The scale of the search for Noah Woods is easy to recite and hard to picture. Suffolk Police, the National Police Air Service, HM Coastguard, dog units, Suffolk Lowland Search and Rescue, Suffolk Fire and Rescue, the ambulance service, a hazardous area response team, the Environment Agency and Metropolitan Police divers were all drawn into a village on the north bank of the River Stour after a three-year-old became separated from a relative at a playground at 2.37pm on 15 September. Around those official lines stood something rarer: about 1,300 members of the public, some local, some who had driven through the night. Two women arrived from Birmingham at five in the morning. Others came from Hampshire. Jessica Gammons, a mother of two from Kelvedon in EsSєx, was among those named in contemporaneous reports.

Dawn Jeffers and her daughter Shanya drove 160 miles from the West Midlands. Volunteers were paired, briefed in groups, and sent out from Brantham Leisure Centre and the village hall until the high-visibility stock ran out. They were told to stay off the railway and away from open water, which belonged to specialists. They were told to look with their eyes because Noah would not answer if they shouted. Residents checked doorbell cameras, sheds, outbuildings and the spaces under garden furniture where a small child might curl up and wait. The search widened to East Bergholt and Manningtree across the EsSєx border. For more than twenty-four hours the working ᴀssumption of a huge part of that crowd was still that he was alive and hidden.

Superintendent Tom Pearse later said the force had been overwhelmed by people putting on their boots, that as a parent he understood why they had wanted to help, and that he needed them to step back once the recovery began. He also said there was nothing at that stage to indicate anything sinister or any element of criminality, though officers were keeping an open mind. The death was treated as unexplained but not suspicious. Formal identification followed the next day, subject to the inquest. What the numbers cannot show is the particular cruelty of searching for a child who cannot answer his name. Every empty shed had to be opened. Every pond edge had to be treated as possible. Every volunteer who went home and could not sleep was answering a plea that had already been made public. By Thursday the playground where Noah had last been seen was no longer a search grid. It was a shrine.

Children left flowers and teddies. One note said simply, sorry we could not do more. A Bluey toy was left with a handwritten apology that they had not been close enough the night before. The 1,300 did not fail from lack of numbers. They failed because the boy they were looking for had already travelled a short unseen distance toward water that required divers, not torches. That is the fact the inquest later made unbearable: the largest volunteer effort in the county’s recent memory was hunting across fields and neighbouring villages for a child who had covered only a few hundred metres.