The Widow

Chapter 10

Thursday, 12 October 2006

The Detective

DI BOB SPARKES was standing in the incident room scanning the boards for emerging patterns and links. He took off his glasses and narrowed his eyes in case a change of focus might reveal something.

There was a maelstrom of activity all around the Elliotts’ garden, but, at the epicenter, Bella remained the missing piece.

All that information but no sign of her, he thought. She’s here somewhere. We’re missing something.

The Forensics team had dusted and swabbed every inch of the brick garden wall and painted metal gate; the garden had been the subject of a fingertip search by a line of police officers, making religious progress on their knees, and fibres from her clothes, golden hairs from her head, dismembered toy parts and discarded sweet wrappers had been preserved in plastic bags like holy relics. But of the abductor, nothing.

‘I think the bastard must have reached over the wall and lifted her straight over and into his vehicle,’ Sparkes said. ‘It would only have taken seconds. She was there and then she wasn’t.’

The team had found a half-sucked blue sweet on Bella’s side of the wall. ‘Maybe it fell out of her mouth when he picked her up?’ Sparkes said. ‘Is it a Smartie?’

‘I’m not exactly an expert on Smarties, Boss, but I’ll get someone to check,’ Sergeant Matthews said.

When it came back from Forensics, it had been identified as a Skittle. Bella’s saliva was on the sweet, matched with the comforter she sucked at night.

‘She never had Skittles,’ Dawn said.

He gave her one to keep her quiet, Sparkes thought. How old-fashioned. He remembered his mum telling him as a boy, ‘Never take sweets from a stranger.’ That and something about men with puppies.

He was reviewing the list of evidence and his energy was dipping. It didn’t look good. There were no CCTV cameras watching over the street – only good old Mr Spencer – and no images collected from the nearest camera sites so far of a scruffy man.

‘Maybe he was just lucky,’ Sparkes said.

‘Luck of the devil, then.’

‘Get on the phone, Matthews, and see when we can get on Crimewatch. Tell them it’s urgent.’

The television reconstruction seemed to take forever to organize, although it was only eight days. A Bella lookalike had to be found from a nursery school in another town because no parent living near the Westland estate would let their child take part.

‘Can’t blame them, really,’ Sparkes told the exasperated director. ‘They don’t want to see their kid as a kidnap victim. Even a pretend one.’

They were waiting at the end of Manor Road for the film crew to set up, discussing what Sparkes would say in his appeal for information.

‘It’ll be live in the studio, Bob,’ the director said, ‘so make sure you have everything sorted in your head before you speak. You’ll know what questions you’re going to get.’

Sparkes was too distracted to take it all in. He had just been putting Dawn Elliott in a police car to her mum’s as the actress playing her arrived.

‘She looks like me,’ she’d whispered to him. She hadn’t been able to look at the child playing Bella. She had laid out a set of her daughter’s clothes, a little headband and Bella’s spare glasses on the sofa, stroking each item and saying her child’s name. Sparkes had helped her up and she had walked, dry-eyed and holding his arm, to the car. She got in beside Sue Blackman and didn’t look back.

The street was now quiet, deserted, as it must have been that day. Sparkes watched as the re-enactment took shape, the director gently coaching ‘Bella’ to chase a borrowed grey cat into the garden. Her mother stood just off camera, with emergency chocolate buttons in case bribes were needed, smiling at her little girl and trying not to cry.

Mrs Emerson volunteered to play her own small role, walking stiffly down her garden path, pretending to look for her little friend next door, and then responding to Dawn’s cries for help. Across the road, Mr Spencer acted out spotting the actor in a long wig strolling past his house, his mimed puzzlement filmed through the bay window by a cameraman standing on Mrs Spencer’s French marigolds.

The ‘abduction’ took only minutes but it was three hours before the director was satisfied and everyone crowded round the monitor in the film truck to watch the end product. No one spoke as they watched ‘Bella’ playing in the garden and only Mr Spencer stayed to mull over the events with the crew.

Afterwards, one of the older officers took Sparkes aside. ‘Have you noticed that our Mr Spencer is always hanging around the investigation team and giving interviews to the reporters? Telling them he saw the man who took her. Bit of a glory-seeker, if you ask me.’

Sparkes smiled sympathetically. ‘There’s always one, isn’t there? He’s probably lonely and bored. I’ll get Matthews to keep an eye on him.’

As expected, the broadcast, twenty-three days after Bella vanished, triggered hundreds of phone calls to the studio and incident room, the film igniting public emotion and a fresh outpouring of variations on ‘My heart goes out to…’ and ‘Why, oh why?’ messages on the show’s website.

About a dozen callers claimed to have seen Bella, many of them sure they had spotted her in a café, on a beach, in a playground. Each call was acted upon immediately, but Sparkes’ optimism began to fade as he took his turn answering the phones at the back of the studio.

The following week, a sudden buzz of voices from the incident room reached Sparkes as he walked down the corridor.

‘Got a flasher in a kids’ playground, Sir,’ the duty officer told him. ‘About twenty-five minutes from the Elliott house.’

‘Who is he? Is he known to us?’

Lee Chambers was a middle-aged, divorced minicab driver who’d been questioned six months earlier for exposing himself to two female passengers. He’d claimed he was just having a quick pee and they’d caught a glimpse as he zipped himself up. Completely unintentional. The women didn’t want to take it further, didn’t want the attention, and the police sent him on his way.

Today, he’d been in bushes beside the swings and slides at Royal Park as children played nearby.

‘I was just having a quick pee,’ he told the police officer called by a horrified mother.

‘Do you normally have an erection while peeing, Sir? That must be inconvenient,’ the officer said as he led him to a waiting car.

Chambers arrived at Southampton Central police station and was put in an interview room.

Peering through the toughened glass panel in the door, Sparkes saw a skinny man in tracksuit bottoms and a Southampton FC shirt, with long greasy hair in a ponytail.

‘Scruffy, long hair,’ Matthews said.

Did you take Bella? Sparkes thought automatically. Have you got her somewhere?

The suspect looked up expectantly as Sparkes and Matthews entered.

‘This is all a mistake,’ he said.

‘If I had a quid…’ Matthews muttered. ‘Why don’t you tell us all about it, then?’ he said as the officers dragged their chairs closer to the table.

Chambers told his lies and they listened. Just a quick pee. Didn’t choose a playground deliberately. Didn’t see the children. Didn’t talk to the children. Completely innocent mistake.

‘Tell me, Mr Chambers, where were you on Monday, October the second?’ Sparkes asked.

‘God, I don’t know. Working, probably. Monday is one of my regular days. The cab controller would know. Why d’you ask?’

The question hung in the air for a beat and then Chambers was all eyes. Sparkes almost expected an audible ding.

‘That’s when that little girl went missing, isn’t it? You don’t think I had anything to do with that? Oh God, you can’t think that.’

They left him to stew for a bit while they went to join their colleagues already searching his address, a bedsit in a converted Victorian house in the city’s rundown red-light area near the docks.

Leafing through the extreme porn magazines beside Chambers’ bed, Matthews sighed. ‘This is all about hating women, not wanting sex with kids. What’ve you got?’

Sparkes was silent. Photos of Dawn and Bella had been cut from newspapers and slipped into a clear plastic folder on the floor of the wardrobe.

The minicab controller was a bored-looking woman in her fifties, bundled up against the cold of her unheated office in a green cable-knit cardigan and fingerless mittens.

‘Lee Chambers? What’s he been up to? More of his accidental flashing?’ She laughed and slurped a Red Bull. ‘He’s a nasty little man,’ she said as she flicked through the records. ‘Everyone thinks so, but he knows a friend of the boss.’

She was interrupted by the fizz of static and a voice rendered robotic by the tinny speakers, and gave some incomprehensible instructions back.

‘Right, where were we?

‘Monday, 2 October. Here we are. Lee was in Fareham early on – hospital run for a regular customer. All quiet until lunch, then he picked up a couple from the airport at Eastleigh to go to Portsmouth. Dropped about 14.00. Last job of the day.’

She printed out the details for them and turned back to the microphone as they left without saying goodbye.

‘They call this firm Rapists’ Cabs in the nightclubs,’ Sergeant Matthews said. ‘I’ve told my girls never to use them.’

The team was all over Chambers’ life. His ex-wife was already waiting for a chat with Sparkes and Matthews, and his colleagues and landlord were being questioned.

Donna Chambers, hard-faced with thick, homemade highlights, hated her former husband, but she didn’t think he would hurt a child. ‘He’s just a wanker who can’t keep it in his trousers,’ she said.

Neither of the detectives dared catch the other’s eye. ‘Bit of a Romeo, then?’

The list was long – almost impressive – as she detailed how Lee Chambers had worked his way through her friends, work colleagues, even her hairdresser.

‘Every time he said it would never happen again,’ the wronged wife said. ‘He had a high sex drive, he said. Anyway, he was very bitter when I finally left him and threatened to come after any bloke I saw, but nothing came of it. All talk. The thing is he’s a born liar. He can’t tell the truth.’

‘What about the indecent exposure? Is that a new thing?’

Mrs Chambers shrugged. ‘Well, he didn’t do it when we were married. Maybe he ran out of women who fell for his lines. Sounds desperate, doesn’t it? Horrible thing to do, but he is a horrible man.’

The landlord knew little about him. Chambers paid his rent on time, made no noise and put out his rubbish. Perfect tenant. But the other drivers had stories to tell. One of them told the detectives about the mags Lee Chambers sold and swapped from the boot of his car.

‘He used to set up a stall at motorway service areas for lorry drivers and other blokes who like that sort of thing. You know, photos of violent sex, rape and kidnap. That kind of stuff. He said he made quite a bit of money.’

He was a horrible man, everyone was agreed, but that didn’t make him a child abductor, Sparkes said miserably to his sergeant.

During their second interview with Chambers later that afternoon, he claimed he’d kept the cuttings in the folder because he fancied Dawn Elliott.

‘I cut pictures of women I’m attracted to out of the papers all the time. Cheaper than the skin mags,’ he offered. ‘I’ve got a high sex drive.’

‘Where did you go when you finished the job in Portsmouth, Mr Chambers?’

‘Home,’ he said emphatically.

‘Anyone see you there?’

‘No, everyone was out working and I’m on my own. I watch telly when I’m off-duty and wait for the next call-out.’

‘Someone says they saw a man with long hair walking down the road where Bella Elliott was playing.’

‘Not me. I was at home,’ Chambers said, touching his ponytail nervously.

Sparkes felt dirty when he came out of the interview room for a short break.

‘He deserves locking up just for breathing,’ Matthews said, joining his boss in the corridor.

‘We’ve spoken to the fare, and they say he helped them in with their suitcase and they offered him a cold drink but he left straight away. No witnesses to his whereabouts after that.’

As they talked, Chambers sauntered past them with an officer. ‘Where are you going?’ Sparkes snapped.

‘To the bog. When are you letting me go?’

‘Shut up and get back in the interview room.’

The two men stood for a moment in the corridor before going back in.

‘Let’s see if we can see him on the cameras. We also need to find his contacts for the boot sales at the services. They’re all perverts travelling the motorways round here. Who are they, Matthews? They may have seen him on the second of October. Get on to Traffic and see if they’ve got any likely names.’

Back in the interview room, Chambers squinted at them across the table and said, ‘They don’t give me their names, do they? It’s all very discreet.’

Sparkes waited for him to claim he was doing a public service, keeping perverts off the street, and Chambers didn’t disappoint.

‘Would you recognize your customers again?’ he asked.

‘Don’t think so. Staring isn’t good for business.’

The detectives began to lose heart, and in the next break, Sparkes called time.

‘We’ll have to watch and see, but make sure we do him for the indecent exposure. And Matthews, tell the local press to look out for him in court. He deserves a bit of publicity.’

Chambers smirked when they broke the news that the interview was over. But it was a brief moment of triumph before he was led away to be processed by the custody sergeant.

‘God, one flasher. That’s all we’ve got to show for the investigation so far,’ Sparkes said.

‘Early days, Boss,’ Matthews murmured.