doesn't get any better

At that moment, in Leeds, a mobile beeped for Brennan, who was explaining the lack of progress to members of the police authority. "We've found Shannon," was the message from Detective Constable Paul Kettlewell, one of five officers who broke down Donovan's door.

"Where's the body?" asked Brennan, a veteran of more than 20 murder inquiries.

"No, we've found her alive and we're on the way to the station," said Kettlewell. "It stopped me in my tracks," says Brennan. "I had to get straight over to Dewsbury to see her physically to reassure myself."

He walked into a room where Shannon was playing with some toys, and she smiled and said hello. Brennan recalls: "I smiled back and said hello myself. That was all that needed to be said. We'd rescued a kidnapped, nine-year-old child and police work doesn't get any better."

Judging from some of the coverage of the Shannon Matthews affair, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the worst thing about murderous child abducters is that there is at least one fewer of them than everybody thought when the kid was first declared missing. These people never seem to be around when the taxpayer needs them. Yet one of the heartening things about the whole business is that it shows how unbroken society actually is. When the child was kidnapped, the community rallied round as it is ideally supposed to do, and tried to find her. She was discovered when a neighbour heard odd sounds from the flat she was detained in, made the connection and took the trouble to call the police. The police did their job efficiently, saw through the cover story and assembled a case. The criminal justice system as a whole produced the correct result. Crime committed; crime detected; crime solved. To cap it all, a hardened cop expects to find a body and instead sees an actual living, breathing child - mauled about a bit but in reasonable physical and mental shape: Shannon and the rest of the kids now have a chance to prosper away from their wretched mother. But that I suppose is even more expense for the taxpayer.

Comments

[Dave Weeden]

Oh gosh, I disagree totally. Call me a Torygraph reader, but the story seems different to me.

The 'community rallied round' sure enough: to report her mother:

And a neighbour, Claire Wilson, 32, said she reported her concerns about Shannon to social workers at least three times in 2002.
She said: "We used to listen to Shannon crying through the bedroom wall. I think social services should be shot. I used to tell them time and again and all they would say is 'we will look into it'.

Society is unbroken; social services, perhaps not.