‘Such as selling the girl back to her father?’
‘It could be that.’
‘What I don’t understand,’ Kenworthy said, ‘is how they think they can get away with that, when it was they who took her in the first place.’
‘They?’
‘Don’t try to outsmart me, Swannee. You know very well you once tried to get Sid Heather to put it down to Len Basset.’
‘Did I? I don’t remember. It doesn’t sound very likely to me. Maybe Sid got hold of the wrong end of the stick.’
As an argument, he did not intend that this should be taken seriously. But there was something of an edge of scalpel steel in Foster’s tone, indicating that he had said all he was going to say. It was an unindexed ingredient of the Swannee legend that the pull he could exercise in high places could start an avalanche. He had helped in his time in other ways, besides national insurance cards.
‘Things have changed, Mr Kenworthy.’
‘Nothing’s changed, Swannee.’
‘No, well—there are two ways of looking at most things. I’ll ask a few questions up and down, I promise you that. And I’ll find some way of getting in touch. I don’t want you coming here again, Mr Kenworthy.’
He spoke in the tone of a man accustomed always to make his own terms.
Detective-Sergeant Lawson lingered at the end of a briefing session waiting for a word with Wright.
‘Is anything happening at all, sir?’
Wright looked at him with eyes that were beginning to show signs of too many hurried snacks, too little exercise, not enough sleep.
‘You know as much as I do, Howard.’
The car which had picked up the invalid chair at Shortlands Station had been properly booked in at the BR car park: its driver must have wanted to avoid any scrapes with even minor officials. The top ranks seemed to think it impossible that that car should have been driven out of Kent. Wright’s squad was dealing in depth with a very narrow sector.
‘I’ve every right to be put where the action is,’ Lawson said.
‘Be your age, Howard. You know damned well no such right exists. And when it comes to personal involvement, there’s only one attitude that prevails at the summit. And I agree with that attitude. You know that too.’
‘Yes, sir, but—’
‘Well, tell me, then—what line ought we to be following?’
What could Howard say? That he had a gut feeling? That the answer might lie somewhere among the airy notions that Anne had in her head? In dreams, and wisps of memory?
‘I know it’s difficult, sir.’
But Wright seemed loath to let it go at that.
‘Howard—suppose I said, “Right—free-lance. Go where you want, and follow up anything your nose runs into.” Which way would you head?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How much leave have you owing to you?’
‘None. Spain took up every half-day I had in credit.’
‘I suppose you could go sick: depression.’
‘Don’t want that on my record.’
‘Nor would I. So concentrate on what you’re doing. Your job is to keep a guiding eye on a dozen DC’s and aides with their questionnaires.’
Commander Cawthorne had turned his conference room into an operations centre that looked as if he were all set to repel airborne invasion. A map of the kingdom had been pinned across accumulated tables. Counters representing provincial help could be thrust up and down with implements that looked uncommonly like billiard-rests borrowed from Recreation. The last sighting of Anne Lawson was still shown as a railway station between Bromley and Beckenham.
Kenworthy went through the proper channels and asked to see Cawthorne.
The evening was fading. After a three-hour session, Angela had gone downstairs—turning the key behind her, though nothing could have been friendlier between them. There were, in fact, at least three Angelas. There was the woman who had lived her own life, had learned all the lessons there were to be learned—and who treated Anne as she had treated her in Jearn Cossey’s flat: with a smug and lofty cynicism. There was the woman who reminisced racily about her transition from Stella Davidge to Basset’s right-hand woman. And there was a third creature, God knows how false, who nevertheless appeared to be Anne’s friend.
Angela had brought her magazines: next month’s Homes and Gardens and a miscellany of paperbacks ranging from Penguin Crime to a Deep South saga that Edwin Booth would not have disowned.
Outside, the trees were being drained of colour in what seemed an abnormally still twilight. Angela had said that she would be back with something for bedtime. From the lower regions of the house came the rise and fall of indistinguishable voices: a radio or TV play. Something had moved through the vegetation in the orchard under the window: some nocturnal hunter coming to life, perhaps a cat reverting to nature.
Now Anne had a new dilemma. The way things had gone, she had drifted into a mindless co-operation with Angela. Did any alternative exist? Did this ludicrous situation itself exist?
Could Edwin Booth possibly have been her father? Everything she had gleaned about the Booths suggested that she would find them totally unsympathetic. But then Angela—whose role in the whole business had been nothing better than shamelessly criminal—could hardly be looked on as an unprejudiced reporter.
Angela confidently expected that Anne would be meeting her father within the next forty-eight hours. That was not something to which Anne could give proper credence. Trying to recharge Anne’s memory, Angela had talked a lot about the old days in the Thames Valley, about walks in the water-meadows, about how Anne, even at the age of two and a half, had insisted to the point of superstition on always following exactly the same sequence of footpaths. Every afternoon had had to follow a ritually undeviating pattern—talking through gaps in the hedge to the same cattle, patrolling the perimeter of the grounds in the same order, throwing crusts to the ducks, all of which she knew by name, knowing precisely which shallows under the bank minnow fry were to be seen. Angela came out of it, even at this range of time, as a bored companion—bored to dementia by the child, jealous of the child’s quality of life, doing no more than keep up the minimal appearance needed to hang on to her job. How infatuated had Edwin Booth been with her—or did it even amount to an infatuation? The way Angela talked about it, it seemed more like a series of acts of sexual evacuation. And what picture emerged of Anne’s mother? She came out of Angela’s talk as no more than a spoiled sex-kitten of whom her husband had grown tired, bored by the facility with which she had always been given everything she had ever asked for.
‘Look, Angela,’ Anne said. ‘This is all very well. You know it’s driving me to distraction not remembering a thing. But all you’re telling me is the things I did when you were supposed to be looking after me. What about relations between me and my parents?’
She was beginning to suspect that this was something that Angela would not know much about.
‘As far as I could see, that didn’t amount to much,’ Angela said. ‘Your father was working and must not be disturbed. Your mother had friends in, or was out visiting—Marlborough, Oxford, the West End. Or resting and not to be bothered.’
‘That’s not going to help me to impress Edwin Booth, is it? There’s barely a word I can say that will persuade him I’m who you say I am. Didn’t anything real ever happen? Didn’t I sometimes have to be punished for misbehaving at table? Or wasn’t I even allowed to eat with them?’
‘As a rule I gave you your meals in the nursery. And of course there’d been a Nanny before me. You were usually expected to go round the grown-ups and say good night.’
‘Great! Didn’t I even get a bedtime story?’
‘Usually from me.’
‘They must have been beauties. Did you start giving me my first lessons in contraception?’
‘There’s no need to be like that.’ Angela said. ‘Now I come to think about it, bedtime stories are something that might be wort
h pursuing. I remember major rows about your bedtime stories. You always preferred your father’s, but he worked to a rigid routine, and your bedtime always came just as he was settling down to do his day’s revision. Whatever you think about his books, he worked like a steam-hammer at them.’
‘That’s obvious from his output.’
‘But if he was in the right mood—which wasn’t often—he would tell you a story, made-up on the spur of the moment, and running on like a serial. And you were a demanding little thing. Let him forget a detail from yesterday, let him forget somebody’s name, and you came down on him like a ton of bricks. But as I say, this didn’t happen often. He was more likely to send you off to your mother for a story. And she’d maybe send you back to him. “You can write books for the pulp-mills,” she’d say. “Can’t you find five minutes for your own flesh and blood?”‘
‘But can’t you fill me in some detail? What sort of stories did he tell me? What were they about?’
‘How the hell should I know what they were about? Your mother read you stories out of books, if you were lucky. Goldilocks, The Wizard of Oz. But you could see her yawning. She’d miss bits out to get the thing over more quickly, and you used to get uptight about that. Sometimes she’d fling the book across the room before she got to the end of it.’
‘Had I any toys?’
‘Any toys? We could have opened a shop.’
‘The only toys I can remember are the ones Jean Cossey bought me.’
‘You had an old doll’s house, a priceless period piece. I once played with it for an hour myself—only you kept getting in my way.’
‘Which toys were my favourites?’
‘Oh, the usual thing—the rag, tag and bobtail. You had a stuffed animal of some sort or other. You’d chewed the dye out of its ears when you were in the teething stage, and it was taken off you because it was unhygienic. You created and wouldn’t go to bed without it.’
‘What did I call it?’
‘You expect me to know that? And that’s pointless, anyway—because Edwin Booth wouldn’t know its name. I doubt if he knew it existed. Now if you could remember some of the things you heard said when he and Diane were having rows—that might convince him.’
‘It’s hopeless,’ Anne said. ‘I can’t even remember them, let alone the things they said.’
‘No—but I might be able to remember for you. I promise you—I’ll be working on it.’
Anne had no patience for any more of this. They did not persevere after that. Angela went downstairs and said she would be back later. After she had gone, Anne thought of another possible line of approach: her friends. She must have been friends with other children. Surely she’d sometimes been invited to parties. She must have had other kids in to play in that garden.
She went and drew her curtains. Outside, it looked like an invigorating spring night. It was a shame to shut it out, a pity to be indoors. It did not seem to her that she would ever be free again.
She heard the creak of a landing floorboard, and someone was having trouble with a key in her door. It did not strike her at first that it would be anyone but Angela, paying her last visit of the day. But it was Basset who came in, wearing a sheeny and flamboyant dressing-gown that might have been designed for the wartime Churchill. His hair was dampplastered down as after a shower, and he had clearly been drinking. His speech was thick and he was having to think about his words. As he turned to lock the door behind himself, he swayed for a moment almost off-balance.
‘So—Angie tells me that your homework is not up to much.’
‘My homework?’
‘You’ve not been remembering like a little girl should.’
‘If I can’t remember, I just can’t. It’s no use flogging the horse any harder.’
He came close to where she was standing.
‘I suppose we shall hear next that you don’t even remember me. I was around from time to time. Have you forgotten how we used to like each other, oh so long ago?’
There was something treacly in his tone that sickened rather than frightened her. He was a man who did not believe that the woman lived who would not find him irresistible.
‘You had a roving eye for passing males when you were two,’ he said. ‘You had a way of smiling at men that showed you had a future.’
He seized her wrists and pulled her towards him. When she tried to draw away, he tightened his grip so that it hurt.
‘You know—you’ve developed.’
‘Let me go.’
‘And you had to go and throw yourself away on a London copper.’
‘I shall scream for Angela.’
He laughed. ‘You think she cares?’
He let go of her left hand, but only to crook his arm round her waist and pull her tight to him. She kicked his shins, and that seemed to make no impression on him. He was a powerful man, and her struggling only had her worse immobilized.
‘Go on, then—scream for Angela. She’ll laugh her head off.’
She did scream, and her mouth, wide open, was close to his ear. He let go of her wrist to clap his hand crudely over her lips.
Angela must still be in the house. She would surely not stand for this.
‘Now listen—’
With her free hand she flew at his face, furrowing deep downward scratches. But it did her no good. He got her wrists together and gripped them agonizingly.
‘Calm down, lady.’
Chapter Nineteen
Kenworthy had to wait to see Cawthorne. He had to wait first for an answer to his request for an appointment, and when that message eventually tracked down from the secretary, the interview was put off until late in the day. And when Kenworthy went up, he was kept hanging about in an ante-room.
The hostility between Kenworthy and Cawthorne went a long way back in time. It was true that there were faults on both sides, but they were not evenly balanced between the sides. It was a relationship that brought out the least useful features of both men. And on the infrequent occasions on which they had to collaborate, they always both became less than fully effective. Today, Cawthorne was playing the game of being joyful to see a subordinate. It was a meaningless act.
‘I know I was warned,’ Kenworthy opened. ‘I know I’ve been trespassing—’
‘In the heat of the moment, Simon, we sometimes say things that we don’t really mean. Anyone who comes up here to shed a little light on this matter is well met.’
Kenworthy let this bland hypocrisy pass by on his blind side. Cawthorne was obviously disposed to a spell of brain-picking.
‘Take this, for example. I can’t think why your bosom friend Wright hasn’t moved heaven and earth to find this woman.’
He passed Kenworthy a typescript report, headed HALLAM, Angela. It emanated from the uniform branch of the Lewisham division.
‘Before you read it, you might as well know, Simon, that I’ve pushed this inquiry down to station level of every force in the country. Angela Hallam—where is she? And more to the point: where was she while the Cossey woman was being electrocuted? Well—we know the answer to the second question now. She was in the company of our Lewisham friends.’
Angela Hallam had driven her Triumph Toledo out of a side-road into the near-side headlamp of a van that she claimed not to have seen. Therefore she was told that she would be reported for a potential without-due-care-and-attention charge. The taking of statements was done in leisurely fashion, and provided her alibi, well away from Jean Cossey’s bathroom. The critical time was very adequately accounted for.
‘In fact,’ Kenworthy said, ‘this establishes her as the murderer.’
‘Does it now?’
‘Yes. If you can put your hands on who it was that stood in for her in Lewisham—complete with her driving licence, certificates of insurance and MoT test. She will, of course, answer the summons herself.’
‘They’ve been to the address in Putney that the woman gave. There was no one about, milk and papers cancelled, no local know
ledge of her whereabouts. But it was undoubtedly Angela Hallam’s flat: all sorts of telling evidence about that.’
‘This will be the second time that this bunch have used law and order as their main cover.’
‘What do you know, Simon?’
‘That a man called Basset could not have kidnapped a child by the Upper Thames because he was doing a post-office in County Durham at the time. At least, the evidence said that Basset did the post-office; and he quite happily did bird for it.’
‘Modus operandi. It’s the opposite of clever to repeat a pattern, just because it worked once.’
‘It’s clever enough, if you can make it work twice.’
‘This is going to be difficult,’ Cawthorne said.
‘So I suggest you don’t waste time trying to break these alibis. That’s not where you’ll nail them.’
But at this point Cawthorne was called into his campaign HQ. Kenworthy followed him in as if he had been invited. Someone had moved a red counter to a new location in southern England: the latest report had come in about the movements of Edwin Booth, novelist.
You had to give Cawthorne his due for thoroughness. The moment Booth had made his first move from Jersey, officers of the island force were on the move too. As Booth’s Cessna homed in on the Lizard, air-controllers’ plottings were being translated into visual symbols on Cawthorne’s operational table.
The plane landed on a club strip on the outskirts of Falmouth, having been delayed for the spell of a stacking circuit while an ace couple from the Cornwall CID reported themselves in position. Booth, an unmistakable bear-like man, drove a hired Sierra eastwards while his pilot made his way to an inn. After the Tamar bridge a couple of unobtrusive Devonians took over, and on the Exeter by-pass were replaced by a squad under Cawthorne’s direct jurisdiction. They worked in staggered pairs, in radio contact with each other and their base, so that Booth did not urinate in a lay-by without a report going to Cawthorne.
The bear-like man overnighted in The Rose and Crown at Salisbury, and the register was duly signed Booth. A new leap-frogging team had him in sight the next morning through Andover and Basingstoke, where he took the A339 south. He stopped for lunch at The Angel at Midhurst, then afterwards drove in leisurely fashion across Sussex, finishing his day in Lewes, where he registered under the new name of Rawdon. Here he craftily managed to get into conversation with two of his shadows, who were forthwith replaced by strangers: Cawthorne’s mobile cadre was geared for flexible action.
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