“I don’t know what you mean,” he answered, reddening.
Matthews spread the relevant pages on the table in front of him. “Sunday finishes here, in the middle of your remarks about litter outside Dawn’s house, Mr. Spencer. The next page is Monday and your notes about the man you say you saw.”
“I did see him,” Spencer blustered. “I tore out the page because I made a mistake, that’s all.”
There was silence around the table.
“Where is the missing page, Mr. Spencer? Did you keep it?” Sparkes asked gently.
Spencer’s face crumpled.
His wife emerged with a tray of tasteful mugs and a plate of homemade biscuits. “Help yourselves,” she was saying gaily when she noticed the heavy silence around the table. “What’s the matter?” she asked.
“We’d like to talk to your husband for a moment, Mrs. Spencer.”
She paused, taking in Stan’s face, and turned, tray still in hand.
Sparkes asked his question again.
“I shoved it in my desk drawer, I think,” Spencer said, and went into the house to look. He reappeared with a folded sheet of lined paper. The rest of Sunday’s log was there, and halfway down the page, Monday’s original log started.
“Weather, clement for the season,” Sparkes read out loud. “Legal vehicles in road during day—morning: number 44’s Astra, midwife’s car at number 68; afternoon: Peter’s van. Illegal vehicles in road—morning: usual seven commuter cars; afternoon: ditto. Leaflets on nuisance parking stuck under wipers. All quiet.”
“Did you see the long-haired man on the day Bella was taken, Mr. Spencer?”
“I . . . I’m not sure.”
“Not sure?”
“I did see him, but it might have been on another day, Inspector. I may have got confused.”
“And your contemporaneous notes, Mr. Spencer?”
He had the grace to blush. “I made a mistake,” he said quietly. “There was so much going on that day. I just wanted to help. To be of assistance to Bella.”
Sparkes wanted to wring his neck, but he maintained the crisp, professional tone of the interview.
“Did you think you were helping Bella by sending us off in the wrong direction, Mr. Spencer?”
The older man slumped in his chair. “I just wanted to help,” he repeated.
“The thing is that people who lie often have something to hide, Mr. Spencer.”
“I haven’t got anything to hide. I swear to you. I’m a decent man. I spend my time protecting the neighborhood from crime. I’ve stopped the thefts from vehicles along this road. Single-handedly. Ask Peter Tredwell. He’ll tell you.”
He stopped. “Will everyone know I got it wrong?” he asked, his eyes pleading with the officers.
“That’s not really our main concern at the moment,” Sparkes snapped. “We’ll need to search your house.”
As members of his team began sifting through the Spencers’ life, he and Matthews let themselves out of the house, leaving the couple to contemplate their new role in the spotlight.
Matthews rubbed his jaw. “I’m going to talk to the neighbors about him, boss.”
At the Tredwells’ house, they had nothing but praise for “Stan the Man” and his patrols.
“He chased off some hooligan who broke into my van last year. Saved my tools from being nicked. Fair play to him,” Mr. Tredwell said. “I park it in a lockup now. Better security.”
“But your van was parked in Manor Road on the day Bella Elliott was taken. Mr. Spencer noted it down.”
“No, it wasn’t. I was using it for work and then put it in the lockup. Do the same thing every day.”
Matthews quickly took the details and stood up to go.
Sparkes was still standing outside the Spencers’ bungalow.
“There’s a blue van in the road unaccounted for at the material time, boss. It wasn’t Mr. Tredwell’s.”
“For Christ’s sake. What else has Spencer got wrong?” Sparkes asked. “Get the team looking back through the witness statements and CCTV in the area. And see which of our perverts owns a blue van.”
Neither man spoke again. They didn’t need to. They knew they were thinking the same thing. They’d wasted a whole month. The papers would crucify them.
Sparkes fished out his phone and rang the press office to try to limit the damage. “We’ll tell the reporters that we have a new piece of evidence,” he said. “And steer them away from the long-haired man. Soft-pedal on that front and focus on the hunt for the blue van. Okay?”
The media, hungry for any new detail, put it on the front pages. This time there were no quotes from their favorite source. Mr. Spencer was no longer answering his door.
TWELVE
The Detective
SATURDAY, APRIL 7, 2007
It took another six months of donkeywork, tracing every blue van in the country, for a breakthrough to come.
It was the day before Easter when the incident room took a call from a delivery firm in South London. One of their vehicles, a blue van, had been making drops on the south coast the day Bella disappeared.
An old hand answered the call and went straight through to Sparkes.
“Think this is one for you, sir,” he said, putting the information sheet down on the desk.
Sparkes rang Qwik Delivery back immediately to confirm the details. The manager, Alan Johnstone, started by apologizing for wasting police time, but he’d only recently joined the company and his wife had made him call in.
“She talks about the Bella case all the time. And when I talked about the cost of respraying the vans the other day, she said to me, ‘What color were they before?’ She nearly shouted the house down when I said they were originally blue. They’re silver now. Anyway, she asked if they’d been checked by the police. She kept on and on at me, so I went through the paperwork and found that one was in Hampshire. Didn’t go to Southampton, so that’s probably why the old management didn’t contact you at the time—probably didn’t think it was worth bothering you with. Sorry, but my wife made me promise.”
“Don’t you worry, Mr. Johnstone. No information is a waste of our time,” Sparkes coaxed, his fingers crossing. “We’re very grateful that you took the time to call. Now, tell me about the van, the driver, and the journey it took.”
“The driver was Mike Doonan, a regular of ours. Well, he’s left now—wasn’t due to retire for another couple of years, but he had a terrible back problem and could hardly walk, let alone drive and lug parcels about.
“Anyway, Mike had drops in Portsmouth and Winchester on October the second. Spare parts for a chain of garages.”
Sparkes was scribbling it all down, phone under his chin, and entering the name and details into his computer with his left hand.
The driver was within a twenty-mile radius of Manor Road to make his drops and, potentially, fit the time frame.
“Mike left the depot just before lunchtime—it’s a one-and-a-half-to-two-hour journey if the M25 doesn’t come to a standstill,” Mr. Johnstone said.
“What time did he deliver the parcel?” Sparkes asked.
“Hold on. I’ll have to call you back when I’ve got the paperwork in front of me.”
As he hung up, Sparkes shouted: “Matthews. In here now!” and handed over the computer search to his sergeant as his phone rang again.
“He dropped first at two oh five,” Johnstone said. “Signed for and everything. The second drop time doesn’t seem to figure on this sheet. Not sure why. Anyway, they didn’t see him come back. The office staff clock out at five and, according to this, the van was left on the forecourt, clean and hoovered out for the next day’s work.”
“Okay, that’s great. We’ll need to talk to him, just in case. He might’ve seen something helpful to us. Where does he live, your driver?” Sparkes asked, fighting to quell a note of excitement in his voice. He wrote down an address in southeast London on his notepad.
“You’ve been very helpful, Mr. Johnstone. Thanks very much for phoning in.” He ended the call.