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  Contents

  John Buxton Hilton

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  John Buxton Hilton

  The Hobbema Prospect

  John Buxton Hilton

  John Buxton Hilton was born in 1921 in Buxton, Derbyshire. After his war service in the army he became an Inspector of schools, before retiring in 1970 to take up full-time writing.

  He wrote two books on language teaching as well as being a prolific crime writer – his works include the Superintendent Simon Kenworthy series and the Inspector Thomas Brunt series, as well as the Inspector Mosley series under the pseudonym John Greenwood.

  Chapter One

  It was curious, Anne Cossey thought, why one remembered certain things so vividly, for no logical reason. There were incidents that stood out over the years: a critical moment of delirium in a childhood fever, a corner of conversation at an indifferent party. There was no reason for some things to stick, yet somehow she knew that today’s homecoming would.

  Today was understandably different. She had come home in the middle of the afternoon. Nobody had wanted to delay her, everyone had urged her to go. Kenworthy was out. One of the men had come back with a bottle of Jugoslav Riesling, and they had drunk it out of office cups. The journey home had been unpressed, a welcome change. She had sat back in a corner seat, seeing the streets, parks, back gardens and railway platforms of south-east London in an unusual ambiance.

  She let herself into the deserted flat. It was shabby, worn, yet too many things were not far enough gone to compel replacement: an electric bar fire from the 1960s; LP sleeves—mostly Nostalgia. But it was a nostalgia that, once one had revived it, one did not want to revive a second time: early Spinners, Matt Monro, vintage Bee Gees. Her Athena blocks did nothing for the room any more—or for her: Brueghel’s Flemish Proverbs, Seurat’s Grande Jatte. She was going to leave them here. It seemed an unnecessary twist of the knife to bequeath to her mother two rectangles of discoloured (or rather undiscoloured) wallpaper. And God knows what horrors her mother would find to replace them with. There were signs that she was growing out of her belated psychedelic period.

  Anne went into her bedroom, where most of her belongings were packed into cardboard cartons begged from the off-licence and supermarket. She changed out of her white blouse and grey skirt, conscientiously compliant with the office parameters as to sleeve-length, neckline and exposure of calf. Not that anybody was ever fierce about the rules, Kenworthy least of all. He never gave the impression that he knew there was such a document as the Code, and ever since Anne had worked there, there had been a gradual trend over the edges. Twice in her time there had been Amendments, mainly to legalize current practices. Some of the girls simply pleased themselves, anyway, but Anne was by nature a complier.

  She looked in the mirror. Howard was not given to compliments. He was by no means inarticulate, but verbal gymnastics embarrassed him. Yet not so long ago he had told her that her face had the perfect imbalance. He had read somewhere or other that if the left half of someone’s face was in exact equilibrium with the right, then that person’s looks could only be ordinary. It was the slight differences, perhaps below the level of conscious perception, that made faces interesting—and beautiful. She experimented now with a sheet of paper, first over her face, then over the mirror, its straight edge plumb down the middle of her nose. The result was twofold and contradictory. At one angle, the two sides seemed exact replicas of each other, condemning her to eternal mediocrity. At another, there were such differences that the two halves scarcely seemed to belong to the same person. She was sure her nose was just a fraction too long and too thin, her chin too soft-spirited, her chestnut hair too banal, the ensemble too oval. But it did not matter, did it, as long as Howard loved her that way—or said he did. Long might he go on saying it! He had told her that her five feet four inches were the ideal height for a woman, according to a table he had seen in a magazine, that her age was precisely the right few years younger than his. She blessed him for the things he unearthed in magazines. They seemed to have been written with her in mind.

  The key grated in the latch. Her mother must have got off early, too. But—oh no!—two voices—and Radio Two switched on the moment they were in the room. Anne wished she were a mountaineer. She wanted to climb out of the window, do a hand-traverse to the fire-escape, betake herself from rooftop to rooftop, come gently to earth blocks and streets away. If only she could vanish! And the feeling was none the less strong for the knowledge that this was the last time she would be trapped like this. She was only going to be trapped for a matter of minutes—but trapped was trapped. She came out of her bedroom and greeted the two women with filial insincerity.

  It was Angela again, taller than her mother, older than her by a few years, probably. It was hard to tell, because Angela was better at reducing her age than Jean Cossey was. And she obviously spent more on herself, had a more rewarding frame to work on. Angela was three inches taller than Anne, stood a full head higher than Anne’s mother, which made one wonder how long it would be before Jean Cossey started looking like a little barrel. Jean Cossey’s injudicious magenta two-piece did not cling to her; yet it drew immediate attention to her lifebelt. And she had recently had her hair done in a frizzy style that suited neither the shape of her head, nor the contours of her face, nor her place of work, nor her—

  Anne’s mother had known Angela all of ten days. Angela was the latest in a lifetime of raving friendships. Anne did not know where they had met: at some enforced sharing of a café-table, most likely. For two or three weeks it would be Angela for Queen, and then they would have a flaming row.

  It was a pity it had to be Angela, just on the eve of her wedding. Angela seemed to find marriage somehow amusing, as if there were something archaic in having had an orthodox engagement, in being in love with one man, in going into it firmly believing that it was going to last.

  ‘I’m just going down to Butcher’s to see they know what’s what for tomorrow.’

  Anything to be out of the flat for the next half-hour. Angela looked at her, faintly laughing, faintly sneering: a woman who saw through everything, or thought she did, she had seen everything before and treated it all with scorn. Every detail in that flat at that moment etched itself into Anne’s memory. She had, of cou
rse, no way of knowing that the trigger-factor would be murder.

  Chapter Two

  Outsiders were saying that Kenworthy was smouldering to fulmination point, but his staff saw no evidence of it. He treated them with a slightly archaic courtesy. There was a remote serenity about him: as if he had chosen serenity to help him weather out this phase.

  Promoted to Chief Superintendent, he was whiling away his last few years in command of an indoor department. There were men, it was said, who wanted him inside—not poking about into some of the curious things that were going on at the Yard at this time. So they had him shunting paper about: dead files, stillborn casework, old master-plans that had foundered. Sometimes an investigating officer had known for certain, but there had been nothing safe to take before a jury. Sometimes there had been no hacking a way through the jungle. Now all these bits and pieces were going to be computerized. It was Kenworthy’s job to decide what. Things were going to be brought together that had not come together before. Retrieval was going to be immediate. An argument oscillated. Was a man’s brain an imperfect computer? Or was a computer an imperfect brain? Could a computer have flair? Unless you’d spent a lifetime rubbing shoulders with vital discrepancies, could you recognize them when you saw them? Kenworthy talked about trigger-factors until people hid their smiles. Every trigger-factor had to be cross-referenced. When Peter Griffiths dropped a bit of the wrapping of a wine-gum packet in the course of a break-in, that was a low-level trigger-factor. Griffiths liked the comfort of something flat and sweet clinging to his tongue while he worked.

  At his left hand, Kenworthy had his feeders, civilians, screening files for him to read: there was enough of the stuff for a lifetime of man. On his right were the labourers at his keyboards, programming what he filtered out to them. He did not give a damn about their daisy-wheels, their interfaces and their floppy discs. He did not care what went on inside a silicon chip. But he would have liked something to happen that might give the job significance.

  In the meanwhile, he acted patience, treating his staff with urbane respect. It was characteristic of him to attend the wedding of a girl he hardly knew, but whose charm and competence had struck him.

  Anne had charm. She had poise, and she did not create the impression that anyone had taught her either of these. She did not dress differently from anyone else in the office, and yet she looked different. Anne Cossey was a natural.

  Chapter Three

  It was no way to start a honeymoon: air-controllers defecting in Spain, Gatwick milling, fat women with music-hall North Country voices monopolizing the concourse seats in their creased pink and powder blue Crimplene. The newly-wed Lawsons had to pay for a hotel bedroom that they hadn’t budgeted for. The insurance would cough up—eventually. They had had to cash two of their travellers’ cheques: corn in Egypt. And they had had to share a dinner table with a corpulent pair who had aggressively ignored them, conversing in some Central European gutturality.

  Anne was determined not to be jaded, though jaded was what she knew she was. The last day was over that she would spend in her mother’s flat, the last hours there unending. There was something, she knew, that her mother was on the verge of trying to say, but she could not articulate it. Anne had slipped away whenever she had looked as if she were about to make a start. And her mother had made this new friend, too. Heaven protect her from her mother’s friendships! She would go without friends for months, then someone new would be filling her life. Why did her friendships always have to be so absorbing, so exhausting—and so often disastrous? God knew where her mother had picked this one up.

  Howard would have preferred the registry office. Inside herself, Anne had wanted church. Getting married ought to be as spiritual as you could make it. But she had not pressed a case. She was scared of boring Howard with spirituality. But then her mother let loose something that she must have been bottling up for weeks, about something not coming up to her expectations. Did anything, ever? Anything but the altar-rail was tawdry, second-rate. When Anne’s mother pleaded from the heart, she was a dab hand at putting her heart into it. Even after twenty years of constantly getting trapped by it, you could be worn down by her bleating sincerity. Anne gave way: stabs of conscience about the devil she’d been to her mother all these years. In all truth, their life as a one-parent family could have been worse. Her mother, not counting unpredictable tangents, had been something of a miracle-worker. So Anne had told Howard she had changed her mind, and he was too good-natured to be anything more than mildly exasperated. But this would be it, wouldn’t it? They couldn’t go on chopping and changing for ever.

  She had become Mrs Howard Lawson at an altar-rail in a Pooterish South London High Street. Women had lined the pavement to watch her come out, in her white organdie, severely buttoned to her throat. If there was any criticism of her wedding-dress, it was that it was too austere. She and her mother had worked at it together, a task not beyond either of them, though the antagonism it had engendered was not to be believed. At the reception, the bar had swarmed with new in-laws. Beery detectives had edged together, talking internal politics: Howard was a detective-sergeant. And Shiner Wright, his inspector, had proposed the only toast of the day worth listening to.

  ‘When a detective marries, it affects the whole Yard. I feel as if it’s not only Howard who’s married Anne. It’s all of us.’

  Laughter: and a smile from Kenworthy, who had brought a rather beautiful set of Bruges lace dressing-table runners. He had not stayed long, but it had been good—unexpected—of him to have come at all.

  And there were girls from Anne’s office there, some of them with weirdos in tow that she’d never have associated with them. Anne was civilian personnel on one of the Yard’s collating teams, one of those on Kenworthy’s left hand, though he could know her only as a name, a sharp intelligence, a working conscience—and power of recall for which people nowadays installed computers. Howard had come in one lunch-hour, needing info, and she had been the dogwatch that had helped him scrabble through tatty folders that had not been processed yet. That was how it had all started. And now one of Howard’s stable-mates was waiting to rush them round London in a borrowed Jag. They found the airport jam-packed and no more flights to Spain today.

  Anne felt near to nervous exhaustion. She hoped that at bedtime Howard would realize how all-in she was. It wasn’t first-night nerves. They had had enough sex to have risen above clumsiness, to know they were compatible. Compatible? They could not exist without each other.

  But tonight, in the chain-standardized, twin-bedded room, she did nothing to entice him. If he was bursting at the seams, she’d try to say No without making him feel rejected. But no—she knew she wouldn’t. If it were like that, she’d let him. But it ought to be special, the first time in their permanent status. It had to establish them. She’d once seen a paperback sex manners manual in his room. Maybe it had had a paragraph, warning him of this very setback. And, indeed, he asked quietly now, ‘Worn out?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Howard. Maybe we’ll wake in the night.’

  ‘I’ve brought my little travelling alarm.’

  ‘Let’s leave it to nature.’

  She woke and he didn’t. She woke from one of those dreams that are so real that it is a relief to jerk out of them, to reorientate oneself, disbelieving at first in the faint light of an unfamiliar room. She remembered where she was and how she came to be there. But she was still disturbed. It would not help to try to go back to sleep. She knew from experience that she would sink back into that dream.

  It was an odd dream, terrifying, and yet without events. Nothing happened in it. Nothing threatened to happen. She was in a place, and the place frightened her. She was trapped in the dream, yet she was looking into it from the outside. She recognized the dream at once, always, a theatre of fright. Yet she had no idea of its location. There were two rows of trees, and they bordered a sandy roadway. It could have been Hobbema’s Avenue, but these were not the trees of the Dutchman’s pai
nting. Unlike Hobbema’s, they converged on a house—which she never could properly picture when she was awake. She had dreamed the dream since long before she had ever visited a picture gallery, so it could not possibly be Hobbema. And until she had started buying reproductions for herself, they had had very few pictures worth looking at in the Cossey household.

  The dream came irregularly. Sometimes the interval was so long that she forgot she had ever dreamed it. Then, at the beginning of her teens, she began to believe that it came as a forecast of bad news: before she had had tonsillitis, and had lost a part in a school play; before her mother had inexplicably upped sticks and taken them away from Broadstairs, where she was sublimely happy, to go and live in a dirty little industrial town in the North-West. The dream always seemed a signpost to the undesirable—and yet that was not quite the truth. Sometimes she dreamed the dream and waited for something wretched to happen, and nothing did. So she would latch on to something trivial, some petty aggro, convince herself that the prophecy had been fulfilled, that she was safe again.

  But why dream it on her wedding-night? Was it some part of her inner self, uneasy about her decision? Was it a warning about tomorrow’s flight? Was something awful going to happen in Spain?

  She pushed such imbecilities away. Wasn’t she adult—now more adult than ever? She looked over at Howard, who had lost the sheets from his shoulders and was sleeping without vest and pyjama jacket. With this body I thee worship. He would know how to kill this nightmare. But she did not wake him. She was reluctant to talk to him about fantasies. There was something fortifying about Howard, something astringent about his materialism. He must not come to think of her as a creature of rarefied fancies. She got up to pull the sheets back over him, closed her eyes and tried to force the trees to materialize, but now they would not. So now she knew how to get rid of them. Challenge them to come back. Simple.