King of the Badgers. Philip Hensher
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Sam said. ‘What’s the latest?’
‘Yes, we must get through it before Kenyon gets home,’ Miranda said.
‘Is he coming home tonight, Miranda?’ Billa said. ‘I thought—’
‘Totally placed a tabu on any further mention of it,’ Miranda said precisely. ‘I don’t imagine we talked about anything else for seventy-two hours last weekend—people popping round to chew over it. Then phoning up. Then Hettie’ —voice lowered at this point— ‘actually coming out of her room and not telling us she hates us for once but wanting to know all the details. So’ —back to normal volume— ‘after three days of Heidi and Micky and Tragic China and the others—’
‘Hannah and Archie and, and, and,’ Sam said, counting them out on his fingers.
‘—Kenyon couldn’t stand it any longer and said he didn’t want to hear another word, not even if Tragic China were found camping underneath the blackcurrant bush in the back garden.’
‘Harvey,’ Sam said with satisfaction. ‘That’s the fourth one. Very ugly child. Unbelievable, really. You can understand why they didn’t have him abducted. Never knew a child could be both porcine and bovine at the same time. Wouldn’t have thought its face would tug at the heartstrings of readers of the Sun when they saw it. I thought the little girl was plain but, really, when you see the others, they were making the best of rather a bad job. It is fascinating, though, do admit.’
‘Simply gripping,’ Billa said. ‘I can’t imagine why Kenyon doesn’t want to talk about it all the time from the moment he wakes up. It’s quite put a pep in Tom’s stride in the morning, knowing that he’s going to bump into someone on the Fore street with some delicious new titbit or ingenious theory. Yesterday it was that the children were in charge of concealing China. No one would suspect them of conspiracy.’
‘And they were the last to see her,’ Kitty said. ‘Very good. She’s probably in the old Anderson shelter in the back garden, or something, getting smuggled chips through the garden fence. What I don’t understand is why the husband, or the lover, or the live-in, or whatever he’s supposed to be, chose the library of all places for his alibi. I mean, anywhere would have done. It simply looks so very peculiar for someone like that suddenly to develop an interest in books.’
‘Kitty, libraries aren’t for reading books any more,’ Sam said. ‘They’ve given all that away. It’s nothing but DVDs and computer terminals nowadays.’
‘And of course it’s the one place where, if he took something out, the computer records would show that it was him and that he’d been there at a specific time.’
‘Oh, Billa,’ Miranda said. ‘If he’d walked down Barnstaple high street the CCTV would show where he’d been. I wonder what he took out. Not The Makioka Sisters, I suppose.’
They speculated luridly about his reading or viewing material for a while.
‘I would have thought the unemployment office would have been a better bet,’ Sam said.
‘In what way?’ Kitty said. She was not always the quickest to catch on.
‘If I were someone like that,’ Sam said. ‘I would do roughly what he’s done. I would go somewhere recognizably official to prove my alibi. Not the library, that’s absurd. I would get it somewhere I could be expected to go to. The unemployment office, enquiring about my benefits, or something.’
‘And the mother, how’s she?’ Miranda said.
‘Simply terrifying,’ Billa said. ‘Chills the heart simply to look at her. Sits there playing with her hair, staring into space, unutterably blank. Like looking at a cloud drift across the sky. She has lovely hair, doesn’t she? Bored and boring, I should say.’
‘And new clothes from top to toe,’ Kitty said. ‘Out of the Save China fund, I should guess.’
‘Do you want another drink, Kitty?’ Miranda said.
‘Well, I don’t mind if I do,’ Kitty said. ‘It was awfully crowded—the world and his wife were there and then some extra, just for fun. Billa and I had to stand at the back and we counted ourselves lucky. People getting so overheated, too, calling for everyone’s heads to roll. Terribly silly and embarrassing, and John Calvin running everything so.’
‘There was a fight in the Case Is Altered last night, I heard,’ Billa said. ‘Tom bumped into the landlord on his morning constitutional this morning. He said they’d never seen or heard of such a thing in twenty-five years’ running the pub. Townees, he said.’
‘Grockles, they were calling them in the queue at the post office this afternoon.’
‘Sam,’ Miranda said. ‘What an awful, frightful, yokel-like word. Never let me hear you say anything so prejudiced again.’
Sam understood that by ‘prejudiced’ Miranda meant, as she usually did, ‘common’, and carried on. ‘A nice policeman came into the shop,’ he said, undeterred, ‘and he was saying that they were hoping, very much hoping, to make an arrest before much longer. He was pretending to question me about my whereabouts and had I recalled anything I might have forgotten earlier, but I know he just wanted a good old gossip really. And I said, “Have you got a suspect then?” and he said, “Even two,” and he didn’t wink exactly, but he made a sort of very winking kind of face without actually winking, if you know what I mean.’
‘I’m sure the little girl’s off safely in Butlin’s or somewhere,’ Billa said. ‘Dyed her hair and sent her off for a couple of weeks to enjoy herself.’
‘The thing I truly object to,’ Kitty said, ‘and I know this sounds trivial and I don’t care if it sounds a bit snobbish, but I don’t care about these awful people and I do care about this. It’s that the whole world now thinks of Hanmouth as being this sort of awful council estate and nothing else, and Hanmouth people like this awful Heidi and Micky people. Absolutely everything you read in the papers is about how they live in Hanmouth and, frankly, they don’t. They live on the Ruskin estate where I’ve never been and I hope never to go anywhere near.’
‘I saw a newspaper photographer in a boat in the middle of the estuary, taking photographs,’ Sam said eagerly. ‘Out there in Brian Miller’s ferryboat. Taking a photograph of the church and the Strand and the quay. That’ll turn up in the Sun as a photograph of Heidi’s home town, I promise you.’
‘As if that family could live somewhere like this.’
‘Or, really, more to the point, as if they would ever contrive a story like this if they did live on the Strand,’ Miranda said. ‘One may be cynical, but one does think that moral attitudes and truthfulness and not having your children kidnapped for the sake of the exposure don’t go with deprivation. It’s material deprivation that starts all this off.’
‘They’ve got dishwashers, Miranda,’ Billa said. ‘They’re not examples of material deprivation. But you’re right. You don’t hear about children disappearing from Hanmouth proper, do you? It’s just bad education, ignorance, idleness and avarice.’
‘And drugs,’ Sam put in. ‘Don’t forget the drugs. The policeman shouldn’t have been saying this, but he hinted very heavily that not only had the women been smoking drugs when they were supposed to be looking after the children, but the woman’s partner’s got some kind of criminal record for selling the stuff.’
‘What an awful story,’ Miranda said. ‘I can’t wait for all those drunks and mischief-makers and rubberneckers and fisticuff-merchants and journalists to call it a day and go somewhere else.’
‘I could wring that bally woman’s neck,’ Billa said.
Because belief in and sympathy for Heidi, Micky and their four children, one missing, believed abducted, ran very low among the membership of the reading groups of Hanmouth.