The Mother's Day Mystery

by Peter Bartram

  Figgis sucked on his Woodbine and stroked his chin.

  He said: "Leave it. It's going nowhere. There'll be other stories."

  "I haven't got other stories at the moment. I've got this one - and I want to take it further."

  "My decision is final," Figgis said. He picked up his galley proofs to show the meeting had ended.

  I said: "I thought I might give His Holiness a briefing on my lecture. Just in case he speaks to anyone else and gets the wrong idea about my archbishop story."

  Figgis dropped the galleys. Sat up straighter. Gave me a flinty look.

  "You steer clear of His Holiness on that."

  "Why?"

  "He doesn't want to be bothered about your blundering debut as a public speaker."

  "That's not the only reason, is it?" I said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "You know perfectly well. That's why you're reaching for another fag. Pope ordered you to make the speech, didn't he? He doesn't know you passed the poisoned chalice on to me."

  "Look, there are policy issues here you don't understand…"

  "Like who should deliver speeches?" I said.

  "Yes."

  "And what stories we should cover?"

  Figgis sat back in his chair and folded his arms in a petulant gesture. He knew when he was beaten.

  "Very well. Take two days to look into the hit-and-run. No more. And I assume we'll hear no more about contacting Pope about suffragan bishops."

  I stood up and headed for the door.

  "Not from me," I said.

  I reached for the handle and opened the door. Turned back to Figgis.

  "By the way, the bishop may have complained about my story - but he laughed."

  I stepped swiftly through the door and closed it behind me.

  Chapter 4

  I suppose I should have skipped back across the newsroom like a spring lamb.

  It's not every day that someone shafts Figgis. Crack open the champagne! I'd blackmailed him into giving me time to develop the story.

  Trouble was, I wasn't sure how to do it. (Developing the story, that is, not skipping like a lamb.)

  I wasn't even sure I was right. Although I'd come down on Holdsworth like an Alpine avalanche, the hard evidence for murder was thin.

  It rested on the fact I thought Hooke had been dragged to the edge of the Bostal escarpment rather than crawled there in his dying moments.

  I slumped back in my captain's chair and stared at my Remington. But it didn't provoke any bright ideas.

  I had two days to make the story stand up. There was no way Figgis would grant an extension. Right now, he'd be sat in his office fuming that I'd outwitted him. He'd scheme what to do if I came back with a fresh demand. He'd dream up a crafty wheeze to put himself in a good light with Pope should the truth about the lecture come out.

  Worse, if I didn't make the story stand up, my reputation would take a hit. No more front-page bylines. No more generous expense account. I might even have to pay for my own lunch.

  What made the job more difficult was the fact the Shoreham cops were handling the case. If it had been my old mate Detective Inspector Ted Wilson at Brighton Police Station, he'd have quietly briefed me on his progress (not much) over a couple of whiskies. But I didn't think Holdsworth would come across with anything useful for a large scotch - or even a bottle. Besides, he'd made it clear that, as far as he was concerned, the case was closed. Short of the killer driver putting his own hand up, there'd be no further investigation.

  So I was on my own.

  But not entirely.

  I stood up and headed for the morgue, the room where the paper's archive of press cuttings was housed.

  ***

  When I walked into the morgue, Henrietta Houndstooth, who ran the place, was at her desk stuffing a large bunch of daffodils into a vase.

  Her assistants, Mabel, Elsie and Freda, crowded round. The three were known around the paper as the Clipping Cousins, which was only half right. Yes, they clipped the newspapers and filed the cuttings. No, they weren't related.

  At the moment, they were arguing the toss about the best way to display the daffs.

  I strolled up to them and said: "Daffodils. Couldn't be a better choice as I'm 'in vacant or in pensive mood'."

  Mabel adjusted a painful ruck in her surgical stocking and said: "What's he talking about?"

  Elsie scratched the hairy wart on the side of her chin and said: "I think it's something to do with that Lake District poet who 'wandered lonely as a cloud'."

  Freda lifted a leg to ease her flatulence and said: "He can't have been that lonely then. When my old man and I went to the Lake District the only thing we saw were clouds - and the rain they brought with them. Even the clouds had clouds."

  Henrietta said: "That's no way to speak of William Wordsworth, one of our greatest men of letters. Mr Crampton was referring to the poem about 'a host of golden daffodils'."

  "Except you've got the daffodils and I've got the pensive mood," I said. "I was hoping you could help me with that."

  Henrietta put the vase of daffodils on a shelf. The Cousins drifted back to the large table they shared in the middle of the room. They started to bicker about clouds.

  Henrietta and I crossed back to her desk.

  "You're in a pensive mood because of that hit-and-run," Henrietta said. "Did finding the body upset you?"

  I perched on the edge of her desk. "It's never a pleasant experience. But I've seen dead bodies before - and ones in worse condition than Spencer Hooke. There wasn't much sign of blood. I expect the post-mortem will show massive internal injuries."

  "And you want to know whether we have any cuttings on him in the morgue?"

  "He was an eighteen-year-old schoolboy so it's unlikely. But I would like to know more about his school, Steyning Grammar."

  "Let's take a look," Henrietta said.

  To one side of her desk an archway led into a cavernous room. It was packed with floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets arranged in aisles. Fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling but the place had a claustrophobic feel. Every time I walked in there, it felt like being shut up in a pharaoh's pyramid.

  But I forced this thought from my mind and followed Henrietta deeper into the maze of corridors. Her shoes click-clacked on the cracked linoleum. We reached the S corridor. Henrietta stopped and yanked open a cabinet drawer. She rifled through the files, let out a little yelp of delight, and pulled a mouldering brown folder from the cabinet.

  She handed it to me. "Looks like we've been keeping this one for a long time," she said.

  ***

  Henrietta was right.

  Back at my desk, I opened the folder and flipped through the cuttings. There were about fifty, some yellowing with age. Some so brittle, the edges flaked off. The oldest dated from the nineteen-thirties, the most recent only a few days old. Well, there'd be another addition soon when pupil Hooke's story was filed.

  I sat at my desk, with the machine-gun rattle of typewriters building towards the next deadline, and read the file.

  Steyning Grammar School, I learnt, had been founded way back in 1614, two years before Shakespeare died, by an old bloke called William Holland. He'd been born in Steyning, but later moved to a city to the west called Chichester where he'd made his money. In those days, I guess, his cash would have been in crowns and groats. The cuttings never explained why he wanted to splash his cash to set up a school. Perhaps it was some kind of seventeenth century status symbol. Today he'd be more likely to fork out for a villa on the Côte d'Azur.

  In one of the cuttings from the ‘thirties, there was a picture of the school. It was a handsome Jacobean pile built out of narrow ochre bricks. There were fat time-blackened oak beams supporting the place. There were latticed windows high up on the walls. There was a wrought iron gate in front of the main entrance.

  Apparently, Holland had set up the place for the "promotion of godliness and sound learning". I had an uneasy suspicion I wasn't go
ing to find much of either in this story.

  Some of the post-war cuttings described how the school had expanded its pupil rolls. A lot of the students were boarders who slept in dormitories. I thought back to those Billy Bunter stories I used to read as a kid. Tuck boxes and midnight feasts in the dorms. Perhaps it was like that at Steyning.

  A three-year-old cutting told me that the school had modernised some of its classrooms. There'd been a new art room and a chemistry laboratory. There was a picture of the lab with a smiling young man wearing black gown and mortar board. The caption identified him as Owen Griffiths, chemistry master.

  Holdsworth had told me that Hooke had been studying for his chemistry A-level and hoped to read the subject at Cambridge. In which case, Griffiths - the proud master of the new lab - could know Hooke better than others.

  Perhaps if I approached him right, he'd talk. I tried to remember what I'd learnt about chemistry. There were acids and there were alkalis. And if you mixed them together they neutralised one another. That didn't sound like something that would grab anyone's attention.

  But there were also Bunsen burners and test tubes and if you heated up the right mixture of stuff it would change colour. Or it would bubble and give off a pong like a hippo's fart. Or, if you were really lucky, it might explode.

  That sounded altogether more promising.

  ***

  Finding the chemistry lab at Steyning Grammar School later that afternoon proved surprisingly easy.

  I just had to follow my nose.

  Chemistry labs everywhere radiate a stink which loiters somewhere between a gas works and a swimming bath. A scrap of chemistry knowledge had come back to me. Sulphur and chlorine. Both guaranteed to assault the nostrils.

  I took a lung-full of the last half-decent air I expected to breathe for some time, opened the lab door, and stepped inside. The place was furnished with rows of those laboratory benches you see in films about mad scientists. The benches were strewn with abandoned equipment. There were beakers and flasks and pipettes. There were crucibles and tests tubes and spatulas. There were funnels and droppers and tongs.

  It looked like the mad scientists had just held a party.

  But among the abandoned kit, there were dark brown bottles with glass stoppers labelled "Poison".

  On the drive from Brighton, I'd decided I'd hang around until school was out. I'd pounce on the lab a few minutes after the bell for the end of school had rung. I reckoned that, with a subject like chemistry, there'd be some clearing up to do and Owen Griffiths would still be in the place.

  And there he was.

  But not clearing up.

  He was sitting behind a bench at the far end of the room. He was attaching a long glass tube to one of those conical flasks with a spout sticking out of the side. They look like a teapot without a handle. The flask was resting on a tripod with an unlit Bunsen burner beneath. There was a rack of test tubes containing different coloured powders by the side.

  Griffiths was wearing goggles and bright yellow latex gloves. He was dressed in regulation chemistry lab white coat. It was stained with chemical spills. There were brown splodges that looked like a mud splatter. There were bright yellow patches that looked like an oriental disease. There was a swathe of purple and scarlet spots that looked like a psychedelic dream.

  He didn't look much like a mad scientist. In the films I'd seen they usually had swivelling eyes, wild hair, and a nervous tic in their cheek.

  Griffiths looked like Mr Normal. At least, Mr Fairly Normal. Actually, if I were a woman - Shirley, for example - I might classify him as Mr Fairly Good-Looking Normal.

  He was about my height (six foot one inch), about my weight (11 stone, 4 pounds, I tell no lie), and about my age (30, if you must know). He had light brown hair cut short and combed with a side parting. He had one of those Roman noses that women seem to find sexy. He had a tiny dimple on his chin they'd probably call "cute". He had a generous mouth with soft lips, all the more to whisper sweet nothings in your ear, ma petite.

  But I was getting carried away. He probably wasn't such a big hit with the ladies, after all. He wouldn't be Shirley's type. He probably lacked my joie de vivre.

  He looked up as I walked across the laboratory and pushed the goggles up on his forehead. He frowned. (Looked like I was right about the joie de vivre.)

  He said: "You look too old to be a pupil and too young to be a parent."

  I said: "That's me. Neither one thing nor the other."

  I strode up to him and held out my hand. He peeled off the latex gloves, took my hand, and shook it reluctantly.

  He shot a sideways glance at the equipment he'd been assembling, reached for a cloth, and draped it over the flask and Bunsen burner.

  He gave a little nervous laugh and said: "Just a little surprise I'm preparing for the sixth form tomorrow."

  I said: "I'm sorry you'll be a boy down."

  Griffiths let out a sigh. "Spencer Hooke. What a tragedy. Such a promising life lost so young."

  "He was one of the stars of the chemistry class, I believe?"

  "Yes, destined for Cambridge. He'd have excelled there, in my opinion. The whole school has been in shock today."

  Griffiths sat down on a stool behind the bench. He removed the goggles from his forehead. Shot me a suspicious look from the corner of his eyes. For a teacher who'd lost a star pupil, he seemed very composed. But tragedy takes people in different ways, I decided.

  "Why are you here?" he asked in a brisk tone. "Did you have a connection with Hooke?"

  "One that I'd have preferred not to have. I found his body."

  "You're that newspaperman."

  "Colin Crampton, Evening Chronicle."

  Griffiths stood up, grabbed a cloth, and began to wipe some green stuff off the top of the bench. He rubbed away with the energy of a man who'd rather be doing anything than talking to a newspaper reporter.

  I said: "We've all got jobs to do, but I hope you understand that mine doesn't usually involve finding dead bodies."

  Griffiths stopped rubbing and tossed the cloth aside. He sat down again on the stool.

  He said: "This has affected us all."

  "I just wanted to learn more about the boy I found," I said lamely. "About the boy I wish I'd been able to save."

  This time, Griffiths nodded thoughtfully. "I think I understand," he said. "For some time I've wished I'd known him better myself."

  "I thought he was a star student."

  "Certainly, a brilliant one. But there were…" Griffiths's voice trailed off. He glanced at the rack of test tubes with the coloured powders. Pushed them under the cloth he'd draped over his apparatus.

  "Sometimes brilliant people can seem difficult to we mere mortals," I said.

  Griffiths managed a thin grin. "That's one way of putting it. Spencer kept things to himself - often trivial things that didn't seem to matter."

  "Such as?"

  "When I set the boys an analysis test - where they have to determine the chemical nature of a substance - I ask them to keep notes on the tests that were negative as well as positive. Spencer used to destroy the negative results and only present the positive. I told him this wasn't good laboratory practice, but he argued that the only thing that mattered was getting the right result."

  "And did he?"

  "Always. And generally well ahead of anyone else in the class. But I didn't like the secretive streak in him. Another time, I found that he'd sneaked into the lab after school hours to do a series of experiments on the reaction of different metal compounds to acid. I found out and asked him why he'd been doing it. He said he thought it would help his Cambridge entrance exams. I told him he didn't have to do that in secrecy - I'd be happy for him to use the lab for extra work, but he just nodded at me and stalked off."

  I thought about that for a moment and asked: "Was he the same with other teachers - perhaps also with other students?"

  "I don't think Spencer was liked around the school. It wasn't just that
he was secretive. He was also aloof. He didn't seem to join in with the other students when they were organising a football game or playing cricket. Don't get me wrong. People treated him with respect - most of the students knew he was cleverer than they were. But they didn't like him."

  "He was a loner?" I asked.

  "Yes, I suppose a loner. But one who had a purpose in life. It's just that nobody could work out what it was. I tried to get him interested in activities outside the school. I'm a member of the bell-ringing team at the local church. I persuaded my fellow team members to let him join."

  "And did he take to them?"

  "I think so, but even after a few weeks some of the relationships seemed strained. That's really all I'm willing to say about Spencer Hooke."

  "Did you like him?"

  "I wouldn't wish him dead," Griffiths said.

  "I suppose you were at the school last night?" I asked.

  Griffiths shot me a suspicious look. "Actually, I was at a meeting of the Sussex Chemical Society." He rummaged on his desk and handed me a small card. "Here's their calendar of events."

  I cast my eye down it. There'd been a meeting in Horsham yesterday evening. Something about polymer chemistry. The kind of thing that makes my brain shut down.

  I made a mental note of the telephone number on the card and handed it back to Griffiths.

  I said: "Quite a drive to Horsham for an evening meeting."

  "I took the train. My car is in for a service and its annual MoT check this week. Now, if there's nothing more…"

  He stood up and shuffled along behind the bench towards the door.

  I said: "One last question: have you any idea why Hooke was cycling along the Bostal road last night - especially as it was pouring with rain?"

  Griffiths shook his head. "That's another mystery. Boys are supposed to get a pass from their housemaster if they want to go out in the evening. There's also a rule about not riding a cycle after dark. Spencer seems to have broken both those rules. But I suppose that doesn't matter now."

  "He had a message in his pocket. Something about meeting at the usual place at 7.30pm. Any idea what that meant?"