The Mother's Day Mystery Read online

  I said. "Looks like this cycle was hit from the rear by something. Probably a car. And going at speed."

  "Is it recent?" Shirley asked.

  "Hard to say," I said. "But the biggest question is what happened to the person riding it? There's no sign of blood, but that could've been washed off by the rain. Let's take a look around."

  Shirley wandered a few steps onto the grass verge.

  "Be careful," I called after her. "The escarpment falls away sharply and there's no fence."

  But, as usual, she'd ignored me. She'd vanished into the blackness of the night. I waved the torch around a bit, but I might as well have been lighting matches down a coalmine.

  I called out: "Shirley." But my cry was carried away on the wind. By now, the rain had seeped under my shirt collar and was running down my back.

  "Shirley," I called.

  No reply.

  I strained my ears and listened for a sound. The wind sobbed in the trees. But there was no crash, no scream as a body hurtled through undergrowth to the foot of the escarpment.

  The rain down my back had reached my underpants. Nothing about this was going to end well.

  I yelled again: "Shirley!" My voice sounded shrill, or perhaps it was just the way the wind distorted it.

  Silence.

  And then…

  "Over here," Shirley shouted.

  I sighed with relief and ran towards her voice. Didn't care whether I was near the escarpment's edge. Couldn't be bothered the rain had now soaked the seat of my trousers. I was just so relieved to hear her voice.

  My torch waved wildly around. I played the beam on Shirley's face. And knew at once there was trouble. Her eyebrows were drawn down and her lips were compressed with tension. She pointed at the ground.

  I swung the torch down.

  A crumpled body lay face down in the long grass. It was tall, more than six feet, I guessed. It was dressed in a long gabardine raincoat and a sou’wester. I knelt down, reached under the sou'wester for the neck and felt for a pulse. None.

  I looked at Shirley. "Dead," I said.

  I handed Shirley the torch. "Give me some light while I do what I've got to do," I said.

  I took hold of the figure's shoulder and rolled the body over.

  Shirley gasped. "My God! It's a boy."

  We looked at the face of a teenager.

  "No older than seventeen or eighteen," I said.

  "A young man," Shirley said. "And he'll never be an older one now."

  "Shine the torch on his face."

  Shirley shifted round and a pale circle of yellow light illuminated his head like a halo.

  "He'd never look like an angel," Shirley said.

  She was right. The lad had a pudgy face with a little too much fat around the jaws. He had a thatch of brown hair which I guessed was normally curly. Now it was plastered by rain to his head. He had a narrow mouth with lips that were open as though he wanted to cry out. His brown eyes were close together. They bulged in unblinking surprise as eyes often do in sudden death. As though they're saying: "This can't be happening to me."

  I leant forward and gently closed his lids.

  "Let's see if we can find out who he is," I said.

  I reached inside the pockets of the raincoat. Empty. I undid three of the raincoat's buttons. Underneath, the lad was wearing a blue blazer with an elaborate badge on the breast pocket. A lion on its hind legs which looked like it was dancing the hokey-cokey. I think heraldic buffs call it a lion rampant.

  I said: "This is part of a school uniform. I think he must be a pupil at Steyning Grammar School."

  "But who is he?"

  I reached into one of the blazer pockets. Pulled out three toffees and nine pence in loose change. I reached round to the other pocket. I felt a bit like a body snatcher rifling a corpse. I put my hand inside the pocket. Took out a thick card with rounded edges.

  Shirley shone the torch on it.

  There was a single name typewritten in capitals on one side: SPENCER HOOKE.

  I turned the card over. The typist had written: "Hollow Bottom Barn, 7.30 tonight. Don't be late."

  Shirley said: "Do you think he was meeting a Sheila for nooky?"

  "Seems likely," I said. "Steyning Grammar is a boys' school with boarders. A teenager with raging hormones. No female company on the premises. And long lonely nights in the dorm with only his cricket bat to cuddle. But where he was heading is only the second question."

  "The first being how he was killed?"

  "Yes." I glanced at my watch. Eight-twenty. "If Spencer was heading for an assignation, he could've passed this point an hour ago."

  "Looks like he's been killed by a hit-and-run driver," Shirley said. "Probably couldn't see his bike in this weather."

  I looked from our position by Spencer's body to the road and back again.

  "If he was hit and left for dead by a car, how come he's over here?" I said. "He must be at least twenty yards from his bike."

  I took the torch from Shirley and shone it on the ground.

  "Look, the grass has been flattened just here - and over here," I said. "It looks as though the body has been dragged from the roadside."

  "If he'd been injured he could have crawled this way before he died," Shirley said.

  "Why crawl away from the place where you're most likely to be found?"

  "The lad was confused. Probably delirious. Didn't know what he was doing."

  "I don't think so. If he was crawling, the marks on the grass would be different. The grass would only be flattened where he'd rested his hands and knees. This grass is flattened in a long swathe. Means he had to have been dragged."

  "By the driver of the car who hit him?"

  "Who else?"

  "Guess the guy hoped to hide the body while he got as far away as possible. What a bludger!"

  "That's the best that can be said of him," I said. "If it was a man."

  "A woman wouldn't drive away from an accident like this."

  I said: "You may be right. We don't know. But, just now, we've got two things to do."

  "I guess the first is to call the police," Shirley said.

  I shifted uncomfortably as my wet trousers stuck to my legs.

  "And the second is get out of these clothes," I said.

  I turned away from Spencer's body and looked towards the road. It snaked away across the ridge like a black ribbon in the night. A schoolboy had died on a lonely hill in the rain. Perhaps it was a hit-and-run accident. But, to my mind, there were too many unanswered questions.

  I couldn't get a line of Kipling's Smuggler's Song out of my mind.

  "Them that asks no questions isn't told a lie."

  But I had plenty of questions to ask. And, I suspected, plenty of lies to hear.

  Chapter 3

  "With a hit-and-run, you've got no chance."

  Detective Inspector Bernard Holdsworth leaned back in his chair with a smug grin as though he relished the thought.

  "You mean the victim has no chance of avoiding the collision?" I asked.

  "No, I was saying there's not a ghost of a hope of nabbing the culprit."

  It was the morning after the accident. We were in Shoreham-by-sea police station. Holdsworth had reluctantly agreed to see me to answer questions.

  He was a burly man with a large head. He had puffy cheeks and a jowly chin. He had tired eyes with heavy lids. His brown hair was fashioned in an elaborate comb-over which failed to hide the fact that he'd soon be bald. He was wearing a dark blue suit in some kind of serge material. The jacket was at least a size too small. His large stomach bulged against the buttons like a suet pudding bursting from its boiling bag.

  He said: "The trouble with you journalists is that you're always trying to make something out of nothing."

  I said: "Spencer Hooke wasn't nothing. He was a pupil at Steyning Grammar School. Do you know anything else about him?"

  "We've been in touch with the headmaster. He was a boarder at the school. Eightee
n years old. Parents both dead, apparently. Nearest relative a distant uncle, coffee planter in Kenya. We haven't had chance to contact him yet, but the school is passing on the hard word."

  "Did he have any particular friends at the school?" I asked.

  "We haven't been able to get into that yet. We know he was studying for his A-level exams. Apparently, he hoped to go to Cambridge University to read chemistry. And he was a member of the bell-ringers at the local church."

  "For whom the bell tolls," I said. "Now it will toll for a young lad on a bicycle who was knocked down by a car and ended up dead."

  "Chances are in weather like last night's the motorist didn't even realise."

  "That's ridiculous. I saw the bike. The back-end was shattered. It must have left damage on the car. Scratches, dents, perhaps worse."

  "Maybe. But where does that leave us? We can't search for a car with unspecified damage to it. You can be sure the driver will arrange to have that repaired pronto."

  "So ask around the garages," I said.

  "Not as simple as you believe. If the driver thinks the damage will raise awkward questions, he'll hide the car. Or he'll cover the existing damage by staging a fake accident - like driving into his gatepost. Anything that will give him a legitimate reason for presenting the car for repair at a garage."

  I frowned and made a note in my finest Pitman's.

  I said: "What about witnesses?"

  Holdsworth shrugged. "Up on the Bostal in that filthy weather? We'd have more luck finding Alfie Hinds hiding out in the station canteen."

  I sniffed. I'm rather good at a sniff which makes clear I've just treated an idea with contempt. I'd already decided Holdsworth was the kind of copper who wouldn't recognise Houdini Hinds, the legendary prison escapee, if the man served him his afternoon tea wearing prison fatigues.

  I said: "Don't dismiss the idea of witnesses. They wouldn't have to see the accident. Perhaps someone in Steyning noticed a car being driven erratically."

  "I don't have the manpower to start an enquiry like that."

  "There could've been a passenger in the car. Why not put out an appeal? Offer a reward for information received? If there were a passenger, perhaps he or she would come forward."

  "Not after the car failed to stop. Any passenger should've reported the accident immediately. If someone turned up now, we'd have some awkward questions to ask."

  "So what now?" I asked.

  "We finish the paperwork and file a report. Another unsolved hit-and-run. Too many of them I'm afraid."

  "What if it wasn't a hit-and-run? Suppose it was murder?"

  Holdsworth leant back in his chair and laughed. A deep rumble like an empty barrel rolling down a hill.

  "Weird way to murder someone. The killer would have to know that Hooke was cycling along the road at that time."

  "What about the note in Hooke's pocket - the meeting in the barn?"

  "No date on the note. It could have been an old one referring to a previous meeting. Besides, there's no certainty a driver could kill a cyclist by knocking him off a bike."

  "But I saw clear signs that the body had been dragged to the edge of the escarpment."

  Holdsworth shook his head. "That could be anything."

  "But it could mean the driver stopped the car after he'd hit Hooke. Perhaps he realised he wasn't dead and finished the job off."

  "How?"

  "I don't know. But if Hooke was already unconscious it wouldn't have been difficult to smother him. Then if he pushed the body over the escarpment into the thick undergrowth below - and followed it with the bicycle - it wouldn't be found for weeks."

  "There's no evidence to support that."

  "Isn't there?" I said. "What about the flattened grass?"

  Holdsworth tried to emulate my contemptuous sniff. It sounded like a broken foghorn.

  He said: "The grass could’ve been flattened earlier by a tractor or something driving over it. Besides, if they planned to push the body down the escarpment, why didn't they do it?"

  "I expect the killer saw the lights of a car approaching. He'd have to leave the job unfinished and drive off quickly."

  "Did you see another car on the road?"

  "No, but we didn't come along until at least an hour later."

  Holdsworth clapped his hands together, like he'd just proved his point.

  "There you are," he said. "No witnesses. Isn't that what I said a few minutes ago? Besides, I have too many other bases to watch. We have to police Shoreham harbour. Ships coming and going all the time. But hardly anything happens in Shoreham harbour that I don't get to hear about."

  Holdsworth picked up a file and opened it. His sign the meeting had ended.

  ***

  An hour later, I was in the newsroom at the Evening Chronicle fuming at Holdsworth's complacency.

  It was late morning and the deadline for the midday edition had passed. For a moment, typewriters had fallen silent. Telephones rang less insistently. Knots of journos hung about the room and swapped stories or whispered secrets in corners. Phil Bailey leant back in his chair and lit one of his Dutch cheroots. Susan Wheatcroft bustled back from the tea room carrying a plate with two large Chelsea buns.

  Sally Martin, who edited the woman's page, ambled over to me. She brushed some loose papers to one side on my desk and perched on the edge.

  "Figgis was looking for you this morning," she said.

  "No doubt to congratulate me on making a successful speech last night - and landing a front-page story on the way home."

  "He had a look on his face like he'd just swallowed a fag-end."

  "So I should head off somewhere safe? Like South America. At least until he's cooled down."

  "Just a friendly warning."

  Sally slid off my desk and strolled over to the Press Association newswire.

  I leant forward in my captain's chair. I pulled my Remington typewriter towards me and rolled copy-paper into the carriage. I typed the catchline Crampton/Hooke…1 and then sat back in my chair. It should have been a straightforward one-shot story. Boy hit by car and dies. A tragedy and a life summed up in three hundred words before I typed the word "ends".

  No, I just couldn't see it like that. Holdsworth's complacent attitude had unsettled me. Was there any crime that he'd take seriously? I accepted that it wouldn't be easy to trace the driver of the car. But that didn't mean he shouldn't try. The story I wrote now shouldn't be the end of the matter. It should be the beginning. This may have been an accident, but the fact the driver hadn't stopped made it an offence. And the fact a boy had died made it a serious crime in my book.

  And I couldn't get out of my mind the idea there was more to it. Holdsworth had dismissed my idea that the body had been dragged to the edge of the escarpment. But I'd seen the trail of flattened grass in the torchlight. And if I was going to give this story the front-page treatment and uncover the truth, I'd need Figgis's backing.

  But, if Sally was right, Figgis was in a bad mood.

  I stood up, crossed the newsroom and headed for Figgis's office.

  I knocked on his door.

  From inside the room, a voice which sounded like a sergeant major with laryngitis bellowed: "What?"

  I opened the door, stuck my head round the side and said: "Actually, that should always be 'who?'"

  Figgis looked up from some galley proofs he was reading. He removed a Woodbine that was hanging like a miniature censer from his bottom lip and glared at me.

  I said: "As an inanimate object will never knock on your door, the query should never be 'what?'."

  He said: "In your case, it's usually why?"

  "I'm glad you see it that way," I said.

  I stepped into the room, crossed to his desk, and sat down in the guest chair without waiting to be invited.

  Figgis stubbed out his ciggie and said: "Before we go into that, I want an answer to the question "How?"

  "How what?"

  "How you managed to rile the suffragan bishop of H
orsham at the Workers' Educational Meeting last night."

  "I was giving a lecture on the ethics of the press. The lecture you'd been booked to give."

  "Ahem." Figgis flushed, a sign I'd embarrassed him. "I had pressing business elsewhere."

  "The Coach and Horses?"

  "Never mind about where. The bishop complained you told a story about the Archbishop of Canterbury making visits to New York strip clubs."

  "No, only getting into hot water by giving an inept answer to a daft question. Anyway, why was the bishop calling you? I'd have thought he'd have taken his complaint direct to His Holiness."

  Gerald Pope was the paper's editor. He was an upper-class twerp who'd got the job because he talked posh. He spent most of his time hobnobbing with the county set on the pretext he was making important contacts. But His Holiness wouldn't recognise a useful contact if it plugged itself into a power circuit and gave him an electric shock.

  Figgis fiddled with the galley proofs on his desk. "I like to keep complaints away from Pope. I arranged for the switchboard to route all calls about the lecture meeting to me."

  That had my attention. It was the first time I'd heard Figgis claim he wanted more calls. Especially more complaints. When the switchboard put them through, he'd normally treat the telephonists to a mouthful of fruity language. There had to be a reason and I thought I knew what it was. But for the moment I decided I'd keep that in reserve.

  I said: "You've heard about the death of the young lad up on the Bostal road near Steyning last night."

  Figgis nodded. "Hit-and-run, I hear. We'll take one column on an inside page and leave it at that. Perhaps a follow-up par about the funeral, but that's it."

  I said: "I think it may be more than a hit-and-run."

  Figgis shot me a sharp glance. He reached for his fags, shook one out of the packet and lit up.

  "Another of your theories?"

  "Perhaps, but they've often been right in the past."

  "Tell me the tale."

  So I told Figgis why I thought the killing could have been a murder.

  I said: "The cop investigating the case is a guy called Bernard Holdsworth. He just wants to clear his in-tray and close the file. I need some time to investigate more."