The Widow

Chapter 36

Friday, 18 December 2009

The Detective

SPARKES LISTENED IN silence as Kate told her story, casually noting the address and names but unable to comment or question. Beside him, his new boss worked on, crunching numbers of street-robbery victims by gender, age and race.

‘OK,’ he said when Kate drew a breath. ‘Bit busy at the moment. Can you send me the document you mentioned? Perhaps we could meet tomorrow?’

Kate understood the professional code. ‘Ten a.m. outside the pub at the end of the road, Bob. I’m emailing you the photo I took now.’

He returned to his computer screen, miming regret for the interruption to his colleague, and waited until they had finished their work to look at his phone.

Sparkes felt sick as he looked at the membership card. Taylor’s last visit was only three weeks earlier.

He called Zara Salmond as he walked to the tube station.

‘Sir? How are you doing?’

‘Fine, Salmond. We need to go back to the case.’ He didn’t need to say which. ‘We’ve got to look at every detail again to find a way to nail him.

‘Right. OK. Can you tell me why?’

He could imagine the look on his sergeant’s face.

‘Difficult at the moment, Salmond, but I’ve had information that he’s back on the porn trail again. Can’t say more than that, but I’ll be in touch when I’ve got more.’

Salmond sighed. He could hear her thought bubble Not again, and couldn’t blame her.

‘I’m off for Christmas, Sir. On leave. But back in on 2 January. Can it wait until then?’

‘Yes. Sorry to ring out of the blue, Salmond. And Happy Christmas.’

He put his phone in his overcoat pocket and trudged down the steps, his stomach knotted.

The force had scaled back the Bella Elliott case, after Downing’s lengthy review found no new leads, no van and no further suspects. DI Jude Downing had tidied her desk and gone back to her real job, and the Hampshire Police Force put out a press release saying that the investigation would continue. In reality, this meant leaving it to tick over with a team of two to check out the now occasional calls about possible sightings and pass them on. Nobody was saying it in public, but the trail had gone dead.

Even the appetite for Dawn Elliott’s emotional campaign was beginning to wane. There were only so many ways you could say, ‘I want my daughter back,’ Sparkes supposed. And the Herald had gone very quiet on the subject after its initial firestorm of publicity.

And when Sparkes went, it had removed the daily impetus for their hunt. DCI Wellington had also made sure Salmond was too busy with other work to take it up on her own initiative. She’d heard when Sparkes was brought back from sick leave, but he’d still not set foot in the office. But his call before Christmas had stirred up all sorts of feelings.

The day she went back to work, she pulled up her own Bella case file, filled with all the loose ends, and made a list while she waited for his call.

Leafing through, she found the query on Matt White. Unfinished business. She’d put it under ‘Priorities’ originally, but had been sidetracked by Sparkes’ latest idea. Not this time. She would chase it down. She went online to search the electoral register for the name. Dozens of Matthew Whites, but none matching Dawn’s information about age, marital status and area.

She missed Sparkes’ dry humour and determination more than she’d admit to her colleagues – ‘Can’t get sentimental if I’m to get anywhere in the police,’ she’d told him.

She needed to find Mr White’s true identity and went back to the basic information about Dawn’s relationship with him. It had taken place largely in the Tropicana nightclub and, once, in a hotel room.

‘Where would he have had to use his real name, Zara?’ she said out loud. ‘When he used his credit card,’ she finally answered. ‘I bet he paid by card at the hotel where he took Dawn.’

The hotel was part of a chain and Salmond mentally crossed her fingers as she dialled its number to ask if they still had records for the dates when Dawn was seeing Matt White.

Five days later, Salmond had another list. The hotel manager was a woman in the same efficient mould as the detective and had emailed the relevant data.

‘Matt White is here, Sir,’ she said confidently to Sparkes in a brief phone call and didn’t speak to anyone for the rest of the day.

Sparkes put down his phone and allowed himself a moment to examine the possibilities. His new boss was an impatient man and he’d a paper to finish on the impact of ethnicity and gender on community policing efficiency. Whatever that meant.

The last five months had been surreal.

As instructed by his superior officer and advised by his union rep, he’d contacted one of the counsellors on the list and spent sixty gruelling minutes with an overweight and under-qualified woman who was all about tackling demons. ‘They are sitting on your shoulder, Bob. Can you feel them?’ she said earnestly, sounding more like a psychic on Blackpool Pier than a professional. He listened to her politely but decided she had more demons than he did and never went back. Eileen would have to do.

His leave was extended piecemeal and as he waited to be recalled to duty, he toyed with the idea of signing up for an Open University course in Psychology; he printed out the reading list and began his studies quietly in his dining room.

When the recall finally came, he was to be sent zigzagging across a series of short-term assignments to other forces, plugging gaps and writing reports, while Hampshire worked out what to do with him. He was still seen as damaged goods as far as the Murder Investigation Unit was concerned, but he wasn’t ready to retire on a pension as they had hoped. He couldn’t leave yet. Things still to do.

It took Salmond a week to work through the dates and names, listing and relisting as she checked the electoral register, police computer records and social media to track down the guests. She loved this sort of work – the chase through data, knowing that if the information was there, she would find it and experience the moment of triumph when the name emerged.

It was a Thursday afternoon when she found him. Mr Matthew Evans, a married man living with his wife Shan in Walsall, and in Southampton on Dawn’s dates. Right age, right job.

She immediately went back to the helpful hotel manager to ask her to put the name back through their system to see if he’d been in the city on the day Bella went missing. ‘No, no Matthew Evans since December 2005. He stayed one night in a deluxe double and had room service,’ the manager reported.

‘Brilliant, thanks,’ she said, already texting Sparkes with the news. She took a breath and walked up the stairs to DCI Wellington’s office to tell her about the new lead. She’d barely registered Zara before, except as part of the Bob Sparkes problem, but that was about to change. Zara Salmond would be on the map.

But if she’d expected a ticker-tape parade, she was mistaken. Wellington listened carefully, muttered, ‘Good work, Sergeant. Write your report and get it to me immediately. And let’s send West Midlands round to see this Evans.’

Salmond walked back to her office, her disappointed feet heavy on the stairs.