At Bergerac, he goes to get the rental car while I wait for the bag, mesmerized by the passing luggage. I miss our case—it’s been so long since we used it, I have forgotten what color it is and have to wait until everyone else has heaved theirs off. I finally go out into the bright sunshine and spot Glen in a tiny red car. “Didn’t think it would be worth getting anything bigger,” he says. “We’re not going to do much driving, are we?”
Funny, but being on our own in France is different from being on our own at home. Without a routine, we don’t know what to say to each other. So we say nothing. The silence should be a rest from the constant noise and banging on our door at home, but it isn’t. It’s worse somehow. I take to going for long walks in the lanes and woods around the cottage while Glen sits on a sun lounger and reads detective novels. I could scream when I see what he’s packed. As if we hadn’t had enough of police investigations.
I decide to leave him with his perfect murders and sit on the other side of the patio with some magazines. I find myself looking at Glen, watching him and thinking about him. If he looks up and catches me, I pretend I am looking at something behind him. I am, I suppose.
I don’t really know what I am looking for. Some sign of something—his innocence, the toll taken by the ordeal, the real man, perhaps. I can’t really say.
The only time we leave the place is to drive to the nearest supermarket to get food and loo rolls. I can’t be bothered to shop for real meals. Finding the stuff to go into a spaghetti Bolognese is beyond me, so we eat bread and ham and cheese at lunchtime and a cold roast chicken and coleslaw or more ham in the evenings. We aren’t really hungry anyway. It is just something to push around our plates.
We’ve been here four days when I think I see someone walking along the lane at the bottom of the property. First person I’ve seen near the property. A car is an event.
I don’t think much of it, but the next morning there’s a man walking up the drive. “Glen,” I shout to him in the house. “There’s a bloke coming up.”
“Get in here, Jean,” he hisses and I hurry past him as he closes the door and begins drawing the curtains. We wait for the knock.
The Herald has found us. Found us and photographed us: “The kidnapper and his wife sunning themselves outside their exclusive hideaway in the Dordogne” while Dawn Elliott “desperately continues her search for her child.” Tom reads us the headlines the next day over the phone. “We’re only here because we’re being hounded, Tom,” I say. “And Glen has been cleared by the courts.”
“I know, Jean, but the papers have convened their own court. It won’t last long before they’ll be on to the next thing—they’re like children, easily distracted.” He says the Herald must have traced Glen’s credit card to find us.
“Are they allowed to do that?” I ask.
“No. But that doesn’t stop them.”
I put down the phone and begin packing. The villains again.
When we get home, they are waiting, and Glen rings Tom to talk about how to stop them from saying these things.
“It’s libel, Jeanie. Tom says we have to sue them—or threaten to sue them—or they’ll keep going, digging into our lives and putting us on the front page.”
I want it to stop, so I agree. Glen knows best.
It takes a while for the solicitors to write their letter. They have to say why the stories are all wrong, and that takes a bit of time. Glen and I go up to Holborn again, taking the same train I used to take when he was on trial. “Groundhog Day,” he says to me. He tries to keep my spirits up, and I love him for it.
The barrister isn’t a Charles Sanderson; he’s a real smooth character. I bet his wig isn’t falling apart. He looks rich, like he drives a sports car and has a country house, and his office is all shiny metal and glass. Libel is obviously the moneymaking end of the business. Wonder if Mr. Sanderson knows.
This one is all business. He’s as bad as the prosecutor, asking all the questions again and again. I squeeze Glen’s hand to show him I’m on his side, and he squeezes back.
The smoothy pushes and pushes on every detail.
“I have to test our case, Mr. Taylor, because this is basically a rerun of the Bella Elliott prosecution. That case was thrown out because of the police actions, but the Herald maintains you kidnapped the child. We say that is wrong and defamatory. However, the Herald will throw everything at you—from the case itself, and they can also use evidence they gathered that was not admissible in the criminal trial. Do you see?”
We must have looked a bit blank, because Tom began to explain it in simple language while the smoothy looked out at the view.
“They’ll have a lot of dirt, Glen. And they’ll throw all of it at you to get the libel jury on their side. We need to show that you’re innocent, Glen, to get the jury to find against the Herald.”
“I am,” he says, all fired up.
“We know. But we need to show it, and we need to be sure there are no surprises. Just saying, Glen. You need to go into this with your eyes open, because it’s a very expensive action to bring. It will cost thousands of pounds.”
Glen looks at me, and I try to look brave, but inside I’m running for the door. I suppose we’ve got the dirty money we can use.
“No surprises, Mr. Taylor?” the smoothy repeats.
“None,” Glen says. I look at my lap.
The letter goes out the next day, and the Herald shouts about it all over its pages and on the radio and television.
“Taylor Tries to Gag Herald” is the headline. I hate the word “gag.”
THIRTY-THREE
The Mother
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2008
The photographs of the Taylors in France made Dawn furious. Is furious she wrote in her Facebook status, with a link to the main picture of Glen Taylor in shorts and bare-chested, lying on a lounger, reading a thriller called The Book of the Dead.
The crassness of it made her want to go around and shake the truth out of him. She cooked the idea in her head all morning, playing the scene over and over of her bringing Taylor to his knees and him crying and begging forgiveness. She was so sure it would work, she rang Mark Perry at the Herald and demanded a confrontation between her and the kidnapper.
“I could go to his house. I could look him in the eye. He might confess,” she said, high on the fear and excitement of meeting her child’s abductor.
Perry hesitated. Not from any compunction about accusing Taylor—he was writing the headline in his mind as he listened—but he wanted the dramatic confrontation to be exclusive, and the doorstep was far too public.
“He might not open the door, Dawn,” he said. “And then we’ll be left standing there. We need to do it where he can’t hide. In the street when he’s not expecting us. We’ll find out when he’s next meeting with the lawyers and catch him as he goes in. Just us, Dawn.”
She understood and told no one. She knew her mum would try to dissuade her—“He’s scum, Dawn. He’s not going to confess in the street. It’ll just upset you and bring you down again. Let the courts get it out of him.” But Dawn didn’t want to listen to sense. She didn’t want advice. She wanted to act, to do something for Bella.
She didn’t have to wait long. “You won’t believe this, Dawn. He’s got an early-morning appointment next Thursday—on the anniversary of Bella’s disappearance,” Perry said on the phone. “It’ll be perfect.”
Dawn couldn’t speak for a moment. There was nothing perfect about the anniversary. It had been looming over the horizon, and the terrible dreams had increased. She found herself reenacting the days leading up to October 2: shopping trips, walking to nursery school, watching Bella’s DVDs. Two years without her little girl seemed like a lifetime.
Perry was still talking, and she tuned back in, trying to reach back to her anger. “Taylor likes to go when no one else is around, apparently, so we’ll have him to ourselves. Come in, and we’ll plan our MO.”
“What’s an MO?”
“It’s Latin for how we’re going to get Glen Taylor.”