The Widow

Chapter 44

Monday, 1 February 2010

The Detective

WHILE FRY AND his team worked the data, Sparkes went back to the van. Taylor had regular routes to the South Coast and Sparkes started to match other dates and times on the delivery firm’s records with Taylor’s statements, traffic reports and motorway cameras. It was the second time through and should have been tedious, but he had new energy now.

He’d made official requests to the Met, Surrey, Sussex and Kent forces, which controlled the patchwork of motorways and roads potentially used by his suspect, and each had promised to look again for Taylor’s number plate on the dates around the kidnap. Now he had to wait.

But when the first call came, it was not about Taylor.

It was from one of his own force’s motorway patrol cars. ‘DI Sparkes? Sorry to disturb you, but we’ve picked up a Michael Doonan and a Lee Chambers at Fleet Services. Both names are flagged up as being of interest to the Bella Elliott case. Are they known to you?’

Sparkes swallowed hard. ‘Both. Bloody hell, we might have expected Chambers to resurface somewhere. But Mike Doonan? Are you sure? We understood he was too disabled to leave his flat.’

‘Well, he’s managed to get to the Services to buy some revolting pictures, Sir. We’ve arrested five men for dealing in illegal pornographic images.’

‘Where are you taking them?’

‘Your gaff. We’ll be there in about thirty minutes.’

Sparkes sat at his desk, trying to process the information and its implications. Doonan, not Taylor? Stricken by the sickening thought that he had been chasing the wrong man for more than three years, he replayed the interview at Doonan’s flat, re-evaluating every word the driver had uttered. What had he missed?

Had he missed Bella?

The minutes ticked by on the wall clock as he wrestled with the fear of knowing and the burning need to know, until a voice outside his door brought him out of his paralysis. He jumped up and ran down the stairs to the Forensics lab.

‘Salmond, Fry, we’ve got Mike Doonan being brought in on extreme pornography charges. He was buying from Lee Chambers’ car boot sale at Fleet Services.’

The two officers gaped at him.

‘What? The driver crippled with a bad back?’ Salmond said.

‘Not as immobilized as he says, apparently,’ Sparkes said, all business now. ‘Let’s pull up the CCTV from Fleet Services on the day Bella was taken.’

Everyone looked grave as the technicians began the online search, and the mounting tension chased Sparkes into the corridor. He was looking for Ian Matthews’ number when Salmond put her head round the door. ‘You’d better come and look, Sir.’

Sparkes sat in front of the grainy image on the screen.

‘It’s him. He’s there at the boot of Chambers’ car, picking through the magazines. Bending over. Back obviously feeling a lot better,’ Salmond said.

‘Date, Salmond? Was he there on the day Bella went?’

Zara Salmond paused. ‘Yes, it’s the day she was taken.’ Sparkes almost rose out of his chair, but his sergeant put up a warning hand. ‘But it rules him out of our investigation.’

‘What do you mean? We’ve got Doonan in the area of the abduction, lying to us about his movements and the extent of his disability and buying extreme pornography on the route home.’

‘Yes, but he was recorded on film doing a deal with Chambers while Bella was being snatched. 15.02. The times don’t add up – he can’t have taken her.’

Sparkes closed his eyes, hoping the relief didn’t show on his face.

‘OK, good work to pin it down. On we go,’ he said without raising his eyelids.

Back in the privacy of his office, he slammed his fist down on his desk, then went for a walk outside to clear his head.

When he returned, he went back to Day One and his gut feelings about the case. They – he – had always treated Bella’s abduction as an opportunistic crime. The kidnapper saw the child and lifted her. Nothing else had made sense. No link had been found between Dawn and Taylor and, once Stan Spencer’s invented long-haired man had been discounted, there had been no reports of anyone hanging around the street or acting suspiciously in the area before Bella vanished. No flashers or sexual crimes reported.

And there had been no real pattern of behaviour for a predator to follow. The child went to and from nursery with Dawn, but not every day, and she only played outside occasionally. If someone had planned to take her, they would’ve gone in at night when they knew where she was at a given time. No one would have sat in a residential street on the off-chance that she might come out to play. He would’ve been spotted.

The police case was that the child had been taken in a twenty-five-minute, random window of opportunity. At the time, on the evidence in front of them, they’d been right to discount a planned kidnap.

But, in the cold light of day, three and a half years later, Sparkes thought that maybe they’d been too quick to rule it out and he suddenly wanted to revisit that possibility.

‘I’m going down to the control room,’ he told Salmond. ‘To pull in a favour.’

Russell Lynes, his closest friend in the force – a bloke he’d joined up with – was on duty.

‘Hello, Russ, fancy a coffee?’

They sat in the canteen, stirring the brown liquid in front of them with little intention of drinking it.

‘How are you holding up, Bob?’

‘All right. Being back to some real work makes a big difference. And this new lead’s giving me something to concentrate on.’

‘Hmm. It made you ill last time, Bob. Just be careful.’

‘I will. I wasn’t ill, Russ. Just tired. Look, I want to look at one thing I may have missed first time.’

‘You’re the boss. Anyway, why’re you down here pulling favours? Get someone from the team to look at it.’

‘They’ve got enough to do and they might not get to it for weeks. If you give me a quiet hand, I can rule it in or out in a couple of days.’

‘OK, what sort of quiet hand?’ Russell Lynes asked, pushing the coffee away, slopping it on to the table.

‘Thanks, mate. I knew I could count on you.’

The two men went and sat in Sparkes’ office with the spreadsheet of Taylor’s deliveries and plotted his visits to Southampton and the surrounding towns. ‘We looked at every frame of CCTV footage in the area round Dawn Elliott’s address on the day of the snatch,’ Sparkes said. ‘But the only time we saw Taylor’s van was at the delivery address in Winchester and at the junction of the M3 and M25. I wore my eyes out looking, but there was nothing to place his van at the scene.’

He could recall vividly the sense of expectation every time they loaded a new piece of footage, and the bitter disappointment when it ended without a glimpse of a blue van.

‘I want to look at other dates,’ he said. ‘The dates Taylor had other deliveries in Hampshire. Remind me, where are the cameras in the Manor Road area?’

Lynes highlighted the locations on the maps in neon green – a petrol station a couple of streets away had one on the forecourt for absconders; a camera to catch jumpers at the traffic lights on the big junction; and some of the shops, including the newsagents, had installed cheap, tinny versions to discourage shoplifters.

‘And Bella’s nursery school has got a camera outside, but she wasn’t at nursery that day. We looked at footage from all of these cameras but there was nothing of interest.’

‘Well, let’s have a look again. We must have missed something.’

Four days later, Sparkes’ phone rang and he knew as soon as he heard Lynes’ voice that he’d found that something. ‘I’m on my way,’ he said.

‘There it is,’ Lynes said, pointing at the vehicle crossing the frame. Sparkes squinted at the screen, trying to retune his eyes to the film’s grainy resolution.

It was there. The van was there. The two men looked at each other triumphantly and then back at the screen to enjoy the moment again.

‘Are we sure it’s him?’ Sparkes asked.

‘It matches the date and time of a delivery to Fareham on his work sheets and Forensics have got a partial number plate that includes three letters that match Taylor’s vehicle.’

Lynes pushed the Play button. ‘Now watch.’

The van stopped just within the camera’s range, pointing away from the nursery school. As if on cue, Dawn and Bella appeared at the school gate at the back of the throng of children and parents, the mother fussing with her daughter’s coat zip and the child clutching a huge piece of paper. The pair walked past the van and round the corner, safe in their routine. Within seconds, the van moved off in the same direction.

Sparkes knew he was watching the moment Glen Taylor had made his decision and his eyes filled with tears. He muttered that he was going to get a notepad and went to his office for a moment’s privacy. ‘We’re so close,’ he told himself. ‘Now don’t mess it up. No rushing; get everything in order.’

He looked at Taylor grinning at him from the wall and grinned back. ‘I hope you haven’t booked a holiday, Glen.’

Back in the lab, Lynes was writing on a whiteboard. ‘This film was taken on Thursday, 28 September, four days before Bella was taken,’ he said.

Sparkes closed his eyes before trusting himself to speak. ‘He planned it, Russ. This wasn’t some chance snatch. He was watching. Any other sightings of the van that day?’

‘At the services at Hook, filling up on the way home. Timeline fits.’

‘Let’s get the work done on the images and get as much detail as we can. Then I’m going to knock on Glen Taylor’s door,’ Sparkes said.

The two men sat back down at the monitor as a technician wheeled back and forth over the van images, zooming in on the windscreen.

‘It’s blurred to buggery but we’re pretty confident it is a white male with short dark hair, no glasses and no facial hair,’ the technician told them.

The face at the windscreen hovered into sight. A white oval with dark patches for eyes.