The Widow(46)

The visits and phone calls from DI Sparkes become part of our lives. The police are building a case, and we watch from the sidelines.

I say to Glen that he should just tell the police about the “private job” and where he was that day, but he insists it would make things worse. “They’ll say we’ve lied to them about everything, Jeanie.”

I’m terrified I’ll do something to make things worse, say the wrong thing. But in the end, it was Glen who let the side down, not me.

The police came to get him for further questioning today. They took him back to Southampton. When they left, he kissed me on the cheek and told me not to worry. “You know it’ll be all right,” he said to me, and I nodded. And I waited.

The police collected more of Glen’s things. All the clothes and shoes they hadn’t taken before. They took things he’d only just bought. I tried to tell them, but they said they were taking everything. They even took my jacket by mistake. I’d hung it in his space in the wardrobe because my side was full.

The next day, Bob Sparkes came and asked me to go with him down to Southampton for questioning. He wouldn’t say anything in the car, just that he wanted me to help with the inquiry.

But when we got in the police station, he sat me in an interview room and read me my rights. Then he asked me if I had taken Bella. Had I helped Glen take Bella?

I couldn’t believe he would ask me that. I kept saying, “No, of course not. And Glen didn’t take her,” but he wasn’t listening properly. He was moving to the next thing.

He pulled out this plastic bag like a conjurer. I couldn’t see anything in it at first, but at the bottom was a scrap of red paper.

“We found this in your coat pocket, Mrs. Taylor. It’s from a Skittles packet. Do you eat many Skittles?”

I didn’t know what he was talking about for a moment, but then I remembered. It must’ve been the bit of sweet packet I’d got from under the mat in the van.

He must’ve seen my face change and kept pushing me. Kept saying Bella’s name. I said I couldn’t remember, but he knew I could.

I told him in the end, to stop him asking me. I told him it might be a bit of paper I’d found in the van—just a bit of rubbish, all fuzzy and dirty—and put it in my pocket to throw away later but never did.

I said it was just a sweet paper, but Mr. Sparkes said they’d found a cat hair stuck to it. A gray cat hair. Like from the cat in Bella’s garden. I said that didn’t prove anything. The hair could have come from anywhere. But I had to make a statement.

I hoped they wouldn’t say anything to Glen before I got a chance to explain. I’d tell him when we both got home that they made me tell them. That it didn’t matter. But I didn’t get the opportunity. Glen didn’t come home.

Seems he went on looking for porn on the Internet. I couldn’t believe he’d be so stupid, when Tom Payne told me. He was always the clever one in the family.

The police had taken his computer, of course, but he bought himself a cheap little laptop and a Wi-Fi router—“for work, Jeanie”—and sat in the spare room while he went into sex chat rooms or whatever they’re called.

It was all very clever—they got some police officer to pretend to be a young woman on the Internet and chat him up. She called herself Goldilocks. Who would fall for that? Well, Glen, apparently.

It wasn’t just chatting up, either. Tom wanted to prepare me for what might be in the papers, so he told me that eventually Goldilocks had cybersex with Glen. “It’s sex without touching,” Glen tried to explain when I visited him the first time. “It’s just words, Jeanie. Written-down words. We didn’t speak or even see each other. It was like it was happening in my head. Just a fantasy. You do see, don’t you? I’m under such a lot of stress with all these accusations. I can’t help myself.”

I tried to see. I really did. It was an addiction, I kept saying to myself. Not his fault. I focused on the real villains here. Glen and I were very angry about what the police did.

I couldn’t believe someone would do that as part of their job. Like a prostitute. That’s what Glen said. Before he found out Goldilocks was a man. That was hard for him to accept—he thought the police were just saying it to make him look like he was gay or something. I said nothing—I couldn’t get my head around cybersex, let alone worry about who he was doing it with. Anyway, it was hardly his biggest problem.

He’d said too much to Goldilocks. Glen told me he’d told “her” he knew something about a famous police case to impress her. “She” practically told him to say it.

This time Bob Sparkes charged Glen with Bella’s kidnapping. They said he’d taken her and killed her. But they didn’t charge him with murder. Tom Payne, his lawyer, said they were waiting until they had a body. I hated him talking about Bella like that, but I didn’t say anything.

I went home alone, and then the press came back.

I wasn’t a big newspaper reader, really. I preferred magazines. I liked the real-life stories—you know, the woman who fostered one hundred kids, the woman who refused cancer treatment to save her baby, the woman who had a baby for her sister. The papers were more Glen’s department. He liked the Daily Mail—he could do the crossword on the back page, and it was the sort of paper his former boss at the bank read. “Gives us something in common, Jeanie,” he said once.