The Widow(45)

Fry could barely type, he was shaking so hard. I’m really turned on. Tell me about the real baby girl.

Her name began with B, like mine, Bigbear said. Can you guess?

No. You tell me.

The silence suffocated them as the seconds ticked by, and they waited for the final piece of the confession.

Sorry, Goldie. Got to go. Someone knocking on my door. Speak later . . .

“Shit,” Fry said, and put his head on the desk.

“I think we’ve still got him,” Sparkes said, looking at Dr. Jones, and she nodded firmly.

“He’s said enough for me.”

“Let’s put it in front of the grown-ups,” Sparkes said, and got up. “Excellent work, Fry. Really excellent.”

Six hours later, the three of them were sitting in the DCI’s office, putting up the case for arresting and charging Glen Taylor.

DCI Brakespeare listened carefully, read the transcripts, and made some notes before sitting back to give his judgment.

“He never used the name ‘Bella,’” he said.

“No, he didn’t—” Sparkes began.

“Did Fry go too far in his prompts?”

“We’ve talked to the legal team, and at first glance, they’re comfortable with it. It’s always a fine balance, isn’t it?”

“But”—Brakespeare talked over him—“we have him talking about taking a real baby girl with a name beginning with B. Let’s get him back in and put it to him. Say we have a witness statement from Goldilocks.”

The room nodded.

“We’ve got very good reasons to have pursued this line: We’ve got him in the area on the day, the blue van, the child porn on his computer, his predatory nature shown in his chat-room outings, a shaky alibi from his wife.

“And key is the risk of further offenses.”

The room nodded again.

“Do you believe he’s our man, Bob?” Brakespeare asked finally.

“Yes, I do,” Sparkes croaked, his mouth dried by anticipation.

“So do I. But we need more to nail it down. Fine-tooth comb, Bob. Do it all again while we’ve got him in. There must be something linking him to the scene.”

The team was sent back up the M3 to the South London suburb to start afresh. “Bring everything he has ever worn,” Sparkes said. “Everything. Just empty the cupboards.”

It was pure chance that they picked up Jean Taylor’s black Puffa jacket. It was wedged between her husband’s winter coat and a dress shirt and was bagged and tagged like everything else.

The technician who received the bags stacked them according to type and started the tests on outerwear, as it was likely to come into contact with the crime victim first.

The jacket pockets were emptied and contents bagged. There was only one item. A scrap of red paper, about as big as the technician’s thumbnail. In the hush of the laboratory, he went through the process of examining it for fingerprints and fibers, lifting any evidence with sticky tape and cataloging it meticulously.

No prints but dirt particles and what looked like an animal hair. Finer than a human hair, but he’d need to look at it under the microscope to get details of color and species.

He took off his gloves and walked to the phone on the wall.

“DI Sparkes, please.”

Sparkes jumped down the stairs, two at a time. The technician had told him not to bother coming—“It’s too early to be sure of anything, sir”—but Sparkes just wanted to see the piece of paper. To reassure himself it was real and wasn’t going to disappear in a puff of smoke.

“We’re comparing the dirt particles with those taken from Glen Taylor’s van in the original sweep,” the technician told him calmly.

“If there’s a match, we can place the paper in the van and we can tell you what sort of paper it is, sir.”

“It’s a bit of a Skittles packet,” Sparkes said. “Look at the color. Get on with it, man. Do you know what sort of animal the hair comes from? Could it be a cat?”

The technician put up a hand. “I can tell you if it’s a cat quite quickly. I’ll get it under the microscope. But we can’t say if it came from a specific animal. It’s not like humans. Even if we have hairs to compare it with, we can’t say definitively that it came from that specific animal. Furthest we can go—if we’re lucky—is that it came from the same breed.”

Sparkes ran both hands through his hair. “Get samples from Timmy Elliott pronto and let’s see.”

He hovered, and the technician waved him out the door. “Give us some time, and I’ll ring you as soon as we have results.”

Back in his office, he and Matthews drew a Venn diagram, putting all the potential new evidence in interconnecting circles to see where they were.

“If the paper is from a Skittles packet and the hair is from a cat the same breed as Timmy, it could place Jean Taylor at the scene,” Matthews said. “It’s her coat. Must be. It’s too small for Glen.”

“I’ll go and get her,” Sparkes said.





TWENTY-FIVE


The Widow

THURSDAY, JULY 12, 2007


Of course, the police don’t give up. They’ve got their teeth into Glen with his van, his pretend child porn, and his “misconduct.” They’ll never let him go. They’ll try to prosecute him for those pictures if nothing else, his solicitor says.