The Widow(72)

The Detective

THURSDAY, JANUARY 21, 2010


The house on Manor Road looked cleaner and tidier. Bella’s toys were stacked in a box by the television, and the front room had been turned into the Find Bella campaign headquarters. Volunteers were at a table going through the post—“We get a hundred letters on a good day,” Dawn said proudly—and sorting them into three piles: possible sightings, well-wishers, and nutters. The nutters pile looked a lot bigger than the others, but Sparkes didn’t comment.

“Lots of people are sending money to help us look for Bella,” Dawn said. The fund was putting adverts in newspapers all over the world and paying for the occasional private investigator to check out a lead.

“Let’s go somewhere quiet, Dawn,” he said, and guided her by her elbow to the kitchen, closing the door.

At the mention of Matt, she burst into tears. “How did you find him? What did he say about me? About Bella?”

“He said he thought he was her father and we’re waiting for the DNA results.”

“Has he got other children?”

“Yes, Dawn.”

“Do they look like her?”

“Yes.”

She cried harder.

“Come on, Dawn. We need to talk about something else Matt Evans told us. About seeing you in an online chat room.”

That stopped the tears. “Matt saw me in a chat room? I didn’t see him.”

“But you went in chat rooms?”

“Yes, but not like the places you talked about in the trial. It wasn’t nasty or about sex.”

Sparkes paused. “Why didn’t you say you had used chat rooms?”

Dawn reddened. “I was embarrassed. I never told anyone when I was doing it because I thought people would think I used them to find sex. I didn’t, Inspector Sparkes. I was just lonely. It was just chatting. Stuff about what happened on EastEnders or I’m a Celebrity . . . I never met anyone in real life. I honestly didn’t think it was worth mentioning.”

Sparkes leaned forward to pat her hand on the kitchen table. “Did you talk about Bella in the chat rooms, Dawn?”

She looked at him and struggled to speak. “No, well, yes, a bit. To other girls. But just, you know, stuff like if Bella had kept me up or funny things she’d done. We were just talking.”

“But other people can hear you, can’t they?”

Dawn looked like she might faint, and Sparkes moved around to her side of the table, easing her chair back and gently pushing her head down into her lap for a moment. She was still deathly pale when she sat back up.

“Him, you mean,” she said. “Did he hear me talk about Bella? Is that how he found her?”

There was no need for names. They both knew who “he” was. “We can’t be sure, Dawn, but we need you to think back, to try to remember who you talked to online. We’ll look on your laptop, too.”

A volunteer came in to ask Dawn a question, and seeing her tearful face, immediately started to back out. “No, please stay. Can you look after Dawn for a minute? She’s had a shock and could probably do with a cup of tea.”

Sparkes went outside and phoned Salmond.

He bagged and brought Dawn’s battered computer back to HQ while his sergeant took a statement from the devastated mother. Sparkes wanted to be in on the hunt through the sites. He wanted to be there when Bigbear, or whatever sick nursery allusion Taylor had used, popped up.

The atmosphere in the lab was fetid, a mixture of locker room and abandoned pizzas, and the technicians looked weary as they took away the machine for cataloging and mining. They were grateful there was a fraction of the activity to plow through this time, but it still took hours to produce a list of chat-room sites and contacts.

The list, when it came, was the familiar jumble of fantasy and lurid names, and Sparkes ran through them quickly to rule out the known Taylor avatars. “He must have used another name,” he told Fry.

“We got all the identities he used from his laptop, sir.”

“Are we sure he only had one laptop?”

“No sign of any others, but he was definitely using at least one Internet café. Maybe others on his travels.”

The technician sighed. “We’ll have to rule out all the ones we can and then narrow the field a bit.”

Sparkes picked up the list and headed back to Dawn Elliott’s house.

Dawn was still crying. Salmond was holding her hand and talking in a low voice. “Let’s carry on, Dawn. You’re doing brilliantly.” She turned to Sparkes. “She’s doing brilliantly, sir.”

Dawn looked up at him standing in the doorway like he had the day Bella had gone. The sense of déjà vu was uncanny.

“I’ve got a list of the people you encountered, here. Let’s look at it together to see if you remember anything.”

The rest of the house was silent. The volunteers had long gone, chased out by the sense of doom and Dawn’s distress.

She ran her finger down the names, page after page. “I didn’t know I talked to so many people,” she said.

“You probably didn’t, Dawn. People can just join a chat room and say hello and then listen.”

She paused several times, making Sparkes’s pulse jump, telling Salmond some small remembered detail—“Seagull, she lived in Brighton and wanted to know about house prices here”; “Billiejean was a big Michael Jackson fan, was always telling us about him”; “Redhead100 was looking for love. Wonder if she found it”—but most of the chat had been so mundane, Dawn had little recollection.