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
