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.
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.
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
