The Widow(68)

A loud knock on the shop door ended the conversation. “You’ve got to go. Got a customer.”

“Okay, thanks for telling me all this. Here’s my card in case you think of anything else. Can I use your loo quickly before I go?”

Lenny pointed at a door in the corner of the room. “It’s pretty grim, but help yourself.”

He left her to it, and as soon as he’d gone, she pulled out her phone and photographed the membership card still sitting on the desk before pulling open the toilet door, holding her breath, and flushing the toilet.

Lenny was waiting for her. He opened the front door and stood to shield the cowering customer from Kate’s inquiring look.

In the street, she phoned Bob Sparkes. “Bob, it’s Kate. I think he’s at it again.”





THIRTY-SIX


The Detective

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2009


Sparkes listened in silence as Kate told her story, casually noting the address and names but unable to comment or question. Beside him, his new boss worked on, crunching numbers of street robbery victims by gender, age, and race.

“Okay,” he said when Kate drew a breath. “Bit busy at the moment. Can you send me the document you mentioned? Perhaps we could meet tomorrow?”

Kate understood the professional code. “Ten a.m. outside the pub at the end of the road, Bob. I’m e-mailing you the photo I took now.”

He returned to his computer screen, miming regret for the interruption to his colleague, and waited until they had finished their work to look at his phone.

Sparkes felt sick as he looked at the membership card. Taylor’s last visit was only three weeks earlier.

He called Zara Salmond as he walked to the tube station.

“Sir? How are you doing?”

“Fine, Salmond. We need to go back to the case.” He didn’t need to say which. “We’ve got to look at every detail again to find a way to nail him.”

“Right. Okay. Can you tell me why?”

He could imagine the look on his sergeant’s face.

“Difficult at the moment, Salmond, but I’ve had information that he’s back on the porn trail again. Can’t say more than that, but I’ll be in touch when I’ve got more.”

Salmond sighed. He could hear her thought bubble—Not again—and couldn’t blame her.

“I’m off for Christmas, sir. On leave. But back in on January the second. Can it wait until then?”

“Yes. Sorry to ring out of the blue, Salmond. And happy Christmas.”

He put his phone in his overcoat pocket and trudged down the steps, his stomach knotted.

The force had scaled back the Bella Elliott case after the lengthy Downing review found no new leads, no van, and no further suspects. DI Jude Downing had tidied her desk and gone back to her real job, and the Hampshire Police Force put out a press release saying that the investigation would continue. In reality, this meant leaving it ticking over with a team of two to check out the now occasional calls about possible sightings and pass them on. Nobody was saying it in public, but the trail had gone dead.

Even the appetite for Dawn Elliott’s emotional campaign was beginning to wane. There were only so many ways you could say “I want my daughter back,” Sparkes supposed. And the Herald had gone very quiet on the subject after its initial firestorm of publicity.

And when Sparkes went, it had removed the daily impetus for their hunt. DCI Wellington had also made sure Salmond was too busy with other work to take it up on her own initiative. She’d heard when Sparkes was brought back from sick leave, but he’d still not set foot in the office. But his call before Christmas had stirred up all sorts of feelings.

The day Salmond went back to work in January, she pulled up her own Bella case file, filled with the loose ends and tasks, and made a list while she waited for his call.

Leafing through, she found the query on Matt White. Unfinished business. She’d put it under “priorities” originally but had been sidetracked by Sparkes’s latest idea. Not this time. She would chase it down, and went online to search the electoral register for the name. Dozens of Matthew Whites but nothing immediately matching Dawn’s information about age, marital status, and area.

She missed Sparkes’s dry humor and determination more than she’d admit to her colleagues—“Can’t get sentimental if I’m to get anywhere in the police,” she’d told Sparkes.

She needed to find Mr. White’s true identity, and went back to the basic information about Dawn’s relationship with him. It took place largely in the Tropicana nightclub and, once, in a hotel room.

“Where would he have had to use his real name, Zara?” she said out loud. “When he used his credit card,” she finally answered. “I bet he paid by card at the hotel where he took Dawn.”

The hotel was part of a chain, and Salmond mentally crossed her fingers as she dialed its number to ask if they still had records from around the dates Dawn was seeing him.

Five days later, Salmond had another list. The hotel manager was a woman in the same efficient mold as the detective and had e-mailed the relevant data. “Matt White is here, sir,” she said confidently to Sparkes in a first, brief phone call, and didn’t speak for the rest of the day.

Sparkes put down his phone and allowed himself a moment to examine the possibilities. His new boss was an impatient man, and he had a paper to finish on the impact of ethnicity and gender on community policing efficiency. Whatever that meant.