The Widow

Chapter 29

Monday, 21 July 2008

The Detective

AFTER THE TRIAL collapsed, there was a different kind of sadness for Bob Sparkes. And anger. Mostly directed at himself. He’d allowed himself to be seduced into this disastrous strategy.

What had he been thinking? He’d heard one of the senior officers describe him as a ‘glory hunter’ as he passed an open door on the top floor and he’d cringed. He thought he’d been thinking of Bella, but perhaps it was all about him.

‘Anyway, it’s not glory I’m covered in,’ he told himself.

The report that finally emerged, five months after the end of the trial, was written in the sanitized language of such documents, concluding that the decision to use an undercover officer to obtain evidence against the suspect was ‘taken on the basis of expert opinion and extensive consultation with senior officers, but the strategy was ultimately flawed due to the lack of proper supervision of an inexperienced officer.’

‘We screwed up’ was the bottom line, Sparkes told Eileen on the phone after a terse meeting with his chief constable.

The next day, he was named and shamed along with his bosses in the papers as one of the ‘Top Cops’ who had ‘wrecked’ the Bella case. There were calls from politicians and punters for ‘heads to roll’; Sparkes kept his head down as the clichés were trotted out and tried to prepare himself for life after coppering.

Eileen seemed almost pleased at the thought of him leaving the force; she suggested security work, something corporate. She means something clean, he thought. His kids were brilliant, ringing most days to urge him on and make him smile with bits of their news, but he couldn’t look much beyond the end of each day.

He started running again, remembering the release it had given him as a young father, letting the rhythm of his pounding feet fill his mind for at least an hour. But he returned home grey-faced and sweating, his fifty-year-old knees killing him. Eileen said he had to stop; it was making him ill. That and everything else.

In the end, his disciplinary hearing was a civilized affair with questions posed politely but firmly. They already knew all the answers, but procedures had to be followed. He was put on gardening leave while he waited for the outcome and was still in his pyjamas when he took the call from his union representative; the force had decided to place the blame higher up and he would have a reprimand on his record but he wouldn’t be sacked. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Eileen cried and hugged him hard. ‘Oh Bob, it’s all over,’ she said. ‘Thank God they saw sense.’

The next day he went back to work, assigned different duties.

’A fresh start for us all,’ DCI Chloe Wellington, newly promoted to fill the disgraced Brakespeare’s chair, told him as part of some sort of re-education interview. ‘I know it is tempting, but leave Glen Taylor to someone else. You can’t go back to it, not after all this publicity. It would look like victimization and any new lines would be tainted by that.’

And Sparkes nodded, talking convincingly about the new cases on his desk, budgets, rosters and a bit of office gossip. But as he walked back to his office, Glen Taylor was top of his list; he was the only name on his list.

Matthews was waiting for him and they closed the door to talk tactics.

‘They’ll be watching us, Boss, to make sure we don’t go anywhere near him. They’ve brought in a senior detective from Basingstoke to review and plan the next steps for the Bella Elliott case – a woman, but a good bloke. Jude Downing. Do you know her?’

DI Jude Downing tapped on Sparkes’ door that afternoon and suggested a coffee. Slim and red-haired, she sat opposite him in a café down the road – ‘Canteen is a bit of a bear pit,’ she said. ‘Let’s get a latte,’ – and waited.

‘He’s still out there, Jude,’ Sparkes said finally.

‘What about Bella?’

‘I don’t know, Jude. I’m haunted by her.’

‘Does that mean she’s dead?’ she asked and he didn’t know how to answer. When he was thinking like a copper, he knew she was dead. But he could not let her go.

Dawn was still interviewed on slow news days, her childlike face staring accusingly out of the pages. He had continued to ring her every week or so. ‘No news, Dawn, just checking in,’ he would say. ‘How are things?’ and she would tell him. She had met a man she liked through the Find Bella campaign and was managing to get through the days.

‘There are three of us in this marriage,’ Eileen said once and laughed that dry, fake laugh she reserved for punishing him. He hadn’t risen to it, but he stopped mentioning the case at home and promised to finish painting their bedroom.

Jude Downing told him she was looking at every piece of evidence to see if anything had been missed. ‘We’ve all been there, Bob. You can get so close to a case like this, you can’t see clearly any more. It’s not a criticism, just how it is.’

Sparkes stared into the froth on his coffee. They had dusted a chocolate heart on it. ‘You’re right, Jude. Fresh eyes needed, but I can help you.’

‘Best if you step back for the moment, Bob. No offence, but we need to start from the beginning again and follow our own leads.’

‘OK. Thanks for the coffee. Better get back.’

Eileen listened patiently later as she poured him a beer and he vented his rage. ‘Let her get on with it, love. You are giving yourself an ulcer. Do the breathing exercises the doctor gave you.’ He sipped his beer and practised the feeling of letting things go, but it just felt like letting things slip away from him.

He tried to immerse himself in his new cases but it was surface activity. A month later, Ian Matthews announced his move to another force. ‘Needed a change, Bob,’ he said. ‘We all do.’

Ian Matthews’ farewell bash was a classic. Speeches from the grown-ups, then a drink-fuelled orgy of hideous anecdotes and maudlin reminiscences about crimes solved. ‘End of an era, Ian,’ Sparkes told him as he released himself from the sergeant’s beery hug. ‘You’ve been brilliant.’

He was the last man standing, he told himself. Apart from Glen Taylor.

His new sergeant arrived, a thirty-five-year-old, frighteningly clever girl – ‘Woman, Bob,’ Eileen had corrected him. ‘Girls have pigtails.’

She didn’t have pigtails. She wore her glossy brown hair up in a tight bun, the tension on the fine hairs at her temples causing her skin to pucker. She was a sturdy young woman with a degree and a career path apparently tattooed on the inside of her eyelids.

DS Zara Salmond – Mum must have a thing about royalty, he’d thought – had transferred from Vice and was there to make his life easier, she said, and began.

Cases ebbed and flowed through his door – a teenage drug death, a run of high-end robberies, a nightclub stabbing – and he waded through them, but nothing could wrest his attention from the man who shared his office.

Glen Taylor, grinning like a monkey outside the Old Bailey, glimmered on the periphery of his day. ‘He’s here somewhere,’ became his mantra as he quietly pored over every police report from the day Bella disappeared, wearing away the letters on his keyboard.

Sparkes heard on the canteen grapevine when they hauled Lee Chambers back in to have another look at him. He’d done his three months for the indecent exposure, lost his job and had to move, but, apparently, had lost none of his front.

Chambers apparently wriggled in his chair, protesting his innocence, but told them more about his trade in porn, including his opening hours and regular haunts, in return for immunity from further prosecution.

‘One to watch’ was the verdict from the new team, but they didn’t believe he was their bloke. They spat him back out, but his information gave the service-station search a new focus and the CCTV finally yielded some of Chambers’ customers. Sparkes waited to hear if Glen Taylor was among them. ‘No sign, Sir,’ Salmond told him. ‘But they’re still looking.’

And on they went.

It was fascinating, like watching a dramatization of his investigation with actors playing the detectives. ‘Like sitting in the stalls,’ he told Kate when she called.

‘Who’s playing you? Robert de Niro? Oh, no, I forgot, Helen Mirren.’ She laughed.

But perching on the edge of his seat as a member of the audience instead of being in the bubble of the investigation gave him a view he’d never had before. He could survey the hunt, Godlike, and that was when he began to notice the cracks and false starts.

‘We focused on Taylor too quickly,’ he told DS Salmond. It had cost him a lot to admit it to himself, but it had to be done. ‘Let’s look at the day Bella disappeared again. Quietly.’

Secretly, they started to rebuild 2 October 2006 from the moment the child woke, using the inside surfaces of a hastily emptied metal cabinet in the corner of Sparkes’ office to paste up their montage. ‘Looks like an art project,’ Salmond joked. ‘Just need a bit of sticky-backed plastic and we’ll get a Blue Peter badge.’

She’d wanted to do the timeline on the computer, but Sparkes was worried it would be clocked. ‘This way, we can get rid of it and leave no trace, if we have to.’

He hadn’t been sure when Salmond asked to help him. She didn’t tease him like Matthews did – he missed it, the intimacy and release of a shared joke, but it felt inappropriate with a woman. Flirtatious rather than comradely. Anyway, he didn’t miss Matthews’ disgusting ketchup-slathered sausage sandwiches and the glimpses of his belly as his shirt came adrift.

DS Salmond was very bright, but Sparkes didn’t really know her or whether he could trust her. He’d have to. He needed her unemotional clear-sightedness to stop him veering off into the undergrowth again.

Bella woke at 7.15, according to Dawn. A bit later than usual, but she was late to bed the night before. ‘Why late to bed?’ Salmond asked. They scrolled through Dawn’s statements.

‘They went to McDonald’s and had to wait for the bus home,’ Sparkes said.

‘Why? Was it a treat?’ asked Salmond. ‘Not her birthday – that’s in April. I thought Dawn was permanently short of money? About five hundred quid owing on her credit card and the neighbour said she rarely went out.’

‘We didn’t ask, according to this paperwork,’ Sparkes said. It went on Salmond’s list. She’s a girl who likes a list, Sparkes thought. Woman. Sorry.

‘And then sweets at the newsagent’s. More treats. Wonder what was happening in their lives?’

Salmond wrote SMARTIES on a new piece of paper and pasted it up in the cabinet.

They sat on opposite sides of his desk with Salmond in the boss’s chair. Between them was a printout of the master file, acquired by Matthews as a parting gift. Sparkes began to feel he was under interrogation, but his new sergeant was teasing out the missed questions and he focused.

‘Did she have a new bloke in her life? What about this Matt that got her pregnant? Did we ever talk to him?’

The holes in the investigation began to gape at Sparkes accusingly.

‘Let’s do that now,’ Salmond said quickly, seeing the gloom descending on her boss.

Bella’s birth certificate had no father’s name – as an unmarried mother, Dawn had no right to record a father unless he was present at the registration – but she’d told the police his name was Matt White and he lived in the Birmingham area and said he worked for a drugs company. ‘He could get his hands on Viagra whenever he wanted,’ she told Sparkes.

An initial search had failed to find a Matthew White in Birmingham who fitted the bill and then Taylor had entered the picture and everyone else was shoved into a drawer.

‘Matt might be a nickname. And I wonder if he gave her a false name? Married men often do – stops the new girlfriend getting in touch unexpectedly, especially after it’s over,’ Salmond mused.

She fitted in her new inquiries around her other work with a calm efficiency that left Sparkes feeling soothed and slightly inadequate. She had a way of swishing into and out of his office in minutes with the right document, question answered and action agreed, barely rippling the surface of his concentration.

He began to believe they would find a new lead. But this new feeling of hope distracted him, made him reckless and relaxed his guard. Discovery of his parallel investigation was probably inevitable.

He’d left the door of the cabinet propped open while he made a call when DI Downing put her head round his door without knocking. Her invitation to share a sandwich never came. She found herself confronted with the alternative Bella Elliott case, pasted up like something from a serial killer’s lair.

‘Jude, it’s just something left over from the original case,’ he said, seeing the hardening of his colleague’s eyes. It sounded feeble even to him and there was nothing to be done to head off the disaster.

There was sympathy rather than a tirade and that was worse somehow.

‘You need some time off, Bob,’ Chief Superintendent Parker told him firmly at their formal interview the following day. ‘And some help. We would recommend counselling. We’ve some excellent people.’

Sparkes tried not to laugh. He took the printed sheet of names and two weeks’ leave, calling Salmond from his car to tell her.

‘Don’t go near the case again, Salmond. They know you’re not going barmy and won’t be so gentle next time. We have to leave it with the new team.’

‘Understood,’ she said curtly.

She was obviously in with someone senior, he thought. ‘Call me when you can talk,’ he said.