by Anne Digby
‘Very well,’ said Miss Welbeck, after a minute’s silence. ‘Go back to bed all of you. No talking.’
They all crushed out of the Common Room, the most senior girls first, anxious to get back to their warm beds but already starting to whisper and exclaim over the sensational happening, as soon as they were out of earshot of the Common Room.
‘Wait a moment, Rebecca.’
Miss Welbeck questioned her closely. Why was she up after midnight? Was she sure she’d seen nobody in the hall? What had woken her up – might it have been the sound of a girl using the phone?
Rebecca just shook her head. She’d been awake for some time. No one used the phone. She would have heard them. She just got up to get a drink of water, that was all.
Miss Welbeck sent her back to bed.
‘Now what do we do?’ asked Mrs Barrington, softly closing the door. ‘It looks as though the girl only said she was ringing from Court House. Could you not hear her voice well enough to recognise who it was?’
‘No,’ said Miss Welbeck, thoughtfully. ‘It was rather muffled – gasping – as though she were trying not to cry.’
‘Should we alert the other boarding houses?’ asked Mrs Barrington, in some alarm. ‘Perhaps the whole school had better be checked. What should we do?’ she repeated.
‘Nothing,’ said Miss Welbeck, shortly.
‘Nothing?’
The Principal wrapped her coat closer round her. She was preparing to go. She looked extremely annoyed.
‘I thought the girl was trying not to cry. On reflection, I think she must have been trying not to laugh. I may live to regret it, but I don’t intend to rouse the whole school at this time of night.’
‘Then –’
‘I seem to be the victim of a hoax,’ said Miss Welbeck. ‘And I am not amused.’
She walked over to the door and started to turn the handle.
‘Would you do one last thing before you go back to bed, Joan?’
‘Of course.’
‘I saw no sign of a glass of water in Rebecca Mason’s hand. Check round the kitchen – see if there’s any sign of a glass having been used.’
‘Very well. But I’m sure Rebecca was speaking the truth.’
‘One hopes so. It would be nice to have her story confirmed, though.’
Miss Welbeck was right. It was a hoax.
Monday morning dawned sunny and the school population was quite intact. No girl had run away from Court House, or any other boarding house.
‘I ask the practical joker to report to my study immediately after Assembly,’ the Principal told the packed hall. ‘If she doesn’t, it will be very much the worse for her.’
But nobody responded to Miss Welbeck’s invitation.
The whole school was astonished by the hoax and everybody talked about it. Some might have considered it a mildly funny happening if it hadn’t involved Miss Welbeck. But she was greatly admired and respected. The juniors were quite upset to see her angry and tight-lipped. It cast a cloud over the day.
The question on everybody’s lips was – who would have had the nerve? And what was there to gain from it? It was all, apparently, thoroughly pointless.
‘Somebody with a twisted sense of humour in your house then, Maggie,’ commented one of the girls in IV Alpha at morning break.
‘Oh, yes, we’ve got our share of lunatics,’ replied Margaret Exton.
‘Poor Miss Welbeck,’ said somebody else.
‘What about poor us?’ asked Margaret, eyes glittering a bit. ‘It was quite frightening, being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, all because of some stupid idiot.’ She was squeezing the last drop of drama out of the situation. ‘I’d like to get my hands on them!’
‘Virginia Slade was in tears at breakfast and said she hadn’t been able to get back to sleep all night.’
‘Oh, she never can,’ said Suky Morris, who was just passing. ‘Every time she has a row with Mark Enwright the whole of V Beta has to hear about it – how she couldn’t get a wink of sleep –’
‘She said she was going to die of a broken heart last Saturday!’
‘Whoever did it,’ resumed Margaret Exton, not welcoming the change of subject, ‘is for the high jump. That’s for sure.’
‘Got any ideas?’
‘It could have been one of Tish Anderson’s crowd,’ said Margaret. ‘They were in a pretty daft mood last night. And d’you know what –’ she lowered her voice ‘– Rebecca Mason had to stay behind after Mrs Barry had checked the roll. Miss Welbeck wanted to know what she was doing up.’
By tea time a whole host of rumours was flying around Trebizon.
It was Rebecca Mason, she’d been seen near the phone at midnight.
No, it was Tish Anderson and Rebecca Mason had covered up for her.
No again – it was definitely Rebecca Mason – Mrs Barry had caught her with the phone in her hand.
No – it was neither of those – it was Virginia Slade. Mark Enwright had dropped her – it was a cry for help.
But by Monday evening, after much heart searching, Miss Welbeck had formed a theory of her own.
‘A motive, Evelyn,’ she confided in the senior maths mistress. ‘One has to look for a motive! I think it might have been a member of Parkinson House –’
‘But Madeleine, how could it –’ began Miss Gates.
‘I’ll give her a day or two to come to her senses. If nobody’s come forward by Wednesday, I shall invite her to my study and ask some very searching questions.’
Miss Welbeck sighed. It was all very tiresome.
‘I can’t be sure, of course,’ she admitted.
SIX
The Missing Number
‘Some people think it was you, Rebecca!’ Tish said indignantly, at breakfast on Tuesday morning. ‘Or me!’
This term she’d taken over Joss Vining’s place as head of their table in dining hall. She was at present dishing out pieces of bacon from an oval serving dish.
Keeping her ear to the ground as only Tish could, she’d picked up some displeasing vibrations.
‘Who cares –’ said Rebecca, pronging her bacon, ‘– what some people think? Miss Welbeck’ll track the person down sooner or later.’
She was fed up with thinking about the hoax. There were other, more important things to think about.
She’d missed the final notice asking for magazine contributions to be given in. She’d got her poem in to Helena King, over at Norris House, only just in the nick of time!
As this year’s Magazine Officer, Helena’s job was to shortlist all Third Year contributions for The Trebizon Journal and then organise a vote to be taken for the best. They would then go forward to Pippa and her committee and inclusion in The Journal was more or less guaranteed. It was all very democratic.
She’d got the poem in yesterday.
The magazine meeting, with the vote, was today!
There was also the question of a maths test, first lesson. Miss Hort wasn’t too pleased with the way Rebecca’s trigonometry was going and Rebecca badly wanted to sort out the difference between sines and cosines once and for all, before the test. Preferably with Tish, if only she’d stop going on about the hoax.
Most important of all, there was a two-hour team practice this afternoon to get the new pairs used to playing together. Rebecca had been told that Jilly and Alison, the second pair, were to play at least three sets against her and Pippa, the third pair. Della and Kate, who’d played together for years, would just play singles.
Tomorrow they were playing Caxton High School in the first round of the inter-schools cup! It was a knockout tournament so if Trebizon were beaten tomorrow, they were out of the cup. Thank goodness they were playing at home, thought Rebecca, so there’d be a good crowd to cheer them on. She wondered anxiously what it was going to be like playing as Pippa’s partner and whether Pippa would still be pleased that she’d got into the team instead of Eddie Burton!
‘What are you daydreaming about?’ asked Mara wit
h a smile.
‘Er –’ Rebecca looked guilty. ‘Nothing really. Trigonometry, I suppose.’
‘At breakfast?’ exclaimed Sue.
In fact, with Tish’s help, Rebecca sorted out her maths problem before lessons started and managed to get seven out of ten in the test, which got her day off to a good start.
In the lunch hour they trooped up to the form room for the Third Year magazine meeting. Margot and Elf had helpfully drummed up the support of all ground floor residents in Court House (with the exception of Aba, who was having some athletics coaching with Angela Hessel) to come along and vote for Rebecca’s poem.
But to Rebecca’s relief there wasn’t even a contest.
‘I’ve only been given two items this term,’ said Helena, ‘and both of them are terrific. If you all agree, we’ll hand them both in together and they can be our contributions for this issue.’
She then read out Rebecca’s poem and passed round a beautiful pen-and-ink drawing that Verity Williams had done of her pony, Brandy, in the Easter holidays. Everybody was very impressed and the vote in favour of both items going in was unanimous.
‘I’ll take them straight over to Parkinson now,’ said Helena, putting them back in her folder, ‘and give them to Pippa.’
When she reached the Upper Sixth boarding house, Pippa and Annie were sitting in Pippa’s car. Annie wound down the window and reached out a hand.
‘Thanks, I’ll take them.’
Pippa had both hands on the steering wheel and was gazing ahead, preoccupied. Annie put the folder on the back seat, then smoothed down her fair hair. A few moments later, they drove off.
Meanwhile, Rebecca and Verity were so delighted at the way things had gone, they took everybody to Moffatt’s and bought barley sugars all round.
Rebecca half hoped that Pippa might say something about the poem at the tennis practice that afternoon. But she didn’t.
They took a while to settle down together. Pippa’s concentration seemed poor and Rebecca was nervous. She’d hang back to let Pippa take shots that were strictly speaking hers, which Pippa promptly missed.
‘Sorry!’ she kept saying.
‘Rebecca Mason, wake up!’ barked Miss Darling. ‘Just because you’re the baby of the team that doesn’t mean you have to behave like one! And stop saying “sorry”!’
Rebecca then overreacted and went to the other extreme – plunging in to take every ball so that twice she and Pippa clashed rackets and she would find herself saying ‘sorry’ again. But Pippa was patient and good-humoured. The problem was they were cast in the same mould, fluent and graceful players who were good all round the court. But slowly they worked out a pattern for playing together.
At the opposite end of the court Alison and Jilly had settled down together much more quickly. Jilly, with her towering height, was brilliant at the net whereas Alison was strong and sound playing back from the baseline. They took the first set easily, 6–1.
However, by the second set Pippa and Rebecca were beginning to build up their own strategy for covering the court and – although they lost again – there were some exciting rallies. The third and final set was long and hard-fought. When they finally ran out the losers at 7–9, Rebecca was exhausted but happy.
‘I feel we’ve been playing together for years now, don’t you?’ smiled Pippa, as she zipped her racket into its waterproof cover. ‘I’m quite looking forward to the match tomorrow!’
‘So am I!’ said Rebecca, though not without a churning sensation in the pit of her stomach. ‘They’re good, aren’t they?’
‘Not as good as us!’ said Pippa.
Miss Darling gathered the whole team around and gave them a pep talk. She also told them all to have an early night.
‘Especially you, Rebecca.’
Rebecca did her prep straight after tea – French and history – then amazed her friends by going off to have a bath and wash her hair at seven o’clock. After that, while her hair dried, she sewed her First VI colours on to her white tennis dress, rinsed it through by hand and then went along to the laundry room and dried it in the tumble dryer.
She’d just fished it out when Tish burst in, dishevelled, in her tracksuit, having just been for a practice run along the beach – she was running in the 800 metres on Sports Day.
‘How do I look?’ asked Rebecca, laughing with excitement and holding her sparklingly clean dress up against her dressing gown. ‘D’you like the team colours? Oh, Tish, I still can’t believe I’ve got them!’
Tish jerked her thumb. ‘You’re wanted on the phone.’
It was Pippa.
‘Rebecca – I read your poem at tea time. And we’ve just had an editorial meeting. We all love it! We’re going to superimpose it on the picture of the cedar tree, just at the bottom where the grass is. I thought you’d like to know.’
‘On – on the cover?’ gasped Rebecca.
‘That’s right. Going to bed early?’
‘Yes.’ Rebecca felt a sense of mounting excitement. ‘Oh, Pippa, my parents will be so thrilled. I’ll order some copies for them.’
Mr and Mrs Mason were in Saudi Arabia and could never get to Trebizon. They’d only seen the school once, but their thoughts were always with Rebecca, whom they missed.
‘It’s pretty hot and dusty where they are, isn’t it?’ said Pippa. ‘Hope they like our nice cool cedar tree to look at! Night, Rebecca.’
Rebecca put the phone down and stood there a while, dazed, staring at the wall in front of her. There was a list of school phone numbers pinned up there, giving the numbers of all the other boarding houses. Rebecca gazed at them, blankly, thinking about her phone call.
‘Sue! Tish! Mara!’ she cried, at last. ‘Guess what –!’
She rushed into the kitchen and told them.
‘What a term you’re having!’ exclaimed Sue. ‘Wow-ee!’
Rebecca went to bed early and was nearly asleep when the others came in. She’d been thinking about tomorrow’s match, feeling keyed up and excited. But suddenly, for no reason, the list of numbers by the coinbox came back to her mind. She could see them very clearly.
‘Hey. That’s funny,’ she said, opening her eyes.
‘What’s funny?’ asked Sue.
‘The list of numbers by the phone. Miss Welbeck’s home number isn’t up there –’
‘Of course it isn’t,’ said Sue. ‘It’s private. I suppose the staff have got it.’ She giggled. ‘Want to give her a ring?’
‘I was thinking about the hoaxer,’ said Rebecca.
‘Hey, yes!’ said Tish. She was doing a headstand on the bed, but quickly turned herself the right way up. ‘That’s interesting. How many girls know Miss Welbeck’s number? I don’t.’
‘Nor me,’ said Sue.
‘None of us do,’ yawned Rebecca.
Tish bounced up and down on the bed a few times, using it as a trampoline. Finally she got in between the covers and picked up a book.
‘When I get the chance I’m going to tell Miss Welbeck that!’
Rebecca turned over. It was the match tomorrow – she didn’t want to think about the hoaxer any more.
But, as things turned out, she was going to have to.
SEVEN
Fire!
Wednesday dawned cool and dull. The early May weather was back to normal.
‘Good!’ said Sue, jumping out of bed and drawing back the curtains. ‘That means there’ll be some spectators this afternoon.’
Rebecca laughed.
Wednesday was a half-day for the Middle and Upper School and if it were sunny this afternoon, counter-attractions like swimming and surfing would draw most girls away from watching the cup match. But it wasn’t going to be sunny!
It looked as though there’d be a good crowd along.
At the end of morning lessons, a lot of III Alpha wished Rebecca luck. Afterwards, in the dining hall, girls from III Beta and Gamma came up as well. Joss may have gone but now they had someone else from the Third Year in th
e team.
‘Hope you win, Rebecca!’ said Roberta Jones, who was on the next table. ‘Hear you’ve got something in the magazine as well.’
Roberta was much more settled these days, now that she had three close friends in Norris House – Debbie Rickard and the Nathan twins.
‘The way she used to fight and struggle to get something in the magazine herself!’ commented Sue, afterwards. ‘When we were juniors. And she couldn’t write for toffee!’
‘It was embarrassing,’ said Mara.
‘Max changed her,’ said Rebecca, remembering. ‘That was one good thing he did. Do you realise that was only a year ago? It seems much longer, somehow.’
‘Lot’s happened since then!’ said Margot. She smiled, showing her beautiful white teeth. ‘I bet you never dreamt then what you’d be doing today. Oh, Rebecca – we’re all dying to see you play!’
‘Supposing we’re knocked out in the first round? I ought to be scared but I’m not really,’ said Rebecca. She thought about it. ‘I’m looking forward to it. To playing with Pippa!’
Lady Edwina came by at that moment.
‘You’d better make a good job of it this afternoon,’ she said, with a half-smile. ‘Good luck.’
‘I’ll try,’ said Rebecca. It was the first time the older girl had spoken to her directly since the trials and the half-smile was all she could manage. ‘Thanks, Eddie.’
In the lunch hour the six friends went down to Trebizon Bay, through the little wicket gate at the back of Juniper House and up over the sand dunes. The skies were grey and the big flat expanse of sand was almost deserted. The sea was fairly rough, tossing great breakers to the shore and the gulls were wheeling and crying round the empty beach huts.
‘Not beach weather,’ said Elf. ‘I’m glad really.’
‘It’s only just tennis weather,’ said Margot, looking up at the skies. ‘I wonder if it’s going to rain?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Sue.
‘I like it!’ exclaimed Rebecca, climbing back up one of the sand dunes, flinging her arms wide and taking some deep breaths at the top. ‘It’s nice when it’s hot, but it’s lovely when it’s like this and you’ve got the whole bay to yourself.’
