‘I don’t know,’ Hannah said. ‘We’d like to stay here with Mom in case?’
‘Mummy will be fine,’ the policewoman said, correcting Hannah’s inflected style, the product of being child-minded by a thousand unsuitable DVDs. ‘Let’s go. We’ll go out of the back door.’
Little Archie, in his carrycot, slept on, deposited behind the thirty-inch television, where the hum seemed to tranquillize him and where no one could step on him.
‘The thing is, Heidi,’ the policewoman’s colleague said, ‘we may have some developments we’d like to talk to you about. And also to Ruth, if you’d like to come through to the kitchen.’
The policewoman took Harvey by the hand, and ushered Hannah ahead of her into the kitchen. The back door was unlocked, and they went through into the garden. A pathway ran between the ends of the gardens in this estate, and there would be a squad car waiting for them where it came out on the Exeter road. They would do their best to make this little trip look like what they had promised, a small treat for Harvey and Hannah. They might even let them set the siren off, if that would help them explain who it was they had been seen talking to in a quiet corner of Old Hanmouth. Confirm who it was, rather. But the policewoman was just unhooking the rusty hinge to the gate when Ruth shouted from the kitchen. The door was open, and what she shouted might even be audible to the newsmen clustered around the other side of the house; it would certainly make the state of affairs clear to Heidi, in the front room. ‘Fucking Marcus!’ Ruth was shouting, enraged and unable to stop herself. The children looked at each other, a message passing from Hannah to Harvey, and the message was this: ‘Shut up.’
‘Here we are,’ the policewoman said. By some miracle, the squad car was waiting where it was supposed to be, and none of the journalists or casual rubberneckers had attached any significance to it. ‘You see? It’s just like an ordinary car, really, with a few alterations.’
‘Do you paint it yourself?’ Hannah said. ‘Or do you get the people who make it to do that?’
‘The police markings, you mean?’ the policewoman said. ‘Well, I think we paint it. This is my friend Bob. He’s a professional driver. Hello, Bob.’
PC Green gave a half-wave; he was a grumpy sod, not very likely to create the right cosy atmosphere in the car, but that couldn’t be helped.
‘Where are we going?’ Harvey asked his sister, or half-sister.
‘They want to drive us round and that,’ Hannah said. ‘Just get in and shut up.’
‘This is exciting, isn’t it?’ the policewoman said, turning round and smiling at the pair. ‘Do your seatbelts up, kids. Bob sometimes likes to drive fast. He’s allowed to, if he’s chasing after people who’ve done something wrong.’
‘Whatever,’ Hannah said.
‘If you like, we might put the siren on in a little while.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, it would be interesting for you, wouldn’t it?’
The children said nothing; their jaws were clenched. They looked directly in front of them as the car slid past the end of their road. They did not even look at the mass of humanity blocking the road, idly fiddling with their equipment, talking on mobile phones, sitting on walls and playing with their handheld gaming devices and, further off from the epicentre, the casual passers-by eating ice-cream in the heat, and with their backs to this car, waiting to see some development.
‘You haven’t been back to school, have you, Hannah?’ the policewoman said.
‘Mom don’t want us to,’ Hannah said. ‘She said she wants us by her.’
‘I know,’ the policewoman said. ‘So you’ve been staying at home, have you? That’s good.’
‘Yes,’ little Harvey added. He had a slow, grinding voice, disconcertingly deep as his colourless eyes. ‘We’ve been staying at home.’
‘Have you been staying at home all the time?’ the policewoman said. ‘Doesn’t it get boring?’
‘We want to be by Mom’s side,’ Hannah said. ‘It’s best we’re by her at a time like this.’
They were clinging to a script. The policewoman reminded herself that they had nothing to do with any of this; that they were not involved; that they were only children, and not themselves evil. The ones who stuck to a script, they were her favourites. It never did any good in the end. She remembered a man last month, taken in for affray outside a pub on this side of town; he’d seen too many cop shows, and had stuck to his two-word script of ‘No comment’ for a good hour.
‘Look,’ Harvey said. ‘There’s a rabbit. Four rabbits.’
He was right: on the verge of the dual carriageway, just before the bridge over the estuary, four rabbits gambolled. For a moment, they were all facing in different directions; then something startled them, a glimpse of a kestrel, and they shot unanimously into the hedgerow as the police car swept past.
‘Nothing you can do about rabbits,’ Bob said in his way. ‘Shoot them, trap them, gas them. They’ll be back in the same numbers. I’ve got an allotment.’
‘You get a bit of a breather every now and then, though,’ the policewoman said to the children.
‘What’s that mean?’ Hannah said.
‘You’re allowed to go out.’
There was no reply to this.
‘For instance,’ the policewoman said, ‘a little bird told me that you’d gone out, you two, this morning for a while.’
Hannah’s lips were tensely gripped, but after a few moments she nodded. ‘The other coppers told you that.’
‘That’s right,’ she said, trying to make her voice as warm and informal as it possibly could be. She thought of bedtime stories; she thought of voiceovers for chocolaty drinks; she thought of motherly speaking animals in warm-hearted cartooons, and she spoke again. ‘Your mum wouldn’t want you to stay inside all the time, would she? So what did you do, this morning, say?’
‘Nothing,’ Hannah said.
‘I always like to go down to the estuary,’ the policewoman said. ‘When I was your age, I’d go down and watch the birds, skim some stones. My brother used to fish. Do you know anyone who ever does that?’
‘We didn’t do any of that,’ Hannah said.
‘What do you do when you want to get away from everything, then, Hannah?’
‘Don’t know.’
The policewoman left a long pause. The car turned right off the main road, onto a high-hedged lane, climbing up the hill. It was in the first range of the hills you could see from Old Hanmouth, on the other side of the estuary.
‘We used to come here on school trips,’ the policewoman said. ‘I remember we came up here to Cinderham Castle. Have you done that?’
‘Yeah,’ Hannah said. ‘We done that.’
‘Did you like it?’
‘It was boring,’ Hannah said.
‘So where did you go this morning, you two?’
‘Just out,’ Hannah said.
‘The thing is, Hannah, a friend of mine says he saw you in Old Hanmouth this morning. You and Harvey both. Did you go there?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘I think you do know, Hannah. You were talking to someone, I know. Who were you talking to?’
‘Wasn’t talking to anyone.’
‘I think you were, Hannah.’
‘If I was, you know I was. You’ve got cameras everywhere, you’ll have seen us talking, but you haven’t, so we weren’t.’
‘We don’t have CCTV cameras everywhere, Hannah. Not everywhere. And my friend says—’
‘Your friend needs her eyes testing. Your friend doesn’t know anything. She a lesbian too?’
‘That’s not polite, Hannah.’
‘Yeah, well, you look like one,’ Hannah said. ‘Doesn’t she? Hey, Harvey. Look at her, she’s a lesbian. She wants to do me. That’s why she’s taking us out.’
‘Hannah,’ the policewoman said. ‘There’s no point in pretending. I know you and Harvey saw China this morning. I think you know I know. You’re not in trouble yet. Just tell us where Ch
ina went, and who she was with.’
‘You’re mental,’ Hannah said. ‘You’re horrible. We haven’t seen China. I don’t know anything about it.’
‘That’s what Marcus said, he hasn’t seen China.’
‘Yeah, well, he’s a liar,’ Harvey said. ‘He’s a big fat fucking liar.’
‘Shut up,’ Hannah said, and she hit him hard in the head.
‘What did China say to you, then, Harvey?’
They were silent. The policewoman felt that she could take a risk here.
‘I said, what did China want to say to you that made Marcus bring her over?’
They had their arms folded. Whatever happened, they were not to respond to the name of Marcus: they had heard it screamed by Ruth from the kitchen, and the hide-and-seek game of hotter, colder, warmer, hotter, boiling hot was coming to an end.
‘Stop the car, PC Green,’ the policewoman said. ‘We know everything that’s happened. If you tell us now, you won’t be in trouble, and your mum won’t be in trouble. But if you carry on pretending something that’s not true, your mum might go to prison, and you’ll get taken into children’s homes. Do you understand me? And you won’t go to the same place. You’ll all be split up. That’ll happen if you don’t tell me why you met China this morning, and where she is now.’
The police car had pulled into a passing place, a yew shading it. Outside, the sounds of the country: of birdsong and a distant bleat of sheep. In the car, there was silence. Hannah looked at her lap. Quite at once, Harvey burst into a long noise; some words, indistinct, were buried in the last vulnerable wail of his short childhood. The policewoman left it. ‘You shut it,’ Hannah said, outraged, but Harvey had had enough, and, through her blows, the words came out— ‘goodbye—had—China’s saying—she said—I said—she said—we had, we had, we had to say goodbye. China wouldn’t go without saying goodbye, she wouldn’t.’
The torrent slowed into sobs; Hannah sat back. She had done what she could do, it seemed. In a moment PC Green started the car, tactfully, calmly, reversed it into the green-hedged space and turned back in the direction of Barnstaple and Hanmouth. The policewoman delved in her bag, and found a new packet of paper tissues. She passed them back, wordlessly, to Hannah. Hannah, without commenting or thanking, began to clean up Harvey. ‘He likes China,’ she said. ‘It’s China he likes best of all of us.’ No one felt the need to ask for any addition to this statement.
26.
‘FUCK HIM.’
‘—easier if you—’
‘He can fucking fuck off, it’s not—’
‘Ruth, why did you say Marcus?’
‘I never. I don’t want to hear more about him, not again, not never.’
‘What’s going on—’
‘I never, Heidi, I never—’
‘What’s Marcus done, Ruth?’
‘That’s what I’d like to know, what’s Marcus—’
‘Heidi, it’s no good.’
Ruth was in the kitchen, two policemen over her. Heidi, in the doorway, was being restrained by Mr Calvin, who had appeared from nowhere. In the hallway of the hot little house, Micky, awed, fat-faced, neglected. A scream from baby Archie was starting up.
‘It’s best if we sit down and talk this through,’ a policeman said. ‘And I think it’s time we went through the events one more time. Take her out, please, sir.’ This one to Mr Calvin.
‘I don’t think I will,’ Calvin said. ‘I think as the mother of the abducted girl, Heidi has a perfect right to hear what’s being said.’
‘I think we need to establish the truth at some point,’ the policeman said. ‘Take her out, please, or I will.’
Almost every house in Heidi’s street had the same front garden. The original architects had envisaged neat fronts of green, a path, a line of flowerbed and a patch of lawn. But almost every house, in the last twenty years, had paved over the soil, and now only cars sat in the square at the front. Only in the house opposite had an old couple maintained their garden, with a privet hedge, four rose bushes, and some clematis in pots about their front window. The kids of the neighbourhood liked to gather there and throw eggs at the house.
Underneath the privet hedge, a cat crouched. The crowd outside Heidi’s house paid it no attention. They had heard a shout from the house, and that was enough to get them to wait alertly, their eyes on the front windows. At the far end of the road, a red Mondeo turned in. Perhaps the driver felt a moment of rage at the crowd that had no place here, blocking the road pointlessly; the car’s engine revved, and it drove towards the scattering crowd at some speed. At that moment, the cat emerged at a run; a woman photographer saw it, a girl with cropped hair, an assistant who could have been a boy, and at the same time saw why she had not seen it under the hedge, saw that her eyes had gone over the cat in the dark shade and not seen it at all. It was an entirely black cat, black as a panther, moving like a single black brushstroke across the road in front of the red speeding car. For a moment it looked as if the cat would slip just across the road before the car reached it. But it did not; the cat ducked and swerved, but its head, its front half went right underneath the wheel, just as it saw it was too late and tried to double backwards. The car went on.
Without knowing when or how, the gathering had all noticed it at once. They had turned from Heidi’s house in silence and, with hands to their faces, were watching the cat in the road. On its side, its legs stretched out forwards and backwards, a single twisting movement repeated over and over its torso, rolling sideways; it spasmed, once, twice, three times; then it seemed to lie and to collapse, and another huge spasm, as if it were being violently sick, as if something were tossing it down. It lay absolutely still.
‘Oh, God,’ somebody said, and a blanket was produced from the back of a car. ‘There’s a vet’s hospital in town,’ someone else said. ‘Just by the station—that’s the best thing.’ A woman gathered the cat’s limp body up and, with a stranger, got into a car. ‘Did anyone get the driver’s number-plate?’ someone asked. Nobody had, it seemed, and a journalist suggested that there were enough police around, you would have thought. But another said that though it was a crime to run over a dog and not stop or report the accident, there was nothing to stop you running over a cat.
‘It’ll be dead,’ people said. ‘Did you see how it went still like that? Nothing could survive that. The car went right over it.’ In a moment, once the excitement was over, someone remembered where they were, and looked at the house. The curtains had been drawn back; in the window, looking out with concern and interest, were two police officers, one a man, one a woman. By them was the boyfriend and, craning to see, Heidi. The shouting and the refusals to listen inside had been reaching a new pitch of rage. Heidi, so mute and calm, had been yelling through the kitchen door that she wanted to know what Ruth was saying, what they’d done with her kids, and where was Hannah, where was Harvey? For days now, the low murmur of conversation from outside had been steady; the gathering of observers uninterrupted.
The quality of the noise changed, quite suddenly, first rising, and then abruptly downwards. A policeman had been drawn to the window. There, they saw not the car passing, but the cat, lying in the road, suffering one huge spasm after another, and the unfamiliar sight of the mass of journalists facing the other direction, their attention taken. ‘Jesus,’ a policeman said.
‘What is it?’ Heidi said.
‘It’s a cat. It’s been run over, I think,’ he said.
‘Jesus,’ a woman police officer said, and came to the window to look. Micky came into the room and up to the window, gawping with ugly fascination.
‘That’s horrible,’ the policewoman said. ‘Poor thing.’
It was then that she saw Heidi had been silenced by the news of this event, drawn to it. She stood there, her arms folded, walking forward to the window, waiting for the small disaster to stop taking attention away from her, and yet welcoming this small, violent event is if it were the first interesting thing that had
happened to her for days, weeks, months, for ever. It struck the policewoman then, and subsequently, as the strangest of Heidi’s strange behaviour, and one that witnessed not a planned front for the situation, but a fundamental and impermeable oddity in the way she was. They had complained, all of them, about the rush of onlookers, of observers, of watchers, of the outbreak of vulgar and uncaring curiosity around the larger tragedy of the child’s disappearance, whatever was at the bottom of it, but to lack that was to lack some crucial element in humanity. Not to want to look at even the staged and implausible spectacle of pain and suffering was to admit yourself reduced to an animal level. Heidi cared, too, but she cared not so much about the tragedy she found herself in but, just like those onlookers, those rubberneckers, about a spectacle that, in the event, was not her own. She cared about a cat—not her own cat, but a cat belonging to someone else, a cat that had made a bad mistake on its own feline level of calculation and speculation—meeting its horrible end underneath the wheels of a strange car. She had revealed herself as human; human as the anonymous onlookers in her thirst for drama, wherever it might be found. The policewoman looked at Heidi, in an old and much-washed T-shirt of Micky’s, flapping over her thin arms, at the window to share in the animal tragedy, to see what had turned them all, shamelessly, into an audience, and saw that Heidi might just as easily have been outside the window with the gawping crowd as inside, madonna-like and grieving. From that moment she knew Heidi could have done anything at all.
27.
‘The truth of it is,’ the policewoman said, ‘the fact is, that Hannah has talked to us, and Ruth has confirmed it. We know that China has been with Marcus. My colleagues are on my way there now. We know that Hannah saw China yesterday in Old Hanmouth.
‘She never,’ Heidi said.
‘She’s told us. She told us that Harvey wanted to see his sister, because she wanted to say goodbye to him. Where is she going, Heidi?’
The sullen surface of the woman boiled; turned; rose. Nothing for weeks had surprised her, and now something had surprised her.
King of the Badgers Page 13
