King of the Badgers. Philip Hensher
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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 ordained 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