The Widow(13)

“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, among Bella’s toys, cards from well-wishers, and letters on lined notepaper from the mad and angry, crushed empty packs of cigarettes, and pages torn from newspapers on the sofa that had become the mother’s ark.

“Have you been to bed, love?” he asked her. Sue Blackman, a young woman in uniform acting as the 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 the 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.”





EIGHT


The Reporter

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2006


Kate Waters arrived at the house at lunchtime with a photographer and a bunch of ostentatious supermarket lilies. She’d parked down the road, away from the pack, so she could get out of the car without attracting attention. She rang Bob Sparkes to let him know she was there and swept past the journalists sitting outside the house in their cars, Big Macs in their fists. By the time they’d leaped from their vehicles, she was inside. She heard a couple of them swearing loudly, warning one another they were about to be shafted, and tried not to grin.

As Bob Sparkes led the way, Kate took it all in: the shambles and stasis created by grief. In the hall, Bella’s blue anorak with a fur-lined hood and teddy-bear backpack hanging on the banister; her tiny, shiny red wellies by the door.

“Get a photo of those, Mick,” she whispered to the photographer following her as they made their way into the front room. There were toys and baby photos everywhere, the scene taking Kate straight back to her own early days of motherhood, struggling against the tide of chaos. She had sat and cried the day she brought Jake home from the hospital, lost in the postpartum hormonal wash and sudden sense of responsibility. She remembered she’d asked the nurse if she could pick him up, the morning after he was born, as if he belonged to the hospital.

The mother looked up, her young face creased and made old by weeping, and Kate smiled and took her hand. She had planned to shake it but simply squeezed it instead.

“Hello, Dawn,” she said. “Thank you so much for agreeing to talk to me. I know how hard it must be for you, but we hope it will help the police find Bella.”

Dawn nodded as if in slow motion.

Bloody hell, Bob wasn’t kidding, Kate thought.

She picked up a red Teletubbies doll from the sofa. “Is this Po? My boys preferred Power Rangers,” she said.

Dawn looked at her, interested. “Bella loves Po,” she said. “She likes blowing bubbles, chases after them, trying to catch them.”

Kate had noticed a photo of the toddler doing exactly that on a table and got up to bring it to Dawn.

“Here she is,” she said, and Dawn took the frame in her hands. “She’s a beautiful little girl,” Kate said. “Full of mischief, I bet.”

Dawn smiled gratefully. The two women had found their common ground—motherhood—and Dawn started to talk about her baby.

First time she’s been able to talk about Bella as a child, not a crime victim, Bob Sparkes thought.

“Kate’s good. You have to give her that. She can get inside your head quicker than a lot of my coppers,” he told his wife later. Eileen had shrugged and returned to the Telegraph crossword. Police work took place on a different planet, as far as she was concerned.

Kate had fetched more photos and toys to keep the conversation flowing, letting Dawn tell her story about each item with barely a question needed. She used a discreet tape recorder, slipped quickly onto the cushion between them, to capture every word. Notebooks were a bad idea in a situation like this—it would be too much like a police interview. She just wanted Dawn to talk. She wanted to hear about the ordinary pleasures and everyday struggles of being a mum. Of getting Bella ready for nursery school, bath-time games, the child’s delight at choosing her new wellies.

“She loves animals. We went to the zoo once, and she wanted to stay watching the monkeys. She laughed and laughed,” Dawn told her, taking temporary shelter in memories of a previous life.

The glimpses of Bella and Dawn would bring the reader straight into the nightmare the young mother was enduring, Kate knew, writing the intro in her head.

A pair of tiny red Wellington boots stand in Dawn Elliott’s hallway. Her daughter, Bella, chose them two weeks ago and has yet to wear them . . .

This was what the public wanted to read so they could shiver in their dressing gowns over tea and toast and say to their spouse, “This could have been us.”

And the editor would love it. “Perfect womb trembler,” he’d say, and clear the front and a spread inside the paper for her story.

After twenty minutes, Dawn began to tire. The drugs were beginning to wear off, and the terror crept back into the room. Kate glanced at Mick, and he stood up with his camera and said gently: “Let’s take a photo of you, Dawn, with that lovely picture of Bella blowing bubbles.”

She complied, like a child herself.