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 and, eventually, 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. People came from Birmingham and Hampshire. 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. Motorists were asked for dashcam from 3pm onward. The search widened to East Bergholt, where Noah lived, and to 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, though the death was treated as unexplained. Parish figures described a village that had rallied and then had to be asked, politely and repeatedly, to let the specialists work.

What the numbers cannot show is the particular cruelty of searching for a child who cannot answer his name. Police and the family were consistent on this point, even when they differed on how the public should describe him. Noah was non-verbal or speech delayed, partially deaf or living with mild hearing loss, and undergoing an ᴀssessment for autism that had not produced a diagnosis. He would not respond to 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 place people brought flowers, teddies and notes. A Bluey toy was left among them, a small echo of the white T-shirt on the last CCTV frame.

The 1,300 did not fail from lack of numbers. The inquest later made the geography unbearable. Noah had left through a gap in an internal fence, crossed a memorial garden, gone out of an open gate, and run toward Decoy Pond while a relative followed and lost sight of him after about two hundred metres. Divers found him the next afternoon five metres from the bank, in submerged tree roots, at about 1.8 metres. The largest volunteer effort in the county’s recent memory had been hunting across fields and neighbouring villages for a child who had covered only a few hundred metres, toward water that required divers, not torches. A fundraiser for the family pᴀssed £46,000, more than doubling a £20,000 target. Suffolk Police said the county had shown itself at its best in the most tragic of circumstances.