KING

OF THE

BADGERS

PHILIP

HENSHER

To

The

Gang:

Bertie

and J.B.

and Sam

and Rita

and Ralf

and Julia

and Yusef

and Jimmy

and Marino

and Renaud

and Richard

and Alan again

and Lapin again

and Professor A

and Dickie Heat-Hot

and not forgetting Nix (Hi Nicola!)

and Mrs Blaikie (with love from Rufus)

and Herbert who said it’s all quite laconic once

but especially and always and once more for my husband

and really just to say to all of them and probably some others too

What

Fun

It’s

All

Been.

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

BOOK ONE

NOTHING TO HIDE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

FIRST IMPROMPTU

THE OMNISCIENT NARRATOR SPEAKS

BOOK TWO

THE KING OF THE BADGERS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

SECOND IMPROMPTU

TWO HUNDRED DAYS

BOOK THREE

NOTHING TO FEAR

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PRAISE

OTHER WORKS

CREDITS

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

BOOK ONE

NOTHING TO HIDE

That bowler-hatted major, his face is twitching,

He’s been in captivity too long.

He needs a new war and a tank in the desert.

The fat legs of the typists are getting ready

For the boys and the babies. At the back of my mind

An ant stands up and defies a steam-roller.

GAVIN EWART, ‘Serious Matters’

1.

Last year, at the hot end of spring, in the small town of Hanmouth on the Hain estuary, a rowing boat floated in the middle of the muddy stream. Its stern pointed inland, where the guilty huddle in cities, its prow towards the ocean, five miles down the steady current. There, all our sins, at the end of all the days and weeks, will be washed away. The boatman dipped his oars deep. There was something thoughtful in the repeated movement. The current was running quickly, and his instructions were to keep the boat where it lay, in the centre of the slow flood, the colour of beer and milk.

‘Most of my customers,’ he said to his single passenger, ‘want to go to the same place. They want to be rowed across the estuary to the pub.’

‘What pub would that be, then?’ his passenger said, with a touch of irritation. He was a man fat in rolls about the middle, the top of his bald head wet and beaded. His gingery-white hair shocked out to either side, weeks away from a respectable haircut. A life of taxis, expense-account drink, and hot greasy lunches had marked him. Bachelor; or divorced more like; let themselves go in the circumstances.

‘It’s the Loose Cannon,’ the boatman said. ‘It’s over there, behind you. You can see the lights. On the spit of land where the river Loose meets the Hain estuary. It’s a joke, a sort of joke, the name of it.’

The man did not turn round to look. Never been in a boat before. Thinks he can drown in two yards deep. His right hand gripped the boat; the left was on the camera about his neck. At his feet, a black case, halfway between a briefcase and a suitcase in size, was laid carefully flat.

‘Easier to get there this way,’ the boatman went on, between his strokes. ‘At the end of the spit. Between the estuary and the Loose. Car park’s near a mile off. Easier to get me to row them across from Hanmouth jetty.’

‘Nice pub, is it?’ his passenger said. Taking an interest at last.

‘Old pub,’ the boatman said. ‘Very. Just that and the lock-keeper’s house over there. Not called the Loose Cannon properly. Someone’s joke. On the licence, it’s the Cannons of Devonshire. Been called the Loose Cannon as long as anyone knows. As long as I’ve been here. Because of the river, there, the one joining the estuary.’

On the ramshackle jetty, ten feet long, the girl with the cropped hair stood where they had left her. Two more heavy cases were at her feet. In the mid-evening light, her features were indistinct. She was an outlined shape, a black silhouette in the deepening blue, a watching upright shadow.

‘You want to go there?’ the boatman asked.

‘?’

‘To the pub. To the Loose Cannon. Most of my customers—I go back and forth like a shuttle in a loom, most of the summer.’

‘No.’

‘There’s nowhere else to go, if you’re crossing the estuary.’

The passenger gave the boatman a brief, city, impatient look. ‘Just what I asked for,’ he said. ‘I want you to row out into the middle of the estuary and keep the boat as steady as you can for twenty minutes while I take some photographs. That’s all.’

‘You’d get some nice snaps from the Loose Cannon lawn,’ the boatman said.

‘Wrong angle. Too high.’

‘That’s a lot of trouble to go to just to get a nice holiday snap or two,’ the boatman said.

The passenger said nothing. The boatman paused, and let the boat float a little downstream, swinging as it went. This was the time of day he most admired. A daylight wash at one end of the sky, behind the far hills, and at the other, the beginning of a warm blue night. The moon was like a fingernail paring, hung above the church, flat on its back. In the half-light, the blossom of the fruit trees in the gardens shone out; the stiff little white flowers on the horse-chestnuts in the churchyard were like bright candles; over a wall, a white-flowering clematis poured and mounted like whipped cream. The disorganized up and down of the town’s gables, house-ends, extensions and rooftops started to be punctuated by the lighting of windows. Here and there curtains were being drawn. The lights of a town like Hanmouth shone out across water for miles at night.

‘Busy this time of year anyway,’ the boatman said. ‘Always busy. People like to come out for the day. For an afternoon. For an evening. Very historic town. Third most picturesque town in Devon, it won, four years back. Don’t know who decides these things. Thomas Hardy came here for a holiday as a boy. You know who Thomas Hardy was?’

‘Yes,’ the passenger said. ‘We did him for O level. I got a B. You’re not from round here.’

‘No,’ the boatman said. ‘You never lose a Yorkshire accent. I’ve been here twenty years. Won’t start saying “my lover” to strangers now. And before that on holiday, every year, since I was a boy, almost.’

‘Like Thomas Hardy.’

‘Like Thomas Hardy. I worked for a steel firm in the north, thirty years. Got laid off. Firm went under. Got a good pay-off first, though. I was a manager. Good job. They said they’d see me all right. Madam says, “Let’s move somewhere we want to live. Hanmouth, that’s the place we want to be.” She was the one who loved it, really loved it. “You can do anything,” she said, “turn your hand to anything. Lot of old people in Hanmouth, very glad to have someone change a light bulb for a couple of pound.” She died five years later. Cancer. Very sudden. Never get over something like that. She wanted to be buried in the churchyard, but they don’t bury anyone there any more. She’s in the city cemetery, like everyone else who’s dead. Still go to pay my respects, every Saturday. Is that so strange?’

‘Just here,’ the passenger said. He opened the camera case hanging from his neck. It was a bulky black object, with a black hole where the lens should have been; not like the pocket-sized silver digital jobs people had these days. The boatman pressed against the seaward current and, fifty feet out in the estuary, they were as steady as a rooted waterweed.

The photographer bent down cautiously, and opened the case at his feet. The boatman could smell his perspiration. In the case, there were three lenses, each resting in a carved-out hollow, and there were other devices the boatman could not have named, each in its specific and bespoke place in the charcoal-coloured foam. The photographer lifted the middle-sized lens out, shutting the case with the same care, not making any sudden moves. It was as if there were some unappeased and hungry beast in the boat with them.

‘I’m seventy now,’ the boatman said. ‘You wouldn’t think it, people tell me. This keeps me fit.’ It was true: his wiry arms had lost flesh, but still pulled firmly; his heart, he considered, beat slowly in his narrow chest. He had kept his hair close-shaven in a way that chimed with the way some young people kept it, though it was white now. ‘There was a boatman before me, there was always a boatman. Running them as wanted from Hanmouth pier to the Loose Cannon. The old one, he’d taken it over from his father, forty years back. Had sons, they weren’t interested. One’s a lawyer in Bristol. Not a full-time job any more, ferryman. Hadn’t been for years. I took it on. Keeps me active.’

‘You must know everyone in town,’ the photographer said.

‘Strange lot of people in Hanmouth this week. Don’t know them, never seen a one of them before. Never seen it so crowded. That little girl. I don’t know what they think they’ll see, though. Won’t see her. She’s missing.’

‘Human curiosity,’ the passenger said. ‘There’s no decent limit to it.’ He raised his camera, and quickly, with a series of heavy crunches, fired off some photographs.

‘Five pounds over, eight there and back,’ the boatman said. ‘Could have put up the fare this week, I dare say.’

‘I thought we agreed a price,’ the passenger said. ‘You said thirty.’

‘There and back in ten minutes is eight pounds,’ the boatman said. ‘To the middle and stay there as long as I say is thirty. Have you got permission from Mr Calvin to be taking photographs?’

‘We agreed a price,’ the passenger said.

‘Oh, yes,’ the boatman said. ‘We agreed a price. I can’t do you a receipt, though.’

‘That’s all right,’ the passenger said. ‘I can write my own receipt. There’s no law that says people need permission to take a photograph of a town. Whatever your Mr Calvin says.’

The boatman lifted his oars and kept them in the air; in a second the boat drifted ten feet seawards.

‘Keep the boat where it was, please,’ the passenger said.

‘Mr Calvin, he’s keeping a register of all the press photographers. A lot of them. A hell of a lot. Keeps it nice and tidy, Mr Calvin says. Shame about that little girl.’

‘Did you know her?’

‘No,’ the boatman said. ‘I don’t know as I even recognized her when I saw her face in the papers. There’s twenty thousand live in Hanmouth and surroundings. You don’t know everyone.’

He pulled hard at the oars, keeping the boat steady and parallel to the shore. They’d been out twenty minutes, he saw. Over half an hour and he’d start charging an extra pound a minute; it wasn’t this bugger’s money he’d be paying with. He kept an eye on his watch, worn on the inside of his wrist in good maritime fashion.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘There’s those who won’t pay the five pounds. If they run off, I don’t chase after them. I phone Mike at the Loose Cannon and he takes the fare out of their change. Not much they can say to that. One lad says to me, last summer, “Five pounds? It’s only over there. I can walk that.” Thinking about low tide, he was. The estuary at low tide, I can’t row across, but they can’t wade across, neither. “No thanks, it’s not deep, we’ll walk across, doesn’t look like much.” I said, “Fair enough.” Fifteen yards out, he were up to his thighs in mud, couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back. The estuary, it’s got its own mind. It shrinks and it quivers. The ducks walk on it; they’ve got webbed feet. He was in his trainers. I was in the window of the Flask, watching him. Come out and chucked him a ladder in the end. Went out making a hell of a din. Come back quiet as church mice. They only do that once. This town needs me.’

In the rich riverine gloom, the photographer held the machine to his face, and fired off more shots, taking no account of the boatman’s story. From here, there was a low and extensive view of the Hanmouth estuary front, the lights in the windows shut off against the night. At the jetty, the crop-haired girl had sat down, her knees raised. Her thin body in its tight boyish denim made a geometrical figure. A half-illuminated line of smoke rose from a concealed cigarette beneath the raised knees.

The boatman pulled against the current, and the boat held quite straight. On the jetty, another figure had joined the photographer’s assistant. He was talking softly to her. The low voice travelled across the water, and from the sound of it and the narrow-shouldered shape of the man, the boatman recognized Mr Calvin. He’d have something to say to a press photographer who hadn’t made himself known.

‘This for a newspaper, then?’ the boatman said.

‘Something like that,’ the passenger said, continuing to photograph.

‘It’s been five days,’ the boatman said. ‘We’ve been under siege, it’s been like. Everyone being asked, all the time, have you seen the little girl, do you know her mum, what do you know about her dad. Just to go to the butcher’s or the bank. I said to one, “If I knew anything, I’d go to the police, I wouldn’t be telling you.” And you can get photographs of Hanmouth anywhere, on the Internet, lovely sunny day. You won’t get much in this light, I wouldn’t have thought.’

On the jetty, the small figure of indeterminate sex waved largely, as if she had a full-sized flag at a jamboree. Calvin, if that was who it had been, had gone. The swans and geese, misled by the wave, checked their paths and swam towards her. They were spoilt by feeders here, and took movement for the promise of generosity.

‘That’s enough,’ the passenger said. ‘Take me back.’

‘I can take you over to the Loose Cannon,’ the boatman said. ‘There’s no more to pay.’

‘We’ll be fine,’ the passenger said, and though they seemed to be facing in the correct direction, the boat swung round in the stream, pulled by one oar, in a full circle, facing in turn the city and the roar of the motorway over the estuary, the remote blue hills where the sun was setting, and then seawards, where everything goes in the end. And on the jetty, the small figure knelt, opening up a black-backed computer, the blue light of the screen illuminating what, after all, was the cropped hair and small face of a pretty girl, intent on her digital task.

2.

Hanmouth, that well-known town on the Hain estuary on the north coast of Devon, formed a stratified appearance whichever way you looked at it. The four streets of the place ran between and parallel to the railway line to the coast and the estuary itself. Less stately thoroughfares—alleyways, gennels, cut-throughs, setback squares of white-painted nineteenth-century almshouses and 1930s suburban ‘closes’ with front gardens made out of a bare foot or two of leftover land—squiggled more liberally across the four vertical and distinguished avenues. The first of those verticals ran seamlessly from Ferry Road in the north to the Strand in the south, knotting around the quay and rising to three historic pubs, a plaque commemorating the birthplace of a centuries-dead attorney general and, at its most expensive, unfettered views of the estuary and the hills beyond, crested with a remote and ducal folly-tower. On this first street lived newsreaders, property magnates, people who had made their money in computers and telecommunications. The first house in Hanmouth to sell for a million pounds was here, and pointed out by the innocent locals; but that had been seven years ago, and the figure was losing its lustre, and had long lost its uniqueness. The pinnacle of envy for miles around, for half a county, the Strand in the south was a series of Dutch-gabled houses, pink, cream, terracotta-red-fronted, and everyone, it was said, lived there, meaning that everyone, of course, did not.

Only an odd few lived in the second avenue, the shopping street; the Brigadier and his wife in a wide, flat, shallow eighteenth-century one-house terrace of brick, facing the wrong direction as if it had turned its back on the commerce. The Fore street was holding up well; the community centre, built in municipal interbellum brick, was celebrating its eightieth birthday next year with a Hanmouth Players production of The Royal Hunt of the Sun, among other things. Outside the community centre was a bronze statue of a boy fishing on his haunches, with an elbow on either knee and an expression of great concentration. The statue had been commissioned for the hall’s fiftieth anniversary, which had coincided with the Queen’s silver jubilee in 1977. It had been unveiled at the height of a street party, trestle tables snaking down the whole length of the Fore street, and was instantly and universally known, even in the hand-printed guide to Hanmouth the second-hand bookshop sold, as the Crapping Juvenile. As for the rest of the Fore street: the new Tesco out of town had had no effect on the excellent butcher, the fair-to-middling greengrocer. Had no power, either, over the knick-knack shops, the amateur jewellers making a go of it, or the Oriental emporium run by the two retired sisters, stocked by bi-annual trips to the markets of south India; they returned from Madurai with triumphant rolls of bright silk, hand-made soap, and encrusted, elaborate, tarnished silver trinket boxes to be sold at twelve times the purchase price.

On the other side of the Fore street, as the railway line grew more apparent, the bohemians, the aspiring many who had escaped only so far from Barnstaple, lived in polite and tidy houses, designed for eighteenth-century churchwardens or pre-war shopkeepers. Here, their view was of their neighbours’ windows, principally. In the town, there was one school, supposed to be very good, one fortnightly French-style market, twelve antiques shops and a junk market, a fishmonger with an almost daily van and seven churches, ranging from those that turned to the east during the Creed with hats on, to one that frankly and openly prostrated itself before spiritual emanations, this last in a converted bike shed with a corrugated-iron roof. Miranda Kenyon, who taught at the university and lived in a Dutch house on the Strand, often announced that she had promised herself she would go into that last, mad church one of these Sundays.

That was the part of Hanmouth people thought of when they aspired to live there. It was the part that pronounced their town Hammuth. The bright upward side of leisurely high-fronted Dutch houses, their glass-punctured façades big and shining with the sun setting over the westward hills, its inhabitants pouring a first drink of the evening behind leaded, curving windows, occupying themselves by counting the long-legged wading birds in the shining estuary. They thought of the square Protestant whitewashed houses in the streets behind, or at worst the Edwardian villas further back, towards the railway line. The railway, bearing only the trundling little train to the coastal stretch around Heycombe, was charming in final effect, rather than a noisy interruption of Hanmouth’s postcard qualities. The flowerbeds at the station were well kept, with ‘HANMOUTH’ in topiary, and a level crossing at which widows with woven wicker shopping baskets lined in gingham always seemed to be waiting patiently. A couple of hundred yards down from the station, a white wicket gate and a footpath across the track showed that this was a rare surviving branch line of the sort that was supposed to have been eradicated decades ago. It was quite charming, and harmless.

The people of Hanmouth were conscious of their pleasant, attractive, functioning little town, and they protected it. A police station with a square blue lamp and a miniature fire station added to the miniaturized, clockwork impression. Its one nuisance was represented by the twelve pubs of the town; there was a sport among the students of the university to embark on the Hanmouth Twelve, a mammoth holiday pub-crawl, which sometimes ended with drunken manly widdling off the jetty, as gay Sam put it, late-night vomit on the station platform to greet you with your early-morning train, and once, a smashed window in the florist’s shop at the quay end of the Fore street. These small-town irritations, the responsibility of outsiders, were talked over in the newsagent’s and in the streets. Mr Calvin, to everyone’s approval, took the sort of initiative only newcomers were likely to take, and formed a Neighbourhood Watch. There was some nervous joshing that you’d have to join in a prayer circle before the meetings got going, but in the end they’d been a great success, as everyone agreed. In the last couple of years, security cameras had been put up over the station in both directions, and at the quay where people waited for buses into Barnstaple. Then a little more lobbying secured six more, and as John Calvin said he had explained to Neighbourhood Watch, and Neighbourhood Watch would explain in turn to everyone they knew, now you could walk from one end of the Fore street to the other at any time of the day or night without fear, watched by CCTV. Even quite old ladies knew to say ‘CCTV’ now. ‘You’ve got nothing to fear if you’ve done nothing wrong,’ John Calvin said. ‘Nothing to hide: nothing to fear,’ he added, quoting a government slogan of the day, and in the open-faced and street-fronting houses of Hanmouth, often wanting to boast about the elegant opulence of their private lives, the rich of Hanmouth tended to agree.

The security and handsomeness of the estuary town drew outsiders. It also, less admirably, persuaded those outside its historic boundaries to appropriate its name. Some way up the A-road towards more urban settlements, there were lines of yellow-brick suburban houses, a golf club, a vast pub on a roundabout offering Carvery Meals to the passing traffic on a board outside. In its car park feral children romped, and, fuelled on brought-out Cokes and glowing orangeades, ran up and over the pedestrian bridge across the A-road. They had been known to shy a half-brick at lorries passing below. There was an extensive and spreading council estate on either side of the traffic artery, surrounding the Hanmouth Rugby Club grounds; it provided a flushed and awkward audience to the field’s gentlemanly battles, over a leather egg, mounted for an afternoon, a drama bounded between two dementedly outsized aspirates.

All these things, encouraged in the first instance by estate agents, had taken to calling themselves Hanmouth too. They, however, called it Han-mouth, to Hanmouth’s formal scorn and comedy. It was one of Miranda Kenyon’s conversational set-pieces, the speculating about where the boundaries of Hanmouth would end. On the whole, Hanmouth thought little of the despoiling and misspeaking suburbs that surrounded it and had taken on its name. Though they poured right up to the gates of Hanmouth, they were obviously the city’s, Barnstaple’s, suburbs, not Hanmouth’s. Hanmouth could never have suburbs.

In these suburbs and estates, men washed their cars on a Sunday morning; kitchens faced the front, the better for wives doing the washing-up to watch the events in the street; children kicked footballs against the side of parked cars until bawled out; support for local or national football teams was made evident in displayed scarves, emblems stuck in windows, flags flown from the back of cars; and, at seven thirty or eight o’clock on weekdays, a ghostly unanimous chorus of the theme tune to a London soap opera floated through the open windows of the entire suburb. There was no reason to go there, and Hanmouth knew nothing much of these hundred streets. It was in the early summer of 2008 that an event in these suburbs, whatever settlement they could be said to belong to, rose up and attached itself to Hanmouth, and could not be detached.

3.

No one in Hanmouth proper had ever heard of Heidi O’Connor. Unless she cut their hair, and then they still wouldn’t know her surname. She did her shopping where no one hailed each other or equably compared purchases, in the Tesco’s on the ring-road. She was not one for going to the pub for social reasons or any other, even to the roadhouse on the Hanmouth roundabout. She would have said she found it ‘common’, a word most of Hanmouth would have been astonished to discover a Heidi O’Connor knew or attached any particular meaning to. She had four children, Hannah, China, Harvey and Archie, from nine down to eighteen months. She lived with Michael Thomas, a moon-faced reprobate seven years younger than her. The four children, two with a version of Heidi’s white-blonde hair, two with a dark, thick, doglike scrub on top, were said to get on with their ‘stepfather’, as Micky Thomas generously termed himself when events made a definition necessary. He was the third such ‘stepfather’ the children had known and the eldest two could remember. Only Hannah could remember, or said she could, her proper father and China’s.

With four children at twenty-seven, Heidi’s existence had its circumscribed aspects. She rarely went into Barnstaple—the opening of a new shopping centre represented an unusual outing. She and Micky and the four kids, walking up and down the glass-covered streets of the mall where municipal jugglers and publicly funded elastic-rope artists played with the air for one afternoon only. Here and there, Heidi and Micky said to each other that it was nothing special, really, letting the kids run in and out of the shops. Barnstaple, in general, was Micky’s territory. He went in every Friday and Saturday night; he stayed out till three or four, returning huge-eyed and off his face, as he would say the next day. Saturday afternoons he spent in Hanmouth’s pubs, often drinking until it was time to pick up Heidi from the salon. He waited outside on the pavement for her; he’d had to be spoken to sharply about coming in and wandering about before half five, picking up bottles of conditioner and tongs and putting them down again. He was a familiar figure in Old Hanmouth, as he called it; he was a well-known figure at the edges of the dance floors of the little nightclubs of Barnstaple, his moon face expressionless under a CCTV-defying baseball cap. He would often sell you a little bit of this, a little bit of that.

Heidi thought herself too old for that sort of thing. She spent most of her time indoors when she wasn’t working at the hair salon in Hanmouth, where most of the customers were over seventy, but all right, really. She’d always said at school she wanted to be a hairdresser, and though Hannah and China coming unexpectedly had interrupted the HND, she’d made an effort, bettered herself, finished her course when she was twenty-two, and got a job here, where she worked now. Her dream was to open up a salon of her own, she said; maybe even in Hanmouth. It could do with some competition, something a bit more up-to-date. A bit less blue-rinse, she would say, though she hadn’t done a blue rinse in her life, only heard of them on comedy sketches. ‘I don’t know how she stands them,’ Micky would say to his mates and his associates when Heidi was in the kitchen, talking about the widows and retired woman civil servants of Hanmouth. ‘Them old punters. Smelling of wee and asking for your blue-rinse perm.’ Heidi herself didn’t mind them, or Hanmouth. She didn’t think too much about it. The pay could have been better, but the tips were generous, and it got her out of the house. Micky made money in his own ways. Those own ways came and went, but were a useful backup at any rate. And every Wednesday and Saturday they played the lottery. If you asked them what their ambitions were, they would both have said that they aimed at a future where an exponentially large sum of money landed on them, unearned and undeserved, and proved inexhaustible, however long the pair of them lived. It was sweet that they didn’t seem to think, for the moment, of a future where undeserved and enormous money would rid them one of the other.

Her childhood sweetheart she’d never married, though he’d given her Hannah and China, and he might be in London by now. Harvey’s dad was the one she’d married, and never again. At the end, in the middle of one of those staircase-shaking rows, he’d said he was going to emigrate, to Australia or Canada, and had gone on saying it, with varying degrees of calmness or rage, until one day he’d just disappeared, never to be seen again. (Heidi supposed she was still married to him, all things being considered.) His name was Marcus. She remembered what he looked like, but what had really remained with her from that marriage was Harvey, of course, and Marcus’s half-sister Ruth—they’d had the same father, but Marcus’s mother had been from Bristol, Ruth’s from Barnstaple. The father was where they’d got the black half from. There were fifteen years between Marcus and Heidi, thirteen between Marcus and Ruth. Ruth had always been the same stern-looking girl with cropped hair touched with grey, though she was only two years older than Heidi. At the wedding, with Hannah only just old enough to be a little bridesmaid in peach, China still a baby in Heidi’s mother’s arms with a terrible rash across her face, Ruth’s constant frown hardly cracked. Some old uncle of Heidi’s with a red carnation in the buttonhole of his grey suit and the red-veined nose all Irish drinkers got in the end had leant over to Heidi’s mother and said he was a handsome lad, but he, he was old-fashioned, he supposed, and thought it a shame, his lovely niece who could have had her pick marrying a half-caste like that. And Ruth had abruptly turned round—people said, ‘So she turned round and said,’ but Ruth really had turned round, as swift as a whip in flight—and said, ‘That’s my fucking brother you’re talking about, you stupid old cunt. His name’s Marcus.’ There was no answer to that. The old uncle, who had only been invited because Heidi’s mother was soft-hearted, mumbled something about no offence being meant, nothing personal, because he was an old man and set in his ways and could see she was half-caste too and nothing wrong with that. Mixed race; Heidi knew you didn’t say ‘half-caste’ any more, thanks to Ruth.

Because after the wedding, the three honeymoonless months which ended when Ruth told her that Marcus was screwing the sister of some garage workmate of his, Marcus walked out. Whether he went to Canada or Australia or, Ruth thought, probably only back to his mother’s house in Bristol, Heidi was left not just with a bump, which turned out to be Harvey, but also with Ruth. Ruth always knew what to do. A year ago, she had told Heidi that she ought to ask the salon for a rise in her wages; Heidi had asked, and she’d got it. Ruth knew about child benefit and housing benefit. She knew where it was best to say Micky lived. Once, in Tesco’s car park, a posh woman had left the boot of her car open with all her shopping in it while she went to return the trolley. Ruth, without saying anything at all, had just calmly removed three of her bags from her boot to Heidi’s, had rearranged what was left, and passed the time of day with the silly cow before getting in and driving off. A chicken, two big tubs of ice cream, loads of other stuff. Ruth always knew what to do. Heidi hadn’t been left with much after Marcus did a bunk, apart from a pregnancy she hadn’t wanted or recognized and which might have precipitated his departure— ‘You want to take a look at yourself,’ had been one of his parting shots, pointing at her fattening belly. In retrospect, spending five thousand pounds on a wedding which hadn’t been made of good solid stuff that would last wasn’t the most sensible thing. But she’d been left with Ruth, who was a good thing to be left with. She was worth it.

That Monday afternoon was Heidi’s day off from the salon, and she’d gone round to her sister-in-law Ruth’s house. Ruth’s mother Karen was there too, visiting from Barnstaple. Sometimes she asked Heidi to do something with her hair, and Heidi reverted from her professional discretion to her schoolgirl hairdressing fantasy, mucking about with Karen’s hair, giving it odd colours and streaks, piling it up asymmetrically for the fun of it, and Ruth joined in too, giving her mother’s hair the odd poke. That Monday, though, it was too hot to do anything much, and they’d started off in the back garden, until Karen had said it was too hot for her—it was the sort of day you liked when you thought about it afterwards—and they’d gone inside. They had put the telly on, and watched one thing after another, Property Deals, Money in the Cupboard, Do or Dare, Cash Cow, for a good four hours. At some point, Ruth brought out a little spliff, and they had quite a nice time, just passing it round. Then, at the end of Cash Cow, Ruth had brought out another one, and they’d smoked that. This had happened before; it was a sort of Monday-afternoon tradition, sometimes going with the mucking-up of Karen’s hair, sometimes just with the telly. Sometimes it was just between Ruth and Heidi, sometimes including Karen as well—she wasn’t some old granny type. Because of Heidi having Mondays off, it seemed like the end of the weekend, which could begin on a Thursday night, too, if it seemed like a good idea. Because of the spliff, and because of the sun shining into Ruth’s front room and onto the screen, they’d drawn the curtains. They’d stayed drawn against the street outside.

Micky wasn’t around that afternoon. He’d gone into Barnstaple to the main library. He wanted to become a member to take out books and DVDs, and he’d made an appointment. They’d told him it wasn’t necessary, but Micky liked to know people were going to be there when he was, and he told them he’d not been interested that much at school, but now he wanted to develop his reading skills. The library had fallen over themselves to make an appointment for him to show him round and talk through, they said, his needs. Later, Heidi said she supposed people weren’t as ready as they used to be to join a library—she knew old folk liked their Shakespeare and that. They’d treat you like royalty if you showed any interest.

Little Archie was asleep upstairs on Ruth’s spare bed. The other kids had come home from school—Hannah and China collected Harvey from his infant’s school, next door to theirs, and Hannah could let herself in and make them something to eat. It was quite normal; it happened like that every day, because Heidi was either working at the salon, or at Ruth’s. Micky was either there or he wasn’t.

Around five thirty they looked up from The Adam Riley Show—he was talking to Jude Vakilzadeh off I Want To Live For Ever. She was 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 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 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 said. ‘Don’t be such an old curmudgeon. You really are a wretch. It’s only Sam, in any case.’

‘Well, I warn you,’ the Brigadier said. ‘There’s not a drop of Campari in the house. He finished it the last time he was here.’

Billa had a couple of small purchases to make as well as the Campari, so she went out to the Co-op on the Fore street. Outside her door, there were clusters of people, twos and threes, outside the bookshop, the travel agent, the jeweller’s, all talking in urgent, restrained style. She might have thought they were talking about her, from the way they hushed and broke off as she approached. And there, as advertised, were two police officers, making their way from door to door. She wondered that they hadn’t made it to their house yet.

In the Co-op, she picked up what she needed—a pack of Lurpak, some emergency washing powder, some savoury biscuits and some loo roll as well as the Campari. It was extraordinary how these things ran out between trips to the supermarket. When she got to the till, on the counter there was the local newspaper. It came out in the evening, and on the cover was a photograph of a fat-faced child, grinning and gummy, evidently an unflattering school photograph. Next to her was a photograph of rather an attractive, though staring, blonde, holding that same photograph on a yellowish leather sofa; around her a thick-looking youth had his arm draped. The headline read, ‘WHERE IS CHINA?’

The girl on the till could have been quite pretty, with her straight red hair and her lucid freckled skin, Billa believed, if she had only had her gravestone teeth fixed. ‘Terrible, this,’ the girl said, gesturing at the newspaper. ‘Terrible.’

‘You never think it will happen in the place you live,’ Billa said. ‘The poor mother,’ and then, hardly meaning to, she picked up a copy of the deliriously untalented local newspaper, something she never bought or read. So when Sam came through the door an hour later, saying, ‘Isn’t it appalling?’ Billa and, more surprisingly, Tom, who joined them for once, had found out a good deal about the case and the poor family. Tom thought he recognized the mother. Nobody recognized the little girl. It was shocking that such things could happen, virtually on their doorstep. In the end, Kitty and Sam stayed for dinner, and Billa insisted that Sam phone up Harry and ask him over, as well.

China was officially missing. Two police officers were assigned to sit with Heidi. Ruth was sitting in the kitchen, incessantly smoking Marlboro Lights, waiting to be called in by her friend. Karen was despatched to a hotel and told that she would be needed in the morning. The children, wide-eyed, excited and frightened, were put to bed while the adults were interviewed. Out in the streets, search parties were setting off, door-to-door, like weary electioneers. On the third day, long before nine, the house towered over a makeshift refugee camp of silver reflective canopies, car batteries, tents, aluminium stools and ladders, men and women all facing in the same direction away from the house and talking, all of them ignoring each other in their steady monologues. Behind them, a curtain moved, a small face could be seen. By the afternoon, the crowds had doubled, and the first strangers arrived on the main street of Hanmouth.

5.

At some point in the next few days, somebody in Hanmouth, behind closed doors—some cynical millionaire on the Strand, talking to some other cynical millionaire—after an hour or two of pious public conversation, paused, and judged their interlocutor, and let their interlocutor judge them. Who was it who said it first? It hardly matters, because soon everyone would be saying it. They said, ‘Do you think—I mean, do you think it’s remotely possible—I know it sounds simply extraordinary, but I can’t help wondering—’

And by the end of the week, that was what Hanmouth was saying, and, quietly, the press and, even more quietly, the police when they were alone with each other. ‘You don’t think, do you, that Heidi could possibly…’

But they both looked at each other, whoever they were, and clapped a hand to their mouths, their eyes wide, then lowered their hands and, rather quietly, began to talk.

6.

In an upper room in a house in the Strand, looking out onto the estuary through leaded windows, a girl sat with her twenty-nine companions. This morning there had been twenty-eight; as before, she had gone out, obeying her mother’s frequent instruction, ‘Why don’t you go out instead of staying in all day long? Go out and make some friends.’ She’d gone out, mooched around the post office, where she’d bought a biro. She’d stood outside the town hall and the Crapping Juvenile. One of the grockles might photograph her and ask her if she knew about that girl that got kidnapped. Or even better, the kidnapper might turn up and try and kidnap her, and she’d scream and get the hatpin out of her pocket and stab him in the back of the hand until he bled and he was screaming for mercy down Hettie’s white shirt. That would be good in front of all of the grockles. Hettie sat on the wall outside the community centre until one of her mother’s friends, passing with a stupid shopping trolley with big pink flowers on it had recognized her and said hello. It was that old woman Billa who lived in the flat sideways house that always gave you the creeps because it looked so witchy. ‘Tell your mother I’m looking forward to tonight,’ the old woman said.

‘I will!’ Hettie said, smiling as stupidly as she could, and the old woman, Billa, she didn’t even realize Hettie was being sarcastic, so Hettie waved, though Billa was only two feet away, and even then she didn’t realize: she made a laughing noise and waved back, as though it was Hettie being stupid.

So then there was no point in sitting there because Hettie had been there for a million hours and no one had come to take her photograph and kidnap her. She might as well go. Hettie, like a prize-winning gymnast taking her bow in front of thousands as she came to the end of her routine, sprang off the wall and made a perfect finish with her feet together in the nine o’clock position. But no one saw, which was typical. On the way back home, she went first into the second-hand bookshop and said hello to Maggie who worked there. She didn’t buy any books. Maggie would tell her mother she had come in, which was the same thing. Then she had got to the place she’d been going to go to all the time. She’d been delaying it, looking forward to it. She had gone inside the antiques centre on the quay, ignoring the old man, in a brown cardigan the weather was too hot for, at the front desk where you paid. She had made a pretence of looking at the stalls downstairs, with mismatching teacups and the sets of glasses and cutlery no one would want because they’d come directly from dead people. (Glasses raised to mouths that were rotting, the skull beneath the face showing as the old flesh fell away; cutlery fixed in fists in rigor mortis—she’d died over her individual cottage pie on the Friday and nobody had found her until the Monday; she’d had to be buried with a fork and a knife in each hand, and the rest of the cutlery canteen sent to the Hanmouth antiques centre.) Then she had gone upstairs. She was too impatient by now, and went to the stall she had had in mind without any delay. It was the stall that had sold her the hatpin, last year; the one Hettie had in her pocket and took everywhere for good luck. They had what she was looking for.

‘Hello, there, young lady,’ the one who took the money had said. ‘Are you sure? Lots of other lovely dollies in the far corner.’

‘Yes, I’m sure,’ Hettie had said, holding out her two-pound coin.

‘It’s just that this one…’ the old one said. ‘It doesn’t have a right arm, you see. Don’t you want a dolly with all her parts?’

‘I didn’t know they made dollies,’ Hettie said, emphasizing the word sarcastically, ‘with all their parts. I don’t know that I’d want one. That sounds awful.’

The old one had taken the money; she hadn’t missed Hettie being sarcastic; and Hettie had taken the one-armed doll-child home to meet its fate.

There were twenty-eight participants in the upper room, and Hettie to arrange everything. Twenty-seven of them had been there for ever, and had their names in everyday life: there was Sad Child, Harriet, Lucinda, Weeping Real Tears, My Little Pony One and Two, Wedding Dress My Little Pony, Kafka, Horseradish, Little Hattie, the Lady Mayoress of Reckham, Cappuccino, Bloodstained Victim, Dead In Childbirth, Mother, Big Hattie, Death, Widow, Child Pornography, Slightly Jewish, Shitface, Pretty Girl, One Eye Doesn’t Work, Dressed As A Man, Rebecca Holden, Lipstick and Hole. Rebecca Holden in real life was a girl in her class with lovely hair, straight down, and thin, who had never spoken to Hettie, though Hettie always got better marks than her. Today they were lined up, twelve of them, including the ponies, in two rows; they were the jury. Two barristers and two juniors and a Clerk of the Court. Then there were members of the public and the victim’s family and the press, and Child Pornography was the judge because of her white curly hair a bit like a wig. The new doll with only one arm didn’t have a name. Hettie wasn’t going to waste one on her. She was just The Accused.

‘Do you have anything further to say,’ Child Pornography said, in a gruff, legal voice, ‘before sentence is passed upon you?’

‘I have something to say,’ called Slightly Jewish from the relatives’ box. She lisped for some reason. ‘She was my little girl and you took her away from me.’

‘Murderer! Beast! Paedophile!’ Two members of the public had called out, Little Hattie and the Lady Mayoress of Reckham, jumping up and down excitedly in either hand. Then one of the ponies, the one with the wedding dress, forgot that she was in the jury and started shouting, ‘You fucking bastard.’

‘Silence in court,’ Child Pornography said, in the special low voice she had when she was the judge. ‘I have heard the jury’s verdict and all the evidence and it is clear that you are guilty of all the charges and that you kidnapped and paedophiled this innocent victim, who was as beautiful as the day is long. I sentence you to twenty years of being done with the hatpin.’

The Accused hadn’t spoken so far, but now he leapt into Hettie’s left hand and started pleading for anything at all but the hatpin, waving his one arm about. Too late! The hatpin and Hole the executioner were already in Hettie’s left hand, and now began to stab the Accused, once, twice, three times. There were little screams and grunts as the punishment proceeded. In a moment or two it got too hard to hold Hole and the hatpin in one hand and to stab the new doll at the same time. Hettie dropped Hole, and went on stabbing with the hatpin into the doll’s head, body, legs, now silently. In fifteen minutes, the doll was torn, small scraps of rubber bearing the imprint of half a mouth on the carpet; the pathetic little eye, scraps of hair torn from the fascinatingly meshed scalp; and all around, the twenty-eight dolls lined up and looked with satisfaction on what happened to people who did bad things, and on the hatpin. ‘There,’ Child Pornography said, but it was in Hettie’s voice now, and she only moved her up and down for the sake of it. ‘Let that be a lesson to you not to kidnap and torture in future.’

‘You know it’s my book group this evening,’ her mother called from downstairs.

‘Yes, I know,’ Hettie said. She could hear how her voice sounded excited and stifled.

‘What are you doing up there?’ the voice called, with a definite inquisitorial edge.

‘Nothing. Just mucking about.’

‘Well, you know you’re welcome to come and sit in on the book group,’ the voice said.

‘I’ll sit up here and watch telly,’ Hettie said. There was a sigh, meant to be heard up a staircase and through a solid bedroom door.

‘Really,’ Kafka said, in an unusually sophisticated and mature voice, ‘Miranda should, to be perfectly honest, have overcome her disappointments by now. It’s not as if she doesn’t know perfectly well that—’

‘That’s right,’ Hettie said, cutting Kafka off. You never knew what Kafka might or might not say when she was in a certain mood.

7.

Kenyon was running for his train across the broad and half-aimless crowd at Paddington station. The gormless, slow and humourless west began with the prevailing manners of Paddington station, and across it, Kenyon ran like a Londoner with somewhere to go. Knees up, his jacket and briefcase-cum-weekend-bag in the other, he had only two minutes, perhaps not that, to catch his train. (The ticket, bought parsimoniously six weeks before, had cost thirty pounds, but was for this exact train. If he missed this one, and caught the next, his ticket would be invalid and he would have to pay sixty-three pounds for a new one; so he ran.) Kenyon led an orderly life, organized weeks in advance, planned in accordance with the convenience of the First Great Western train company. But there had been a last-minute query from the Department about the reported Ugandan infection rates in a paper he’d written for them; the Underground had groaned inexplicably to a halt shortly after Euston Square; pushing aside massively laden Spaniards who did not know which side to stand on, he had run up the black and greasy steps and iron escalators of the Underground, diagonal, hung and groaningly floating over great unspecified voids, like public transport envisaged in a nightmare by Piranesi. Now he ran across the ‘piazza’, as it was now festively renamed. The holidaymakers heading for the west, with their surfboards, rucksacks the size of a sheep, square brown suitcases dug out of wardrobes, sat in his path like deliberate obstacles, like a miniature village. He jinked and swerved among the slow-witted and the heavy-laden like a man divided between his consciousness of an almost certainly lost something, and his fierce intention towards that train, there, that particular one, behind the barrier.

He had read somewhere that the identity of the 16.05 train to Anytown resided in its distinction, its differences, and that presumably a train that ran only the once could have no identity at all. It remained the same from day to day, still the same 16.05, despite being constituted out of different engines, different carriages, staffed by different individuals and carrying entirely different complements of passengers. Philosophically true that might be, but the identity of this one, beyond the barrier, did not seem remotely mutable, at all capable of replacement with different units as he fumbled with his ticket and limbs and thrust-out bags in the general direction of the ticket-checking machine at the barrier and ran towards the first carriage. A guard already stood by the door of the first-class carriage, arm raised. This train, he felt, was unique, and he hardly noticed the youth on this side of the ticket barrier who seemed in no hurry to get on the train, kneeling by an open black case on the platform between waiting trains. It was as if he had nowhere very much to go. But at the time Kenyon barely gave him a thought.

‘Only just made it,’ said the guard, in tones of quite pointless admonition. Kenyon clambered on, and into the first-class carriage, where the other passengers gave him half a glance before raising their newspapers against him, lowered their faces to their books, or just turned their heads away. Kenyon, dripping, purple-faced, crumpled, stumbled up the aisle panting with his detritus-like luggage. He fell into his reserved seat. It faced the wrong way, with, as a man of Kenyon’s age and class still put it, its back to the engine. This was either due to Kenyon’s vagueness when booking or the railway company’s incompetence. Around him, everyone was tactfully engaged in things that meant they didn’t have to look at Kenyon just for the moment.

Out of the window, the guard blew a whistle and raised an arm. Some sort of electronic signal within signified the locking of the doors. Almost at the same moment on the platform, the young man in the nondescript camel-coloured duffel coat, completely wrong for the temperature and the time of year, raised himself in a leisurely way from his crouching position over the black case. Somewhere further away there was a cry, then a number of shouts. The noise was muffled in the compartment. The train began to move away. The man raised his right arm, his left hand gripping his right wrist. There was a popping sound, as if of a balloon, then another. The train continued to move. Kenyon’s last impression was of a vague and retreating mass of people, running and throwing themselves to the marble floor, or perhaps being shot and falling to the floor. The small resolute figure stayed where it was, its arms outstretched with a firing weapon at the end of them. The train slid out from the station canopy around the concealing curve, into the sunlit railway path, lined with sunlit towers, of west London.

‘Did you see that?’ Kenyon said. He asked nobody in particular, and nobody answered. Perhaps nobody had seen it. The pages of the newspapers between his fellow passengers and Kenyon stayed where they were. Something in the angle of the sheets made it clear that they were not being read. They were thinking of Kenyon’s sweating dishevelment, and would lower them when he might have cooled down and stopped panting like a dog. So it was left to Kenyon to read the story on the front page of all of them. It was concerned with the small town he lived in and where he was travelling to. Tomorrow, those same front pages would be filled with what he had just half seen, a teenager shooting at random at strangers at Paddington station on a sunny afternoon. None of them would mention what seemed most noteworthy to Kenyon, that a train had managed its departure at the exact same moment, as if the shooting were no more than a trivial and irrelevant part of the station’s normal work. He concluded, as the train went on with a smooth lack of feeling or shocked response, that he was being swept away from one catastrophe towards another. The world was experiencing an ugly abundance of news, and its experience in the face of that abundance was neglected and unshared. Nobody knew what it was like to travel from the site of a mass shooting towards the site of a child’s kidnapping, and sit in a first-class compartment, the only announcements to listen to those coming from the buffet, about hot and cold drinks, snacks and light refreshments.

It could have been a delirious dream. But at the first stop, Reading, the platforms were milling with disgorged passengers beyond the extinguished trains. They had the patient and forest-like appearance of English people asked to stand and await news about an inconvenient but remote crisis. The crisis, remote as it was, had not been enough to erase the difference between travelling strangers, and for the moment they stood separately without coming together to share observations. ‘Due to an incident,’ an announcement from the platform began. The doors shut, the train moved on. Like a forlorn responding bird call, the Tannoy said, ‘For the benefit of customers joining us at Reading, the buffet is now open for the sale of light refreshments, snacks, tea and coffee, soft drinks and alcoholic drinks. Please have the correct change if at all possible.’ There was nothing in the westward direction to detain them, after all.

8.

On an early summer evening in a medium-sized city in the west of England, a more than customary crowd stood on a railway platform and noisily waited. Between the tracks, someone had once placed heavy concrete troughs and had planted them. Nobody, however, had tended them for years. A tattered linear meadow had spread. Scraggy meadowsweet and Michaelmas daisies had seeded themselves in the gravel between the lines and even along the tracks. They grew leggily, their flowers patchy and periodic as a disease of the skin.

The holiday atmosphere had spread up the line from Hanmouth. Caroline inspected the other passengers coldly, fingering the Moroccan beads at her neck. On this line, you got the squaddies from the camp at Reckham. They were bony, pimpled youths with identically applied and variously successful haircuts. With them was the miscellaneous and motley humanity, and its sourly unpromising children, that had washed up finally at the grim and dole-funded settlements where the train ground to a halt. They all came into Barnstaple to shop, to have an afternoon’s spree, to be subjected to a modicum of education. Today, too, there were others: prim middle-aged couples in neat gear, as if for Sunday-morning drinks, and professionals, too, with a notebook or a complex camera about their necks. One such professional had insinuated himself into a seaside group of teenagers: a fat, womanly Goth in an unseasonable floor-length black leather coat and purple eyeshadow, his dead-black hair plastered to his scalp with sweat, and with him, three blonde girls, non-matching and clean, in floral sprigs or mini-skirts, pastel in overall effect. The professional—the journalist—was polo-shirted and knowledgeable rather than knowing in appearance. He was committing their comments to a list-sized notebook, flicking the short pages over as he scribbled. The children talked one over the other, craning over his shoulder to wonder at his shorthand.

Caroline looked away as if at a lapse in taste or judgement. She knew what they were talking about. She believed, on the whole, that if one had something to say about such stuff, one said it to the police, and if not, not.

One infrequently saw one’s neighbours from Hanmouth on this platform, though the train was at least as convenient as driving into Barnstaple, and without the terrific bore of having to find a parking space. It was particularly unusual to see Kenyon here on an early Thursday night. He was standing on the platform, this hot and celebratory night, as if no one had told him a girl had been abducted from the town he lived in. The ensemble of his professional London wear had somewhat disintegrated in the three-hour sequence that had led him from his Islington AIDS-aid office to the platform at Barnstaple. (Caroline had heard the explanation of the structures of his commuting more than once. Sometimes, at his wife’s parties, people took pity on Kenyon and engaged him in conversation. If they did, he tended to fall back on explanation of how he got from Hanmouth to Islington and back again every week, perhaps rightly assuming that people didn’t cross the room at Miranda’s party to hear about anything interesting like AIDS outreach in Africa, which was how he spent his days.) The jacket of his suit lay in the crook of his arm. His scuffed briefcase stood at his feet, the seams unravelling at each corner. He looked mostly as if he had been recently dipped head downwards in the vat of some sugary solution, his hair anyhow in all directions, though smoothed down by the ineffective motion of his palms. His white shirt and red tie might never have been ironed at all. Kenyon was so evidently at the end of some long and exhausting journey that, for his sake, Caroline hesitated to greet him. But he saw her. With the last smile of a long, smiling, official day, he came over to her.

‘The most extraordinary thing,’ he said. ‘Have you seen a newspaper—an evening newspaper?’

‘To be honest, we’ve rather given up,’ Caroline said. ‘I honestly don’t care to read about it any more. That poor little girl, and that awful family. And everyone—’ She shuddered, as if shaking off everyone around her.

‘No, the most—the most extraordinary thing,’ Kenyon said. ‘Just happened at Paddington. Just as the train was—’ He gave up, unable to explain. ‘It seems very crowded, doesn’t it?’

‘Hanmouth’s’ —Hammuth’s— ‘become a popular destination these days,’ Caroline said. Then, as Kenyon didn’t seem to understand, or was still deep in contemplation of whatever coincidence or casual meeting had occupied his thought for the last three hours, she murmured, ‘You know—the ghouls…’ and left it at that.

‘The—’ Kenyon said. ‘Oh. That poor little girl. And the awful family, as you say. I can’t understand it either. Are they hoping to discover them, or are they just curious? Rubberneckers, Miranda calls them. She’s had a new story about a group of them every night this week, every time we’ve spoken on the phone. One lot tried to take a photograph through our front window, as if the little girl might be bound and gagged in our sitting room. What do you think they’re coming for?’

A stout family of four on a bench, raising and lowering food to their mouths in a steady, complex, four-part rhythm, caught Caroline’s eye and answered the question so firmly that she said nothing.

‘Have you had the police round?’ Kenyon said. This had become an ordinary opening to conversation in Hanmouth in the last week or two.

‘A couple of days ago. It was lucky, really. Of course we could all say where we’d been the night the little girl went missing, a dozen of us. It was Miranda’s book club that evening, so everyone was round at each other’s houses, boning up, I’m sorry to say—you know how Miranda leaps on one if one hasn’t done the reading, so we do rather meet up in advance to see how the land lies. Nazi Writers in the Americas.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Nazi Writers in the Americas. That’s what we were doing.’ Kenyon still looked bemused. ‘It’s a book. We were all in the same two or three places, all secretly boning up on Roberto Bolaño, sharing our notes. The police must have thought we were quite a little conspiracy when they kept getting the same story back, but different locations—of course, we don’t all meet at once, just in pairs and threes, I suppose. Not that there’s anything conspiratorial or planned about it.’

‘So everyone had an alibi except Miranda,’ Kenyon said.

‘At the university, I believe. And you, of course, I suppose.’

‘I was in London, oddly enough. I must get to my wife’s reading group, one of these days. It sounds very interesting.’

‘Well, we could do with another man, and if only you’d read the book I would say there’s no time like the present.’

‘What?’

‘That’s what I’m dashing back for. Miranda’s book group. It’s tonight, didn’t you know?’

‘Oh, Lord, is it really? I never get a chance to get Miranda on her own. That really is too bad.’

Caroline looked at Kenyon and wondered why he’d said Miranda only, not mentioned any failure to get his daughter Hettie on her own. Then the thought of Hettie came to mind—mouth-breathing, with an incipient dewy moustache on her upper lip, in argument hurling plates, books, knives, even, once, a small table with the unvarying refrain that nobody ever considered her needs and desires—and she admired Kenyon for being able to put Hettie out of mind, if that was what he had done.

‘Well, I’m not going to complain about the book club, now that it’s provided us with such a good alibi. Not that I suppose any of us were very likely suspects in the first place. It’s always been a terror of mine—you know, the windowless cell, the two policeman, the “And where were you between the hours of six thirty and—and whenever”’ —imagination failing Caroline here— ‘“on the night of September the twenty-third?” You know. On the police-brutality shows.’

‘The police-brutality shows?’

‘I mean the police shows on the telly. I always watch them. But if they asked you in real life, one would probably have to say—’

‘“I haven’t a single solitary clue.” Of course one would.’

‘Or just “I expect I was cooking dinner, or we might have been watching some nonsense on the telly, though I can’t remember what it was one had been watching.” ’

‘There’s Sky Plus nowadays. Record and watch later. One couldn’t rely on that as an alibi. A murder detective would see through it immediately.’

Caroline looked at Kenyon’s red eyes in his jowly and humourless damp face. He was an odd fellow to have thought all that through.

‘But luckily,’ Caroline said, ‘Miranda’s a marvel about all of that. A date and a place booked weeks in advance. And then she writes it all up afterwards in her diary, I’m sure someone told me. Marvellous, the energy to write an entry in your diary every day. I wouldn’t have the energy even to do half of what she does, let alone write about it all afterwards.’

‘I expect she enjoys doing it,’ Kenyon said drily. ‘Here’s the train. Do you want a hand with your bags?’

9.

Miranda, Kenyon’s wife, was marvellous, everyone agreed. Her house, at exactly the right point in the Strand where the picturesque, in the form of old fishermen’s cottages lived in by gay couples, began to give way to the imposing line of mercantile mansions, was a marvel, renewed every year. There might be more valuable houses in Hanmouth, but when she and Kenyon had bought it, five years before, it was the highest price ever paid for a Hanmouth house. Her drawing room had no taint of the rural, still less of the estuarine, but was rather defined by a Wiener Werkstätte desk in steel, an icy Meredith Frampton of a chemist holding a white lily and resting his hand on a bright array of test tubes, and two Mies van der Rohe black leather chaises-longues with liquorice-allsorts headrests, in the crook of which first-time visitors tended to perch like elves on the inside of an elbow. (Returning visitors had learnt their lesson, and made for one of the three less distinguished but more comfortable armchairs.) At the door there was always a collecting box for an African cause; a small shelf in the hallway held some classics of Miranda’s professional interest (Regency women poets), Miranda’s two books on the subject, this year’s and last year’s Booker shortlist. There were also usually a couple of Harry Potters or similar pre-pubescent epics—not to suggest Hettie’s reading, since she clearly didn’t do any, but to indicate that Miranda was not an intimidating intellectual but a girl at heart with, just below the surface, a well-developed sense of fun. Often some of these were signed copies, since Miranda spent a whole week every summer at the Dartington literary festival. Later, the deserving few would be decanted upstairs to the study, the others donated to the lifeboat charity or the air-rescue service, to sell for a pound or two in one of their many shops.

Miranda had a grey-white Louise Brooks bob, and severe black glasses, oblong like a letterbox; her necklines squarely suggested the unspecifically medieval. With what she could alter, she tried to impose corners, lines and geometry on a general appearance otherwise curved and bulging to a fault. She was aware of the dangers to a woman of her size and age of flowing red and purple velvet, of ethnic beads and the worst that Hampstead Bazaar could do. She would not, like most of Hanmouth’s women, be inspired by Dame Judi Dench on an Oscar night, and she dressed, as far as possible, in the black and white lines and corners of the fat wife of a Weimar architect. Kenyon was used to being told what a marvel his wife was; he did quite well, all things considered.

Reading groups, local groups, charities, and a party three times a year. It was obvious what Miranda thought of herself in her lovely and expensive home. Most people agreed she was marvellous, though wondering how she and Kenyon stretched to such a house on the salary of a civil servant and a university lecturer. Kenyon himself had lived for so long in proximity to the marvel that, like a waiter working in a restaurant with a view of the Parthenon, he seemed years ago to have stopped decently appreciating it.

‘What did they see in each other?’ Hanmouth asked, when Miranda wasn’t in the room—running late, usually. Over a long, green-baize-covered table, all of them in possession of a too-elaborate agenda produced by the committee’s word-processing expert, or standing about at a party in a garden in the summer, or craning their necks backwards in the direction of a neighbour and fellow book-grouper in the row behind as they waited for the curtain to go up on the Miranda-produced Hanmouth Players production of The Bacchae or Woyzeck, they would put the same questions. How did they meet in the first place? How did they afford that house—was there money in the family? What were they like when they were young? And what—this above all—did they do or talk about when no one else was there? Hettie didn’t seem enough to sustain their interest or their occupation. Bold speculations about their all-enveloping sex lives, unspoken, filled the air; and then the lights went down, the curtain went up, and Hanmouth concentrated on a production of Marat/Sade in the community hall.

Kenyon was not there during the week; it was just Hettie and, people imagined, Miranda being understanding but firm with her over the dinner table from Monday to Thursday. It was a surprise to Caroline to see Kenyon on Barnstaple station on a Thursday night. He worked in London. ‘For an NGO,’ Miranda would say, not always to the perfect comprehension of those who had asked. ‘He’s been donated for ten years, a solid commitment by the Treasury.’ People envisaged Kenyon, reduced to two dimensions, being pushed through the slot of rather a large collection tin. Kenyon would smile, and explain that ‘seconded’ was really the term for the way the Treasury had concluded it could rub along perfectly well without him for the next decade.

Hardly anyone knew or understood or bothered to enquire what it was Kenyon did for a living. It was something to do with AIDS in Africa. That was an improvement, Miranda would confide, on the Treasury. Of course, she would say, when Kenyon worked at the Treasury, one knew in an abstract and uncomprehending way that he did something very important. It was something to do with the balance of payments or with incomes policy or whether interest rates were going to go up or come down—why, she went on, did interest rates go up but come down? The choice of verb was interesting: it was as if we human beings existed at a sort of base rate—at zero—that we were the nothing that interest rates pretended to improve upon, and what would happen if interest rates ever came down to zero and looked us in the face? Yes, our mortgage repayments might be less murderous, she supposed—but why those comings and goings, one really couldn’t say—and why interest rates when of all the utterly dread and drear and tedious and unforgivably…

That was Miranda’s style of conversation, and very good of its own sort it was, too. Kenyon would smile graciously and in a generally abstracted way, never pointing out that ‘balance of payments’ and ‘incomes policy’ dated Miranda very badly to her era of courting and seduction, when she had last paid serious attention to Kenyon’s explanations of what he did for a living during the day. The Treasury hadn’t touched interest rates for eight years when Kenyon was donated to the NGO. On the other hand, everyone knew what Miranda did: she was always ready to explain about post-colonial theory.

Kenyon, Miranda said, had gone on to something where at least you could see where the good was being done. Who knew whether anything was being improved, what end was being served by the vagaries of monetary policy? (‘You don’t mean monetary,’ Kenyon said, though it was impossible to tell whether Miranda meant monetary or not, surely.) At the AIDS non-governmental organization, there were clear villains and clear heroes. There were Roman Catholic cardinals in Africa who told lies to their flocks about rubber prophylactics. And on the other side, there were orphans. The Treasury had been like that once: there had been Thatcher, the witch, and monetarism on the one side, destroying people’s lives and cackling over it, and on the other, the miners. Those moral contrasts seemed to have gone on holiday for the moment. In more recent times, there had been no cardinals or orphans at the Treasury; it all seemed so vast and trackless nowadays.

At the time Miranda had been voluble about Kenyon’s change of career. She had gone on talking about it ever since. Through a useful mechanism, the Treasury had gone on matching Kenyon’s salary and had agreed to regard him as being seconded to Living With Aids (Africa) for five years in the first instance. In a moment of exuberance, Miranda had led him to a bank, told an unverified white lie or two, and walked out with a mortgage six times their combined salaries, with which they had moved from a fisherman’s cottage to the wide bright house on the Strand. Four years had gone by, and it was as if they had always lived there. Kenyon, in private, would occasionally bemoan their lack of savings, the way things seemed to run out towards the end of the month. It was lucky they had principles about not educating their daughter outside the state system. But the house was an unarguable good. And more to the point, nothing had been said by the Treasury about Kenyon’s imminent return. For some reason—some guilty reason, since Kenyon was so able and likeable—it often occurred to those she spoke to to wonder whether the Treasury might not have been keen to get rid of Kenyon for some reason. But surely not. Miranda said she hoped Kenyon would stay for the ten years they were now anticipating. It did her so much good to think of what Kenyon did for a living.

10.

The train was crowded and talkative. Kenyon and Caroline squashed into the same seat with their various bags piled up on their laps, facing forward. In a line, spread out along the aisle, seven teenagers called out. They were going to the Bear first—no, the Pincers; but one had told Carrie they would be in the Jolly Porters and they knew she’d lost her mobile, so what about that then, what were they going to do about that?

‘These people,’ Caroline said, shifting her bag of shopping further onto her knees. She meant to be heard. ‘I don’t know what they expect to see when they get to Hanmouth.’

‘The most extraordinary thing,’ Kenyon said. ‘As we were pulling out of Paddington, a young man got out a gun and started firing into the crowd.’

‘Oh, no,’ Caroline said. ‘On the train?’

‘No,’ Kenyon said. ‘On the concourse. I just glimpsed it as the train was pulling out of the station. I haven’t seen a newspaper and there weren’t any announcements, so I don’t know how serious it was.’

‘How dreadful,’ Caroline said. ‘That sort of thing seems to happen so much more often nowadays. What a lucky escape you had. I can’t imagine what these people are doing going down to Hanmouth. People just seem to go wherever they think there’ll be a crowd. Trafalgar Square on New Year’s Eve. People go there but they don’t know why. Safety in numbers, I suppose—numbers of idiots, anyway.’

Two girls in front of Kenyon and Caroline, one talking on her mobile phone with a hand pressed against her other ear, turned simultaneously, stared from a three-foot distance, and shrugged with as much direct offence as they could muster before turning back.

‘What are you reading tonight?’ Kenyon asked. ‘I remember now—Miranda told me to make myself scarce and not expect much in the way of supper.’

‘Don’t you get something at Paddington?’ Caroline said. Kenyon agreed that sometimes he did, holding back the recurrence of a scene as his mind reconstructed it. ‘They’re terribly good, those outlets nowadays—sushi on a conveyor-belt at Paddington, isn’t there?’

‘Waa-raa-argh,’ went the four teenagers in a scrum at the end of the carriage as the train leant into the St Martin’s bend. They fell against each other, then righted themselves hilariously.

‘No, I’ll wander down to the pub on the quay for a bite to eat,’ Kenyon said. ‘Once I’ve done my duty and greeted my wife.’

‘You’ll be lucky,’ Caroline said. ‘Everywhere’s been packed to the gills all week. Haven’t you heard? Trippers, journalists, film crews, all eating their heads off. And drinking, of course. It’s been precisely like a siege. Hasn’t Miranda said?’

‘She did,’ Kenyon said. ‘I thought she was exaggerating.’

‘Not in this case.’

11.

There was a new noise in the air, of disagreement and disapproval and pleasure. It was like the load of a substantial lorry shifting and rumbling; it was like the bass voice that announced coming attractions at the cinema clearing its throat; it was like a Welsh male voice choir saying ‘RUM’ in unison. It was the sound of a community centre in the west of England, every chair filled and every spare standing space occupied with onlookers, journalists, locals, cameramen, people who had no reason or every good reason to be there. The hall was full, and spilling out into the street outside. Dozens of curious people were standing in the warm late-spring evening. From time to time one jumped up to glimpse, through the open double doors and over the heads of the crowd, the six mismatched individuals on the stage of the community centre.

One of them, the chief constable, gave a wounded, reproachful look around the hall. His face had something weak and sheeplike about it, a long, loose-lipped face topped off with hair white, crinkled, sheeplike, and his voice bleated as it attempted to assert some authority. ‘I repeat: we are doing everything possible in this case, with the greatest possible sense of urgency. We are following several, a number of strong leads at this present time. The efficacy of the police operation should not be doubted by anybody here present.’

It was the use of the word ‘efficacy’ that roused the moan of satisfied disagreement in the first place. The policeman’s first use of such a word stirred the gathering to a communal expression of disapproval and unformed hostile emotion. Now he repeated it, satisfied with the official and distant tone of the word. Perhaps he felt it conveyed calm practicality. The hall’s rage and distaste rose in volume, mounted and prepared to come to a point. One of the women who had arrived early with Ruth, the mother’s best friend, a woman not known to the crowd at large, now stood up. When she did so, it could be seen that she and Ruth and three other women had arrived early and placed themselves with some care: they occupied a prime position between the television cameras and the party on stage. The woman’s hand was already raised, as if in a tragic gesture, as if to take a courtroom oath.

‘I’d like the chief constable to know that it isn’t “this case” we’re talking about. It may be just “this case” to him in his big office and his forms he’s filling in all day long. It’s not “this case” to me and Heidi and Mick up there on the stage, and a hundred other people who know China and are missing her. Heidi and Mick are crying their eyes out and not getting a wink of sleep for worry. It’s my little girl Natasha’s best friend China we’re talking about. It’s their little girl who’s been missing for ten days now. Ten days and ten nights and nothing done. Anything could have happened to her. What have they found out? Nothing. They’d done nothing.’

‘I can assure everyone—’ the chief constable said, holding onto the microphone, but he got no further. The woman who had spoken was, it seemed, no more than a warm-up act for a familiar and by now keenly anticipated routine. As she sat down, Ruth stood up, and the television cameras had not troubled to turn to the chief constable, but stayed where they were, fixed on Ruth, the little girl’s aunt. Was that who she was? By now, all the journalists knew her well. Calvin, the media manager, had introduced all of them to her, a hard-faced black woman. They had had to admit she was nobody’s fool, and had been saying the same thing to them with great energy for ten days now. The police, too, knew her and her enthusiastic but unhelpful denunciations. She had never had so large an audience for her comments as she had now, and she was going to make the most of the arguments she had been polishing.

‘There’s not been a policeman on the beat here for years. Where are they all? Filling in their little forms in their little offices. And they’re here now, but what are they doing? Not house-to-house, they’re not doing that. They know, we know, there’s sex offenders living here in our midst, in Hanmouth. One of the chief constable’s officers told me as much. But they won’t tell us who they are or where they live. Anyone who’s got a little girl in this town wants to be worried. You think, it could be your daughter or your granddaughter next. It might be as easy them that get taken as China, next time. We want to know. It’s our right. What’s he got to say about that?’

On the stage in front of the blue west of England police screens, next to the chief constable with his bewildered expression, the girl’s mother sat, entirely relaxed. She might have believed the mission statement in fake loopy handwriting behind them, so calm did she seem: Helping People Safely. Her eyes were cast down towards her folded hands. Her long blonde hair fell like a curtain over her features. Heidi: she had been Helen in the papers, her birth name, or Tragic Helen, names nobody who knew her had ever called her. Snatched or posed, photographs of her frozen madonna-mask, refusing to weep, made a perfect front page; an old school photograph of China the usual inset. One enterprising paper had gone to Heidi’s long-estranged mother in Yeovil, and printed some old photographs of Heidi, ten or fifteen years old; the mother, afterwards, had been warned off coming anywhere near Heidi or Hanmouth, and some journalists were under the impression that Ruth’s mother Karen was her real mother.

Next to her was Micky, China’s stepfather, with the half-wit expression and shaved head, his mouth fallen half open. The visitors had taken his expression for shock or grief. Those who lived in Hanmouth had seen his empty face hundreds of times outside the worst of the small town’s pubs. They had never considered before that he came from Hanmouth, exactly. Some of them were surprised to hear that the sister-in-law, or whoever she was, was talking about ‘here’ as if she lived in Hanmouth, rather than in one of the grim suburbs that lay between Hanmouth and Barnstaple. Micky was known to everyone as far as Heycombe, however. He had a long-standing habit of showing his penis to newcomers and to girl students from Barnstaple, doing the Hanmouth pub crawl. His bun-like face was not made bewildered by grief or fear. That was what he looked like.

The chief constable allowed himself to think that the mother had prepared and rehearsed her sister, or sister-in-law, in these accusations. He also allowed himself to think that those involved in the rehearsal were much more extensive than that. The mother and the stepfather were, he saw, wearing new clothes from top to bottom, quite different from the new clothes they had been wearing when he had met them that morning. The price tag had still been on the sole of the woman’s shoes, as he had seen when she knelt to wipe some jam off one of her younger children’s chops. Newspaper money had paid for the new shoes, no doubt including a fat fee the interview in the Daily Whatever had brought them two days ago. The press had been full of the news that they’d asked to be paid in cash for that, though they’d all made a silent agreement not to mention any of that in their own coverage. This pair had been exploiting their opportunities and, in the eyes both of the police and the press, they knew what they were doing. It was as if they had been planning it before the child went missing, and the machinery had swung into action within hours. The way that the woman’s face had fallen to her hands a second or two before Ruth stood up had had a practised appearance. She didn’t want her satisfaction at the interruption and the discomfiture of the police to be too evident.

‘Let me assure you,’ the policeman said. ‘Let me assure everyone here that we are, indeed, carrying out house-to-house enquiries. These inquiries have led to a number of fruitful leads. We are now pursuing those. It would not be helpful, in the interests of our investigations, to explain here exactly what those leads are. I should also say that, in the hours immediately following China’s disappearance, we went as a matter of urgency to everybody in the vicinity who was on the sex offenders’ register. Of course, that was the first thing we did. We know who they all are, and they were our first priority.’

There was another rumpus, from the back of the hall. It was a man this time, looking not at all like one of Micky and Heidi’s relations, both deplorable and beyond genealogical analysis. This one looked very much like the sort of person who was supposed to live in Hanmouth, and soon people recognized him as the man who sat at the cash desk in the antiques emporium on the quay. He was the sort of person who in normal circumstances would complain about Heidi and Micky. He was wearing a tweed jacket and a tie, even on this hot spring night. His wife, by his side, nodded agreement as he shouted.

‘Who are they?’ he shouted. ‘Who are these sex offenders living in our communities? We need to know their names. I have grandchildren and—and—’

Heidi looked up, interested. She hadn’t anticipated or prepared this one.

‘Let me assure you—’ the chief constable said. ‘And that wasn’t the first thing you did. The first thing you did was to go wandering round my back garden without permission and walk up and down the long field out back, questioning innocent people while time got wasted. My wife and our grandchildren, our grandchildren, I tell you, they need to know—’

‘Let me assure you that investigations into such persons were immediate and very thorough. We will not, however, in the light, in the light of the strength, ah, of feeling around this case—’

‘This case?’

‘—around this case be revealing the names of those individuals who, though on the sex offenders’ register, are innocent of any involvement in China’s disappearance. I’m sure you can understand the thinking behind that.’

‘It’s not “this case”, it’s—’

‘We need to know—’

On the far end of the trestle table, Mr Calvin sat in his blue suit, taking notes. The chief constable had got to know him well in the last few days. He lived in Hanmouth, on the best street, the Strand. Calvin was the sort of respectable figure who would not normally have had anything to do with anyone like the O’Connors. He had announced himself to the police, once challenged, as ‘a friend of the family’s’, who would be liaising with them and advising them. Already, the chief constable happened to know, he had told the press and television that he was the O’Connors’ ‘representative’. An officer with a good memory recalled that, in fact, he was nothing more than the chairman of the Hanmouth Strand Neighbourhood Watch and, last year, had lobbied successfully for CCTV to be placed not only from one end of the Fore street in Hanmouth to the other, but the whole length of the Strand and some tranquil streets behind it where no crime had ever been committed. Whether any criminal had been caught by this inch-by-inch surveillance in the two years since, no police officer could say, but the cameras, and the signs announcing their presence, had been conjured into existence by the wish of Calvin and his committee. Now, his pseudo-legal authority had allowed him to take control of the O’Connors’ wishes and campaign. The police and press had, already, found common, unvoiced ground in detesting him. He gave a tight little smile to his clients, or friends, or customers, and finished what he was writing in his orange notebook. He tore out the page and passed it to Heidi, before closing the notebook.

‘I’d like to invite Heidi and Micky to say a few words,’ the chief constable said, with resignation. ‘I’m sure we all understand how difficult this is for them, and appreciate how brave they’ve been in coming here tonight.’

Heidi looked up from underneath her curtain of blonde hair, and turned to her left. She did not look at Micky, but at Mr Calvin in his blue three-buttoned suit and grey-white slicked-down hair. ‘Look at her,’ one of the women at the very back of the hall, Billa Townsend, the Brigadier’s wife, said to her friend from the reading group, and they both looked at Heidi. Despite the four children, the years of men’s demands and children’s commands in a small house buried a long way within the Ruskin estate on the Torcombe road, despite the lack of sleep this last week and the worst her newly acquired chainstore wardrobe could do for her, she was a beauty. Billa Townsend was indicating that in low tones, and her friend Kitty understood what she was being asked to look at. Heidi looked what she was, or had been: the sumptuous heroine of the Hanmouth Academy, and the eleven years since she had left school had done little to touch her perfect high-boned face, her green eyes, the pale stripe of hair falling like a shadow across her perpetually bronzed cheek, and that awkward but perfect element, the nose of an eagle or a duchess. They had shaken their heads when she had gone off, at sixteen, with sad, ratty Nigel. There must have been a reason for her to do that, and for the two hopeless men, one a hopeless and brief husband, since then. Must have been a reason, even, for Micky Thomas, seven years her junior. Hanmouth had hardly heard her speak since she left school, unless she had been suggesting a colour rinse in flat tones. Hanmouth had only, in the last year or two, seen her man in the worst of its pubs, heard his daft opinions, seen him manhandling different girls into the pub toilets at closing time. In her hand was the little page of the notebook Mr Calvin had passed her. She hardly glanced at it.

‘I’d just like to say thank you,’ Heidi said, in a flat quiet voice—the chief constable chivalrously adjusted the microphone in front of her. ‘I’d like to say thank you to everyone who is helping by making a contribution to the Save China fund. It means a lot to us that people who never met China care so much that they’ll send in thirty, forty, fifty pounds to help with the family expenses and the investigation that is going to help find China. China’s a lovely girl. She’s not an angel, she’s full of mischieviousness like any other eight-year-old. I just want to say to whoever’s got her that they want to think about us, think about her family, who love her so much and miss her. Her little brothers and her sister don’t understand she’s been taken, but they cry themselves to sleep every night. So, please, just bring her back home safe and sound soon.’

The cameras stayed for a moment at their sustained angle, waiting perhaps for the mother to start weeping. She had done so once before. ‘Hard as nails,’ one cameraman muttered to his sound man, and lowered the camera in disappointment. The chief constable was winding up now, giving the same appeal for information that he had given the day before, but none of that needed filming. The party on the stage stood up—the chief constable and the woman police officer in charge of the O’Connors’ welfare, Calvin, the lawyer, Micky and Heidi. As at the end of a wedding, they sorted themselves out into disparate couples, the chief constable taking charge of Heidi, Mr Calvin walking with Micky’s elbow firmly in his grip, the lawyer and the woman police officer bringing up the rear. The community centre rose like a congregation, solemnly and silently. At the back of the hall, the crowd, which hadn’t found seats and was filling the lobby and half the street outside, pressed against each other and divided. The police officers at the back pushed and shoved, finding space for Micky and Heidi and their official attendants. ‘Those sex offenders—we need to know, Chief Constable,’ the man who had shouted out said again, now in quite a reasonable voice as the officers passed. Heidi smiled brilliantly for a moment; the chief constable did not appear to have heard.

The hall had been solemn, concerned and angry, but the mood petered out the further you got from the stage. Outside, in the warm spring evening, the crowd was inquisitive, unfamiliar to each other, and even festive. One man staring at Heidi and Micky’s departure was finishing off a Cornetto. They hadn’t bothered to change their clothes into anything respectful of the occasion. Some of the men were in swimsuits with a T-shirt or vest on top, a pair of vivid splashy Vilebrequin shorts and flip-flops, straight from the pool, their girlfriends in spaghetti-stringed tops and sarongs over wet bikinis. They stared as if at celebrity, and spilled halfway down the street as far as the Co-op and the Case Is Altered, one of the better Hanmouth pubs, and evidently doing very well out of the influx of curious outsiders. One woman had come from as far away as London, it was said, though an excited report of travellers from Germany turned out to refer to some holiday-makers who happened to have stumbled, bemused, on the happy scene.

In the middle of the crowd, blocking the street, there was a police car. Somehow a path was got through to it. Heidi and Micky, guarded by police, got into the back. Micky was openly staring at the strangers staring at him. Each of them held up a camera phone to their faces over the policemen’s shoulders. The woman police officer in charge of the investigation got into the front, and the crowd, disappointed, parted. The car was permitted to set off. The chief constable, accompanied by a couple of officers, made his way as best he could through the crowd to his driver and car in the car park behind the community centre and the fire station. The stars of the show had departed. The audience, leaving the community centre, lost its focus of interest but not its excitement. Hanmouth acquaintances started greeting each other, quite happily. The outsiders, knowing no one, drifted away disappointedly.

12.

‘Well, that was sad,’ Billa Townsend, the Brigadier’s wife, said to her friend Kitty. She spoke briskly.

‘I know,’ Kitty said, as if with wonderment that, of all the emotions in the world, Billa had happened by sheer chance to express the very one that she, too, happened to be feeling. ‘Awfully sad, really. Rather wish I hadn’t gone. Just to look at the poor mother—what she must be feeling, I can’t imagine. Terribly sad.’

‘We’re going to be late for Miranda’s book club,’ Billa said. ‘We’d better make a move.’

The pair of them, each with a string bag containing a book—the same book—and strong, cross, hairy old faces over their quilted blue or green sleeveless gilets, turned away from the community centre and down the Fore street towards the quay. Beyond that was the long line of Dutch houses where Miranda lived. The air of reckless festivity was strong in the street now that the police had gone. Outside the Case Is Altered, a dozen men stood and drank, smoking. None of them was known to Billa or to Kitty. A noisy record from the jukebox enquired, through the open window of the inn, whether someone wished his girlfriend was hot like the singer. Billa didn’t know why it was so necessary to make such a frightful din about everything nowadays, and Kitty, throwing everything into her answer, said that she knew. Three unfamiliar children, perhaps the children of some of the drinkers, did handstands without surveillance or restraint against the white-painted carriage arch, against the landlady’s trellis. It didn’t appear like a community in which a dangerous child-abductor was on the prowl.

‘It all seems so normal,’ Kitty said. ‘And us carrying on as normal, going to the book group just as we arranged before all of this happened, as if nothing had happened at all. Talking about the same book we were going to talk about.’

‘Well, I don’t know what we were supposed to do,’ Billa said. ‘Everyone always complains that they hardly have time to finish a book even with a month’s notice. We could hardly have changed the book to something more suitable, even if’ —the noise of the crowd was muted as they turned down the kink in the Fore street’s progress ‘—people really wanted to talk about a book with more relevance. A kidnapping story, I suppose you mean.’

That wasn’t what Kitty really meant; she couldn’t have said what she meant. Billa’s flat-fronted Georgian house, like a house front on a stage flat, came into view. They inspected it from top to bottom. The Brigadier stood in the window of the kitchen, conducting with one hand the orchestra on Classic FM, which was murmuring on the sill next to the scarlet pelargoniums. With the other, he was evidently ironing; he liked to do the week’s ironing on a Tuesday evening, and nothing much got between him, the ironing and Dvoák Evening on the radio.

He was deeply involved in his double task, and did not observe Kitty or Billa as they passed; neither did they try to attract his attention. He had had a lifetime of putting rifles together, of instructing others how to put rifles together, of walking down lines of men ensuring that rifles had been put together properly, and finally of confidence that the men had been properly trained and inspected before he walked a step or two behind Her Majesty, brimming with pride. In old age and retirement, he ensured that he maintained the orderly requirements of a lifetime, dressed with the neatness of an old soldier, and presumably had managed in the army to carry out small domestic chores when required. But little improvements in domestic items over the years had achieved the difficult task of reducing him to helplessness, and he struggled with steam irons and the programmes of modern washing-machines.

They passed on, and a new crowd outside the yellow-painted pub on the quay soon made itself apparent.

‘Have you read it?’ Kitty said.

‘The Makioka Sisters?’ Billa said. ‘Yes, indeed. We ought to have gone through it when we were supposed to rather than tramping off to Crimewatch UK. Now we’re just going to have to discuss it when we get to Miranda’s. I suppose it’s called keeping your powder dry, but I don’t care for it.’

From the upper reaches of the first house on the Strand emerged the sound of the Bach G major cello suite, soupily expressive on every attained top note. It was John Gordon, straining and sobbing over every unfulfilled promise of tune in the piece. At seven, every evening, before dinner, he always did this. Billa and Kitty knew what the piece was because it was John Gordon’s only piece, brought out at parties and dinners, at every invitation and carefully announced. Some people said it was not only his only piece but his only accomplishment in life. He had learnt it at school, many years ago, and at seven in the evening, every day, he opened the upper window and embarked on it, playing it through twice. But everyone knew the same errors would be in it the next day, unimproved by practice and the imitation of self-analysis.

The curtains at the next house, the drawing-room windows of which were sunk somewhat below the level of the pavement, were drawn tightly. Everyone knew why. The Lovells’ children had departed to the City, PR in Dubai, and that final difficult one to Oxford to read Japanese. Now, while the sun was still above the horizon and their children far away, the Lovells had taken to early-evening sex in the sitting room, kitchen or even hallway. Mr Lovell returned from his GP’s practice in Barnstaple and dropped his clothes in the hall; Mrs Lovell, abundantly fleshy, would come from the garden to meet him, wriggling out of skirt and blouse as she came. Tonight, the little squeaks of joy came with treble clusters of tintinnabulating piano chords, as if in improvised modernist accompaniment to John Gordon’s Bach next door. They were doing it in the dining room, on the keyboard of their untuned Yamaha upright. It happened to some people, that obsession with throwing their clothes off at an age when it would be best to keep them on. The Lovells’ invitations to view their holiday photographs were only accepted once, by the unwary.

Over the road, in the detached gardens belonging to each house, a dog sat before a white-painted hen house. He was entranced. Stanley’s long marmalade ears flapped to the ground, his doleful eyes on one chicken or another. They emerged, retreated, strutted like showgirls around Stanley. Stanley the basset hound belonged to gay Sam who ran the specialist cheese shop and his solicitor boyfriend, the Terrible Waste, Harry Milford—Lord Harry, properly—with the office in Bidecombe. The dog had a mania for forms of life smaller than itself, and could sit happily in front of the Kenyons’ chicken coop for long hours. The Kenyons had no objection; they did not believe what the older and more vulgar inhabitants of Hanmouth told them, that that there dog was scaring they hens into fits. Miranda Kenyon didn’t believe that sort of hen was much of a layer in any case.

At the very end of the Strand, where the road ran out and turned into a narrow stone pathway along a beach of mole-coloured mud for another two hundred yards, the last house, Mrs Grosjean, kept a white-slatted beehive. It looked like a miniature tongue-and-groove New England lunatic asylum. Stanley loved that even better. It must have been something to do with the rasping hum the slatted box made, or so it was supposed. Mrs Grosjean suspected him, however, of wanting to thieve the honey within, and would chase him off with a flapping tea-towel and shrieks of alarm if she saw him sitting before it. As far as anyone knew, neither Mrs Grosjean’s bees nor Miranda Kenyon’s chickens had the slightest objection to Stanley sitting there, manoeuvring about him with their habitual chicken or bee noises, and he certainly seemed satisfied to sit and meditate in their presence. If it were rainy, however, he might settle for the more cryptic simulacrum of colony life presented by the washing-machine in Sam and Lord What-a-Waste’s kitchen once it arrived at the spin cycle. The only command he ever mastered, because everyone in Hanmouth said it to him, all the time, was ‘Go home, Stanley.’

13.

‘I wish they’d go home,’ Miranda said, peering out of the window, although the rubbernecking crowds had only come this far in dribs and drabs, and there was no one to be seen. ‘How’s Lord What-a-Waste?’

‘Oh, he’s fine,’ Sam said. He joined Miranda at the window. Once, Miranda had gone into the greengrocer just as Sam was leaving it. The two awful old crones who ran it had been rearranging some rather wrinkly Coxes and discussing Sam. Yes, he was that lord’s—the one who worked as a lawyer in town—he was his boyfriend. They lived up behind the Strand in one of those old fishermen’s cottages—two, rather, knocked into one. Big house, now, all wood and glass inside. What a waste, one harridan assured the other. It was as if she had believed that a nice rich lord with a solicitor’s practice and a big house—two knocked into one—would otherwise have done very well for her, or her ghastly friend, or for one of their slack-jawed daughters. They hadn’t said the same about Sam, who only ran a cheese shop, and who, therefore, wasn’t so much of a catch. Or perhaps it was that, though Lord What-a-Waste was somewhat inclining to plumpness these days, Sam could only be described as fat. With his shaved head and full jowls, he had a certain charm but, as he said himself, no one would call him love’s young dream any more. In the greengrocer’s, Miranda had listened to this unbelievable conversation before buying a random bag of woolly Spanish tomatoes and going round to Sam’s shop. She had told him the whole story without any delay. It couldn’t have been funnier, and since then Harry had been Lord What-a-Waste, though naturally not to his face. ‘He couldn’t be more cheerful, actually. He’s got some lovely new bit of hypochondria on the go. Full of the joys of something that might turn out to be a goitre, he believes.’

‘What is a goitre?’ Miranda said.

‘Heaven alone knows,’ Sam said. ‘I only said it for the comic potential.’

‘Sciatica.’

‘Boils. Piles.’

‘Giant wen,’ Miranda said fondly, as if bringing out a pet name.

‘Gout,’ Sam said. The nice thing about Miranda was that you never had to explain a joke: she was quicker than any woman Sam had ever known to catch on to an elaborating absurdity. She could catch a principle. ‘And shingles.’

‘Shingles really isn’t amusing if you have it,’ Miranda said. ‘An old aunt of mine had it, and it was awful. Most of these things, it’s the old names that are so amusing, like the Shaking Palsy, which is Parkinson’s, isn’t it? I don’t know why they don’t think up a non-funny, anti-funny name for shingles that would mean you took it more seriously. As if psychiatrists had to say that their patients were loony, bonkers, round the twist and nut-jobs. Shingles sounds about as serious as freckles, and it’s no fun at all.’

‘Miranda, freckles can be terrifying,’ Sam said. ‘Much worse than Harry’s goitre, if it does turn out to be a goitre, which I seriously doubt. I don’t suppose any of them are actually enjoyable to get. Some of them sound funny, and some of them don’t. Goitre. Funny. Leukaemia. Not funny. Children used to get mumps, didn’t they? That’s a funny-sounding disease. Did Hettie get mumps ever?’

Miranda busied herself with some flowers on the walnut card table, and Sam saw that he had trodden on one of those occasional and unpredictable patches in Miranda’s life where she was not prepared to be clever or amusing. ‘I don’t know why you should know any better than I do. Is that Stanley out there again?’

‘Staring at the chickens,’ Miranda said. ‘They seem quite inured to him. If I were a chicken and there were an immobile great hound staring at my every doing from a foot away, I’d peck him on the nose. I haven’t noticed that he even stops them laying, though they won’t do it in front of him, which is what I guess he’s waiting to see.’

‘Like not being able to go to the loo with someone watching, I expect. I admire your hens’ composure immensely.’

‘Does Stanley sit and watch you on the lav in the morning, then?’ Miranda said. ‘Go on, you’re blushing, he does. I knew he did. Doesn’t it put you off laying?’

‘Please.’

Sam leant forward and tapped on the window. He meant to attract the attention of Stanley, in the fenced-off garden on the other side of the road. Stanley inclined to deafness, as basset hounds do. He made no response, his attention fully on the chicken coop. Or perhaps he did hear: the sound of knuckles rapping on windows followed him around, every day of his life. Just then, a woman was passing. ‘Woman. Came into the shop this afternoon. I’ve seen her around and about before,’ Sam said. ‘Bought half a pound of Wiltshire Gjetost and an olivewood cheeseboard for her new kitchen.’

‘Not a ghoulish tripper, then,’ Miranda said. Just then Billa and Kitty came to the door with their copies of The Makioka Sisters, each recognizable in a string bag, for the evening’s discussion. She went into the hallway and opened the door. For an odd moment Sam could hear her welcoming cries in two dimensions, from the outside and from the inside, like a two-woman chorus. Inexplicably, the woman who had waved at Sam came up behind Billa and Kitty. Sam went into the hallway, almost knocking over a Japanese lacquer table in his haste.

‘You don’t know me,’ the woman was saying to Miranda over Billa’s imperturbable green-quilted shoulder. ‘But I know you’re Miranda Kenyon. It’s nice to meet you. I live in the flats over there, on the top floor. With my husband. My name’s Catherine Butterworth.’

They were awkwardly placed. Sam relished these moments of embarrassing social disposition, and this one was almost unprecedented. Billa and Kitty were at the door, and could not be invited in without actively dismissing the woman. They stood there, half turned between Miranda and Miranda’s new friend, their smiles fixed and formal, not quite greeting anyone. Miranda’s smile in turn was general and remote. Probably, Sam reflected, never in her life had Billa been greeted with the words ‘You don’t know me, but…’

‘Hello there, Sam,’ Catherine Butterworth said, giving him a flap of a wave. He’d evidently told her his name, though he couldn’t remember doing so.

‘Hello, Catherine,’ he said. ‘Did you enjoy the Gjetost? Unusual cheese, that.’

‘Toffeeish,’ Catherine said. ‘Very unusual. We’re saving it for an after-dinner treat. I’ll let you get on. We’re having a little drink next week—next Saturday at six or so. Our son’s coming down to see our new place—he’s bringing his new partner, so we thought he’d like to meet some neighbours, too. Any of you. That would be delightful. Over there, in the block of flats—Woodlands. Silly name. On the top floor, number six—it’s the only flat on the top floor. Do come.’

‘On the top floor of the flats that spoil our view,’ Miranda said, once she had waved Catherine on her way and ushered Billa and Kitty towards the drinks table. A schooner of fino for Kitty, like wee in a test tube, and a gut-destroying but no doubt Colonel’s Mess-ish Campari and soda for Billa. Sam knew the clearing-out effects Campari had on Billa’s insides. He looked forward to the later stages of their Makioka discussions being accompanied by Billa’s thunderous tummy-rumbles. ‘I’ve never met anyone who lives there before. Couldn’t even identify them by sight. I can’t imagine what anyone was thinking of, throwing up a monstrosity like that between the Strand and the estuary. I think people must have been quite mad in the 1960s. It’s so out of keeping.’

‘We’ve been to the meeting,’ Kitty burst out.

‘Oh, God, how I envy you,’ Sam said. ‘What’s the latest?’

‘Yes, we must get through it before Kenyon gets home,’ Miranda said.

‘Is he coming home tonight, Miranda?’ Billa said. ‘I thought—’

‘Totally placed a tabu on any further mention of it,’ Miranda said precisely. ‘I don’t imagine we talked about anything else for seventy-two hours last weekend—people popping round to chew over it. Then phoning up. Then Hettie’ —voice lowered at this point— ‘actually coming out of her room and not telling us she hates us for once but wanting to know all the details. So’ —back to normal volume— ‘after three days of Heidi and Micky and Tragic China and the others—’

‘Hannah and Archie and, and, and,’ Sam said, counting them out on his fingers.

‘—Kenyon couldn’t stand it any longer and said he didn’t want to hear another word, not even if Tragic China were found camping underneath the blackcurrant bush in the back garden.’

‘Harvey,’ Sam said with satisfaction. ‘That’s the fourth one. Very ugly child. Unbelievable, really. You can understand why they didn’t have him abducted. Never knew a child could be both porcine and bovine at the same time. Wouldn’t have thought its face would tug at the heartstrings of readers of the Sun when they saw it. I thought the little girl was plain but, really, when you see the others, they were making the best of rather a bad job. It is fascinating, though, do admit.’

‘Simply gripping,’ Billa said. ‘I can’t imagine why Kenyon doesn’t want to talk about it all the time from the moment he wakes up. It’s quite put a pep in Tom’s stride in the morning, knowing that he’s going to bump into someone on the Fore street with some delicious new titbit or ingenious theory. Yesterday it was that the children were in charge of concealing China. No one would suspect them of conspiracy.’

‘And they were the last to see her,’ Kitty said. ‘Very good. She’s probably in the old Anderson shelter in the back garden, or something, getting smuggled chips through the garden fence. What I don’t understand is why the husband, or the lover, or the live-in, or whatever he’s supposed to be, chose the library of all places for his alibi. I mean, anywhere would have done. It simply looks so very peculiar for someone like that suddenly to develop an interest in books.’

‘Kitty, libraries aren’t for reading books any more,’ Sam said. ‘They’ve given all that away. It’s nothing but DVDs and computer terminals nowadays.’

‘And of course it’s the one place where, if he took something out, the computer records would show that it was him and that he’d been there at a specific time.’

‘Oh, Billa,’ Miranda said. ‘If he’d walked down Barnstaple high street the CCTV would show where he’d been. I wonder what he took out. Not The Makioka Sisters, I suppose.’

They speculated luridly about his reading or viewing material for a while.

‘I would have thought the unemployment office would have been a better bet,’ Sam said.

‘In what way?’ Kitty said. She was not always the quickest to catch on.

‘If I were someone like that,’ Sam said. ‘I would do roughly what he’s done. I would go somewhere recognizably official to prove my alibi. Not the library, that’s absurd. I would get it somewhere I could be expected to go to. The unemployment office, enquiring about my benefits, or something.’

‘And the mother, how’s she?’ Miranda said.

‘Simply terrifying,’ Billa said. ‘Chills the heart simply to look at her. Sits there playing with her hair, staring into space, unutterably blank. Like looking at a cloud drift across the sky. She has lovely hair, doesn’t she? Bored and boring, I should say.’

‘And new clothes from top to toe,’ Kitty said. ‘Out of the Save China fund, I should guess.’

‘Do you want another drink, Kitty?’ Miranda said.

‘Well, I don’t mind if I do,’ Kitty said. ‘It was awfully crowded—the world and his wife were there and then some extra, just for fun. Billa and I had to stand at the back and we counted ourselves lucky. People getting so overheated, too, calling for everyone’s heads to roll. Terribly silly and embarrassing, and John Calvin running everything so.’

‘There was a fight in the Case Is Altered last night, I heard,’ Billa said. ‘Tom bumped into the landlord on his morning constitutional this morning. He said they’d never seen or heard of such a thing in twenty-five years’ running the pub. Townees, he said.’

‘Grockles, they were calling them in the queue at the post office this afternoon.’

‘Sam,’ Miranda said. ‘What an awful, frightful, yokel-like word. Never let me hear you say anything so prejudiced again.’

Sam understood that by ‘prejudiced’ Miranda meant, as she usually did, ‘common’, and carried on. ‘A nice policeman came into the shop,’ he said, undeterred, ‘and he was saying that they were hoping, very much hoping, to make an arrest before much longer. He was pretending to question me about my whereabouts and had I recalled anything I might have forgotten earlier, but I know he just wanted a good old gossip really. And I said, “Have you got a suspect then?” and he said, “Even two,” and he didn’t wink exactly, but he made a sort of very winking kind of face without actually winking, if you know what I mean.’

‘I’m sure the little girl’s off safely in Butlin’s or somewhere,’ Billa said. ‘Dyed her hair and sent her off for a couple of weeks to enjoy herself.’

‘The thing I truly object to,’ Kitty said, ‘and I know this sounds trivial and I don’t care if it sounds a bit snobbish, but I don’t care about these awful people and I do care about this. It’s that the whole world now thinks of Hanmouth as being this sort of awful council estate and nothing else, and Hanmouth people like this awful Heidi and Micky people. Absolutely everything you read in the papers is about how they live in Hanmouth and, frankly, they don’t. They live on the Ruskin estate where I’ve never been and I hope never to go anywhere near.’

‘I saw a newspaper photographer in a boat in the middle of the estuary, taking photographs,’ Sam said eagerly. ‘Out there in Brian Miller’s ferryboat. Taking a photograph of the church and the Strand and the quay. That’ll turn up in the Sun as a photograph of Heidi’s home town, I promise you.’

‘As if that family could live somewhere like this.’

‘Or, really, more to the point, as if they would ever contrive a story like this if they did live on the Strand,’ Miranda said. ‘One may be cynical, but one does think that moral attitudes and truthfulness and not having your children kidnapped for the sake of the exposure don’t go with deprivation. It’s material deprivation that starts all this off.’

‘They’ve got dishwashers, Miranda,’ Billa said. ‘They’re not examples of material deprivation. But you’re right. You don’t hear about children disappearing from Hanmouth proper, do you? It’s just bad education, ignorance, idleness and avarice.’

‘And drugs,’ Sam put in. ‘Don’t forget the drugs. The policeman shouldn’t have been saying this, but he hinted very heavily that not only had the women been smoking drugs when they were supposed to be looking after the children, but the woman’s partner’s got some kind of criminal record for selling the stuff.’

‘What an awful story,’ Miranda said. ‘I can’t wait for all those drunks and mischief-makers and rubberneckers and fisticuff-merchants and journalists to call it a day and go somewhere else.’

‘I could wring that bally woman’s neck,’ Billa said.

Because belief in and sympathy for Heidi, Micky and their four children, one missing, believed abducted, ran very low among the membership of the reading groups of Hanmouth.

14.

Catherine had had such a nice half-hour in the shops of Hanmouth that afternoon. She had started with the Oriental emporium. There was hardly anything that could be described as a window display. It looked more like the random circulation of stock in the half-lit front. The door was hung with a bright purple and red throw, tied back. Out of the dark interior a jangle of temple bells and a whiff of what Catherine thought of as joss-sticks came—David had had quite a craze for the things at one stage, had been unable to embark upon his physics homework in the back bedroom in St Albans without them.

And then, saving it up rather, she’d gone into Sam’s cheese shop. She’d seen Sam around, walking his dog down the Wolf Walk, reading the papers on a Sunday lunchtime outside the pub on the quay with what must be his partner. She had identified him after a month or two as the owner of the attractive little shop, white-tiled inside with built-in display cabinets. He was often to be seen swapping lengthy stories with other Hanmouthites in the street, the newsagent and the butcher. He seemed to know everyone, and Catherine didn’t consider she would be a proper Hanmouthite until she’d made his acquaintance. He’d been delightful this afternoon: he had foisted the Wiltshire Gjetost on her and a Gorgonzola from a farm just up the road outside Iddesleigh, and something very unusual, a chocolate-flavoured log of goats’ cheese. ‘Made by lesbians in Wales,’ Sam had explained superfluously. And then, not being very busy, he’d asked about the bag she was holding, from the Oriental emporium, and then, very cosily, what she was doing in Hanmouth, did she live here? He’d even clapped his hands when she said she was refurbishing the spare bedroom. It was really quite without any character at the moment, just the previous-owner-who-had-died’s magnolia on the walls. It might even have been the builder’s magnolia, Catherine speculated; there would be no reason to alter that in the first owner’s mind. ‘Well,’ Sam had said reasonably enough, ‘I don’t want to pour cold water, but paint does yellow. It might even have been the builder’s white, forty years ago.’

‘I suppose it might have been,’ Catherine said, enjoying this banter. She wanted to liven it up, furnish the room, give it something resembling character before her son came to visit for the first time. He was bringing his new partner, too, about whom Catherine knew nothing.

‘And did they persuade you into buying their Buddha?’ Sam asked, referring to the sisters with the Oriental antiques. ‘A four-foot gold Buddha. Did you see it? They’ve had it for ten years. I don’t suppose anyone will ever buy it now—it’s almost a joke. Promise me you didn’t buy it.’ Catherine reassured him. ‘We shopkeepers, we do have these disasters, and then we’re stuck with them. So easy to get carried away, and now, I dare say, it’s quite an old friend. I don’t know what Lesley and Julia would do without their Buddha.’

Of course they had laughed together. She had been tempted to bring up David’s new boyfriend, but she thought that might be presumptuously making connections between them. She didn’t know the name of David’s boyfriend, and there was no reason to suppose Sam knew that she knew he had a boyfriend, so the conversation would run quickly into embarrassment. (Catherine was good, she considered, at anticipating conversational awkwardnesses like that one.) After an hour, she came home with some experimental cheese, an olivewood board, a ceramic butter dish ornamented with octopuses, squid, fish and smiling underwater anemones, as well as a charming glass from next door in a padded red cloth frame, decorated with gold embroidery and pieces of mirror. ‘Filling up the house with tat,’ Alec said, looking round from beyond the blinkers of his green leather wing-chair as she came in, but not unkindly. That was his customary response whenever she brought anything home.

So when she heard a rapping at a window and turned to see Sam, gesturing in her direction, she naturally waved back. It was only when he rapped again, and a dog—Sam’s dog—bounded past her that Catherine realized he hadn’t been trying to attract her attention at all. Of course Catherine knew Sam’s dog. She’d known Stanley’s name since before she’d known Sam’s. She had heard him calling impatiently after Stanley almost every morning as the basset hound lumbered off down the Strand. Finding out Sam’s name had been more of a challenge. She still hadn’t discovered his fairly handsome partner’s name. Eavesdropping on a Sunday lunchtime had produced nothing but an exchange of ‘darling’, rather edgy in tone.

She knew Miranda Kenyon’s name, however. When Miranda opened her door to the two ladies, Catherine found herself propelled into the doorway of the house. She could explain her mistake, be friendly, and at the same time offer an invitation to the little drinks she and Alec were having when David and his partner were there next weekend. They were planning to invite all the people they had made friends with since they arrived in Hanmouth. It didn’t seem to go quite as well as she had hoped. It was extraordinary that four sentences could congeal in the air and fall to the floor between strangers. But the gesture had been made. The awkwardness, in the future, might lessen. Catherine stumped up the little rise at the quay end of the Fore street, past estate agent, white-tablecloth French bistro and charity shop. She forced herself to think that Sam had been very kind to her, and friendly, too, that afternoon. They were not at all the same thing, kindness and friendliness, but he had shown both. There was no reason to suppose that she and Alec wouldn’t make good friends in this place.

Still, there had been rebuffs, which couldn’t be shared with Alec, him being a man and not very interested in the smaller details of social life. After a month or six weeks, she’d grown confident when faces presented themselves as familiar. She had started to say hello to them, and been greeted back. She’d even got to know a few names. Every face met before nine and perhaps ten must be a resident, she believed, rather than a tripper, and worth a greeting. The return of greeting had sometimes been enthusiastic, as with a lady with a small West Highland White Terrier on her morning rounds, out and about rather earlier than anyone else. Sometimes the return was more doubtful, provisional, and sometimes rudely withheld. There was an elderly man she saw almost every morning, tall and long-faced and sinewy, with a knowing, watery, foolish expression. He had a regular route: he picked up the paper and got some fresh air, as she did. Their rounds crossed at some point almost every morning. After a month or so of meeting practically every day, she ventured a greeting, a neutral sort of comment about the weather. It was her favourite sort of day. Blue-skied and blustery, the clouds galloping at a racehorse’s pace inland, the spring whiff of salt carried in the buoyant breeze from the ten-miles-remote Bristol Channel. The seagulls widely embraced the wind, wedged diagonally on the air, falling backwards and inland on the salt-swept air, and, walking over the salt-encrusted lawn of the little churchyard that was her shortcut, Catherine smiled and said, ‘Lovely day,’ to a familiar long-faced man. He looked at her directly, as if she were a tree or an animal of some sort, and said nothing. She had read in nineteenth-century novels about people being cut directly. Before she and Alec had moved to Hanmouth, she had been ignored or overlooked, but never cut in so blunt a way.

He was a horrible old man, as it turned out. Afterwards, she heard him laying down the law in the street, his false teeth loose, his loud, humourless Devon accent spitting over whoever he thought worth talking to. She knew people like that were proved unpleasant and not worth knowing by their parade of superiority and withholding of so simple a thing as friendliness. All the same, it hurt. You couldn’t explain any of that to Alec. He would always ask why on earth you cared. He had a point.

15.

‘That was a lovely town,’ Catherine had said, as they drove away from Hanmouth five years before. They had come from St Albans to visit Alec’s old secretary from the paper suppliers. She had retired down here with her husband. Alec and Barbara had always got on well in the office, but he and Catherine had been surprised by the invitation to come and spend a long weekend down in Devon with them. They’d had a lovely time. Barbara and Ted, her husband, lived in a whitewashed settlement around a harbour. You couldn’t call it a village. The harbour was a picturesque muddy lagoon, filled with leaning skiffs and old fishing boats. In their front garden, a rowing boat was planted with lobelias and geraniums. When they returned to St Albans, agreeing that they had had a lovely time, it did occur to Catherine that Barbara and Ted might be somewhat lonely in their prettily brackish nook. They hadn’t been greeted in anything but a professionally cheerful way when they went into the pub in the harbour. You might have expected more. It was the only pub in the village, and the village only had twenty or so houses in it.

Still, they had had a lovely time. Barbara had suggested they might like to drive over to the other side of the estuary to a small town called Hanmouth, directly opposite Cockering. ‘Very historical,’ Barbara said remotely. It gave off an air, even at a water-divided distance, of picturesque activity. It had a front of white-painted houses, a square-towered mock-Norman church flying a flag on a promontory facing Cockering over some steak-red cliffs, thirty feet high. It appeared martial and festive. On Thursday nights, if the conditions were clear, the clamour of bellringers going through their changes drifted over the estuary. They had arrived on a Thursday afternoon; at seven, Barbara had hushed them over a pre-dinner drink, and they had heard the distant hum and clanging, the mathematical variations blurring into a halo of sky and sea and seabirds. At night from Cockering, the town looked like Monte Carlo, its lights clustering like bright grapes, reflecting in the high water.

They went, and were surprised how quickly a Saturday morning passed. They had dawdled from coffee to market to bookshop. In the village hall, or community centre, there was a Saturday-morning market. The Women’s Institute sold cakes and pickles on one stall, the biggest and most prominent. Other stalls sold hopeful bric-à-brac, forced pot plants, low-skill craft product such as home-made psychedelic candles, macramé hanging holders or batik throws. When you got down to the jetty and the mooring places, there were boats both large and small, neat, shiny as refrigerators, elegant Edwardian craft with shining brass fittings holding them together like corsets, and squat, businesslike, bumptious tugs. Between them swans, geese, ducks, spoon-billed wading birds and alert-headed coots swam and dived, swimming out to possess the middle stream of the estuary. The boats tranquilly waited for their owners to return. From here, Cockering was impossible to identify or pick out.

There was a square brick warehouse from the turn of the century on the quayside where a bus into Barnstaple waited, the driver sitting on the step with the door open, reading a thriller with some absorption. Three geese, like old womanly friends with no urgent occupation, stood in the middle of the concrete apron, sizing him up as a likely source of bread. The building must once have been a storehouse for the fish industry but now it turned out to be filled with antiques of every description. There were pretty old pubs whose names had to have some story behind them—the Case Is Altered! On the high street, blue, white and red bunting hung from side to side in high airy zigzags. It must have been for the Hanmouth Festival with a procession led by the Hanmouth Festival Queen 2008. Catherine and Alec read about it in a series of shop windows. Alec remarked that the procession would be a short one. The high street—the Fore street, as many Devon main streets were called—was a bare five hundred yards long.

There were two Italian restaurants. One had pretensions, the other gingham tablecloths and a pizza menu. There was a French bistro where everything, white tablecloths, white walls, glassware, cutlery, seemed to polish and reflect Catherine’s smile back at her through the windows. There was no Chinese takeaway or kebab shop, as far as she could see. There was a cheese shop, with a plump man in a blue and white striped apron, proffering wafery samples with good cheer to his customers. Best of all, there was a butcher. It was unexpected how butchers had become a means to register the life and independence of any English town. Until recently they had been an ordinary and unnoticed presence in a community of any size. Now they had become a thermometer measuring a body’s health, and the last butcher in St Albans had given up the unequal struggle with Tesco’s meat counter three years before. For no very good reason, they joined the queue in the Hanmouth butcher’s and bought two pounds of their homemade sausages. ‘We’re almost down to the last of the free-rangers till Tuesday,’ the butcher told the shopper before her. Catherine inwardly shivered for shame that the town in which she had made her home had not, it seemed, needed a butcher. The town was busy and jolly. On their way back to Barbara’s for a lunch of soup, bread-and-Wensleydale and a salad, Catherine and Alec agreed that if they ever moved from St Albans, this was the sort of place that they would like to live in.

Neither of them could pin down exactly when it was that they had firmly decided to move. Their growing seriousness about the idea had been marked by their growing engagement with the Hanmouth estate agents. At first they only looked in the windows of estate agents. Frustratingly, they did not display the prices of the houses at the upper and most intriguing end. Often, the grandest houses had their own glossy brochures. They soon graduated, in a series of interviews, to pretending to be interested in buying a house. Nosily, they went round half a dozen they could never have afforded, tutting and shaking their heads sorrowfully over the lack of a utility room, a library, a music room.

It was embarrassing to have to go back to the same estate agents, a month later, after a serious conversation or two, with different aims. They had to concoct a story that they had decided, after consideration, not to move down there permanently. (‘A permanent residence,’ Alec had said, overdoing it.) They now wanted a holiday home. Their invented objections gave way to real ones: plausible fishermen’s cottages, almshouses, inter-war semis dropped away. Too small, too expensive, facing east, facing west, too large, the worst house in a good area (embarrassment), the best house in a bad area (ostentation). A garden to keep up; a garage, which would only fill with junk. There seemed no objection that a property in Hanmouth would not meet in the most specific terms.

16.

Added to these objections were the comments of David, their son. They had told him about their intentions only at that point. He had been dubious. He had gone on living in St Albans, though he worked in London and commuted every day. Perhaps he was not the right person to consult about any adventurous enterprise. They knew people in St Albans, apart from him. They were familiar with things and services thereabouts. What if something went wrong, what if someone fell ill? At home in St Albans, they would be surrounded by willing volunteers from their circle. In this town in Devon they’d taken a liking to, no one would even know either of them was ill. No one would think of helping out. They were getting on. These things had to be thought about.

These gloomy objections were evidently weighing in Alec’s mind when, for the seventh time that year, they found themselves in a Hanmouth estate agent’s. One of three. It was an unpromising day for viewing anything: rain at St Albans had turned steadily colder as they headed westwards, and by now the sleet was so thick outside that you could barely see the other side of the Fore street. Maria, the untidy woman in charge, hair flying and papers everywhere on the desk, like the White Queen in steady employment, had said over the telephone that there was a nice house which had just come on the market. Should she send them the particulars? Maria had giggled as she said this, and as she said most things, though none of them were at all amusing. They had driven down the same morning. Maria had been taken aback to see them, though Alec had definitely said, ‘We’ll pop over this afternoon,’ on the telephone. She hadn’t been able to find the keys at first: she knew she hadn’t popped them on the key rack, she’d just dropped them for a moment—scream of laughter—as she’d come in to take her coat off and run herself up a little cup of coffee, because she’d picked them up on her way in; Apthorpe Avenue was really the way she took from home into work—a small giggle. A Mozart piano concerto on Classic FM formed a backdrop to Maria’s comments; as she turned half her desk upside down searching for the keys, she was starting in on a description of the house, very nice, pre-war, a striking sculpture in the front garden, had been lived in by the same owner for nearly forty years, but he’d taken good care of it.

Catherine started to suspect and, as Maria continued, grew sure of it, that the house she was talking about was, in fact, a house she had shown them eight months earlier; it had come off the market without finding a buyer (faced west, seller immovable on price). It had, evidently, now come back on. Maria had forgotten or never knew that she had shown Catherine and Alec the house. As inspiration started to fail her, Alec began to interject with unhelpfully general observations: perhaps David had a point. Did they want to be moving to a town where they’d be making new friends from scratch? What if one of them had a turn of some sort? And then there was the question of security, wasn’t there? They’d hardly considered that. This was a rich town, but not everywhere near here was rich. What did they know about the burglary situation? Was it even safe to walk the streets at night? There were a lot of pubs, weren’t there? You heard about such things in country towns—it was as bad on a Saturday night as in St Albans, or so Alec had heard.

Maria seemed to be paying little attention to Alec, dourly backsliding from his househunting obligations. She was only putting in encouraging titters, an occasional ‘Oh, surely…’ and an ‘I think you’ll find…’ and an ‘It’s really ever such a, er, er, supportive little community we’ve got here,’ this last bringing out a gale of laughter. Her attention moved from the attempt to find the keys to Apthorpe Avenue, which, she had started to confide, might very well be in her house, she having picked them up not on her way in but on her way home last night. She looked at the window where, between the tessellated placards of the houses for sale, a dark figure had coagulated out of the dark afternoon sleet.

‘There,’ she said, with finality. ‘That’s convenient. Here’s our Mr Calvin—I wonder if he’s in a great hurry to get anywhere. He can tell you so much more about that side of things in Hanmouth than I can.’

She jumped up. A desk-tidy with three pencils in it was sent flying. She poked her head outside the door, letting in a fierce blast of ozone-frozen air. After a brief exchange, she ushered the man in. His black coat and black astrakhan hat were mantled with sleet and snow. Like a magician performing a trick, he removed them in a single upwards gesture, placing them on the coat-rack, unpeeled his brown ostrich-skin gloves and placed them neatly aligned on Maria’s catastrophic desk. With a quick rub of his heavily polished shoes up the back of his pinstriped trousers, right and then left, he seemed never to have been outside at all. He was thin and upright, had clean mouse-like, beady-eyed, polished features, and a smoothed-down cap of white hair. His hands went up, unnecessarily, to smooth his hair down to right and left; they were strikingly large and flat hands, like flippers.

‘This is our Mr Calvin,’ Maria said. The man’s sleek smile went from Alec to Catherine, from Catherine to Alec, without registering any change at all. The sort of smile that dolphins have, built into their bones and into their faces, meaning nothing much, Catherine believed. She wondered what he was seeing: a woman with the anxious, motherly expression she had so often caught unawares in shop windows, and her bald, pugnacious husband, in the dim sort of beige anorak, padded, toggled and with multiple purposeful pockets that you could not believe you had ever bought with any intent to charm, beguile or seduce. If that was what you wanted an anorak to do for you.

‘Mr and Mrs Butterworth,’ Maria said. ‘They’re looking for a house to buy in Hanmouth. We’ve been at it quite some little time. The first houses we looked at’ —gesturing at the bleak midwinter outside— ‘we had to stop halfway and have a sit-down and an ice-cream, it was so hot. Can you—’ her shrill, sentence-punctuating laugh went up the scale, and cut abruptly off.

‘Top of the morning to you,’ Calvin said. ‘And a beautiful morning it be.’ Then he switched disconcertingly out of his stage comic Irishness into ordinary English. ‘You’ll love it here. I moved down from Liverpool ten years ago, never regretted it. The weather could be better for you today, I admit.’

Alec was perking up: it was the attention of an extrovert person with a ready smile. ‘We do like it,’ he said.

Maria dived in. ‘Mr Butterworth was wondering about how safe it was in Hanmouth,’ she said. ‘And then—there you were. As if sent along to answer all those questions. You couldn’t possibly spare us two minutes? Mr Calvin, he’s the person you really want to get on your side in Hanmouth. Came along, shook everybody up, took charge of Neighbourhood Watch, which was really a very sleepy sort of body before—’ Hee, hee, hee, she went; no wonder she had no, and seemed never to have had any, colleagues.

‘I don’t think they did anything but stick orange stickers on lamp-posts,’ Calvin said. ‘Which was about as much use as a chocolate teapot, as we say in Liverpool.’

‘We have Neighbourhood Watch round us,’ Catherine said. ‘But you would only know about it from those stickers. I don’t know who runs it, or where they meet, or when.’

‘Well, you’d know about it in Hanmouth,’ Calvin said. ‘To be sure, to be sure, to be sure. We identified some active members of the community to form a new committee. We carried out a survey on day one of the new committee, asking everyone in the town what they were most concerned about. One of the pubs that caused most trouble, the one at the near end of the Strand, we objected to the renewal of their licence— “Gaarn! Leave it ahht! You lookin’ at my bird! ’E ain’t wurf it, Keif!” —and had it closed down. Turned into a tea-room. Great success. The pub crawl the students go on, it’s really the Hanmouth Eleven now, though the students still talk about Doing the Twelve. Can’t count after eight pubs, ’tis said, so it is. All that was just in our first year, year one. Then we lobbied the police and demanded security cameras. CCTV. There’s not much of the centre of Hanmouth not covered by CCTV nowadays. And that has to be a good thing. The crime rate in Hanmouth is as low as it could be. So,’ Calvin slipping into mid-Atlantic telly interviewers’ fake-serious accent, ‘how can we justify the expense of these surveillance cameras, if there is no crime? The answer, my friend, is this. There is no crime because a criminal knows he cannot commit one. The crime is headed off at the pass, long before it is committed. Voilà.’ Calvin considered for a moment, then added, ‘Monsieur. We aren’t happy that there are still parts of Hanmouth which aren’t covered by CCTV. The Fore street cameras have been there five years, and the technology has moved on. We’re working on implementing some new cameras that are being trialled in Middlesbrough, with a loudspeaker and sound system attached. A police officer sees a youth up to no good in the street. Can flick a switch, say, “’Ello, ’ello, ’ello, what’s all this then? Move along, move along, commit not that there nuisance in this ’ere street.” And Johnny Mugger or Leeeee-roy the Burglar and his dusky friends with a jemmy and an ice-pick, they lift up their knees very sharply indeed, say, “Vat is well rank, man,” and off they head to burgle somewhere a little bit less well guarded and watched, a nice safe distance away, a place which you and I do not care a great deal about. That’s the general idea. We don’t see why we shouldn’t get the model with loudspeaker by this time next year. This—’ deep breath, sincere gaze ‘—is one of the very safest places in this country. Ask anyone.’

Maria the estate agent had been smiling from the beginning, and as Calvin went through one accent after another, she started to titter, then giggle, then chortle, then chuckle, then snigger, then hoot, then roar, then guffaw. By the end, and Calvin imitating a black youth cowering under a loudspeaker ordering him to go away and burgle some less forward-looking community, she gave every impression of coming out into the open about her desire to howl till she pissed herself.

But by the end of the afternoon, they had viewed and made an offer on a big modern flat, occupying the whole top floor of a small, neat, well-made block right on the estuary, with walnut panelling in the lobby, rosewood fittings and banisters, black marble flooring from top to bottom. It was really very stylish. The previous owner had lived and died there, and his or her belongings had been carried away long ago. The empty rooms were clean, well-sized and open. They hadn’t thought of a flat at all. The attractions of those fishermen’s cottages or almshouses were fading. In practice, they always came with so individual and overwhelming a set of objections. The weather had brightened up, and the view was of silver-shining mud and a slash of light-embodying water, a thunderous zinc-black sky livid with flashes of brightness. Opposite, at the peak of the hills beyond the estuary, the castle’s folly was washed in a well of sunlight as the clouds above passed on and separated. The flat’s empty spaces were filled with watery light. Above in the sky, just as they were standing there, four swans flew overhead. Their wings made the regular beat of a solemn and remote drum. It was a noise that might mark the progress of an exotic and half-understood ceremony. For the first time in several months, Catherine remembered and thought freshly that she wanted to live in this place, and not in a road in St Albans where the view from the window was of a house with the precise dimensions of the one you yourself were in. She didn’t really care what the people were like.

‘Amusing man, that Mr Colvin,’ Alec said, on the drive home.

‘Calvin, I think it was,’ Catherine said, surprised but not wanting to dissent.

‘I think he would be a bit of a life-and-soul type,’ Alec said. ‘Probably worth getting to know once we’re down there. Centre of the social life of the place, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised.’

‘I hope we’re not going to hit the worst of the traffic on the M25,’ Alec said.

‘Just our luck if we did,’ Catherine said.

17.

‘Come on,’ Catherine said over the telephone to David, that same evening. ‘It’s not as if we have one foot in the grave, exactly. It’ll be perfectly all right. You’ll see.’

18.

‘I wasn’t doing anything wrong,’ the man said. On the table, a range of photographic equipment, a case lying open. A policeman was poking at the back of the camera, trying to get the digital screen to switch on. ‘It’s my job.’

‘That’s right,’ the boyish-looking girl said—she was his assistant, she’d stated. ‘We were just trying to get some good photographs. There was nothing harmful in it.’

‘We’ve got to take every precaution,’ the policeman said. ‘It’s not normal behaviour, now, is it?’

The recreation ground divided into two: the wide open grassy space, where the older kids ran and chased and played adult games, like softball and football, and the playground for the younger ones. With bright-coloured climbing apparatus and ingeniously varied swings and roundabouts, this was a popular place among the under-nines. Barnstaple Council had recently renovated the old playground, replacing the knee-crunching asphalt with some soft substance, putting in new and exotic attractions, and fencing it round. At the moment, there were few places where the young of Hanmouth could enjoy themselves. This was one of them.

That afternoon, a mother deposited her seven-year-old there after school while she went to buy a chicken from the butcher’s for dinner. She had done it before, and thought nothing of it; there were plenty of other children there. She didn’t believe in the existence of the child-snatcher in any case. When she came back, she was surprised to see two adults she’d never seen before: one, a fat bald man, was actually kneeling inside the playground, a large professional camera at his face. He was taking photographs of the children.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ she said.

The other adult, an androgynous figure, made a throat-cutting gesture. The photographer got up briskly and started walking out of the playground, straight past the mother.

‘No, no, no,’ the mother said. ‘You don’t just walk away like that.’

The pair kept on walking. The mother called to her son to stay where he was, and followed them, getting her mobile out and dialling a three-figure number as she walked.

‘You see,’ the policeman said, in the police station, ‘that doesn’t seem a very sensible thing to do in the present circumstances. Does it?’

‘It’s my job,’ the photographer said.

‘You don’t have to photograph strange children playing, do you?’ the policeman said. ‘That’s asking for trouble, I would have thought. In the present circumstances.’

‘I get told what they want photographed, and I do it,’ the photographer said.

‘I’m not charging you with anything,’ the policeman said.

‘That’s good, because he’s done nothing wrong,’ the girl said.

‘Jess,’ the photographer said.

‘But I’m not going to let you walk out of here, for your own safety,’ the policeman said. ‘Feeling’s running very high round here. The lady who made the complaint, who saw you photographing her little boy without permission from her or from Mr Calvin or from anyone else, sees you, a complete stranger, could be anyone, with this case going on, unsolved, the kidnapper at large—do you see what I’m saying? She feels very strongly about it.’

‘Well, I’m very sorry,’ the photographer said.

‘That’s the ticket,’ the policeman said, referring not to the apology but to the camera, which, with a four-note tune, had switched on, showing the last of the photographs. ‘Now. I’m not going to confiscate your camera. I can see it’s the tool of your trade and I think you’ve learnt a valuable lesson here. But I am going to take the memory card out of the camera and keep that while we look at it and what’s on it.’

‘Can’t you look at it now and give it back to me?’

‘I can’t do that,’ the policeman said. ‘We need to look at it very carefully.’

19.

The police car pulled away from the Hanmouth community centre. The photographers in the street pressed their lenses up against the window. Some were professional, working for the press. Others were using their little pocket digital cameras or even the cameras built into their mobile phones. Heidi and Micky sat as still as they could. In the front, Mr Calvin sat next to the driver, his brown pimpled attaché case on his lap. The police liaison officer was in the back with Heidi and Micky. She was supposed to be helping and comforting them. The police driver drove. He listened.

‘Thank God that’s over and done with,’ Heidi said. Her little voice was accented half by London, half by America, and by Devon not at all. It could hardly sound anything but bored. ‘I hate it when they stare at us. They’ve made their minds up and they won’t help us at all.’

‘Who’s they, Heidi?’ Mr Calvin said.

‘Those snobs,’ Heidi said. ‘Those snobs who live in Old Hanmouth. I cut their hair, half of them, and the other half I reckon they’re too much snobs to get their hair cut in Hanmouth or even in Barnstaple. I reckon they go to Bristol or to London. They know me but they don’t say hello. They stare like I’m in a zoo and they’ve paid their entrance ticket.’

‘Everyone’s very concerned and worried for China, Heidi,’ the police liaison officer said. ‘I’m sure they wouldn’t have come to find out what’s being done if they didn’t care very deeply about China’s disappearance.’

‘’Ass right,’ Micky said. ‘You want to think of that, girl.’

‘Don’t you believe it,’ Heidi said, as the police car slowed for the level crossing. An upright woman in a headscarf with a bounding Jack Russell on a lead peered into the back of the car and quickly looked away. Someone had breached good taste here. ‘They don’t care. They just want their face on the TV.’

‘Oi! Oi! Oi! Look at me, Mum! I’m on the TV! I’m famous! The more people,’ Mr Calvin said, ‘that get involved, the quicker we find China. I know some of them aren’t very nice, and they don’t really take the right attitude, but they are involved. The ones who don’t want to know—I expect the police will be asking themselves why these people are keeping themselves to themselves so much.’

Unnoticed, the driver felt his face harden into an expression of unbelief.

‘It would never have happened,’ Mr Calvin said, ‘if there’d been CCTV on Heidi’s street. But, of course, you put that to the police before something like this happens, and they give you a brush-off. “Not necessary, we do not consider that the above application if granted would represent a good use of current resources.” And then a little girl gets kidnapped and they’ve no idea at all.’

The train crossed; the barriers lifted and the car drove on. Silence fell.

‘You know the BBC are coming to interview you at home,’ Mr Calvin said. ‘They’ll be round about seven, they said.’

‘I know,’ Heidi said.

‘Am I all right like this?’ Micky said. ‘Should I put on my new shirt?’

‘You’re all right,’ Heidi said. ‘It doesn’t look good if you’re changing your clothes every five minutes. They’ll be showing this in conjunction with the footage from the press conference, I reckon.’

‘I don’t honestly think it matters all that much,’ the policewoman said.

‘Mr Calvin,’ Heidi said.

‘Yes, Heidi?’

‘I like your bag.’

‘Thank you.’

‘It’s unusual, what it’s made of, isn’t it?’

‘It’s ostrich skin, I think.’

‘I’ve never seen one like that before. I thought it was a design at first.’

‘No, that’s how ostrich skin looks. You mean the sort of puckers, the marks. That’s where the feathers were.’

‘Yeah. Where did you get it?’

‘Milan, I think. I got some gloves from the same place in ostrich skin. They’re to die for, fabulous, honey.’

‘Heidi,’ the policewoman said—she was not quite used to Mr Calvin’s outbreaks into voices just yet.

‘There on holiday,’ Micky asked.

‘No, on business,’ Mr Calvin said. ‘I shouldn’t have got it—it was far too expensive. I do love it, though.’

‘I didn’t know you were in business,’ Micky said. ‘I thought you did—’

‘What did you think he did, Micky?’ Heidi said grumpily.

‘I thought he did’ —Micky gestured around him at the inside of the car, its cramped quarters of need and disaster— ‘I thought he did this.’

‘Heidi,’ the policewoman started again. ‘I just want to explain to you and Micky what we’ve been doing today to find China. And what we’re going to do tomorrow.’

Heidi slumped against Micky resentfully. ‘I heard you’ve been asking after Hannah’s dad.’

‘Marcus,’ the policewoman said. ‘Yes, that’s right. We had to make an enquiry there.’

‘And Micky’s brothers, too, they said you’d been asking them where they’d been.’

‘Dominic and—’ she consulted her notes ‘—Vlad, is that right?’

‘Vlad’s not his brother,’ Heidi said.

‘That’s right,’ Micky said.

‘Vlad’s his sister’s boyfriend. Avril. He’s from Poland.’

‘Ukraine, he told us,’ the policewoman said. ‘You understand we have to ask everyone with some connection to China where they were, even if it’s just to eliminate them. I’m sure you can explain that to people if they feel we shouldn’t investigate them. I understand that if people are concerned and working hard on behalf of China, they may feel upset if we seem to be regarding them as suspects.’

‘I don’t give a shit about them,’ Heidi said. ‘But I don’t want you going near Marcus. He’s scum. I don’t want him turning up and saying he’s worried about China. He’s not been in touch for years. Ruth hasn’t heard from him for years, either. I don’t know what happened to him. I don’t want him any part of this.’

‘Heidi, you understand we have to pursue every possibility?’ the policewoman said. Heidi looked for a moment as if she were about to challenge this, but then just turned her sulky face to the window and watched the fields go by. ‘And then,’ the policewoman continued, ‘we’ve been making good progress on the door-to-door.’

‘Does that mean you’ve found some indication of who might be involved?’ Mr Calvin said.

‘No,’ the policewoman said. ‘It means that we’ve managed to cover a large part of the community and speak to a large proportion of those in the immediate—’

‘Well, that’s frankly not very—’

‘We’ve been concentrating,’ the policewoman went on in her stolid, uninterruptable way, ‘on known sex offenders in the county.’

‘Sex offenders,’ Calvin said.

‘People on the sex-offenders register, yes,’ the policewoman said.

‘In our area, these are,’ Heidi said. ‘Who are they, then?’

‘You know we can’t share that information,’ the policewoman said. ‘Not even with you. I don’t know that we’ve got any very strong leads through that inquiry, but we are still investigating three or four people of that cohort who couldn’t give a good account of themselves for that afternoon. They might have perfectly good reasons, or just have been on their own in peace. We’re still conducting door-to-door inquiries, as I said. That will go on for the next two or three days. There’s a search of land in the immediate area which we’re going to expand as the search goes on and’ —hurrying on rather— ‘we will be wanting to interview both of you and Ruth and the children again in the next few days. Nothing at all sinister, just that often when you talk over events for a second or third time, little details pop up that can be quite helpful to an investigation.’

‘I’ve told you everything I can think of,’ Heidi muttered, her hands clutching her arms. ‘More than once.’

‘Wasting time interviewing her and me,’ Micky said. ‘Should be out there locking up the sex offenders. I want to know who they are. I’ll go round there and beat it out of them. No one’s told us there were sex offenders on the estate. One of them’s taken China.’

‘Yes, well, Micky—’ the driver began, without turning round.

‘Don’t think about it too much,’ Calvin said. ‘The police know everything about everyone these days. They ought to be able to find China, with all the information they’ve got. Everything’s on computer files nowadays—who’s got a conviction for looking at dirty pictures of children, who’s changed their name, who’s not paid for their television licence, who buys what from the supermarket. What do you think loyalty cards are for? To keep an eye on you, and the police can use that information. If they’ve committed a crime, the police have got their DNA. If they’ve been taken in on suspicion, the police will have their DNA. If I had my way, everyone in the country would have their DNA on file. Then we’d know straight away who had committed a crime if they’d left just one hair at the scene. You can really leave the police in charge these days, Heidi.’

‘Police,’ Heidi said. ‘What have they done for us?’

‘I’m as impatient as you are,’ Calvin said. ‘But sometimes you’ve got to leave it to the professionals. And here we are.’

The car slowed as it turned into Heidi’s street. A bundle of photographers, television crews, idle observers and small boys, curious on bicycles, were waiting as if for visiting royalty. They all turned expectantly, made way for the car. Mr Calvin, with his lovely blond attaché case, and the policewoman got out. They shielded Heidi and Micky all the way to the front door. Through the front window, a BBC camera crew could be seen setting up. A short brilliant burst of floodlight illuminated the street from within. The two policewomen—the one at the door, the other from the car—nodded at each other. The door shut on the observers. Heidi went through to face her close-up.

‘That’s me done for the day,’ the policewoman said, sitting back in the front seat of the car. ‘Are we going back to the station now, then? I was hoping to get to Marks and Sparks before they close.’

‘There’s posh.’

‘I thought I could stretch to their fish bake, once in a while.’

‘I’ll take you back,’ the driver said placidly. ‘I’ve got better things to do than hang around here. “I like your bag,” ’ he quoted.

‘You never know what people are going to say,’ the policewoman said reproachfully. ‘In these situations.’

‘You know what people aren’t going to say,’ the driver said. ‘Or shouldn’t. Lovely bag. What a thing to say. I think she thought he might give it to her if she said she liked it.’

‘Tragic Heidi,’ the policewoman said. ‘It was a nice bag, though.’

‘Glad I’ve got something else to do now,’ the driver said. ‘I don’t think I could have stood much more of those two. And what’s his name—why are we driving him about?’

‘John Calvin,’ the policewoman said. ‘You don’t have to like any of them.’

‘Just as well,’ the driver said, slowing down for the Ruskin roundabout. ‘If I were Micky—’

‘I know what you’re going to say.’

‘If I were Micky,’ the driver continued regardless, ‘I wouldn’t go on about how the police ought to open up the sex-offenders register quite so much.’

‘Do you think she knows?’

‘About Micky? I wouldn’t have thought so. Micky doesn’t seem very clear about it himself.’

‘What was it again?’

‘Indecent exposure. Two twelve-year-old girls. Not very nice at all. Not for the first time, either. Four years ago.’

‘Well, we don’t have to like them,’ the policewoman said.

‘Just as well,’ the driver said, turning into the station car park.

20.

Kenyon came in and excused himself quickly, saying that he would come and say hello properly once he was more presentable; Billa and Kitty helped out by saying how exhausting and overcrowded that London train always was. ‘The most extraordinary thing…’ Kenyon began, then seemed to change his mind, and went upstairs rapidly. He might come down or he might not, they knew. On the rare occasions when a book club meeting took place and Kenyon was there, he generally said hello, then went upstairs for the rest of the evening, exactly like that. In his wake followed Caroline, who had walked down from the station, she said, with Kenyon, only popping in at her house to drop off some shopping from Barnstaple; she’d had quite a day of it, and what about all those awful people in the Fore street?

The next to arrive at Miranda’s was Sukie, Miranda’s American colleague. The university operated an exchange programme every year. A small liberal-arts college in Kansas had once funded a literature professor to examine the letters of Bryher, now in the basement of the Old Library at Barnstaple University. No one had ever looked at the leavings of the lesbian poet before. The Kansas professor proposed to do so, not because of any great interest in Bryher but because it seemed to be an untouched archive a hell of a long way from Kansas, with someone aching to fund it.

In practice, the archive proved too inextensive to justify a programme on the scale envisaged by the Kansas institute, and the professor grew bored. The small Barnstaple faculty took to inviting him out to lunch and dinner and, after a dropped suggestion or two, including him on the teaching programme. (This was in 1973, when things could be done in this informal way.) After a few months, he and the department’s Chaucer expert—but it could have been almost anyone—started to have an affair. One thing led to another, and the visiting professor went back to Kansas with the sad information that the Bryher archives were more substantial and potentially much more important than anyone knew. He conveyed an image of grey stacks, receding into the middle distance of a dusty basement interior, lit by flickering fluorescents. It was a great stroke of luck for a small and unnoticed college like Quincunx, Kansas. They congratulated themselves on forging links with so ancient and distinguished a foundation as Barnstaple University. The Quincunctians, who on the whole were well-read and inquisitive people, piqued themselves on the connection. For them, having a link with a place not far from the place that the man came from who interrupted Coleridge while he was composing Kubla Khan was as good a connection as any. Bryher, whoever she was, was an added bonus.

Small and unnoticed Quincunx might be, but it was very well funded. In two years, a proper exchange programme was up and running. The English found it a useful way to pack off the younger and more Yank-struck members of the faculty for a year. The Americans liked to come, to soak up, they said, the theatre and the Sights. They didn’t mean the Hanmouth Players or the abject university theatre, struggling through Hay Fever or Oedipus Tyrannus. Nor did they mean, evidently, the statue of the Crapping Juvenile in Hanmouth or the Romanesque parish church with twelve neo-classical marble placards of alto-rilievo nymphs weeping among bulrushes and the like, all memorials to Regency slave-owners. They meant the Shaftesbury Avenue and a girl out of Friends starring in John Gabriel Borkman and the usual doomy Holocaust-installation stuff out of Tate Modern, which they could have found in Kansas anyway.

There had never been an American exchange professor who hadn’t gone through his entire year behaving as if Devon were a suburb of London. You had to travel three solid hours from Quincunx College to the next theatrical offering or one of those scraps of Corot that so pepper the North American continent, and three hours by plane to glimpse a soprano singing a single note in the German language on an operatic stage. A mere two hours on the train to see Simon Russell Beale in The Cherry Orchard seemed like a short hop into real quality.

The thrilling founding adultery had long since run its course, though the Chaucer expert was now not a waif-like youth with a tied-back swatch of black hair falling over deliciously lickable olive skin, but a grizzled boyfriendless ancient with bags under his eyes and a badly advised combination of balding top and pepper-and-salt ponytail, given to looking at himself in the mirror and mouthing the never-to-be-forgotten words ‘Deliciously lickable’ to the reflection. The book on the Parliament of Fowls and the long-awaited reunion with the big-cocked Kansas aesthete would both have to wait until he retired, the year after the year after next. Since then, the visiting Quincunctians had by tradition set up shop in Hanmouth. The letting agency kept a three-bedroomed red-brick Edwardian villa for each arriving American family, and they usually liked it. Since her own arrival Miranda, too, had kept a place in her book club for an American. This one had written twenty-three articles and a book about Sylvia Plath, and was a recovering alcoholic. She had turned down the offer of a drink at her very first social outing in Hanmouth, and in the same breath asked if anyone had the number of the Barnstaple AA. It was important to keep in touch, she had said, sipping brightly at her sparkling water.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ Sukie, said, coming through the door. She was talking about the figure with her, her elder son.

‘Of course not,’ Miranda said. She did think that the boy—Michael, was it?—could probably be left on his own. He was fifteen, six foot three, ripely and malodorously pubescent. What was wrong with him? Was he a pyromaniac, not to be trusted with an empty house that contained a box of matches in a drawer and a desk full of notes on… Rossetti, was it? ‘Does he want to sit with us—no, of course you don’t, Michael. I’ll get my daughter Hettie down.’

There was something in Michael’s demeanour as he was led into the hallway that suggested that he knew Hettie already. His posture, as he walked forward, was curved and bent, as if actually backing away. Sukie went into the sitting room confidently, greeting the others. ‘And this is Michael—Michael, come on in.’

From upstairs the noises of insistence and complaint could be heard joining in response. They all looked upwards for a moment at where the floorboards creaked. Before the sounds could turn into specific and probably embarrassing words, they all started talking at once.

‘How are you finding—’

‘Are you at the same school—’

‘I’m sure Miranda would want you to have—’

‘Goodness, isn’t this nice—’

Michael himself stood in the doorway, not allowing himself to come further into the house. The doorframe grazed his temples. His mouth hung slightly open to show his perfect American teeth. ‘I don’t see why…’ the voice from above cried, the last word turning into a wail. There was a brief Miranda-ish rat-a-tat. Her words were unclear but the commanding tone put an end to the argument.

‘And here’s Hettie!’ Miranda said, from the top of the stairs. Behind her Hettie made some kind of yodelling groan. Hettie was thirteen, and a well-built girl. Her face seemed organized around a newly huge nose. Her knotted hair fell about her features. She came to the bottom of the stairs holding her right elbow in her left hand, pressing her broad bosom into one mass. With her other hand, she pulled at her hair. Some experiment had been taking place this afternoon with green eyeshadow and rouge, placed centrally on her cheeks.

‘Hello, Hettie,’ Sam said. Hettie spent enough time in the shop demanding free samples and slivers for him to greet her. The others followed suit raggedly or heartily. She muttered something in response.

‘Have you met Michael?’ Sam said.

‘Well, why don’t you go upstairs?’ Miranda said. ‘Show him your things. You can watch telly in the bedroom, if you like.’

There was a moment when it was not clear whether Michael or Hettie would go along with this suggestion. They all held their breath. It was as if a military officer had issued a command to a band of unruly and potentially violent natives out of nothing but bluster. But this time the natives seemed to obey. Hettie turned, hardly looking at Michael, who followed her. ‘—know why they made—come downstairs,’ she muttered.

‘Thank God for that,’ Miranda said, almost before the door upstairs was closed with a perhaps excessive firmness. ‘I did think that we’d have one more year of peace before all that started. I do blame puberty.’

‘It starts so very much earlier than in our day,’ Kitty said.

‘I didn’t begin on all that until I was fifteen,’ Billa said. ‘I’m sure you were the same. One didn’t think it quite the thing to be much earlier. But now…’

‘You hear about girls of nine or ten beginning,’ Kitty said.

‘I can’t imagine,’ Billa said. ‘I want to ask what their parents must be thinking of, but I don’t suppose there’s anything you can do about it.’

‘Well, I do think it’s nice to see a girl maturing into a young woman like that,’ Sukie said, aghast, accepting a glass of lime and soda water. ‘Those little growing pains—goodness, I’m sure we all had them and were able to laugh about them afterwards. I know my mother—’

‘Well, it sounds awful, but I do wish we could send them away on their thirteenth birthday and get them back at twenty to hear all the funny stories,’ Miranda said. ‘I know that’s not awfully motherly of me.’

‘I know my mother—’ Sukie continued.

‘There are things called boarding schools,’ Sam said.

‘I could never do that,’ Miranda said. ‘We just couldn’t send Hettie away like that.’

‘Well,’ Sam said, getting up and pouring himself another drink, ‘we could all chip in, I suppose. Want a top-up, Billa?’

That wasn’t what Miranda had meant. ‘Has Michael eaten, or should I take some sandwiches up?’ she said.

‘He has eaten, and some sandwiches will be very welcome all the same, I’m sure. When I was his age—of course, that was when I was drinking, I remember my mother—’ Sukie said.

‘Good, I’ll do that,’ Miranda said. She got up and went into the kitchen, leaving Sukie to tell the story of her juvenile nights with the vodka bottle.

The house had been extended in most directions by the previous owner. Behind the frontage, three rooms had been knocked into one sitting room; a dining room went off to the right of the hallway, not often used. The kitchen at the back was a large addition, steel and glass in a steel-and-glass shell, and lit up like seaside illuminations at night. Miranda, Kenyon and certainly Hettie were not great ones for sitting in gardens, and the loss of half the garden to this marvellous kitchen didn’t seem to concern them. Twice or three times in the summer, Miranda would don a floppy hat kept specifically for the purpose. She would go and sit on one of their four deckchairs with a gin-and-tonic and a copy of a novel by Virginia Woolf. There she would stay until the doorbell rang, and she could be discovered in that position. As far as the outside went, she preferred to walk the streets of Hanmouth and look upon the estuary and its birds. You could not meet up by chance with friends and acquaintances if you sat on your own in your garden. Upstairs there were three bedrooms and a study with a futon; above that, the previous owners had converted the loft into an indeterminate space. If you were any more than Kenyon’s height, you could not stand upright in the converted uppermost room other than along its central spine, under the eaves.

When Miranda had taken the sandwiches and a large bottle of some radioactive fizzy drink upstairs— ‘I know… I’ve just given up trying to give them anything healthier, and they wouldn’t drink squash out of a jug, anyway’ —she refilled the glasses, brought out other oval plates of Marmite pinwheels, bruschetta, vegetables, dips and bought-in miniature fishcakes and Scotch eggs. Reluctantly, they left the topic of Tragic China—they had returned to it, almost without wanting to.

‘Well,’ Billa said. ‘The Makioka Sisters.’

She stressed it in an unusual way, and when Miranda began the discussion, she took care to stress the o.

Half an hour later, Kenyon, washed, brushed and hungry, came downstairs to fetch something for his solitary supper at the kitchen table. He paused at the half-open door, wondering whether to go in, to tell them about the murder he believed he had seen at Paddington station, perhaps even to ask whether he might put the television on to see if there was anything on the news. He heard his wife say, ‘Well, when Kenyon and I were in Japan two years ago…’ She was speaking with confidence. She had got into her stride. He thought of the radio in the kitchen, and the news at nine o’clock.

21.

When Kenyon and Miranda were in Japan, two years ago, they travelled first of all to Kyoto. There were reasons for that. Miranda had proposed that they see the historic parts of Japan before they saw anything more contemporary— ‘To do it in order,’ she said. She had researched not in guidebooks but in historical studies of the period, in works of art history, architectural analysis and garden history, many of which she had lugged home from the university library as soon as the airline tickets had been bought. She also researched online, asking travellers who had been to Kyoto where they recommended staying, what out-of-the-way places they should visit, where they might like to eat, all the time making allowances for the national origins and evident literacy of the recommender. In the end, Miranda set one of her graduate students to compile the information she had gathered in this complicated way into two separate folders, one green for Kenyon, one red for Miranda, and handed Kenyon’s to him in the departure lounge at Heathrow airport, once they had left the car in the long-term car park. Guidebooks were beneath Miranda; if she ever took one, she would be careful to consult it only in her hotel room, and decant any relevant information into the back of a small diary bound in soft leather like a ballerina’s practice shoes. She would be physically incapable of walking the streets of a historic city with a guidebook in her hand.

Hettie had been left behind. In fact, it might be thought that the trip to Japan was a sort of celebration, a kind of honeymoon, to mark the moment that Hettie, at eleven, was able to take her own holidays without her parents. The school had arranged an outward-bound week on Dartmoor. Some kind colleagues of Miranda’s who worked in the library had offered to take Hettie for the second week. They had a daughter the same age, and Mabel was going on the same week on the moor. Hettie did not object any more than she would have to anything else. Kenyon wondered whether they were truly friendly, and previous attempts to bring Hettie and Mabel together had not been much of a success. They had been sent upstairs together, and had come down together, without making any kind of friendship. Still, Kenyon reflected on the failed family holidays from the last ten years, characterized by sulking from one corner or another; Hettie’s refusal, the previous summer, to admit that the Sicilian baroque was as dramatic and entertaining as most authorities believed. Or there was the summer before that, when Miranda had first put a brave face on, then satirically descanted over her agreed fate of spending five days at Disneyland Paris. She’d enjoyed it in the end more than Hettie had. Miranda had managed to keep up the monologue about semiotic and cultural imperialism from one end of Main Street USA to the other. There must have been some pleasure in that. Hettie had only wanted to go because her classmates had gone, and hadn’t really cared for the giant exaggerated animals poking their fat plush fingers in her face. Kenyon thought about these two failed holidays, and it seemed to him that their holidays together had never worked, and that Hettie’s festival independence might be something worth celebrating. He wondered afterwards where it was that he might like to go, though.

(There was one afternoon with the Sicilian baroque. The argument had sent his two women in opposite directions: Hettie back to the hotel and Miranda off with her guide-folder. He was on the steps of some big building, a palace or a cathedral or a museum, or something. Above him, the yellow crumbling cliff of fantasy, curling and uprising and flowering into stone bouquets and flying winged sandstone children; about him, the marble-paved square shining in the afternoon sun as if half an inch of still water covered it. Nobody was about. It was over ninety degrees, perhaps more. Kenyon, in his Englishman’s shorts and his Englishman’s sandals, sat in the sun surrounded by treasures of the Sicilian baroque. He took a long drink of the cold bottle of water he had just bought, and closed his eyes against the heat and the silence. It was some long minutes before thought returned: thoughts of home, and money, and work, and budgets. Those long minutes were probably the place he wanted to go.)

‘I know you didn’t enjoy yesterday all that much,’ Miranda said in Kyoto, after they had left their hotel and its rush-mats and paper sliding walls and endless proffered slippers. They had got through their third morning’s trying breakfast of miso, cold fried mackerel, pickles, rice and a swampy dish of green tofu disintegrating into cold salty water.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ Kenyon said.

‘Well, there’s a few things I want to see, and I can get round them much quicker if we just agree to meet back at the ryokan at four.’

Kenyon did not object to this prepared speech. Something like it was often produced at roughly this point in their holidays. He had enjoyed the previous day, in fact. He had liked the empty yards of gravel with a rock or two in them that passed for a garden in this part of the world. He quite enjoyed looking at a stretch of moss on a boulder, and he liked the way the floors in the temples creaked, rocking back and forth on one to make it sing. He liked the restful way that the four temples they had visited had been much the same, only varying in their size and in the number of visitors there. It all seemed very nice, and not in need of the explanations that Miranda had been offering him from time to time, about Zen contemplation, representations of the Great Tortoise swimming across the void, or any such thing.

She got into a taxi and, smiling brightly, waved him off. Kenyon rebelliously put his folder of explanations into his shoulder bag, and started walking. Fairly soon, he came across a busy shopping street, of no historical interest, full of department stores and electronics shops. They had driven across it in a series of taxis a dozen or so times by now, and the area had called for no comment. He stopped at a street corner, and waited as if for the light to change. It did change, and Kenyon still stood there, enjoying the foreignness of the beeping and the foreignness of the movement. He liked looking at well-dressed people, and this crowd was uniformly well dressed. They seemed to have put on clothes according to their age and station, and not questioned the basis of their wardrobe any further.

Kenyon watched the crowds crossing the shopping street several times. After ten minutes, he went into a department store, and walked around looking at perfectly ordinary objects: saucepans, plates, clothes hangers. When he came across something he did not think existed in his country—men’s fans, kimonos, displays of sweets made of bean paste, pink jelly and chestnut—he walked on austerely.

Later, he came to a quarter of the town where trees hung over a clear roadside river, and men in tight athletic costumes sat by rickshaws and waited for tourists. Their shoes were rubber socks, cleaving between the big toe and the others, as if that were something they needed to grasp and grip with. He went on, and found himself in a street of wood-fronted houses, two miniature storeys high. This was picturesque, and yet there were no other tourists. They had been everywhere yesterday, snapping at anything.

Soon Kenyon began to feel hungry. He had tried to eat the breakfast but had largely failed. He decided that when it reached twelve o’clock he would go into a restaurant and order lunch. He did not know when lunch was eaten here, but they would surely make allowances for an English tourist, and some English people did eat their lunch at twelve. Twelve came, and he came to a restaurant. Through a bamboo gate, he could see a small garden, twelve feet by four, with a miniature bridge, a pond with carp in it, a bamboo trickling device and some arrangements of moss. There was no priced menu on the front, and suddenly he wondered whether this was a restaurant at all. He had heard fantastic stories about visitors to Hanmouth, after all, opening the gate to a private garden, sitting down at a garden table and ordering tea and scones. He went on.

There was a little run of restaurants further on, and every one had three shelves of plastic models of food in the window. They shone glossily, falsely and inedibly; no one could want to eat anything that looked like that. One of Kenyon’s rules was that restaurants that displayed their food in the window, whether raw, cooked, or artificial, catered for people who could not read. He did not want to eat with people who could not read. He went on. It was only a few minutes later that Kenyon realized that, after all, he could not read here either. The plastic dishes were aimed squarely at him.

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