The Hobbema Prospect

by John Buxton Hilton

  Outside the café buses were edging forward like great red bullies, nosing into the flocks of street-crossers. The peakhour tide was spent, but hordes were still charging both ways, as if every man, woman and child were under some nightmare urge to be on the move. She leaped out of the way of a taxi, did not catch what was said by the driver of another one that she had not seen. Every telephone-box under the entrance arch was occupied. That was a good excuse for not making the call that she had no intention of making, anyway. Let them wonder.

  A man stepped forward from among the loose scrum outside the kiosks, holding out a 50p piece.

  ‘Do you happen to have change?’

  He would be in his early forties, might once have been considered good-looking—by some. Certainly he had not yet given up fancying himself. She was tempted to show him the sight of her shoulders, told herself not to be churlish, stopped to look in her bag, though she felt certain she was not carrying so much coin. He thanked her, and made a rush for a kiosk that someone was leaving.

  She went and found an empty compartment: one recompense at least for working late. The floor was filthy, the windows grimed, obscenities pointlessly scrawled on the walls. Heads and shoulders passed the window, eyes looked in at her, passed on. Then the door opened, men were rushing in past her knees, a lot of them, it seemed, and noisy, conscious only of their own entity, as if they were a rugger team on the move. They had been drinking, were laughing loudly at something recently shared. Somebody clambered clumsily over her feet, someone else sat down at her side, not looking what he was doing, setting his buttocks down on an open flap of her coat. She tried to tug it away from him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, got up to release her, looking at her with sexy appraisal, breathing beer into her face. She pressed herself impossibly tighter into the window-corner. The man was leaning against her heavily now, trying to get at something in his pocket: cigarettes, though it was a non-smoker. Something hurt her arm. He continued to lean.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  She made signs that she wanted to stand up. He got up himself to allow her to do so. She opened the door, got out, walked down the train, found a compartment with only one or two in it. Ten minutes after the time-tabled departure time, she was still staring at the same patch of grey platform.

  Sleep of a sort settled over her as they hauled up to Battersea: dreams that weren’t dreams—images that merged—the child by the river’s edge—the arrogant nursemaid. Brixton. Clapham. Herne Hill. Her eyes opened, saw a blue signboard over an office in a siding: Approved Coal Merchant. Her eyes closed again, saw Diane Booth’s rose-pruning apron. Worn to be photographed pruning that one bush?

  In an instantaneous lifting of her eyelids, she glimpsed the playing fields of Dulwich College, the green fading into twilight. Then a deeper sleep engulfed her, no mere head-nodding cat-nap. She sank down into an immeasurable gulf of dreamlessness. She felt as if she were both in sleep and out of it, seeing her own sleep from outside it. It was like being in hospital: anaesthetics. She had had her appendix out when she was twelve, had felt the pain and the apprehension fade away under pre-medication. Then had come the tiniest prick in the back of her hand: not painful, not even startling.

  Paradoxically, it had been gratifying, an assurance that someone was caring for her, that the anaesthetist was her friend.

  Timelessness. She was no longer outside her sleep. In the hospital that time, when it was all over, she had wakened first momentarily, to see the square lines of the ward window opposite, a carafe of water, a Get Well card on her locker.

  But now she was coming to in a jolting, tobacco-ridden chilliness, a gut-heaving stale dustiness of car upholstery. She was on the back seat. A man and a woman were in front of her. She closed her eyes again. But then she forced herself jerkily awake, grasping for understanding.

  She was in a car, sprawled out on the seat. Over the heads of the couple in front of her, she could see the unkempt hedges of a neglected lane. And trees: Hobbema’s trees. No: they were not Hobbema’s trees. They were different from Hobbema’s. But these were the trees.

  My God—

  Chapter Fourteen

  The fulcrum of the Lawsons’ evening was to have been the thirteenth and final instalment of Is he Popenjoy? after the nine o’clock news. But none of them could concentrate. When Howard’s father got up and switched off the set after five or six minutes of the play, that was the feeling of the meeting.

  Not that it was late enough yet for them to have quite run out of rational explanations. The one thing that neither Howard nor his mother had mentioned was Anne’s veiled threat to find somewhere else to live. At half past eight, Howard had rung up the Yard, but Anne’s department was shut down for the night. He rang Jane Dewhurst at home. All she could tell him was that Anne had said she would work late. It was easy to picture her taken ill on the way home. She ought not to have been at her desk at all today. It was not feasible for one man to ring every casualty department to which she might have been taken between SW1 and these south-eastern extremities, but Howard started making a list of the major ones. At a few minutes after ten, he rang Wright’s home. Shiner was out, but his wife was an affable woman to whom he found it somehow easier to explain the situation than it would have been to Shiner.

  ‘I’ll tell him as soon as he comes in. I’m sure everything will come out in the wash. Do let me know if you hear any news in the meanwhile.’

  Just after half past eleven, Shiner rang back himself.

  ‘You’ve got on to the hospitals?’

  ‘All the big ones.’

  ‘Try British Rail. They probably have no machinery for collating minor incidents, but if anything out of the ordinary has happened, someone may know about it.’

  Nothing. But it was customary for the arches and concourse of Victoria Station to be manned by an unobtrusive detective-constable, and the one on duty knew Anne by sight, having met her at some social function. He had seen her come through the main entrance, had watched her open her bag and look for change for the man outside the telephones. Then he had moved over to keep an eye on a beery bunch who were converging on the Sevenoaks train. He saw Anne come out of their compartment and find herself another. He did not blame her for that.

  But it was not until fairly late the next morning that this piece of information was paid into the system: the officer concerned had gone off duty, and did not learn until midmorning what had happened to Anne. Inquiries were by that time strung out over a distance, and everything was being gone into, however unlikely it seemed. Thus another memorandum that reached Wright’s desk at about the same time was that last night a woman had been taken off Shortlands Station, between Beckenham and Bromely, in a wheelchair—a folding model that had been carried in the guard’s van. There was nothing to connect her with Anne. No description worth having. But the item was logged: a woman travelling with companions—a man and a woman.

  Hobbema’s trees—

  Anne had no idea what time of day it was. Actually, it was very early morning, with dewy dampness in ill-kempt hedgerows, a good deal of busy bird-life—and no signs of human activity. It was that kind of lane which in the Fen country is called a Drove—a straight and unmetalled road, overgrown with grasses, that led between the drainage channels of the low-lying land.

  But Anne did not take the landscape in immediately. Despite the need to be alert, her desire for sleep was still uppermost. But the wheels were bumping cruelly along the earthy ruts, which did not make for comfort. She tried to do something about her position.

  Her head was twisted backwards and her neck felt as if it were breaking. The circulation in her right arm seemed to have stopped.

  This was not the Hobbema dream. This avenue was for real. There were bulrushes growing at the edge of a dyke: they were real bulrushes. The water in the ditch was floating with green weed. A coot retreated frantically as they passed. About the tangled vegetation, even about the light of the barely developed dawn, there was a reality, a
chilly common-placeness too convincing for dream.

  So where was she? Holland? Flanders? She was not sure of the nationality of Old Master Hobbema. But she had rejected Hobbema, hadn’t she? Her mind did not seem to be working in logical steps: was jumping about irrationally from one plane to another. She could see the landscape stretching out in unrelieved flatness to the horizon on all quarters. And, exactly as in the dream, there was the vital divergence from Hobbema: the trees led her eye up to a house. It was an ancient house, timber and plaster, the eighteenth century imposed on the seventeenth, evolved from the sixteenth and fifteenth, probably on much earlier foundations.

  ‘I’m going to be sick.’

  The woman in the front passenger seat turned and looked over her shoulder. It was Angela, Jean Cossey’s most recent friend, suave as ever in intention, with a certain shining greasiness under her eye-sockets, as if a long night was beginning to be too much for her too. And as the man at the wheel also turned, Anne saw from his profile that he was someone that she had been before. But she could not yet place him in her mind.

  ‘We shall be there in a minute,’ Angela said. ‘Hold on if you can.’

  But Anne was not able to oblige. She heaved and retched. Angela told the driver to stop, got out and came to the door, helped her out to the edge of the ditch. There was a cold bite in the morning. Anne tried to be sick again, failed, and did not see how she was going to remain on her legs.

  ‘Do you think you can walk to the house?’

  It was about seventy yards away.

  ‘I know I can’t. I feel awful.’

  ‘You’ll feel better in a little while, once you get indoors, and into a bed, and with something warm inside you.’

  Angela was not being particularly sympathetic: simply practical.

  ‘Where is this place? Where are we? What is happening?’

  The man looked at her with unconcealed hostility, assessing her as of sexual habit, rejecting her because of her present state of wretchedness. He needed a shave. He must have been driving most of the night.

  Anne tried to walk a step, tottered groggily, supported herself against the open car door. She looked at the man again and was able to place the face she had seen under the arches at Victoria, asking her for change for the phone. But then the certainty vanished from her again. She could not think. Nothing made sense.

  ‘All right. Get back in the car.’

  They reached the house without getting up speed.

  Kenworthy had taken to arriving at his office early. It helped him to bear BR(SR) at its worst: he did not bring his car into SW1 these days.

  He had got into the habit of walking round the office before anyone arrived. He did not interfere with anything—but information, he told himself shamelessly, was always where you could get it: somebody’s in-tray that did not look as if anything had shifted in it since the day before yesterday. And how far on its rounds had his last All to see memo gone?

  There was little to note this morning—except that Anne Lawson’s desk was clear. He went upstairs. The morning mail—even the overnight internal—had not yet arrived. The cassette of Bartram’s tape was lying tidily on top of the files that Anne had laid there. He set it aside, picked up the first of what Anne had brought him.

  She was a good lass—one of the few in the office who had really grasped the sort of thing that they were looking for. Pity she couldn’t stand pipe smoke.

  He was not impressed by the unsolved stealing from a pram, almost a quarter of a century ago: hardly the depth of field he’d have looked for in Jean Cossey. Unless, of course, this had been an aberration—and she had spent the rest of her life trying to live up to the worst mistake she’d ever made. Wasn’t that roughly what he thought she’d been doing, anyway? Maybe: but it had to have been something a bit less casual than a pram outside a supermarket. That wouldn’t have led her to a path-crossing course with Swannee Foster; at least, Kenworthy could not at this moment see how.

  Abduction from a nunnery garden? That must surely have been some family affair—Catholics, Irish, all that. How the hell did an imbecilic crime like that manage to go unsolved? It made Kenworthy think that somebody hadn’t been bloody well trying.

  He thought back to Stella Davidge. It was on the cards that Stella Davidge had become Jean Cossey; yet somehow the notion did not appeal to him. There was something about Jean Cossey that leaped at him from between her lines. He believed that there had been an earthiness about her, a quick wit, ready to grab the opportunities of the moment; a resolution not to be put down by frustrations. Slodden-le-Woods had been rotten for that pair; but it had been the escape that Jean Cossey had seen for them, and she had stuck it out. That was not a spirit that one naturally associated with the bowler-hat belt. That sort of staying-power was usually the product of a sub-tribal moulding. To build up that core of intuition, you needed hardship behind you. Stella Davidge and Jean Cossey would not have gone for the same sort of man. Stella would have gone for someone who talked riding-school language—another from along the Marylebone line—or else someone who had dropped out of that ethos because he found it as repugnant as she did. It was possible to think of Stella Davidge besotted by an anarchist. But could you imagine Jean Cossey listening to politics—or even anti-politics—for more than twenty minutes or so?

  Kenworthy opened the thick file. And the very first memoslip brought him to life: Toplady, Guppy, Heather—those were names to juggle with, if you still sighed occasionally for the days before the rot set in. Guppy had been an Assistant Commissioner (Crime) whom you kept out of the way of—unless you were winning. Toplady had been Detective Chief Superintendent before they had started throwing the rank of Commander about as lavishly as they did these days. And if it had been Sid Heather’s case, and he had not closed it, then it must have been a rough business.

  The first time through, Kenworthy did not read every page. He got hold of the gist without that—but he did not propose to wait long before getting down to the detail. He rang down to see if Anne had arrived yet. The first flutter of the day was just beginning. Shiner was trying to get through to him on one line, the Commander on another.

  ‘Anne Lawson didn’t get home last night.’

  ‘Kenworthy—what have you got on dead files about missing children, nineteen-fifty-eight to ’sixty-one? Let me have abstracts as soon as you can of all those that went unaccounted for. And don’t forget what I told you yesterday.’

  Yesterday, at 11.07, Commander Cawthorne had been in that mood where he got things done by shafts of unbarbed irony; the barbs came later, if he hadn’t proved his point in the preliminary knock-up.

  ‘Looks to me as if you have more than a finger in this pie that DI Wright is cooking up, Kenworthy.’

  ‘He did come over and talk a few things over with me. We had something in the annals.’

  ‘Which helps to show why our computerizing is fifteen per cent behind target.’

  ‘That target was tentative, if you remember. We’d no real idea then how much reading there was going to be.’

  ‘I just want you to know that I’m taking personal charge of this case, Kenworthy. I’m not averse to help from any man. But I need to have it clear in my mind what help I’m getting—in advance.’

  ‘Sir.’

  Kenworthy never saw any harm in verbal agreement. It saved vexatious arguments. And if there was a Commander for whom he did not give a bugger, it was Cawthorne.

  Chapter Fifteen

  They hustled her in. She formed impressions, but was not allowed to let her eye rest too inquisitively on things. She was aware of a glow of old furniture, a warming-pan, low ceilings, old brown beams, angles listing from subsidence.

  They pushed her upstairs to a mercifully quiet and airy room that was clearly on the least frequented flank of the house. It overlooked a neglected orchard: trees with twisted inner boughs that had not been pruned for years: bindweed taking over gooseberry bushes.

  The couple left her immediately. She
heard the key in the lock. The window had close-set horizontal bars. It was a room custom-adapted as a prison. She must have been here before—but how and when? She knew now that the Hobbema dream was a thrown-up remnant of memory. But what set of circumstances …?

  She could not think. She gave up trying to think. She laid herself fully clothed on the bed and let her eyes close. It could have been half an hour, it could have been three hours, when she was wakened by someone opening her door. It was Angela, apparently rested, her make-up renewed.

  ‘Hi!’

  Spontaneous enough. Anything but unfriendly.

  ‘Still feeling bloody? Just a touch of anaesthetic. I’m sorry we had to put you out. You’ll take no harm.’

  ‘I’m not so sure. I’m pregnant. I ought to see a doctor.’

  ‘Pregnant, are you? I didn’t think anyone ever had honeymoon babies these days. You’re just the sort who’d let that happen to you, aren’t you?’

  Derisive; but not with the cutting edge of embittered hostility.

  ‘How far are you?’

  ‘A few weeks.’

  ‘Yes, well, we’ll keep an eye on you. We need you in good fettle. As for a doctor—you’ll be seeing your own in a day or two, I hope.’

  ‘Would you mind telling me—?’

  ‘Everything—in due course. We shan’t get far unless we have you with us—wholeheartedly. But something to eat, first—’

  ‘It’ll have to be something pretty neutral.’