The last ordinary pictures of Noah Woods are brief, and that is what has made them so hard to watch. Suffolk Police released CCTV from the play area on Merriam Close showing him running and playing at the merry-go-round on Tuesday afternoon. He was with a relative. The visit was not an outing invented for the day. His family would later say that every Tuesday since the day he was born, Noah had gone to that park with a treasured relative, and that the two of them loved playing chase, running around and exploring the equipment. At about 2:37pm he became separated from that relative. Officers said he was thought to have run down an alleyway beside the playground, towards a new-build housing estate and a large fishing lake known locally as Decoy Pond. He was white, three years old, with curly ginger hair, wearing a white Bluey T-shirt, shorts and white trainers. He was partially deaf and non-verbal. Police were explicit about what that meant for anyone hoping to find him by calling out. He would not respond to his name.

That single fact reshaped the search. A missing child who can shout back can be looked for with voices. A child who cannot, or will not, has to be looked for with eyes, in the places a three-year-old can fit and an adult might not think to open. Residents were asked to check doorbell cameras, gardens, sheds and outbuildings. Door-to-door inquiries ran through the village. On Wednesday the search widened to East Bergholt and to Manningtree, across the EsSєx border. The National Police Air Service and HM Coastguard put aircraft over the ground. Dog units worked the streets and the open land. Suffolk Lowland Search and Rescue, Suffolk Fire and Rescue, the ambulance service, a hazardous area response team and the Environment Agency were drawn in. Volunteers were paired, briefed and sent out in small groups from Brantham Leisure Centre and the village hall, which became a makeshift headquarters and then ran out of hi-vis vests because too many people had arrived to wear them. Suffolk Police later put the public contribution at about 1,300 people. Some had driven from Birmingham. Some had come from Hampshire. Jessica Gammons, a mother of two from Kelvedon in EsSєx, was among those who turned up. Superintendent Tom Pearse, speaking while the search was still live, said there was nothing at that stage to indicate anything sinister or any element of criminality, though officers were keeping an open mind. He also told volunteers to stay away from the railway and from open water, which needed specialist teams.

The water was the part the public could not search for him. Decoy Pond sits roughly 320 metres from the playground. It was cordoned off. On Wednesday afternoon, divers from the Metropolitan Police went in. Before 6pm, police confirmed that dive teams had recovered the body of a child. Pearse said formal identification had yet to take place, that Noah’s family had been told, and that the discovery was being treated as not suspicious but unexplained. He said the force had been overwhelmed by people putting on their boots, and that as a parent he understood why they had wanted to help. He asked them, in almost the same breath, to step back. The identification was confirmed the next day, subject to the inquest.

What the volunteer army could not have known on Tuesday night, and what the inquest would only set out ten days later, was how short the unseen distance had been. The search had covered villages, an estuary edge, a railway, a construction site and a lake. The boy they were looking for had left the play area, crossed a memorial garden, and run down a path on the new estate toward the pond his relative was already chasing him toward. For more than twenty-four hours, 1,300 people looked for a child who could not call back, in a landscape that had already hidden him a few hundred metres from the merry-go-round.