King of the Badgers. Philip Hensher
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standing on the platform, this hot and celebratory night, as if no one had told him a girl had been abducted from the town he lived in. The ensemble of his professional London wear had somewhat disintegrated in the three-hour sequence that had led him from his Islington AIDS-aid office to the platform at Barnstaple. (Caroline had heard the explanation of the structures of his commuting more than once. Sometimes, at his wife’s parties, people took pity on Kenyon and engaged him in conversation. If they did, he tended to fall back on explanation of how he got from Hanmouth to Islington and back again every week, perhaps rightly assuming that people didn’t cross the room at Miranda’s party to hear about anything interesting like AIDS outreach in Africa, which was how he spent his days.) The jacket of his suit lay in the crook of his arm. His scuffed briefcase stood at his feet, the seams unravelling at each corner. He looked mostly as if he had been recently dipped head downwards in the vat of some sugary solution, his hair anyhow in all directions, though smoothed down by the ineffective motion of his palms. His white shirt and red tie might never have been ironed at all. Kenyon was so evidently at the end of some long and exhausting journey that, for his sake, Caroline hesitated to greet him. But he saw her. With the last smile of a long, smiling, official day, he came over to her.
‘The most extraordinary thing,’ he said. ‘Have you seen a newspaper—an evening newspaper?’
‘To be honest, we’ve rather given up,’ Caroline said. ‘I honestly don’t care to read about it any more. That poor little girl, and that awful family. And everyone—’ She shuddered, as if shaking off everyone around her.
‘No, the most—the most extraordinary thing,’ Kenyon said. ‘Just happened at Paddington. Just as the train was—’ He gave up, unable to explain. ‘It seems very crowded, doesn’t it?’
‘Hanmouth’s’ —Hammuth’s— ‘become a popular destination these days,’ Caroline said. Then, as Kenyon didn’t seem to understand, or was still deep in contemplation of whatever coincidence or casual meeting had occupied his thought for the last three hours, she murmured, ‘You know—the ghouls…’ and left it at that.
‘The—’ Kenyon said. ‘Oh. That poor little girl. And the awful family, as you say. I can’t understand it either. Are they hoping to discover them, or are they just curious? Rubberneckers, Miranda calls them. She’s had a new story about a group of them every night this week, every time we’ve spoken on the phone. One lot tried to take a photograph through our front window, as if the little girl might be bound and gagged in our sitting room. What do you think they’re coming for?’
A stout family of four on a bench, raising and lowering food to their mouths in a steady, complex, four-part rhythm, caught Caroline’s eye and answered the question so firmly that she said nothing.
‘Have you had the police round?’ Kenyon said. This had become an ordinary opening to conversation in Hanmouth in the last week or two.
‘A couple of days ago. It was lucky, really. Of course we could all say where we’d been the night the little girl went missing, a dozen of us. It was Miranda’s book club that evening, so everyone was round at each other’s houses, boning up, I’m sorry to say—you know how Miranda leaps on one if one hasn’t done the reading, so we do rather meet up in advance to see how the land lies. Nazi Writers in the Americas.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Nazi Writers in the Americas. That’s what we were doing.’ Kenyon still looked bemused. ‘It’s a book. We were all in the same two or three places, all secretly boning up on Roberto Bolaño, sharing our notes. The police must have thought we were quite a little conspiracy when they kept getting the same story back, but different locations—of course, we don’t all meet at once, just in pairs and threes, I suppose. Not that there’s anything conspiratorial or planned about it.’
‘So everyone had an alibi except Miranda,’ Kenyon said.
‘At the university, I believe. And you, of course, I suppose.’
‘I was in London, oddly enough. I must get to my wife’s reading group, one of these days. It sounds very interesting.’
‘Well, we could do with another man, and if only you’d read the book I would say there’s no time like the present.’
‘What?’
‘That’s what I’m dashing back for. Miranda’s book group. It’s tonight, didn’t you know?’
‘Oh, Lord, is it really? I never get a chance to get Miranda on her own. That really is too bad.’
Caroline looked at Kenyon and wondered why he’d said Miranda only, not mentioned any failure to get his daughter Hettie on her own. Then the thought of Hettie came to mind—mouth-breathing, with an incipient dewy moustache on her upper lip, in argument hurling plates, books, knives, even, once, a small table with the unvarying refrain that nobody ever considered her needs and desires—and she admired Kenyon for being able to put Hettie out of mind, if that was what he had done.
‘Well, I’m not going to complain about the book club, now that it’s provided us with such a good alibi. Not that I suppose any of us were very likely suspects in the first place. It’s always been a terror of mine—you know, the windowless cell, the two policeman, the “And where were you between the hours of six thirty and—and whenever”’ —imagination failing Caroline here— ‘“on the night of September the twenty-third?” You know. On the police-brutality shows.’
‘The police-brutality shows?’
‘I mean the police shows on the telly. I always watch them. But if they asked you in real life, one would probably have to say—’
‘“I haven’t a single solitary clue.” Of course one would.’
‘Or just “I expect I was cooking dinner, or we might have been watching some nonsense on the telly, though I can’t remember what it was one had been watching.” ’
‘There’s Sky Plus nowadays. Record and watch later. One couldn’t rely on that as an alibi. A murder detective would see through it immediately.’
Caroline looked at Kenyon’s red eyes in his jowly and humourless damp face. He was an odd fellow to have thought all that through.
‘But luckily,’ Caroline said, ‘Miranda’s a marvel about all of that. A date and a place booked weeks in advance. And then she writes it all up afterwards in her diary, I’m sure someone told me. Marvellous, the energy to write an entry in your diary every day. I wouldn’t have the energy even to do half of what she does, let alone write about it all afterwards.’
‘I expect she enjoys doing it,’ Kenyon said drily. ‘Here’s the train. Do you want a hand with your bags?’
Miranda, Kenyon’s wife, was marvellous, everyone agreed. Her house, at exactly the right point in the Strand where the picturesque, in the form of old fishermen’s cottages lived in by gay couples, began to give way to the imposing line of mercantile mansions, was a marvel, renewed every year. There might be more valuable houses in Hanmouth, but when she and Kenyon had bought it, five years before, it was the highest price ever paid for a Hanmouth house. Her drawing room had no taint of the rural, still less of the estuarine, but was rather defined by a Wiener Werkstätte desk in steel, an icy Meredith Frampton of a chemist holding a white lily and resting his hand on a bright array of test tubes, and two Mies van der Rohe black leather chaises-longues with liquorice-allsorts headrests, in the crook of which first-time visitors tended to perch like elves on the inside of an elbow. (Returning visitors had learnt their lesson, and made for one of the three less distinguished but more comfortable armchairs.) At the door there was always a collecting box for an African cause; a small shelf in the hallway held some classics of Miranda’s professional interest (Regency women poets), Miranda’s