Coincidence: A Novel

O
ne Midsummer's Day, when she was only three years old, the girl they called Azalea Ives was discovered alone and lost at a fairground in Devon. It was late in the evening, when children of her age should surely have been at home, tucked up in bed. She was held in the fairground manager's caravan for an hour, or even more, while appeals were made over loudspeakers. This was a travelling fair, and we can imagine what a faint impression the public address system might have made against the caterwauling of shrieking teens, the clattering of the roller coaster, the thundering of the waltzer, the hollering of hawkers and hucksters, and the pounding basslines of fairground music. By ten o'clock when the noise had subsided, and when most of the revellers had dispersed into the night, no one had come forward to claim the little girl. A police car arrived from the town of Torquay and two large policemen, unfamiliar with the ways of very young children, did their best to communicate with the child. They asked her her name, and when she told them, one policeman carefully wrote down
Azalea Ives
, and this is what they called her from that moment on. They asked her where she lived, and she told them that she lived at Number Four.

âWhat's the name of the road where you live?' asked one of the policemen.

âNumber Four,' said the girl.

âNo, not the number of the house,' said the policeman. âDo you know the name of the road?'

âNumber Four.'

âDo you know the name of the town?' asked the policeman.

Azalea shook her head.

The second policeman tried a different tack. âDo you know your daddy's name?' he asked.

âDaddy,' said Azalea.

âBut does he have a name?'

âJust Daddy,' repeated Azalea with a shrug.

âWhat does your mummy call him?'

Azalea thought about this. âShe calls him Daddy too.'

The police in Torquay searched through phone books and the electoral roll and the police records for anyone called Ives. Phone calls were made. No one seemed to know anything about the missing girl.

âIs your house close by .Â .Â . or is it a long way away?' asked the policemen.

âA long way away,' Azalea told them.

âHow did you come to the fair? Did you come by bus? On a train?'

Azalea looked at them directly with clear green eyes. âMummy drove us here,' she said.

âWhere were you going?'

âWe were going to see Daddy.'

âDoes your daddy live near here?' the second policeman asked, scenting a promising line of enquiry. âDoes your daddy live in Totnes? Does he live in Torquay?'

Azalea shook her head.

âCan you remember what time you set off from home?' asked the first policeman.

Another shake of the head.

âDid you have lunch on the way?'

âYes,' the girl's eyes widened. âWe had
ham
sandwiches,' she said.

If Azalea and her mother had started their journey before lunchtime, enjoyed ham sandwiches and
still
only arrived at the fairground in the evening, then the search area could easily include most of England and all of Wales.

Back at the police station, a child protection officer called Sergeant Jennifer Nails was given the job of looking after Azalea. A police photographer was summoned from his bed to photograph the girl. Social Services were awoken and instructed to check their âat risk' registers for any child matching Azalea Ives's description. Photographs of Azalea, looking sleepy, were printed, and posted by first-class mail to the Department of Education, from where they would be forwarded to the head teachers of primary schools to see if anyone could identify her.

Azalea did possess one distinguishing mark. This was an inch-long scar running down her face just to the side of her left eye.

âHow did you get that scar?' Sergeant Nails asked her. But the little girl just shook her head.

A police doctor examined the scar, but declared it to be an old wound â possibly even a forceps mark from birth. No signs of abuse or neglect could be found. Azalea was well nourished, suitably dressed and clearly well cared for; her hair had been combed and her fingernails trimmed. It all added to the general sense of mystery that clung to her apparent abandonment. Who would do this to a child like Azalea?

By nine o'clock the next morning, when Sergeant Nails and Azalea Ives appeared at the Torquay police station, the phones were busy. The police had widened their net. Calls were made to police forces in Cornwall and Somerset. Police computers (such as they were back then) were queried. People named Ives were visited and questioned across the South and West of England and the Midlands, and Wales.

By midday, with no sign of progress, a Chief Inspector from Exeter arrived in Torquay to take over the investigation. Sergeant Nails reported that there was a faint hint of an Irish accent when Azalea spoke. The girl also had red hair, and to Sergeant Nails's mind this indicated Irish origin. So a speech therapist from the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital was called. She listened carefully to the tapes that the police had made and said that evidence of an Irish accent was thin, but that she wasn't strictly speaking an expert on accents, so she couldn't be sure. Recordings were then played over the telephone to a London expert in regional accents. He told the police that the girl's speech exhibited a number of distinctive characteristics, which might suggest that she was from an itinerant family, or perhaps that her mother had a different accent to her father. The expert proposed that they might want to look around Liverpool and North Wales, but he wouldn't commit to either. âThe girl has a rather neutral accent,' he told the police inspector. âShe has a high rising terminal which is a feature of Australian speech, where the inflection tends to rise rather than fall at the end of a sentence. Some Americans also talk in this way. But we can't really conclude that the girl is Australian or American.'

By the second day after Midsummer's Day, the puzzle surrounding Azalea Ives had reached the newspapers. Her photograph featured, with police consent, in the
Daily Mirror
and the
Daily Mail
. Extra staff were drafted in to the police station in Torquay to handle the resulting telephone calls. Child protection officers were included to help detect malicious callers. For operational reasons, the newspapers had not been given the name âAzalea'. Instead, they were asked to identify the child simply as âGirl A'. The reasoning was, with a name as unusual as Azalea, if anyone was to call the Torquay police station and volunteer the correct name, they would surely be bona fide.

But by the end of the second day, not one caller had suggested the name Azalea â or even the name Ives. A child psychologist was charged with trying to gain further information from the girl. She spent the third day playing with Azalea and coaxing her to talk. She discovered that Azalea knew her letters but had made very little progress in reading or numbers. She knew she had a mummy and a daddy, but no nana, and no brothers or sisters or aunties or uncles. She said she had never been to school. She had been to Sunday School, but she couldn't remember where. She didn't remember ever having visited London, or Blackpool, or Brighton. She may have been to a zoo. If she had, then it may have been a zoo with elephants. This led to more calls. Maybe if they could identify the zoo, then they could narrow down the search area. The Zoological Society of London confirmed that only a few zoos kept elephants, but these zoos were widely scattered around the country; they included Bristol, London, Chester, Whipsnade and Edinburgh, and you could, if you wanted, throw in Dublin as well, and safari parks such as Longleat. It was a rather unhelpful geography. The child psychologist showed Azalea some photographs of the different zoos, but her results were inconclusive.

The forensic people examined Azalea's clothes, but all were common department-store lines, with nothing to identify the particular shop where they had been purchased. Most of the items had been bought recently; they were, it appeared, all from the 1982 summer range of children's wear â but then children grow so fast, you would
expect
all her clothes to be new, unless perhaps they were hand-me-downs or items from charity shops. Which they weren't.

Several more ideas were explored to see if Azalea could help them to refine the search. They showed her station idents from different regional TV stations to see which ones she might recognise. She wasn't able to help. They showed her photographs of the sorts of places where children might be taken on outings. She recognised beaches and fairgrounds and parks, but only in a very general sense. Photographs of city centres or landmarks only resulted in a shake of her head.

âWhen did you last see your daddy?' the child psychologist asked.

Azalea looked at her, wide-eyed.

âDid you see your daddy this week?'

âNo.'

âBut you came here to see your daddy?'

âYes.'

âDo you know where your daddy lives?'

Azalea thought about this. âDaddy lives on a boat.'

âA boat? A boat or a house? Does your daddy live in a house?'

She thought again. âYes, a house,' she said.

âIs it maybe .Â .Â . a houseboat?' asked the psychologist.

Azalea shook her head, but she looked uncertain.

âSo it
is
a house. Yes? But maybe your daddy has a boat too? Does he have a boat?'

Azalea seemed puzzled. âYes,' she said at last.

âDo you know where the boat is? Do you know where your daddy keeps his boat?'

The child seemed to be thinking hard about this. âSheffield,' she said eventually.

The psychologist picked up the telephone.

Throughout the entire investigation, at the centre of a maelstrom of activity, Azalea remained remarkably untouched by the whole experience. The child psychologist, in her report, described Azalea as âextraordinarily balanced', and âapparently unconcerned by the absence of her parents, or any of the familiar features of her life'. She was a child, it seemed, of a cheerful disposition. She did not speak a great deal, except to respond to questions, but this she did with a politeness that would have done credit to a much older girl. Since her appearance at the fairground she had not once cried, nor had a tantrum, nor complained, nor asked for anything or anybody. She had absorbed herself in the toys she was given, the TV she was watching and the conversations that were intended to extract information. She seemed anxious to help, and disappointed, often, that the answers she gave were not more useful. In some cases, this desire to help made the adults more sceptical about her answers.

âTell me about your house,' the psychologist asked her. âIs it a big house?'

âYes, a
big
house,' said Azalea, holding her hands wide apart.

âOr is it a small house? A teeny-weeny house?'

âYes, it's a teeny-weeny-weeny house,' said Azalea, helpfully but unhelpfully.

âDo you go upstairs to bed?'

âYes. Upstairs to bed.'

âAnd what can you see from your window?'

âHouses.'

âDo you live in a big town? Or a little town?'

âA big town.'

âOr a little town?'

âA little town.'

âHow old are you, Azalea? Can you tell me how old you are?'

âThree.' Azalea held up three fingers.

âOr are you four? You're a bit of a big girl for three.'

âFour.'

âSo you're four? Are you?'

âYes. Four.'

The child psychologist and Sergeant Nails spent all day with Azalea. They played some games and they went out for a walk. At the end of the third day the girl was made a ward of court, and a temporary foster family was assigned. George and Eileen Robins from the Cornish village of Indian Queens came and collected Azalea, a lady from Social Services helped to complete all the forms and then a police car followed them home to check that everything was in order. Azalea joined George and Eileen's three older foster children and one biological child in a noisy but happy-sounding household. The Robins were briefed carefully and told to report any information that might help to identify the girl.

A sample of Azalea's hair and some fingernail clippings were sent off to a lab in London for isotopic analysis and geographic profiling. One of Azalea's first molar teeth was loose, and with a little encouragement this was removed and also sent for testing. But this was 1982, and these were early days for this type of analysis. Today, experts could probably use such tests to pinpoint a child's origin down to a county or even a village. In 1982 the results were inconclusive. The lab confirmed that Azalea may have spent the past few months of her life in Northern Europe, most probably in northern Britain. But they couldn't rule out southern Britain. She may have shared her time between two locations â perhaps spending some of her time with her father in Sheffield, and some of her time with her mother in who-knows-where. There were no traces of cocaine (or any other drugs) in the girl's red hair, which suggested that Azalea's mother was probably not a dropout, nor an addict. The levels of fluoride in the tooth suggested that she came from an area where there was no natural fluoridation of the water supply, helpfully ruling out the West Midlands and the North-East of England and parts of Essex, but leaving open the possibility that the girl and her mother had lived almost anywhere else, that is, in practically ninety per cent of the United Kingdom.

By the end of the first full week after Azalea's midsummer appearance at the fairground, the Devon police were working on the theory that the girl had been abandoned deliberately. The assumption, based upon answers supplied by Azalea herself and on deductions made by experts and authorities, was that she came from a family that lived in the North-West of England â possibly in Lancashire or Merseyside. Her father may have walked out. Or else, perhaps, he worked away from home. Certainly he hadn't been seen by Azalea for a long time. He probably lived near Sheffield â but perhaps not in the city itself. His house was on a hill, close to a wood and next to a stream, if Azalea's account was to be believed. He sometimes lived on a boat. It was uncertain if Azalea and her mother lived with him. It seemed more probable that the
couple had separated several months earlier, and that Azalea's mother had moved out and was renting a house somewhere â the âNumber Four' of Azalea's account. Azalea's mother, went the theory, had finally snapped. Unable to cope, she had bundled the girl into an old car that was light blue in colour and, telling Azalea that they were off to meet her father, she had driven as far away from home as she could before deciding that it was getting too dark to drive much further. She had spotted the bright lights of the fairground and had chosen this as the place to abandon her daughter. She had left Azalea sitting on a bench with some candy
floss, and then walked out of her life.

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