Philip Hensher - King of the Badgers

‘I’d like to invite Heidi and Micky to say a few words,’ the chief constable said, with resignation. ‘I’m sure we all understand how difficult this is for them, and appreciate how brave they’ve been in coming here tonight.’

Heidi looked up from underneath her curtain of blonde hair, and turned to her left. She did not look at Micky, but at Mr Calvin in his blue three-buttoned suit and grey-white slicked-down hair. ‘Look at her,’ one of the women at the very back of the hall, Billa Townsend, the Brigadier’s wife, said to her friend from the reading group, and they both looked at Heidi. Despite the four children, the years of men’s demands and children’s commands in a small house buried a long way within the Ruskin estate on the Torcombe road, despite the lack of sleep this last week and the worst her newly acquired chainstore wardrobe could do for her, she was a beauty. Billa Townsend was indicating that in low tones, and her friend Kitty understood what she was being asked to look at. Heidi looked what she was, or had been: the sumptuous heroine of the Hanmouth Academy, and the eleven years since she had left school had done little to touch her perfect high-boned face, her green eyes, the pale stripe of hair falling like a shadow across her perpetually bronzed cheek, and that awkward but perfect element, the nose of an eagle or a duchess. They had shaken their heads when she had gone off, at sixteen, with sad, ratty Nigel. There must have been a reason for her to do that, and for the two hopeless men, one a hopeless and brief husband, since then. Must have been a reason, even, for Micky Thomas, seven years her junior. Hanmouth had hardly heard her speak since she left school, unless she had been suggesting a colour rinse in flat tones. Hanmouth had only, in the last year or two, seen her man in the worst of its pubs, heard his daft opinions, seen him manhandling different girls into the pub toilets at closing time. In her hand was the little page of the notebook Mr Calvin had passed her. She hardly glanced at it.

‘I’d just like to say thank you,’ Heidi said, in a flat quiet voice—the chief constable chivalrously adjusted the microphone in front of her. ‘I’d like to say thank you to everyone who is helping by making a contribution to the Save China fund. It means a lot to us that people who never met China care so much that they’ll send in thirty, forty, fifty pounds to help with the family expenses and the investigation that is going to help find China. China’s a lovely girl. She’s not an angel, she’s full of mischieviousness like any other eight-year-old. I just want to say to whoever’s got her that they want to think about us, think about her family, who love her so much and miss her. Her little brothers and her sister don’t understand she’s been taken, but they cry themselves to sleep every night. So, please, just bring her back home safe and sound soon.’

The cameras stayed for a moment at their sustained angle, waiting perhaps for the mother to start weeping. She had done so once before. ‘Hard as nails,’ one cameraman muttered to his sound man, and lowered the camera in disappointment. The chief constable was winding up now, giving the same appeal for information that he had given the day before, but none of that needed filming. The party on the stage stood up—the chief constable and the woman police officer in charge of the O’Connors’ welfare, Calvin, the lawyer, Micky and Heidi. As at the end of a wedding, they sorted themselves out into disparate couples, the chief constable taking charge of Heidi, Mr Calvin walking with Micky’s elbow firmly in his grip, the lawyer and the woman police officer bringing up the rear. The community centre rose like a congregation, solemnly and silently. At the back of the hall, the crowd, which hadn’t found seats and was filling the lobby and half the street outside, pressed against each other and divided. The police officers at the back pushed and shoved, finding space for Micky and Heidi and their official attendants. ‘Those sex offenders—we need to know, Chief Constable,’ the man who had shouted out said again, now in quite a reasonable voice as the officers passed. Heidi smiled brilliantly for a moment; the chief constable did not appear to have heard.

The hall had been solemn, concerned and angry, but the mood petered out the further you got from the stage. Outside, in the warm spring evening, the crowd was inquisitive, unfamiliar to each other, and even festive. One man staring at Heidi and Micky’s departure was finishing off a Cornetto. They hadn’t bothered to change their clothes into anything respectful of the occasion. Some of the men were in swimsuits with a T-shirt or vest on top, a pair of vivid splashy Vilebrequin shorts and flip-flops, straight from the pool, their girlfriends in spaghetti-stringed tops and sarongs over wet bikinis. They stared as if at celebrity, and spilled halfway down the street as far as the Co-op and the Case Is Altered, one of the better Hanmouth pubs, and evidently doing very well out of the influx of curious outsiders. One woman had come from as far away as London, it was said, though an excited report of travellers from Germany turned out to refer to some holiday-makers who happened to have stumbled, bemused, on the happy scene.

In the middle of the crowd, blocking the street, there was a police car. Somehow a path was got through to it. Heidi and Micky, guarded by police, got into the back. Micky was openly staring at the strangers staring at him. Each of them held up a camera phone to their faces over the policemen’s shoulders. The woman police officer in charge of the investigation got into the front, and the crowd, disappointed, parted. The car was permitted to set off. The chief constable, accompanied by a couple of officers, made his way as best he could through the crowd to his driver and car in the car park behind the community centre and the fire station. The stars of the show had departed. The audience, leaving the community centre, lost its focus of interest but not its excitement. Hanmouth acquaintances started greeting each other, quite happily. The outsiders, knowing no one, drifted away disappointedly.

‘Well, that was sad,’ Billa Townsend, the Brigadier’s wife, said to her friend Kitty. She spoke briskly.

‘I know ,’ Kitty said, as if with wonderment that, of all the emotions in the world, Billa had happened by sheer chance to express the very one that she, too, happened to be feeling. ‘Awfully sad, really. Rather wish I hadn’t gone. Just to look at the poor mother—what she must be feeling, I can’t imagine. Terribly sad.’

‘We’re going to be late for Miranda’s book club,’ Billa said. ‘We’d better make a move.’

The pair of them, each with a string bag containing a book—the same book—and strong, cross, hairy old faces over their quilted blue or green sleeveless gilets, turned away from the community centre and down the Fore street towards the quay. Beyond that was the long line of Dutch houses where Miranda lived. The air of reckless festivity was strong in the street now that the police had gone. Outside the Case Is Altered, a dozen men stood and drank, smoking. None of them was known to Billa or to Kitty. A noisy record from the jukebox enquired, through the open window of the inn, whether someone wished his girlfriend was hot like the singer. Billa didn’t know why it was so necessary to make such a frightful din about everything nowadays, and Kitty, throwing everything into her answer, said that she knew. Three unfamiliar children, perhaps the children of some of the drinkers, did handstands without surveillance or restraint against the white-painted carriage arch, against the landlady’s trellis. It didn’t appear like a community in which a dangerous child-abductor was on the prowl.