Fiona Barton - The Widow

“They’ve got enough to do, and they might not get to it for weeks. If you give me a quiet hand, I can rule it in or out in a couple of days.”

“Okay, what sort of quiet hand?” Russell asked, pushing the coffee away, slopping it into the saucer.

“Thanks, mate. I knew I could count on you.”

The two men went and sat together in Sparkes’s office with the spreadsheet of Taylor’s deliveries and plotted his visits to Southampton and the surrounding towns. “We looked at every frame of the CCTV footage in the area around Dawn Elliott’s address on the day of the kidnapping,” Sparkes said. “But the only places we saw Taylor’s van were at the delivery address in Winchester and at the junction of the M3 and M25. I wore my eyes out looking, but there was nothing to place his van at the scene.”

He could recall vividly the sense of expectation every time they loaded a new piece of footage and the bitter disappointment when it ended without a glimpse of a blue van.

“I want to look at other dates,” he said. “The dates Taylor had other deliveries in Hampshire. Remind me—where are the cameras in the Manor Road area?”

Lynes highlighted the locations on the maps in neon green—a petrol station a couple of streets away had one on the forecourt for absconders, a camera to catch drivers jumping the red traffic lights on the big junction, and some of the shops, including the newsagent’s, had installed cheap, tinny versions to discourage shoplifters.

“And Bella’s nursery school has got a camera outside, but she wasn’t at nursery that day. We looked at footage from all of these cameras, but there was nothing of interest.”

“Well, let’s have a look again. We must have missed something.”

Four days later, his phone rang, and when he heard Lynes’s voice he knew immediately he’d found that something.

“There it is,” Lynes said, pointing at the vehicle crossing the frame. Sparkes squinted at the screen, trying to retune his eyes to the film’s grainy resolution.

It was there. The van was there. The two men looked at each other triumphantly and then back at the screen to enjoy the moment again.

“Are we sure it’s him?” Sparkes asked.

“It matches the date and time of a delivery to Fareham on his work sheets, and forensics have got a partial plate number that includes three letters that match Taylor’s vehicle.”

Lynes pushed the play button. “Now watch.”

The van stopped just within the camera’s range, pointing away from the nursery school. As if on cue, Dawn and Bella appeared at the door of the school at the back of the exodus of children, the mother fussing with her daughter’s coat zipper and the child clutching a huge piece of paper. The pair walked past the van and around the corner, safe in their routine.

Within seconds, the van moved off in the same direction. Sparkes knew he was watching the moment Glen Taylor had made his decision, and his eyes filled with tears. He muttered that he was going to get a notepad and went to his office for a moment’s privacy. “We’re so close,” he told himself. “Now, don’t mess it up. No rushing; get everything in order.”

He looked at Taylor grinning at him from the wall and grinned back. “I hope you haven’t booked a holiday, Glen.”

Back in the lab, Lynes was writing on a whiteboard. “This footage was taken on Thursday, September twenty-eighth, four days before Bella was taken.”

“He planned it, Russ. This wasn’t some chance abduction. He was watching.”

“Any other sightings of the van that day?”

“At the services at Hook, filling up on the way home. Timeline fits.”

“Let’s get the work done on the images and get as much detail as we can. Then I’m going to knock on Glen Taylor’s door.”

The two men sat back down at the monitor as the technician wheeled back and forth over the van images, zooming in on the windscreen.

“It’s blurred to hell, but we’re pretty confident it is a white male with short dark hair, no glasses, and no facial hair,” the technician told them.

The face at the windscreen hovered into sight. A white oval with dark patches for eyes.

FORTY-FIVE

The Husband

MONDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2006

Glen Taylor had first caught sight of Bella Elliott on Facebook after meeting Dawn (aka Little Miss Sunshine) in a chat room that summer. She was telling a group of strangers about her daughter and a trip to the zoo.

One of her new friends asked if there was a picture of Bella from the trip—one with the monkeys she had loved. Glen had eavesdropped idly on the conversation, and when Dawn referred everyone to her Facebook page, he’d looked. There was no security on the page, and he flicked through Dawn’s photos.

When the image of Bella appeared, he looked at that small, confident face and committed it to memory, to be retrieved at will in his dark fantasies. Bella joined his gallery, but she wouldn’t stay there like the others. He found himself looking for her whenever he saw a blond child on the street or in the parks where he sometimes ate his lunch when he was on the road.

It was the first time his fantasies had moved off the screen into real life, and it frightened and thrilled him in equal measure. He wanted to do something. He wasn’t sure what at first, but in the hours at the wheel of his van, he started to plan a way to meet Bella.

Little Miss Sunshine was the key, and he adopted a new avatar especially for encounters with her. Operation Gold had taught him that there must be no trail, so he’d stop at the Internet café near the depot on his way back from jobs, to enter Dawn’s world. He’d draw her into his.

He called himself TDS and approached LMS quietly, joining group chats when he knew she was in the room and saying little. He did not want to draw the wrong kind of attention to himself, so he asked occasional insightful questions, flattering her, and gradually he became one of her regulars. LMS sent her first private IM to TDS within two weeks.

LMS: Hi. How are you?

TDS: Good. You? Doing much?

LMS: Stuck at home today with my little girl.

TDS: Could be worse. She sounds lovely.

LMS: She is. Lucky really.

He wasn’t there every day. He couldn’t be, what with Jean and his job, but he managed to keep contact for a while, using a quiet Internet place Mike Doonan had taken him to once, when they were still speaking. Still visiting the same chat rooms and forums. Before he told the boss about the disability scam Doonan was pulling. He’d seen him jump out of his van outside Internet Inc. like a man half his age and felt it was his duty to expose his lie. It was what any right-minded person would do, he’d told Jean. And she’d agreed.

It was in the club that he built up the details of Dawn’s life. He had known her real name and Bella’s birthday from her Facebook page and found out they lived somewhere in Southampton from a chat about child-friendly restaurants. Dawn favored McDonald’s because “no one tuts when your kid cries—and it’s cheap” and made special mention of her local one.

He called in at the restaurant the next time he was making a delivery down there. Just looking, he told himself as he unwrapped a burger and watched the families around him.

When he left, he had a drive around. Just looking.

It took a while, but Dawn finally let slip the name of Bella’s nursery school as she chatted to another mother in the careless way she had developed online. Dawn treated every exchange as a private conversation—like the people on buses who talk on their mobile phones about the breakup of their marriage or genital warts. Glen mouthed a silent Yes and hugged the information to himself.

Later, sitting across from Jean over a chicken casserole, he asked about her day.