The Widow(57)

He tried to immerse himself in his new cases, but it was surface activity. A month later, Ian Matthews announced a move to another force. “Needed a change, Bob,” he said. “We all do.”

Ian Matthews’s farewell was a classic. Speeches from the grown-ups, then a drink-fueled orgy of hideous anecdotes and maudlin reminiscences about crimes solved. “End of an era, Ian,” he told him as he released himself from his sergeant’s beery hug. “You’ve been brilliant.”

He was the last man standing, he told himself. Apart from Glen Taylor.

His new sergeant arrived, a frighteningly clever thirty-five-year-old girl—“Woman, Bob,” Eileen had corrected him. “Girls have pigtails.”

She didn’t have pigtails. She wore her glossy brown hair up in a tight bun, the tension on the fine hairs at her temples causing her skin to pucker. She was a sturdy young woman with a degree and a career path apparently tattooed on the inside of her eyelids.

DS Zara Salmond—Mum must have a thing about royalty, he’d thought—had transferred from Vice and was there to make his life easier, she said, and began.

Cases ebbed and flowed through his door—a teenage drug death, a run of high-end robberies, a nightclub stabbing—and he waded through them, but nothing could wrest his attention from the man who shared his office.

Glen Taylor, grinning like a monkey outside the Old Bailey, glimmered on the periphery of his day. “He’s here somewhere” became his mantra as he quietly pored over every police report from the day Bella disappeared, wearing away the letters on his keyboard.

Sparkes heard on the station grapevine when they hauled Lee Chambers back in to have another look at him. He’d done his three months for the indecent exposure, lost his job, and had to move, but apparently he had lost none of his confidence.

Chambers had wriggled in his chair, protesting his innocence, but told them more about his trade in porn, including his opening hours and regular haunts, in return for immunity from further prosecution.

“One to watch” was the verdict from the new team, but they didn’t believe he was their bloke. They spat him back out, but his information gave the service station search a new focus, and the CCTV finally yielded some of Chambers’s customers. Sparkes waited to hear if Glen Taylor was among them. “No sign, sir,” Salmond told him. “But they’re still looking.”

And on they went.

It was fascinating, like watching a dramatization of his investigation with actors playing the detectives. “Like sitting in the orchestra,” he told Eileen when she called.

“Who’s playing you? Robert De Niro? Oh, no, I forgot, Helen Mirren.” She laughed.

But perching on the edge of his seat as a member of the audience instead of being in the bubble of the investigation gave him a view he’d never had before. He could survey the hunt, godlike, and that was when he began to notice the cracks and false starts.

“We focused on Taylor too quickly,” he told DS Salmond. It had cost him a lot to admit it to himself, but it had to be done. “Let’s look at the day Bella disappeared again. Quietly.”

Secretly, they started to rebuild October 2, 2006, from the moment the child woke, using the inside surfaces of a hastily emptied metal cabinet in the corner of Sparkes’s office to paste up their montage. “Looks like an art project,” Salmond joked. “Just need a bit of sticky-backed plastic and we’ll get a gold star.”

She’d wanted to do the timeline on the computer, but Sparkes was worried it would be noticed. “This way, we can get rid of it and leave no trace, if we have to.”

He hadn’t been sure when Salmond asked to help him. She didn’t tease him like Matthews did—he missed it, the intimacy and release of a shared joke, but it felt inappropriate with a woman. Flirtatious rather than comradely. Anyway, he didn’t miss Ian Matthews’s disgusting ketchup-slathered sausage sandwiches and the glimpses of his belly as his shirt came adrift.

DS Salmond was very bright, but he didn’t really know her or whether he could trust her. He’d have to. He needed her unemotional clear-sightedness to stop him from veering off into the undergrowth again.

Bella woke at seven fifteen, according to Dawn. A bit later than usual, but she was late to bed the night before. “Why late to bed?” Salmond asked. They scrolled through Dawn’s statements. “They went to McDonald’s and had to wait for the bus home.”

“Why? Was it a treat? Not her birthday—that’s in April. I thought Dawn was permanently short of money? About five hundred quid owed on her credit card, and the neighbor said she rarely went out.”

“We didn’t ask, according to this paperwork,” Sparkes said. It went on Salmond’s list. She’s a girl who likes a list, Sparkes thought. Woman. Sorry.

“And then sweets at the newspaper shop. More treats. Wonder what was happening in their lives.”

Salmond wrote SMARTIES on a new piece of paper and pasted it up in the cabinet.

They sat on opposite sides of his desk with Salmond in the boss’s chair. Between them was a printout of the master file, acquired by Matthews as a parting gift. Sparkes began to feel he was under interrogation, but his new sergeant was teasing out the missed questions, and he focused.

“Did she have a new bloke in her life? What about this Matt who got her pregnant? Did we ever talk to him?”