His return was typically low-key. “Hello, Salmond. Let’s see where we are with Matthew Evans,” he said as he took his coat off.
And he slipped back in as if he’d stepped out for just a few minutes. Salmond and the IT forensics team did not have encouraging news. They had gone steaming back through the data downloaded from Taylor’s original computer to hook out LMS as soon as they got the information. But she wasn’t there.
“No chats, no e-mails, sir. We’ve looked under all the permutations, but she doesn’t seem to figure.” Sparkes, Salmond, and DC Dan Fry, who had been brought back into the team, stood in a ragged semicircle behind the techie’s chair and stared at the screen as names rolled up, willing her to appear. It was the fourth time through the list, and the mood in the room was bleak.
Sparkes went back to his office and picked up the phone. “Hello, Dawn. It’s Bob Sparkes. No, no news exactly, but I have a couple of questions. I need to talk to you, Dawn. Can I come now?”
She deserved to be handled carefully after all she’d been through, but this had to be addressed head-on.
THIRTY-EIGHT
The Mother
THURSDAY, JULY 13, 2006
Dawn Elliott liked going out. She loved the ritual of a deep, perfumed bath, conditioning and blow-drying her long hair in front of the mirror. Putting on thick mascara with party music playing loudly. The final look in the full-length mirror on the wardrobe door and then clip-clopping to the taxi in high heels, the fizz of excitement rising in her chest. Going out felt like being seventeen forever.
Bella had stopped all that for a while. It had been bloody stupid getting pregnant, and it was her own fault. Too eager to please. He was so sexy—dancing to be close to her that first time they set eyes on each other. He’d taken her hand and twirled her around until she was dizzy and laughing. They’d taken their drinks outside with the smokers, to get some air. His name was Matt and he was already taken, but she didn’t care. He visited Southampton only once a month for work, but he phoned and texted every day in the beginning, when his wife thought he was fetching something from the car or taking the dog for a walk.
It had lasted six months—until he told her his office had moved him from the south coast to the northeast. Their last encounter had been so intense, she felt drunk on the experience afterward. He’d begged her to have sex without a condom—“It’ll be more special, Dawn.” And it was, she supposed, but he didn’t hang around to hear the result. Married men don’t, her mother had told her, despairing of her na?veté. “They’ve got wives and children, Dawn. They just want sex with stupid girls like you. What are you going to do about the baby?”
She didn’t know at first, and she put off any decision in case Matt reappeared like a knight on a white horse to whisk her away to a new life. And when he didn’t, she read glossy baby magazines and sleepwalked into motherhood.
She didn’t regret going ahead with the pregnancy—well, not often, only when Bella woke up every hour from three a.m., or was teething and screaming, or filling a nappy. The baby years turned out to be not as advertised in the magazines, but they had survived it together and things got better as Bella became a person and a bit of company for Dawn.
She’d tell her daughter all her secrets and thoughts, safe in the knowledge that Bella wouldn’t judge her. The little girl laughed along with her when she was happy and cuddled into her lap when Dawn cried.
But hours spent watching CBeebies and playing video games on her phone didn’t fill her life. Dawn was lonely. She was only twenty-six. She shouldn’t be on her own, but who would be interested in a single mum?
She was attracted to married men—she’d read somewhere the older man represented a father figure and the excitement of forbidden fruit. She hadn’t got the biblical allusion but understood the mixture of danger and safety all too well. She wanted to find another Matt but couldn’t afford babysitters and her mum disapproved of her going out until late.
“What are you doing? Nightclubs? For goodness’ sake, Dawn, look where that got you last time. You are a mother now. Why don’t you go out for a meal with one of your friends?”
So she did. She and Carole, an old school friend. Sharing a Hawaiian pizza was nice, but she didn’t return home buzzing with music and vodka shots.
She’d found the chat room through a magazine in the doctor’s waiting room. Bella had a temperature and a rash, and Dawn knew that Dr. John, as he liked to be known, would chat with her, give her some attention—“fancies me a bit,” she told herself, deciding to put on makeup at the last minute. She needed to be fancied. Every woman did.
Flipping through the pages of a teen mag, grimy with dozens of fingers and thumbs, she had read about the new dating scene online. She was so engrossed, she missed her number being called. The receptionist had to shout her name, and she got up quickly, grabbing Bella from the Lego pit and stuffing the magazine into her bag for later.
Her laptop was old and battered, not helped by the fact that she kept it on top of the wardrobe, away from Bella’s sticky fingers. A bloke at work had given it to her when he got a new one. She’d used it at first, but when the charger stopped working and she didn’t have the money to get another one, she’d lost interest.
On the way home from the doctor’s, she used her emergency credit card to buy a new charger.
The chat room was brilliant. She basked in the attention from her new friends, the men who wanted to know all about her, who asked about her life, her dreams and wanted her photo, who weren’t put off by her having a child. Some even wanted to know about her little girl.
She didn’t tell anyone else. No one outside the laptop. This was her thing.
THIRTY-NINE
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.”