The Widow(59)

Perry walked to his desk and came back with one of the A3 sheets of paper covering his desk. He shifted the tray to another cube and laid the sheet on the table. It was the mock-up of a front page—one of several drawn to sell the Herald’s exclusive. There were no stories cluttering the page, just seven words screaming: “This Is the Man Who Stole Bella” and a photograph of Glen Taylor.

Perry had favored the headline “KILLER!” but that would have its day when they nailed the bastard.

“What about this?” he asked, and Dawn picked it up and scrutinized it like a pro.

In the beginning, she could hardly bear to look at Taylor’s face, seeing it beside the face of her baby in every paper, but she’d forced herself. She looked at his eyes, searching for guilt; looked at his mouth, looking for weakness or lust. But there was nothing there. He looked like a man she might sit next to on a bus or stand behind in a supermarket queue, and she wondered if she ever had. Was that why he’d picked her child?

It was the question that reverberated through every waking minute. Her dreams were full of Bella, glimpses of her just out of reach, being unable to move or make any progress toward her child no matter how hard she ran and, on waking, realizing as if for the first time that she was gone.

At first she was unable to take part in any sort of life, she was so overwhelmed by failure and helplessness. But when, eventually, she’d surfaced from the sedatives, her mum had persuaded her to fill her days with practical things. “You need to get up, get dressed every day, and do something, Dawn. Even something small.”

It was the same advice she’d given when Bella was born, when Dawn struggled to cope with the sleep deprivation and the colicky screaming of her new baby.

And she’d got up and got dressed. She’d walked down the path to the gate. She’d stood in the garden like Bella had and looked out at the world passing by.

The Find Bella campaign had begun on Dawn’s Facebook page with her posting something about Bella or how she was feeling most days. The response was like a tidal wave, swamping her and then buoying her up. She gathered thousands, then hundreds of thousands of friends and likes as mothers and fathers all over the world reached out to her. It had given her something to focus on, and when people with money contacted her to offer cash to help find her little girl, she’d said yes.

Bob Sparkes had admitted he had reservations about some of the directions taken by the Find Bella campaign but said it was okay as long as his officers weren’t being diverted from the task in hand. “Still, you never know,” he’d told her. “The campaign might shame someone into coming forward.”

Kate will go mad when she sees I’ve gone with the Herald—“the Enemy,” she’d told herself when first approached. But her lot didn’t match the offer on the table. She’ll see the sense.

In truth, she wished it would be Kate and Terry handling the story, but the Daily Post had passed on the opportunity.

It was hard because she’d got close to Kate over the months. They talked most weeks and met up every so often for lunch and a gossip. Sometimes the paper would send a car to bring Dawn to London for the day. And in return, Dawn told Kate everything first.

But the Post’s coverage had petered out recently. “Is the paper bored with me?” she’d asked Kate at their last meeting when an interview failed to appear.

“Don’t be daft,” the reporter had said. “There’s just quite a lot of other stuff happening at the moment.” But Kate hadn’t been able to meet her eye.

Dawn was no longer the lost girl on the sofa. She understood.

And when the Herald called her to propose a campaign to bring Taylor to justice and a generous donation to the Find Bella fund, she’d accepted it.

She’d rung Kate to let her know her decision—she owed her that. The call sent the reporter into a blind panic. “Christ, Dawn, are you serious? Have you signed anything?”

“No. I’m going to see them this afternoon.”

“Okay. Give me twenty minutes.”

“Well . . .”

“Please, Dawn.”

When the reporter rang back, Dawn knew immediately that Kate was empty-handed.

“I’m sorry, Dawn. They won’t do it. They think it’s too risky to accuse Taylor. And they’re right. It’s a stunt, Dawn, and could blow up in your face. Don’t do it.”

Dawn sighed. “I’m sorry, too, Kate. You know it’s not personal—you’ve been brilliant—but I can’t stop now just because one paper has lost interest. Better go, or I’ll be late. Let’s speak soon.”

And here she was, looking through the contract and rechecking the subclauses for loopholes. Her lawyer had already read it but had advised her to take another look “in case they slip something new in.”

Mark Perry watched her, nodding encouragingly whenever she spoke and smiling broadly when she signed and dated the document.

“Okay, let’s get started,” he said, standing and propelling her out of the office to the waiting feature writer who would do “the Big Interview.”

The paper had thousands of words already written, prepared for the expected guilty verdict. Before Glen Taylor’s trial, they’d interviewed former colleagues from the bank and delivery firm, collected the sordid tales of the chat-room women and had the child porn confirmed in an off-the-record briefing by a detective on the team. They’d also bought up a neighbor of the Taylors, paying her for her exclusive photos of Taylor with her kids—one of them a little blond girl.