The Hobbema Prospect

by John Buxton Hilton

  ‘Not in any case of mine if that’s what you’re thinking,’ Cawthorne said.

  When the other two arrived together, Lawson was looking all in. Wright was merely dog-tired.

  ‘Right, let’s have it, Sergeant. Quickly and without frills. What did you find in Lincolnshire? And never mind what you were doing there. That will come later.’

  Lawson gave it them in a dozen sentences.

  ‘Now put Wright in the picture about Swannee, Simon.’

  Kenworthy was even more succinct.

  ‘It’s like doing a jigsaw-puzzle picture side down,’ Cawthorne said. ‘So now let’s have your theory.’

  ‘Booth and Swannee were in cahoots eighteen years ago. They had a business relationship—Swannee was printing Booth’s books. Booth wanted rid of his wife and daughter and thought up a scheme to get them killed on a kidnap retrieval that went wrong. He couldn’t mount it himself, because he hadn’t the contacts. Swannee had the contacts, but wouldn’t look at that sort of caper unless the lolly was abundant. Booth was one of the few men in the country who could talk the sort of money that Swannee would look at. So Swannee put himself under contract, recruited Len Basset to do the close-quarter work—Basset was an up-and-coming post-war hoodlum who didn’t draw the line at anything he was being paid enough for. He also had a small string on the streets that Angela—the Davidge girl—had just joined. The very woman to bring in as nursemaid: leave her references to Swannee. Then there was Jean Cossey, naive, sentimental and good-hearted—the very one to mind the child during phase one. They were paid one third to a half of their fees in advance: that’s standard practice—and that’s where Jean’s Egbert came from. The kidnapping took place. The killings were scheduled for the hand-over. Jean and the child were shunted into one of Swannee’s long-term sidings, the safe house in Lincolnshire where Stableford was caretaker.’

  Cawthorne had started taking notes at first, but was now drawing arabesques on his pad.

  ‘Jean took the child—as she was bound to, being Jean—and she may have had a brainstorm, or she may have overheard something. At any rate, she got to know what the next stage in the plan was: there was going to be shooting at the rendezvous that Basset was going to set up. We know what happened: Diane Booth fatally shot. But Anne had been saved by Jean Cossey. We don’t know the details. We probably never shall, with Jean Cossey dead and Anne too young to remember. But somehow Jean got Anne out of that safe house, even though she had neither the time nor the energy to get her farther than across the road. And Swannee did a double cover-up. He had Basset impersonated in County Durham, and at the same time had it slipped to Sid Heather that the word among the mushes was that Basset had had the biggest finger in the Booth pie.’

  Cawthorne had now completed a Moorish frieze down one side of his paper.

  ‘Basset did his spell for holding up the post-office he’d been nowhere near. When he got out, he got somehow on the trail of Jean Cossey in Broadstairs. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was Angela who’d traced her, and was waiting for him to come out and do the rough stuff. He met the pair at the kindergarten gate and demanded hush money. That was why there was a big withdrawal from one of her building society accounts just before she went up north. You drew attention to that, very early on, Shiner. Why was she parting with a thousand at the very time when she could least afford to? It had to be because she was terrified of Mr Camel-Leopard—Basset. It was a crafty move, vanishing into working Lancashire the way she did. It was so unlikely—as unlikely as hiding in Waterman’s Cottage. There were times when I’d take my hat off to Jean Cossey—if only she could have been consistent. She had the nerve—and the stupidity—to run away from Lancashire in the first place to try to become a groupie. And if you ask me, she never had wholly grown away from the kid she’d been in those days.’

  Cawthorne had started on a sea-serpent, each coil with its circle of ripples in the waves.

  ‘We don’t know yet—maybe we can ask them—why they left it so long before trying to see what more they could screw out of Booth. There may have been a bit of publicity about Anne’s forthcoming wedding—an engagement party photograph in the local press—something like that. It got somebody talking—and thinking. Swannee must have been in on it, otherwise they wouldn’t have had the use of his place up in Lines. And if Swannee was in on it, that means he was in charge. He’d never have taken orders from Basset. And I don’t think the main thrust was to sell Anne back to her father. I think they meant to blackmail him for the whole thing—for commissioning the kidnapping, for what can be charged as the murder of his wife. They couldn’t, of course, have shopped him to us. But the threat of memoirs in the press would have left him little choice. To sell it in Fleet Street, they’d have to muster every shred of evidence that they could show: Anne and Jean Cossey too. We don’t know yet who killed Jean. Not Booth, because he hadn’t been brought into the act at that stage. I’m certain that Angela was involved—because of that Lewisham alibi. Why else should she need an alibi? And my guess is that Basset was with her—at least in the final stages. Jean Cossey was in an alcoholic stupor. She had to be undressed and carried into the bathroom. The ramshackle electrics had to be rigged. Angela might feasibly have managed it all alone. I don’t think she’d have cared to—but with assistance it would have been relatively easy.’

  ‘But why kill Jean Cossey?’

  ‘There’s surely only one reason for that—because, perhaps to their surprise, she wouldn’t play. What did they need her for? As additional proof of Anne’s identity. Especially since she was the one who could speak authoritatively of what sort of a child Anne had been in those days—what were her whims and fancies—what were her real feelings about her parents. Remember that Anne would have talked to Jean as she had never talked to Angela. Jean’s information was crucial if Booth was to be convinced that this really was Anne. Angela and Basset may have been surprised that Jean didn’t want to be cut in on the final act. Who wouldn’t want to be cut in for that sort of money? Short answer: Jean Cossey—because Jean Cossey had suffered all her life from a sentimental sense of honour. She knew where Anne’s happiness lay—in being happily married to a detective-sergeant. Jean Cossey’s heart was never anywhere but in the right place. But all her life she had had the unfortunate defect of not being able to see round more than three out of every four corners. She may not actually have threatened to blow the gaffe. But she may have given her thoughts away to the point at which she had them worried.’

  ‘And nobody foresaw that Booth might want to settle this bit of bother in his own way.’

  ‘That’s my reading. Booth’s a big man. He thinks big and he acts big. And the risk’s worth it, because the price he’d have to pay would be too steep. And there was no compromise in the way he disposed of Swannee and Broadbent.’

  ‘So where are they taking Anne?’

  ‘To meet her father, I think. He’ll have made an appointment. He’ll have told them he’s ready to do a deal. And remember, Angela and Basset haven’t got Swannee’s subtle direction now. I don’t need to tell you that Anne is in a very dangerous position.’

  Wright leaned forward to the Commander. ‘You’re still tracing Booth’s course, sir?’

  ‘We are tracing the courses of three men who could be Booth. Booth has money for everything, and he didn’t have to go to Swannee for a heavy mob this time. Let’s go to the Control Room.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  It was one of those lay-bys that used to be a loop in the road, leafy, undulant and blind. Angela had misjudged the distance from the blue Parking sign and pulled into it late and roughly. Basset was thrown almost off the seat, but the jolt did not wake him. Angela switched off the engine, sat for a moment savouring the silence, then got out to come round to the passenger side. She opened Anne’s door.

  ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do with this bugger. He’s going to be in no fit state for Edwin Booth to see.’

  Anne stepped out into the night
. A patch of illumination from the courtesy light fell on the deteriorated tarmac. The headlamps were dipped and playing on to a rubbish receptacle that had not been emptied for many months. It was remarkable what people found to throw away in lay-bys.

  ‘We’ll have to leave him out of negotiations,’ Angela said. ‘Things can’t go any more awry for that.’

  ‘Does he often get into this state?’ Anne asked her. But that proved to have been the wrong thing to say.

  ‘Listen, kid. Don’t get up-market about Len. You’ve not learned enough in your young life to know what’s what between women and men. We don’t all go for the CID. OK—get in. We’ve a good two hours’ drive yet. I’d like to find a hotel somewhere where we can freshen up a bit.’

  ‘Where are we meeting my father?’

  To have called him Mr Booth would have sounded fatuous, but the word father came unnaturally to her lips.

  ‘No questions. Let’s keep things the way they’ve been. Neither of us has made any bad mistakes up to now.’

  And that was an answer to a question more important than the one she had actually asked. Although there was an uneasy appearance of trust between them, and although it was nominally as allies that they were calling on Edwin Booth, Angela was still the watch-dog. Split-second timing was needed now—the moment before Anne got back into the car was vital. Angela’s fingers were on the button of the doorhandle. She was putting out her other hand to push Anne’s arm. And they both heard another car coming along the road from the direction in which they had come themselves. It did not dip its headlights as it came to rest some ten yards behind them and Angela, momentarily dazzled, turned her eyes aside.

  It was Anne’s chance to sidestep. She had already spotted the pocket of black shadow into which she intended to dodge, hoping then to impede pursuit by zigzagging tactics. Angela clawed out for her, but missed her by the vital inch. Anne took a step backwards, crossed the tarmac, darted forward, turned back towards the main road, came back on her footsteps and was almost abreast of the car again as Angela was running from it.

  And that was the stage they had reached when another car passed the entrance to the lay-by. It slowed down, its power smoothly restrained—and turned in at the further entrance to the loop.

  Cawthorne looked proudly down at his beflagged operational map. It did not look as if there were any area of the kingdom in which he was not deploying someone—or persuading himself that he was.

  ‘There’s one who crossed southern England to go to Dieppe. I have to admit he’s foxed us. There’s one who came over at Southampton, and I’ll swear that’s Booth. And there are any number of other reports, most of which just have to be false—and every one of which has been followed up. There’s one in Nottinghamshire that I don’t believe for a moment, but there’s a tail on him all the same.’

  ‘Notts isn’t all that far from Lines, sir,’ Lawson muttered.

  ‘We’ll soon know. The orders are clear: not to lose sight of their quarry at any price, but to give him as long a leash as safety will allow. The object has been, you see, gentlemen, to see where these fellows will lead us.’

  He looked round their faces to see whether this lesson in subtle strategy from high level experience was being appreciated.

  ‘And until now, we had no reason to believe that Edwin Booth had himself committed any crime.’

  ‘We don’t disbelieve it now, I hope,’ Kenworthy said.

  ‘We don’t disbelieve it now. So now we start pulling them all in—wherever each of them happens to be at this precise moment.’

  He went and gave a brief instruction to the uniformed inspector in technical charge of his battle-room. His action orders were carried down on an endless belt to the telephonists who would relay them out to the teams.

  Radio waves carried the messages out into the night. A bear-like man in a motel in Oxfordshire was dragged out of the bed which he was sharing with a woman whom he had not set eyes on four hours previously. Another putative Booth was at a hotel in Basingstoke—alone in a single room, and it took time to establish that he had no connection at all with the affair in hand. Another innocent, who had had a double tail on him for days, was in a twin-bedded room with his wife at their home in Bracknell. None of these was Edwin Booth; but the characters in Basingstoke and Oxfordshire were held on suspicion of being his associates—a fact eventually proven in one of their cases.

  Cawthorne’s action order reached the couple who were following the real Edwin Booth just before Angela turned into the lay-by for Anne to change seats. They had not been aware of Anne and Angela, who had been ahead of Booth throughout the night’s drive. With two colleagues alternating in another car, they had been trailing Booth for forty-eight hours, overnighting close to him in Maidstone, Tonbridge and Norwich. It seemed an odd route that he was following, and his behaviour was that of a casual and very arbitrary tourist. He looked at a parish church here, an ancient market-hall there. In Norwich he appeared to have settled down for the night, and the quartet had decided to make a dog-watch of it. Then he had reappeared just before midnight and made his way down to the hotel car park.

  First he drove south-west, gave London a wide western berth, and went up into the hills above Newbury along a private road on which they could not follow him without drawing fatal attention to themselves. He was not out of their ken for more than an hour, and spent the inside of that day in Windsor. It was only after his evening meal that he moved north again, making for King’s Lynn and then up along the east coast route. Finally he had turned west again, as if to cross the backbone of the country. He was driving fast, but always within the legal limits: a man not wanting to risk embroilment that might draw attention to himself.

  His tail almost missed his turn into the lay-by. But by now they were absolutely convinced that of all Cawthorne’s mobiles, they were the ones who were on to the real thing. They reported this conviction over their radio net, and were reminded to stick strictly to orders. That was at 1.20 a. m. At 1.42 they were told, as were their colleagues everywhere else, to intercept their prey as immediately as was feasible. They cruised past the lay-by and turned into its second entry just as Anne was getting out of the car. And they saw Booth, who was now getting out of his: holding a hand-gun.

  The policemen were not armed. It was no time for heroics that could easily have put an end to their own existence, and would probably have been lethal for the women. One of them stayed in the car long enough to radio to their leap-frogging oppos, calling for urgent support. This pair were less than three-quarters of a mile behind.

  They saw Anne dart away towards the main road and lost sight of her. Then Angela saw that Booth was taking aim at her, and she screamed. Anne went unattended to for an instant.

  ‘We are police officers,’ one of the constables shouted from the shadows. ‘Drop your gun.’

  Booth fired at where he judged the voice to have come from. Then he fired at Angela, and missed her as she spurted for shadow. Then Booth turned sideways with a yelp. Something had hit him hard on the side of his head: a half-brick thrown by Anne from close range.

  Then the second police car was arriving, very fast along the main road, disconcertingly noisy and throwing a great deal of light over the arena. The two officers who had been first on the scene rushed Booth simultaneously, from different angles. He was bulky, powerful and desperate, giving the pair of them a memorable fight, even after his weapon had been knocked from his hand. But he was no match for four young fighters, although there was a good deal of bruising and abrasion and considerable damage to uniform. They overpowered him in the end, and then it took time for them to be convinced of Anne’s identity. They consulted each other about Basset, and it was decided that one of them should drive him in his own car to the nearest police station. Throughout the skirmish he had come to no kind of coherent consciousness.

  For the rest of the night they lost Angela. But Cawthorne had enough patrols within a ten-mile radius of that lay-by to have guaranteed t
he security of a foreign head of state. She was picked up in the early grey of morning, trying to hitch a lift.

  There were loose ends to be got into comprehensible order. Angela was confronted by the officers who had reported her for a traffic transgression in Lewisham. She insisted for some hours that she was not the woman they had dealt with—until they got her so weary that she started tripping into inconsistencies.

  Even then she might have beaten them over the main issue, had they not been holding Basset in a different part of the building. Like most professionals played one against the other, they were blasé at first about the insinuations about betrayals going on behind their backs. But they were up against experts who knew how to let doubts creep in—and how to make the most of it when the veneers began to crack.

  Basset was the first to weaken. They had worked on him overnight before they struck oil by telling him that Angela had admitted that they had met Jean Cossey in a pub a couple of hours before the murder.

  ‘And a right state she was in,’ Basset said. ‘She never had been able to hold her drink. She was always ready to pass out after three or four. Angela took her home to her flat. How am I to know what happened when she got her there?’

  They got the name of the pub out of him; they found witnesses from both sides of the bar; they gave Angela Basset’s written statement to read.

  They knew she would not let Basset leave her facing it alone. She agreed that they had met Jean Cossey by arrangement. It was true that Jean had had a drop too much—but that did not mean much in her case. Angela had got her home before it became a case of having to carry her there. And, yes, they’d had another drink or two on arrival. Basset had followed an hour later. Angela was too tough to be pushed nearer an admission than that; but the jury were perceptive.

  Angela Hallam was not known in the archives under that name, but under others she was on record: with her prints. It was the dates of her previous offences that were interesting.