Fiona Barton - The Widow

“You don’t want to go in there, love. It’s for blokes.”

“How do you mean?”

“Porn place, innit? They don’t let the public in. It’s a sort of club thing for dirty old men.”

“Oh, right. Who runs it, then?”

“Dunno really. Manager is an Asian bloke called Lenny, but it’s open at night mainly, so we don’t see him much.”

“Thanks. I’ll have four of those apples.”

She’d come back later.

Internet Inc. looked even less savory in the dark. Kate had spent two and a half hours in a grimy pub, sipping a succession of warm fruit juices and listening to Perry Como work his magic on “Frosty the Snowman.” She was not in the mood for a brush-off.

When she tried the door it was still locked, but knocking on the blackened glass produced a voice from within.

“Hello. Who is it?”

“I need to speak to Lenny,” Kate said, looking up at the camera with her most winning smile.

Silence.

The door opened and a tall, muscular man in a vest and jeans appeared. “Do I know you?” he asked.

“Hi. You must be Lenny. I’m Kate. I wondered if I could have a quick word.”

“What about?”

“About a story I’m writing.”

“You’re a reporter?” Lenny slid backward into the shop. “We’ve got a license. It’s all legit. There’s no story here.”

“No, it’s not about you. It’s about Bella Elliott.”

The name was like a magic talisman. It transfixed people. Drew them in. “Bella Elliott? Little Bella?” he said. “Look, come on through to my office.”

She entered a narrow, darkened room, lit only by the LED glow of a dozen computer screens. Each was in a booth with a chair. There was no other furniture, but in a nod to the season, a piece of tinsel hung limply from the central light.

“No customers yet. They usually come a bit later,” Lenny explained as he led her to his cupboard of an office, the walls lined with stacks of DVDs and magazines. “Ignore those,” he advised as he caught her looking at the titles.

“Right,” she said, and sat.

“You’ve come about Glen Taylor, haven’t you?”

Kate couldn’t speak for a moment. He’d cut to the chase before she’d had a chance to ask her first question.

“Yes.”

“I wondered when someone would finally knock on my door. Thought it’d be the police. But it’s you.”

“Did he come here? Was Glen Taylor a member of your club?”

Lenny considered the questions. “Look, I never talk about members—no one would come if I did. But I’ve got kids . . .”

Kate nodded. “I understand, but I’m not interested in anyone else. Just him. Will you help me? Please.”

The manager’s struggle between the omertà of his sex shop and doing the right thing played out in the seconds of silence. He gnawed at a fingernail. Kate let him stew.

Finally he looked up and said: “Yes, he came here occasionally. Started a couple of years ago. I looked up his card when I saw his face in the paper. We don’t use real names here—members prefer it that way. But I knew the face. It was 2006 he started coming. Another member brought him.”

“Mike Doonan?”

“You said you wouldn’t ask about anyone else. Anyway, as I said, no real names, but I think they worked together.”

Kate smiled at him. “That’s so helpful, thanks. Can you remember the last time he came—are there any records?”

“Hang on,” Lenny said, and unlocked an ancient filing cabinet.

“He registered as 007. Very smooth. No visits registered after September 6, 2006, until August this year.”

“This year? He’s come back?”

“Yeah, just a few sessions, now and then.”

“What was he doing here? Do you know, Lenny?”

“That’s enough questions. It’s all confidential. But you don’t need to be a genius to guess. We don’t monitor sites visited—best not to, we decided. But basically, our members come to view adult sites.”

“Sorry to be blunt, but you mean porn?”

He nodded.

“Weren’t you tempted to look to see after you realized it was him?”

“It was months after he stopped coming in that I realized it was him, and he’d used different computers. It would’ve been a big job, and we’re busy.”

“Why didn’t you call the police about Glen Taylor?”

Lenny looked away for a moment. “I thought about it, but would you invite the police in here? People come because it’s private. It would’ve closed the business. Anyway, they arrested him, so I didn’t need to.”

A loud knock on the shop door ended the conversation. “You’ve got to go. Got a customer.”

“Okay, thanks for telling me all this. Here’s my card in case you think of anything else. Can I use your loo quickly before I go?”

Lenny pointed at a door in the corner of the room. “It’s pretty grim, but help yourself.”

He left her to it, and as soon as he’d gone, she pulled out her phone and photographed the membership card still sitting on the desk before pulling open the toilet door, holding her breath, and flushing the toilet.

Lenny was waiting for her. He opened the front door and stood to shield the cowering customer from Kate’s inquiring look.

In the street, she phoned Bob Sparkes. “Bob, it’s Kate. I think he’s at it again.”

THIRTY-SIX

The Detective

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2009

Sparkes listened in silence as Kate told her story, casually noting the address and names but unable to comment or question. Beside him, his new boss worked on, crunching numbers of street robbery victims by gender, age, and race.

“Okay,” he said when Kate drew a breath. “Bit busy at the moment. Can you send me the document you mentioned? Perhaps we could meet tomorrow?”

Kate understood the professional code. “Ten a.m. outside the pub at the end of the road, Bob. I’m e-mailing you the photo I took now.”

He returned to his computer screen, miming regret for the interruption to his colleague, and waited until they had finished their work to look at his phone.

Sparkes felt sick as he looked at the membership card. Taylor’s last visit was only three weeks earlier.

He called Zara Salmond as he walked to the tube station.

“Sir? How are you doing?”

“Fine, Salmond. We need to go back to the case.” He didn’t need to say which. “We’ve got to look at every detail again to find a way to nail him.”

“Right. Okay. Can you tell me why?”

He could imagine the look on his sergeant’s face.

“Difficult at the moment, Salmond, but I’ve had information that he’s back on the porn trail again. Can’t say more than that, but I’ll be in touch when I’ve got more.”

Salmond sighed. He could hear her thought bubble— Not again —and couldn’t blame her.

“I’m off for Christmas, sir. On leave. But back in on January the second. Can it wait until then?”

“Yes. Sorry to ring out of the blue, Salmond. And happy Christmas.”

He put his phone in his overcoat pocket and trudged down the steps, his stomach knotted.

The force had scaled back the Bella Elliott case after the lengthy Downing review found no new leads, no van, and no further suspects. DI Jude Downing had tidied her desk and gone back to her real job, and the Hampshire Police Force put out a press release saying that the investigation would continue. In reality, this meant leaving it ticking over with a team of two to check out the now occasional calls about possible sightings and pass them on. Nobody was saying it in public, but the trail had gone dead.

Even the appetite for Dawn Elliott’s emotional campaign was beginning to wane. There were only so many ways you could say “I want my daughter back,” Sparkes supposed. And the Herald had gone very quiet on the subject after its initial firestorm of publicity.