The Widow(58)

The holes in the investigation began to gape at Sparkes accusingly. “Let’s do that now,” Salmond said quickly, seeing the gloom descending on her boss.

Bella’s birth certificate had no father’s name. As an unmarried mother, Dawn had no right to record a father unless he was present at the registration—but she’d told the police his name was Matt White, and he lived around the Birmingham area and worked for a pharmaceutical company. “He could get his hands on Viagra whenever he wanted,” she told Sparkes.

An initial search had failed to find a Matthew White in Birmingham who fit the bill, and then Taylor had entered the picture and everyone else was shoved into a drawer.

“Matt might be a nickname. And I wonder if he gave her a false name,” Salmond said. “Married men often do—stops the new girlfriend getting in touch unexpectedly, especially after it’s over.”

She fitted in her new inquiries around her other work with a calm efficiency that left Sparkes feeling soothed and slightly inadequate. She had a way of swishing into and out of his office in minutes with the right document, question answered and action agreed, barely rippling the surface of his concentration.

He began to believe they would find a new lead. But this new feeling of hope distracted him, made him reckless, and his guard relaxed. Discovery of his parallel investigation was probably inevitable.

He’d left the door of the cabinet propped open while he made a call when DI Downing put her head around his door without knocking. Her invitation to share a sandwich never came. She found herself confronted with the alternative Bella Elliott case, pasted up like something from a serial killer’s lair.

“Jude, it’s just something left over from the original case,” he said, seeing the hardening of his colleague’s eyes. It sounded feeble even to him, and there was nothing more to be done to head off the disaster.

There was sympathy rather than a tirade, and that was worse somehow.

“You need some time off, Bob,” Chief Superintendent Parker told him firmly at their formal interview the following day. “And some help. We recommend counseling. We have some excellent people.”

Sparkes tried not to laugh. He took the printed sheet of names and two weeks’ leave, calling Salmond from his car to tell her.

“Don’t go near the case again, Salmond. They know you’re not going mad and won’t be so gentle next time. We have to leave it with the new team.”

“Understood,” she said sharply.

She was obviously in with someone senior, he thought. “Call me when you can talk,” he said.





THIRTY


The Mother

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2008


Dawn had made an effort. She’d bought an expensive jacket and put on a pair of heels with new tights and a skirt. The editor made a huge fuss over her, meeting her at the lifts and walking her through the newsroom in front of all the reporters. They smiled and nodded from behind their computer terminals, and the man who had sat in court every day put down his phone and came over to shake her hand.

The editor’s secretary, an impossibly elegant woman with magazine-standard hair and makeup, followed them into the inner sanctum and asked if she wanted a tea or a coffee. “Tea, please. No sugar.”

A tray arrived, and the small talk ended. The editor was a busy man.

“Now, then, Dawn, let’s talk about our campaign to bring Taylor to justice. We’ll need a big interview with you to launch it. And a new angle.”

Dawn Elliott knew exactly what the editor wanted. Years of media exposure had toughened her up. A new angle meant more space on the front page, follow-ups in all the other papers, breakfast TV interviews, Radio 5 Live, Woman’s Hour, magazines. Like night follows day. It was exhausting, but she had to keep going, because most days she knew, really knew, deep inside her, that her baby was still alive. And, on the other days, she hoped.

But sitting on a sky-blue foam cube—a corporate decorator’s attempt to humanize the space—becalmed in the air-conditioned office, she also knew that this newspaper wanted her to say for the first time that Bella had been murdered. It would be the “belter of a story” the editor required to go after Glen Taylor.

“I’m not saying Bella is dead, Mark,” she said. “Because she isn’t.”

Mark Perry nodded, his faux sympathy stiffening his face, and pressed on. “Look, I completely understand, but it’s difficult to accuse someone of murder, Dawn, if we’re saying that his victim is still alive. I know how hard this must be, but the police believe Bella is dead, don’t they?”

“Bob Sparkes doesn’t,” she replied.

“He does, Dawn. Everybody does.”

In the silence that followed, Dawn struggled with her options: please the papers or go it alone. She’d talked to the PR advising the campaign on pro bono terms earlier that morning, and he’d warned she’d face “Sophie’s Choice.” “Once you say that Bella is dead, there’s no going back, and the danger is that the search for her will stop.”

That couldn’t happen.

“I think we should keep the question open,” Dawn said. “Why don’t we stick with accusing him of the kidnapping? When I find her, you won’t want to be the paper that said she was dead. Everyone will say that you stopped people from looking for her.”