Fiona Barton - The Widow

Salmond looked at him coolly, registering the floppy fringe, big brown eyes, and cheeky, persuasive smile, and moved on.

“And did you know that Dawn had a baby after your romance? Did she contact you?”

Evans swallowed hard. “No, I knew nothing about the baby. Look, I changed my mobile number because she was getting a bit clingy and . . .”

“You didn’t want your wife to find out,” Sparkes finished for him.

Matt looked grateful and turned on the man-to-man stuff. “Yeah. Look, Shan, my wife, doesn’t need to know about this, does she?” The last time Shan Evans had been contacted by one of her husband’s conquests, she’d said there would be no more chances and demanded that they have another baby, their third. “It’ll bring us closer, Matt.”

It hadn’t. The sleepless nights and postpartum sex moratorium had sent him out looking for fun and relaxation again. There was a secretary in London at the moment. He couldn’t help himself.

“That’s up to you, sir,” Sparkes said. “Has there ever been any contact between you since you changed your mobile?”

“No. I steered well clear. Dangerous to go back—they think you’ve come back to marry them.”

Heartless bastard , Zara Salmond thought, writing hb in the margin of her notebook. Then amending it to fhb . She’d had her own teenage encounters with married men on the prowl.

Evans was fidgeting in his hard chair. “Actually, funny thing. I did spot her once in a chat room on the Internet. I was just browsing through, like you do, and there she was. Seem to remember she was ‘Little Miss Sunshine,’ like the children’s book—my eldest’s got that one—but she was using her own photo. Not the brightest spark, Dawn.”

“Did you make yourself known to ‘Little Miss Sunshine’?”

“’Course not. The whole point of chat rooms is everyone is supposed to be anonymous. More fun that way.”

DS Salmond wrote it all down, asking him to spell out the name of the chat rooms he favored and his own online identities. After twenty-five minutes, Evans began to rise to show them out, but Sparkes had not finished.

“We need you to give some samples, Mr. Evans.”

“What for? I’m pretty sure Bella was mine—she looks just like my other kids.”

“Well, that’s good to know. But we need to be sure, and we need to be able to rule you out of our investigation.”

Evans looked aghast. “Investigation? I haven’t had anything to do with the disappearance of that little girl.”

“Your little girl, sir.”

“Well, yes, okay, but why would I kidnap a child? I’ve got three of my own. Some days I’d pay someone to kidnap them.”

“I’m sure, sir,” Sparkes said. “But we need to be thorough so we can rule you out. Why don’t you get your jacket and tell your wife you need to go out?”

The officers waited outside.

Salmond looked like she might burst, she was so pleased with herself. “He saw Dawn in an over-eighteens chat room. She was a player—an amateur but a player.”

Sparkes tried to remain calm, but the adrenaline was pumping through him, too. “This could be the link, Salmond. The link between her and Glen Taylor.” He laughed despite himself.

Neither of them heard the exchange between husband and wife, but Salmond sensed it was unfinished business when Evans got in the car with them.

“Let’s get this over with,” he said, and shut up. At the local police station, Evans gave DNA samples, attempting laddish banter with the younger officers, but no one was charmed. Tougher audience than the wasted girls on the dance floor, Sparkes thought as Salmond applied a little more force than was strictly necessary on Evans’s fingers in the ink.

“Sorry, sir. You have to press hard to get a good impression.”

Zara Salmond told Sparkes she was driving back to her HQ to tell her new boss the news, face-to-face. She needed time to put together her story without dropping Sparkes—and herself—in it.

“I’ll say West Midlands didn’t have the resources, so I went and confirmed that he’s Bella Elliott’s father. That he’s a serial shagger from Brum like we thought—one Matthew Evans. Pharmaceutical company rep, married with three children. What do you think?”

He’d smiled encouragement, adding: “And he may provide the link between Glen and Bella.”

Cue champagne corks, Sparkes thought, more in hope than in expectation.

In the end, she told him later, the significance of the breakthrough swept aside questions about why she had taken it upon herself to visit Evans herself.

“We’ll talk about that later, Salmond,” DCI Wellington said as she picked up the phone to Chief Superintendent Parker to claim her part of the glory.

Sparkes’s recall to the Hampshire squad came four days later. CS Parker was short and to the point. “We’ve got a fresh lead on the Bella case, Bob. No doubt you’ve heard. We want you to take it on. I’ve talked to the Met to clear it. How quickly can you come back?”

“On my way, sir.”

His return was typically low-key. “Hello, Salmond. Let’s see where we are with Matthew Evans,” he said as he took his coat off.

And he slipped back in as if he’d stepped out for just a few minutes. Salmond and the IT forensics team did not have encouraging news. They had gone steaming back through the data downloaded from Taylor’s original computer to hook out LMS as soon as they got the information. But she wasn’t there.

“No chats, no e-mails, sir. We’ve looked under all the permutations, but she doesn’t seem to figure.” Sparkes, Salmond, and DC Dan Fry, who had been brought back into the team, stood in a ragged semicircle behind the techie’s chair and stared at the screen as names rolled up, willing her to appear. It was the fourth time through the list, and the mood in the room was bleak.

Sparkes went back to his office and picked up the phone. “Hello, Dawn. It’s Bob Sparkes. No, no news exactly, but I have a couple of questions. I need to talk to you, Dawn. Can I come now?”

She deserved to be handled carefully after all she’d been through, but this had to be addressed head-on.

THIRTY-EIGHT

The Mother

THURSDAY, JULY 13, 2006

Dawn Elliott liked going out. She loved the ritual of a deep, perfumed bath, conditioning and blow-drying her long hair in front of the mirror. Putting on thick mascara with party music playing loudly. The final look in the full-length mirror on the wardrobe door and then clip-clopping to the taxi in high heels, the fizz of excitement rising in her chest. Going out felt like being seventeen forever.

Bella had stopped all that for a while. It had been bloody stupid getting pregnant, and it was her own fault. Too eager to please. He was so sexy—dancing to be close to her that first time they set eyes on each other. He’d taken her hand and twirled her around until she was dizzy and laughing. They’d taken their drinks outside with the smokers, to get some air. His name was Matt and he was already taken, but she didn’t care. He visited Southampton only once a month for work, but he phoned and texted every day in the beginning, when his wife thought he was fetching something from the car or taking the dog for a walk.

It had lasted six months—until he told her his office had moved him from the south coast to the northeast. Their last encounter had been so intense, she felt drunk on the experience afterward. He’d begged her to have sex without a condom—“It’ll be more special, Dawn.” And it was, she supposed, but he didn’t hang around to hear the result. Married men don’t, her mother had told her, despairing of her naïveté. “They’ve got wives and children, Dawn. They just want sex with stupid girls like you. What are you going to do about the baby?”