by Fiona Barton
We don’t talk about Bella again. Glen is very nice to me, telling me he loves me all the time, checking up to make sure I’m all right. Checking on me. ‘What are you up to, Jeanie?’ he says when he rings my mobile. And so we carry on.
But Bella is with us all the time. We don’t talk about her, don’t mention her name. We carry on as my secret starts to grow inside me, kicking at my heart and stomach, making me throw up in the downstairs toilet when I wake up and remember.
He was drawn to Bella because of me. He wanted to find a baby for me. And I wonder what I would’ve done if he had brought her home to me. I would’ve loved her. That’s what I would’ve done. Just loved her. She would’ve been mine to love.
She was almost mine.
Glen and I still shared a bed afterwards. My mum couldn’t believe it. ‘How can you bear to have him near you, Jean? After all the things he did with those women – and that man?’
Mum and I never talked about sex, normally. It was my best friend at school who’d told me how babies were made and about periods. Mum wasn’t very easy talking about things like that. It was as if it was dirty, somehow. I suppose Glen’s sex life being in the papers made it easier for her to say it out loud. After all, everyone else in the country knew about it. It was like talking about someone she didn’t really know.
‘It wasn’t real, Mum. It was all make-believe,’ I told her, not catching her eye. ‘It’s something all men do in their heads, the psychologist said.’
‘Your father doesn’t,’ she said.
‘Anyway, we’ve decided to put it all behind us and look to the future, Mum.’
She looked at me as though she was going to say something important, but then stopped.
‘It’s your life, Jean. You must do what you think best.’
‘Our life, Mum. Mine and Glen’s.’
Glen said I should start looking for a little job. Outside the area.
I told him I was nervous about facing strangers, but we agreed I needed something to keep me busy. And out of the house.
Glen said he’d go back to the idea of starting his own business. But not driving this time. Something on the internet. Some kind of service.
‘Everyone’s doing it, Jeanie. Easy money and I’ve got the skills.’
I wanted to say so many things, but it seemed best to keep quiet.
Our attempt at looking to the future lasted just over a month. I’d begun working Fridays and Saturdays at a big salon in town. Big enough to be anonymous with lots of walk-ins and not too many prying questions. Classier than Hair Today, and the hair products were very expensive. You could tell they cost a fortune because they smelled of almonds. On my work days, I caught the tube up to Bond Street and walked the rest. It felt OK, better than I thought.
Glen stayed at home in front of his screen, ‘building his empire’, as he called it. He was buying and selling stuff on eBay. Car stuff. There were always parcels being delivered and clogging up the hall, but it kept him busy. I helped a bit, wrapping things up and going to the post office for him. We got into a routine.
But neither of us could put the case behind us. I couldn’t stop thinking about Bella. My almost little girl. I find myself thinking it should’ve been us. She should be here with us. Our baby. Sometimes I find myself wishing he had picked her up that day.
But Glen isn’t thinking about Bella. He can’t put the entrapment behind him. It weighs on his mind. I can see him brooding, working himself up, and every time there’s something on the telly about the police, he sits there fuming, saying how they’ve ruined his life. I’ve tried to persuade him to let it go, to look to the future, but he doesn’t seem to hear me.
He must’ve made a phone call, because Tom Payne came to see us one Thursday morning to explain about suing the Hampshire Police Force. We’d get compensation for what they’d put Glen through, he said.
‘So they should. I was locked up for months because of their tricks,’ Glen said and I went to make some tea.
When I came back, they were working out figures on Tom’s big yellow pad. He was always good at numbers, Glen. So clever. When they did the last calculation, Tom said, ‘I reckon you should get about a quarter of a million,’ and Glen whooped like we’d won the Lottery. I wanted to say that we didn’t need the money – that I didn’t want this dirty money. But I just smiled and went over and held Glen’s hand.
It’s a long process but it gives Glen a new focus. The eBay parcels stop arriving and instead he sits at the kitchen table with his paperwork, reading reports and crossing stuff out, highlighting other bits with new coloured pens, punching holes in documents and filing them in his different folders. Sometimes he reads a bit out to me, to see what I think.
‘The effect of the case and the stigma attached to it means that Mr Taylor now suffers frequent panic attacks when he leaves the house.’
‘Do you?’ I ask. I hadn’t noticed. Not like my mum’s panic attacks, anyway.
‘Well, I feel churned up inside,’ he says. ‘Do you think they’ll want a doctor’s note?’
We don’t go out much anyway. Just to the shops and once to the pictures. We tend to go very early and shop in big, anonymous supermarkets where you don’t have to talk to anyone, but he’s nearly always recognized. Not surprising really. His picture was in the papers every day when the trial was on and the girls on the tills know it’s him. I’ve said I’ll go on my own but he won’t hear of it. He won’t let me face it alone. He holds my hand and braves it out and I learn to give anyone who dares say a word a look, to shut them up.
It’s more difficult when I meet people I know. When they see me, some cross the road, pretend they haven’t noticed me. Others want to know everything. I find myself saying the same thing over and over: ‘We’re fine. We knew the truth would come out – that Glen is innocent. The police have got a lot to answer for.’
Mostly, people seem glad for us, but not all. One of my old clients from the salon said, ‘Hmm. But none of us are completely innocent, are we?’
I told her it had been lovely to see her but I had to get back to help Glen.
‘It’ll mean going back to court,’ I work myself up to say to him one day. ‘Having everything dug up again and gone through. I’m not sure—’
Glen stands and holds me. ‘I know it’s hard for you, love, but this will be my vindication. This will make sure people know what I went through. What we went through.’
I see the sense in that and try to be more helpful, remembering dates and terrible encounters with people in public to put in his evidence. ‘Remember that bloke at the cinema? He said he wouldn’t sit in the same room as a paedophile. Shouted it and pointed at you.’
Of course Glen remembers. We had to be escorted out of Screen 2 by Security ‘for our own safety’, the manager said. The bloke kept shouting, ‘What about Bella?’ and the woman with him was trying to make him sit down.
I wanted to say something – that my husband was innocent – but Glen gripped my arm and said, ‘Don’t, Jean. It’ll make it worse. He’s just some nutter.’
He doesn’t like remembering this but he writes it down in his statement. ‘Thanks, love,’ he says.
The police resist the compensation claim – Tom says they have to because it is taxpayers’ money they will have to pay out – until the very last minute. I’m getting dressed in my court outfit when Glen, already in his good suit and shoes, gets a call from Tom.
‘It’s over, Jeanie,’ he shouts up the stairs. ‘They’ve paid up. Quarter of a million.’
The papers and Dawn Elliott call it blood money, made on the back of her little girl. The reporters write horrible things about Glen again and they are back outside. I want to say ‘I told you so,’ but what good would that do?
Glen goes quiet again and I pack in the job before they can let me go.
Back to where we started.
Chapter 29
Monday, 21 July 2008
The Detective
AFTER THE T
RIAL collapsed, there was a different kind of sadness for Bob Sparkes. And anger. Mostly directed at himself. He’d allowed himself to be seduced into this disastrous strategy.
What had he been thinking? He’d heard one of the senior officers describe him as a ‘glory hunter’ as he passed an open door on the top floor and he’d cringed. He thought he’d been thinking of Bella, but perhaps it was all about him.
‘Anyway, it’s not glory I’m covered in,’ he told himself.
The report that finally emerged, five months after the end of the trial, was written in the sanitized language of such documents, concluding that the decision to use an undercover officer to obtain evidence against the suspect was ‘taken on the basis of expert opinion and extensive consultation with senior officers, but the strategy was ultimately flawed due to the lack of proper supervision of an inexperienced officer.’
‘We screwed up’ was the bottom line, Sparkes told Eileen on the phone after a terse meeting with his chief constable.
The next day, he was named and shamed along with his bosses in the papers as one of the ‘Top Cops’ who had ‘wrecked’ the Bella case. There were calls from politicians and punters for ‘heads to roll’; Sparkes kept his head down as the clichés were trotted out and tried to prepare himself for life after coppering.
Eileen seemed almost pleased at the thought of him leaving the force; she suggested security work, something corporate. She means something clean, he thought. His kids were brilliant, ringing most days to urge him on and make him smile with bits of their news, but he couldn’t look much beyond the end of each day.
He started running again, remembering the release it had given him as a young father, letting the rhythm of his pounding feet fill his mind for at least an hour. But he returned home grey-faced and sweating, his fifty-year-old knees killing him. Eileen said he had to stop; it was making him ill. That and everything else.
In the end, his disciplinary hearing was a civilized affair with questions posed politely but firmly. They already knew all the answers, but procedures had to be followed. He was put on gardening leave while he waited for the outcome and was still in his pyjamas when he took the call from his union representative; the force had decided to place the blame higher up and he would have a reprimand on his record but he wouldn’t be sacked. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Eileen cried and hugged him hard. ‘Oh Bob, it’s all over,’ she said. ‘Thank God they saw sense.’
The next day he went back to work, assigned different duties.
’A fresh start for us all,’ DCI Chloe Wellington, newly promoted to fill the disgraced Brakespeare’s chair, told him as part of some sort of re-education interview. ‘I know it is tempting, but leave Glen Taylor to someone else. You can’t go back to it, not after all this publicity. It would look like victimization and any new lines would be tainted by that.’
And Sparkes nodded, talking convincingly about the new cases on his desk, budgets, rosters and a bit of office gossip. But as he walked back to his office, Glen Taylor was top of his list; he was the only name on his list.
Matthews was waiting for him and they closed the door to talk tactics.
‘They’ll be watching us, Boss, to make sure we don’t go anywhere near him. They’ve brought in a senior detective from Basingstoke to review and plan the next steps for the Bella Elliott case – a woman, but a good bloke. Jude Downing. Do you know her?’
DI Jude Downing tapped on Sparkes’ door that afternoon and suggested a coffee. Slim and red-haired, she sat opposite him in a café down the road – ‘Canteen is a bit of a bear pit,’ she said. ‘Let’s get a latte,’ – and waited.
‘He’s still out there, Jude,’ Sparkes said finally.
‘What about Bella?’
‘I don’t know, Jude. I’m haunted by her.’
‘Does that mean she’s dead?’ she asked and he didn’t know how to answer. When he was thinking like a copper, he knew she was dead. But he could not let her go.
Dawn was still interviewed on slow news days, her childlike face staring accusingly out of the pages. He had continued to ring her every week or so. ‘No news, Dawn, just checking in,’ he would say. ‘How are things?’ and she would tell him. She had met a man she liked through the Find Bella campaign and was managing to get through the days.
‘There are three of us in this marriage,’ Eileen said once and laughed that dry, fake laugh she reserved for punishing him. He hadn’t risen to it, but he stopped mentioning the case at home and promised to finish painting their bedroom.
Jude Downing told him she was looking at every piece of evidence to see if anything had been missed. ‘We’ve all been there, Bob. You can get so close to a case like this, you can’t see clearly any more. It’s not a criticism, just how it is.’
Sparkes stared into the froth on his coffee. They had dusted a chocolate heart on it. ‘You’re right, Jude. Fresh eyes needed, but I can help you.’
‘Best if you step back for the moment, Bob. No offence, but we need to start from the beginning again and follow our own leads.’
‘OK. Thanks for the coffee. Better get back.’
Eileen listened patiently later as she poured him a beer and he vented his rage. ‘Let her get on with it, love. You are giving yourself an ulcer. Do the breathing exercises the doctor gave you.’ He sipped his beer and practised the feeling of letting things go, but it just felt like letting things slip away from him.
He tried to immerse himself in his new cases but it was surface activity. A month later, Ian Matthews announced his move to another force. ‘Needed a change, Bob,’ he said. ‘We all do.’
Ian Matthews’ farewell bash was a classic. Speeches from the grown-ups, then a drink-fuelled orgy of hideous anecdotes and maudlin reminiscences about crimes solved. ‘End of an era, Ian,’ Sparkes told him as he released himself from the sergeant’s beery hug. ‘You’ve been brilliant.’
He was the last man standing, he told himself. Apart from Glen Taylor.
His new sergeant arrived, a thirty-five-year-old, frighteningly clever girl – ‘Woman, Bob,’ Eileen had corrected him. ‘Girls have pigtails.’
She didn’t have pigtails. She wore her glossy brown hair up in a tight bun, the tension on the fine hairs at her temples causing her skin to pucker. She was a sturdy young woman with a degree and a career path apparently tattooed on the inside of her eyelids.
DS Zara Salmond – Mum must have a thing about royalty, he’d thought – had transferred from Vice and was there to make his life easier, she said, and began.
Cases ebbed and flowed through his door – a teenage drug death, a run of high-end robberies, a nightclub stabbing – and he waded through them, but nothing could wrest his attention from the man who shared his office.
Glen Taylor, grinning like a monkey outside the Old Bailey, glimmered on the periphery of his day. ‘He’s here somewhere,’ became his mantra as he quietly pored over every police report from the day Bella disappeared, wearing away the letters on his keyboard.
Sparkes heard on the canteen grapevine when they hauled Lee Chambers back in to have another look at him. He’d done his three months for the indecent exposure, lost his job and had to move, but, apparently, had lost none of his front.
Chambers apparently wriggled in his chair, protesting his innocence, but told them more about his trade in porn, including his opening hours and regular haunts, in return for immunity from further prosecution.
‘One to watch’ was the verdict from the new team, but they didn’t believe he was their bloke. They spat him back out, but his information gave the service-station search a new focus and the CCTV finally yielded some of Chambers’ customers. Sparkes waited to hear if Glen Taylor was among them. ‘No sign, Sir,’ Salmond told him. ‘But they’re still looking.’
And on they went.
It was fascinating, like watching a dramatization of his investigation with actors playing the detectives. ‘Like sitting in the stalls,’ he told Kate when she
called.
‘Who’s playing you? Robert de Niro? Oh, no, I forgot, Helen Mirren.’ She laughed.
But perching on the edge of his seat as a member of the audience instead of being in the bubble of the investigation gave him a view he’d never had before. He could survey the hunt, Godlike, and that was when he began to notice the cracks and false starts.
‘We focused on Taylor too quickly,’ he told DS Salmond. It had cost him a lot to admit it to himself, but it had to be done. ‘Let’s look at the day Bella disappeared again. Quietly.’
Secretly, they started to rebuild 2 October 2006 from the moment the child woke, using the inside surfaces of a hastily emptied metal cabinet in the corner of Sparkes’ office to paste up their montage. ‘Looks like an art project,’ Salmond joked. ‘Just need a bit of sticky-backed plastic and we’ll get a Blue Peter badge.’
She’d wanted to do the timeline on the computer, but Sparkes was worried it would be clocked. ‘This way, we can get rid of it and leave no trace, if we have to.’
He hadn’t been sure when Salmond asked to help him. She didn’t tease him like Matthews did – he missed it, the intimacy and release of a shared joke, but it felt inappropriate with a woman. Flirtatious rather than comradely. Anyway, he didn’t miss Matthews’ disgusting ketchup-slathered sausage sandwiches and the glimpses of his belly as his shirt came adrift.
DS Salmond was very bright, but Sparkes didn’t really know her or whether he could trust her. He’d have to. He needed her unemotional clear-sightedness to stop him veering off into the undergrowth again.
Bella woke at 7.15, according to Dawn. A bit later than usual, but she was late to bed the night before. ‘Why late to bed?’ Salmond asked. They scrolled through Dawn’s statements.
‘They went to McDonald’s and had to wait for the bus home,’ Sparkes said.
‘Why? Was it a treat?’ asked Salmond. ‘Not her birthday – that’s in April. I thought Dawn was permanently short of money? About five hundred quid owing on her credit card and the neighbour said she rarely went out.’
