Philip Hensher - King of the Badgers

‘They have to exclude every possibility, systematically,’ Doreen said, whose nephew was a constable in the Hampshire constabulary. ‘They’re doing all the right things, I’m sure.’

In the possession of the police was another list of names. Unlike the list of China’s friends and acquaintances, gathered by talking to her mother, to Micky, to her aunt and her siblings and her other friends, this was kept securely on a computer, and not printed out lightly, not shown to anyone outside the police service. On it were the names of those in Devon and Cornwall who had been convicted or accused of some sexual crime against children. Some of them had fucked eight-year-old nieces thirty years ago, and had recently been released from decades of drinking prison tea, pissed in by generations of kitchen-serving muggers. Others had been found with images of carefree naked toddlers on their computers, each one fairly unobjectionable, but amounting to a collection of tens of thousands. One unfortunate had, in 1987, had sex with a bricklayer who turned out to be twenty years old and thus below the age of consent; he, too, found himself on the police’s list of slavering lunatics beside the others with horrible designs on toddlers. There seemed no means of removing him from the police list, and he, like all the others, received a visit from the police in the little pink-fronted terraced house in Drewsteignton with a rainbow sticker in the window where he lived with the same bricklayer, now in his forties.

‘Someone’s taken her, I know it,’ Heidi was saying. ‘They’ve taken her, they’ve definitely taken her.’

Her apricot sitting room was crowded now: five police officers, Micky, Ruth, and a man from the local press as well as Heidi. The police didn’t know how he had got there and who had asked him, but he was taking notes silently, as if in competition with the woman police officer on the arm of the sofa doing the same thing. And there was someone else no one knew what he had to do with anything; a man called Calvin, well-dressed and elegant. One of the officers knew him, apparently, and had said, ‘Hello, Mr Calvin,’ when he had come in, so nobody had challenged him. Heidi wanted him to be there, it seemed; she turned to him from time to time instead of answering a question. He was an improbable friend for Micky or Heidi, but he nodded and smiled, or shook his head and frowned when appealed to. He had some role, possibly self-assigned. Outside on the stairs, the children sat, Ruth’s mother guarding them in watchful silence.

‘She hasn’t fallen into the estuary,’ Ruth said. ‘I said she hasn’t. We knew she hadn’t gone playing hide and seek, or gone off to visit one of her friends without telling anyone. We told you that yesterday. I told you she’d been taken by someone.’

‘We have to explore every possibility,’ one of the police officers said. ‘We’re dedicating a very large number of officers to this case. This morning, they have started paying home visits to every individual in the area known to us with some sort of record. You needn’t have any concerns about that.’

‘Oh, my God,’ Ruth’s mother said, coming into the room. ‘You’re telling us that there are people who have done this, living here, living round here sort of thing?’

‘Those are our first port of call,’ the police officer said.

‘Living here, on the estate?’ Micky said. ‘Who are they?’

‘Not necessarily here on the estate.’

‘Are they supposed to be living in Hanmouth?’ Ruth said. ‘Or Old Hanmouth?’

‘I’m very sorry,’ the police officer said, ‘but I can’t give you that information.’

‘I heard,’ Billa said to Sam over the telephone—he was only in his shop, not thirty yards away across the street, but it seemed altogether best to telephone, or Tom would be asking where she was going, ‘that there’s a little girl gone missing… Yes, I know. Just yesterday. A policeman came round to ask if we had a shed, or something. As if she were a lost cat… No, not at all. I don’t think she’s from Hanmouth properly speaking—I think Kitty said she went missing from up the road, on that post-war estate you drive past… That’s right. But Tom was speaking to another police officer, I think a more senior one, and he was saying that they now think the girl’s actually been taken by someone. Isn’t that frightful?… No, nobody saw anything. Apparently she was there one moment and gone the next. No car or anything. That’s why they thought at first she had run away, I suppose, but now they do think that she must have been abducted. You simply don’t think of that sort of thing happening in Hanmouth. How are you getting on with that Japanese novel? I can’t think why we agreed to it, I can’t get on with it, not one bit… Yes, do drop in, six-ish or whenever you close up—bang on Kitty’s door on your way over, we’ll make a little party of it.’

‘Have you just invited some ghastly reprobates to drink us out of house and home?’ the Brigadier called from his study, just next door.

‘Yes, I rather think I have,’ Billa said. ‘Don’t be such an old curmudgeon. You really are a wretch. It’s only Sam, in any case.’

‘Well, I warn you,’ the Brigadier said. ‘There’s not a drop of Campari in the house. He finished it the last time he was here.’

Billa had a couple of small purchases to make as well as the Campari, so she went out to the Co-op on the Fore street. Outside her door, there were clusters of people, twos and threes, outside the bookshop, the travel agent, the jeweller’s, all talking in urgent, restrained style. She might have thought they were talking about her, from the way they hushed and broke off as she approached. And there, as advertised, were two police officers, making their way from door to door. She wondered that they hadn’t made it to their house yet.

In the Co-op, she picked up what she needed—a pack of Lurpak, some emergency washing powder, some savoury biscuits and some loo roll as well as the Campari. It was extraordinary how these things ran out between trips to the supermarket. When she got to the till, on the counter there was the local newspaper. It came out in the evening, and on the cover was a photograph of a fat-faced child, grinning and gummy, evidently an unflattering school photograph. Next to her was a photograph of rather an attractive, though staring, blonde, holding that same photograph on a yellowish leather sofa; around her a thick-looking youth had his arm draped. The headline read, ‘WHERE IS CHINA?’

The girl on the till could have been quite pretty, with her straight red hair and her lucid freckled skin, Billa believed, if she had only had her gravestone teeth fixed. ‘Terrible, this,’ the girl said, gesturing at the newspaper. ‘Terrible.’

‘You never think it will happen in the place you live,’ Billa said. ‘The poor mother,’ and then, hardly meaning to, she picked up a copy of the deliriously untalented local newspaper, something she never bought or read. So when Sam came through the door an hour later, saying, ‘Isn’t it appalling?’ Billa and, more surprisingly, Tom, who joined them for once, had found out a good deal about the case and the poor family. Tom thought he recognized the mother. Nobody recognized the little girl. It was shocking that such things could happen, virtually on their doorstep. In the end, Kitty and Sam stayed for dinner, and Billa insisted that Sam phone up Harry and ask him over, as well.

China was officially missing. Two police officers were assigned to sit with Heidi. Ruth was sitting in the kitchen, incessantly smoking Marlboro Lights, waiting to be called in by her friend. Karen was despatched to a hotel and told that she would be needed in the morning. The children, wide-eyed, excited and frightened, were put to bed while the adults were interviewed. Out in the streets, search parties were setting off, door-to-door, like weary electioneers. On the third day, long before nine, the house towered over a makeshift refugee camp of silver reflective canopies, car batteries, tents, aluminium stools and ladders, men and women all facing in the same direction away from the house and talking, all of them ignoring each other in their steady monologues. Behind them, a curtain moved, a small face could be seen. By the afternoon, the crowds had doubled, and the first strangers arrived on the main street of Hanmouth.