Fiona Barton: The Widow

Kate and Mick sit on the sofa facing me. They are eating the noodles without any enthusiasm. “This is horrible,” Mick says eventually, and gives up.

“You chose it,” Kate says, and looks at my full plate. “Sorry, Jean. Shall I get you something else?”

I shake my head. “Just a cup of tea,” I say. Mick asks if I’ve got any tins in the cupboard and goes off to make beans on toast for himself. I get up to go to bed, but Kate turns on the news and I sit back down. They are saying something about soldiers and Iraq, and I lean back in my seat.

The next item is me. I can’t believe what I’m seeing. My face in one of the pictures Mick took. “Mick, quick, your stuff’s on the television,” Kate shouts through to the kitchen, and he races in and drops heavily onto the sofa.

“Fame at last,” he says with a grin as the presenter rattles on about the exclusive interview I’ve given to the Daily Post and my “revelation” that Glen was responsible for taking Bella. I start to say something, but the program cuts to Dawn, who’s been crying, all swollen eyes, and she’s asked what she thinks about the interview. “She’s an evil monster,” she says, and it takes me a minute to realize she means me. Me. “She must’ve known all along,” she wails. “She must’ve known what her husband did to my poor baby.”

I stand up and turn on Kate. “What have you written?” I demand. “What have you said to make me the evil monster? I trusted you. I told you everything.”

She has difficulty looking me in the eye, but Kate tells me Dawn has “got it all wrong.”

“That isn’t what the story says,” she insists. “It says you’re another of Glen’s victims, that you only realized much later that he could’ve taken her.”

Mick is nodding dumbly, backing her up, but I don’t believe them. I’m so angry I go out of the room. I can’t bear their betrayal. Then I go back in. “Leave now,” I say. “Get out, or I’ll call the police and have you removed.”

There’s silence while Kate wonders if she can talk me around again. “But the money, Jean . . .” she starts to say as I usher her and Mick into the hall, and I cut her off.

“Keep it,” I say, and I open the front door. Mr. Telly’s still standing at the end of the path with his crew.

As she reaches the gate, he says something to her, but she’s already on the phone to Terry, explaining how it’s all gone “pear-shaped.” I beckon the film crew in. I’ve something I want to say.

FORTY-SEVEN

The Detective

FRIDAY, MAY 14, 2010

Days and then weeks ticked by without a decision being made to rearrest Taylor. The new bosses clearly didn’t want to stumble down the same disastrous path as their predecessors and defended their inaction strenuously.

“Where’s the evidence to link Taylor with this new CCTV? Or the Internet club?” DCI Wellington asked after watching the images. “We’ve got a partial plate number and the dodgy word of a porn merchant. There’s no further identification of the suspect—apart from your gut feeling, Bob.”

Sparkes had been ready to resign, but he couldn’t abandon Bella.

They were so close. The forensics team was working on the plate number of the van on the CCTV, to try to tease out one more digit or letter, and experts were trying to match phrasing in the e-mails from TDS and Bigbear . He almost had his hand on Glen Taylor’s arm.

So when he heard that Glen Taylor was dead, he felt it like a physical blow. “Dead?” An officer he knew from the Met had called as soon as the news came through to the operations room. “Thought you’d want to know immediately, Bob. Sorry.”

It was the “sorry” that did it. He hung up and put his head in his hands. They both knew there would be no confession now, no moment of triumph. Bella would never be found.

His head suddenly shot up. Jean. She was free of him now—she could speak out, tell the truth about that day.

Sparkes shouted for Salmond, and when she put her head in the door, he croaked: “Glen Taylor is dead. Knocked over by a bus. We’re going to Greenwich.”

Salmond looked like she might cry but checked herself and went into superwoman mode, organizing and getting ready.

In the car, he filled in the details for her. She knew as much about the case as he did, but he needed to say everything out loud, to walk himself through it all.

“I always thought that Jean was covering for Glen. She was a decent woman, but she was completely dominated by him. They married young—he was the bright one, the one who did well at school and had a good job, and she was his pretty little wife.”

Salmond glanced at her boss. “Pretty little wife?”

He had the grace to laugh. “What I mean is that Jean was so young when they met, he blew her off her feet with his suit and prospects. She never had a chance to be her own person.”

“I think my mum was a bit like that,” Salmond said, indicating to turn off the motorway.

Not you, though, Sparkes thought. He’d met her husband. Nice solid bloke who didn’t try to outshine her or put her down.

“Sounds like it could be a folie à deux , sir,” Salmond said thoughtfully. “Like Brady and Hindley or Fred and Rose West. I looked at their cases for a paper I wrote at college. A couple shares a psychosis or a delusion because one is so dominant. They end up believing the same thing—their right to do something for example. They share a value system that is not accepted by anyone outside their partnership or relationship. Not sure I’m explaining it properly. Sorry.”

Bob Sparkes was silent for a bit, turning the theory over in his head. “But if it was a folie à deux, then Jean knew and approved when Glen took Bella.”

“It’s happened before. Like I said,” his sergeant said without taking her eyes off the road. “Then, when you separate the couple, the one who’s been dominated can quite quickly stop sharing the delusion. They kind of come to their senses. Do you see what I mean?”

But Jean Taylor had not let the mask slip when Glen had gone inside. Was it possible that he kept control of her from behind bars?

“I wondered about cognitive dissonance or selective amnesia,” he ventured, a little nervous about trying out his homework reading in forensic psychology. “Maybe she was too frightened of losing everything to admit the truth. I read that trauma can make the mind delete things that are too painful or stressful. So she deleted any details that challenged her belief that Glen was innocent.”

“But can you really do that? Make yourself believe that black is white?” Salmond asked.

The human mind is a powerful thing , Sparkes thought, but it sounded too trite to say out loud.

“I’m not an expert, Zara. Just some reading at home. We’d have to talk to someone who’s done the research.”

First time he’d called her “Zara,” and he felt a prickle of embarrassment. Inappropriate , he told himself—always called Ian Matthews “Matthews” at work. He risked a quick glance at his sergeant. She showed no sign of offense or even registering his unprofessional slip.

“Who would we approach, sir?”

“I know an academic who might be able to give us a steer. Dr. Fleur Jones helped us before.”

He was grateful that Salmond didn’t react to the name. It hadn’t been Fleur Jones’s fault that everything had gone bad.

“Why don’t you call her?” she said. “Before we get there. We need to know the best way to approach the widow.”

Salmond pulled over at the next service station and he began to dial.

An hour later, Sparkes walked through the accident and emergency department doors.

“Hello, Jean,” he said, and sat down beside her on an orange molded-plastic chair. She barely moved to acknowledge him. She looked so pale, and her eyes were blackened by grief.