The Hobbema Prospect

by John Buxton Hilton

  But Howard, after reading the message, turned away when Anne held out her hand for it. He took it over to the window and read it again, as if he were unsure of its meaning. It had been written out in longhand by a clerk to whom the copying of a foreign tongue was a laborious business.

  Howard folded the telegram and put it away in his pocket. Anne looked at him inquiringly, but it was not until they were back in the bedroom with the balcony that he began to prepare her for shock.

  ‘Darling—’

  Anne’s mother had died. There was a lack of further information that left them utterly helpless. Anne did not disbelieve the news—she could not disbelieve it—but it did not seem real to her—yet.

  And at first impact, neither of them saw anything ominous in the fact that the telegram had been signed Wright.

  Chapter Five

  The journey home was messy, hot, crowded and delayed. Howard found Anne’s composure surprising. She had little to say, and the nearest she came to pathos was with her naive, ‘I wish it wasn’t true.’

  ‘I’m afraid that it is true, darling.’

  She looked away out of the streaked window of the aircraft. They were flying at thirty-odd thousand feet and the cloud formation below them was punctuated by pinnacles of white fluff. At Gatwick they looked around for a message, but no one was paging them. Howard went to make a phone call. When he came back he was looking even more solemn than before.

  Duty had brought Howard Lawson into the presence of death: street accidents in his uniform days; an overdose suicide; two murders since he had been in Shiner’s squad. But they had been the type of murder more common in fact than in fiction. Drearily domestic, they had posed no problems. He had seen blood, human organs drastically exposed. He had seen strangers’ tears. But he had never been personally involved.

  He had been taught theory, elements of applied psychology, including some notes on the transference of guilt, by a sergeant-instructor hard-boiled by a lifetime of other people’s miseries. This man had impressed Howard: he was not the one to talk about non-material values unless he believed what he was saying. Death came as a shock—so people clutched at things to blame themselves for. And when they had lived close to the dead, they did not usually have to look far to find something to plague their haunted consciences with.

  Anne was going to suffer. Her relations with her mother had been equivocal. She was not going to be short of grounds for self-torture. Howard had learned enough about her in Spain to believe that she was going to be difficult to handle. Because not only, Shiner had told him over the phone, had Jean Cossey’s death been suicide, it had been suicide in a loathsomely stage-managed manner. And it had been backed up by a letter to the coroner that could not have been better guaranteed to break Anne’s heart if it had been written with that intent.

  Jean Cossey had first blunted cowardice with gin. The seal from the bottle-top was duly found in her kitchen. She had taken it into her bathroom, where in her final convulsion the unstoppered bottle had been knocked into the bath. Analysis of the bath-water suggested that she had drunk at least four-fifths of that bottle. The pathologist believed she must have been near to alcoholic poisoning. Jean Cossey had electrocuted herself. She had done so on the principle of the electric chair, with a simple but effective extension from a live lead to foil that she had taped to her head and to a wire bracelet round her left wrist. The neutral lead had been connected to one ankle, under water. The terminals had been connected to a length of new cable which had been cobbled into the oven element of her cooker, two rooms away. The timer had been set to switch itself on at ten-thirty in the evening.

  Detective-Inspector Wright had been trained by Kenworthy and had an eye for detail. His Detective-Sergeant Izzard—normally the task would probably have fallen to Howard—had found a crumpled supermarket till receipt in the bottom of Mrs Cossey’s shopping-bag: for one item—the price of the gin. In her pedal-bin was the bag in which she must have brought home the cable from a multiple hardware store round the corner. In the bottom of that bag was another receipt—undoubtedly for the cable.

  The note to the coroner was short, shallowly derivative, childishly naive:

  Dear Sir,

  I am sorry for the trouble I am causing. When you have

  given the whole of your life for something you no longer

  have, there is nothing left.

  It is all too empty now, without what I have always lived

  for.

  Yours truly,

  Jean Cossey

  It had been written with a cheap and rather blotchy ballpoint, which was found among a miscellany of its kind in a jar on a kitchen shelf. The notepaper and envelope matched a pad and packet in a drawer of the cabinet. Shiner Wright got succinct papers together for the coroner and sent Sergeant Izzard off on another case. Howard treated Anne with great delicacy.

  They needed her at the mortuary for identification, and she faced up to that with an aplomb that surprised him. Afterwards he took her to a quiet restaurant and told her more than he had originally intended about the details of her mother’s death. And again her reaction was not what he would have expected. She was pale, and she did not speak at once when he had come to the end. He was not sure that it had all sunk in. But she remained in control of herself. Maybe the full reaction was going to be delayed—perhaps even for a day or two.

  ‘I find it very difficult to believe,’ she said at last, firmly but calmly.

  ‘I’m sure you do.’

  ‘Nothing could be less like her character.’

  ‘We can never know what’s going on in someone else’s mind,’ he said.

  ‘You didn’t know her, Howard. The sort of life we led, we knew each other inside out. I’m sure that’s why there were times when we didn’t get on. We knew each other too well, we got sick of each other. Oh, she was volatile: she had her ups and downs. She had her sentimental moments. She could listen to Stars on Sunday—weepy hymns—and she’d weep. Now and then. A sort of indulgence. But that was one off. When she was up against it, she was the hardest-headed woman I’ve ever known. She had to be, to have managed our lives the way she did. I mean, I never knew why we went to Slodden. Slodden was the dregs—but she saw to it that we never sank quite to the bottom. She was an optimist, Howard. If she hadn’t seen silver linings where there were none, we could not have survived. And the wording of that silly note is not hers. She would never for a moment have contemplated taking her own life because I had left home to get married. That is perfectly absurd.’

  ‘The human mind is a funny thing, Anne. I’m afraid we are up against something that words can’t fight—the facts of the matter.’

  ‘That’s just what I can’t accept, Howard—the so-called facts. She knew nothing about electricity. She couldn’t have changed a fuse. She hated putting a new bulb in, in case it lit up while it was still in her hand. If she tried to fit a plug on to something she’d bought—a hair-drier, a toaster—I always looked to see whether she’d fixed the brown lead to the earth-pin. All she knew about electricity, she said, was that it could bite: and she left it alone. Besides, there was a lot that she was looking forward to. There was this new friend she’d found. I didn’t like her, but they were getting on famously. She wasn’t too old to make something of her new freedom. She said to me so often, these last few months, that she was looking forward to her fling.’

  ‘You’ve been no brake on her freedom—especially since you’ve had a job.’

  ‘Freedom from responsibility, freedom from set habits: don’t you see that? Freedom from somebody else’s timetable. She was a woman with a tremendous capacity for enjoying herself—but she had always put her responsibility to me first. That’s the habit that it wasn’t easy to break.’

  ‘What about men friends—actively—recently?’

  ‘Off and on. I’ve told you before—she often showed the most appalling judgement of people. She always thought they were what she would like them to be. Even at the age of seve
n, I tried to warn her off some of the men she made friends with. Not that they amounted to a procession, you understand. Just now and then.’

  A difficult angle. Howard Lawson had formed his own impression of Jean Cossey’s taste in men. He did not want to go too deeply into that just now.

  ‘Maybe she had been let down by someone.’

  ‘I can’t think who it could be. And in any case, that wouldn’t be a situation she hadn’t handled before. More than once. She might be depressed about it—well, not so much depressed as angry. But she’d bounce back. She always did. She’d swear there’d never be another. And for three or four months—or weeks—or days—perhaps there wouldn’t be. How soon are we going to be allowed into the flat?’

  ‘I’ll have to ask. I expect all the scene of crime stuff will be finished. And they’ve said publicly that they don’t suspect foul play.’

  ‘I want to go there. I want to go there now.’

  Howard still had much to learn about his wife.

  ‘We shan’t be able to shift any of your stuff tonight,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want to shift any stuff. There’s something I want to look at.’

  ‘Something that can’t wait?’

  ‘I shan’t sleep if I don’t.’

  He phoned Shiner’s office and got clearance. It meant a taxi, and running the gauntlet of the neighbours’ curiosity. And yet no one seemed to have been curious on the night Jean Cossey had died: there was no one who would admit to having heard or seen anything or anyone. Everything bore the lifeless look of quarters deprived of a woman’s care. There was still a mug on the draining-board, decorated with the Colman’s Mustard logo. Jean Cossey’s gadgets were where she always kept them, too many for her racks and jars: whisks, spatulas, kitchen scissors jam-packed at drunken angles. The door of the oven was slightly ajar and there were scraps of oven dirt on the tiles in front of it: a legacy no doubt from the suicidal connection.

  In the living-room there was a special kind of emptiness: cheap reproductions—Toulouse-Lautrec and Monet’s poppies—pictures that would never give pleasure again; Jean Cossey’s LP’s—James Last, pop Galway, Abba. She had not listened to most of them for years, and Anne was never going to listen to them again. There was a Woman’s Own and a shelf of paperbacks: Robbins, Hailey, Delderfield, Edwin Booth. The Booth was years old: Four Marys. Anne remembered how she had picked it out once when she was thinning their shelves for a jumble sale. And her mother had angrily snatched it back, as if she attached some sentimental value to it. And what added to the sense of pathos was the obvious evidence that all this had been gone over by the investigators, by Shiner and his team. Some things had not been put back exactly where they belonged. The snowstorm paperweight that Anne had bought in the Eiffel Tower had changed places with a carved Bambi. The magazines by the skirting-board were in reverse order, the older ones now on top: Family Circle and a Private Eye: who could have brought that home?

  Howard went straight into the bathroom, hunting down any relic of the gruesome that he felt ought to be concealed. In here the search had clearly had to be more fundamental. Talc had been spilled. Some of the all-but-empty phials from the medicine cabinet had been left out: soluble aspirin, vitamin capsules, a few dregs left over from a bronchial winter.

  Anne went into her mother’s bedroom, not pausing to take stock, but heading straight for the old walnut wardrobe. She opened it and plunged through the summer dresses, the cleaners’ plastic covers. She reached down into the farthest corner.

  ‘Howard—come here.’

  She had brought out two bottles of Californian table wine, a jar of cocktail cherries, three-quarters full, a half-finished Haig Dimple and a Tia Maria.

  ‘My mother wasn’t what I’d call a drinking woman. I’ve known her go weeks, even months, without taking a drop. Then once in a while she’d have what she called a ball—usually in the first flush of misery after someone had stood her up. It never did her any good. She might get a bit flushed and giggly after the first couple of gins—but after another you’d soon see her nodding off to sleep. That was the only useful effect alcohol ever had on my mother. But she did like to think there was drink in the house. She didn’t like to be caught out if anyone called. If someone gave her a bottle as a present—I remember, she won one not long ago in a raffle—it generally went straight into the wardrobe. She used to say that was two-thirds of the way out of temptation. Including this—and this—’

  One was a bottle of Gordon’s, the other a Beefeater, both with their seals unbroken.

  ‘So why a receipt from a supermarket off-licence? Now I’m going to show you something else.’

  She went to a free-standing broom-cupboard, and was for a moment held up by the clutter. The moment she opened the door, everything fell out.

  ‘What about this?’

  She was holding a hank of years-old electric extension cable, its cotton covering badly frayed over both plugs.

  ‘The man who wired this house didn’t give much thought to where he was putting the power points. This is what my mother had to use when she wanted to iron and watch the telly at the same time. Howard, I want you to see whether it would reach from the cooker to the bath.’

  He had already measured the distance with his eye, and he knew that it would. He said as much.

  ‘No. Let’s make sure.’

  There were at least thirty feet of the cable, and it crossed the space easily.

  ‘Howard, my mother wasn’t mean. But she’d never spend money where she didn’t have to. She wouldn’t buy cable to kill herself while she had this on the premises.’

  Howard’s eyes had been travelling the room. He saw that Mrs Cossey’s Moo-Moo Dairies calendar had been heavily ringed for a Tuesday still a week ahead.

  ‘Of course, it’s abundantly clear that she wasn’t herself,’ he said.

  ‘You mean she was out of her mind? I don’t believe that.’

  ‘Anyone capable of killing herself must have been disturbed.’

  ‘Not so disturbed as to buy gin when she’d two bottles in the house.’

  ‘How can we be sure? We’re talking about regions where even the experts won’t commit themselves. I don’t want to harp on this, darling, but I did speak on the phone to one of the first officers to come in here. He told me what he found.’

  ‘He found my mother dead. That’s a fact. My mother killing herself—that’s an appearance. And it’s ludicrous to think that she’d do it in this lunatic fly-trap manner. That note she wrote—is supposed to have written—when can I see it?’

  ‘Tomorrow, for certain—at the inquest.’

  ‘She’d never have written what you told me.’

  ‘I can’t guarantee that I gave you the precise words.’

  ‘I must check her handwriting.’

  ‘They’ll have done that. Routine. They’ll have found a sample somewhere.’

  ‘I want you to tell Mr Wright about the gin and the cable.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Tonight. Now.’

  ‘He’ll be at home.’

  ‘Then ring him at home.’

  But that needed thought: ringing the DI at home about an open-and-shut case—Howard did not doubt that it was open and shut. The evidence wouldn’t have been treated superficially: the seal from the bottle, the cable, the bag it was brought home in—

  ‘Are you going to ring him—or shall I? I thought that in your line of business, time was supposed to be vital.’

  She made for the phone. He reached it first and put a hand over hers.

  ‘We don’t want to stir up mares’ nests.’

  ‘Howard—there were strange things in my mother’s life.’

  Mr Camel-Leopard? Egbert?

  ‘I haven’t told you everything about her,’ Anne said. ‘There were strange things in her life before she had me.’

  Mr Pennyman?

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to use your imagination, Howard? Suppose she didn’t do this. Suppose someone
else did it—set it up—isn’t that the phrase you use? Wouldn’t it be easy to plant check-out receipts and the rest?’

  Howard took his hand off his wife’s and started to dial. A minute and a half later, he put the phone back on its rest.

  ‘He’s coming round now.’

  Chapter Six

  After the first flurry of activity, the melancholy inertia of the flat took over. Deprived of their owner, the trivial things that had belonged to Jean Cossey seemed themselves defunct: the bus ticket bookmark in the Catherine Cookson that she would never finish; an Agatha Christie. Her reading had been undemanding, for preference sentimental. But she had read good things in her time. When Anne had been growing up, she was always nagging her to read Lord of the Flies and Barchester Towers—thereby creating consumer resistance.

  She had often wondered just how intelligent her mother really was. When Anne had tried to nail down her schooling, she had always evaded the issue. But although she always successfully dodged revealing the details, there were sequins of pride that glistened. She had been to a High School. She had passed the eleven-plus—which she always called winning a scholarship. She had lived for the library at school. Maybe the books she had been guided through in class were the only ones she truly appreciated. She had repeated time and again that Eng. Lit. (sic) was the only school subject that she had truly enjoyed.

  Howard was now sitting, tired, in the chair that had always been her mother’s. He lit a cigarette. He smoked too many, but Anne had not said much about that—as yet. She could not remain seated. There was an inner call to be up and doing, but when she was on her feet there was nothing to do. She went and shut herself in her old bedroom, a setting that had played a large part in her adolescence. She had already done most of her packing before the wedding, but some things were still lying about—the juvenilia from her bookshelves, her badminton racquet, a teddy-bear. It came as a minor shock to her that the police had been through her things too. Her roll of posters had been interfered with. She had a map of the Paris Metro, a head and shoulders of Elton John.