The Hobbema Prospect

by John Buxton Hilton

  At a quarter past three, Kenworthy went out. They knew that in the general office, because he rang down for them to record a call that he was expecting. A sort of tension was always lifted when Kenworthy left the premises.

  Anne turned to her next file. It referred to one of those fringes of Epping Forest where there were still trees. It was an Essex case, but there had been massive co-operation from the Met because the abduction had very probably been into Greater London.

  In 1962, Bernadette Antonia Anselme had apparently gone up in vapour from the sunny play-garden of a convent-orphanage. Substitution had played a large part in Bernadette’s life. Her given name had derived from the saint’s day on which she had first been taken into the care of the sisters. She was a foundling: a carry-cot in a telephone kiosk. Medical opinion had certified a healthy child, clean and warmly dressed in new clothes of good quality. Whoever had abandoned her had not been totally without conscience. Also in the kiosk had been a couple of dozen new nappies and a basic kit of safety-pins, cotton wool and patent baby foods.

  Jean Cossey? There was a roundabout concern for Bernadette’s welfare, and that was the way that Anne’s mother had sometimes done things. Had she left the child in the kiosk, then later, falling on better fortunes, crept in and taken her back? It posed difficult questions: she would somehow have had to be able to identify the child and its whereabouts.

  Inquiries into Bernadette’s case had led nowhere. Everything possible seemed to have been covered. It would take any genius Kenworthy possessed to wring anything out of that file.

  Interruption: a call to be recorded for Kenworthy.

  ‘Hold on, please, Superintendent Bartram,’ the girl on the switch-board said. She checked the state of the cassette and inserted a fresh one. Apparently Bartram had said that he expected to be talking for a long time.

  Another file: Anne lifted the corner of a wad of papers, thicker than any other she had handled today. The top sheet was relatively uninformative: a flimsy in which a man called Toplady informed an officer called Heather that someone called Guppy had seen these papers and was unhappy about them.

  Within a dozen pages, Anne was enthralled. By the twentieth she was conscious of a fluttering change in her pulse rate. Why should she want to be this girl, rather than one of the others? Was it because this sort of origin seemed so much more desirable? More exciting, certainly—

  Towards the end of the file, there were a number of envelopes containing exhibits. She sifted through them—then called over to Jane to know whether she had heard Kenworthy come in again yet.

  He hadn’t. The other girl changed her cassette. Bartram was still at it.

  The case on file followed a relatively familiar pattern. Except for one or two features, it was almost a series of criminals’ clichés.

  A child had been kidnapped, the two-year-old daughter of parents who could have unbuckled a significant ransom. Between these parents, things were not all they might have been. Years of bickering had broken into open warfare. When they saw the ransom conditions they delivered battle on each other afresh. The police had already been informed that the child was missing—had wandered away, it seemed, from a daydreaming nursemaid, from a lawn into a neighbouring woodland. When the demand arrived, the mother let the police know at once. The father thought otherwise. He stormed at his wife. The police would mess about with faked bundles of money, a pick-up point, a timed ambush, insisting that the release of the child should be shrewdly synchronized. It had all happened before. The father did not share the mother’s pathetic confidence in the sensitivity of the law. Shrewd synchronization needed sensitive management. One over-conspicuous plain-clothesman, loitering where no man would loiter without purpose, and the whole sequence would be blown. Capital punishment was a thing of the past: they might well kill the child if that was the only way of avoiding a long prison-sentence. It had all happened before.

  The parents did not agree to go their own ways. They simply went them. The mother treated with the police, and a Chief Inspector Heather took over the production number. The father knew in outline what was planned. He said that he was happy to see Heather in charge.

  In the meanwhile, he himself had contacted the kidnappers, through a channel that they had stipulated. He quite unscrupulously let them know that he was acting independently of his wife, and that if they made any arrangements with her, they would be trapped. They must deliver the child to him, at least twenty-four hours before the curtain time that Heather was proposing. Edwin Booth was apparently that kind of man, that kind of bully.

  Edwin Booth—author of a tattered paperback, Four Marys, with which Jean Cossey had refused to part for a jumble sale …

  It was not known to the compiler of the file whether Edwin Booth intended to hand over good money or not. It was not clear whether Chief Inspector Heather knew of his independent plans—or whether Heather was a crafty opportunist, perpetually prepared for everything.

  What did happen was that Heather’s men were waiting in the wings for Edwin Booth’s rendezvous, which took place at a riverside edge of Booth’s compact but highly desirable estate. Diane Booth was also out of doors that night, which suggested bad security on somebody’s part—another point which the file did not clear up: no wonder Guppy and Toplady had been dissatisfied. There was gunplay under cover of darkness. Diane Booth was shot and died of internal haemorrhages in hospital at Burford. The child, Edwina, was heard to shout for her parents, and then to scream. There was blood on the grass at a spot close to where her voice had come from. The blood-group was hers.

  She was never seen again. Those who had come to collect the ransom—a trio?—a quartet?—made an escape of which Chief Inspector Heather could not have been proud. His ultimate interview with Toplady and Guppy must have been chillier than anything that went down on paper. Edwina Booth disappeared untraceably, as had Stella Davidge of Northwood Hills, Baby Eltersley of Arnos Grove, and Bernadette Antonia Anselme from the grounds of a nunnery in Epping Forest.

  Edwin Booth was a novelist. He had written three runaway bestsellers, one of them a runaway trilogy. He had had two peak-hour television adaptations, which had also done well in the States, and had been sold to more than one European network. He was a man who had anticipated the swinging decade. He had gambled on the outcome of the Lady Chatterley trial. His As Other Men Were dead-heated with the emancipation of the four-letter word. ‘The nineteenth century novel in twentieth century orbit’, a reviewer said. ‘Balzac on skids. The Human Comedy with the brake off.’ Some of the less enthusiastic critics were equally pithy. ‘Warts et praetera nihil,’ someone wrote of Roundhead.

  Diane Booth had been eight years her husband’s junior, a Country Life frontispiece as Diane Keightley, and heiress to the Ross and Keightley silk mills, where manmade fibres had been anticipated by five patent-registering years. It was his wife’s capital that enabled Booth to pull off his most fruitful gamble. He was under no publisher’s contract for royalties: he had commissioned his own work on win-all-lose-all terms—he was not a man who ever considered losing. He was, in fact, his own publisher, and did not delegate intermediate stages. For the rest of his creative days, he had gone on pocketing a good deal more than an author’s normal share of the takings.

  At the time of the kidnapping, his home had been a custom-built villa on the Upper Thames, between Lechlade and Radcot. He was now tax-havened in Jersey.

  Anne Lawson had known none of this about him. She had glanced at no more than a page or two of Four Marys. It was obvious to her now that she was of exactly the right age to be his daughter. And she liked to think that she had the right sort of mind for the offspring of a creative spirit. It was difficult to see where Jean Cossey could come into the picture, but Kenworthy might have ideas about that.

  Anne turned to the packet of photographs, mostly angles of rooms and the grounds of a modern country property: a patio edging a swimming pool. She felt certain that somewhere in the sheaf that she was holding there would
be a police technician’s shot of the Hobbema avenue. But she riffled through the pictures in vain. There was no such scene: only modern rooms—as modern, at any rate, as the late 1950’s—bucket chairs, massive, machine-turned, two-door television consoles, a man’s study with a rather ugly microphone to record for an audio-typist.

  There were people, too—not posed, not studio portraits, but opportunist shots, taken from long distances by zoom lenses: a transgression against normal police regulations holding on record the activities of people against whom no charge was contemplated. Edwin Booth was amusing himself teaching a pair of Alsatians to jump over a hurdle. His wife was wearing an immaculate gardening apron, pruning a rose. Baby Edwina was crawling by an inlet of river-bank, a setting suitable for Toad, Mole and Water Rat. Anne felt another leap of adrenalin: could that be her at the age of two, in floral dungarees and a frilly sun-bonnet? There was a profile of a girl who must surely be the negligent nursemaid: something familiar about her. Ought Anne to recognize her? An obvious theory erupted, but had to be put down straight away: in no way was this girl like Jean Cossey. Anne carried the portrait over to a better light. There was something supercilious about the girl, who had qualified no doubt on some elite nursery-nursing course, had probably been appointed as much for her social acceptability as for any particular devotion.

  There were shots of the child’s bedroom: a Beatrix Potter frieze and a well-ordered line-up of expensive toys, the largest teddy-bear she had ever seen. But there was something else, too—a toy that did not belong to this generation. It was a bird in flight with wings outstretched, a bird made of blue felt, with one eye missing. Even on a print such as this, the gap was visible. And this time Anne knew she was not fantasizing. She knew that bird.

  She had always been afraid of it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.’

  Bartram’s voice breezed from the tape.

  ‘There’s nowt so funny as folk.’

  However feeble, he had to start with his joke.

  ‘You just can’t believe what can be set in motion when Mum and Dad won’t extend their tastes in music. Neither would young Jean.’

  ‘There’s been murder for less,’ Kenworthy muttered to himself. ‘Stone the crows, Bartram—get on with it.’

  ‘Black and White Minstrel Show, that was about the measure of Ma and Pa Pogson’s musicology. Note the name: Pogson. I don’t know where she dug the Cresswell and the Carter and the Cossey from. Anyway, she was a right little rock’n’ roller when she was fourteen. Bill Haley, Chubby Checker, Enis the Penis. Of course, this was before the Beatles. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again—’

  When the blazes was he going to come to the point?

  ‘What was I on about? They used to call some of us squares. The Pogsons were so square, they could have shat potato-chips. They were the first generation everything. First generation to have more than ninepence credit at the corner shop. First generation to be able to put ten per cent down on their own house.

  ‘But that’s progress, you see, Kenworthy—and there’s nowt so deadly as progress. Progress makes people respectable—and that can be a right killer. Ernie Pogson’s father had been out of work right through the ’thirties. Spent all of every morning dubbining Ernie’s football boots—just to have something to do. Supplest bit of football leather on Lower Shitheap Recreation Ground, Ernie had on his feet. Then the war took Ernie places: Padgate, RAF armourer. Went up in the world, if not in an aeroplane. Leading aircraftman: got a propeller on his arm by the time he was demobbed. Bizerta. Cairo. Saw the Great Pyramid. Came home and found his mother had taken up cigarette-smoking at the age of eighty-three. Don’t worry, Kenworthy—I’m coming to it.

  ‘Ernie’s demobbed. Gets taken on at Potter’s. Office job. Marries Liz Beadle, white wedding, topped off with ham salad at Robinson’s caff. Liz Beadle had grown up arse-rag poor up Snothole Nab: that’s Lancashire for Stonehill Bank. The most respectable crap-pile in the County Palatine, is Snothole. More chapels than pubs. No cross, no crown, you know. People have to have something to believe in, even up Snothole.

  ‘Enter Jean. First generation Pogson or Beadle to go to a grammar school. Won the scholarship, as they still called it. Big future for her: brilliant woman surgeon, first female barrister with chambers in Toe-Rag Street. Matron of Bloodbottle Hospital. Well—she might have made it into a bank or a library, but that wasn’t what she wanted. Musical: Johnny Mathis and Cliff Richard. When she was fifteen, she put her name down for a crooning competition at the Phoenix Hotel. Old Ernie went spare. I feel for him, poor old sod.

  ‘She’d all these records of the Everley Brothers, Guy Mitchell, Freddy Fart-Arse and his Fanny-fumbling Five. Life in that house was one livelong bloody battle—and it was all about music. Of course they’d bought her a record-player. Of course they were delighted when her friends came round, jealous of it. But once their munificence had been put on show, it lost its purpose as far as Ma and Pa were concerned. And what was the use of a record-player when they were always wanting it off because Friday Night was Music Night?

  ‘Then Gwen Beecham went to live in London. That was what did it. Gwen Beecham has a lot to answer for. She was a year or two older than Jean. She used to see her across the road when Jean was a Mixed Infant. I got most of what I’m telling you from Gwen Beecham. If you remember, old Nellie Gregory wasn’t impressed by Gwen. Well, that’s less than fair, because I don’t see much wrong with her, except what life’s dealt her. But she was one of those who wanted away from the cotton valleys—and she was one of the first of her lot to make it. And there was nothing unrespectable about her early London days—except for a tendency to talk a bit larger than life. She went to London, started off living with her mother’s cousin, did a run-of-the-mill commercial course, sighed for independence, and went to live at the YWCA. And she surely did get around: she could even afford a pop concert once a month. She got the autograph of a man called Johnny Pewter—even reckons to have spoken to him. That was big stuff to write to young Jean about. Why don’t you come to London when you leave school? No place like it.

  ‘You and I know, Kenworthy—you a lot better than me—how many kids did that. We’ve lost a tidy lot from up here. You know how many you picked up and sent home—and you’ve some notion of how many you didn’t. And Jean hadn’t been there long before she became an embarrassment to Gwen Beecham. Gwen had never believed the kid would actually show up, just like that, with no job, no training, and so-called savings that wouldn’t pay more than a week or two’s rent. And Jean must have seen through Gwen in a day or two. Where the hell was Johnny Pewter? Gwen took her to see him from the back of the upper circle; she could have managed that at the Manchester Palace. And Gwen was a working girl. She came home hungry and tired of an evening. Jean had time on her hands. She started finding her own friends, one in particular, a lass who called herself Angela. Gwen took an active dislike to that one.’

  And it was at this point in the tape that one of the most glacial and self-glorious of the top corridor secretaries rang. Would Chief Superintendent Kenworthy report to the Commander at seven minutes past eleven, please? That was one of the Commander’s gimmicks—settling the brevity of appointments in advance.

  ‘Yes,’ Kenworthy said. ‘I’ll be there. What does he think he is—a blooming train?’

  Anne read the Booth file again slowly, checking each personality in turn against the photographs. Could she really have lived in that house, in those grounds? Could she have played along that stretch of river-bank? Was she in danger of forcing false memories on herself? She studied the pictures of Mrs Booth, tried to imagine what it would be like, having a woman like that for a mother: a woman in her thirties, who did not have to do mental arithmetic in supermarkets, who complained when she wasn’t properly noticed by the Tatler, who didn’t keep her gin in a walnut wardrobe. There was something extraordinarily new about the gardening apron, as if she had put
it on only for that moment, and would never wear it again. Anne could not imagine calling her Mummy.

  Yet the memory of the hanging bluebird was indelible. She had always hated that bird. She had been afraid of it, as one is afraid of the unnatural and unnamed. It had once scorched its way into the sick dreams of a childhood fever. It smelled of dust and departed generations. She remembered screaming for it to be taken away. And they had taken it away, though not out of the room. They had hung it over in a far corner, and she was afraid of turning over in bed, for fear she should see it.

  Anne stayed in the office after the others had gone, telling them she was making up the time she had lost this morning. She waited until it was too late for any of the commuter trains at which she usually aimed. At half past six she wrote a covering note to Kenworthy and took the files up to his room. The cleaners were already in. She put the folders down conspicuously on his desk. One of his pipes lay in its bowl of ash, its bowl unevenly charred, the mouthpiece dented by his corner teeth.

  As she checked herself out at the front desk, she was beginning to feel light-headed: she had eaten no food all day. She told herself that she had enough common sense to try to eat something before committing herself to British Rail. She had always found the surrounds of Victoria disappointing snack country, but there was one stand-up counter that she had found tolerable in the past. She ordered a cheese sandwich. And tea or coffee? The thought of either was repellent. There was alleged orangeade in a container that had two plastic fruit floating round in it. She asked for a glass and, oddly, it seemed to be what her system was craving. But after two bites at the sandwich, she laid it aside.

  She looked at her watch, was happy to see that she had missed yet another train. They would be growing uneasy at the Lawsons’ now. What would happen if she were to live up to her half-threat and not go ‘home’? Why shouldn’t she put up at a hotel somewhere? She knew in the centre of her brain that she would do no such thing. But it was amusing—and comforting—to pretend that she had not made up her mind about it yet. At this rate, it would be getting on for nine before she was home, anyway. And when she did get there, she’d go straight to bed. Horizontality was what her condition demanded. She thought of the microscopic little fish-like creature that Howard had activated inside her. When were she and Howard going to get the chance to be themselves?