Little Hands Clapping by Dan Rhodes

Author:Dan Rhodes [Rhodes, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, General Fiction
ISBN: 9781847678119
Publisher: Canongate UK
Published: 2002-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

I

The first people to be identified will be those who had been reported missing, and whose trails had ended in the city with a final phone call, postmark or cash withdrawal. A photograph from the doctor’s collection will be matched with one already in the police files, and for a few days name after name will be released to the press. And then things will slow down.

Having looked forward to months of frenzied coverage, news editors will be disappointed as the story, thwarted on several fronts, stalls much sooner than they had hoped. Early on they will be disheartened by the balanced reactions of the families – instead of the emotional outbursts they had anticipated, their statements will be simple and quiet. Where they had hoped to find condemnation they will find resignation. What anger there is, at the doctor and at those who have gone, will be kept inside. Sometimes there will be an expression of relief at finally knowing what had become of a son or a daughter, a mother or a father, or a few words of self-reproach from somebody who feels they could have done more to help, and there will be sincere, though fruitless, attempts to convey the emptiness left by the knowledge that somebody who ought to have been there, and whose return had been longed for, has gone for ever. There will even be words of pity for the doctor, and sadness for him having turned out this way. In news terms, none of this will propel the story forwards.

The next difficulty for the editors will be its scale, or rather its lack of scale. The early front page cries of One Hundred Dead in House of Horrors? will turn out to have been optimistic. Finding that the shards of bone and scraps of clothing correspond with the evidence in the doctor’s extensive diaries and painstakingly filed photograph albums, the police will announce the official tally to be a little over a quarter of that. The initial glee at adding a new name to the list of notorious German cannibals will soon fade, leaving them unsure in which direction they should take the story. While it was clear to everybody that the old man and the doctor ought to have behaved differently, there was no reason to believe that in their final moments these people had been victims of anybody but themselves. The faces that look out of the pages of the newspapers had belonged to people who had made their own choices.

And then the stories behind the faces will begin to emerge, tangling things further still. Most will be heartbreaking: the young woman who had seemed so happy with her life and had given no sign of even the slightest turmoil in her mind; the man who had been unable to recover from the loss of his wife; the woman who had been suffering from an agonising and incurable illness. But then there will be the sex attacker, the fraudster, the

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