The Mother's Day Mystery Read online

  Praise for earlier Crampton of the Chronicle mysteries…

  "A fun read with humour throughout…"

  Crime Thriller Hound

  "An excellent novel, full of twists and turns, plenty of action scenes, crackling dialogue - and a great sense of fun."

  Fully Booked

  "A good page-turning murder mystery, with a likeable protagonist and great setting."

  The Bookworm Chronicles

  "A highly enjoyable and well-crafted read, with a host of engaging characters." Mrs Peabody Investigates

  "An amiable romp through the shady back streets of 1960s Brighton."

  Simon Brett, Crime Writers' Association Diamond Dagger winner

  "A highly entertaining, involving mystery, narrated in a charming voice, with winning characters. Highly recommended."

  In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel

  "A romp of a read! Very funny and very British."

  The Book Trail

  "Superbly crafted and breezy as a stroll along the pier, this Brighton-based murder mystery is a delight."

  Peter Lovesey, Crime Writers' Association Diamond Dagger winner

  "It read like a breath of fresh air and I can't wait for the next one."

  Little Bookness Lane

  "By the end of page one, I knew I liked Colin Crampton and author Peter Bartram's breezy writing style."

  Over My Dead Body

  "A little reminiscent of [Raymond] Chandler."

  Bookwitch

  "A rather fun and well-written cozy mystery set in 1960s Brighton."

  Northern Crime

  "The story is a real whodunit in the classic mould."

  M J Trow

  "A face-paced mystery, superbly plotted, and kept me guessing right until the end." Don't Tell Me the Moon Is Shining

  "Very highly recommended."

  Midwest Book Review

  "One night I stayed up until nearly 2am thinking 'I'll just read one more chapter'. This is a huge recommendation from me."

  Life of a Nerdish Mum

  The Mother's Day Mystery

  A Crampton of the Chronicle Adventure

  Peter Bartram

  Deadline Murder Series Book 2

  The Bartram Partnership

  First published by The Bartram Partnership, 2018

  For contact details see website:

  https://www.colincrampton.com

  Text copyright: Peter Bartram 2018

  Cover copyright: Barnaby Skinner 2018

  All characters and events in this book, other than those clearly in the public domain, are entirely fictitious and any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

  The rights of Peter Bartram as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Text and Cover Design: Barney Skinner

  Also by Peter Bartram

  Crampton of the Chronicle Mystery novels

  Headline Murder

  Stop Press Murder

  Front Page Murder

  Deadline Murder Series novels

  The Tango School Mystery

  The Mother's Day Mystery

  Novella

  Murder in Capital Letters

  Morning, Noon & Night Trilogy

  Murder in the Morning Edition

  Murder in the Afternoon Extra

  Murder in the Night Final

  The Morning, Noon & Night Omnibus Edition

  (All four Morning, Noon & Night books are also in audiobook)

  Short stories

  Murder from the Newsdesk

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Bonus chapter

  Chapter 1

  Author's note and acknowledgements

  About the author

  Chapter 1

  England. Four days before Mother’s Day, 1965.

  Shirley Goldsmith jabbed me in the ribs and said: "I knew you'd blow it."

  Shirl was delivering her verdict on a lecture I'd just given to the Workers' Educational Association. My subject: the ethics of the press.

  I said: "I thought it went rather well. I'm even thinking of changing my byline to Colin Crampton, crime correspondent and orator."

  Shirl snickered. "Forget it. Your whole talk went tits up as soon as you told that joke about the archbishop."

  My girlfriend Shirley is from Australia. She speaks her mind. As a critic she's as sharp as the coral in the Great Barrier Reef.

  It was a few minutes after the meeting had ended. We were walking back to my car down a narrow street in Steyning, a picture-book village of flint walls and narrow lanes. We passed a tiny thatched cottage with lattice windows and a weathered oak door.

  Ahead was a small green shadowed by beech trees. It was a gloomy place with the smell of evil about it. It was where villagers used to burn witches before they found a more humane way to keep them out of mischief. These days, they make them join the Women's Institute.

  "This place is creepy," Shirl said.

  She reached for my hand. I took it and gave a reassuring squeeze.

  But Shirl was right. Heavy clouds cast the street into twilight. Yellow beams from a single street lamp glimmered through a mist. It was as though the evening was drawing a veil over my speech.

  Too bad.

  It hadn't been my idea in the first place. The workers had invited Frank Figgis, my news editor at the Evening Chronicle, to address them. But at the last moment, Figgis decided he had more pressing business. Like cutting his toenails. Or counting his paperclips. Or picking his nose.

  He'd drafted me in as his replacement.

  I'd tried to winkle out of it, but Figgis pointed out I hadn't exactly been overworked these past few weeks.

  I tried to explain that I only reported on murders - I didn't commit them. And if there weren't any, there was nothing I could do about it. But Figgis was insistent. If I couldn't produce the front-page splash he wanted, I'd have to develop a new line as a public speaker.

  So that's how I'd come to be standing before a group of bored faces telling them about the time an English archbishop visited New York.

  I said: "That archbishop story wasn't a joke. It was true."

  Shirley rolled her eyes. "Who says?"

  "Frank Figgis. He told me about it when I joined the paper."

  "What for?"

  "He was making the point that, like George Washington, journalists can never tell a lie."

  "Now that is a joke."

  "But, according to Figgis, we can invent the truth."

  "Now you're just playing with words," Shirley said.

  "Not at all. The archbishop story demonstrates the difference. That's why Figgis told it to me."

  "It never happened."

  "I'll admit that it might be apocryphal."

  "A poke re… what? A poke in the eye more like. To the poor saps in the audience who had to listen to you rambling on. I was
sitting up the back. Their shoulders all tensed when you delivered the punch-line. Especially that big cobber with the bulbous nose and tonsure of curly white hair."

  "How was I to know he was the suffragan bishop of Horsham and had been mates with the same archbish as the one in the story?"

  "Perhaps the obvious clue that he was wearing his collar back to front."

  "We orators don't notice things like that when we're in full flow."

  We turned a corner into a narrow alleyway paved with ancient granite flagstones. Walls made out of old Sussex flints towered over us. Our footsteps echoed as we hurried along. The first lazy fat raindrops had started to fall. We pulled our coats more tightly around ourselves and walked faster.

  Shirley said: "Just supposing that story was true, could it really have been as recently as the nineteen-fifties before an Archbishop of Canterbury visited the United States for the first time?"

  "So Figgis claims. About ten years ago. These days, this country is changing fast. But back in the 'fifties America was years ahead of Britain in its attitudes. There was none of this deference to so-called betters and forelock tugging which you still get here sometimes."

  "Including among newspaper reporters?" Shirley asked.

  "Especially among some reporters," I said. "Present company excepted. The days when a reporter would open his notebook and respectfully ask a VIP like an archbishop whether he had any thoughts to share with the nation are disappearing now in Britain. But they'd vanished years ago in the United States."

  "So the old Archbishop was in for a shock when his plane touched down in New York," Shirley said.

  "Like he'd just stepped into an elevator and pressed the button for Hell rather than Heaven by mistake. Back in Blighty, the journos would've been penned behind a red rope. But in New York, the reporters surged in a gang round the aeroplane's steps. When the Archbishop came down them he was surrounded by hacks screaming questions at him."

  "They all wanted a good quote they could use in tomorrow's paper?" Shirley said.

  "Yes. They wanted to get his take on social trends in America. So before he'd even put his foot on the ground, he had a reporter from the New York Times yelling in his face, 'Hey, your reverence, what do you think about this rock and roll that's driving our kids crazy?' What was the old boy supposed to say? Usually, he'd be asked what hymns he was planning for Sunday's service. He just shrugged his shoulders and mumbled, 'Oh, I don't know… does it really have that effect?'"

  "Seems fair enough," Shirley said. "He was giving the reporter guy the brush off."

  "But there are dangers in that. Next the Herald Tribune hack screamed at him, 'Mr Canterbury, what do you think about the violence in all these TV cop shows like Dragnet?' I mean, he'd never heard of the show. He shook his head and mumbled, 'Oh dear, is it really that bad?'"

  "And, as you told it during the lecture, that's when he should've walked to his waiting limo," Shirley said.

  "Not easy when you're surrounded by pushy journos. Especially like the one from the Daily News. It's the Big Apple's scandal sheet. His question was, 'Archie, baby, what do you think about all these new striptease clubs opening in New York? And, by now, the poor archbish thought he'd entered one of Dante's circles of Hell. Probably the ninth one. I think it's treachery. All he could think to say to the question was, 'Oh dear, are there many?'"

  "Fair answer," Shirley said. "Admitted he knew nothing about it."

  I said: "The Archbishop finally pushed his way through the melee of reporters and climbed exhausted into his Rolls Royce relieved it was over. But it wasn't. Even though some of the reporters thought they'd wasted their time. They hadn't got anything out of him. The guys from the New York Times and the Herald Tribune reckoned they'd come away without a story. But the hack from the Daily News knew he had something. Not by telling a lie, but by inventing the truth."

  "And that's when you had the suffragan bishop turning as pink as a pig in a pulpit," Shirley said.

  "The following morning, the Daily News began its story: England's Archbishop of Canterbury flew into Idlewild Airport last night and immediately asked, 'Are there many strip clubs in New York?'"

  "And you call that honest reporting?" Shirley asked.

  "No, I call that accurate and misleading reporting."

  "It can't be accurate and misleading at the same time."

  "The Archbishop did ask whether there were many strip clubs in the city - which makes it accurate. But the story leaves out the context of the question - which makes it misleading."

  "Would you scam your readers like that?"

  "Not under my byline. But ordinary people play the same trick in conversation all the time. Perhaps they want to bamboozle someone or get their own way on the basis of shaky facts. All I'm saying is: if you're going to invent the truth, invent all of it."

  "Sounds like a shonky argument to me," Shirley said.

  We stepped out of the alley into a small car park lit by a single lamp. The rain was now falling steadily.

  My MGB was parked under a horse chestnut tree. The tree's branches creaked in the rising wind like they were in pain. Not far off, a fox barked and a cat yowled. The lamp flickered, then died.

  Shirley grabbed my arm. "Let's get out of this place," she said. "It spooks me. It's like one of those places where you meet a killer in the shadows and then trip over his victim’s corpse."

  I put my arm around her shoulder and squeezed gently.

  "Don't worry," I said. "The place looks sinister in the dusk, but Steyning is a harmless village. You'll never find a murder here."

  Chapter 2

  Shirley leaned forward and stared out of the rain-streaked windscreen.

  "Jeez, Colin, where are you taking me?" she asked.

  We were in my MGB heading out of Steyning the dangerous way - on a narrow track which climbed over the South Downs range of hills. Ahead, the road became steeper. The engine note rose as I changed down from third to second gear. High banks overgrown with bushes and nettles closed in on either side. The track was slick with muddy water. If we met a car coming the other way, there'd be a stand-off. Whoever blinked first would have to back up hundreds of yards to a passing place.

  I'd rather reverse around Piccadilly Circus in blindfolds.

  But after my talk my throat was dry. I needed a drink - and was taking the shortest route I knew.

  I said: "There's a great little pub called the Marquess of Granby in the village of Sompting on the other side of the hills. We can get some supper there."

  "Sounds great. But is this road the only way? It sure is lonely."

  "It's called the Bostal," I said. "It's a Sussex word for a narrow track leading up a hill. This one heads over the Downs to the coast. And you're right - not much traffic ever comes this way. Especially at night. Or in weather like this."

  Pounding rain ran in rivulets across the windscreen. The wipers struggled to clear the water.

  I said: "The loneliness of this road made it popular with smugglers not so many years ago."

  Shirley swivelled in her seat and stared open-eyed at me. "You mean the real ones with black patches over their eyes and spotted handkerchiefs tied round their necks?"

  "And parrots on their shoulders screaming, 'Pieces of eight'. No, not like the smugglers from fiction. Not even like Rudyard Kipling's smugglers. You remember the poem: 'Five and twenty ponies trotting through the dark, Brandy for the parson, baccy for the clerk…' These were real smugglers who were in it for profit. Big money. And woe betide anyone who stood in their way. Even in my granddad's time there was a gun battle up here between smugglers and customs men. Two smugglers were shot dead."

  "You wouldn't get them fighting it out on a night like this," Shirley said.

  The engine note fell as we reached the summit of the hill. I changed up a gear and we picked up speed. To our left, the hills fell away in a steep escarpment. The blackness of the night was broken by pinpricks of light on the horizon. They flickered dimly through the rai
n.

  I pointed. "Brighton."

  I depressed the accelerator and the MGB surged forward. The tyres fizzed as they cut through spray from the road.

  "Stop," Shirley yelled. "Stop, now!"

  "What the…?"

  I stamped down on the brake. The tyres squealed on the wet road. The MGB's rear-end fishtailed. The headlights wavered. The engine cut as we shuddered to a halt. So what? A perfectly executed emergency stop in my book. And I'd defy any driving instructor to disagree.

  I turned to Shirley, but she'd already wound down her window and was staring at something back along the road.

  "What is it?" I said.

  "There's something lying on the verge."

  "A person?"

  "I don't think so."

  "It's probably a dead fox," I grumbled. "Road kill. But we’d better check."

  I grabbed my torch from the glove compartment and we climbed out of the car. The wind blew needles of rain into our faces. We hunched our shoulders like a couple of old ditch diggers. We scrunched up our eyes and stared into the darkness.

  I said: "There is something there. Looks like a lump by the side of the road."

  I shone my torch, but it just made the raindrops sparkle like falling diamonds.

  We slithered towards the lump. Our feet splashed through puddles and squelched on mud. We skidded to a halt on the wet grass at the side of the road.

  The lump turned out to be a bicycle.

  It lay abandoned by the roadside. I shone my torch downwards. It had been a smart bike, too. A bike it's owner would have taken pride in. A Norman 77I - the I stood for Invincible - made by the British Cycle Corporation. But it wasn't an invincible bike now. The back wheel was broken. The spokes splayed out like a busted rake. Some were bent, others had snapped. The rear tyre was shredded. One brake cable had severed. Red glass from the rear light lay broken on the road. The handlebars were twisted.