At the back fence, Mick helps me over. It’s not high, really. More for show than security. I’ve got trousers on, but it’s still a bit of a struggle. He’s parked his car around the corner, he says, and we creep slowly to the end of the alley behind the houses, in case one of the reporters is there. I suddenly want to cry. I’m about to get into a car with people I don’t know and head off to God knows where. It’s probably the craziest thing I’ve ever done.
Glen would’ve had a fit. Even before all the police stuff, he liked to keep things private. We lived in this house for years—all our married life—but, as the neighbors were only too glad to tell the press, we kept ourselves to ourselves. It’s what neighbors always say, isn’t it, when dead bodies or mistreated children are found next door? But in our case, it was true. One of them—it could’ve been Mrs. Grange opposite—described Glen to a reporter, as having “evil eyes.” He had nice eyes, actually. Blue with longish lashes. Little-boy eyes. His eyes could turn me over inside.
Anyway, he used to say to me, “Nobody’s business but ours, Jeanie.” That was why it was so hard when our business became everyone else’s.
? ? ?
Mick the photographer’s van is filthy. You can’t see the floor for burger boxes, crisp packets, and old newspapers. There’s an electric razor plugged into the lighter thing and a big bottle of Coke rolling around in the foot well.
“Sorry about the mess,” he says. “I practically live in this van.”
Anyway, I’m not getting in the front. Mick takes me around the back and opens the doors.
“In here,” he says, grasping my arm and guiding me in. He puts his hand on my head and ducks me down so I don’t bang my head. “Keep down when we drive off, and I’ll give you the all clear.”
“But—” I start to say, but he’s slammed the doors, and I’m sitting in semidarkness among camera gear and dustbin bags.
SEVEN
The Detective
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2006
Bob Sparkes yawned loudly, stretching his arms above his head and arching his aching back in his office chair. He tried not to look at the clock on the desk, but it winked at him until he focused. It was two a.m. Day three of the hunt for Bella over and they were getting nowhere.
Dozens of calls about long-haired, scruffy men and other leads were being checked in an ever-widening circle from the locus, but it was meticulous, slow work.
He tried not to think about what was happening to Bella Elliott—or, if he was honest, what had already happened. He had to find her.
“Where are you, Bella?” he asked the photo on his desk. The child’s face was everywhere he looked—the incident room had a dozen photographs of her, smiling down at the deskbound detectives, like small religious icons giving a blessing to their work. The papers were full of pictures of “Baby Bella.”
Sparkes ran his hand over his head, registering the growing bald patch. “Come on, think!” he told himself, leaning in to the computer screen. He read once more through the statements and reports from the trawl of the local sex offenders, searching for the tiniest weaknesses in their individual stories, but he could see no real leads.
He scanned through the profiles one last time: pathetic creatures, most of them. Solitary blokes with body odor and bad teeth, living in a fantasy online universe and occasionally straying into the real world to try their luck.
Then there were the persistent offenders. His officers had gone to Paul Silver’s house; he’d abused his kids over the years and had done time for it. But his wife—His third? he wondered. Or is it still Diane?—confirmed wearily that her old man was inside, doing five years for burglary. Diversifying, apparently, Bob Sparkes had told his sergeant.
Naturally, there’d been sightings of Bella reported all over the country in the first forty-eight hours. Officers had rushed off to check, and some calls had got his heart racing.
A woman from just outside Newark had rung to say a new neighbor had been playing in the garden with a child. “She’s a little blond girl. I’d never seen a child in the garden before. I thought she didn’t have kids,” she said. Sparkes sent the local force around immediately and waited at his desk for the phone to ring.
“It’s the neighbor’s niece, visiting from Scotland,” the local DI had told him, as disappointed as him. “Sorry. Maybe next time.”
Maybe. His problem was that most of the calls to the incident room were always going to be from chancers and attention seekers, desperate to be part of the drama.
The bottom line was that the last sighting of Bella by anyone other than Dawn was at the newsagent’s shop down the road. The owner, a mouthy grandmother, remembered mother and child coming into the shop around eleven thirty. They were regulars. Dawn went in most days to buy cigarettes, and this visit, Bella’s last, was recorded in the grainy stop-start images of the shop’s cheap security camera.
Here, little Bella holding her mother’s hand at the counter; cut to Bella, face blurred and indistinct, as if she were already disappearing, with a paper bag in her hand; cut to shop door closing behind her.
Dawn’s mum had phoned the house after lunch—2:17, according to her phone records—and told police she’d heard her granddaughter shouting along to Bob the Builder in the background and asked to speak to her. Dawn had called her, but Bella had apparently run off to fetch a toy.
The timeline of the next sixty-eight minutes was Dawn’s. It was vague, punctuated by her household chores. The detectives had got her to reenact the cooking, washing up and folding of Bella’s clothes from the tumble dryer to try to get a sense of the minutes that passed after Dawn said she saw Bella wander into the garden to play, just after three o’clock.
Margaret Emerson, who lived next door, had gone to fetch something from her car at 3:25 p.m. and was sure the front garden was empty.
“Bella always shouted ‘Peepo’ to me. It was a bit of a game for her, poor little thing. She loved attention. Her mum wasn’t always interested in what she was doing,” Mrs. Emerson said carefully. “Bella used to play on her own a lot, carting her dolly round and chasing Timmy, the cat. You know what kids get up to.”
“Did Bella cry a lot?” Sparkes had asked.
It had given Mrs. Emerson pause for thought, but then she’d shaken her head and said briskly: “No. She was a happy little thing.”
The family doctor and health visitor agreed. “Lovely child,” “Little poppet,” they chorused. “Mum struggled a bit on her own—it’s hard bringing up a child alone, isn’t it?” the doctor said, and Sparkes nodded as if he understood. All of this was logged away in the now-bulging files of evidence and statements, proof of the effort his blokes were making, but he knew it was all surface chatter. They were making no progress.
The long-haired man was the key, he concluded, switching off his computer and carefully stacking the files on his desk before heading for the door and five hours of sleep.
“Maybe tomorrow we’ll find her,” he whispered to his sleeping wife when he got home.
A week later, with no news, Kate Waters was on the phone.
“Hi, Bob. The editor has decided to offer a reward for any information that leads to Bella being found. He’s putting up twenty grand. Not too shabby.”
Sparkes groaned inwardly. “Bloody rewards,” he cursed to Matthews later. “The papers get all the publicity, and we’ll get every nutter and con man in the country on the phone.”
“That’s very generous, Kate,” he said. “But do you think this is the right moment? We’re working on a number—”
“It’s going on the front page tomorrow, Bob,” she interrupted. “Look, I know the police usually hate the idea of rewards, but people who see or hear things and are worried about ringing the police will see twenty grand and pick up the phone.”
He sighed. “I’ll go and tell Dawn,” he said. “I need to prepare her.”