The scale of the search for Noah Woods is now part of the public record, and it began with a separation that police first described as happening at about 3pm on Tuesday 15 September, later refined by CCTV to a last playground sighting at 2.37pm. Suffolk Police released images of a white boy with curly ginger hair, last seen in a white Bluey T-shirt, shorts and black Vans trainers with a white stripe. Officers stressed that he was non-verbal, had partial hearing loss, was being ᴀssessed for autism and would not respond to his name. Appeals asked residents to check gardens, outbuildings, CCTV and doorbell cameras, and asked drivers through Brantham to review dashcam from 3pm onward.

Helicopters from the National Police Air Service, dog units, HM Coastguard, Suffolk Fire and Rescue and Suffolk Lowland Search and Rescue joined officers and volunteers. People travelled from as far as Birmingham and Hampshire. By the time a body was recovered, police said at least 1,300 members of the public had helped. Searches widened overnight and into Wednesday to East Bergholt and across the border to Manningtree. Superintendent Tom Pearse later said the force had been overwhelmed by people putting on their boots. Divers from the Metropolitan Police entered Decoy Pond, a fishing lake about 350 yards from Merriam Close, on 16 September in the area where Noah was last seen heading.

They found the child the next afternoon. Formal identification had not been completed when police first announced that a child’s body had been recovered, but the family had been informed, and the death was described as unexplained but not suspicious. The inquest later fixed the recovery point at about five metres from the bank, among submerged roots, at an estimated depth of 1.8 metres, with death confirmed at 4.31pm and identification completed by Charlie Peck at Ipswich Hospital. The medical cause remains pending further investigation after the Addenbrooke’s examination. What the search proved, and what it could not change, now sit side by side: a village and a much wider public turned out within hours, and the boy they were looking for was already in the pond by the time specialist divers reached him.

The route Noah Woods took is no longer only a police reconstruction. It is a physical gap that local reporters could still see, and then could not. At the opening of the inquest on 25 September, DCI Matthew Connick said CCTV showed Noah playing with his relative before he left through a gap in the fence leading to the memorial garden, where he left through an open gate and continued toward Decoy Pond while the relative tried to keep up and shouted after him. Suffolk News reported that the relative’s statement described Noah leaving the under-fives area through that gap into the memorial garden and making off down a path, with the relative in close pursuit, until he could not be seen about 200 metres from the play area.