an animal hair. Finer than a human hair, but he’d need to look at it under the microscope to get details of color and species.

He took off his gloves and walked to the phone on the wall.

“DI Sparkes, please.”

Sparkes jumped down the stairs, two at a time. The technician had told him not to bother coming—“It’s too early to be sure of anything, sir”—but Sparkes just wanted to see the piece of paper. To reassure himself it was real and wasn’t going to disappear in a puff of smoke.

“We’re comparing the dirt particles with those taken from Glen Taylor’s van in the original sweep,” the technician told him calmly.

“If there’s a match, we can place the paper in the van and we can tell you what sort of paper it is, sir.”

“It’s a bit of a Skittles packet,” Sparkes said. “Look at the color. Get on with it, man. Do you know what sort of animal the hair comes from? Could it be a cat?”

The technician put up a hand. “I can tell you if it’s a cat quite quickly. I’ll get it under the microscope. But we can’t say if it came from a specific animal. It’s not like humans. Even if we have hairs to compare it with, we can’t say definitively that it came from that specific animal. Furthest we can go—if we’re lucky—is that it came from the same breed.”

Sparkes ran both hands through his hair. “Get samples from Timmy Elliott pronto and let’s see.”

He hovered, and the technician waved him out the door. “Give us some time, and I’ll ring you as soon as we have results.”

Back in his office, he and Matthews drew a Venn diagram, putting all the potential new evidence in interconnecting circles to see where they were.

“If the paper is from a Skittles packet and the hair is from a cat the same breed as Timmy, it could place Jean Taylor at the scene,” Matthews said. “It’s her coat. Must be. It’s too small for Glen.”

“I’ll go and get her,” Sparkes said.

TWENTY-FIVE

The Widow

THURSDAY, JULY 12, 2007

Of course, the police don’t give up. They’ve got their teeth into Glen with his van, his pretend child porn, and his “misconduct.” They’ll never let him go. They’ll try to prosecute him for those pictures if nothing else, his solicitor says.

The visits and phone calls from DI Sparkes become part of our lives. The police are building a case, and we watch from the sidelines.

I say to Glen that he should just tell the police about the “private job” and where he was that day, but he insists it would make things worse. “They’ll say we’ve lied to them about everything, Jeanie.”

I’m terrified I’ll do something to make things worse, say the wrong thing. But in the end, it was Glen who let the side down, not me.

The police came to get him for further questioning today. They took him back to Southampton. When they left, he kissed me on the cheek and told me not to worry. “You know it’ll be all right,” he said to me, and I nodded. And I waited.

The police collected more of Glen’s things. All the clothes and shoes they hadn’t taken before. They took things he’d only just bought. I tried to tell them, but they said they were taking everything. They even took my jacket by mistake. I’d hung it in his space in the wardrobe because my side was full.

The next day, Bob Sparkes came and asked me to go with him down to Southampton for questioning. He wouldn’t say anything in the car, just that he wanted me to help with the inquiry.

But when we got in the police station, he sat me in an interview room and read me my rights. Then he asked me if I had taken Bella. Had I helped Glen take Bella?

I couldn’t believe he would ask me that. I kept saying, “No, of course not. And Glen didn’t take her,” but he wasn’t listening properly. He was moving to the next thing.

He pulled out this plastic bag like a conjurer. I couldn’t see anything in it at first, but at the bottom was a scrap of red paper.

“We found this in your coat pocket, Mrs. Taylor. It’s from a Skittles packet. Do you eat many Skittles?”

I didn’t know what he was talking about for a moment, but then I remembered. It must’ve been the bit of sweet packet I’d got from under the mat in the van.

He must’ve seen my face change and kept pushing me. Kept saying Bella’s name. I said I couldn’t remember, but he knew I could.

I told him in the end, to stop him asking me. I told him it might be a bit of paper I’d found in the van—just a bit of rubbish, all fuzzy and dirty—and put it in my pocket to throw away later but never did.

I said it was just a sweet paper, but Mr. Sparkes said they’d found a cat hair stuck to it. A gray cat hair. Like from the cat in Bella’s garden. I said that didn’t prove anything. The hair could have come from anywhere. But I had to make a statement.

I hoped they wouldn’t say anything to Glen before I got a chance to explain. I’d tell him when we both got home that they made me tell them. That it didn’t matter. But I didn’t get the opportunity. Glen didn’t come home.

Seems he went on looking for porn on the Internet. I couldn’t believe he’d be so stupid, when Tom Payne told me. He was always the clever one in the family.

The police had taken his computer, of course, but he bought himself a cheap little laptop and a Wi-Fi router—“for work, Jeanie”—and sat in the spare room while he went into sex chat rooms or whatever they’re called.

It was all very clever—they got some police officer to pretend to be a young woman on the Internet and chat him up. She called herself Goldilocks. Who would fall for that? Well, Glen, apparently.

It wasn’t just chatting up, either. Tom wanted to prepare me for what might be in the papers, so he told me that eventually Goldilocks had cybersex with Glen. “It’s sex without touching,” Glen tried to explain when I visited him the first time. “It’s just words, Jeanie. Written-down words. We didn’t speak or even see each other. It was like it was happening in my head. Just a fantasy. You do see, don’t you? I’m under such a lot of stress with all these accusations. I can’t help myself.”

I tried to see. I really did. It was an addiction, I kept saying to myself. Not his fault. I focused on the real villains here. Glen and I were very angry about what the police did.

I couldn’t believe someone would do that as part of their job. Like a prostitute. That’s what Glen said. Before he found out Goldilocks was a man. That was hard for him to accept—he thought the police were just saying it to make him look like he was gay or something. I said nothing—I couldn’t get my head around cybersex, let alone worry about who he was doing it with. Anyway, it was hardly his biggest problem.