The Widow(39)

Sparkes doodled as he thought, drawing spiders on the pad in front of him.

If Jean loved children so much, why would she stay with a man who looks at child abuse on the computer? he thought. Why would she be loyal to a man like that? He was certain Eileen would be out the door instantly. And he wouldn’t blame her, so what was Glen’s hold over his wife?

“Perhaps we’ve been looking at it from the wrong angle,” he told his reflection as he washed his hands in the gents’. “Maybe it’s her hold over Glen? Perhaps Jean put him up to it?”

Sure enough, Jean’s name was scrawled on a whiteboard in the incident room when he returned. The officers looking at “women who can’t have babies” were discussing previous cases. “Thing is, sir,” one of the team said, “it’s usually a woman acting on her own who takes the child, and they don’t go for toddlers. Some pretend to their partners or family that they are pregnant, wearing maternity clothes and padding, and then take babies from maternity wards or strollers outside shops to fulfill the pretense. Taking a toddler is high risk. Little kids can put up quite a fight if they are frightened, and a crying child attracts attention.”

Dan Fry, one of the force’s new graduate recruits lurking around the incident room, raised his hand, and Matthews nodded at him to add his piece. He was young, barely out of college, and stood to speak to the group, unaware that the culture was to stay seated and address the desktop.

Fry cleared his throat. “Then there’s keeping an older child out of sight. It’s a lot harder to explain a two-year-old suddenly appearing to friends and family. If you were snatching a child of that age to raise as your own, you’d have to disappear, too. And the Taylors haven’t budged.”

“Quite right, um, Fry, is it?” Sparkes said, waving him to sit down.

The other teams had ruled out kidnap for cash or revenge. Dawn Elliott didn’t have any money of her own; they’d trawled back through her teenage years for previous boyfriends and evidence of drugs or prostitution in case there was an organized crime connection. But there was nothing. She was a small-town girl who’d worked in an office until she’d fallen for a married man and become pregnant.

They still hadn’t found Bella’s father—the name he gave Dawn looked like it was false, and the mobile phone number was for a pay-as-you-go that no longer rang.

“He’s a chancer, boss,” Matthews said. “Just out for a bit of extramarital and then disappears. The life of a thousand traveling salesmen, a shag in every town.” “Pedophiles” was all that was left on the board.

The energy leached out of the room. “Meanwhile, back to Glen Taylor,” Sparkes said.

“And Mike Doonan,” Matthews muttered. “What about Operation Gold?”

But his superior officer appeared not to hear him. He was listening to his own fears.

Personally, Sparkes was certain Glen Taylor was already thinking about his next victim, fueling his thoughts with Internet porn. Looking at these images becomes an addiction—as hard to kick as a drug, according to psychologists.

Sparkes had been told the reasons blokes became dependent on Internet porn—depression, anxiety, money troubles, work problems—and some of the theories about the “chemical payoff,” the thrill produced by adrenaline, dopamine, and serotonin.

One report he read as homework compared viewing porn to “the rush of first-time sex” for some men, leading them to chase a repetition of the same high with more and more extreme images. “A bit like how cocaine addicts describe their experience,” it had added.

Surfing on the net opened up a safe fantasy world full of excitement, a way of creating a private space in which to offend.

“Interestingly,” Sparkes told Matthews later, as they sat in the cafeteria, “not all porn addicts get erections.”

Ian Matthews raised an eyebrow as he rested his sausage sandwich on the Formica table. “Do you mind, boss? I’m eating. What are you reading there? Sounds like complete bollocks.”

“Thank you, Professor,” he snapped. “I’m trying to get inside Glen Taylor’s murky little world. We’re not getting in there through interviews, but he won’t be able to stay away from his habit. I’ll be waiting for him. We’ll find him and catch him.”

His sergeant sat back heavily and resumed chewing on his lunch. “Go on, then, tell me how.”

“Fry, one of the clever kids they’ve sent us to knock into shape, came to see me yesterday. He says we’ve missed a potential trick. Chat rooms. That’s where porn addicts and sexual predators look for friends and lose their inhibitions.”

Detective Constable Fry had paid a visit to his senior officer’s office, pulling up a chair without being invited and treating the conversation like an Oxbridge tutorial.

“The problem as I see it is we need disclosure from Glen Taylor.”

No shit, Sherlock, Sparkes thought. “Go on, Fry.”

“Well, perhaps we need to enter his world and catch him at his most vulnerable.”

“I’m sorry, Fry. Can we cut to the chase? What are you going on about? His world?”

“I bet he’s on the prowl in chat rooms—probably looking for new prospects—and he could disclose some key evidence to us if we pose as punters. We could put in a CHIS.”