The Mother's Day Mystery

by Peter Bartram

  They looked up at us as we climbed out of the MGB and waved.

  "Let the sunshine in," one of them called to us.

  We waved back.

  "Cool car," Shirley shouted to them.

  They laughed, hugged one another, and went back to their painting.

  To the right of the driveway there was a crumbling red brick wall. It had an arch in the middle. We walked towards it and stepped through the arch into a garden. A gravel path looped around the garden and up to the house.

  The garden was filled with huge rhododendron bushes, but there were flower beds between them. Daffodils swayed in a light breeze. There were white, blue and purple crocuses. There were snowdrops which drooped their heads like a shy girl at a dance. There were yellow primroses that clustered around the roots of the rhododendrons.

  I said: "When they talk about flower power, it looks as though they mean it. This garden is out of this world."

  Shirley said: "Just like that pair sitting over there."

  A man and woman slumped on a garden bench. He wore a shirt dyed in an eye-strain of psychedelic colours and a pair of brown moccasins. She wore a shift dress in striped primary colours. Her hair was braided with beads. The pair had thick reefers between their lips. The sweet smell of cannabis drifted across the garden.

  The woman rose from the bench when she saw us and drifted across the garden. She picked a daffodil, looked at it and giggled. She walked up and handed the daffodil to me.

  "Look at its face, my friend," she said. "It's smiling at you."

  I said: "At least something is pleased to see me. Where can I find Christabel?"

  The woman looked at me through blank unblinking eyes.

  "Who?" she asked.

  "Christabel Fox," I said. "The woman who owns this place."

  "We all own the earth and the moon and the skies," she said.

  "Listen, sister," Shirley said. "Who puts out the rubbish when it's the day for the bin men to collect?"

  The woman's dreamy eyes moved slowly from me to Shirley. She didn't understand. She turned and drifted away, humming tunelessly to herself.

  Feet crunched on the gravel behind me and I turned around.

  A young woman approached. She was tall and had a slim figure. She had luxuriant blonde hair which fell to her waist, like you see in those shampoo adverts. It would've made Rapunzel dead jealous. Her face had a kind of wasted beauty, like some of it had been used up by hard living. Her green eyes were dreamy as though some soft and soothing music were playing inside her head. Her wide lips had the lightest touch of blue lipstick. No other make-up, but I guess with blue lipstick, you don't need it. She was dressed in a kaftan decorated with red, yellow and blue petals and open-toed sandals.

  She crossed her arms and said: "I am Christabel Fox. We ask people to come here in peace and love, but you look as though you have come in neither."

  Chapter 16

  I said: "There doesn't seem to have been a lot of peace and love to spare in this area recently. Especially for young Spencer Hooke."

  Christabel moved closer. The dreamy look in her eyes had faded. She wanted to give me a flinty look, but she couldn't manage it. She was on something. And it wasn't aspirin.

  She said: "Who are you?"

  "Seekers after truth - just like you."

  The ghost of a smile passed over Christabel's lips. "There is no truth - only perception," she said.

  "That's the gospel according to Dr Timothy Leary, is it? Nothing is real, particularly when you're spaced out on an acid trip with LSD. But it's not the gospel according to Frank Figgis."

  "I know no Figgis."

  "I wish I didn't most of the time. He's my news editor."

  "And a big-time smoker like your pals over by the rhododendron bush," Shirley chipped in.

  "Except Frank's poison is a Woodbine," I said.

  "Not a spliff as thick as a kangaroo's todger," Shirley added.

  Christabel's cheeks flushed in anger. "And you've come to print lies about us?"

  "I thought you just said there was no truth."

  "I did."

  "In which case, there can't be any lies," I said. "I'm Colin Crampton. I'm from the Evening Chronicle and I'm not interested in even the perception of lies."

  "I'm Shirley Goldsmith," Shirl chimed in. "And as straight as an Aussie state line."

  I said to Christabel: "And, yes, we come in peace and love. Even for peace and love. A piece of cake and we'd love a cup of tea." I grinned. "Why don't we start this conversation again?"

  Christabel thought about that for a moment and then shrugged.

  She said: "Follow me."

  She moved towards the house like she planned to float there.

  ***

  Christabel led us into the house through a side door.

  In the earls' days, it would have been the servants' entrance. The door led into a scullery. There were three huge stone sinks each with a wooden draining board. Plates and cups monogrammed with elaborate coats of arms were stacked by the sinks. Whoever was on washing-up duty had bunked off early.

  The scullery led into a kitchen. The walls had once been whitewashed but they'd yellowed with age. At one end of the room a blackened cooking pot hung from a chain above an open fireplace. It was the kind of place where you'd expect to see a group of peasants roasting an ox.

  A large deal table dominated the centre of the room.

  On the far side a kettle simmered on the hob of an ancient Aga. Christabel busied herself looking out a teapot and cups. She spooned tea from a caddy into the pot and topped up with boiling water. She fetched a bottle of milk from the pantry and gave it a discreet sniff before pouring some into a jug. She went back to the pantry and came out carrying a plate with small cakes. They had crimson icing which looked like it was radioactive. She put everything on a tray.

  She said: "We'll go into the library."

  I said: "For a talk rather than a read, I hope."

  "Follow me."

  She carried the tray and led us down a dark passage. We turned a corner and came to a large door left ajar. Christabel pushed her way in and we followed.

  The library was an impressive room lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The shelves were filled with leather-bound volumes, many in sets. I saw a six-volume quarto edition of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and a two-volume early edition of Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language with raised bands on the leather spine.

  To one side of the room was a handsome walnut writing desk. It held a large blotter and crystal inkstand. There was a wooden stationery tidy holding writing paper and cards. I wandered over for a closer look.

  On the other side of the room, there was a fireplace with a marble surround. A group of red leather armchairs was gathered around a coffee table. The table was piled with a drift of papers. Some had floated onto the floor.

  Christabel hovered around the table wondering where to place the tray.

  Ever helpful, I hurried forward and gathered up the papers. While Christabel put the tray on the table and busied herself with the tea things, I carried the papers to the other side of the room. I had a quiet rummage through them as I went. (Well, what did you expect me to do?) There were letters from a firm of solicitors about the house, a big envelope stuffed with papers from the Sussex Coast Building Society, and some correspondence from a bank. If Natterjack Grange was the home of peace and love, the bank manager hadn't received the message.

  I stuffed the papers into a space on a bookshelf and walked over the fireplace.

  A picture of a young man and woman on their wedding day hung over the fireplace. He was tall and ascetic looking. He had a handlebar moustache and a look of complacent arrogance in his deep-set eyes.

  The woman was shorter. A Thumbelina to her husband. She wore a pair of shoes with six-inch heels, but that only brought her up to her husband’s shoulder. If she’d wanted to whisper sweet nothings into his ear, she’d have needed a pair of stilts. She probab
ly had to climb a stepladder to kiss him goodnight.

  "My father and mother," Christabel said.

  She waved us to the chairs. She poured the tea and handed round the cups and saucers. We declined the radioactive cakes.

  She said: "Thank you for moving those papers to make way for the tea."

  Christabel smiled. It was a wan effort, but genuine I thought. "I should have welcomed you with the peace and love we aspire to."

  "But you've been pestered by journalists before," Shirley said.

  "And can't 'bear to hear the truth you've spoken, twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools'," I added.

  Christabel took a sip of tea. "Yes, when I moved in here five months ago, the national newspapers thought it was a story. Earl's granddaughter turns stately home into a hippie commune. Well, you only have to look around. The place wasn't that stately when Grandpapa died."

  I looked at the well-filled bookshelves. "This room is handsome," I said.

  Christabel nodded to accept the compliment. "It is now. When I moved in, the room was packed with boxes of old family papers. I think Grandpapa had been sorting them when he died. I’ve no idea what was in them. I sent them straight to the County Records Office in Chichester. They take a pride in cataloguing the papers of the aristocratic county families. But don't be fooled by this room. The rest of the place is falling down."

  "And you've been angry because journalists have written stories about the earl's granddaughter living a drug-fuelled high-life with a bunch of hippie freeloaders?"

  "Something like that," she said.

  Shirley piped up: "Some reporters are real bastards. Not Colin, of course."

  "And you don't want newspaper headlines about wild drug orgies?" I said.

  "There are no illegal drugs here,” Christabel said. “I insist on that. Everyone here knows I won't stand for illegal drugs."

  "Including the two muggle-heads in the garden?" Shirley asked.

  "I shall speak to them when you've gone."

  "But you take LSD here - lysergic acid diethylamide, to the boffins." I said. "Also known to the hip-heads as golden dragon, window pane, and yellow sunshine."

  "I said I won't tolerate illegal drugs. LSD is still legal in Britain. We can use it, as though it were aspirin, without breaking the law."

  "But you can't buy it at the pharmacy, like aspirin. And you can't do that because it's a powerful hallucinogenic. Or as the headline writers have it, a mind-bender. What I'd like to know is how an earl's granddaughter got in with the psychedelic crowd."

  "If I tell you, will you print the truth?" Christabel asked.

  I grinned. "If you'll accept the perception of truth."

  Christabel nodded. "I suppose I asked for that. But, anyway, I think it's all down to my mother and father trying to make me do things I didn't want to. Last year, when I left Roedean, they wanted me to go to a finishing school in Switzerland. I ask you! Switzerland would be enough to finish anyone."

  "Not unless you want to watch the Gnomes of Zurich counting their money," I said.

  "I persuaded Mama and Papa to let me go to the United States. The idea was that I would travel around and see the sights. I was in a bar in California one night when I met a girl called Carolyn Adams. She told me about a group of people planning a road trip across America. It sounded great - see the sights. Just what Mama and Papa suggested. Carolyn said the trip was being organised by a man called Ken Kesey."

  "Someone we should know?" Shirley asked.

  "Kesey wrote that book One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, which came out about four years ago," I said. "I'd heard he's good mates with Timothy Leary, the LSD champion."

  "The following day Carolyn took me to see Ken and meet his friends,” Christabel said. “They were a wild crowd, like no-one I'd ever met before. They called themselves the Merry Pranksters and they lived life right up to the edge. I used that phrase to Ken and he told me it was possible to live life beyond the edge - with some help from California sunshine."

  "He offered you LSD?" I asked.

  Christabel nodded. "I wasn't sure but Mountain Girl - that's what we used to call Carolyn - said I had to try it. She said it would bring me closer to the group. I was frightened but I took my first trip that night."

  "Jeez! What happened?" Shirley asked.

  "It was slow at first, but then I felt like I could hear the colours. I felt I was walking through a wood and the brown of the tree trunks was played on a trombone and the green of the leaves on a violin. I felt happier than I'd ever felt in that forest, but at the same time sad that the happiness wouldn't last. I walked on, even though my feet never seemed to touch the ground. Then everything faded and the trees and the leaves became silent in my head. And finally, I must have fallen asleep. A few days later, we all left on the road trip in this crazy psychedelic painted bus we called Further.

  "I learnt a lot on that road trip. We took more acid as well while we were on the road. It helped me to see so clearly what was wrong with us and what was right. It's true what Ken says - if we all took psychedelic drugs we could transform the world into the beautiful visions we see."

  "But in the meantime, we have to rely on Harold Wilson and Lyndon B Johnson to do the job," I said.

  "A few days before we were due to end the trip in New York, I learnt that my Grandpapa had died and left me this house. I decided I was going to build a community here that would live up to the ideals of the Merry Pranksters."

  "So it's peace and love for all," I said.

  Christabel shrugged. "It hasn't turned out quite like that."

  I said: "Like when Spencer Hooke was killed. The lad seems to have been an enterprising type. Had he ever been here?"

  Christabel gazed into the fireplace as though there was cheery blaze of pine logs. The grate was empty. Perhaps in her drug-addled mind the fire crackled and the smoke drifted up the chimney.

  "Not while I was around," she said.

  I glanced at Shirley. I'd been convinced Christabel had told us the truth about her American adventures. But now she'd just lied.

  “Was Spencer here when you weren’t around?” I asked.

  “He may have been.”

  “Many times?”

  “We live freely here – people come and go as they please.”

  "On the night he died, Spencer was cycling to Hollow Bottom Barn. Is that on this estate?"

  "Yes," Christabel answered. "It's on the edge of Runciman's Field, just beyond the wood. But nobody ever goes there. I can't think why Spencer should."

  Christabel had lied again. She'd told me nobody went there. I hadn't asked whether they did. Liars, like Christabel, give too much information because they're nervous. They think if they please their interrogator, they'll be believed. Yes, Christabel was a liar.

  I said: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single lad without a bean to his name must be in want of a woman who's loaded."

  Christabel flashed angry eyes at me. "I'm not loaded. And even if I were, what possible interest could I have in a schoolboy chemistry swot?"

  "So you know he was a chemistry savant," I said. “Even though you say you’ve never met.”

  Christabel blushed. "I think someone must have mentioned it when we heard about his death. But I had no interest in Spencer Hooke. I have a boyfriend."

  "One of the Merry Pranksters?" I asked.

  "No, he’s a wonderful guy I met in New York, before I flew back to Britain. He'd followed the exploits of the Merry Pranksters in the press and said how much he'd admired them. I told him about my plan to bring their vision of life to Britain and he just wanted to be part of it."

  I bet he did, I thought. Penniless Yank would like to meet aristocratic Brit with own stately home. With a view to living a life of ease. No doubt he was a street-corner hustler who thought he'd hit the jackpot.

  I said: “Have your parents met him?”

  Christabel nodded. “I think they approve. At least my father likes him.”

  I
said: "Can we meet him?"

  "It would be great if we could say 'G'day'," Shirley said.

  "I'm afraid he's out. He had to arrange a delivery of feed for the farm animals," Christabel said.

  "At least tell us the hunk's name," Shirley said.

  "It's Zachariah," Christabel said.

  ***

  "Jeez, Colin, I thought your blood had drained down to your boots," Shirley said.

  "For a moment it felt like it," I said.

  We were sitting in the MGB parked in a lay-by on the Bostal road a mile from Natterjack Grange. A stiff breeze rocked the car on its springs.

  "When I was at Shoreham harbour last night, there was a man who looked like he was the boss of the outfit. He was an American and one of the others said he came from New York. They called him Zach."

  "Then why didn't you tell Christabel about that?"

  "Two reasons. First, I can't be one hundred per cent sure that the Zach at the harbour and her boyfriend Zachariah are the same person."

  "They have to be," Shirley said. "How many crazy parents name their children so they spend their life sounding like an Old Testament prophet?"

  "I agree there are ninety-nine chances out of a hundred the two are the same - but there's still one chance that they're different. I have to be sure before I start throwing serious accusations around. But the second reason is even more important."

  "Why?"

  "Because I can't be certain how much Christabel knows about this."

  "She has to know," Shirley said. "She met the guy in New York - she must have seen what he was into there."

  I twisted in my seat to face Shirley. "I'm not so sure. We know Christabel takes LSD and has some kind of weird conviction that it can save the world. But she said she strongly opposed illegal drugs.”

  Shirley nodded. "Yeah. She could have meant what she said."

  "She seemed genuinely annoyed when we pointed out two of her flower children were smoking pot. If Zach is the lynchpin in a drug smuggling operation, he could be doing it under her nose. She's so spaced out she could be flying round Venus."

  "But she lied about knowing Hooke," Shirley said.