The Widow

Chapter 25

Thursday, 12 July 2007

The Widow

OF COURSE, THE POLICE don’t give up. They’ve got their teeth into Glen with his van, his pretend child porn and his ‘misconduct’. They’ll never let him go. They’ll try and prosecute him for those pictures if nothing else, his solicitor says.

The visits and phone calls from DI Sparkes have become part of our lives. The police are building a case and we watch from the sidelines.

I say to Glen that he should just tell the police about the ‘private job’ and where he was that day, but he insists it would make things worse. ‘They’ll say we’ve lied to them about everything, Jeanie.’

I’m terrified I’ll do something to make things worse, say the wrong thing. But in the end, it was Glen who let the side down, not me.

The police came to get him for further questioning today. They took him back to Southampton. When they left, he kissed me on the cheek and told me not to worry. ‘You know, it’ll be all right,’ he said to me and I nodded. And I waited.

The police collected more of Glen’s things. All the clothes and shoes they hadn’t taken before. They took things he’d only just bought. I tried to tell them, but they said they were taking everything. They even took my jacket by mistake. I’d hung it in his space in the wardrobe because my side was full.

The next day, Bob Sparkes came and asked me to go with him down to Southampton for questioning. He wouldn’t say anything in the car, just that he wanted me to help with the inquiry.

But when we got to the police station, he sat me in an interview room and read me my rights. Then he asked me if I had taken Bella. Had I helped Glen take Bella?

I couldn’t believe he would ask me that. I kept saying ‘No, of course not. And Glen didn’t take her,’ but he wasn’t listening properly. He was moving on to the next thing.

He pulled out this plastic bag like a conjuror and I couldn’t see anything in it at first, but at the bottom was a scrap of red paper.

‘We found this in your coat pocket, Mrs Taylor. It’s from a Skittles packet. Do you eat many Skittles?’

I didn’t know what he was talking about for a moment, but I remembered then. It must’ve been the bit of sweet packet I’d got from under the mat in the van.

He must’ve seen my face change and kept pushing me. Kept saying Bella’s name. I said I couldn’t remember, but he knew I could.

I told him in the end, to stop him asking me. I told him it might be a bit of paper I’d found in the van. Just a bit of rubbish, all fuzzy and dirty. I’d put it in my pocket to throw away later, but never did.

I said it was just a sweet paper, but Mr Sparkes said they’d found a cat hair stuck to it. A grey cat hair. Like from the cat in Bella’s garden. I said that didn’t prove anything. The hair could have come from anywhere. But I had to make a statement.

I hoped they wouldn’t say anything to Glen before I got a chance to explain. I’d tell him when we both got home that they had made me tell them. That it didn’t matter. But I didn’t get the opportunity. Glen didn’t come home.

Seems he went on looking for porn on the internet. I couldn’t believe he’d be so stupid, when Tom Payne, Glen’s lawyer, told me. He was always the clever one in the family.

The police had taken his computer, of course, but he bought himself a cheap little laptop and a Wi-Fi router – ‘for work, Jeanie’ – and sat in the spare room while he went into sex chat rooms or whatever they’re called.

It was all very clever – they got some police officer to pretend to be a young woman on the internet and chat him up. She called herself Goldilocks. Who would fall for that? Well, Glen, apparently.

It wasn’t just chatting up, either. Tom wanted to prepare me for what might be in the papers, so he told me that eventually Goldilocks had cybersex with Glen. It’s sex without touching, Glen said when he tried to explain when I visited him the first time. ‘It’s just words, Jeanie. Written-down words. We didn’t speak or even see each other. It was like it was happening in my head. Just a fantasy. You do see, don’t you? I’m under such a lot of stress with all these accusations. I can’t help myself.’

I try to see. I really do. It’s an addiction, I keep saying to myself. Not his fault. I focus on the real villains here. Glen and I are very angry about what the police did.

I couldn’t believe someone would do that as part of their job. Like a prostitute. That’s what Glen said, too. Before he found out Goldilocks was a man. That was hard for him to accept – he thought the police were just saying it to make him look like he was gay or something. I said nothing – I couldn’t get my head round cybersex, let alone worry about who he was doing it with. Anyway, it was hardly his biggest problem.

He’d said too much to Goldilocks. Glen told me he’d told ‘her’ he knew something about a famous police case to impress her. ‘She’ practically told him to say it.

This time, Bob Sparkes charged Glen with Bella’s kidnap. They said he’d taken her and killed her. But they didn’t charge him with murder. Tom Payne said they were waiting until they had a body. I hated him talking about Bella like that, but I didn’t say anything.

I went home alone and then the press came back.

I’m not a big newspaper reader, really. I prefer magazines. I like the real-life stories – you know, the woman who fostered one hundred kids, the woman who refused cancer treatment to save her baby, the woman who had a baby for her sister. The papers have always been more Glen’s department. He likes the Mail – he can do the crossword on the back page and it’s the sort of paper his former boss at the bank read. ‘Gives us something in common, Jeanie’, he said once.

But now the papers and the telly – and even the radio – are about us. Glen is big news and the reporters have started knocking on the door again. I found out they call it ‘doorstepping’ and some of them actually sleep in their cars outside all night to try and catch a word with me.

I sit upstairs in our bedroom at the front, peeking out from behind the curtain, watching them. They all do the same thing. It’s quite funny, really. They drive past first, checking out the house and who’s already outside. Then they park and stroll back to the gate, a notebook in their hand. The others jump out of their cars to cut the new one off before he or she can get to the door. Like a pack of animals, sniffing round the new arrival.

After a few days, they’re all friends – sending one to get coffees and bacon sandwiches from the café at the bottom of the hill. ‘Sugar? Who wants sauce on their sarnie?’ The café must be making a fortune. I notice the reporters keep to one group and the photographers to another. Wonder why they don’t mix. You can tell them apart because the photographers dress differently – trendier, in scruffy jackets and baseball caps. Most of them look like they haven’t shaved for days – the men, I mean. The women photographers dress like men, too. In chinos and baggy shirts. And the photographers are so loud. I feel a bit sorry for the neighbours at first, having to listen to them laughing and carrying on. But then they start bringing out trays of drinks, standing and chatting to them and letting them use their loos. It’s a bit of a street party for them, I think.

The reporters are quieter. They spend most of their time on their phones or sitting listening to the radio news in their cars. Lots are young blokes in their first suits.

But after a few days, when I won’t talk, the press send the big guns. Big beery men and women with sharp faces and smart coats. They roll up in their expensive, shiny cars and step out like royalty. Even the photographers stop messing about for some of them. One man who looks like he’s stepped out of a shop window parts the crowd and walks up the path. He bangs on the door and calls out, ‘Mrs Taylor, what is it like to have a child murderer as a husband?’ I sit there on the bed, burning with shame. It feels like everyone can see me even though they can’t. Exposed.

Anyway, he isn’t the first to ask me that. One reporter shouted it at me after Glen was rearrested, as I was walking down to the shops. He just appeared, must’ve followed me away from the other journalists. He was trying to make me angry, to get me to say something, anything, so he’d have ‘an interview’ with the wife, but I wasn’t falling for that. Glen and I’d discussed it.

‘Jeanie, just stay quiet,’ he said when he rang me from the police station. ‘Don’t let them get to you. Don’t let anything show. You don’t have to talk to them. They are scum. They can’t write about nothing.’ But of course they did. The stuff that came out was awful.

Other women said they’d had cybersex with him on the internet and were queuing up to sell their stories. I couldn’t believe any of it was true. Apparently, he was called BigBear and other ridiculous names in the chat rooms. I would look at him sometimes on my prison visits and try to imagine calling him BigBear. It made me feel sick.

And there was more stuff about his ‘hobby’ – the pictures he bought on the net. According to ‘informed sources’ in one of the papers, he’d used a credit card to buy them, and when the police did a big swoop on paedophiles, tracking them through their card details, he panicked. I expect that’s why he got me to report his card missing, but how do papers get information like that? I thought about asking one of the reporters, but I can’t without saying more than I should.

When I asked Glen about it at our next visit, he denied it all. ‘They’re just making it up, love. The press make it all up. You know they do,’ he said, holding my hand. ‘I love you,’ he said. I didn’t say anything.

I didn’t say anything to the press either. I went to different supermarkets so they couldn’t find me and started wearing hats that hid my face a bit so other people wouldn’t recognize me. Like Madonna, Lisa would’ve said if she was still my friend. But she wasn’t. No one wanted to know us now. They just wanted to know about us.