50 odd years ago, Frank and Chick Plant were laying out the pineapple squares and fish paste sandwiches in preparation for a grand party. They lived in the idyllic property illustrated. It was bought in extraordinary circumstances – blind, you might say – since neither of them had seen the house or knew of the area before it was offered to them for the minuscule sum of £5,000 by the head mistress of the African bush school where Chick had been teaching 10 years beforehand. The head mistress had recently inherited the property; Chick and Frank were returning to England after a hasty – whoops! – shotgun marriage.

Out of those difficult beginnings grew a love affair; both with each other, with the child, Christopher, who duly emerged, with a truly incredible house and with the small village of Kingswear.

They overcame other difficulties; not least the discovery that Chick had been engaged to my Father for six years – the same man who had once been the detested employer of Frank. A small world indeed. Chick and my Father had an enduring and unbreakable bond. He had once been the youngest Captain in the Royal Engineers, a bomb disposal expert in London during the latter part of the blitz. She was the much older woman, a ‘Mother’ figure perhaps, in the Auxiliary Territorial Service in charge of sending those young men out to perform their dangerous task. Although my Father had broken the engagement, unkindly by Telegram to marry my Mother, a woman he had only met six weeks beforehand, they remained as close as ever. How close will never be known.

After Christopher, another child was born, John.  John sadly did not live for long, born with profound physical and mental handicaps. He was buried in Kingswear churchyard. Chick and Frank resolved to take their yacht, and Christopher; rent the house out and take up employment in St Kitts for a year or so, a fresh start, but with the much loved house, and John’s grave, to return to.

There was no room on the yacht for all the possessions they would require for a year in the Caribbean, and so several of the old fashioned hoop topped steamship cabin trunks were acquired. The sort that have a tray that fits in the top, two tiered affairs. Duly packed, they sat in the garage awaiting collection by the commercial carriers. With nothing left to do, they made arrangements for their leaving party. All Kingswear was there. A small community in those days; they had many friends.

Christopher was put to bed with the promise of a bed time story in due course, and the guests started to arrive. The wine flowed, the conversation sparkled. Inverdart was an exceptional house, built for the Chairman of the Great Western Railway which stretched from London to the nearby town of Paignton. In those days the house was surrounded by a conservatory which stretched round three sides, overlooking the Royal Naval College, out to sea, and Dartmouth castle. It had a boathouse and the only piece of foreshore not owned by Prince Charles. Acres of winding gardens, filled with rhododendrons and exotic plants bloomed on all sides – there was much for the guests to discuss.

It was 10pm before Frank made his way upstairs to read Christopher his bed time story – and Christopher was not in his bed. Frank looked in the other bedrooms, he went back downstairs and checked the playroom. He looked in the garden. Panic was setting in, quickly, as it does with any parent. He found Chick, discretely, unwilling to startle the guests. They both searched, no sign of Christopher. The guests were told of the problem, over 100 of them. They searched. They searched the house, they searched cupboards, they searched the garden, they searched neighbouring gardens.

The Police were called, they arrived en masse at midnight. They fanned out through the village, assisted by virtually every occupant of the village, and searched every outhouse, every boat house, every nook and cranny. They double searched the house.

A stranger had been seen in the local pub. A local artist was enlisted to draw his image which duly appeared in the local paper, trilby hat pulled down sinisterly over his eyes, trench coat collar pulled up, surely this individual was responsible for Christopher’s disappearance? A reward was offered. To no avail, Christopher had vanished without trace. 12 years old.

The village supported Chick and Frank in every way they knew, daily the house was full of people making tea for the police who by now had sent down frogmen into the harbour, and were combing the undergrowth. The entire area was a hive of activity.  Frank was interviewed by the Police, quite correctly, as the last person to have seen Christopher.  Chick, as you may imagine, was inconsolable. She had already lost one child, now another was missing. In her grief, she confided to a waiting Policeman – for they had never left the house – that Frank had never loved the child as she had. Untrue as it happens, but I can understand the circumstances in which it had been said. For part of the reason for the move abroad was that they had tried hard for another baby, with no success. Frank had visited the local Doctor, tests had been made, pretty rudimentary tests given that it was 50 years ago, and Frank had been told that it was unlikely he would ever Father a child.

Not surprisingly, the finger of suspicion had fallen on the ever present spectre of my Father. His relationship with Chick was an intensely private one to both of them. Letters flowed backwards and forwards between them on a weekly basis. 50 years later those letters were still kept. She was, she told Frank, just supporting him through his ‘nervous troubles’ which resulted form his war time experiences, something only she could understand. Frank held a much darker view of my Father, born of his experience in working for him in Liverpool. I will never know the truth, I have read the letters, and quite honestly, they are ambiguous, you could read into them what you wanted to.

This intensely personal piece of information should never have escaped the confines of the Police – but it did. It became common knowledge that Frank was unlikely – embroidered to definitely not – the Father of Christopher and John. It became common knowledge that Frank, rather than Frank and Chick, was the last person to see Christopher, and as the days of searching wore on Frank became aware that tongues were wagging. He was, quite literally, furious with Chick for her confession. There was no time to discuss the matter though, for the house was still filled daily with policemen and villagers supporting the unhappy couple.

Thus it was, an entire week later, that Christopher’s body was discovered. He had been dead for a week. He had climbed into one of those hoop topped boxes, under the second tier, and pulled the lid down on himself. A game of hide and seek gone wrong. There was no foul play. At least three people, including a policeman, attested at the inquest that the cabin trunks had been opened – but discovering them filled to the brim, no one had thought to dig down and remove the second tier. No one had noticed the pile of belongings neatly stacked on the side that should have been under the second tier – placed there by Christopher as he made room for himself. The trunk appeared full, a pile of surplus possessions nothing unusual in a household being packed up.

If you have ever wondered why I am so adamantly opposed to idle speculation in these matters, to the armchair detectives who ‘know’ exactly what has occurred – now you know. I have spent my entire life watching the damage wrought, not just by Christopher’s death, but by the speculation as to who was responsible. Frank ultimately drank himself to death, nursing a life long hatred of my Father. Chick succumbed to several nervous breakdowns and finally a debilitating stroke. They were good people, destroyed by wagging tongues. Incredibly, I didn’t know the full story until I was in my late 30s; I knew them as ‘Uncle’ Frank and ‘Aunty’ Chick, never quite sure where they fitted into our complicated family, but much loved as the couple where my Father parked me frequently as a child. They treated me as their own (and bear in mind how difficult that must have been for Frank) never a word was uttered, until my Father committed suicide shortly after Chick’s death, and the whole story came tumbling out from various other family members. Frank came to live with me, along with his collection of wine bottles and grumpy spaniel. We were, we joked, the founder members of the ‘Donald should have married Chick in the first place’ club. When he died, he left me the right to live in Inverdart – I couldn’t bear to any more than he could by then.

It is scarcely surprising that I am minded of this in the light of the tragic Tia’s death.

The media and the armchair detectives are quite sure that a body couldn’t lie unnoticed in a house for a week. Yes it could.

The ‘retired detectives’ are quite sure that if they had been in charge, they would have ripped the house apart ‘floorboard by floorboard’ on the first day. 270,000 teenagers go missing every year, one every three minutes – you are really going to tear apart every house of every truculent teenager that goes missing?

The McCann ‘haters’ are out in force – ‘the dogs never lie’ they cry. Cadaver dogs should have been sent up into the loft on day one. I’ll grant you that you can train dogs to run up a step ladder, but when you can train them to only step on the rafters rather than plunge through the plasterboard ceiling just in time to land in the lap of said returning teenager to howls of protest from the Daily Mail – ‘Why was this much loved family home ripped apart like this for the crime of reporting a missing teenager’? – then I’ll listen.

The speculation, the body language experts, ‘you could see his shifty eyes’ remind me of the days spent following up on the shady stranger with his trilby pulled down over his eyes. Definitely him.

The innuendo, who fathered whom, who slept with whom – and all this before anyone knows how Tia died, when she died, why she died, for God’s sake she hasn’t even been formally identified yet!

Yet ‘the community’ are annoyed and traumatised because the police ‘let’ them search for a missing teenager who was dead all the time!

The media appear more preoccupied with the alleged Police ‘shortcomings’ than with waiting to find out what happened. As does Twitter. Even the bitter army of retired policemen.

Why not wait until the facts emerge? You might be proved right, Stuart Hazell may be a murderous scum bag – you’ll have plenty of chance to bang on the side of his prison van if so. The parents could be neglectful arseholes – you’ll get your chance to say so.

Just try and avoid the premature articulation, I am mindful of the fact that there can be entirely innocent tragedies, and that they are only compounded by idle gossip. Believe me, the reverberations can last for generations.

GildasTheMonk
August 16, 2012 at 10:08

What a profound and moving piece Anna

Robert Zimmerman
August 15, 2012 at 15:15

What puzzles me is that the body has not yet been – five days after having
been found – ‘formally’ identified, and that in spite of being named in the
murder charge as Tia. What could be the reason for that?

Whichever way you look at it, it’s incredulous that it took the police (at
least) four searches to find the body.

The public cannot be blamed for having/developing opinions on a high
profile case like this, and, quite frankly, with the Met being involved this
is quite understandable.

Matt
Wardman August 14, 2012 at 19:07

I’ve withdrawn the piece published in error earlier. It is only half done,
and unfortunately I was on the train between Surrey and Home.

Full version due in the next day or so.

… with pictures.

imakimou
August 13, 2012 at 10:59

Dear Anna
Thanks for trying to keep our world decent!
Allow me to
call this and much more of your stuff ‘Ethic Cleansing’
Please don’t
stop.
imakimou

Elena ‘andcart
August 13, 2012 at 09:40

We still don’t know why The Police missed the body. There might be a
logical explanation. Best to wait and see before blaming them. Of course they
apologised, it would have been extremely unkind not to do so.
But while all
of that was going on The Police were still following up leads and checking
acres of CCTV footage. Another important part of any missing child case.
I
can’t help wondering what would have been said if The Police had gone in on
Day One and ripped that house apart, only to find nothing, while an abductor
was getting up to what ever abductors get up to. That would not have made
pretty reading.

JuliaM August
14, 2012 at 06:58

“Of course they apologised, it would have been extremely unkind not to
do so.”

Ah, but you’re assuming that we don’t live in an extremely litigious age
where the slightest slip of the tongue would be pounced on as an admission
of liability.

Usually, ‘apologies’ are very, very carefully worded to admit nothing.
That’s what makes this one so unusual, and makes me suspect that the facts
of this case will NOT show the police in a good light.

Frankie August 12, 2012 at 23:42

There are sad parallels between the stories but, respectfully, I think that
Anna has missed an essential point with regard to the Tia case – and that is
that there were several (I believe 4), reportedly, thorough searches of the
house and its environs by, I would imagine, trained search officers. It is
entirely possible that the body was missed on the first search, at the time of
Tia’s disappearance, but surely, given that there was more than one carried
out then these must have been more thorough, or do I presume too much?

Given the level of resources available to the police in London at the
moment one can assume that those investigating this disappearance were not
short of feet on the ground and I would assume that this task was planned
properly and not on the back of a fag packet.

Assuming this fact is true (and bearing in mind that I would not, for a
moment, wish to condemn any individual officer involved in this terrible case)
there are questions that arise from the failure to find the body sooner –
given that the body was not, as has been suggested, moved from place to place.

It is fairly evident that even in the absence of the actual body, if it had
been moved, there would have been clues that foul play had occurred, if the
searching officers chose to look for them. That is not an assumption on my
part, it is a material fact, and I speak with some authority on this
matter.

There are other issues that should be examined, such as not securing the
prime suspect, or, at the very least keeping tabs on his current whereabouts
minute by minute. Surely, surely, no one was convinced for a minute by the
pitiful display of concern he put on at the press conference? It simply did
not ring true. It is a simple truth that in a very large number of cases the
last person to have been seen with the ‘disappeared’ and subsequently murdered
person is the person convicted of their murder. Perhaps the police were
playing the old game of giving Hazell enough rope, by letting him participate
in the press conference pantomime, but his disappearance when the body was
discovered was slipshod.

I think that heads will roll over this one. Unfortunately, it is a sad fact
of life that the police are routinely blamed when they are proved to be human,
and therefore fallible, and are not possessed of the powers of second sight,
but I think it is fairly evident that the police dropped the ball on this
one…

Lion August 14, 2012 at 01:08

They would not have been looking for a body in the beginning. The
searches would have been to check that she wasn’t hiding or hidden up
there.

Frankie August 16, 2012 at 01:00

Exactly my point.

It was stated that a thorough search was made, but clearly not
‘thorough’ enough…

Lesson No. 1 in ‘How to deal with a missing person’ (Step 1 ) is:
“Search the home address”. Straight out of the training manual. An
essential step.

No matter how many times the person has absented themselves, even if
they are a regular absconder, search the home address. Every time. Without
fail.

Occasionally children hide themselves away in obscure parts of the home
address, either because they are in fear of something, or because they are
being bullied, or because they want to make a point about something, or
because they think its a huge joke… or for any other reason. Either way,
that search, or, in this instance, several searches would, or should have
been made.

Either the body was there all along and the searching officers missed
it several times, or they did not search properly, or it was moved between
searches.

I do not know which but the first two scenarios are all the more
inexplicable, given that the property was searched more than once.

Edna Fletcher
August 12, 2012 at 22:07

Gossip, innuendo and hearsay with all the attendant emotions now dominates
the psyche of the British. This could possibly explain how the country has
moved to a position such that it is now necessary to prove ones innocence
rather than be considered innocent until proven guilty (A famous barrister
noted this some years back). This makes for a unsafe society and gives power
to one set of people over another rather too readily. Proving innocence is
harder than proving guilt.

JuliaM August 12,
2012 at 18:13

“… for God’s sake she hasn’t even been formally identified yet!”

No, indeed. Not that that stopped a slip of the tongue from the Beeb
newsreader just now! ‘…the attic where her bod…the body was
found..’

Whoops!

Pompey Cowboy
August 12, 2012 at 19:34

I fell in the River Dart last month near Stoke Gabriel– trying to board a
tiny dory, water was cold.
MY shoulder still hurts from hauling myself
out

Pericles August 12, 2012 at 17:18

Now, however, I’m puzzled :  by the incident in Kingswear. 
Why didn’t Plod plunge his hand down in to the contents of the first
ship-trunk ? Had he done so, even if he had never travelled beyond
Shepton Mallet and was unaware of the structure of such luggage, he would
immediately have discovered the tray and, one might hope, lifted it to see
what lay beneath.  Or was it just that some stone had to be left unturned
for the benefit of M. l’inspecteur Zhapp and Monsewer Pwahrow ?

Back to the present :  if you’re about to search a house with a
loft, you assume – especially in Britain – that the joists might be uncovered,
possibly not even having insulation between them, and take along a few
crawling boards … don’t you ? (I suspect even the excellent K9 unit is
not up to training the dogs to walk on the rafters !)

ΠΞ

Mudplugger
August 12, 2012 at 18:02

One other interesting fact about loft-searching is that, when searching
loft-space in terraced properties, especially in those areas with some
degree of inherent criminality, it is not unknown for there to be concealed
hatchways between the lofts of adjoining properties. With a measure of
co-operation between neighbours similarly inclined, the form is that, when a
search by Plod is anticipated, you merely shift the ‘hot goods’ into the
neighbour’s loft (who may then move them on to the next neighbour, and so on
along the terrace), until Plod give up the search process, at which point
the ‘hot goods’ are shifted back along the terrace to their original
‘owner’.

Whether such mutual agreements would also cover the transfer of corpses
probably depends greatly on the loal threshold of morality, even in deeply
criminal areas, but it could certainly delay Plod’s discovery of any item of
interest.

However, Plod should already know this and always expect the
‘terrace-flow process’ to apply, thus spreading their search to the extent
of the range in very serious cases.

Pericles
August 12, 2012 at 18:13

The mind boggles, Mudplugger, n’est-ce
pas ?  ΠΞ

Anna
Raccoon August 12, 2012 at
18:17

I’m struggling to remember a very celebrated case which involved
adjoining attics, just such a scenario – not sure it was a corpse being
moved around, it might have been a wanted person, but there was a lot of
talk at the time that Plod should have been aware that you could move from
one house to another via the attic – anyone remember what it was?

Pericles
August 12, 2012 at 18:48

Here’s a case in which the perpetrator of a murder – a neighbour –
used such an access to his victim’s home.

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2007-03-24/news/0703240510_1_townhouse-attic-crawl-space

There’s something about Titanic in the story.  (Her
‘watertight’ bulkheads did not reach the weather deck so that, once
water had filled one compartment, it could overflow in to the next.)

ΠΞ

Jim August 16, 2012 at 00:18

My late Great Aunt always maintained that the burglary she suffered
was carried out by her next door neighbour, their houses being a pair
of semi-detached cottages, by his coming down into her house via means
of the shared roof space and the loft hatch. No sign of any forced
entry was ever found.

wassname August 12, 2012 at 16:41

Bloody Hell Anna, what a story and with a moral. My old friend always says
“you know what assume does? It makes an ass of u and me”.

Pericles August 12, 2012 at 13:42

Excellent article, Anna.

What makes me laugh is that, when ever some-one arraigned for a
particularly nasty crime and found not guilty by a twelve men good and true,
it becomes a case of his having ‘got away with it’.  How could the jury
have reached this conclusion ?  What was the judge
doing ?  And so on.

This process has, as macheath says, spread to the
Internet :  no sooner is the acquittal is announced than some-one
starts a petition on ‘Change.org’ to have it overturned ;  the
thousands that will ‘sign’ such a petition are not in the least bothered by
the fact that – unlike the twelve good and true aforesaid – they have not
actually examined all the evidence.

ΠΞ

Brass Monkey
August 13, 2012 at 00:08

Good piece Anna, but the righteous won’t agree. Spot on Pericles, and as
Edna below says in effect being found not guilty is not the same as proving
your innocence.

macheath August
12, 2012 at 12:38

It is cases like this that really show how the internet has let the genie
out of the bottle; it doesn’t take much foresight to see the damage that idle
online speculation can do. Frankly, I’m amazed that the online news reports
allowed and published comments on a missing person story right up to the point
that the police took someone in for questioning.

I only hope the tabloids now have the decency to leave the girl’s mother
and other relatives well alone; unfortunately the theatre of bereavement is
big business these days.

JuliaM August
12, 2012 at 18:08

“I only hope the tabloids now have the decency to leave the girl’s
mother and other relatives well alone…”

Ah, but sadly, we are no longer in the time when grieving relatives shut
themselves away, attended by close friends and the local priest.

For now is the time of Public Grieving, and lo, cometh the Sky TV crew,
to ensure you are broadcast to the nation as you lay your wreath or giant
cuddly soft toy (or imported Dutch orchid, in this case) on the fast-growing
ChavShrine.

All that’s missing are the sunglass-and-suited bodyguards muttering ‘No
pictures, no pictures’ (but softly, under their breath)….

D August 16, 2012 at 00:02

Ah, the ChavShrine. As recently as the Dunblane massacre, the local
people would remember the dead by going to the church (or cathedral), and
the cameras were firmly outside. Now we have the wholly secular pilgrimage
to an al fresco memorial-come-photo-opportunity. In many cases the
intentions of the pilgrims are wholly honourable, but it has become wholly
stage managed.

Mrs D has clear instructions: if I ever die in an accident, there are
to be no flowers-still-in-their-wrappers tied to the nearest lamp
post.