by R. A. Spratt
‘Actually,’ said the Headmaster wearily, ‘I find if you ride roughshod over the students, legal representation is exactly what they do get, which requires the school to get legal representation, which costs several hundred dollars per hour. It is almost always easiest to just let them consult with Ms Barnes to see if she can get them off on some loophole.’
‘You mean crucial fact,’ said Friday.
‘Yes, yes,’ said the Headmaster. ‘Wainscott, you may explain the situation to Ms Barnes.’
‘Colonel Hallett gave me a detention,’ began Ian.
‘The blighter was reading a book in my class,’ accused Colonel Hallett.
‘Surely book reading is to be encouraged?’ said Friday.
‘It was a novel,’ said Colonel Hallett. ‘That type of trash should only be read on holidays by the beach when you don’t want to get sand in a proper book.’
‘So you don’t regard the empathetic and emotional benefits of reading fiction as being important?’ asked Friday.
‘Pish-posh,’ said Colonel Hallett. ‘That namby-pamby rubbish should be left in the nursery.’
‘The Colonel has a grudge against me,’ explained Ian. ‘He worked out that it was my father who embezzled all the money from the teachers’ pension fund.’
‘I don’t understand how you can let this troublemaker stay in the school after such an outrage!’ said the Colonel, turning on the Headmaster.
‘It’s not the boy’s fault if his father is a morally bankrupt con man,’ said the Headmaster.
‘If it’s any consolation, he’s living in exile in the Cayman Islands now,’ said Ian.
‘No, that is not a consolation, boy!’ bellowed the Colonel. ‘I’d give my eyeteeth to be living in exile in the Cayman Islands. Instead I’m stuck here teaching the likes of you!’
‘Okay, that’s a larger metaphysical problem that we can’t solve right now. Let’s deal with the issue at hand,’ said Friday, turning to Ian. ‘You called me here to prove that you weren’t reading a novel?’
‘No, I was reading the novel. I called you here to prove that I did attend the detention,’ said Ian. ‘Colonel Hallett says I didn’t, but I reported to his office at exactly the time he requested and stayed there a full hour.’
‘The boy takes after his father. He’s a liar!’ declared Colonel Hallett. ‘Should be expelled on the spot.’
‘Yes, well, given how few academically gifted students we have, we prefer not to expel them without giving them some opportunity to explain themselves,’ said the Headmaster.
‘So what happened?’ asked Friday.
‘That’s just it,’ said Ian. ‘Exactly as I told you. I went to the detention. Colonel Hallett says I didn’t. I can’t prove otherwise.’
‘I was in my office marking papers from 2 till 5 pm and the boy never showed,’ said Colonel Hallett. ‘He was supposed to be there at 3 o’clock on the dot and he wasn’t. Case closed.’
‘Yes, I’d prefer to gather some more evidence first,’ said Friday. ‘Now, Ian, you say you were in his office.’
‘Yes, he told me to go in and wait,’ said Ian. ‘I was there from 3 till 4.’
‘I want to inspect the scene of the crime,’ declared Friday.
‘Good gracious!’ exclaimed Colonel Hallett. ‘Is this the way you allow students to carry on? No wonder the school’s reputation has gone to the dogs.’
‘I’ve never understood that expression,’ said Melanie. ‘Everyone likes dogs.’
Five minutes later, Friday, Melanie, Ian, Colonel Hallett and the Headmaster were all assembled outside Colonel Hallett’s office.
‘Let’s examine the evidence. You both claim you were in this office from 3 till 4 pm yesterday afternoon?’ asked Friday.
‘He claims it,’ said Colonel Hallett. ‘I state it for a fact.’
Ian just rolled his eyes. He had correctly gauged that the Colonel was not worth arguing with. It would be the verbal equivalent of hitting your head against a brick wall.
Friday opened the door and looked into the office. It was a perfectly normal teacher’s office in every respect. There was a standard timber desk. An armchair. A large clock on the wall, which Friday checked told the correct time. A bookshelf full of reference material and stacks of papers and assignments, presumably waiting to be marked. There was a framed medal on the wall. Friday leaned in for a closer look. The frame was cheap and plastic but the medal was definitely genuine for ‘meritorious service’. There was nothing suspicious at all. Friday checked that there were no significant footprints then stepped into the room. She went over to the window and looked out. There was a lovely view of Mr Pilcher’s veggie patch. The snow peas were looking particularly good.
Friday spun on her heel so she was facing Ian.
‘What?’ asked Ian, uncomfortable to be the sudden subject of Friday’s intense scrutiny.
But Friday wasn’t looking at Ian’s face. She was looking at his wrist. She stepped over and grabbed him by the hand.
‘Finally, they’re holding hands!’ exclaimed Melanie.
Friday raised Ian’s hand to her face.
‘Oh my gosh,’ said Melanie. ‘She’s going to kiss his hand.’
Friday did not. She leaned in and sniffed Ian’s watch. Ian rolled his eyes. Still holding Ian’s hand, she turned and looked at the Colonel’s clock. ‘Perfectly synchronised,’ said Friday.
‘Every military man knows the importance of an accurate timepiece,’ said the Colonel.
‘I can’t see anything here,’ announced Friday.
‘Just as I said,’ said Colonel Hallett. ‘Expel the boy.’
‘Wait, I want to inspect the corridor,’ said Friday, as she stepped outside.
‘Ridiculous,’ blustered Colonel Hallett. ‘What can there possibly be to inspect in a corridor?’
Friday was ignoring him. She was looking at the walls, then the floor, then she even got down on her hands and knees and peered closely at the linoleum.
‘What on earth is she doing?’ asked Colonel Hallett.
‘Investigating,’ said the Headmaster. ‘Just wait, she’ll sniff something next.’
On cue, Friday bent down and sniffed along the skirting board where the wall met the floor.
‘Are you going to put a stop to this, Edgar?’ demanded Colonel Hallett. ‘The whole thing is an enormous waste of my time.’
‘Your name is Edgar?’ asked Melanie.
‘Be quite, Pelly,’ said the Headmaster. ‘If you tell another soul, I’ll expel you.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ said Melanie. ‘They’d never believe me anyway.’
Now Friday was rubbing her hands back and forth across the wall. She tapped it in several spots.
‘Would you just put us out of our misery and tell us what you’re thinking?’ asked Ian.
‘I’m thinking that you both claim to be here at the same time,’ said Friday. ‘What if neither of you are lying? What if there is some way you were both in the same place at the same time? There is nothing unusual about the Colonel’s office. His clock tells the correct time. As does your watch. So there can have been no mistake there. There must be another, more illogical explanation.’
‘Like what?’ asked Ian.
‘This panel of the drywall isn’t flush with the rest of the wall,’ said Friday, pointing to a ridge running from floor to ceiling at one point.
‘So, it’s an old building,’ said the Headmaster. ‘These things happen.’
‘Also,’ said Friday, ‘the floor along the wall smells like oil.’
‘You think there is an oil refinery behind the wall?’ asked Ian.
‘I think something has been lubricated along the bottom of the wall,’ said Friday.
‘Now this is just getting weird,’ said Melanie.
‘Where you have lubrication, you have movement,’ said Friday, and with that she laid both her palms against the wall and pushed it hard, sideways. Nothing happened.
‘The child is mad,’
said the Colonel.
‘A little help,’ said Friday, turning to Ian.
He laid his hands on the wall alongside hers and they both pushed. This time the wall moved. One panel slid an inch to the side.
‘It’s on some sort of slider!’ exclaimed Ian.
‘Push harder,’ said Friday.
They both pushed again, and this time the wall kept sliding across a full two metres, revealing that behind the innocuous sheet of drywall, there was a door.
‘Well, I never!’ said the Colonel.
The door looked exactly like the door to Colonel Hallett’s office. Right down to the detail of having his name plate in the centre.
‘What on earth is this about?’ demanded the Colonel.
‘Let’s see, shall we?’ said Friday.
She took hold of the door handle, turned it and swung the door inwards.
‘I don’t believe it,’ said the Headmaster.
Inside was an exact replica of Colonel Hallett’s office. The desk, the chair, the paperwork had all been copied down to every last detail.
Friday stepped back out into the corridor. She looked across to where Colonel Hallett’s real office was, but they couldn’t see the door now because the drywall had slid across in front of it.
‘It’s a classic magician’s trick,’ said Friday. ‘An identical dummy is used to create the illusion that two things are in the same place at the same time.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said the Headmaster.
‘The Colonel arrives and sits in his office. Our culprit pushes this segment of wall across, hiding this door and exposing the other. Ian arrives and enters the dummy door. They both think they are in the same place at the same time.’
‘But that’s just crazy,’ said Ian, bewildered by the scale of the hoax.
‘Who would do such a thing?’ asked the Headmaster.
‘That’s the tricky part of the mystery,’ said Friday. ‘Who would go to such enormous lengths to get Ian in trouble?’
‘You?’ suggested Melanie. ‘You two do like to snipe at each other.’
‘But I don’t have the construction skills to create a dummy sliding door,’ said Friday.
‘You told me you could learn anything from reading books,’ said Melanie.
‘True,’ agreed Friday. ‘Except I didn’t. Ian and I are getting along quite well at the moment. I have no motive to have him expelled.’
Melanie nodded. ‘Because you’re in love.’
‘So who does have a motive?’ asked the Head master.
Friday looked about at the immaculately constructed replica room. ‘It would have to be someone with access to tools,’ she said.
‘You’re not saying Mr Pilcher did it?!’ asked Melanie. ‘He always seems like such a nice man. He has kind eyes.’
‘No,’ said Friday. ‘He doesn’t have a motive. Besides, Mr Pilcher is an uncomplicated man. If he wanted to hurt Ian he wouldn’t do something so elaborate and involved. He would just yell at him. That’s what he usually does when boys annoy him by using his garden stakes for nefarious purposes.’
‘Then who else could have done it?’ asked Ian.
‘Let’s go and ask the woodwork teacher,’ said Friday.
‘You’re not suggesting Mr Searle did it, are you?’ asked the Headmaster. ‘He fought with the marines in Vietnam. I don’t want to get on the wrong side of him.’
‘I was in Vietnam,’ said Colonel Hallett. ‘You don’t seem to give me any special treatment.’
‘Yes, but I always assumed you were in central command yelling at people over telephones,’ said the Headmaster.
‘Not to be scoffed at,’ said Colonel Hallett. ‘It was a stressful job.’
‘Yes,’ said the Headmaster, ‘but I suspect Mr Searle was more of a killing people with his bare hands type of man.’
‘As fascinating as his violent past may be, I have no reason to suspect Mr Searle,’ said Friday. ‘But he is the person with the largest supply of tools. I think we should start by finding out if any of them are missing.’
Ten minutes later, they were all standing in the tool store.
‘Everything’s here,’ said Mr Searle, as he showed Friday and the Headmaster about. The place where each tool should be was clearly painted on a peg board so it would be easy to tell if one was missing.
‘And these tools are only ever used in the woodwork room, is that correct?’ asked the Headmaster.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Mr Searle.
Melanie coughed.
‘If you’ve got a frog in your throat you can go outside, girl,’ snapped Colonel Hallett. ‘I don’t know why you’re here anyway.’
‘Because she’s an essential part of this investigation,’ said Friday. ‘Melanie was coughing precisely because she is polite.’
‘Since when is it polite to hack your germs up over everyone?’ asked Colonel Hallett.
‘Because she isn’t really coughing,’ said Friday. ‘Melanie has an unerring gift for being able to tell when someone is lying. She was merely alerting me to the fact that Mr Searle was telling a falsehood.’
‘I was not!’ protested Mr Searle.
Melanie coughed again. ‘Pork pie,’ she whispered into the cough.
‘I’m sure you didn’t mean to lie,’ said Friday. ‘There are many gradations of untruths. There is a naked lie, when the liar knows they are telling a great big whopper. But there are also more subtle variations, when the liar honestly believes they are telling the truth because in their mind they are.’
‘I won’t stand here being accused by a precocious brat!’ snapped Mr Searle. ‘I will not put up with this.’
Melanie stepped behind Friday for protection. ‘He’s not going to kill me with his bare hands, is he? Although, on the whole I’d prefer bare hands to using any one of these tools.’ Melanie looked about at the sinister woodworking implements. The router in particular scared her.
‘I won’t stand for it either,’ said Colonel Hallett. ‘In my day, insulting a teacher was cane-worthy.’
‘When was your day?’ asked Ian. ‘Was it within the last century? It sounds like you were a principal in a Dickens novel.’
‘All right, that’s enough, we try not to resort to physical violence so quickly these days,’ said the Headmaster. ‘Friday, please explain what’s going on, or I will throttle you myself.’
‘I’m sure that Mr Searle doesn’t allow students to take tools from this room,’ said Friday. ‘But sometimes tools would have to leave when Mr Searle has been asked to perform woodworking tasks on school grounds.’
‘I don’t know,’ said the Headmaster. ‘I’m not involved in that sort of detail. Do you do things like that?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Mr Searle. ‘Sometimes some of the teachers, particularly the lady teachers, need a hand. I like to be of assistance.’
‘You see,’ said Friday. ‘Mr Searle enjoys being a knight in shining armour. What man wouldn’t?’
Mr Searle’s chest puffed out proudly.
‘Have you had such a job recently?’ asked Friday.
‘Well, yes,’ said Mr Searle. ‘The librarian requested that I remove her office door and a sheet of drywall from the ladies’ lavatory.’
‘You did that?!’ demanded the Headmaster.
‘Yes. She asked me to do it during the night so I wouldn’t disrupt the quietness of the library,’ said Mr Searle.
‘But she spent an hour the next morning complaining about it,’ said the Headmaster. ‘She was outraged that her door was missing. She wanted me to search the school. I assumed it was just a student prank. Quite a few students enjoy playing pranks on the librarian. I tell her it would happen less if she was not so severe with her library fines. Poor Patel’s parents had to pay more in library fines than they did in tuition last semester.’
‘That doesn’t make sense! I was only following instructions,’ said Mr Searle. He went to his desk and riffled through a drawer. ‘Look, she wrote me a note specifica
lly explaining what she wanted done.’
Dear Mr Searle,
Please be a dear and remove the door from my office. I think it would improve the feng shui of the building.
Also, could you take out the sheet of drywall from the ladies’ lavatory? It would be nice to give the space an urban hipster feel.
Many thanks,
The librarian
‘Clearly this is a forgery,’ said Friday.
‘Clearly,’ agreed Ian as he read over her shoulder.
‘How can you tell?’ asked the Headmaster.
‘The librarian would never be so nice,’ said Friday. ‘Also, from the way she insists on arranging the stacks at right angles to the doorway you can tell she has not got the least respect for the concept of feng shui.’
‘Also, why would she sign the note “the librarian”?’ said Ian. ‘She’d use her own name, wouldn’t she?’
‘Actually, the librarian prefers to be referred to as “the librarian”,’ said the Headmaster. ‘She feels her peers should respect the job title. And as she has very few friends, no-one knows her actual first name.’
‘When you say “very few friends”,’ said Melanie, ‘you actually mean “none”, don’t you?’
‘She might have a friend outside of school,’ said the Headmaster. ‘I prefer to know as little about the staff’s personal lives as possible.’
‘So who wrote the note?’ asked Colonel Hallett.
‘Someone who wanted a door and a sheet of drywall,’ said Friday. ‘And access to tools.’
‘This is getting complicated,’ said Ian.
‘Mr Searle,’ said Friday, ‘removing a door must be quite a big job. Did you get anyone to help you?’
‘Yes, actually. One of the students,’ said Mr Searle. ‘Doors are tricky, so I got the new lad.’
‘Who?’ asked Friday.
‘Abotomey,’ said Mr Searle. ‘He’s got a lovely knack for timber.’
‘Oh, you mean the boy from the assembly? The one with the extreme vasodilation of his facial blood vessels?’ said Friday.
‘Huh?’ said Mr Searle.
‘He blushed a lot,’ explained Ian.
‘That’s Abotomey,’ said the Headmaster, nodding.
