How can we be discussing whether to have fish fingers or chicken curry, like this is a normal home? “I don’t care. You choose,” I say. “I’m not really hungry.” She says okay and puts bread and butter and tea and coffee and washing-up liquid and a bottle of wine on the list.
“I’ll send Mick to get it and bring it around the back,” she says, and reaches for her phone.
She reads it over to him, and he seems to be taking it down really slowly so she has to repeat everything twice. She’s getting twitchy by the end and breathes deeply when she puts the phone down. “Men!” she says, and forces a laugh. “Why are they so bloody hopeless?”
I tell her that Glen never went shopping on his own, not even with a list. “He hated it, and he always bought the wrong things. He couldn’t be bothered to read the labels, so he’d come home with diabetic jam or decaf coffee by mistake. He’d only buy half the ingredients for a recipe and then get bored. He’d forget the tins of tomatoes for a spaghetti Bolognese or the meat for a casserole. Maybe he did it on purpose so I wouldn’t ask him again.”
“My old man’s the same. It’s just a chore,” Kate adds, kicking off her shoes and wriggling her toes like she lives here. “Ironic that Glen was shopping when the accident happened.” She calls him Glen now. It was always “your husband” at the beginning, but she feels she knows him now. Knows him enough to talk about him like this. She doesn’t.
“It was unusual for him to come shopping with me,” I say. “He never came with me before all this happened—he used to do football training with the pub team while I did the big shop. After he was arrested he went with me for a bit so I wouldn’t have to face people on my own. He did it to protect me, he said.”
But after a while he stopped coming with me because people stopped saying things. I don’t think they stopped thinking “child murderer,” but accusing us lost its novelty and excitement, I suppose.
“The day he died, he insisted on coming. Strange, really.”
“Why did he?” Kate asks.
“I think he might have wanted to keep an eye on me,” I say.
“Why? Were you planning to do a disappearing act in Sainsbury’s?”
I shrug. “Things were a bit tense that week,” I say.
“Tense” doesn’t really do it justice. The air felt thick with it, and I couldn’t breathe properly. I sat outside the kitchen door on a stool to try to find some relief, but nothing helped. I was suffocating in my thoughts. All the time I was fighting them back. Closing my eyes so I wouldn’t see them. Turning up the radio so I wouldn’t hear them, but they were there, just out of reach, waiting for me to weaken.
The Monday before he died, he brought me a cup of tea in bed. He did that sometimes. He sat on the bed and looked at me. I was still half asleep, sorting out the pillows behind me and trying to get comfortable to have my tea.
“Jean,” he said, and his voice sounded flat. Dead. “I’m not well.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Is it one of those headaches? I’ve got those really strong painkillers in the cupboard in the bathroom.” He shook his head.
“No, not headaches. I just feel so tired. I can’t sleep.”
I knew. I’d felt him tossing and turning beside me and heard him getting up in the middle of the night.
He looked tired. Old, really. His skin looked grayish, and there were dark shadows under his eyes. Poor Glen.
“Perhaps you should go to the doctor,” I suggested, but he shook his head again and turned away to look at the door.
“I keep seeing her when I shut my eyes,” he said.
“Who?” I said, but I knew full well who he meant. Bella.
FORTY-FOUR
The Detective
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2010
While Fry and his team worked the data, Sparkes went back to the van. Taylor had regular routes to the south coast, and he started to match other dates and times in 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, the forces controlling a patchwork of motorways and roads potentially used by his suspect, and each had promised to look for Taylor’s plate number on the dates around the kidnapping. 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 service station. Both names are flagged as of interest to the Bella Elliott case. Are they known to you?”
Sparkes swallowed hard. “Both. Bloody hell, 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 station. 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, reevaluating 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, and it was only a voice outside his door that 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’s 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’s number when Salmond put her head around 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’s 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—at three oh two. 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.
“Okay, 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. Kidnapper saw the child and lifted her. Nothing else had made sense. There was no link 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.