King of the Badgers

by Philip Hensher

  ‘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 na
me—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 othe
r 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.’