The Widow Read online

  Fry was also having to engage with other blokes in the chat rooms so that Taylor didn’t feel singled out, and the puerile humour and endless innuendo was beginning to wear him down. He could picture them, he said. Heavy-metal T-shirts and bald spots.

  Sparkes began to worry that being the bait would prove too much for him.

  He couldn’t fault the younger man for his commitment – he found Fry leafing through women’s magazines to get in character and starting to talk about PMT, much to Matthews’ disgust.

  And it was all taking so long. After fifteen nights in the chat room, Matthews was getting restless and told his boss it was a waste of time.

  ‘What do you say, Daniel?’ Sparkes asked. It was the first time he’d used the junior officer’s first name and Fry realized he was being put in the driving seat.

  ‘We’re building a relationship with him because we don’t want it to be a quick sex session. We want him to talk. Why don’t we give it another week?’

  Sparkes agreed and Fry, glowing with a new sense of power, rang his former tutor to urge her to up the ante. She was doubtful at first, but they agreed that Jodie should play hard to get and disappear for a couple of days, and then hit Glen hard.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ BigBear asked when Goldilocks reappeared. ‘Thought I’d lost you in the woods.’

  ‘My dad said I was on the computer too much,’ Goldilocks said. ‘He punished me.’ They both knew that she was twenty-seven, but the game was on.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Don’t want to say. I might get into trouble again.’

  ‘Go on.’

  And so she did. BB, as she now called him, was hooked.

  ‘Why don’t we meet up, somewhere online where your dad will never find us?’ he suggested.

  Chapter 24

  Tuesday, 10 July 2007

  The Detective

  GLEN TAYLOR SAID he was tapping the keys softly, telling his new friend that everyone in the house was asleep apart from him.

  Goldie, as he now called her, had sent a photo of herself, in baby-doll pyjamas, and he was trying to persuade her to take them off.

  DI Sparkes had asked Fleur Jones to be present during all the private email sessions with Taylor and they sat behind Dan Fry, barely lit by the glow of the screen.

  ‘You are so sweet, Goldie. My lovely girl.’

  ‘Your bad baby girl. You know I’ll do what you want.’

  ‘That’s right. My bad baby girl.’

  There followed a series of instructions from BB that Goldie told him she was obeying and enjoying. When it was over, Dan Fry took the next step. It wasn’t what Dr Jones had scripted but he was clearly growing impatient.

  ‘Have you ever had a bad baby girl before?’ Fry asked. Reflected in the window, Sparkes could see Fleur raise a hand to urge caution.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was it a real baby girl, or like me?’

  ‘I like both, Goldie.’

  Dr Jones signalled for him to get back on the agreed track. They were going too fast, but it felt like Taylor was ready to open up.

  ‘Tell me about the other bad baby girls. What did you do with them?’

  And Glen Taylor told her. He told her about his nightly adventures online, his encounters, his disappointments and triumphs.

  ‘But you’ve never done it for real? In real life?’ Dan asked and all three of them held their breath.

  ‘Would you like that, Goldie?’

  Sparkes went to put up his hand, but Fry was already typing.

  ‘Yes. I’d like that very much.’

  He had, he said. He had found a real baby girl once. Sparkes wavered. It was happening too fast to think straight. He looked at Fleur Jones and she got out of her chair and stood behind her protégé.

  Fry could barely type, he was shaking so hard.

  ‘I’m really turned on. Tell me about the real baby girl.’

  ‘Her name began with B, like me,’ he said. ‘Can you guess?’

  ‘No. You tell me.’

  The silence suffocated them as the seconds ticked by and they waited for the final piece of the confession.

  ‘Sorry, Goldie, got to go. Someone knocking on my door. Speak later …’

  ‘Shit,’ Fry said and put his head on the desk.

  ‘I think we’ve still got him,’ Sparkes said, looking at Dr Jones, and she nodded firmly.

  ‘He’s said enough for me.’

  ‘Let’s put it in front of the grown-ups,’ Sparkes said and got up. ‘Excellent work, Fry. Really excellent.’

  Six hours later, the three of them were sitting in the DCI’s office putting the case for arresting and charging Glen Taylor.

  DCI Brakespeare listened carefully, read the transcripts and made some notes, before sitting back to give his judgement.

  ‘He never used the name Bella,’ he said.

  ‘No, he didn’t—’ Sparkes began.

  ‘Did Fry go too far in his prompts?’

  ‘We’ve talked to the legal team and at first glance, they’re comfortable with it. It’s always a fine balance, isn’t it?’

  ‘But,’ Brakespeare talked over him, ‘we have him talking about taking a real baby girl beginning with B. Let’s get him back in and put it to him. Say we have a witness statement from Goldilocks.’

  They all nodded.

  ‘We’ve got very good reasons to have pursued this line: we’ve got him in the area on the day, the blue van, the child porn on his computer, his predatory nature shown in his chat-room outings, a shaky alibi from his wife. And, key, is the risk of further offences.’

  Everyone nodded again.

  ‘Do you believe he’s our man, Bob?’ Brakespeare asked finally.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Sparkes croaked, his mouth dry with anticipation.

  ‘So do I. But we need more to nail it. Fine toothcomb, Bob. Do it all again while we’ve got him in. There must be something linking him to the scene.’

  The team were sent back up the M3 to the south London suburb to start afresh. ‘Bring everything he has ever worn,’ Sparkes said. ‘Everything. Just empty the cupboards.’

  It was pure chance that they picked up Jean Taylor’s black puffa jacket. It was wedged between her husband’s winter coat and a dress shirt and was bagged and tagged like everything else.

  The technician who received the bags stacked them according to type and started the tests on the outerwear, as it would have been likely to come into contact with the crime victim first.

  The jacket pockets were emptied and contents bagged again. There was only one item. A scrap of red paper, about as big as the technician’s thumbnail. In the hush of the laboratory, he went through the process of examining it for fingerprints and fibres, lifting any evidence with sticky tape and cataloguing it meticulously.

  No prints, but dirt particles and what looked like an animal hair. Finer than a human hair, but he’d need to look at it under the microscope to get more details of colour and species.

  He took off his gloves and walked to the phone on the wall.

  ‘DI Sparkes, please.’

  Sparkes jumped down the stairs two at a time. The technician had told him not to bother coming – ‘It’s too early to be sure of anything, Sir’ – but Sparkes just wanted to see the piece of paper. To reassure himself it was real and wasn’t going to disappear in a puff of smoke.

  ‘We’re comparing the dirt particles with those taken from Glen Taylor’s van in the original sweep,’ the technician told him calmly. ‘If there’s a match, we can place the paper in the van. And we can tell you what sort of paper it is, Sir.’

  ‘I’ll bet it’s a bit of a Skittles packet,’ Sparkes said. ‘Look at the colour. Get on with it, man. Do you know what sort of animal the hair comes from? Could it be a cat?’

  The technician put up a hand. ‘I can tell you if it’s a cat quite quickly. I’ll get it under the microscope. But we can’t say if it came from a specific animal. It’s not like humans. Even if we have hairs to com
pare it with, we can’t say definitively that it came from that specific animal. Furthest we can go – if we’re lucky – is that it came from the same breed.’

  Sparkes ran both hands through his hair. ‘Get samples from Timmy Elliott pronto and let’s see.’

  He hovered and the technician waved him out of the door. ‘Give us some time. I’ll ring you as soon as we have results.’

  Back in his office, he and Matthews drew a Venn diagram, putting all the potential new evidence in interconnecting circles to see where they were.

  ‘If the paper is from a Skittles packet and the hair is from a cat the same breed as Timmy, it could place Jean Taylor at the scene,’ Matthews said. ‘It’s her coat. Must be. It’s too small for Glen.’

  ‘I’ll go and get her,’ Sparkes said.

  Chapter 25

  Thursday, 12 July 2007

  The Widow

  OF COURSE, THE POLICE don’t give up. They’ve got their teeth into Glen with his van, his pretend child porn and his ‘misconduct’. They’ll never let him go. They’ll try and prosecute him for those pictures if nothing else, his solicitor says.

  The visits and phone calls from DI Sparkes have become part of our lives. The police are building a case and we watch from the sidelines.

  I say to Glen that he should just tell the police about the ‘private job’ and where he was that day, but he insists it would make things worse. ‘They’ll say we’ve lied to them about everything, Jeanie.’

  I’m terrified I’ll do something to make things worse, say the wrong thing. But in the end, it was Glen who let the side down, not me.

  The police came to get him for further questioning today. They took him back to Southampton. When they left, he kissed me on the cheek and told me not to worry. ‘You know, it’ll be all right,’ he said to me and I nodded. And I waited.

  The police collected more of Glen’s things. All the clothes and shoes they hadn’t taken before. They took things he’d only just bought. I tried to tell them, but they said they were taking everything. They even took my jacket by mistake. I’d hung it in his space in the wardrobe because my side was full.

  The next day, Bob Sparkes came and asked me to go with him down to Southampton for questioning. He wouldn’t say anything in the car, just that he wanted me to help with the inquiry.

  But when we got to the police station, he sat me in an interview room and read me my rights. Then he asked me if I had taken Bella. Had I helped Glen take Bella?

  I couldn’t believe he would ask me that. I kept saying ‘No, of course not. And Glen didn’t take her,’ but he wasn’t listening properly. He was moving on to the next thing.

  He pulled out this plastic bag like a conjuror and I couldn’t see anything in it at first, but at the bottom was a scrap of red paper.

  ‘We found this in your coat pocket, Mrs Taylor. It’s from a Skittles packet. Do you eat many Skittles?’

  I didn’t know what he was talking about for a moment, but I remembered then. It must’ve been the bit of sweet packet I’d got from under the mat in the van.

  He must’ve seen my face change and kept pushing me. Kept saying Bella’s name. I said I couldn’t remember, but he knew I could.

  I told him in the end, to stop him asking me. I told him it might be a bit of paper I’d found in the van. Just a bit of rubbish, all fuzzy and dirty. I’d put it in my pocket to throw away later, but never did.

  I said it was just a sweet paper, but Mr Sparkes said they’d found a cat hair stuck to it. A grey cat hair. Like from the cat in Bella’s garden. I said that didn’t prove anything. The hair could have come from anywhere. But I had to make a statement.

  I hoped they wouldn’t say anything to Glen before I got a chance to explain. I’d tell him when we both got home that they had made me tell them. That it didn’t matter. But I didn’t get the opportunity. Glen didn’t come home.

  Seems he went on looking for porn on the internet. I couldn’t believe he’d be so stupid, when Tom Payne, Glen’s lawyer, told me. He was always the clever one in the family.

  The police had taken his computer, of course, but he bought himself a cheap little laptop and a Wi-Fi router – ‘for work, Jeanie’ – and sat in the spare room while he went into sex chat rooms or whatever they’re called.

  It was all very clever – they got some police officer to pretend to be a young woman on the internet and chat him up. She called herself Goldilocks. Who would fall for that? Well, Glen, apparently.

  It wasn’t just chatting up, either. Tom wanted to prepare me for what might be in the papers, so he told me that eventually Goldilocks had cybersex with Glen. It’s sex without touching, Glen said when he tried to explain when I visited him the first time. ‘It’s just words, Jeanie. Written-down words. We didn’t speak or even see each other. It was like it was happening in my head. Just a fantasy. You do see, don’t you? I’m under such a lot of stress with all these accusations. I can’t help myself.’

  I try to see. I really do. It’s an addiction, I keep saying to myself. Not his fault. I focus on the real villains here. Glen and I are very angry about what the police did.

  I couldn’t believe someone would do that as part of their job. Like a prostitute. That’s what Glen said, too. Before he found out Goldilocks was a man. That was hard for him to accept – he thought the police were just saying it to make him look like he was gay or something. I said nothing – I couldn’t get my head round cybersex, let alone worry about who he was doing it with. Anyway, it was hardly his biggest problem.

  He’d said too much to Goldilocks. Glen told me he’d told ‘her’ he knew something about a famous police case to impress her. ‘She’ practically told him to say it.

  This time, Bob Sparkes charged Glen with Bella’s kidnap. They said he’d taken her and killed her. But they didn’t charge him with murder. Tom Payne said they were waiting until they had a body. I hated him talking about Bella like that, but I didn’t say anything.

  I went home alone and then the press came back.

  I’m not a big newspaper reader, really. I prefer magazines. I like the real-life stories – you know, the woman who fostered one hundred kids, the woman who refused cancer treatment to save her baby, the woman who had a baby for her sister. The papers have always been more Glen’s department. He likes the Mail – he can do the crossword on the back page and it’s the sort of paper his former boss at the bank read. ‘Gives us something in common, Jeanie’, he said once.

  But now the papers and the telly – and even the radio – are about us. Glen is big news and the reporters have started knocking on the door again. I found out they call it ‘doorstepping’ and some of them actually sleep in their cars outside all night to try and catch a word with me.

  I sit upstairs in our bedroom at the front, peeking out from behind the curtain, watching them. They all do the same thing. It’s quite funny, really. They drive past first, checking out the house and who’s already outside. Then they park and stroll back to the gate, a notebook in their hand. The others jump out of their cars to cut the new one off before he or she can get to the door. Like a pack of animals, sniffing round the new arrival.

  After a few days, they’re all friends – sending one to get coffees and bacon sandwiches from the café at the bottom of the hill. ‘Sugar? Who wants sauce on their sarnie?’ The café must be making a fortune. I notice the reporters keep to one group and the photographers to another. Wonder why they don’t mix. You can tell them apart because the photographers dress differently – trendier, in scruffy jackets and baseball caps. Most of them look like they haven’t shaved for days – the men, I mean. The women photographers dress like men, too. In chinos and baggy shirts. And the photographers are so loud. I feel a bit sorry for the neighbours at first, having to listen to them laughing and carrying on. But then they start bringing out trays of drinks, standing and chatting to them and letting them use their loos. It’s a bit of a street party for them, I think.

  The reporters are quieter
. They spend most of their time on their phones or sitting listening to the radio news in their cars. Lots are young blokes in their first suits.

  But after a few days, when I won’t talk, the press send the big guns. Big beery men and women with sharp faces and smart coats. They roll up in their expensive, shiny cars and step out like royalty. Even the photographers stop messing about for some of them. One man who looks like he’s stepped out of a shop window parts the crowd and walks up the path. He bangs on the door and calls out, ‘Mrs Taylor, what is it like to have a child murderer as a husband?’ I sit there on the bed, burning with shame. It feels like everyone can see me even though they can’t. Exposed.

  Anyway, he isn’t the first to ask me that. One reporter shouted it at me after Glen was rearrested, as I was walking down to the shops. He just appeared, must’ve followed me away from the other journalists. He was trying to make me angry, to get me to say something, anything, so he’d have ‘an interview’ with the wife, but I wasn’t falling for that. Glen and I’d discussed it.

  ‘Jeanie, just stay quiet,’ he said when he rang me from the police station. ‘Don’t let them get to you. Don’t let anything show. You don’t have to talk to them. They are scum. They can’t write about nothing.’ But of course they did. The stuff that came out was awful.

  Other women said they’d had cybersex with him on the internet and were queuing up to sell their stories. I couldn’t believe any of it was true. Apparently, he was called BigBear and other ridiculous names in the chat rooms. I would look at him sometimes on my prison visits and try to imagine calling him BigBear. It made me feel sick.

  And there was more stuff about his ‘hobby’ – the pictures he bought on the net. According to ‘informed sources’ in one of the papers, he’d used a credit card to buy them, and when the police did a big swoop on paedophiles, tracking them through their card details, he panicked. I expect that’s why he got me to report his card missing, but how do papers get information like that? I thought about asking one of the reporters, but I can’t without saying more than I should.