The Hobbema Prospect

by John Buxton Hilton

  You had to be close to Nellie Gregory’s mind to catch the full flavour of her condemnations.

  ‘It was Mrs Beecham who came round to fix up about the kid coming here. I reckon it was her found Alice Stanford for them. I dare say it was Gwen Beecham who put in a word for her at Ormsby’s. And she’s another who’s come undone at the seams. Divorced,’ Nellie Gregory said, shredding the woman’s character into its ultimate ribbons.

  ‘Maybe she didn’t get on with her old man,’ Bartram suggested.

  ‘There’s no telling what that poor bugger had to put up with.’

  Foam-baths, perhaps—

  ‘Gone away, has she?’

  ‘Three-four years ago.’

  ‘Bugger it! Folks are slipping away from me in all directions. Well, I mustn’t take up any more of your precious time.’

  Chapter Ten

  It seemed that nothing could save Mrs Lawson and Anne from misunderstandings. Every issue that arose had its dangers. Mrs Lawson was already knitting frenetically, and seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of patterns that ought to be in some costume museum. She could not be blind to Anne’s lack of enthusiasm. Then she produced the Baby Book on whose doctrines Howard had been raised, and that led to a discussion of Howard’s character in which they did not seem to be talking about the same man.

  The next day, Sunday, Howard was actually home. And the elder Lawsons announced that they were going out visiting for the day, presumably a noble gesture to give the young people time to themselves.

  But the young people seemed unable to recapture any magic. Anne felt so unsteady when she tried to stand on her legs that she could not even face the thin, milkless tea that Howard brought up to her. She pretended to sleep for the next hour and a half, and when she finally came downstairs, Howard was lost to her, in filthy mid-stream of reorganizing his father’s garage, a job he had been promising to do for months.

  At the lunch table she could only pick at her plate. And he told her that he had a surprise in store for her tomorrow. How would she like a day in Broadstairs? Not, he added, that they had much choice.

  ‘No choice? For one thing, I’m working tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s all fixed.’

  ‘Fixed, is it? So would you mind telling me how much else in my life has been fixed?’

  ‘It will do you good, a breath of sea air. And for me it’s duty—the sort of outing that doesn’t fall in one’s lap every day.’

  ‘I think I might have been asked. Broadstairs! Are you trying to break my heart?’

  ‘It’s in the best of causes. And in any case, it’s orders.’

  ‘Whose orders?’

  ‘Shiner’s.’

  ‘And since when have I been working for Shiner?’

  ‘That’s neither here nor there. I would have thought, for the sake of finding out who killed your mother—’

  Outburst: the boiling over of the pot.

  ‘What does it matter who killed her? Will that bring her back?’

  Was she so far gone that she couldn’t steer clear of a cliché like that?

  ‘What’s the point of dredging? What do you expect me to find for you in Broadstairs? I haven’t set foot there since I was four.’

  Her mother, in fact, had always refused to the point of anger to go back to the Thanet coast. At the age of thirteen or fourteen, Anne had had twisted thoughts about what might be so horrifying to her mother in the thought of Broadstairs.

  ‘Well, point number one is that I’m not an element in anybody’s brief. Point number two is that I wouldn’t even be able to find the house we lived in.’

  ‘That is the point. If you saw it again, you might remember.’

  ‘I don’t want to remember anything.’

  ‘In that case, I’ll let Shiner know. He said not to press you. I’ll go on my own—if he thinks that’s worth while.’

  Her nausea was so bad that she closed her eyes and felt as if she were about to fall over backwards.

  ‘Are you all right, darling?’

  ‘Of course I’m not all right.’

  Kenworthy walked round the end of the counter of the radio parts shop that Lionel Friedman’s son ran in Warren Street. The onset of video had put a new line of goods in the window. Terry Friedman did not know Kenworthy, and tried to put his anything but formidable body in the way.

  ‘Law,’ Kenworthy said.

  ‘You’ll stay on that side, unless you’ve a warrant. I was gone over last week—and found clean.’

  ‘I’m not looking for dirty pictures. I want a word with your dad.’

  ‘You ask first, then. Who are you?’

  ‘Kenworthy.’

  Only seconds later, young Friedman—he was not far under fifty—was back, sullen, because his father suddenly wanted a red mat laid out for the fuzz.

  Lionel Friedman was an old man whose years had taken flesh off a frame not too well endowed with it in the first place. It was twenty years, at Kenworthy’s round guess, since Lionel had last done anything significantly unlawful. He’d done porridge—not a lot—and the time had come, in sight of his pension, when he had decided that he was too old to face another basinful. He had disposed of his plates and presses and some, though not all, of his engraving tools. Kenworthy thought he knew who had bought them—but that information was not for direct question. And in retirement, old Lionel had lost neither his eye nor his willingness to learn. He was not by nature an idle man. At the moment he was doing something with a soldering iron to the circuit of a pocket calculator, the specification spread out on the bench in front of him.

  ‘Unexpected pleasure, Mr Kenworthy.’

  ‘Unexpected necessity, Mr Friedman.’

  ‘You know I’ve been retired a long time now, Mr Kenworthy.’

  ‘Except for very special favours for very special clients.’

  ‘Off-target, Mr Kenworthy. I’d have to be bloody desperate to risk the sort of company they put me with last time.’

  He set down his soldering iron.

  ‘I mean, I was a professional. You’ve got to admit that. They slammed me up with a couple of tea-leaves. From south of the river.’

  Kenworthy looked round for a chair, had to make do with a stool.

  ‘Just pulling your pisser, Lionel. If I wasn’t ready to believe every word you say, I wouldn’t waste my time coming here. I need help.’

  ‘Anything I know is twenty years old.’

  ‘I’ll split the difference. I only want to go back six. Birth certificates.’

  And Friedman laughed—as near to a belly-laugh as a man with no belly could manage.

  ‘Never touched them. You won’t find many who would. They take a narrow view of anything connected with that sort of caper—ladle out the gruel with a JCB.’

  ‘They weren’t too ungenerous with those cheque-books you did, were they?’

  ‘Don’t be unkind, Mr K—I had a lot of expenses at the time.’

  ‘I’m sorry—I ought to have asked—how is Nora?’

  ‘Never looked back since she had her bits and pieces out.’

  ‘She must have been glad to see you settle down. Now—birth certificates. You never handled them. I believe you. But suppose—just suppose—you’d had some big domestic expense in your youth. You needed a birth certificate blank for a top-paying client. You’d have known where to get one?’

  ‘Very expensive,’ Friedman said. ‘Like paying corkage on your own South African plonk in the Dorchester. There was one man. You know him. A loner.’

  Friedman looked down at the wiring of the calculator as if it were calling him.

  ‘So you won’t need me to say his name.’

  ‘I knew a chap who once supplied Giro cheques for a supplementary benefits hand-out. But the job had to be called off.’

  But Lionel Friedman was too old a hand to be caught by a superior-knowledge ploy.

  ‘That would have been a mug’s game,’ he said, switching on his iron. ‘Don’t think I’m trying to hurry you.
It takes this thing a bit to warm up.’

  ‘You disappoint me, Lionel.’

  ‘When I pulled out, Mr Kenworthy, I pulled out from both sides. I don’t fancy losing my looks to a chivver. I have Nora to think about.’

  ‘OK, I’ll try elsewhere. But if anyone should drop in in the next day or two and whip you round to Victoria Street for questioning about video-tapes, try asking for me. I might have an ounce or two I can throw into the balance.’

  Friedman tested his iron with a moistened fingertip.

  ‘You’re a pack of bastards, you lot.’

  ‘Listen, Lionel—six years ago, a young woman—’

  ‘I don’t see that it concerns me.’

  ‘It concerns me. Because a few days ago this woman died. She died in her bath. The mains supply had somewhere got mixed up in the water. I expect you’ll have heard about it.’

  ‘And you think I can tell you anything about that?’

  ‘It all turns on birth certificates—six years ago.’

  ‘She didn’t get them off me.’

  ‘There aren’t many others she could have got them off. And what defeats me is how would she have known where to go.’

  ‘I was out of the game by then. Out of all the games.’

  Kenworthy got up and wandered a few paces about the grubby little workshop.

  ‘I gather one of our DI’s has started showing an interest in your son.’

  There was a bloodshot spot in one of Lionel’s eyes.

  ‘You’ll get nothing out of me that way. There’s nothing to be got out.’

  ‘Spicer’s Roller Towel Service—that’s how you’re all taking delivery, I hear. Not dirty tapes—just pirated ones, Lionel. A word in your ear: there’s a drive on.’

  ‘They’ve been and done us over. There was nothing for them to find.’

  ‘There will be next time.’

  Both Friedman and Kenworthy knew that evidence could sometimes be where a DI wanted it.

  ‘All right. But it wouldn’t do for him to know that I’d sent you to him. Let me go and see him first. Let me go and explain to him, Mr Kenworthy. Because it’s Swannee Foster.’

  He said the name as if he expected it to be the universal passport to special treatment.

  ‘How soon can you get to him, Lionel?’

  ‘Tomorrow. If you could put off going there until after four o’clock tomorrow afternoon, Mr Kenworthy—’

  ‘I’ll be there at five past,’ Kenworthy said.

  Chapter Eleven

  Howard had not rung the DI. If he had felt diffident about disturbing him at home on a weeknight, he felt even less keen on a Sunday. Tomorrow morning he would report that Anne had wakened up more than usually under the weather. But on the Monday morning she was up before he was, had made him tea. Howard’s mother was also padding about in the kitchen, in a green quilted housecoat.

  Anne was determined to fight her malaise down. She was going to Broadstairs with Howard today if her sickness blinded her. Howard was shaken by how ghastly she looked.

  ‘They’re not expecting you in today, anyway,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not going in. I’m coming with you.’

  No one was going to say that she was a spoke in his wheel. She made it to the passenger seat of their G registration Cortina. Once they had started moving, she told herself, once she had wound down the window, once there was cool, non-smelling air on her face, she’d feel better. This thing came and went in phases.

  ‘Stop somewhere and buy me some mints—Glacier mints.’

  They were the only thing she felt safe to have in her mouth. Rain started at Sittingbourne, one of those grey, sea-mist drizzles that sometimes hang over the Thames estuary like a damp Shetland blanket. She had never even known their postal address in Broadstairs, but she had a vague hope that she might recognize their road when she saw it. It had been a long, straight road, leading down to the sea from a highway where red buses ran.

  ‘You talked about a beach with a natural arch,’ Howard said. ‘If we could find that, things might start coming back to you. And this sort of weather often changes when the tide turns.’

  ‘What am I supposed to be looking for?’ she asked, as they drove out of Whitstable. They had left the main road to look for a coffee. She had nibbled without after-effect at a Kitkat.

  ‘Maybe some shop you used to go in with your mother. That might take us to a face that you recognize—someone we could ask—someone who might remember more than you do. We can surely find your kindergarten.’

  They came in along the Margate sea-front, past the Royal Sea Bathing Hospital and Dreamland. She twisted in her seat as they approached the Harbour.

  ‘That must be where I had the ice-cream with the sparklers. The name looks Italian. But I don’t remember any of this.’

  It was not clear whether the tide had turned or not, but there was no change in the weather. Putting Cliftonville behind them, they started looking at beaches. It was not long before they came upon the arch. And it did lead down to an enclosed cove, which a storm had littered with great boulders of chalk.

  ‘Do you remember this?’

  ‘It’s no use saying I do. And what this beach needs is a fringe of palms.’

  Leading up from the green clifftop were three parallel avenues: large pre-Second World War villas at the lower end, earlier houses in the upper reaches.

  ‘I’ve got a feeling the school was in one of those half-timbered places.’

  They walked past them all, and found no kindergarten.

  ‘Are you sure you feel up to this?’

  ‘I’m enjoying it. I like the quiet. I even like the cold air.’

  And that was true. This was one of her better hours. He went to the door of one of the large houses to ask, learned that the school had ceased to exist more than ten years ago. The proprietress-headmistress had died. She had operated in a double-fronted mock-Tudor now called Channel Winds.

  Anne looked in at the gateway. Three enormous bay windows must have belonged to the main schoolroom. Where had they been let out to play? She had a memory of a sandpit, a climbing-frame. There were no signs of climbing-frame or sandpit here.

  ‘Where’s it all gone? I was happy here. Now it’s as if I’d never seen it before. It’s depressing.’

  ‘It’s a depressing day.’

  Behind them the sea was a continuous surge, even the cliff-edge merging into mist fifty yards away.

  ‘But you know what,’ Anne said. ‘I could find my way home from here.’

  Home: the word fell naturally from her lips. It was the first time she had used it in this context.

  ‘Not by taking thought, as the Bible puts it. But by letting my footsteps take me.’

  ‘Let them take you, then.’

  She walked a pace ahead of him; it was her expedition now. They took a side-road, between garden hedges, into the second of the avenues. Then a similar link-road brought them into the third road. The sea was both behind them now and in front. They were on the very tip of Thanet, of Kent, of England. Behind the houses opposite must be the cornfields she had seen from her bedroom window. A foghorn was sounding on a distant sandbank.

  ‘It must have been one of these.’

  They had reached a row of less prosperous houses—though they were far from impoverished. There were eight of them in a terrace, three-storeyed, with mansard windows. They had small front gardens, in one of them a honeysuckle hedge, clematis climbing a porch, paintwork in good trim.

  ‘I think it was one of those in the middle.’

  ‘We’ll walk slowly past. Look at the patterns of the doors. Some of them have stained-glass panels. One of those might remind you.’

  But they roused nothing in her. An elderly man came out of one of the doors, hobbled to his gate, leaned out bending forward from the base of his spine.

  ‘Mr Okapi!’

  The man turned to look her full in the face with damp, irritable eyes; no recognition—only the one-way resentment of sen
ility. He turned and went into the house without speaking.

  ‘Another of your menagerie?’

  ‘Out of the same picture-book. I used to call him that. He used to wear a pullover with a band of stripes round the bottom. He liked being called Mr Okapi. We were good friends.’

  ‘He’s probably living with a son or daughter.’

  A woman appeared at the door of the house.

  ‘Mrs Harrington?’

  Anne remembered. Mrs Harrington remembered. She called her Anne Cresswell. There was a scene of incredulous joy. The woman was comfortably middle-aged, uninhibitedly sentimental.

  ‘You used to collect dandelion leaves for my rabbit. Your mother always looked so unbelievably young to have had you. Then, not a word of warning, a taxi at the gate, and you were away. My father—a stroke—but he knew you when you called him Mr Okapi. He came in and said—’

  Mrs Harrington even had some badly shot box-camera snapshots of Anne and her mother. Jean Cossey looked singularly uncare-ridden.

  ‘Was there anything else that struck you about that sudden departure?’ Howard asked.

  The question and its tone puzzled Mrs Harrington.

  ‘What sort of thing would you call striking?’

  ‘Had there been, for example, any unusual callers?’

  ‘I’m not a peeper round curtain edges.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re not. But wasn’t there something of a mystery about the whole thing? If you’d seen anything odd, you’d have talked about it among yourselves, wouldn’t you?’

  Anne took no part in this. She went over and put a hand on Mrs Harrington’s father’s arm.

  ‘I thought you didn’t know me outside just now, Mr Okapi.’

  ‘He hasn’t found his voice properly,’ Mrs Harrington said. ‘He’s shy about talking to strangers. He says he croaks like a frog. His voice is all right, isn’t it? Tell him his voice is fine, Anne.’

  Howard came back to his questioning.