Philip Hensher - King of the Badgers

‘I can assure everyone—’ the chief constable said, holding onto the microphone, but he got no further. The woman who had spoken was, it seemed, no more than a warm-up act for a familiar and by now keenly anticipated routine. As she sat down, Ruth stood up, and the television cameras had not troubled to turn to the chief constable, but stayed where they were, fixed on Ruth, the little girl’s aunt. Was that who she was? By now, all the journalists knew her well. Calvin, the media manager, had introduced all of them to her, a hard-faced black woman. They had had to admit she was nobody’s fool, and had been saying the same thing to them with great energy for ten days now. The police, too, knew her and her enthusiastic but unhelpful denunciations. She had never had so large an audience for her comments as she had now, and she was going to make the most of the arguments she had been polishing.

‘There’s not been a policeman on the beat here for years. Where are they all? Filling in their little forms in their little offices. And they’re here now, but what are they doing? Not house-to-house, they’re not doing that. They know, we know, there’s sex offenders living here in our midst, in Hanmouth. One of the chief constable’s officers told me as much. But they won’t tell us who they are or where they live. Anyone who’s got a little girl in this town wants to be worried. You think, it could be your daughter or your granddaughter next. It might be as easy them that get taken as China, next time. We want to know. It’s our right. What’s he got to say about that?’

On the stage in front of the blue west of England police screens, next to the chief constable with his bewildered expression, the girl’s mother sat, entirely relaxed. She might have believed the mission statement in fake loopy handwriting behind them, so calm did she seem: Helping People Safely. Her eyes were cast down towards her folded hands. Her long blonde hair fell like a curtain over her features. Heidi: she had been Helen in the papers, her birth name, or Tragic Helen, names nobody who knew her had ever called her. Snatched or posed, photographs of her frozen madonna-mask, refusing to weep, made a perfect front page; an old school photograph of China the usual inset. One enterprising paper had gone to Heidi’s long-estranged mother in Yeovil, and printed some old photographs of Heidi, ten or fifteen years old; the mother, afterwards, had been warned off coming anywhere near Heidi or Hanmouth, and some journalists were under the impression that Ruth’s mother Karen was her real mother.

Next to her was Micky, China’s stepfather, with the half-wit expression and shaved head, his mouth fallen half open. The visitors had taken his expression for shock or grief. Those who lived in Hanmouth had seen his empty face hundreds of times outside the worst of the small town’s pubs. They had never considered before that he came from Hanmouth, exactly. Some of them were surprised to hear that the sister-in-law, or whoever she was, was talking about ‘here’ as if she lived in Hanmouth, rather than in one of the grim suburbs that lay between Hanmouth and Barnstaple. Micky was known to everyone as far as Heycombe, however. He had a long-standing habit of showing his penis to newcomers and to girl students from Barnstaple, doing the Hanmouth pub crawl. His bun-like face was not made bewildered by grief or fear. That was what he looked like.

The chief constable allowed himself to think that the mother had prepared and rehearsed her sister, or sister-in-law, in these accusations. He also allowed himself to think that those involved in the rehearsal were much more extensive than that. The mother and the stepfather were, he saw, wearing new clothes from top to bottom, quite different from the new clothes they had been wearing when he had met them that morning. The price tag had still been on the sole of the woman’s shoes, as he had seen when she knelt to wipe some jam off one of her younger children’s chops. Newspaper money had paid for the new shoes, no doubt including a fat fee the interview in the Daily Whatever had brought them two days ago. The press had been full of the news that they’d asked to be paid in cash for that, though they’d all made a silent agreement not to mention any of that in their own coverage. This pair had been exploiting their opportunities and, in the eyes both of the police and the press, they knew what they were doing. It was as if they had been planning it before the child went missing, and the machinery had swung into action within hours. The way that the woman’s face had fallen to her hands a second or two before Ruth stood up had had a practised appearance. She didn’t want her satisfaction at the interruption and the discomfiture of the police to be too evident.

‘Let me assure you,’ the policeman said. ‘Let me assure everyone here that we are, indeed, carrying out house-to-house enquiries. These inquiries have led to a number of fruitful leads. We are now pursuing those. It would not be helpful, in the interests of our investigations, to explain here exactly what those leads are. I should also say that, in the hours immediately following China’s disappearance, we went as a matter of urgency to everybody in the vicinity who was on the sex offenders’ register. Of course, that was the first thing we did. We know who they all are, and they were our first priority.’

There was another rumpus, from the back of the hall. It was a man this time, looking not at all like one of Micky and Heidi’s relations, both deplorable and beyond genealogical analysis. This one looked very much like the sort of person who was supposed to live in Hanmouth, and soon people recognized him as the man who sat at the cash desk in the antiques emporium on the quay. He was the sort of person who in normal circumstances would complain about Heidi and Micky. He was wearing a tweed jacket and a tie, even on this hot spring night. His wife, by his side, nodded agreement as he shouted.

‘Who are they?’ he shouted. ‘Who are these sex offenders living in our communities? We need to know their names. I have grandchildren and—and—’

Heidi looked up, interested. She hadn’t anticipated or prepared this one.

‘Let me assure you—’ the chief constable said. ‘And that wasn’t the first thing you did. The first thing you did was to go wandering round my back garden without permission and walk up and down the long field out back, questioning innocent people while time got wasted. My wife and our grandchildren, our grandchildren, I tell you, they need to know—’

‘Let me assure you that investigations into such persons were immediate and very thorough. We will not, however, in the light, in the light of the strength, ah, of feeling around this case—’

‘This case?’

‘—around this case be revealing the names of those individuals who, though on the sex offenders’ register, are innocent of any involvement in China’s disappearance. I’m sure you can understand the thinking behind that.’

‘It’s not “this case”, it’s—’

‘We need to know—’

On the far end of the trestle table, Mr Calvin sat in his blue suit, taking notes. The chief constable had got to know him well in the last few days. He lived in Hanmouth, on the best street, the Strand. Calvin was the sort of respectable figure who would not normally have had anything to do with anyone like the O’Connors. He had announced himself to the police, once challenged, as ‘a friend of the family’s’, who would be liaising with them and advising them. Already, the chief constable happened to know, he had told the press and television that he was the O’Connors’ ‘representative’. An officer with a good memory recalled that, in fact, he was nothing more than the chairman of the Hanmouth Strand Neighbourhood Watch and, last year, had lobbied successfully for CCTV to be placed not only from one end of the Fore street in Hanmouth to the other, but the whole length of the Strand and some tranquil streets behind it where no crime had ever been committed. Whether any criminal had been caught by this inch-by-inch surveillance in the two years since, no police officer could say, but the cameras, and the signs announcing their presence, had been conjured into existence by the wish of Calvin and his committee. Now, his pseudo-legal authority had allowed him to take control of the O’Connors’ wishes and campaign. The police and press had, already, found common, unvoiced ground in detesting him. He gave a tight little smile to his clients, or friends, or customers, and finished what he was writing in his orange notebook. He tore out the page and passed it to Heidi, before closing the notebook.