‘Hannah said what?’
‘So you know where China has been, Heidi.’ ‘Hannah said what?’
‘Hannah told us that China wanted to say goodbye. Where is she going, Heidi?’
‘HANNAH.’
‘She’s not here, Heidi.’
‘HANNAH.’
‘Where is China, Heidi?’
‘Where has she been, Heidi?’
‘RUTH.’
‘We’ve taken Ruth down to the police station to help us out some more. My colleagues are on their way to Marcus’s house. Is that where China is?’
‘HANNAH.’
The policeman turned round from the window, where he had been examining the waiting crowd. He looked at Heidi, gripping herself tightly, her features white and shocked, and Micky, there in the door, wearing what must be the last of the Save China T-shirts over a long-sleeved navy top. Behind him was the omnipresent John Calvin. The policeman had been trying to think, ever since he came on to this case and John Calvin had crossed his path, what exactly it was that Calvin reminded him of, with his long loose limbs, his neat and close-cropped hair, his dark eyebrows and regular features, as if outlined by artificial means. Now it came to him: a painted wooden puppet. Calvin now made an unreadable gesture; it seemed like a glimpse of a longer and more considered performance, and the way he moved his arms and shifted his eyes and mouth would only make sense if you understood the character he was bodying forth at the bottom end of some strings. The policeman resisted a sharp temptation that had been building up inside him for some days now: to tell him very briskly that his services were no longer needed, and had always been somewhat misplaced. That time would come, but it wasn’t necessary to make the remark in front of Heidi and Micky.
28.
It was a beautiful day; Kenyon loved these late spring days, and he loved the town he lived in. Only when he thought not of the beauty of his house and the places it looked out on but of how much he paid—how much they owed—did the beauty reveal an unpleasant aspect, like a turd under a Christmas tree. (The last six months, he had ended the month in overdraft, something that hadn’t happened for ten years, and last month he had more or less started the month in overdraft, too; he didn’t even want to think about the balance on the credit cards. But he had an overdraft facility of five thousand pounds, which he hadn’t even asked for, and another ten thousand available on the credit cards, and then—no, he wouldn’t think about it, and he wasn’t anywhere near his limit just yet.) He pushed those thoughts into parenthesis; he lived in a beautiful place. The sun had wiped the estuary surface clean with a metallic shine, and seawards, in the direction of the Bristol Channel; there was the white fluttering blaze of sun and reflecting water. The folly on the hill opposite was black and silhouetted in the spring light, the hill itself a flat shape. The aching song of waterbirds, of crakes—was it?—against the humming inland motorway was broken by a deeper whoop, whoop, whoop, and above, three swans, flying from the bird sanctuary over the top of the Strand’s roofs and eastwards to the other bank of the estuary. They beat on, slowly; you could not see how they kept flying, so large and steady were their wing-beats.
On his morning constitutional, Kenyon tended to turn left these days, towards the Wolf Walk and the glimpse of the open sea. The other direction went towards the Fore street. Today was Friday, and one of his infrequent days off in Hanmouth. Somebody else would be looking after the AIDS orphans in Africa; somebody else would be fielding tricky enquiries from the technical press; somebody else could discuss the budget for 2010–11 with the man from the Treasury; somebody else would be wondering out loud how it was that when people borrowed a personal mug, they never had the good taste to wash it up and leave it where they’d found it. Kenyon didn’t often have a day off. They worked out around one in seven—they were supposed to be more frequent, but things often arose at the last minute. But this week he had got away, and today was his day off.
He had put on his waxed cotton jacket and his absurd but treasured deerstalker—it had been a Christmas gift from Miranda two years ago with a set of Sherlock Holmes. Nobody had expected him to wear it, but it brought out something dashing and thoughtful in him, or so he thought, and he did wear it. The road was not perfectly straight, and the houses, painted an uncontrolled mixture of pastels, leant over the street picturesquely. It was still early enough for milk bottles to sit on the doorsteps—milk delivery would be the next thing to go, Kenyon reckoned, and everyone would soon be buying their milk from the supermarket, like everything else. In the early-morning sunshine, the windows of the little 1960s block in its own trim gardens shone and flashed. A figure, made dark by the sun behind it, was coming irresolutely towards Kenyon; it was doing that thing of looking up into the sky, inspecting gardens, examining its fingernails to put off the moment when it might reasonably be expected to recognize Kenyon as a neighbour and start the process, thirty yards off, of greeting him. It must be the Neighbourhood Watch man: it must be Calvin; his name was John.
‘Hello, John,’ Kenyon said. ‘Lovely day.’
‘Lovely,’ Calvin said and, undecidedly, paused. ‘I suppose you’ve heard about Heidi?’
Kenyon had not really been around, and had found the subject distasteful. He had not listened to people discussing it if he had found any means of cutting it short; he thought it village gossip, which had somehow got into the press. He would rather not think about it in any way. He did not know Calvin at all well; he had moved into a long, awkward house at the far end of the Strand two years before, a house that had sold and then lost its buyer three times. There was some legal provision about thoroughfare through the garden, which had only come to light late in the process, or so Kenyon believed. Finally Calvin had moved in, and had told everyone he had met in the first few weeks that they had snapped up the house for a bargain price before starting to talk about his Neighbourhood Watch group. He had a wife, Kenyon recalled; but Kenyon had only very occasionally met Calvin in circumstances like this one, and Calvin’s wife, to his knowledge, only once in his life. He saw no reason why Heidi might not be the name of Calvin’s wife.
‘No,’ Kenyon said. ‘I hadn’t heard. Nothing serious, I hope?’
‘That depends,’ Calvin said, ‘that may very well depend, my lord, on my lord’s definition of serious. Yes, I would think it is a little bit serious. Deceived me. Deceived us all. Led us up the garden path. That’s what I would say. She wasn’t abducted at all. At least, the police don’t think so. Never did, they intimated. Never believed a word any of us were saying. Listened carefully to what I was asking, and in their own minds, they always thought Heidi’s little girl was somewhere safe and sound, in a hideaway well known to Heidi. A Heidi-way. Ha, ha, ha.’
Kenyon had more or less caught up at some point during this, and blushed, realizing the error he had been close to making. ‘So the woman…’ He left it hanging there, encouragingly.
‘Yes,’ John Calvin said. ‘The police more or less told me they think Heidi and her friend cooked the whole thing up. Two of the other kids were seen meeting China here in Hanmouth a couple of days ago. The police don’t think Heidi knew anything about that. They think the children somehow got in touch with China, or she got in touch with them—the elder girl’s got a mobile phone, it seems. She turns up, and in the car of a man looking very much like Marcus McColl.’
Kenyon tried to look vague and interested.
‘Marcus McColl—he’s Ruth’s brother. Ruth’s Heidi’s best friend. Was her sister-in-law. The police told me they think the little girl was handed over to her friend Ruth’s brother right at the start. Never was an abduction. It was all to get some cash out of the public. Save China. I’ve got a T-shirt. Might be worth something as a collector’s item. Yes, sir, this is a most interesting, ah, a fascinating unique artefact. Do you have any idea as to worth? I can see it now on the Antiques Roadshow in twenty years’ time.’
‘So where is she now?’
‘The police went off first thin
g this morning to get China out of Marcus’s house. Ruth told them the whole story, and Heidi confirmed bits of it in interview. She’s going to be charged later today.’
‘What an awful story.’
Calvin moved out of the sun, and Kenyon took a step sideways. With the glare out of his eyes, he could see not only the customary neat outline of Calvin’s turn-out, his hair slicked back and his trim long grey overcoat an almost geometric neatness. He could see, too, now that he had moved out of the sun’s glare, that Calvin’s eyes were bagged and haunted, rimmed with red; how the loss of a man’s self-worth could rob him of sleep. He could see that Calvin had taken a resolution to leave the house and tell everyone he met the whole story, to take charge of it before Hanmouth started putting it around in its own way. Kenyon could see the virtue of that. He wondered whether, on a normal day, Calvin would have found the time to speak to his neighbour Miranda’s London-labouring husband, a man he had hardly met.
‘The good thing is, I suppose,’ Calvin finished, ‘that while the police were still taking this seriously, or pretending to take it seriously, I got them to agree to some extra CCTV cameras in Hanmouth. After all, if there had been a few more, there might have been evidence of China meeting up with the other kids. As it is, there’s nothing. So that’s one good thing to have come out of the whole business.’
He looked upwards, as if to heaven. Kenyon followed his gaze. He had never noticed it before, but there, on the lamp-post just by Lord What-a-Waste’s house, sat an oblong grey shoe-box with an eye on it, pointing downwards. It was a closed-circuit television camera. It was pointing directly at Kenyon and Calvin, having their morning conversation. Was that new? Kenyon tried to feel safer on its account.
‘Must get on,’ Calvin said.
‘Sorry about that,’ Kenyon said, uncertainly and unspecifically.
‘The thing is,’ Calvin said, ‘the thing that makes me so furious—it’s that…’
Kenyon waited.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Calvin said in the end. Kenyon knew what he was trying to say: that the provision of new CCTVs; the extra bobby on the beat; the ability to search your neighbours’ upper rooms; the taking of fingerprints and DNA samples; the idea that if you had nothing to hide you had nothing to fear; all that could fall down if, after all, nobody had kidnapped fat little China. But it rested on something. Children were kidnapped every day by strangers. Two, three times a day. Surely they were. And the bobby on the beat, dropping in for a cosy chat and to take your blood with his blunt needle and your fingerprints with his John Bull printing set. Calvin and Neighbourhood Watch had achieved that now.
‘I’d better fuck off, I suppose,’ Calvin said.
30.
The unmarked van drew up in the Bristol street. The area had been long colonized by students, young professionals working in the media or small advertising agencies. The street had once been lived in mainly by new immigrants from the Caribbean, replacing old working-class couples; then they themselves had been replaced by students, then white academics from the university, then impoverished couples in the creative industries; and then finally, in two houses, children of those 1960s immigrants, working on the radio and on the local BBC Television station. Everyone said hello to those two households. They were the pride of the street.
The street had been done up in stages. Only one house remained untouched. No magazine recommendations had been implemented here. The garden did not have a path made out of the fragments of smashed plates; mirrors were not embedded in the wall of the garden. There were no monochromatic planting schemes in that front garden, and no ironic or amusing use of artificial grass, garden gnomes or other ornaments; nor did it contain unironic and unamusing abstract sculptures. The stucco front of the house was not painted a bold or pastel colour; in the window were no hanging artistic objects. No political slogan pasted in the window supported a cause or a party. Marcus McColl had lived here for thirty years, his whole life, apart from two years in inexplicable Hanmouth with Heidi. He had come back with his tail between his legs to his mother’s house, and when she had died, he had gone on living here. In the window was a single macramé pot-holder, a dead spider-plant in it. The curtains were not drawn; a single table lamp within illuminated to the five a.m. street an interior of dust and unobserved waste.
The police had been here before, during the day; they had knocked, in pairs, and come in when invited; they had sat and talked to the owner of the house. Now they raised the latch on the garden gate, went up the garden path and, in a single gesture with a heavy ram, smashed the door in. There were eight of them. Over the road, a light came on in an upstairs room, and the husband of the creative director of an advertising agency looked out, winding the front bedroom curtain around his naked torso. Somewhere nearby a baby began to cry. The two police officers at the front—bulked up, visors over their faces, anonymous, insectile and glistening black—dropped the ram and shouted out. The door was hanging off its hinges, and the squad thudded in.
There was nothing downstairs; the light left burning in the front room had been there all night, it seemed. The kitchen door was shut, but unlocked. A cup and a glass stood on the draining-board, and two small plates. Everything was neat and clean, but—as the police who had been here before remembered noticing—nothing in the white Formica kitchen had been new for thirty years, perhaps forty. The oven still had an overhead gas grill; the brown tiles behind the work surfaces were brown and yellow reliefs in the style of the late 1960s. He had followed his mother’s working habits, and nothing was stained or dirty, even behind the oven where grease often stayed. But he could not, or had not wanted to renovate anything.
Upstairs, the noise of police boots thundering, and nothing else—no cry of complaint or disturbance, no sound of a child. They left the kitchen and went up the stairs, more slowly. As they came into the large front bedroom, one of their colleagues was kneeling and pulling at an addition to the double bed. Behind the purple floral nylon ruffled valance skirt falling to the floor, home-made planks of MDF had been fixed to each other, bounding in the under-bed area. The policeman pulled, and it came away, fixed only with a strip of velcro. He took off his helmet and visor, and, lying on the dustless carpet, peered into the dark underside. Someone handed him a torch; from thick-gloved hand to thick-gloved hand, it was an awkward business.
‘She’s not there,’ he said, but reached in. He pulled out one, then two magazines; pink and bold, the lettering advertised free giveaways, a glitter-covered pen, a picture of a puppy-eyed band of boys.
‘I wouldn’t have thought that was left there by old mother McColl,’ one said. Because, after all, this was Marcus’s mother’s bedroom; like the kitchen, it had hardly been touched from the way she had left it, the florid dadoed walls, the dressing-table with its back to the front window. The kidney-shaped dressing-table with its tripartite mirror must once have held her perfumes, her powders, her medicines towards the end of her life; now the glass top with lace pinned underneath it was terribly bare. Marcus McColl probably slept in here. What would a Marcus McColl place on a mahogany kidney-shaped dressing-table with three adjustable mirrors?
‘It’s this week’s issue of the magazine,’ another said. ‘My daughter reads that. I saw it on our tea table only last night.’ The policeman on his knees reached in again, and his gloved hand met a small bottle, and somewhere underneath, a resistance when it pulled away, which must be some sort of sticky texture on the carpet. ‘This isn’t his mother’s, either,’ he said, bringing out a confusion, a green facecloth mixed up with a bottle of pink nail varnish, its top lost, half the contents spilt down the side and half left on the carpet, by the feel of things.
‘She must have knocked it over and tried to hide it,’ someone said. ‘Poor little girl. She must have been afraid of what he’d say if he found out.’
‘They must have gone in a hurry,’ another said. ‘He hasn’t made much of an effort to clear it.’
The police officer dropped first
the magazine, then the facecloth, then the spilt and drying nail varnish into three large ziplock bags, held open by a visored and patient constable. ‘We’ll get something positive off of those, easy as pie,’ he said, referring to fingerprints and DNA, bodily traces that could not but be left behind. There, in the little room, the six of them, and two standing solemnly on the landing, seemed like anonymous dignitaries, serving at some last alien rite. Only one police officer had removed his helmet and visor, and he stood at the back, his blond hair tousled, his cheeks red and glowing, not much more than a boy who had been admitted for the first time to these secret exchanges. ‘I’d like to know,’ he said finally, ‘how it is that officers visited this house more than once, in the course of the inquiry, and failed to discover any of this.’
‘There’ll be a time for that,’ said another, perhaps more senior, a shade gruffly.
As the first of the police officers went outside with the first of a morning-long series of bags, the radio of the driver, still sitting in the van, crackled into life. The street had been woken up, and now at a couple of doors neighbours stood barefoot or slippered, hugging their dressing-gowns around themselves. They were only generally interested in the spectacle of one of their neighbours being broken into by the police; they could not have made any connection with the Hanmouth kidnapping. In the next few hours, they would all be spoken to. Now, as the police officers came out with their offerings, silent and serious, not exchanging a word as they did their task, a spot or two of rain began to fall. Then, before anyone could remark that it had started to rain, the thin drizzle of a grey spring dawn.
31.
‘I’m afraid that they seem to have gone,’ Heidi was told, by an official source. In the windowless interview room, lit by fluorescent light, where she could not tell whether it was day or night or dawn or dusk, Heidi shook her head, and the noise from her mouth was that of an animal. Her solicitor sat by her, her pen and her notebook to hand, and waited for something she could write down.
King of the Badgers Page 14
