Fiona Barton - The Widow

She didn’t know at first, and she put off any decision in case Matt reappeared like a knight on a white horse to whisk her away to a new life. And when he didn’t, she read glossy baby magazines and sleepwalked into motherhood.

She didn’t regret going ahead with the pregnancy—well, not often, only when Bella woke up every hour from three a.m., or was teething and screaming, or filling a nappy. The baby years turned out to be not as advertised in the magazines, but they had survived it together and things got better as Bella became a person and a bit of company for Dawn.

She’d tell her daughter all her secrets and thoughts, safe in the knowledge that Bella wouldn’t judge her. The little girl laughed along with her when she was happy and cuddled into her lap when Dawn cried.

But hours spent watching CBeebies and playing video games on her phone didn’t fill her life. Dawn was lonely. She was only twenty-six. She shouldn’t be on her own, but who would be interested in a single mum?

She was attracted to married men—she’d read somewhere the older man represented a father figure and the excitement of forbidden fruit. She hadn’t got the biblical allusion but understood the mixture of danger and safety all too well. She wanted to find another Matt but couldn’t afford babysitters and her mum disapproved of her going out until late.

“What are you doing? Nightclubs? For goodness’ sake, Dawn, look where that got you last time. You are a mother now. Why don’t you go out for a meal with one of your friends?”

So she did. She and Carole, an old school friend. Sharing a Hawaiian pizza was nice, but she didn’t return home buzzing with music and vodka shots.

She’d found the chat room through a magazine in the doctor’s waiting room. Bella had a temperature and a rash, and Dawn knew that Dr. John, as he liked to be known, would chat with her, give her some attention—“fancies me a bit,” she told herself, deciding to put on makeup at the last minute. She needed to be fancied. Every woman did.

Flipping through the pages of a teen mag, grimy with dozens of fingers and thumbs, she had read about the new dating scene online. She was so engrossed, she missed her number being called. The receptionist had to shout her name, and she got up quickly, grabbing Bella from the Lego pit and stuffing the magazine into her bag for later.

Her laptop was old and battered, not helped by the fact that she kept it on top of the wardrobe, away from Bella’s sticky fingers. A bloke at work had given it to her when he got a new one. She’d used it at first, but when the charger stopped working and she didn’t have the money to get another one, she’d lost interest.

On the way home from the doctor’s, she used her emergency credit card to buy a new charger.

The chat room was brilliant. She basked in the attention from her new friends, the men who wanted to know all about her, who asked about her life, her dreams and wanted her photo, who weren’t put off by her having a child. Some even wanted to know about her little girl.

She didn’t tell anyone else. No one outside the laptop. This was her thing.

THIRTY-NINE

The Detective

THURSDAY, JANUARY 21, 2010

The house on Manor Road looked cleaner and tidier. Bella’s toys were stacked in a box by the television, and the front room had been turned into the Find Bella campaign headquarters. Volunteers were at a table going through the post—“We get a hundred letters on a good day,” Dawn said proudly—and sorting them into three piles: possible sightings, well-wishers, and nutters. The nutters pile looked a lot bigger than the others, but Sparkes didn’t comment.

“Lots of people are sending money to help us look for Bella,” Dawn said. The fund was putting adverts in newspapers all over the world and paying for the occasional private investigator to check out a lead.

“Let’s go somewhere quiet, Dawn,” he said, and guided her by her elbow to the kitchen, closing the door.

At the mention of Matt, she burst into tears. “How did you find him? What did he say about me? About Bella?”

“He said he thought he was her father and we’re waiting for the DNA results.”

“Has he got other children?”

“Yes, Dawn.”

“Do they look like her?”

“Yes.”

She cried harder.

“Come on, Dawn. We need to talk about something else Matt Evans told us. About seeing you in an online chat room.”

That stopped the tears. “Matt saw me in a chat room? I didn’t see him.”

“But you went in chat rooms?”

“Yes, but not like the places you talked about in the trial. It wasn’t nasty or about sex.”

Sparkes paused. “Why didn’t you say you had used chat rooms?”

Dawn reddened. “I was embarrassed. I never told anyone when I was doing it because I thought people would think I used them to find sex. I didn’t, Inspector Sparkes. I was just lonely. It was just chatting. Stuff about what happened on EastEnders or I’m a Celebrity . . . I never met anyone in real life. I honestly didn’t think it was worth mentioning.”

Sparkes leaned forward to pat her hand on the kitchen table. “Did you talk about Bella in the chat rooms, Dawn?”

She looked at him and struggled to speak. “No, well, yes, a bit. To other girls. But just, you know, stuff like if Bella had kept me up or funny things she’d done. We were just talking.”

“But other people can hear you, can’t they?”

Dawn looked like she might faint, and Sparkes moved around to her side of the table, easing her chair back and gently pushing her head down into her lap for a moment. She was still deathly pale when she sat back up.

“Him, you mean,” she said. “Did he hear me talk about Bella? Is that how he found her?”

There was no need for names. They both knew who “he” was. “We can’t be sure, Dawn, but we need you to think back, to try to remember who you talked to online. We’ll look on your laptop, too.”

A volunteer came in to ask Dawn a question, and seeing her tearful face, immediately started to back out. “No, please stay. Can you look after Dawn for a minute? She’s had a shock and could probably do with a cup of tea.”

Sparkes went outside and phoned Salmond.

He bagged and brought Dawn’s battered computer back to HQ while his sergeant took a statement from the devastated mother. Sparkes wanted to be in on the hunt through the sites. He wanted to be there when Bigbear, or whatever sick nursery allusion Taylor had used, popped up.

The atmosphere in the lab was fetid, a mixture of locker room and abandoned pizzas, and the technicians looked weary as they took away the machine for cataloging and mining. They were grateful there was a fraction of the activity to plow through this time, but it still took hours to produce a list of chat-room sites and contacts.

The list, when it came, was the familiar jumble of fantasy and lurid names, and Sparkes ran through them quickly to rule out the known Taylor avatars. “He must have used another name,” he told Fry.

“We got all the identities he used from his laptop, sir.”

“Are we sure he only had one laptop?”

“No sign of any others, but he was definitely using at least one Internet café. Maybe others on his travels.”

The technician sighed. “We’ll have to rule out all the ones we can and then narrow the field a bit.”

Sparkes picked up the list and headed back to Dawn Elliott’s house.

Dawn was still crying. Salmond was holding her hand and talking in a low voice. “Let’s carry on, Dawn. You’re doing brilliantly.” She turned to Sparkes. “She’s doing brilliantly, sir.”

Dawn looked up at him standing in the doorway like he had the day Bella had gone. The sense of déjà vu was uncanny.