The Widow(81)

Sparkes closed his eyes, hoping the relief didn’t show on his face.

“Okay, good work to pin it down. On we go,” he said without raising his eyelids.

Back in the privacy of his office, he slammed his fist down on his desk, then went for a walk outside to clear his head.

When he returned, he went back to day one and his gut feelings about the case. They—he—had always treated Bella’s abduction as an opportunistic crime. Kidnapper saw the child and lifted her. Nothing else had made sense. There was no link found between Dawn and Taylor and, once Stan Spencer’s invented long-haired man had been discounted, there had been no reports of anyone hanging around the street or acting suspiciously in the area before Bella vanished. No flashers or sexual crimes reported.

And there had been no real pattern of behavior for a predator to follow. The child went to and from nursery school with Dawn, but not every day, and she only occasionally played outside. If someone had planned to take her, they would’ve gone in at night when they knew where she was at a given time. No one would have sat on a residential street on the off chance she might come out to play. He would’ve been spotted.

The police case was that the child had been taken in a twenty-five-minute random window of opportunity. At the time, on the evidence in front of them, they’d been right to discount a planned kidnapping.

But in the cold light of day, three and a half years later, he thought maybe they’d been too quick to rule it out, and he suddenly wanted to examine that possibility.

“I’m going down to the control room,” he told Salmond. “To pull in a favor.”

Russell Lynes, his closest friend in the force—a bloke he’d joined up with—was on duty. “Hello, Russ. Fancy a coffee?”

They sat in the cafeteria, stirring the brown liquid in front of them with little intention of drinking it.

“How are you holding up, Bob?”

“All right. Being back to some real work makes a big difference. And this new lead’s giving me something to concentrate on.”

“Hmm. It made you ill last time, Bob. Just be careful.”

“I will. I wasn’t ill, Russ. Just tired. I just want to look at one thing I may have missed the first time.”

“You’re the boss. Anyway, why’re you down here pulling favors? Get someone from the team to look at it.”

“They’ve got enough to do, and they might not get to it for weeks. If you give me a quiet hand, I can rule it in or out in a couple of days.”

“Okay, what sort of quiet hand?” Russell asked, pushing the coffee away, slopping it into the saucer.

“Thanks, mate. I knew I could count on you.”

The two men went and sat together in Sparkes’s office with the spreadsheet of Taylor’s deliveries and plotted his visits to Southampton and the surrounding towns. “We looked at every frame of the CCTV footage in the area around Dawn Elliott’s address on the day of the kidnapping,” Sparkes said. “But the only places we saw Taylor’s van were at the delivery address in Winchester and at the junction of the M3 and M25. I wore my eyes out looking, but there was nothing to place his van at the scene.”

He could recall vividly the sense of expectation every time they loaded a new piece of footage and the bitter disappointment when it ended without a glimpse of a blue van.

“I want to look at other dates,” he said. “The dates Taylor had other deliveries in Hampshire. Remind me—where are the cameras in the Manor Road area?”

Lynes highlighted the locations on the maps in neon green—a petrol station a couple of streets away had one on the forecourt for absconders, a camera to catch drivers jumping the red traffic lights on the big junction, and some of the shops, including the newsagent’s, had installed cheap, tinny versions to discourage shoplifters.

“And Bella’s nursery school has got a camera outside, but she wasn’t at nursery that day. We looked at footage from all of these cameras, but there was nothing of interest.”

“Well, let’s have a look again. We must have missed something.”

Four days later, his phone rang, and when he heard Lynes’s voice he knew immediately he’d found that something.

“There it is,” Lynes said, pointing at the vehicle crossing the frame. Sparkes squinted at the screen, trying to retune his eyes to the film’s grainy resolution.

It was there. The van was there. The two men looked at each other triumphantly and then back at the screen to enjoy the moment again.

“Are we sure it’s him?” Sparkes asked.

“It matches the date and time of a delivery to Fareham on his work sheets, and forensics have got a partial plate number that includes three letters that match Taylor’s vehicle.”

Lynes pushed the play button. “Now watch.”

The van stopped just within the camera’s range, pointing away from the nursery school. As if on cue, Dawn and Bella appeared at the door of the school at the back of the exodus of children, the mother fussing with her daughter’s coat zipper and the child clutching a huge piece of paper. The pair walked past the van and around the corner, safe in their routine.

Within seconds, the van moved off in the same direction. Sparkes knew he was watching the moment Glen Taylor had made his decision, and his eyes filled with tears. He muttered that he was going to get a notepad and went to his office for a moment’s privacy. “We’re so close,” he told himself. “Now, don’t mess it up. No rushing; get everything in order.”