The Hobbema Prospect

by John Buxton Hilton

  ‘And there’s something else worrying you, isn’t there?’

  ‘Like Angela Hallam, it could be nothing.’

  ‘We have nothing to go on, except things that might be nothing.’

  ‘Just before our honeymoon, I caught sight of a file. It wasn’t a job I was working on—it just caught my eye while I was looking for something else. I glanced through it, that was all—and I haven’t been back in the office since.’

  ‘It worried you?’

  ‘It struck me. It was about a girl who left home after having a baby. She was just about the right age to have been Mother. But that goes for thousands of others, I know.’

  ‘Tell me more about this one.’

  ‘I’d like to refresh my mind first, look at the file again.’

  ‘Do that, then—then bring it straight up to me, even if you find you’ve cooled off about it. What sector are you on at the moment?

  ‘Nineteen-thirty-nine, March to September. But I sometimes get off course and follow things up. I start reading things that shouldn’t concern me.’

  ‘We all do that. It can be fatal. And sometimes very informative. Nobody’s got to nineteen-fifty-eight to ’sixty-three yet, have they?’

  ‘No, Mr Kenworthy—not yet allocated.’

  ‘Move over to that bracket. That assignment ought to keep a bright young lady occupied for a week or two. Nineteen-thirty-nine can wait on ice—there aren’t many of those wrong ’uns still around. And if you find anything, you have direct access to me. Don’t talk on the open phone if you don’t want to. Come up and see me.’

  She could hear traffic outside, someone hooting for his own satisfaction at a driver slow to pull out from a junction.

  ‘You know what triggers you are looking for?’

  ‘Birth certificates?’

  ‘That would be jam on it. You won’t be so lucky. And remember that not all missing persons get on our files. Sometimes even missing children are not reported. Sometimes people abscond, and nobody wants them back anyway. But I don’t want to feed you too many ideas. They might hamstring you. Follow your nose. You’ll find things.’

  She might light on something particularly nasty, and it might be her own self that she’d go on to discover. The interview was over. As soon as she had left him, Kenworthy ran his eye speedily over the few bits of paper that had come in to him this morning. He appended notes to send them on their way, then lit his pipe.

  Then he asked switchboard to get him a Lancashire number.

  Chapter Eight

  They had never intended to live with Howard’s parents. But there was no question of taking over Jean Cossey’s flat, even though the lease could easily have been transferred. Anne could not have borne that. No one suggested she should.

  The house that she and Howard were waiting to move into had been victim of every possible form of contractor’s trouble, from labour disputes to non-flow of capital. They had already postponed their wedding date once, and could not put off guests and the givers of presents again. Nor could they jockey about trying to co-ordinate another set of leave patterns. They did not want to wait, anyway.

  In close prospect, Anne was uneasy about living with the Lawsons. For all their meticulous kindness, her parents-in-law lived beyond an unfamiliar chasm. She felt the undertow beneath their faultless code of No Comment. No criticism was voiced: yet she felt perpetually on the brink of it. And the Lawsons’ tastes and thoughts were not hers. They started introducing her to a social set with whom she had nothing in common. True, she would be out of the house during commuting hours—but there would be no hope that Howard’s shifts would often coincide with hers. He would often be on duty at weekends, and the gaping void of Sundays horrified her. Now there even seemed to have been a certain cosiness in the years with her mother, a snugness more easy to remember than their bickerings.

  Then something else happened. She discovered that she was pregnant.

  The man whom Kenworthy rang in Lancashire was Superintendent Bartram, with whom he had once worked on a provincial case. Bartram was a joker, a man under compulsion to say something funny as a prelude to every statement he made. Four times out of five it was worth at least a smile, and at least that unified his audience. Bartram was a good copper. Because there are other things to being a good copper, besides the number of villains that you nick. It is sometimes worth spending time with people—time that your superiors might consider wasted, if they knew about it. Bartram was a born chatter-up of strangers—and he owed Kenworthy a favour. Bartram had been catching an unfair ration of cloud-shadow when Kenworthy had been wished on him. They had set about looking at things together in a civilized manner, and Kenworthy had left him with the bonus of a cleared case.

  ‘Bartram?’

  ‘What can we do for you this time, you damned old rogue? Spot of cat burglary up Blackpool Tower?’

  ‘One of those jobs that they might not wear if I try to pass it through the bosses. Come to that, I’m not supposed to be on the case myself.’

  ‘That’s pickle on the side of the plate.’

  ‘Slodden-le-Woods. Eighteen years ago.’

  Slodden was not on Bartram’s patch. He might or might not have difficulty making inquiries there. It depended on the liver of the Slodden incumbent.

  ‘No problem,’ Bartram said. ‘They have long memories in Slodden.’

  ‘They’ll need them. I want to know about a girl who was calling herself Jean Carter at the time. She came to Slodden in 1963 with a four-year-old child, worked somewhere in a mucky factory. The child, name of Anne, was minded by a woman called Gregory till she was old enough for school. They left in ’sixty-six.’

  ‘Anything else about them?’

  ‘Mother got murdered a few days ago. Bath-water too hot. You do read the papers?’

  ‘What do you want me to find out?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘As good as done. You know where to come when it’s service you want.’

  There was another source of information that Kenworthy wished was already computerized: the movements in and out of Her Majesty’s Prisons over the years. Who had been released in the late spring of 1963—and had then traced Jean Cossey to Broadstairs, thus sending her fleeing up to Slodden? Who had gone down again in 1966, leaving Jean Cossey free to take Anne to live in London? Who had been set at liberty again not so very long before Anne’s wedding, and had succeeded in locating Jean Cossey?

  There were too many of them. They came and went to and from too many places. It had to be another case for decidedly human sampling—for running the naked eye down the columns here and there. People were accustomed to receiving from Kenworthy short-notice demands which they did not see why he should need. He limited himself in the first instance to release records from top security wings. They were better documented, and Mr Camel-Leopard had probably qualified for high-class treatment.

  And what were the previous aliases of Angela Hallam? Kenworthy saw no way of coming to immediate grips with that.

  The early stages of Anne Lawson’s pregnancy were troublesome. Her euphemistically styled morning sickness prolonged itself for hours after unfaced breakfasts. She suffered vertigos, nauseas and nervous deficiency at random hours of day. She became difficult to get on with, and those who had had no experience of getting on with her at normal times were misled into a wrong impression of her temperament. She was snappish, she knew that she was being snappish, and it seemed that she could do nothing to organize herself. Her mother-in-law had never learned how to be passively kind. She did not know how to keep her kindness in the background. When at a loss, she had a tendency to become fussy. She asked Anne whether she wanted a girl or a boy. Anne held strong views about that question. If she expressed a preference now, she might have to imply disappointment later on. She answered in a tone that conveyed her bile rather than her meaning.

  ‘I only asked,’ Mrs Lawson Senior said.

  Slodden-le-Woods was one of those cotton towns that might sti
ll serve as a text-book illustration of the Industrial Revolution—even though it had long since lost its cotton. The first mill had been built in a valley bottom, where a chilly brook from off the Pennines had driven a water-wheel. The newest mill, 1908, had portentous copper turrets and prosperous streaky-bacon brick-work. There was also coal in the vicinity, which had added slag to the contours. There was a dyeworks, with an effluent that sometimes stank. The miners, spinners and dyers had been incarcerated in terraces that clung in steep geometry to the flanks of narrow valleys. Now every front room had colour TV, and many of them video-recorders as well.

  There were reasons why Bartram would have preferred to have been asked to go free-booting elsewhere than in Slodden. They boiled down to the hubris of Bill Smalley. Bartram and Smalley had risen to be Superintendents up different crevices. Bartram had used imagination and diplomacy, was socially amusing, had flair. Smalley had always played safe, stayed in line. He was mentally myopic, and like many men of close vision, he could be obsessed by trivialities.

  Bartram went to Smalley and said he wanted to make a small inquiry on his manor. He did not confess that he was doing it on a rest day. He did not hint that this was a favour to the Met that had not gone through the books. He had jested his way out of less petty infringements than this in his time.

  He called first at the school that Anne had most probably attended, but here he was frustrated. There had been a complete turnover of staff since Anne’s day. The attendance registers for that far-off period had been sent to the Education Department. Bartram lost half a day, finding the right clerk to rummage in the right cabinet. It was late afternoon before he got back to Slodden.

  No. 39, Darwen Road, had changed owners twice since the Cossey-Carters had lodged there. It was one of a long climbing row that had been built for £300 each just before the First World War; its present owner had borrowed £9000 for it just before becoming unemployed last year. His wife had given up trying to captivate him, but there was enough of her eighteen-year-old sexiness left within her twenty-four-year-old frame to suggest how they had come to get married. And no, they knew nothing at all about the last occupant but one of their house.

  Bartram went to the neighbours. He found several who remembered Alice Stanford, who had died in No. 39. She had been a respectable weaver’s widow who had let her spare bedroom. And yes—people remembered the Carters, mother and daughter. Old Alice would not have turned away an unmarried mother and child.

  And, people had to say, Alice Stanford had not been let down. Jean Carter had proved a decent, sober, hard-working young woman, whose daughter was more than a credit to her. Oh, they had all had their doubts at first. Mrs Carter—she called herself Mrs, but Darwen Road had not been taken in by that—had looked like a woman with a roving eye. There had at one time been something between her and one of the foremen at Ormsby and Gregg’s, where she worked. Stan Boulter, a married man. But nothing had come of it. Mrs Carter had somehow extricated herself from something that would have spelled only trouble, and had gone on to conduct herself quietly for many months. She had even managed to hold on at Ormsby’s without getting aggro from Boulter.

  Ormsby and Gregg’s had had the receiver in eighteen months ago. The gates were padlocked. Someone had daubed anti-Thatcher signs over the warehouse door. Was it worth digging out Stan Boulter?

  Then Bartram struck ringing ore. He found Anne Carter-Cossey’s babysitter. And the moment he set eyes on Nellie Gregory, he knew he was on the road.

  Chapter Nine

  Anne Lawson dreamed again, but this time with a difference. Again they were the Hobbema trees, their tall trunks stark and familiar. As always, their branches were menacing, knowing. It was an irrational adjective to use of the branches of a tree—but that was the impression that they always gave her. They knew who she was, and where she was, and what she was doing here, and what was going to happen to her next. And she knew none of these things. They were a sort of personified accusation—but she did not know what they were accusing her of.

  As she got out of bed, sick before racing for her commuter train, she felt as if she had been deprived of sleep all night.

  Nellie Gregory was on the sixty mark. Twenty years ago she must have been an even more uncompromising woman, even more confident and careless in her snap judgements. The threshold of old age might have quietened her down somewhat. Perhaps she even felt the cautionary influence of a man who introduced himself frankly as an off-duty police superintendent. But she did not much care about the ranks and precedences of men. She lavishly proclaimed the contrary. She was a woman who had always lived by announcing a reputation that she then had to live up to.

  She believed in speaking her mind (she said) and her mind, when spoken, was exclusively destructive. She tore down idols: and many and varied were the things that were idols to Nellie Gregory. Nearly every word she spoke was a slander of someone or other. She attacked everyone who departed from her norms. The difficulty lay in establishing what her norms were.

  Bartram did not take long to decide that Anne Carter must have detested every hour that she spent in Nellie Gregory’s care. It came out early in the conversation that there had been a certain refinement—a sensitivity—about Anne, a precocious fastidiousness of speech, the beginnings of orthodoxy in English grammar, perhaps—and firm home-training in matters of elementary hygiene. Nellie Gregory was not an unclean woman, but her closest cronies would not have called her fussy. There had been things about Anne that had been different—and they were suspect in Nellie Gregory’s eyes. In a bigger girl, they would have been the brand-marks of an intolerable superiority. And Nellie Gregory was not blind to the irony that this was the child of a woman who, somewhere down her line, had come off the rails. Nellie would not say a word of that to the child; but the child would know that she was thinking something nasty. Sometimes Nellie would be overloud in her remarks to other people. And she was not beyond talking to herself, if that was the only way of ridding her system of poison.

  Not that she was an unkind woman. Bluntness had never hurt her, and if it hurt other people, it was a pity they had not grown out of such softness. She thought scathing thoughts about Jean Carter’s past moral turpitude; but if Jean Carter had stood in visible material need, Nellie Gregory would have done what she could for her. Bartram was able to meet her mentality three-quarters of the way. He spoke the language of women like Nellie Gregory.

  ‘Pretty snooty bloody lot down this end of Paradise Alley, are they, then?’

  She waited for him to answer his own riddle.

  ‘I just heard her at Number Ten call a dog-turd a visiting card.’

  ‘Oh, her—’

  ‘You used to mind a little girl—oh, years ago—eighteen, to give chapter and verse.’

  ‘I’ve looked after a lot in my time.’

  ‘Some of them must stand out. Like Anne Carter?’

  ‘Anne Carter?’

  ‘Mother used to lodge with Alice Stanford. Worked at Ormsby’s.’

  ‘I remember. She used to make me laugh. The little girl, I mean. Very proper. Used to look at me with such serious eyes. She couldn’t make me out.’

  ‘And what about her mother? Could you make her out?’

  ‘Mrs Carter? Or should it have been Miss Carter? Miss Something-or-other, anyway. Not one of us. I don’t know what it was about her. Didn’t exactly give herself airs. She couldn’t, hardly, working in the finishing-shop at Ormsby’s, could she? But she wasn’t one you ever got to know. Folks don’t care for secrets, round here. You only get back from folks what you give them.’

  ‘Maybe Mrs Carter didn’t want anything back.’

  ‘She had something on her mind. She’d come unstuck once, that’s for sure. We’re not a prying lot, round here, but a lot of people would have given their ears to know how, when—and by who.’

  ‘There’s folks as still would,’ Bartram said.

  Nellie Gregory was smart enough to know that he was not here for gossip. Men lik
e Bartram did not come slumming for kicks.

  ‘I don’t know what else I can tell you,’ she said, fishing for a lead.

  ‘Had she men friends?’

  ‘Once or twice. She hung about the foreman’s office at the works at one time. Stan Boulter knew how to make women feel sorry for him. Some women.’

  ‘Is Stan Boulter still about?’

  ‘Telling the angels that his wife didn’t understand him. What’s she done, this Mrs Carter?’

  ‘That’s what I hoped someone in Slodden might tell me.’

  ‘I don’t know what you take us for in Slodden. We know how to mind our own business, here. Mind you, I used to look at her sometimes and think to myself: you’re going to get more than you’ve bargained for, one of these days, my young lady.’

  ‘Why was that, then?’

  ‘She had that look about her.’

  Bartram knew what she meant, though she could not express it. The moment women like Nellie Gregory started trying to analyse their thoughts, their thoughts ceased to be useful.

  ‘Coming like she did from nowhere. Then off again, two-three years later, not so much as dropping in to say goodbye.’

  When Jean Carter had seen the light go green for leaving Slodden, she had not been slow about shaking the dust off.

  ‘I didn’t go much for her friends, either,’ Nellie Gregory said.

  ‘Any particular friend in mind?’

  ‘There was a Mrs Beecham, over up Barleyfields. A Gwen Beecham.’

  Barleyfields. A spec-built estate, intended in the ’fifties to bring middle-class money over to the greener side of Slodden. It had petered out after an avenue and a half. You could still just about see where they’d laid out future roads and closes.

  ‘No bottle,’ Nellie Gregory said, writing off Gwen Beecham in a phrase of decisive dismissal. ‘If Mrs Carter gave herself airs, you thought just now and then there might possibly once have been something behind them—especially when you looked at her kid. But Gwen Beecham was never owt but froth. Damn it, I saw her once in Madgwick’s chemists, buying herself a packet for a foam-bath. What does anyone in Slodden want with a foam-bath?’