King of the Badgers

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.