Fiona Barton - The Widow

A woman from just outside Newark had rung to say a new neighbor had been playing in the garden with a child. “She’s a little blond girl. I’d never seen a child in the garden before. I thought she didn’t have kids,” she said. Sparkes sent the local force around immediately and waited at his desk for the phone to ring.

“It’s the neighbor’s niece, visiting from Scotland,” the local DI had told him, as disappointed as him. “Sorry. Maybe next time.”

Maybe. His problem was that most of the calls to the incident room were always going to be from chancers and attention seekers, desperate to be part of the drama.

The bottom line was that the last sighting of Bella by anyone other than Dawn was at the newsagent’s shop down the road. The owner, a mouthy grandmother, remembered mother and child coming into the shop around eleven thirty. They were regulars. Dawn went in most days to buy cigarettes, and this visit, Bella’s last, was recorded in the grainy stop-start images of the shop’s cheap security camera.

Here, little Bella holding her mother’s hand at the counter; cut to Bella, face blurred and indistinct, as if she were already disappearing, with a paper bag in her hand; cut to shop door closing behind her.

Dawn’s mum had phoned the house after lunch—2:17, according to her phone records—and told police she’d heard her granddaughter shouting along to Bob the Builder in the background and asked to speak to her. Dawn had called her, but Bella had apparently run off to fetch a toy.

The timeline of the next sixty-eight minutes was Dawn’s. It was vague, punctuated by her household chores. The detectives had got her to reenact the cooking, washing up and folding of Bella’s clothes from the tumble dryer to try to get a sense of the minutes that passed after Dawn said she saw Bella wander into the garden to play, just after three o’clock.

Margaret Emerson, who lived next door, had gone to fetch something from her car at 3:25 p.m. and was sure the front garden was empty.

“Bella always shouted ‘Peepo’ to me. It was a bit of a game for her, poor little thing. She loved attention. Her mum wasn’t always interested in what she was doing,” Mrs. Emerson said carefully. “Bella used to play on her own a lot, carting her dolly round and chasing Timmy, the cat. You know what kids get up to.”

“Did Bella cry a lot?” Sparkes had asked.

It had given Mrs. Emerson pause for thought, but then she’d shaken her head and said briskly: “No. She was a happy little thing.”

The family doctor and health visitor agreed. “Lovely child,” “Little poppet,” they chorused. “Mum struggled a bit on her own—it’s hard bringing up a child alone, isn’t it?” the doctor said, and Sparkes nodded as if he understood. All of this was logged away in the now-bulging files of evidence and statements, proof of the effort his blokes were making, but he knew it was all surface chatter. They were making no progress.

The long-haired man was the key, he concluded, switching off his computer and carefully stacking the files on his desk before heading for the door and five hours of sleep.

“Maybe tomorrow we’ll find her,” he whispered to his sleeping wife when he got home.

A week later, with no news, Kate Waters was on the phone.

“Hi, Bob. The editor has decided to offer a reward for any information that leads to Bella being found. He’s putting up twenty grand. Not too shabby.”

Sparkes groaned inwardly. “Bloody rewards,” he cursed to Matthews later. “The papers get all the publicity, and we’ll get every nutter and con man in the country on the phone.”

“That’s very generous, Kate,” he said. “But do you think this is the right moment? We’re working on a number—”

“It’s going on the front page tomorrow, Bob,” she interrupted. “Look, I know the police usually hate the idea of rewards, but people who see or hear things and are worried about ringing the police will see twenty grand and pick up the phone.”

He sighed. “I’ll go and tell Dawn,” he said. “I need to prepare her.”

“Right,” Kate said. “Look, what are the chances of getting a sit-down chat with Dawn, Bob? Poor woman could barely speak at the press conference—this would be a proper chance for her to talk about Bella. I’ll be very gentle with her. What do you think?”

He thought he wished he hadn’t answered her call. He liked Kate—and there weren’t many reporters he could say that about—but he knew she was like a terrier with a bone when she was after something. He knew she wouldn’t let up until she got what she wanted, but he wasn’t sure he and Dawn were ready for this sort of grilling.

Dawn was still a largely unknown quantity: an emotional mess, drugged against her terror and unable to focus on anything for more than thirty seconds. Bob Sparkes had spent hours with the young mother and he felt he’d only scratched the surface. Could he really let Kate Waters loose on her?

“It might help her to talk to someone who isn’t a police officer, Bob. Might help her remember something . . .”

“I’ll ask her, Kate, but I’m not sure she’s up to it. She’s on tranquilizers and sleeping pills and is finding it hard to concentrate on anything.”

“Brilliant. Thanks, Bob.”

He could hear the smile in the reporter’s voice.

“Hold on. It’s not a done deal yet. Let me talk to her this morning, and I’ll give you a ring back.”

When he arrived, he found Dawn sitting in exactly the same spot, among Bella’s toys, cards from well-wishers, and letters on lined notepaper from the mad and angry, crushed empty packs of cigarettes, and pages torn from newspapers on the sofa that had become the mother’s ark.

“Have you been to bed, love?” he asked her. Sue Blackman, a young woman in uniform acting as the family liaison officer, shook her head silently and raised her eyebrows.

“Can’t sleep,” Dawn said. “Need to be awake for when she comes home.”

Sparkes took PC Blackman into the hall. “She needs some rest or she’s going to end up in the hospital,” he hissed.

“I know, sir. She’s dozing on the sofa during the day, but she hates it when it gets dark. She says Bella is afraid of the dark.”

EIGHT

The Reporter

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2006

Kate Waters arrived at the house at lunchtime with a photographer and a bunch of ostentatious supermarket lilies. She’d parked down the road, away from the pack, so she could get out of the car without attracting attention. She rang Bob Sparkes to let him know she was there and swept past the journalists sitting outside the house in their cars, Big Macs in their fists. By the time they’d leaped from their vehicles, she was inside. She heard a couple of them swearing loudly, warning one another they were about to be shafted, and tried not to grin.

As Bob Sparkes led the way, Kate took it all in: the shambles and stasis created by grief. In the hall, Bella’s blue anorak with a fur-lined hood and teddy-bear backpack hanging on the banister; her tiny, shiny red wellies by the door.

“Get a photo of those, Mick,” she whispered to the photographer following her as they made their way into the front room. There were toys and baby photos everywhere, the scene taking Kate straight back to her own early days of motherhood, struggling against the tide of chaos. She had sat and cried the day she brought Jake home from the hospital, lost in the postpartum hormonal wash and sudden sense of responsibility. She remembered she’d asked the nurse if she could pick him up, the morning after he was born, as if he belonged to the hospital.

The mother looked up, her young face creased and made old by weeping, and Kate smiled and took her hand. She had planned to shake it but simply squeezed it instead.