by Anne Digby
Tish just shook her head. Suddenly her mind was very, very clear again.
‘I’m sorry, Miss Welbeck. The girl might have done that – but it wasn’t Rebecca. That’s ridiculous. Completely ridiculous!’
Miss Welbeck walked back to her desk, smiled and sat down.
‘Very well, Ishbel. You may go.’
Tish walked to the door and took the handle. She turned round. Miss Welbeck was marking some papers, as though she’d already forgotten her existence.
‘Will I be punished?’ she asked, in a small voice. ‘For calling the fire brigade.’
‘No,’ said Miss Welbeck, without looking up.
Afterwards, Tish had the feeling that the Principal had been having some sort of game with her. But she couldn’t be sure.
In spite of the fact that Rebecca and Pippa played badly, and lost, Trebizon got through. Alison and Jilly won their match and then, after some nail-biting suspense, Della and Kate clinched theirs 9–7 in the final set. But Trebizon had come within a hairsbreadth of being knocked out of the cup in the first round!
As Tish put it: ‘Miss Dreadful looks it!’
At the tennis tea, the mistress said to Pippa and Rebecca: ‘You two had better pull yourselves together before the next round. You’ve got a fortnight.’
When they saw the Caxton High team off, after tea, there was a general air of ill feeling.
‘I can’t bear to look at their poor minibus,’ said Pippa. ‘It’s been a dreadful afternoon, hasn’t it, Rebecca? And whatever happened to us?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Rebecca, helplessly.
‘Hadn’t you better go and see how your friend Tish got on?’ asked Pippa gently. Then she smiled reassuringly. ‘I expect everything’s all right, Rebecca.’
As Rebecca walked away, she glanced back and saw that Pippa was walking back to Parkinson House, along past the big cedar tree. She remembered that it was Pippa’s last term and suddenly she felt sad that this afternoon had marred it for her.
‘It’s this hoaxing business,’ Rebecca thought angrily. ‘It’s rather horrible. Us getting the blame – Pippa getting upset!’
She sprinted all the way back to Court House and found Tish and the others in the Common Room.
‘We’ve got to find out who the hoaxer is!’ they burst out.
‘Did you get punished, Tish?’ Rebecca asked anxiously.
‘No, she let me off,’ said Tish. ‘But I was given a real grilling, all the same! Miss Welbeck’s baffled, if you ask me. She even floated a wild theory that you could be the hoaxer, Rebecca –’
That didn’t surprise Rebecca.
‘Well, it could have been me, couldn’t it? I mean, look at Sunday night. And as for setting off the fire alarm –’ Rebecca looked solemn. ‘I was on my own, wasn’t I? I haven’t got an alibi.’
They all looked so worried that she laughed.
‘But then, nor have you Tish!’
‘And nor have lots of other people!’ added Sue.
They started to joke about it then, as a kind of reaction to the tension of the afternoon, suggesting all sorts of unlikely suspects.
‘Miss Hort –’
‘No, Gatesy –’
But, beneath it all, they were determined to try and find out who the hoaxer really was. If they could.
‘Well, you six are good at solving mysteries,’ said Robbie, later. He had telephoned to find out how the match had gone. ‘I expect you’ll find the culprit.’
But he was wrong. This particular mystery looked insoluble.
NINE
A walk on the Beach with Robbie
At assembly the next morning, Miss Welbeck referred publicly to the matter for the last time:
‘There’s no need for me to go into the unhappy details of the hoax that was played on the school yesterday afternoon. You all know about it and you also know that this is the second hoax to have been played here within a week. I’ve one simple message to give the hoaxer. This sort of behaviour cannot be tolerated at Trebizon. I’m thinking about you, all the time, whoever you are. I expect you to come forward and own up. Do not assume from my future silence that I’ve forgotten this affair. My patience is long. I shall bide my time.’
There was a deathly hush in the big assembly hall.
‘Phew,’ said Tish, in III Alpha’s form room afterwards. ‘The hoaxer must be shaking in her shoes. Bet she doesn’t play any more.’
‘D’you think she’ll own up now?’ asked Margot.
‘Hope so,’ said Elf.
‘Well, it’s all very well for Miss Welbeck to sit back and wait,’ said Rebecca. ‘But we’re not going to!’ She was still angry that the six of them, and she and Tish in particular, were under a cloud of suspicion. A few funny glances as they’d come out of Assembly hadn’t escaped her notice. ‘We’ve got to be like real detectives – reconstruct the crimes. Somebody, somewhere, must have seen or heard something suspicious. Either Sunday night, or yesterday afternoon, when the glass panel was smashed –’
‘Would you girls at the back please stop talking and go to your desks?’ said Miss Hort, their form mistress, who also took them for maths. ‘And please stop fiddling with your calculator, Elizabeth, and see if you can use your brain this lesson – exercise it a little.’
Miss Hort was rather brusque, with a crisp line in classroom conversation, but the girls liked her.
‘And don’t toss your hair back at me, Rebecca Mason, or I’ll ask you to have it cut.’
‘I was just tossing it out of my eyes, Miss Hort.’
For the rest of that week, the six had the investigating craze. They went around the school questioning people.
Had they seen anybody run out of the main building, just after the fire alarm was set off? Alternatively, had they heard anybody in their boarding house use the phone very late on Sunday night? Did they know anybody who might have a grudge against the school? Or against Miss Welbeck personally?
They followed up various clues. But none of them led anywhere.
‘Half of Juniper House seems to have a grudge about something, if Susannah’s to be believed,’ sighed Margot.
‘Mainly about food though, not the right sort, not enough of it,’ said Elf, with her plump smile. ‘One quite understands that sort of grudge.’
‘We know it’s not a junior, anyway,’ said Sue. ‘It’d be impossible for a junior to sneak out of a big dormitory and use the phone at night, without Miss Morgan or somebody knowing –’
‘And they were at lessons when the fire bell went,’ added Tish.
‘Let’s face it, we’re not getting anywhere,’ said Rebecca.
The worst part of it was that some people were beginning to laugh at them while others, like Margaret Exton, put the word around that their activities were all a big cover-up – they were just trying to deflect suspicion from someone amongst their own number.
‘Why not just forget it?’ Pippa said kindly to Rebecca, after tennis practice on Saturday. ‘It doesn’t look as though there are going to be any more hoaxes. Think about something pleasant – like the match on the nineteenth! It’s a lovely journey to St Mary’s – and they’ve got beautiful courts. We have to make up for last time, Rebecca! We do seem to be playing well together now.’
They’d just played a match against Miss Darling and Miss Willis and managed to take a set off them.
Even Miss Darling had said ‘Played’ and very nearly smiled.
That night, Rebecca, Tish and Sue lay in their beds and took stock of the situation.
‘As far as the fire alarm goes, nobody saw a thing and that’s that,’ said Tish. ‘After she’d smashed the panel the girl must have moved like lightning. Fled down a side corridor, I suppose. She certainly didn’t come out the front because Della and Jilly and Kate were waiting for the minibus and they didn’t see a thing!’
‘That leaves the phone call last Sunday night,’ sighed Sue. ‘The girl said she was ringing from Court House, but she wasn’t. Rebecca was w
ide awake and she’d have seen or heard if someone had used the phone.’
‘Right,’ said Rebecca. ‘So we know the hoaxer is nobody in Court House.’
‘The other boarding house we can rule out completely is Parkinson,’ said Sue. ‘According to Tish, Miss Welbeck received the phone call there. As they’ve only got one line, nobody could have been making the call from there at the same time!’
‘Unless Miss Welbeck was phoning herself,’ giggled Tish. ‘Can’t imagine anybody in the Upper Sixth playing hoaxes, anyway. I don’t know about you two, but this mystery is getting me cross-eyed.’
‘We can rule out everybody in Court House and we can rule out everybody in Parkinson House,’ said Rebecca, the most dogged of the three. ‘We can also rule out Juniper House. So that narrows it down to –’ she ticked the boarding houses off on her fingers ‘– Norris, Tavistock, Chambers, Sterndale and Willoughby.’
There was silence.
‘Not all that narrow, is it?’ said Sue, at last.
‘No,’ admitted Rebecca.
It seemed that that was as far as they were likely to get.
‘Maybe we should just forget it?’ said Tish.
‘That’s what Pippa says,’ said Rebecca.
It took a while to forget it. But, by the time a week had gone by and she’d played some tennis with the county D squad, it began to fade a little. No more hoaxes were played. By the following week, with the cup match against St Mary’s to think about, the whole thing had gone out of Rebecca’s mind.
But it hadn’t gone out of Miss Welbeck’s.
‘Do you realise, Evelyn,’ she said to the senior maths mistress, ‘that it’s very nearly a fortnight since the affair of the false fire alarm?’
‘You said you might have to bide your time.’
‘I’m tired of waiting,’ said the Principal unhappily. ‘I think I must try and exert a little pressure now.’
For Rebecca, the evening before the match was one of the happiest of the whole term.
It was Tuesday and a beautiful May evening, coming at the end of a sunny day. Tennis practice was kept to half an hour. ‘Well done, all of you,’ said Miss Darling. ‘Now save your strength for the match tomorrow. We’re going to win!’
Annie Lorrimer had been waiting for Pippa outside the courts and they went off for a walk through the grounds, arm in arm, heads bent close together. Annie had been very busy lately, doing some important music exams, but these were over and she and Pippa spent a lot of time in each other’s company again.
Rebecca felt slightly at a loss. It was too late to go and join the others. They’d gone to Mulberry Cove to meet Curly Watson, Mike Brown and Chris Earl-Smith, their friends in the Third Year at Garth College, for a swim. She came away from south courts, and dawdled. Then she sat down on the grass under the cedar tree. It was cool, lovely! There were faint breezes stirring above. She couldn’t bear to return to the boarding house, and go back indoors, not yet . . .
‘Rebecca!’ Somebody had run silently up behind the tree and now peered round the massive girth of its trunk. ‘Found you!’
‘Robbie!’
He pulled her up to her feet and she stared at him in surprise. His black curly hair was wild and uncombed and there were rings under his eyes, but he bore himself happily like a small boy playing truant, all six foot of him.
‘You’re supposed to be studying!’ laughed Rebecca.
Tish’s brother was in the Fifth Year, with his important GCSEs only three weeks away. He was working very hard, by all accounts.
‘It’s such a marvellous evening,’ smiled Robbie. ‘I decided to break free for an hour! Besides, I want to talk to you. Come for a walk?’
They went down to the bay and walked across the sands together, slowly, while Robbie gave Rebecca a long lecture about the match the next day. He knew what had happened at the previous match and he didn’t want it to happen again.
‘Concentration is the only thing that really matters,’ he told her. ‘While you’re playing you’ve got to watch that ball the whole time and shut out the rest of the world, so that it doesn’t even exist. It doesn’t matter what’s happened just before the match, or what’s going to happen just after, shut it all out . . . play every single point as though that were the one that decides the game.’
Quite suddenly, he put his arm round her shoulders.
‘Don’t let yourself down, will you, Rebeck?’
‘I’ll try not to,’ said Rebecca. She suddenly felt confident.
He dropped his arm and walked her back to Court House, in silence. Finally, outside the front porch, he said:
‘Is it true you’ve been given a fantastic new dress for Commem?’
‘Yes!’ said Rebecca. The dress had been tucked away at the back of the clothes cupboard, ever since the county tennis party. ‘I wonder what Commem’s like?’
Commemoration Day was at the end of June and was held in honour of the school’s founder. A special service took place in the morning and in the evening was the Commem Ball. This year Rebecca and her friends would be allowed to go to the Ball, which was for the Middle School and upwards, only.
‘I don’t know,’ said Robbie. ‘Why don’t you let me take you and then we can find out.’
Rebecca stared at him.
‘What’s the matter? Have you got a partner already?’
Rebecca shook her head. She’d never even thought about partners.
‘Will you, then?’
‘I – I’ll have to find out what the others are doing,’ said Rebecca, looking confused.
‘Well, Tish has said she’ll go with Edward. I know that for a fact.’
‘The dark horse!’ thought Rebecca.
‘Will you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good!’ He looked pleased. ‘Excellent, in fact!’
That was a moment when Rebecca felt especially happy.
Sixteen schools had entered for the inter-schools cup and now Trebizon was in the last eight. If they beat St Mary’s, they’d go through to the semi-final. The match against St Mary’s was an away match and it was too far for Trebizon’s supporters to come and cheer. In fact, it was quite a long train journey away and the team would be having lunch on the train. In case a substitute were suddenly needed, so far from home, Lady Edwina was going to travel with the team as reserve.
On Wednesday morning, not long before the team was due to catch its train from Trebizon station, Miss Welbeck called Pippa to her study.
‘Pippa, I’m sorry to have to involve you again. It’s rather unpleasant, but I feel you can be a great help to me.’
‘Unpleasant?’ Pippa jumped slightly. ‘I don’t understand, Miss Welbeck.’
‘You’re quite close to Rebecca Mason, aren’t you? She thinks a great deal of you. When you come back on the train this evening, after the match, would you sit with her? Talk to her?’
‘Talk to her –?’
‘Yes, if anyone can persuade her to own up, I’m sure you can. You see, Pippa, I’m perfectly certain in my own mind that Rebecca is our little hoaxer. My patience is wearing rather thin. But I want her to come forward of her own free will.’
Pippa stood there. She looked stunned. Her mouth opened and closed but no sound came out.
‘Off you go and get ready then,’ said Miss Welbeck, briskly. ‘We can’t have you missing the train.’
TEN
A Bad Day for Pippa
Pippa was very quiet on the train. She seemed really fed up. And when they played their match against St Mary’s third pair, her mind simply wasn’t on tennis.
She missed some shots, overhit others. Her forehand, usually a winner, kept going into the top of the net. She just couldn’t seem to concentrate.
‘Take more of the play, Rebecca,’ whispered Miss Darling, in some anguish, when they’d lost the first set 1–6. ‘Jilly and Alison are getting beaten, too. You’ve got to win this match!’
It very nearly unnerved Rebecca, the way Pippa was pla
ying. But then she remembered Robbie’s advice yesterday: . . . shut out the rest of the world, so that it doesn’t exist. Today, the rest of the world meant even her own partner!
She shut Pippa out and just played her own game, running for everything, volleying and smashing and intercepting in marvellous form – and they took the second set 6–3.
But by the final set she was tiring. It was exhausting, one person trying to cover a doubles court! The opposition was playing more and more to Pippa and Pippa still couldn’t find her touch. Somehow, by Rebecca hanging on grimly with some inspired play, they managed to level at six games all.
She needed a home crowd, to lift her, but all the shouting was for St Mary’s. Della and Kate won. Jilly and Alison had lost. So it was 1–1 and this match was the decider. If they went down now, Trebizon were out of the cup!
St Mary’s served some double faults in the next game and by almost running herself into the ground on a long rally, Rebecca managed to take the game for her and Pippa. They were leading 7–6!
But Rebecca was on the very brink of exhaustion. As she towelled her face down by the umpire’s chair and took a quick drink she said to Miss Darling:
‘That last rally finished me. I don’t think I can run any more.’
‘Then serve, Rebecca. It’s your service. Beat them on service.’
Rebecca’s legs were giving out beneath her, but her arms were still strong. She thought of everything Robbie had taught her – he’d taught her to serve like he did – hard, unstoppable, swerving services. Could she produce some now? It was the only way to end the agony!
Because if she let it go to 7–7, with their best server to come, that would be the end.
She served. It was an ace!
Then another!
‘Thirty love,’ said the umpire.
Rebecca closed her eyes. Play every single point as though it’s the one that decides the game.
Another good service; this time it came back in a limp sky-high lob –
Pippa moved up to the net. She couldn’t possibly miss that one!
‘Forty love.’
Three match points.
A beautiful deep service – a good return to Rebecca’s forehand – Rebecca got it back – then it came back on the far side of the court. It was no good, she couldn’t run another step. But Pippa was moving up to the ball –
