King of the Badgers. Philip Hensher

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 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 СКАЧАТЬ