The Widow

Chapter 12

Saturday, 7 April 2007

The Detective

IT TOOK ANOTHER five months of donkey work, tracing every blue van in the country, for a breakthrough to come.

It was Easter Saturday when the incident room took a call from a delivery firm in South London. One of their vehicles, a blue van, had been making drops on the south coast the day Bella disappeared.

An old hand answered the call and then went straight through to Sparkes. ‘Think this is one for you, Sir,’ he said, putting the information sheet down on the desk.

Sparkes rang Qwik Delivery back immediately to confirm the details. The manager, Alan Johnstone, started by apologizing for wasting police time but said he’d only recently joined the company and his wife had made him call in.

‘She talks about the Bella case all the time. And when I talked about the cost of re-spraying the vans the other day, she said to me, “What colour were they before?” She nearly shouted the house down when I said they were originally blue. They’re silver now. Anyway, she asked if they’d been checked by the police. She kept on and on at me, so I went through the paperwork and found that one was in Hampshire. Didn’t go to Southampton, so that’s probably why the old management didn’t contact you at the time – they probably didn’t think it was worth bothering you with. Sorry, but my wife made me promise.’

‘Don’t you worry, Mr Johnstone. No information is a waste of our time,’ Sparkes coaxed, his fingers crossed. ‘We’re very grateful that you took the time to call. Now, tell me about the van, the driver and the journey it took.’

‘The driver was Mike Doonan, a regular of ours. Well, he’s left now – wasn’t due to retire for another couple of years but he had a terrible back problem and could hardly walk, let alone drive and lug parcels about. Anyway, Mike had drops in Portsmouth and Winchester on the second of October. Spare parts for a chain of garages.’

Sparkes was scribbling it all down, phone under his chin, and entering the name and details into his computer with his left hand. The driver was within a twenty-mile radius of Manor Road to make his drops and, potentially, fitted the timeframe.

‘Mike left the depot just before lunchtime – it’s a one-and-a-half to two-hour journey if the M25 doesn’t come to a standstill,’ Mr Johnstone said.

‘What time did he deliver the parcel?’ Sparkes asked.

‘Hold on, I’ll have to call you back when I’ve got the paperwork in front of me.’

As he hung up, Sparkes shouted, ‘Matthews. In here now!’ and handed over the computer search to his sergeant as his phone rang again.

‘He dropped first at 2.05,’ Johnstone said. ‘Signed for and everything. The second drop time doesn’t seem to figure on this sheet. Not sure why. Anyway, they didn’t see him come back, according to this. The office staff clock off at five o’ clock and, according to this, the van was left on the forecourt, clean and hoovered out for the next day’s work.’

‘OK, that’s great. We’ll need to talk to him, just in case. He might’ve seen something helpful to us. Where does he live, your driver?’ Sparkes asked, fighting to quell a note of excitement in his voice. He wrote down an address in south-east London on his notepad. ‘You’ve been very helpful, Mr Johnstone. Thanks very much for phoning in.’ He ended the call.

An hour later, he and Matthews were on their way up the M3.

At first glance, the driver’s profile on the police computer hadn’t contained anything to make their pulses race. Mike Doonan was in his late fifties, lived alone, had been a driver for years and was reluctant to pay his parking fines. But Matthews’ scan of the police database had pulled him up as ‘of interest’ to the boys on the Operation Gold team. ‘Of interest’ meant there was a possible link to child-sex-abuse websites. The Operation Gold team was working its way through a list of hundreds of men in the UK whose credit cards appeared to have been used to visit specific sites. They were concentrating on those with access to kiddies first – the teachers, social workers, care staff, scout leaders – then moving on to the rest. They hadn’t reached Doonan (DOB 04/05/56; Profession: Driver; Status: Council tenant, divorced, three children) yet and at the current pace of the investigation were not due to knock on his door for another year.

‘I’ve got a good feeling about this,’ Sparkes told his sergeant. Everything was in place: Met officers had been discreetly positioned to watch the address but no one was to move until the Hampshire officers arrived.

The DI’s mobile buzzed in his hand.

‘We’re on. He’s at home,’ he said when he hung up.

Mike Doonan was marking his race card in the Daily Star when he heard his doorbell.

Swinging his bulk forward to rise out of his armchair, he groaned. The pain shot down his left leg and he had to stand for a moment to catch his breath.

‘Hang on, I’m coming,’ he shouted.

When he cracked open the door on to the walkway, it was not his Good Samaritan neighbour with his Saturday shop of lager and sliced bread, but two men in suits.

‘If you’re Mormons, I’ve already got enough ex-wives,’ he said and made to close the door.

‘Mr Michael Doonan?’ Sparkes said. ‘We’re police officers and we’d like to talk to you for a moment.’

‘Bloody hell, it isn’t about a parking ticket, is it? I thought I’d cleared them all. Come in, then.’

In the tiny sitting room of his council flat, he slowly lowered himself back into his chair. ‘Back’s buggered,’ he said, gasping from a spasm of pain.

At the mention of Bella Elliott, he stopped wincing.

‘Poor little thing. I was in Portsmouth that lunchtime on a job. Is that why you’re here? I told the boss he ought to ring in when the papers said about the dark-blue van – you know I drove one that colour – but he said he didn’t want coppers sniffing around his business. Not sure why – you’ll have to ask him. Anyway, I was nowhere near where the little girl lived. Just did my job and came back.’

Doonan continued to be helpful to a fault, offering his thoughts on the case and what should happen to ‘the bastard who took her’.

‘I’d do anything to get my hands on him. Mind you, couldn’t do much if I did, not in the state I’m in.’

‘How long have you been in this state, Mr Doonan?’ Sergeant Matthews asked.

‘Years. I’ll be in a wheelchair soon.’

The officers listened patiently, then broached his alleged interest in internet child pornography. He laughed when they talked about Operation Gold.

‘I haven’t even got a computer. Not my kind of thing. Bit of a technophobe, if I’m honest. Anyway, all these investigations are bollocks, aren’t they? Clever blokes in Russia stealing credit-card numbers and selling them on to paedos, it says in the papers. Don’t take my word for it. Have a look round, officers.’

Sparkes and Matthews took up his offer, pushing through clothes jammed into a wardrobe and lifting the mattress on Doonan’s bed to look in the storage bags underneath. ‘Lot of women’s clothes, Mr Doonan,’ Matthews observed.

‘Yes, bit of a cross-dresser when the mood takes me,’ Doonan laughed easily. Too easily, Sparkes thought. ‘Nah, the clothes belonged to my latest ex-wife. Haven’t got round to chucking them out.’

There was no sign of a child.

‘Do you have kids, Mr Doonan?’

‘Grown-ups now. Don’t really see much of them. They sided with their mothers.’

‘Right. We’ll take a quick look in the bathroom.’

Sparkes looked across at his sergeant, digging through the laundry basket and trying not to breathe.

‘Well, she’s not here, but I don’t like him,’ Matthews hissed through his teeth. ‘Over-friendly. Creepy.’

‘We need to talk to the Operation Gold boys again,’ Sparkes said, closing the bathroom cabinet. ‘And get his van in for Forensics to go over.’

When they filed back into the sitting room, Doonan smiled. ‘All done? Sorry about the washing. Expect you’ll be off to see Glen Taylor now?’

‘Who?’ Sparkes asked.

‘Taylor. One of the other drivers. He did a drop in the area the same day. Didn’t you know?’

Sparkes stopped putting on his coat and moved closer to Doonan. ‘No. Mr Johnstone didn’t mention a second driver when he called in. Are you sure there were two of you?’

‘Yeah, I was going to do both jobs but I had a doctor’s appointment and had to get back to town by four thirty. Glen said he’d do the second drop. Maybe he didn’t put it on the log. You should ask him.’

‘We will, Mr Doonan.’

Sparkes signalled to Matthews to go and call Johnstone to confirm the new information.

As the sergeant closed the front door behind him, Sparkes looked hard at Doonan. ‘Is this other driver a friend of yours?’

Doonan sniffed. ‘Not really. Bit of a mystery, if I’m honest. Clever boy. Deep, I’d say.’

Sparkes wrote it down. ‘Deep, how?’

‘Acted all friendly but you never knew what he was thinking. The blokes would be talking in the canteen and he’d just be listening in. Secretive, I suppose.’

Matthews knocked on the window, startling them both, and Sparkes put his notebook away and said goodbye without shaking hands.

‘We’ll see you again, Mr Doonan.’

The driver excused himself from getting up to let him out.

‘Slam the door behind you and come back any time,’ he called after him.

The officers got into the stinking lift and looked at each other as the doors closed.

‘Mr Johnstone says there’s nothing in the log about Glen Taylor doing any jobs that afternoon,’ said Matthews. ‘He’s looking for the delivery receipt to see whose signature is on it. I’ve got Taylor’s address.’

‘Let’s go there now,’ Sparkes said, reaching for his keys. ‘And check if Doonan turned up for his doctor’s appointment.’

In the flat, Mike Doonan waited for an hour and then staggered to the coat hooks in the hall and fished out a padlock key from his jacket pocket. He shook two of his special painkillers from a white plastic container and swallowed them with a gulp of cold coffee. He stood while they kicked in and then shuffled out to remove the pictures and magazines from his locker in the neighbour’s garage.

‘Fucking police,’ he grumbled as he braced himself against the lift wall. He’d burn the photos later. He’d been stupid to keep them really, but they were all that was left of his little hobby. The computer stuff had come to an end months ago when his spine had started to collapse and he couldn’t get to his special internet café any more.

‘Too crippled for porn,’ he laughed to himself – his painkillers making him lightheaded and giddy. ‘That’s tragic.’

He opened the door of the grey metal cabinet and pulled the battered-looking blue folder off the top shelf. The corners of the photocopies had become dog-eared with use and the colours were beginning to fade. He’d bought them from another driver, a bloke who drove cabs down on the coast and sold his stuff from the boot of his car. Doonan knew his pictures off by heart. The faces, the poses, the domesticity of the backgrounds – living rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms.

He hoped the detectives were giving Glen Taylor a good going-over. Serve him right, jumped-up little prick.

The older one had looked interested when he said Taylor was ‘deep’. He smiled.