The next morning, the man giving himself out to be Rawdon was on his way to Newhaven to catch the Dieppe boat. He had told the two men in the bar that he had a thing about flying. And since they must at all costs conceal their knowledge of how he had arrived at Falmouth, this did not lead to a conversational trap. Rawdon did take the Dieppe boat, and Interpol was activated.
The cost in time and manpower was lavish. The message that had just reached the report centre as Kenworthy followed Cawthorne in was that another bear-like man, this time carrying a British passport in the name of Booth, had arrived in Southampton on the Sea-Link ferry. Cawthorne’s machine had made ample allowances for shunts and loop-ways.
‘So Booth wants to play it his own way,’ Cawthorne said.
‘As he did once before.’
‘And he’s recruited skilled help.’
‘Seems so.’
Cawthorne looked at Kenworthy keenly.
‘Simon, far be it from me to want to seem churlish. You have been very helpful. But there is something that has to be said.’
They were in the deciding round at last. Kenworthy knew that he was on the carpet. The interesting thing was the form that the carpeting was taking. Cawthorne was being too nice about it—wrapping things up, keeping Kenworthy sweet. So all that mattered was the message of the moment. The current state of play between two old enemies was of lesser importance.
‘Simon, I know you want in on this. I see no real difficulty in letting you in. No problem. I want this thing knotted and sealed.’
‘I can see only one way in,’ Kenworthy started to say.
‘There’s one thing I must ask you.’
‘What’s that?’
Kenworthy snapped it out. Here came the crux of the matter, and he knew in advance that it was a crux that he would be unwilling to accept. Cawthorne’s entire demeanour was leading up to the unacceptable.
‘Leave Swannee Foster to somebody else. Don’t go visiting the downs again.’
‘It makes me sick,’ Kenworthy said—and it did. So Foster had put in a complaint—and it had been listened to.
‘It makes me wonder what hold Swannee’s got over us.’
‘Over me, do you mean?’
The Commander looked as if he were about to protest too much. Kenworthy knew Cawthorne well. He believed he could see through every shade and phase of his bluff and his play-acting, of his sales-talk and his deals from under the pack. But Cawthorne at this moment was trying to do something unusual. He was trying to convince Kenworthy of a truthful fact.
‘Simon—it’s no secret that I’ve used methods in my time that you wouldn’t. I’ve cut corners in ways that I wouldn’t care to have publicized. But I’ve never connived at injustice. Not once in my career. The opposite. If I had not taken the course of action that I’ve chosen once or twice, there are odd bits of justice that never would have got done. You know what I’m talking about.’
Kenworthy did. He knew that if certain facts ever came to light about planting evidence—against men of known but unprovable guilt—Cawthorne would have gone the way taken by a number of senior officers in recent times. The question that mattered to Kenworthy was not whether justice had been done—it was not even whether Cawthorne would have got his promotions otherwise. It was that Cawthorne never questioned his own judgement of what was just and what was unjust. In fact Cawthorne had never cared. All that he had ever lived for was showing results: not getting them—showing them.
‘Never in my career have I owed anything to Swannee Foster. Others may have.’
It was a landmark in the wars between Kenworthy and Cawthorne. Cawthorne was speaking the truth—and Kenworthy was believing him.
‘Who?’
‘Don’t ask.’
‘I bloody well hate this. I’ve hated the Yard since—’
‘Bide your time, Simon. That’s what I’m doing. Make the most of the passing moment. It is passing.’
‘One visit from me, and he’s begging for protection. And getting it. What’s he scared of?’
But Cawthorne moved pointedly to a new subject.
‘Foster apart, who else would you like to talk to?’
Kenworthy thought for a few seconds.
‘I’d like to go up to Lancashire.’
‘Lancashire?’
‘There’s a girl called Gwen Beecham. If you could get me clearance—’
‘Act as if you’ve already got it.’
‘That’ll make a change—doing something according to the book.’
Howard Lawson saw his DCs and aides off on their designated routes. He also picked out the senior detective-constable and told the others that if they lighted on anything and he did not happen to be around, this man would do the necessary liaison with Shiner. He made it sound as if this were a perfectly normal way of conducting a detective-sergeant’s business.
Lawson knew in theory, that love between a man and a woman was not static. What he had not expected was that his feelings for Anne should have altered so much in the short time since they had flown from Gatwick to Faro: though the interval was not to be considered normal by anyone’s standards.
Now he was cut off from her, hopelessly cut off. There was one lethal fact to be faced: one tiny mistake by those who were supposed to know what they were doing, and Anne was likely to lose her life. He could not hang about, not doing anything about it himself.
This was the sort of bedrock thought that changed a man’s attitudes—and that did not just mean being sorry about a lunch-time scene in her office. He thought again about the whimsical things that she was always saying. His attitude and Anne’s were different. When he had first met her, while they had been engaged, he had enjoyed her fantasies as one might enjoy a light book at the end of a tiring day. He had never doubted her sincerity—but many of her ideas were simply fanciful. Now a cold grip of certainty had hold of him. All the odd things that she said had a beginning somewhere—a logical beginning, a reality. And the men at the bottom of this reality would be willing to kill to achieve their ends.
Take this Hobbema picture. Lawson had never seen a reproduction of it—not to know that that was what he was looking at. He knew it only from Anne’s description, and had put the ingredients together in a different pattern from hers, producing a different picture.
Now he went to the National Gallery to look at the original.
He stood and looked at the Avenue in Middleharnis. Until he lost consciousness of the shuttle of shufflers, around, behind and in front of him. Anne had never been to Middleharnis: she had always stressed the difference between the dream and the painting itself. She had been somewhere like Middleharnis.
If only the sort of magic that Anne believed in were true, it ought to be possible to gaze at that painting and answer the question Where?—by taking thought, as Anne herself had once said in a different context.
And now Howard knew—without the need for magic. It was the Fens—Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire. There had been an address in Lincolnshire, early in the log.
Waterman’s Cottage, Spurlsby Drove, Lines. That had been the address from which Jean Cossey had first written to the estate agent in Broadstairs.
Howard looked at the time. It was going to be a testing drive. He would be in dereliction of duty. He could not expect any support from Shiner if he came unstuck.
Chapter Twenty
Kenworthy and Bartram called on Gwen Beecham together. She lived in a nineteen-fiftyish close on the unfinished spec-built estate on the outskirts of Slodden-le-Woods.
There were two children. Gwen had had them somewhat later in her child-bearing life than some of her contemporaries had had theirs. Her fourteen-year-old boy had retreated upstairs to equal rations of homework and hard rock. Her eight-year-old was about the living-room and the floor was scattered with enough Lego to model Manhattan. Gwen Beecham must in her time have been an attractive young woman—perhaps more especially in the eyes of the unsophisticated. But she was no longer putting much eff
ort into her appearance. Her hair was too long to keep itself tidy, her jeans were as she discarded them at night and picked them up in the morning. She had squirmed into her off-white sweater as it had come to hand. Her house was not badly kept, and she was not without possessions: a signed print or two, two shelves of Literary Guild, commonplace travel trophies from France, Denmark and the Algarve.
It was possible to judge that life had treated Gwen Beecham undeservedly badly. Of the three girls who had known each other in Stella Davidge’s London, she was the one who had lived and gone on living in the YWCA, who had not had to dodge the claws of the do-gooders, who had not eaten discarded pie-crusts from other people’s plates—who had not even liked talking of women being on the game. Then after more than fifteen years of conventionally faultless married life, her husband had left her, for no other reason, it seemed, than for a change of sexual partner. In the course of the usual machinery, she could expect to get such compensation as was considered her entitlement. It was not inconceivable that some fault of her own had contributed to the disaster. This was not Kenworthy’s nor Bartram’s business, and they steered round the dangers of going into it. But they were both experienced enough to know that the events of her life would influence her telling of events in other people’s lives.
‘So—what can you tell us about Jean Cossey? Well—you knew her as Jean other things—Pogson, for one.’
‘Yes.’
Gwen Beecham leaned back her head, half closed her eyes and looked nostalgically remote. She became nostalgically remote several times during the course of the evening that Bartram and Kenworthy spent with her.
‘She was a strange girl, very likable, though unmanageable at times. Of course, she should never have left home. She should never have fallen out with her parents. They should never have allowed themselves to fall out with her. She should have gone back to see them. She should have made things up with them. I kept telling her to. I don’t know whether it was pride or shame or conscience that stopped her. I’m beginning to think nowadays that even conscience is an illusion.’
‘How long had she been in London before you saw which way things were going with her?’
‘She turned up without notice. It shattered me. I know I’d written her letters that had made her want to come. But then, you write people letters about the things that interest them, don’t you? Pop groups, lead guitarists, road managers—that was all she had in her head. I mean, we all went through it to some extent, I suppose. But Jean didn’t seem as if she was ever going to go on to anything else. There was even a time when she fancied herself as a singer.’
‘But she did at least grow out of that?’
‘She had an audition with some amateurs. I think it was Balham, or Tooting. When they played the recording back to her, it was enough to cure anyone.’
Gwen Beecham was out of the laughing habit. The smile that she mustered up was rudimentary and short-lived.
‘Surely she’d heard a recording of her own voice before?’
‘Not with backing.’
‘And the life she was leading didn’t appeal to you?’
‘She couldn’t find work. She spent a lot of time hanging about squalid dance-halls—getting there early, so that she could see the group set their gear up. It was worse than flirting—she was throwing herself at them. As far as they were concerned, she was just another—luckily for her, I always thought.’
‘So she didn’t actually take up with any of them?’
‘She said she did. But I didn’t believe half her stories. She knew what to say to upset me. And I let her know I wasn’t interested in the sort of people she was trying to take up with. I thought I’d better make that clear early on. This was the time of the Rock ‘n’ Roll riots. Gangs of youths went to dances all ready—tooled-up, they called it, with flick knives, even choppers.’
‘Had she any friend in particular that you objected to?’
‘There was Angela. I told you about her the other day, Mr Bartram.’
‘How and where did she meet her?’ Kenworthy asked.
‘I can’t tell you. By then she wasn’t spending much time in my company.’
‘What did you object to in Angela?’
‘What pop was to Jean, sex was to Angela. It was the time when adolescent girls were wearing golliwogs from marmalade jars to show that they were no longer virgins. Angela didn’t just wear her golliwog—she made sure you didn’t miss it.’
‘Did Jean wear one?’
‘Sometimes, I think, but she took it off to come into the hostel.’
‘Did you know that Angela had already had a baby?’
‘Not at first. And then I didn’t believe it straight away. It came up in the conversation as if they thought I’d known all along.’
‘So who was looking after the child when Jean and Angela were out together?’
‘I’ve got a horrible feeling that some of the time nobody was. Only it upset Jean to think of her being neglected. And she started taking care of her herself. I tell you, Jean was a mixture.’
‘You knew that at the time she was doing it? You hadn’t completely broken off with her?’
‘I tried not to lose touch altogether. I thought I’d be some sort of anchorage for her, even if we only saw each other for an hour now and then.’
‘You must have been a very hopeful young person. You know what we’re trying to get at, don’t you, Gwen?’
‘Not really.’
‘I’m trying to pinpoint the day when those two girls’ fortunes changed.’
‘They went a long way down before that happened. They began to look dirty, smelled as if they’d given up taking baths. They told revolting stories of the things they were up to. I felt sure they were exaggerating, just to disgust me. Then things changed, as you say. And I can tell you exactly when it was. I’d taken things into my own hand, written to Jean’s mother, persuaded her parents to come one weekend. It wasn’t my business, but no one else was going to make it theirs. Of course, it was fatal. I wished I’d let well alone.’
‘Instead of a reunion, a stand-up row?’
‘In the hostel. I’m afraid Mr and Mrs Pogson didn’t have much clue. I don’t think they saw through to how bad things really were. I mean, they’d heard of this kind of nastiness, but I don’t think in their heart of hearts they could believe that Jean was really mixed up in it. And they went on about things that didn’t matter all that much—like not liking Jean’s hairstyle. They insisted on treating her as if she were still a child. And whatever else she was, she’d put childhood behind her. I could see that they were reviving all the old bitterness, even before they’d started. And to make matters worse—’
From the room upstairs, the throbbing bass of her son’s LP’s was penetrating downwards. It made conversation difficult, but Gwen seemed unaware of it.
‘What made matters worse was that I could see that Jean and Angela had something on between them that day. They had tidied themselves up no end. They were watching the clock. Later that afternoon, they were going somewhere. Jean asked me if I had a map, and all I had was an ancient school atlas, which wasn’t much good. She couldn’t find the place she was looking for. But I was watching every little move that might tell me anything, and I know it was near that town with the race-course: Newbury, is it? And I didn’t—and don’t—know a thing about racing. But I know they don’t have meetings on Sundays.’
‘Did you see either of them again after they’d kept this appointment?’
‘Only once. And what a transformation! They must have spent a fortune in Carnaby Street.’
‘You didn’t pick up any more than that?’
‘No. Previously they’d always been boastful in an indirect sort of way. Now I got the impression that they didn’t trust me with what was going on. They stopped coming. They didn’t need me to shock and impress any more. I guessed they’d moved into a new circle. That’s all I can tell you. They drifted out of my life, and I can’t say I wasn’t relieve
d. Jean and I exchanged Christmas cards, perhaps wrote a line or two on them, but that’s all I ever heard from her until I had that desperate phone call from her in Broadstairs.’
Bartram and Kenworthy rounded off their day over pints in a mouldy-smelling lounge bar in which they were the only customers.
‘So you’re a wiser man now, are you, Simon?’
‘Considerably. I now know who scripted and produced the Edwina Booth kidnapping. I can guess whom he hired for the rough stuff on the ground. It was a man called Basset, who’d been poncing on a girl called Angela. And Jean Cossey was brought in as the baby-minder for Stage Two. But there are some questions I can’t answer yet. I think I know whose idea it would have been to mount that County Durham job, and see that Basset got done for it. It was a fine alibi, with a double twist to it, because Basset had already been grassed to Sid Heather as kidnapper-in-chief. That was very clever of Swannee Foster. I’ve no doubt he felt sure that that let him out. Well, so it has—up to now. He’s the key to all this, Swannee Foster. Where I’m still not on course is how an operator like Swannee got as far from his true trade as this. I’ve always admired Swannee—as a craftsman.’
Chapter Twenty-One
Directly he turned into Spurlsby Drove, Howard Lawson knew what Anne meant. He was a man entirely unendowed with any sense of the supernatural, of the uncanny. He did not claim to have a rational explanation for everything—but he believed that rational explanations could always be found. Yet he had a feeling, too strong to ignore, that he was now entering Anne’s dream. There was nothing fleshtingling about it. Trees, ruts, sandy soil, a largish house and a converted row of cottages: these things could not by themselves hurt a man. But he knew that there might be eyes behind the windows of one of those dwellings that might have no goodwill towards strangers. So he backed out of the entrance to Spurlsby Drove in the manner of a man who has mistakenly turned into a cul-de-sac, parked his car some way away in a gateway, well concealed by foliage from observation from the Drove. He kept his head down and worked out a reconnaissance that would bring him as near as he could get to the large house without showing himself.
The Hobbema Prospect Page 13