The Hobbema Prospect

by John Buxton Hilton

  Inspector Wright was a long time in coming: he had a sizeable quadrant of London to cross. When he did arrive, he was apologetic yet businesslike. Neither she nor Howard had known him at the time when he was making a name for himself as Kenworthy’s winger. Howard knew him only as taskmaster—and, in general, a friendly spirit. He was a bit of a self-conscious oracle, phenomenally hard-working. It was obviously one of his things to be visibly ahead of his squad when it came to techniques, cross-references—and memory. Their working programme often seemed like a kind of competition. He usually won.

  ‘I’m sorry to keep you up so late, Anne. You’ve had a terrible shock and a tiring journey, I know. But I take it you’ll not be turning in to work in the morning.’

  As a matter of fact, she had thought of doing so. She thought she ought to keep herself occupied. And there was still an unprocessed file she badly wanted to see again: Stella Davidge.

  ‘It’s up to you. But you’ll be wanted at the inquest in the afternoon. And I’ll have a word with Simon Kenworthy.’

  Wright was supposed to be one of the best welfare officers in the Met. He looked after his team and their families.

  ‘Now I believe you have something to tell me—to show me?’

  Howard made as if to do the telling for her, but Wright held him off. She told him about the cable and the drinks cupboard. Wright nodded. It was not clear whether that was to acknowledge understanding, or because he was not at all surprised by this complication.

  ‘So you are suggesting that somebody killed your mother?’

  She sought words.

  ‘If she didn’t do it herself,’ Wright said, ‘that’s the only alternative, isn’t it? Do you know of anyone who was likely to?’

  ‘Certainly not among her present acquaintances.’

  ‘You seem to have a special way of saying that. Among present acquaintances—what of the past?’

  Anne looked sideways at Howard. He must be dreading the Pennyman/Camel-Leopard scenario. She had to tell it all, but decided to keep it brief, to keep her terms adult. Then, without the childish labels, it all seemed stilted, unreal—and terribly intricate. Before she had finished, Wright had gone to his briefcase and brought out a document wallet. When she had done he waited a second, as if he thought there might be more to come.

  ‘Your mother kept an address book. I expect you’ve seen this before.’

  ‘I’ve seen her use it. It’s a very old one. It was made clear to me, even in early childhood, that it was not for my eyes.’

  ‘Some spirited children would have risen to that challenge,’ Wright said, not without a twinkle. ‘Didn’t you sometimes want to check up on her, as you grew older?’

  ‘Check up on her?’

  ‘Men do predominate in that notebook.’

  ‘A lot of the names there are dentists, plumbers, chimneysweeps.’

  ‘I dare say all of them were something,’ Wright said. ‘But some were strictly social, surely?’

  ‘Obviously,’ she said, after a pause.

  ‘Is there anything else you think you ought to tell me about her?’

  She was tempted to sidle from the issue, tempted even to resent it. But she took a grip on temptation.

  ‘I can understand what you must be thinking, Mr Wright. My mother liked men’s company. She needed the company of a nice man. Sometimes she assumed that a man was nice when he wasn’t.’

  ‘Which ones weren’t?’

  ‘I don’t think I can really answer that. She didn’t tell me everything. She kept remembering that she ought to set me an example. I think that thought always won the day—ultimately.’

  ‘Always, Anne?’

  Anne thought back. Nearly always. But in retrospect, even the exceptions had been harmless. There had been some poor specimens, but they had disappeared quickly from her mother’s life. It seemed pointless to complicate Inspector Wright’s vision at this stage with things about which she was basically unsure. And what about the woman she’d befriended a week or two before the wedding, that Angela? The only thing Anne really knew about her was that she didn’t like her. Was she worth mentioning? Wright spoke again before she could.

  ‘It may come to the point, Anne, where I shall want to go through this little notebook with you—if only to eliminate the chimney-sweeps. But we can’t do that tonight. Let’s just look at a few. The very last on the list, for instance.’

  She had, of course, sneaked a look in her time, but not recently.

  ‘Inkie Ingham. A Streatham telephone number. Ring any bells?’

  ‘None whatever.’

  ‘James Rafferty, Dulwich Village?’

  ‘Domestic heating consultant.’

  Wright flicked back a number of pages.

  ‘One or two are so heavily scored out, you’d think she’d done it in a fit of bad temper. We may have to go to Forensic to take out the overlay. Stephen Matthewson, Blackpool?’

  ‘I remember him. That’s years ago.’

  Just before they came to London. She was seven. Her mother could not have seen Stephen Matthewson more than three or four times.

  ‘Don’t trust my judgement of him,’ she said. ‘He seemed decent enough at the time. I think I even had high hopes for him. But it fizzled out.’

  ‘And Richard Foulkes, Accrington?’

  ‘A pain in the neck. At least, that’s what my mother said.’

  Howard was wearing his non-blinking face, not looking at Wright—nor at her.

  ‘I don’t think those names are going to get us far, Mr Wright. I was still at a Lancashire primary school in those days.’

  ‘So if you had remembered them, that would have been because they were memorable. Let’s roll the years on a bit. Eric Talbot, Thornton Heath. Your judgement was better developed by that time.’

  ‘It was. I was seventeen. I told her he was no good. We had the father and mother of a row.’

  ‘Who won?’

  ‘I never saw him again. My mother treated me for a week as if I’d personally deprived her.’

  That phase of their lives had been bad.

  Wright closed the book with a snap of finality.

  ‘Would you have said that your mother was financially comfortable?’

  ‘Sometimes far from it. Recently she’s been getting by.’

  ‘She had worked all her life?’

  ‘She never did in our Broadstairs days. When we went to Lancashire, she had a revolting job on an assembly line. In London she worked in various places—shops, cafés, offices. For the last six or seven years she was receptionist at a driving school. She seemed to enjoy that.’

  Wright produced two pass-books from a folder.

  ‘She had two building society accounts. They are interesting. You may know about them already.’

  ‘I don’t know the details. I dare say they will not surprise me.’

  ‘What pattern would you expect, then?’

  ‘Difficult to say. I didn’t even know there were two accounts.’

  ‘Both opened on the same day,’ he said. ‘In nineteen-sixty-one. One for three thousand. One for two thousand. The one for two thousand went down fairly rapidly.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘Large monthly withdrawals in nineteen-sixty-two and nineteen-sixty-three. Nothing put back.’

  ‘That would be what she—we—were living on.’

  ‘There was a final big withdrawal—one thousand—in nineteen-sixty-three.’

  ‘That would be when we went to Slodden.’

  ‘Was Slodden such a spending spree?’

  ‘As I remember it, quite the opposite.’

  ‘The other account lasted very much longer.’

  Egbert…

  ‘There was a first withdrawal in nineteen-sixty-three.’

  School fees and uniform—

  ‘Then very little else—ten or twenty pounds at Christmas time—until nineteen-seventy-five. A hundred and fifty—’

  Paris. Her fare. New clothes. Pocket money.
It was a rat race against the other girls. That had mattered very much to her mother.

  ‘A withdrawal to close the account a few days before your wedding. She could, of course, have made the paid-up shares over to you.’

  ‘She said there were to be no strings—not even hints or suggestions. It was to be my money.’

  For the first time, she knew, there was a crack in her voice.

  ‘I owe my mother a great deal,’ she said. ‘She had guts, and she was loyal. Yet sometimes I think I know next to nothing about her. I do know she didn’t kill herself.’

  Wright did not commit himself. He waited to see whether her moment of emotion would produce anything else. When she withdrew into herself, he brought something else from his sheaf of documents. He handed her two birth certificates.

  ‘I’d like you to look at these closely. Take your time. Tell me if there’s anything that strikes you about them.’

  COSSEY, Agnes Jean. 18th September, 1941. Farnworth General Hospital, Lancashire. Father: James Cossey. Mother: Mabel Anne Cossey, maiden name Dowe. Father’s occupation: plasterer, of 18, Barrow Brow, Stonehill, Lancashire. Informant: James Cossey. Date registered: 26th September, 1941. P.R. Canfield, Deputy.

  COSSEY, Anne. 4th July, 1959. General Hospital, Carshalton, Surrey. Father: Peter Burne Pennyman. Mother: Agnes Jean Cossey. Father’s occupation: Shipping Clerk, of 4A Brook Buildings, Southampton. Informant: Agnes Jean Cossey, c/o Walwyn, Knutsford House, Carshalton. Date registered: 23rd July, 1959. J.W. Smith, Deputy.

  ‘The same ink,’ Anne said, when at last she looked up.

  ‘That’s not important. They use the same ink throughout the Registrar-General’s Department: a composition that does not fade easily. But actually these documents were not written in Registrar-General’s ink—only a chemical approximation to it. We have already established that. Anything else?’

  She could not see what else he might be getting at.

  ‘Look at the serial numbers. They are consecutive. And since these are supposed to be originals, separated in time by eighteen years and in space by two hundred miles, how can they have been written on forms that were neighbours in the book? They can only have come from a book unlawfully possessed. In fact, these are both forgeries.’

  ‘They can’t possibly be originals. Surely they’re certified copies? I remember my mother going to London for them. She said she might as well get a copy of her own while she was about it.’

  ‘They purport to be originals.’

  She told him frankly about the episode of her passport.

  ‘Thank you. And my apologies again for the hour. I had to press on with this, to tidy up my report to the coroner. Well—let’s not call it tidy up. Let’s say rewrite. If we could have got a clear verdict, well and good. A case out of the way, and law-abiding people could have got on with their lives. As it is—’

  ‘As it is—?’

  ‘Unanswered questions. No one on the landings, no one on the stairs heard or saw a thing. We shall have to ask them all again—shan’t we, Howard?—a little more forcefully, perhaps. And ask the coroner for an adjournment.’

  Chapter Seven

  It was a time for great kindness, for soft words, for tactfully steered conversations, a time when people’s intentions were sometimes finer than their understanding. Anne needed to think, but when she managed to get time to herself, her own lack of understanding puzzled and frightened her. Would she ever understand anything again?

  Wright had tactfully hinted that a month’s adjournment would give him time to follow up complexities. The coroner, asserting his right to be in control, had quietly insisted on twenty-one days.

  Howard’s parents had been kind. Anne had been dreading their brand of kindness, expecting it to be self-conscious, excogitated—and off-beam. But this was not the way it worked out. Howard’s father had the good sense to carry on with his own thing—his newspapers, the abstracts he brought home from his office. Howard’s mother, with smooth self-discipline, stayed away from Anne’s private affairs. Perhaps she felt that that was territory which any good woman and true would be prudent to steer clear of. Anne knew what she feared, and she saw those fears materializing close under every surface.

  Howard was kind. But he, of all people the one from whom she surely had the right to expect intuitive comprehension, was in fact the most bewildered. It hurt him, she could see, when his kindnesses did not evoke demonstrative responses. Perhaps he felt that his position as the rightful centre of her existence was being usurped. She tried to act up to his expectations—but knew she was acting.

  Kindest of all was Kenworthy. For one reason or another, she did not actually go back to the office for two more working days, and then the weekend supervened. The funeral was on the Monday, so it was the Tuesday morning before she reported back for duty. The files on which she had been working the day before her wedding were still waiting for her, untouched in her absence. It was long-term material that she was passing up to Kenworthy after she had sifted it according to the principles he had laid down. She had just arranged her day’s work in order of handling, when Kenworthy sent down for her. She was preceded into his office by a tray bearing coffee and biscuits for two.

  She could not say that she knew Kenworthy well. Still less would she have believed that he knew very much about her. They had a working relationship. He had concisely let her know the form and content of what he wanted from her, and unlike some of her fellow toilers, she generally managed to give it to him. Kenworthy was a man of whom she always felt more than just slightly afraid. Even his serene courtesy was something to be afraid of. He was the spirit that parted the waters of their department. She could not conceive how anyone could give him less than their best.

  He received her with avuncular familiarity. Within the next few minutes she was surprised by how much Shiner Wright must have talked to him about her. This was apparent not only from the detail he revealed, but from his whole attitude. Of all the people who had asked her questions in the last few days, he was the only one who seemed to have every fact at his fingertips. He knew what everything was about—and he sympathized unreservedly with her. She did not know that his reputation had been built up on precisely that ability to establish confidence; or that such confidence could be totally unfounded, if that was what suited his book.

  He did not come straight at the matter. He had been to Spain, and had driven along the road from Malaga to Almunecar. He believed, though he was not sure, that he and his wife had lunched at the Lawsons’ hotel.

  ‘So you came back to disaster.’

  ‘Unmitigated.’

  ‘And one of the trigger-factors in this instance would appear to be birth certificates?’

  ‘It seems so.’

  How could she herself be untainted by the constructive dishonesty of those forgeries?

  ‘Anne—how often have you come across false documentation in the dead files you’ve been handling here?’

  Passports, now and then, even academic diplomas. But birth certificates? Not specifically. She recognized that she probably wouldn’t. Once such a forgery was done, the perpetrator had a very strong chance of getting away with it. She said so.

  ‘And to plunge into the heap, looking just for birth certificates, would be a daunting job? It almost makes me believe in computers,’ he said.

  They just hadn’t the manpower to comb intensively through unindexed archives covering a quarter of a century. She said that, too.

  ‘When you went to Paris, your mother went personally to get certified copies, and came back with originals. That was achieving the impossible. So we’ll have to pay visits to some of our more illustrious forgers, won’t we? That’ll put wind up a few of them. You had a young mother, Anne.’

  Do mothers ever seem young to their infants? She knew what Kenworthy meant. It was something she had always taken for granted.

  ‘You must both have had fun.’

  ‘We did,’ she said. ‘Especially in the Broadstair
s days.’

  Should she tell him other things? Her fears about Stella Davidge? About Angela? Or should she think round these things some more? Take another look at that old file first?

  Kenworthy was an old hand at spotting hesitation.

  ‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’

  ‘But probably nothing in it. I keep thinking of a friend that my mother made, just before we married.’

  ‘A man?’

  ‘A woman. I’ve no reason to think anything sinister about her. There was something a little sickening about it. I don’t know quite what it was. They were so thick together—as if they were soul-mates who’d spent a lifetime waiting for each other. And they worked on each other. For one thing, they drank too much. And that wasn’t one of my mother’s habits—not a regular one, anyway.’

  She tried to smile it away apologetically.

  ‘You must excuse me. Anyone would think I’d spent my life being jealous of anyone who wanted my mother’s company. But she sometimes got herself tied up with some pretty poor types, in my estimation. Then she’d have the problem of sloughing them off.’

  ‘And she didn’t slough this one off?’

  ‘She hadn’t before we left for Spain. I spotted her in church at our wedding.’

  ‘Her name?’

  ‘Angela. Angela Hallam. But I don’t know whether that was her married name or what her personal arrangements were.’

  ‘Can you describe her?’

  ‘I’d say she was a few years older than my mother, doing her best to look several years younger. A well-preserved figure, but her make-up was crucial, if her age wasn’t to show.’

  ‘You didn’t like her at all?’

  ‘She was so knowing. She looked at me as if she despised me—while at the same time professing open-hearted friendship. She was utterly cynical about Howard and me and our—’

  She was going to say decency, but said optimism instead.

  ‘What did she and your mother do together?’

  ‘I don’t know, not really. Nothing very original. Ate out. Drank—both out and at home. They didn’t talk to me about their outings.’