The Widow by Fiona Barton Read Free Book Online

happened. He had to find her.
    â€˜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 a small religious icon 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 into the computer screen. He read once more through the statements and reports from the trawl of the local sex offenders, searching for the tiniest weakness 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 odour 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 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 said to 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 neighbour had been playing in the garden with a child. ‘She’s a little blonde girl. I’ve never seen a child in the garden before. I thought she didn’t have kids,’ she said. Sparkes sent the local force round immediately and waited at his desk for the phone to ring.
    â€˜It’s the neighbour’s niece, visiting from Scotland,’ the local DI had told him, as disappointed as he was. ‘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 the police she’d heard her granddaughter shouting along to ‘Bob the Builder’ in the background and had asked to speak to her. Dawn had called Bella but apparently she had 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 re-enact the cooking, washing up and folding of Bella’s clothes from the tumble drier to try and 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 then. ‘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