The detective was standing in the incident room, scanning the boards for emerging patterns and links, taking off his glasses and narrowing his eyes in case a change of focus might reveal something.
There was, apparently, a maelstrom of activity all around the Elliotts’ garden, but at the epicenter, Bella remained the missing piece.
All that information but not a sign of her, Sparkes thought. She’s here somewhere. We’re missing something.
The forensic team had dusted and swabbed every inch of the brick garden wall and painted metal gate; the garden had been the subject of a fingertip search by a line of police officers, making a religious progress on their knees and, like holy relics of the child, fibers from her clothes, golden hairs from her head, dismembered toy parts, and discarded sweet wrappings touched by her had been preserved in plastic bags. But of the abductor, nothing.
“I think the bastard must have reached over the wall and lifted her straight over and into his vehicle,” Sparkes said. “It would have taken only seconds. She was there and then she wasn’t.”
The team had found a half-sucked red sweet on Bella’s side of the wall. “Maybe it fell out of her mouth when he picked her up,” Sparkes said. “Is it a Smartie?”
“I’m not exactly an expert on Smarties, boss, but I’ll get someone to check,” Sergeant Matthews said.
When it came back from forensics, it had been identified as a Skittle. Bella’s saliva was on the sweet, matched with the comforter she sucked at night.
“She never had Skittles,” Dawn said.
He gave her one to keep her quiet, Sparkes thought. How old-fashioned. He remembered his mum telling him as a boy: “Never take sweets from a stranger.” That and something about men with puppies.
He was reviewing the list of evidence and his energy was dipping. It didn’t look good. There were no CCTV cameras watching over the street—only good old Mr. Spencer—and no images so far of a scruffy man collected from the nearest camera sites.
“Maybe he was just lucky,” Sparkes said.
“Luck of the devil, then.”
“Get on the phone, Matthews, and see when we can get on Crimewatch. Tell them it’s urgent.”
The television reconstruction seemed to take forever to organize although it was only eight days. A Bella look-alike had to be found from a nursery school in another town, because no parent living near the Westland estate would let their child take part.
“Can’t blame them, really,” Sparkes told the exasperated director. “They don’t want to see their kid as a kidnap victim. Even a pretend one.”
They were waiting at the end of Manor Road for the film crew to set up, discussing what Sparkes would say in his appeal for information.
“The appeal is live in the studio after we screen the reconstruction, Bob,” the director said. “So make sure you have everything sorted in your head before you speak. You’ll know what questions you’re going to get.”
Sparkes was too distracted to take it all in. He had just put Dawn Elliott in a police car to her mum’s as the actress playing her arrived.
“She looks like me,” she’d whispered to him. She hadn’t been able to look at the child playing Bella. She had laid out a set of her daughter’s clothes, a little headband and Bella’s spare glasses on the sofa, stroking each item and saying her child’s name. Sparkes had helped her up, and she had walked, dry-eyed and holding his arm, to the car. She got in beside Sue Blackman and didn’t look back.
The street was now quiet, deserted as it must have been that day. Sparkes watched as the reenactment took shape, the director gently coaching “Bella” to chase a borrowed gray cat into the garden. Her mother stood just off camera, with emergency Chocolate Buttons in case bribes were needed, smiling at her little girl and trying not to cry.
Mrs. Emerson volunteered to play her own small role, walking stiffly down her garden path, pretending to look for her little friend next door and then responding to “Dawn’s” cries for help. Across the road, Mr. Spencer acted out spotting the actor in a long wig strolling past his house, his mimed puzzlement filmed through the bay window by a cameraman standing on Mrs. Spencer’s French marigolds.
The abduction took only minutes, but it was three hours later that the director was satisfied and everyone crowded around the monitor in the film truck to watch the end product. No one spoke as they watched “Bella” playing in the garden, and only Mr. Spencer remained to mull over the events.
Afterward, one of the older officers took Sparkes aside: “Have you noticed that our Mr. Spencer is always hanging around the investigation team and giving interviews to the reporters? Telling them he saw the man who took her? Bit of a glory seeker if you ask me.”
Sparkes smiled sympathetically. “There’s always one, isn’t there? He’s probably lonely and bored. I’ll get Matthews to keep an eye on him.”
As expected, the broadcast, twenty-three days after Bella vanished, triggered hundreds of phone calls to the studio and incident room, the film igniting public emotion and a fresh outpouring of variations on “My heart goes out to . . .” and “Why? Oh why?” messages on the show’s website.
About a dozen callers claimed to have seen Bella, many of whom were sure they had spotted her in a café, on a beach, in a playground. Each call was acted upon immediately, but Sparkes’s optimism began to fade as he took his turn answering the phones at the back of the Crimewatch television studio.
The following week, a sudden buzz of voices from the incident room reached Sparkes as he walked down the corridor.
“Got a flasher in a kids’ playground, sir,” the duty officer told him. “About twenty-five minutes from the Elliott house.”
“Who is he? Is he known to us?”
Lee Chambers was a middle-aged, divorced minicab driver who’d been questioned six months earlier for exposing himself to two female passengers. He’d claimed he was just having a quick pee and they caught a glimpse as he zipped himself up. Completely unintentional. The women didn’t want to take it further, didn’t want the attention, and the police sent him on his way.
Today he’d been in bushes beside the swings and slides at Royal Park as children played nearby.
“I was just having a quick pee,” he told the police officer called by a horrified mother.
“Do you normally have an erection while peeing, sir? That must be inconvenient,” the officer said as he led him to a waiting car.
Chambers arrived at Southampton Central Police Station and was put in an interview room.
Peering through the toughened glass panel in the door, Sparkes saw a skinny man in tracksuit bottoms and a Southampton FC shirt, with long, greasy hair in a ponytail.
“Scruffy, long hair,” Matthews said.
Did you take Bella? Sparkes thought automatically. Have you got her somewhere?
The suspect looked up expectantly as Sparkes and Matthews entered. “This is all a mistake,” he said.
“If I had a quid . . .” Matthews muttered. “Why don’t you tell us all about it, then?” he said as the officers squeaked their chairs closer to the table.
Chambers told his lies and they listened. Just a quick pee. Didn’t choose a playground deliberately. Didn’t see the children. Didn’t talk to the children. Completely innocent mistake.
“Tell me, Mr. Chambers, where were you on Monday, October the second?” Sparkes asked.
“God, I don’t know. Working probably. Monday is one of my regular days. The cab controller would know. Why’d you ask?”
The question hung in the air for a beat, and then Chambers was all eyes. Sparkes almost expected an audible ding.
“That’s when that little girl went missing, isn’t it? You don’t think I had anything to do with that? Oh God, you can’t think that.”