The Widow

Chapter 7

Thursday, 5 October 2006

The Detective

BOB SPARKES YAWNED loudly, stretching his arms above his head and arching his aching back in his office chair. He tried not to look at the clock on the desk but it winked at him until he focused. It was 2 a.m. Day three of the hunt for Bella over and they were getting nowhere.

Dozens of calls about long-haired, scruffy men and other leads were being checked in an ever-widening circle from the locus, but it was meticulous, slow work.

He tried not to think about what was happening to Bella Elliott – or, if he was honest, what had already happened. He had to find her.

‘Where are you, Bella?’ he asked the photo on his desk. The child’s face was everywhere he looked – the incident room had a dozen photographs of her, smiling down at the deskbound detectives like a small religious icon giving a blessing to their work. The papers were full of pictures of ‘Baby Bella’.

Sparkes ran his hand over his head, registering the growing bald patch. ‘Come on, think!’ he told himself, leaning into the computer screen. He read once more through the statements and reports from the trawl of the local sex offenders, searching for the tiniest weakness in their individual stories, but he could see no real leads.

He scanned through the profiles one last time: pathetic creatures, most of them. Solitary blokes with body odour and bad teeth, living in a fantasy online universe and occasionally straying into the real world to try their luck.

Then there were the persistent offenders. His officers had gone to Paul Silver’s house – he’d abused his kids over the years and done time for it – but his wife – His third? he wondered. Or is it still Diane? – confirmed wearily that her old man was inside, doing five years for burglary. Diversifying, apparently, Bob Sparkes had said to his sergeant.

Naturally, there’d been sightings of Bella reported all over the country in the first forty-eight hours. Officers had rushed off to check and some calls had got his heart racing.

A woman from just outside Newark had rung to say a new neighbour had been playing in the garden with a child. ‘She’s a little blonde girl. I’ve never seen a child in the garden before. I thought she didn’t have kids,’ she said. Sparkes sent the local force round immediately and waited at his desk for the phone to ring.

‘It’s the neighbour’s niece, visiting from Scotland,’ the local DI had told him, as disappointed as he was. ‘Sorry. Maybe next time.’

Maybe. His problem was that most of the calls to the incident room were always going to be from chancers and attention-seekers, desperate to be part of the drama.

The bottom line was that the last sighting of Bella by anyone other than Dawn was at the newsagent’s shop down the road. The owner, a mouthy grandmother, remembered mother and child coming into the shop around eleven thirty. They were regulars. Dawn went in most days to buy cigarettes and this visit, Bella’s last, was recorded in the grainy stop-start images of the shop’s cheap security camera.

Here, little Bella holding her mother’s hand at the counter; cut to Bella, face blurred and indistinct as if she were already disappearing, with a paper bag in her hand; cut to shop door closing behind her.

Dawn’s mum had phoned the house after lunch – 2.17 according to her phone records – and told the police she’d heard her granddaughter shouting along to ‘Bob the Builder’ in the background and had asked to speak to her. Dawn had called Bella but apparently she had run off to fetch a toy.

The timeline of the next sixty-eight minutes was Dawn’s. It was vague, punctuated by her household chores. The detectives had got her to re-enact the cooking, washing up and folding of Bella’s clothes from the tumble drier to try and get a sense of the minutes that passed after Dawn said she saw Bella wander into the garden to play, just after three o’clock.

Margaret Emerson, who lived next door, had gone to fetch something from her car at 3.25 p.m. and was sure the front garden was empty then. ‘Bella always shouted “Peepo” to me. It was a bit of a game for her, poor little thing. She loved attention. Her mum wasn’t always interested in what she was doing,’ Mrs Emerson said carefully. ‘Bella used to play on her own a lot, carting her dolly round and chasing Timmy, the cat. You know what kids get up to.’

‘Did Bella cry a lot?’ Sparkes had asked.

The question had given Mrs Emerson pause for thought, but then she’d shaken her head and said briskly, ‘No, she was a happy little thing.’

The family doctor and health visitor agreed. ‘Lovely child… little poppet,’ they chorused. ‘Mum struggled a bit on her own – it’s hard bringing up a child alone, isn’t it?’ the doctor said and Sparkes nodded as if he understood. All of this was logged in the now bulging files of evidence and statements, proof of the effort his blokes were making, but he knew it was all surface chatter. They were making no progress.

The long-haired man was the key, he concluded, switching off his computer and carefully stacking the files on his desk before heading for the door and five hours’ sleep.

‘Maybe tomorrow we’ll find her,’ he whispered to his sleeping wife when he got home.

A week later, with no news, Kate Waters was on the phone.

‘Hi Bob, the editor has decided to offer a reward for any information that leads to Bella being found. He’s putting up twenty grand. Not too shabby.’

Sparkes groaned inwardly. ‘Bloody rewards,’ he cursed to Matthews later. ‘The papers get all the publicity and we’ll get every nutter and conman in the country on the phone.’

‘That’s very generous, Kate,’ he said. ‘But do you think this is the right moment? We’re working on a number…’

‘It’s going on the front page tomorrow, Bob,’ she interrupted. ‘Look, I know the police usually hate the idea of a reward, but people who see or hear things and are worried about ringing the police will see twenty grand and pick up the phone.’

He sighed. ‘I’ll go and tell Dawn,’ he said. ‘I need to prepare her.’

‘Right,’ Kate said. ‘Look, what are the chances of getting a sit-down chat with Dawn, Bob? The poor woman could barely speak at the press conference – this would be a proper chance for her to talk about Bella. I’ll be very gentle with her. What do you think?’

He thought he wished he hadn’t answered her call. He liked Kate – and there weren’t many reporters he could say that about – but he knew she was like a terrier with a bone when she was after something. He knew she wouldn’t let up until she got what she wanted, but he wasn’t sure he and Dawn were ready for this sort of grilling.

Dawn was still a largely unknown quantity; she was an emotional mess, drugged against her terror and unable to focus on anything for more than thirty seconds. Bob Sparkes had spent hours with her and he felt he’d only scratched the surface. Could he really let Kate Waters loose on her?

‘It might help her to talk to someone who isn’t a police officer, Bob. Might help her remember something…’

‘I’ll ask her, Kate, but I’m not sure she’s up to it. She’s on tranquillizers and sleeping pills and is finding it hard to concentrate on anything.’

‘Brilliant. Thanks Bob.’ He could hear the smile in the reporter’s voice.

‘Hold on, it’s not a done deal yet. Let me talk to her this morning and I’ll give you a ring back.’

When he arrived, he found Dawn sitting in exactly the same spot as when he had first met her, on the sofa that had become her ark, among Bella’s toys, crushed empty cigarette packs and pages torn from newspapers, cards from well-wishers and letters on lined notepaper from the mad and angry.

‘Have you been to bed, love?’ he asked her.

Sue Blackman, a young woman in uniform acting as family liaison officer, shook her head silently and raised her eyebrows.

‘Can’t sleep,’ Dawn said. ‘Need to be awake for when she comes home.’

Sparkes took PC Blackman into the hall. ‘She needs some rest or she’s going to end up in hospital,’ he hissed.

‘I know, Sir. She’s dozing on the sofa during the day but she hates it when it gets dark. She says Bella is afraid of the dark.’