King of the Badgers. Philip Hensher

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СКАЧАТЬ showing her new collection of pillowcases, duvet covers and sheets, Heidi later recalled with some exactness. One of the kids was there. At first she’d thought, muzzily, that it was China, but it wasn’t. It was Hannah. She had come in through the back, which was hardly ever locked, and stood in the doorway, holding her own hands, one in each.

      ‘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 СКАЧАТЬ