King of the Badgers Read online

  ‘I won’t be long,’ Heidi said. ‘Put something in the oven. I’ll be back home at six.’ The children were supposed to know they weren’t to bother her on her afternoons off, but any old worry, any crisis no matter how small—a missing cowboy hat of Harvey’s, there weren’t any chocolate biscuits, China had hit Hannah—would bring one of them over the road, usually in tears.

  Hannah wasn’t in tears. ‘China hasn’t come back from the shops,’ she said. ‘I don’t know where she’s gone.’ Glum and slow with skunk though Heidi, Ruth and Karen were, they all agreed that was what Hannah had said. Karen thought she’d said, ‘And I’m scared,’ as well. That was probably just her picturesque addition to what Hannah had said, a fat little figure standing in the sun-strewn fog, making clutching gestures. In the corner of Ruth’s front room in the sugary smoke, standing up against the purple-paisley dado strip, Hannah made an unconventional harbinger of catastrophe.

  ‘She’ll be back home before long,’ Heidi said. ‘I’ll be over soon.’

  But Hannah had insisted. China had been away for an hour and a half. Hannah and Harvey had gone out looking for her, and had walked the two hundred yards between home and the shop in the arcade, back and forward, four times. ‘I expect she’s gone to visit a friend of hers,’ Ruth said, irritated. Hannah had insisted. Harvey had wanted a PB and J, and had started bawling. China had gone to the shops—she knew he was sitting bawling, she’d have come straight back.

  ‘In any case,’ Heidi said to the police later, quite calmly, ‘I knew China hadn’t gone to visit her friends for one straight and simple reason. She doesn’t have any friends. She’s not been a popular girl, ever. They bully her, I expect, because they say she’s fat and she smells. I don’t think she smells, but at that age, it’s always some reason they’ve got to pick on her, isn’t it? I knew she hadn’t gone to visit a friend. To tell the truth, I thought at first, China, she’s playing some trick on her brother and sister. I’ll tan her hide, I thought at first.’

  When Micky came back, it was seven thirty. After his appointment at the library, he’d arranged to meet an associate in a pub by the station, and they’d sunk a fair few before Micky had said it was time for him to be getting back. (A junior librarian, the associate and a bored barmaid had confirmed all of this. The barmaid said she’d never have served him the last few if she’d thought for one moment that he’d be getting in a car and driving anywhere.) By the time he got back home, a small crowd of neighbours had gathered at Heidi’s front gate. Micky got out of the car, his blue and yellow hooped T-shirt outlining ample belly and breasts. The neighbours let out a moan of satisfied excitement and interest.

  ‘What’s going on?’ said Micky. The door to Heidi’s house was hanging open. Ruth came out and looked at him with one of her grimmest faces. By eight, the police had arrived.

  4.

  There is, of course, no need to worry. There is a process. It is a police process, evolved and tested by a thousand cases that never come to court. That never last more than five hours, most of them. The process searches for a child in a succession of ways, each larger, each more serviced, each more public than the one before. There might be a metaphor here: a series of sieves, each one finer than the previous one. At first the obvious, the nearby is tested, a very few people. But more and more people fall into the sieve, and after a while, everyone is being tested. It escalates, the process, and it escalates quickly. Another metaphor: an escalator, rising like a cliff, speeding—a better metaphor—like a glass lift, rocketing upwards. A case is either solved unobtrusively and swiftly, or it arrives on the front pages of the national newspapers. Almost always it is solved swiftly, and nothing more is heard of it; nobody not related by blood to the child ever hears of it. But there is a process, and it is followed.

  The police arrived around eight o’clock. There were two of them at first. They took notes. A male policeman and a policewoman. They sat in Heidi’s apricot lounge, each at the edge of the sofa, smiling wanly. They balanced their notebooks on their knees. ‘Don’t worry,’ one said. ‘Children disappear, and most of them turn up quickly.’ And this was true. They asked about birthday parties China had gone to. They asked about her best friends, and where they lived; about everyone China had ever known on the estate. The children came in, and could add another ten names, tumbling over each other in their urge to be helpful.

  ‘She’s not with any of them,’ Heidi’s friend—sister-in-law, in fact—Ruth said, walking in and walking out again contemptuously. ‘You’re wasting time.’

  The police explained to Heidi—because Ruth had not stayed for an answer—that this was always the first line of enquiry. And then, within half an hour, they left with the names of everyone China knew, as far as Heidi and the children were aware.

  The police multiplied. They went to thirty addresses, most of them similar yellow-brick houses on the estate. It was quite late in the evening by now. They knocked on the doors, and a parent came, wondering who it was. A child was summoned from bed or television. But, no, China had not been seen by any of them, not since that afternoon. She’d gone, everyone knew that, she’d disappeared, some of them said; she was there in the street one moment and she was gone the next, the best-informed of them said. By midnight, the last of the names had been canvassed. By midnight in these cases, the process says, most children who have been reported missing in the day will have come home of their own accord. But China had not come home.

  Kitty liked to get up early; make a brisk start to the day. When Dennis was still alive, after they had retired, he preferred to stay in bed if he could, sometimes until ten or ten thirty. Kitty’s hours between seven and Dennis’s rising were her own; she could read, or do a touch of quiet gardening in the tubs in the courtyard, or get on with any quiet little task. Or she could simply close the wicket gate behind her and go out for a walk through Hanmouth in the early-morning light, enjoying the wind, or the sun, and the weather, and the shifting moods of the estuary.

  Now she was on her own, but she still liked to make a brisk start. Some people did; most people didn’t. There was a small conspiratorial club of early risers, out and about by seven. That was how she had met half the people she knew in Hanmouth, after greeting them as they sailed out in search of their morning paper. Now, turning the corner into the Fore street from the little snicket that led nowhere but to her own back gate, she found herself facing Harry, another of these early risers, with the Guardian in his hand.

  ‘Hell of a lot of police about this morning,’ Harry said, when they had exchanged the usual greetings. ‘You don’t know what it’s about?’

  ‘I hadn’t seen,’ Kitty said. ‘I’ve only just come out.’

  ‘A hell of a lot,’ Harry said. ‘Down the Wolf Walk, poking round the car park at the doctor’s surgery, and there’s even a chap putting on scuba gear with his legs dangling over the quay. Dozens of them.’

  ‘Gosh,’ Kitty said. ‘How exciting. The Queen’s not coming, is she?’

  ‘Not that I’ve heard,’ Harry said. ‘I can’t think what it could be.’ He waved briefly with his umbrella, and let Kitty go on her way.

  The next stage of the police process had begun overnight. It had not been announced. At first light, mud-brown and frail, twenty police were scattered over the wild places of the parish; wherever was overgrown and abandoned, wherever was wild, the police were. At the edges of Hanmouth, the clouded dawn showed police eyeing empty lands: the bird sanctuaries, the abandoned huts and sheds and workshops, which can be found everywhere in England. In the warm night, the police had arrived in vans, and in the fields about the city, in the woodlands, in long waders in the muddy estuary, the police walked with a strange, crane-like gait, their faces downwards, no more than a body’s length between them. They went slowly and gracefully through the waste ground, the unfarmed lands, the woods and clearings, and even along the undredged river. As Harry had seen, there was a scuba diver sitting at the edge of the quay, and soon, when the shifts ordai
ned by the police authority changed, there were four more, at the quay, at the jetty, along the Wolf Walk. They plunged into the high water, again and again, surfacing, plunging, surfacing in further and further places. On the quay, a senior policeman stood; he did not take his own notes, but had a subordinate to do that. From time to time, he was informed of progress. Last night he had not been told about the girl’s disappearance. This morning he had been told, and he was inspecting the wild places, the hiding places, the places where a child could disappear and find no way out. The mood was calm and systematic. They were working through their process. By eleven, the tide was low, and the wet, brackish mud hissed as the water drained from it, like geese or rain. The scuba divers stood in it, thigh-deep. There was nowhere to go but further towards the ocean, where the estuary still ran deep and secret.

  ‘Apparently,’ Doreen Harrington said in the coffee shop at eleven, ‘they’re looking for a small girl. Gone missing.’ She popped a gobbet of cheese scone into her mouth, swilled it with coffee, and went on talking, her manners not being all they should be.

  ‘I saw some police divers at work in the estuary as I was coming out,’ her friend Barbara said. ‘Has she fallen in, do they think?’

  ‘They don’t know,’ Doreen said. ‘I was speaking to a nice young constable—I saw him going into the old workshop at the back of me, the abandoned one, and I didn’t see his uniform at first. I thought it might be kiddies going in to make mischief, so I went over to chase him out, but he explained everything. It’s a little girl from the estate; she disappeared yesterday afternoon and hasn’t been seen since. They don’t know what’s happened to her. The divers, it’s just a precautionary measure.’

  Mary and Kevin, who ran the coffee shop, had heard Doreen’s informed knowledge. They now came over, he from the kitchen in a striped and flour-dusted blue butcher’s apron, she in a waitress’s frilly one, a pencil in hand. ‘I do hope she hasn’t been—that there’s no talk of anyone taking her—that—’ Mary said.

  ‘Paedophiles, you mean?’ Doreen said, in a frank, open tone. ‘They simply don’t know.’

  ‘But they wouldn’t be fishing in the estuary, would they,’ Barbara said, ‘if they thought it was paedophiles?’

  ‘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 bet
ween 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.