Fiona Barton - The Widow

He’d always thought he’d let her down somehow. Should’ve found the link earlier. Should’ve asked different questions. Should’ve found her quicker. His boss and the press had treated it like a triumph, but he couldn’t celebrate. Not after he’d seen those eyes.

Wonder where she is now, he thought. Wonder where Uncle Jim is now.

• • •

Manor Road was filled with reporters, neighbors, and police officers, each interviewing one another in a verbal orgy.

Sparkes pushed his way through the knot of people at the gate of number 44a, nodding at the journalists he recognized. “Bob,” a woman’s voice called. “Hi. Any news? Any leads?” Kate Waters pushed forward and smiled mock wearily. He’d last seen her during a grisly murder investigation in the New Forest and had enjoyed a couple of drinks and a gossip in the weeks it took to nail the husband.

They went way back, bumping into each other every so often on different cases and picking up where they’d left off. Not really a friendship, he thought. It was definitely all about work, but Kate was all right. Last time, she’d held onto a line in the story she’d stumbled on until he was ready for the information to come out. He owed her one.

“Hello, Kate. Just got here but may have something to say later,” he said, ducking past the uniform guarding the house.

There was a smell of cats and cigarettes in the front room; Dawn Elliott was huddled on a sofa, trembling fingers clutching a mobile phone and a doll. Her blond hair was tethered off her face in a halfhearted ponytail, making her look even younger. She looked up at the tall, serious-looking man in the doorway, her face collapsing.

“Have you found her?” she managed.

“Ms. Elliott, I’m Detective Inspector Bob Sparkes. I’m here to help find Bella, and I want you to help me.”

Dawn looked at him. “But I’ve told the police everything. What’s the good of asking the same questions over and over? Just find her. Find my baby!” she shouted hoarsely.

He nodded and sat down beside her. “Come on, Dawn, let’s go through it together,” he said gently. “There may be something new you remember.”

So she told him her tale, dry sobs choking off her words. Bella was Dawn Elliott’s only child, the result of a doomed affair with a married man she’d met at a nightclub, a sweet little girl who loved watching Disney videos and dancing. Dawn didn’t mix much with the neighbors. “They look down their noses at me. I’m a single mum on benefits. They think I’m a scrounger,” she told Bob Sparkes.

But as they talked, his team and scores of volunteers from the community, many still in their work clothes, were searching back gardens, dustbins, hedges, attics, basements, sheds, cars, kennels, and compost heaps all over the neighborhood. The light was beginning to fade outside, and a voice suddenly cried out, “Bella! Bella! Where are you, lovey?” and Dawn Elliott jumped to her feet to look out the window.

“Dawn, come and sit down,” Sparkes said. “I want to ask if Bella has misbehaved today.” She shook her head.

“Have you been cross with her about anything?” he continued. “Little ones can be a bit of a trial, can’t they? Did you have to smack her or anything?”

The intent behind the questions slowly dawned on the young woman, and she shrieked her innocence. “No, of course not. I never smack her. Well, not very often—only when she acts up sometimes. I haven’t hurt her. Someone’s taken her . . .”

Sparkes patted her hand and asked the family liaison officer to make another cup of tea.

A young constable put his head around the sitting room door and gestured to his senior officer that he needed a word.

“Someone saw a bloke wandering about the area earlier this afternoon,” he told Sparkes. “A neighbor saw him. Didn’t recognize him.”

“Description?”

“A bloke on his own, he said. Long hair, looked rough. Neighbor said he was looking in the cars.”

Sparkes fished his phone out of his pocket and called his sergeant. “Looks like a live one,” he said. “No sign of the child. We’ve got a description of a suspicious character walking down the road, details on their way. Get it out there to the team. I’m going to talk to the witness.

“And let’s knock on the door of every known sex offender in the area,” he added, his gut churning at the thought of the child in the clutches of any of the twenty-two registered sex offenders homed by the local authority on the Westland housing estate.

Hampshire Police Force had about three hundred offenders in its area: a shifting population of flashers, voyeurs, pedophiles, and rapists who disguised themselves as friendly neighbors in unsuspecting communities.

Across the road, at the window of his neat bungalow, Stan Spencer was waiting for the senior detective. Sparkes had been told he’d started an ad hoc neighborhood watch a few years back, when the spot in which he felt he was entitled to park his Volvo kept being usurped by commuters. Retirement held few activities for him and his wife, Susan, apparently, and he relished the power a clipboard and nightly patrol gave him.

Sparkes shook his hand, and they sat together at the dining room table.

The neighbor referred to his notes. “These are contemporaneous, Inspector,” he said, and Sparkes suppressed a smile.

“I was watching out for Susan coming back from the shops after lunch, and I saw a man walking down our side of the road. He looked a rough sort—scruffy, you know—and I was worried he was going to break into one of the neighbors’ vehicles or something. You have to be so careful. He was walking past Peter Tredwell’s van.”

Sparkes raised his eyebrows.

“Sorry, Inspector. Mr. Tredwell is a plumber who lives down the road and has had his van broken into several times. I stopped the last one. So, I went outside to keep watch on the man’s activities, but he was quite far down the road. Unfortunately, I only saw the back of him. Long dirty hair, jeans, and one of those black anorak things they wear. Then my phone rang indoors, and by the time I came back out, he’d gone.”

Mr. Spencer looked very pleased with himself as Sparkes noted it all down.

“Did you see Bella when you went down your path?”

Spencer hesitated but shook his head. “I didn’t. I hadn’t seen her for a few days. Lovely little thing.”

Five minutes later, Sparkes perched on a chair in Dawn Elliott’s hallway and scribbled a press statement before going back to her sofa.

“Have you got any news?” she asked.

“Nothing new at the moment, but I’m going to tell the media that we need their help to find her. And . . .”

“And what?” Dawn said.

“And that we want to trace anyone who was in the area this afternoon. People who might have been driving or walking down Manor Road. Did you see a man walking down the road this afternoon, Dawn?” he asked. “Mr. Spencer across the road says he saw a man with long hair, in a dark coat, someone he hadn’t seen before. It might be nothing . . .”

She shook her head, tears already sliding down her face. “Was it him that took her?” she said. “Was it him who took my baby?”

SIX

The Widow

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 9, 2010

More feet on the gravel. This time Kate’s phone rings twice and stops. Must be some sort of signal, because she immediately opens the front door and lets in a man with a big bag over his shoulder.

“This is Mick,” she says to me, “my photographer.”

Mick grins at me and sticks out his hand. “Hello, Mrs. Taylor,” he says. He’s come to pick us up and take us to a hotel “somewhere nice and quiet,” he says, and I begin to protest. Everything’s moving so fast.