The last confirmed images of Noah Woods do not look like the last images of a missing child. They look like an ordinary Tuesday in a village playground. Detective Chief Inspector Matthew Connick told Suffolk Coroner’s Court that motion-activated CCTV at the under-fives play area on Merriam Close in Brantham first showed the three-year-old at 2.13pm on 15 September 2026, playing with a relative who had taken him there as part of a routine that had existed since the day he was born. Twenty-four minutes later, at 2.37pm, the same cameras still had him in the play area, on or around the merry-go-round, looking well. He was white, with curly ginger hair, wearing a white Bluey T-shirt, shorts and black Vans trainers with a white stripe. The cameras do not run continuously. They fire when something moves, so the public record of that afternoon is a chain of bursts rather than a single film, and that technical fact later became part of the ache: there is a last happy frame, and then there is absence.

What the opened inquest reconstructed is short enough to walk. Noah left the enclosed play area through a gap in an internal fence that was being built to separate the playground from a neighbouring memorial garden, crossed that garden, went out through an open gate, and ran down a path on a new housing estate toward Decoy Pond, a fishing lake a few hundred metres from the swings. A relative followed, shouting, trying to keep up. After about two hundred metres Noah was no longer in sight. Another man joined the hunt. Then police were called. That is the whole visible distance of the last run: not a journey across a county, not a disappearance into distant woods, but a short ordinary path that a three-year-old could cover in a sprint while the person who loved him was still calling his name. The pond itself sits roughly 320 metres from the playground, on the north bank of the River Stour, in a village pressed against the Suffolk-EsSєx border.

The difficulty, police said from the first afternoon, was that Noah would not answer that name. He was speech delayed, had mild hearing loss, and was being ᴀssessed for autism, though he had not received a diagnosis. His father, Rhys Woods, later told the community Facebook group that people should stop inventing stories: Noah was only mildly autistic, had partial hearing loss, and was fully capable of everyday tasks. Searchers were still told the usual method would fail. A child who can shout back can be hunted with voices. A child who cannot has to be hunted with eyes, in sheds, under trampolines, behind wheelie bins, in the dark corners of gardens and at the edges of water. By the next afternoon the boy on the merry-go-round had become the subject of one of the largest volunteer missing-child searches Suffolk had seen, with at least 1,300 members of the public alongside helicopters, dog units, coastguard aircraft, firefighters and lowland search teams.

The cameras never showed the water. They only showed the last ordinary minute, and then they stopped. Metropolitan Police divers recovered the body of a child from Decoy Pond on the afternoon of 16 September, about five metres from the bank, among submerged tree roots, at an estimated depth of 1.8 metres. Paramedics confirmed death at 4.31pm. That evening his mother, Charlie Peck, identified him at Ipswich Hospital. Suffolk Police said the death was unexplained but not suspicious, and that nothing at that stage indicated criminality, though officers were keeping an open mind while enquiries continued. A post-mortem at Addenbrooke’s in Cambridge left the medical cause pending further tests. ᴀssistant coroner Jyoti Gill opened and adjourned the inquest in Ipswich on 25 September after a hearing of about six minutes, called it a very sad and tragic death, and fixed no date for the full hearing. The route has been mapped. Why a child who left a fenced playground in the middle of a routine afternoon was ᴅᴇᴀᴅ in that pond the following day has not.