The Widow(55)

Glen stayed at home in front of his screen, “building his empire,” as he called it. He was buying and selling stuff on eBay. Car stuff. There were always parcels being delivered and clogging up the hall, but it kept him busy. I helped a bit, wrapping things up and going to the post office for him. We got into a routine.

But neither of us could put the case behind us. I couldn’t stop thinking about Bella. My almost little girl. I found myself thinking it should’ve been us. She should have been here with us. Our baby. Sometimes I found myself wishing he had picked her up that day.

But Glen wasn’t thinking about Bella. He couldn’t put the entrapment behind him. It weighed on his mind. I could see him brooding, working himself up, and every time there was something on the telly about the police, he’d sit there fuming, saying how they’d ruined his life. I tried to persuade him to let it go, to look to the future, but he didn’t seem to hear me.

He must’ve made a phone call, because Tom Payne came to see us one Thursday morning to explain about suing the Hampshire Police Force. We’d get compensation for what they put Glen through, he said.

“So we should. I was locked up for months because of their tricks,” Glen said, and I went to make some tea.

When I came back, they were working out figures on Tom’s big yellow pad. He was always good at numbers, Glen. So clever. When they did the last calculation, Tom said, “I reckon you should get about a quarter of a million,” and Glen whooped like we’d won the lottery. I wanted to say that we didn’t need the money—that I didn’t want this dirty money. But I just smiled and went over and held Glen’s hand.

It was a long process, but it gave Glen a new focus. The eBay parcels stopped arriving, and instead, he sat at the kitchen table with his paperwork, reading reports and crossing stuff out, highlighting other bits with new colored pens, punching holes in documents and filing them in his different folders. Sometimes he read a bit out to me, to see what I thought.

“The effect of the case and the stigma attached to it mean that Mr. Taylor now suffers frequent panic attacks when he leaves the house.”

“Do you?” I asked. I hadn’t noticed. Not like my mum’s panic attacks, anyway.

“Well, I feel churned up inside,” he said. “Do you think they’ll want a doctor’s note?”

We didn’t go out much anyway. Just to the shops and once to the pictures. We tended to go very early and shop in big, anonymous supermarkets where you don’t have to talk to anyone, but he was nearly always recognized. Not surprising really. His picture was in the papers every day when the trial was on, and the girls on the tills knew it was him. I said I’d go on my own, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He wouldn’t let me face it alone. He held my hand and braved it out, and I learned to give anyone who dared say a word a look, to shut them up.

It was more difficult when I met people I knew. When they saw me, some crossed the road, pretended they hadn’t noticed me. Others wanted to know everything. I found myself saying the same thing over and over: “We’re fine. We knew the truth would come out—that Glen is innocent. The police have got a lot to answer for.”

Mostly, people seemed glad for us, but not all. One of my old clients from the salon said: “Hmm. But none of us are completely innocent, are we?”

I told her it had been lovely to see her but I had to get back to help Glen.

“It’ll mean going back to court,” I worked myself up to say to him one day. “Having everything dug up again and gone through. I’m not sure . . .”

Glen stood and held me. “I know it’s hard for you, love, but this will be my vindication. This will make sure people know what I went through. What we went through.”

I could see the sense in that and tried to be more helpful, remembering dates and terrible encounters with people in public to put in his evidence. “Remember that bloke at the cinema? He said he wouldn’t sit in the same room with a pedophile. Shouted it and pointed at you.”

Of course Glen remembered. We’d had to be escorted out of Screen 2 by security “for our own safety,” the manager said. The bloke kept shouting, “What about Bella?” and the woman with him was trying to make him sit down.

I’d wanted to say something, that my husband was innocent, but Glen gripped my arm and said, “Don’t, Jean. It’ll make it worse. He’s just some nutter.”

He didn’t like remembering this, but he wrote it down in his statement. “Thanks, love,” he said.

The police resisted the compensation claim—Tom said they have to because it is taxpayers’ money they have to pay out—until the very last minute. I was getting dressed in my court outfit when Glen, already in his good suit and shoes, got a call from Tom.

“It’s over, Jeanie,” he shouted up the stairs. “They’ve paid up. Quarter of a million.”

The papers and Dawn Elliott called it blood money, made on the back of her little girl. The reporters wrote horrible things about him again and they were back outside. I wanted to say “I told you so,” but what good would that do?

Glen went quiet again, and I packed in the job before they could let me go.

Back to where we started.





TWENTY-NINE


The Detective

MONDAY, JULY 21, 2008