The Mother's Day Mystery

by Peter Bartram

  "This is an all-boys school. It wouldn't be the first time a lad here had fancied a bit of female company."

  He moved towards the door with a confident stride like he was cock-of-the-walk.

  "And now I need to lock up the lab," he said.

  I extended my hand and Griffiths shook it.

  "Hope our little chat has been of help," he said.

  "It has. Good to see the inside of a chemistry lab again - first time since school days."

  "Were you good at chemistry?" Griffiths asked.

  "Absolutely hopeless. I thought the periodic table was something you only sat at occasionally."

  For the first time, Griffiths smiled. His eyes lit up. If I were a suspicious person, I'd have thought he was delighted at my chemical ignorance.

  ***

  I left Griffiths taking off his white coat and made my way back through the school.

  I'd reached the stairs which led out of the old Jacobean building when a dark shadow in the corner moved.

  The shadow lightened as it detached itself from the dark of the ancient wood panelling.

  It stepped alongside me and said: "I'm Sneath."

  I looked down at a little goblin of a boy, barely five feet tall, with a broad face, big ears and pink cheeks. He had a tangled mop of fair hair and a grin that revealed a row of gapped teeth.

  I said: "Who?"

  He said: "Sneath of the remove."

  "The remove? That's the class before the sixth form."

  "That's right," Sneath said. He had a voice that was trying to break. It wasn't the treble of the boy. It wasn't the fine tenor - or perhaps basso profundo - of the man. Sneath's hadn't decided what it was going to be. At the moment, it sounded a bit like a 78rpm record playing at the wrong speed.

  "If you're in the remove, Sneath, that would make you about fifteen," I said.

  "Yes, but I will be sixteen one day."

  "A fine ambition. What can I do for you, Sneath?"

  "Ask not what your school can do for you but what you can do for your school," the little tyke drawled.

  "You're not the late and much-missed John F Kennedy so get to the point, Sneath. I'm busy."

  "Not too busy to hear this. I know stuff about Spencer Hooke that you don't."

  That had my attention. "What kind of stuff?"

  "Stuff that Stinker Griffiths didn't tell you."

  "How do you know what Mr Griffiths told me?"

  "I was next door in the physics lab. There's a ventilation grill in the wall between the two. If you stand on the workbench and press your ear up to it, you can hear what they're saying in the chemistry lab."

  "That's the latest research in physics, is it? Albert Einstein would be proud of you. But let's get to the point. What do you know about Spencer Hooke that I don't?"

  Sneath stuffed his hands in his pockets. Shifted from one foot to the other.

  "I'd like to visit the tuck shop," he said.

  "Don't let me stop you."

  "I can't because I've spent my pocket money this week."

  "So what's this information going to cost me? A couple of gobstoppers? A bag of toffees? A string of liquorice?"

  "We could go to the tuck shop and see. They might have buns."

  "Buns?"

  Sneath nodded. "Cream buns."

  "I've never before paid for a tip-off with buns," I said.

  Chapter 5

  The tuck shop was on the other side of the street from the school.

  It was a quaint little eighteenth century cottage built out of Sussex flint. It had a small display window to the left of a duck-or-grouse door. The door would have been installed in those far-off days when if you were six feet tall people thought you were a giant. There was moss growing on the roof and a brown iron stain on the wall by the drainpipe. There was a window box with some peonies in bud. It was the kind of place where you'd expect to find an old spinster still knitting woollen socks for the lover who never made it home from the First World War trenches.

  The window had a display of the shop's goodies. There were big brown buns and biscuits with pink icing. There were tarts filled with jam like congealed blood. There were dusty jars filled with toffees and gobstoppers and cough drops.

  Sneath hurried up to the window and pressed his nose against it.

  He turned to me grinning. "They've got two cream buns left and I'm having both of them - and some liquorice toffees."

  He shoved open the door and rushed inside.

  I followed him, wondering whether Sneath was scamming me for his tuck or whether he really had hard information to trade about Spencer Hooke.

  I stepped into a small room with a wooden counter topped with a glass-fronted case. To the side of the case was a set of balance scales with its weight tokens. Behind the counter were shelves loaded with jars of sweets. There were chocolate drops and sherbet lemons and liquorice allsorts. There were humbugs and fruit gums. There was barley sugar which glowed yellow like it was radioactive.

  The air was loaded with a sickly scent like it had been sprinkled with sugar dust. If you breathed in deeply, you felt you were dancing.

  To the right of the shelves, a heavy velvet curtain covered a doorway. A hand with long fingers and red-painted nails reached around the curtain and pulled it to one side. And I immediately realised I'd been wrong about the spinster with the knitting.

  The young woman who stepped through the door could have walked right out of a French film. One of those naughty ones they showed at the Continentale cinema in Brighton's Kemp Town. She'd be playing the nice girl who didn't. At least, not until she'd tamed the bad boy she'd met in the first reel and the end-credits started to roll.

  She had shoulder-length auburn hair, cut to the nape of her neck and waved so that it curled in a natural way. She had green-blue eyes and eyebrows that arched mischievously over them. She had a figure that would get Brigitte Bardot demanding a recount. She was wearing a jumper with red, white and blue hoops, and red slacks.

  Little laugh lines crinkled around her mouth as her full lips parted in the kind of welcome smile I felt I could pay into the bank.

  She certainly took my mind off the toffees.

  The smile vanished as her gaze travelled from me to Sneath.

  She looked at the lad in the way she might have looked at an old toad peeing on her peonies and said: "I've told you not to come in here when you've already spent your pocket money."

  Sneath twitched a thumb in my direction and said: "This man is paying for me, Miss Staples. So I'll have two cream buns, a quarter of liquorice toffees, and three gobstoppers."

  Miss Staples looked at me and her eyes widened with the question.

  I nodded: "I guess buying all this sweet stuff must make me a sugar daddy."

  She put the cream buns in a paper bag, weighed out the toffees into another bag, and added the three gobstoppers from one of the glass jars.

  "I don't know about sugar daddy but it makes you one and nine pence poorer," she said.

  Sneath grabbed his tuck from the counter as I handed over the money.

  Miss Staples took the cash and put it in a drawer under the counter.

  "He'll only stuff all that in one go and be sick," she said.

  I turned to see what Sneath made of that. But he'd already hurtled outside.

  I made towards the door. Turned back with my hand on the doorknob.

  "Sneath sick?" I said. "Gives new meaning to: 'Sic transit gloria mundi'."

  ***

  Sneath was already fifty yards down the street by the time I stepped out of the tuck shop.

  I called after him: "Wait!"

  He turned clutching his paper bags.

  I trotted up to him. "We need to find somewhere quiet to talk, Sneath."

  He pointed down the street. "The churchyard."

  About two hundred yards away, the tower of an ancient church rose above the roofs of the surrounding buildings. We walked towards it.

  I said: "I can't keep calling yo
u Sneath. What's your first name?"

  "Ranfurly," he said. "But most people call me Snitcher."

  "I can't think why. But Snitcher it is."

  We entered the churchyard through an ancient lychgate. A gravel path led up to the church porch. But Snitcher pointed to a corner of the churchyard. A yew tree, that could have been a sapling when Cromwell was chopping off Charles the First's head, stood close to a crumbling flint wall.

  We picked our way between the tombstones and crept behind the yew. There was a single grave up against the wall. Snitcher sat on the gravestone and opened his bag of buns.

  I took a look at the headstone. It read: "Arthur Jeremiah Popplewell. Fell asleep 21st June 1883." I sat down and leant my back against the headstone. But not too hard in case Popplewell unexpectedly woke up.

  Snitcher stuffed most of one of the buns into his mouth. He wiped some cream off his nose with the sleeve of his jacket.

  I said: "You've got the pay-off. Now tell me what you know about Spencer Hooke."

  "I suppose it doesn't matter now that he's gone. I wouldn't tell if he was still alive."

  "Were you afraid of him?"

  Snitcher stuffed the rest of the bun into his mouth. Crumbs sprayed out as he talked.

  "Everyone was afraid of Hooke - if he had something on you."

  "And he had something on you?"

  "Might have done." Snitcher swallowed hard and reached for his second bun.

  "What was it?"

  "He found out that I knew Talbot Minor had cheated in a Latin exam. He'd written conjugations of Latin verbs up his arm. He wore a short-sleeve shirt under his jacket, so when he wanted to find something he only had to look up his sleeve."

  "And he got away with it?"

  "Old Masterson the Latin teacher used to fall asleep during exams."

  "And the other boys didn't notice?"

  "They're all swots. They were too busy translating a passage from Caesar's Gallic Wars into English. But I was sitting behind Talbot and I clocked what he was doing."

  Snitcher finished the second of his buns and started on the toffees.

  I said: "And you decided to put the squeeze on Talbot?"

  "I don't know what you mean."

  "You told him he'd have to pay up or you'd snitch on him."

  "I was reasonable about it. I only asked for sixpence a week."

  I said: "Talbot wasn't your first blackmail victim, was he? You didn't get your Snitcher nickname for nothing. How many others are there?"

  Snitcher grinned, like he'd just won a medal in the school sports. "There's Herbert Jackson. He discovered that if he stood on his bed after lights out, he could see across the courtyard to matron's room. There was a gap in her curtains and he watched her going to bed."

  "And what did his voyeurism cost him?"

  "Nine pence a week and help with my maths homework. Then there's Timothy Pugh. I caught him stealing pencils from the stationery cupboard. He buys me a chocolate covered Turkish delight after school every Friday."

  "That all?"

  "There's Andrew Todd-Willoughby."

  "And what was his indiscretion?"

  "I hid while he wrote something on the wall in the lower corridor bogs. He didn't even spell it right. There are two Ts in that word."

  "So he's paying you as well?"

  "He gives me the pot of raspberry jam his mother sends him every month."

  "And Hooke found out about your blackmail racket?"

  Snitcher nodded and unwrapped the last of his toffees.

  "How did you guess?" he asked.

  "I didn't guess. Your career in crime is just starting, so you won't have heard the old saying: set a thief to catch a thief. In this case, substitute blackmailer for thief. I'm guessing that Hooke was blackmailing too - but for bigger stakes. He'd have spotted the signs of your bungling efforts. Flush with pocket money other boys didn't have. Turkish delight and jam you couldn't afford. He'd have been worried that if your amateur racket had been uncovered, the headmaster might have spread the search wider. So he closed you down."

  Snitcher stuck out his tongue at me. The liquorice toffees had turned it black. "You're wrong."

  "I see. He didn't close you down. He took over your accounts - probably for higher amounts."

  "And he paid me a commission if I found anyone else he could touch."

  "Did you?" I asked.

  Snitcher shrugged. "Tried some, but Hooke wasn't interested. And one day he went to Chichester. When he came back he said he'd hit the big time, whatever that was supposed to mean."

  I knew what it meant. That Hooke had expanded his blackmail racket beyond the boys. Could he have found out secrets about some of the teachers? Perhaps even Steyning residents outside the school?

  That "big time" comment meant he'd found a rich mug with a confidence to hide. And enough money to keep it secret.

  Suddenly, it looked as though there could be a motive for running him down on his bicycle on a dark night. But who would have the motive?

  And why?

  Hooke's blackmail of the boys would be small beer. He'd terrorise them for minor misdemeanours around the school. Besides, I doubted that any but a handful of sixth-formers would have access to a car and know how to drive it. The manner of Hooke's death suggested an adult was the killer. And after what Snitcher had just told me, one of his grown-up blackmail victims could be in the frame.

  If Hooke put the black on adults, it wouldn't be for cheating in Latin exams or writing on lavatory walls. It would be for serious stuff. The kind that puts people in mortal fear. The kind they'd pay big money to keep quiet. The kind that might drive them to kill.

  It was clear that Hooke had had some kind of special relationship with Owen Griffiths. But, then, that would be natural as Griffiths was tutoring Hooke in the subject he hoped to study at university. But did the relationship go further? Griffiths had encouraged Hooke to join the bell-ringers' group. Could the killer be one of the bell-ringers? Or could it be another Steyning resident nobody suspected? Or perhaps somebody beyond the village? After all, Sneath said Hooke had visited Chichester.

  I gave Snitcher my stern look and asked: "Do you know why Hooke was cycling over the Bostal?"

  Snitcher reached for a green gobstopper. He shook his head. "No." He shoved the gobstopper in his mouth and his cheeks bulged like a balloon.

  "Was it to meet someone?"

  Snitcher shrugged.

  "Did he mention the names of any people outside the school to you?"

  Snitcher took the gobstopper out of his mouth. It had turned purple.

  He said: "No." His mouth closed around the gobstopper again.

  Snitcher was keeping schtum about something. There had to be a reason. He'd opened up about his own scams. He'd told me how Hooke had taken over his blackmail business and put him on commission. But there had to be something else. Clearly Snitcher knew about some of Hooke's operation. But Hooke would have been careful to keep the serious stuff - the black he had on any adults - to himself.

  That would only have piqued the curiosity of someone like Snitcher. He wasn't the kind of little tyke to let that rest. He'd have ferreted away until he had something on Hooke. It would have been a blackmailer's honour thing. Even the score. Find their weak spot. Keep the secret in reserve for the day when the scams collapse. Then use it as a bargaining counter. The get-out-of-jail-free card.

  I said: "You had something on Hooke. What was it?"

  Snitcher levered himself off the gravestone.

  I commanded: "Sit down!"

  Snitcher shot me a look like he wanted the ground to open and swallow my body in an ancient tomb. But he sat down.

  I said: "All this will come out one day. Now's the time to decide whether you want me as an ally or an enemy when it does."

  Snitcher took the gobstopper out of his mouth. It was now yellow. He was frowning and a nervous tic had started up at the side of his mouth.

  He said: "Hooke said he'd protect me."

/>   "Hooke's lying in a mortuary. You're on your own Snitcher. Unless I decide to help you."

  "Why would you help me?"

  "Because it might lead me to a scoop for my newspaper."

  "Will there be more tuck?"

  "If you deliver what I think you can, you'll be the Henry the Eighth of the tuck shop."

  Snitcher looked at his gobstopper. Thought about shoving it back in his mouth. Decided he'd save it for later. Wrapped it in a snotty handkerchief and thrust it into his pocket.

  He said: "Hooke kept papers."

  "What kind of papers?"

  "I don't know. I never saw them."

  "Then how do you know he had them?"

  "Because I once followed him and saw him hide them."

  "A resourceful scam artist like you would have returned and viewed them at your leisure."

  "Hooke hid them somewhere I couldn't get them. But you could."

  "You could show me where?"

  "It would be dangerous."

  "For you or me?"

  "Both of us."

  I said: "As Friedrich Nietzsche advised us, 'Live dangerously!'"

  "Who's he?"

  "Nobody you need to worry about."

  "We'll have to do it at night."

  "Tonight," I said.

  A cloud of indecision passed across Snitcher's face.

  "And you're quite sure there'll be more tuck in it for me?"

  "If I find what I think we'll find, as much as you can eat."

  Snitcher stuck out his hand and said: "Let's shake on it."

  I said: "Let's not. Your fingers are covered in gobstopper goo."

  Chapter 6

  By the time Snitcher had climbed off the gravestone and scampered out of the churchyard, he was down to the red centre of his gobstopper.

  I'd arranged to meet him late that night at a quiet spot near the school. He'd assured me he could sneak out and spirit me into the school unseen. At least I believed him on that. Snitcher was a boy who'd turned sneaking into an art form. I only hoped he was as good at the spiriting part. Otherwise, I was going to be in big trouble.

  I'd spent a long time questioning him about his relationship with Hooke. I still wasn't sure that he'd told me everything. When you're dealing with blackmailers, you learn they always keep a little something back. They can't help themselves. It's as though giving up everything is like stripping themselves naked. I wondered what Snitcher was still hiding.