by R. A. Spratt
‘That’s why you called us here?’ said Friday. ‘I thought you finally wanted me to help you find Mrs Thompson.’
‘I’ve been given strict instructions from the investigating officer not to allow you to get involved in any of that,’ said the Headmaster.
‘But I’m good at solving mysteries,’ said Friday.
The Headmaster picked up a letter on his desk and read from it. ‘You’re good at contaminating evidence and endangering members of the public, according to the inspector.’
‘Of all the cheek,’ said Friday.
The Headmaster rubbed his head. ‘Just find my aspirin, would you? I’ve looked everywhere. I don’t know where they’ve gotten to.’
Friday was not very good at picking up on the emotions of others, but even she could see that the Headmaster was deeply distressed.
‘Of course,’ said Friday. ‘You just sit down and try to relax. It might take a little while but I’ll find them. Where did you last see them?’
‘If I knew that, I wouldn’t need you to find them, would I?!’ yelled the Headmaster.
‘When did you last take one?’ asked Friday.
‘Um … two days ago, maybe three,’ said the Headmaster. ‘I usually keep them right here on my desk under the memorial carriage clock.’
Friday picked up the clock and looked underneath it.
‘I’ve already looked there!’ snapped the Headmaster. ‘What are you expecting, a secret trap door?’
‘You never know,’ said Friday. ‘The students at this school do some very bizarre and elaborate pranks.’
The intercom on the Headmaster’s desk buzzed. The Headmaster pressed the button and barked into the machine, ‘What is it now?’
‘We’ve just had a complaint,’ said Miss Priddock, her voice crackly through the small speaker. ‘Apparently, there are two boys up in the clock tower dropping acorns on people’s heads and yelling down that “the sky is falling”.’
‘Of all the outrageous gall!’ snapped the Headmaster, leaping to his feet. ‘They’re going to have something fall on their heads very soon, the full weight of my wrath.’
‘I think they’d be terrified enough just of your full weight,’ said Melanie. The Headmaster was not a skinny man.
The Headmaster strode towards the door. Friday was close on his heels. ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded, turning to confront Friday.
‘Assisting you in your investigation,’ said Friday.
‘You’re meant to be finding my aspirin!’ yelled the Headmaster.
‘But this is a much more interesting case,’ said Friday.
‘There is no case,’ said the Headmaster. ‘It’s just two silly boys who are going to be spending the rest of their adolescence in detention. Your job is to find those darn pills.’
‘Tablets,’ said Friday. ‘They aren’t pills. Aspirin are tablets, unless they’re capsules. But they’re never pills.’
‘What’s the difference?!’ snapped the Headmaster.
‘A tablet is compressed –’
‘For goodness sake,’ said the Headmaster.
‘He was being rhetorical,’ said Melanie helpfully.
‘That’s not fair,’ said Friday. ‘He knows I can’t recognise that.’
‘Just get on with it,’ wailed the Headmaster. ‘You can have another free term of tuition if you find them for all I care.’
He stomped off and the two girls were left alone in the big opulent office.
‘I’ve never been on my own in here without supervision before,’ said Melanie as she looked about. ‘Do you think we could get Miss Priddock to bring us some chocolate biscuits?’
‘You could just help yourself,’ said Friday. ‘He keeps them in the bottom-left drawer of his desk.’
Melanie opened the drawer and there were over a dozen packets of the finest chocolate biscuits. ‘How did you know?’
‘He’s almost always just shutting that drawer when I come in,’ said Friday. ‘Plus, the crumbs. There’s a distinct brown tinge to the carpet in that spot where he drops crumbs and the cleaner’s vacuum doesn’t quite suck them all up.’
‘Poor Headmaster, so many secrets to be ashamed of,’ said Melanie. ‘So where do you think the tablets are?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Friday. ‘The Headmaster, for all his faults, is a very intelligent man. He would have methodically worked through what he considered to be all the reasonable and then unreasonable possibilities.’
As she spoke, Friday picked up the wastepaper bin and tipped it over the floor, shaking it as she did so to spread the rubbish out as much as possible.
Melanie gasped. ‘What did you do that for? Hasn’t the poor man suffered enough?’
‘I’m looking for evidence,’ said Friday, as she crouched and closely inspected the rubbish.
‘Do you think he threw away his own tablets?’ asked Melanie.
‘It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility,’ said Friday, ‘but rubbish bins hold all sorts of secrets. People have a false sense of confidence that something they have thrown away has disappeared, when it is still sitting right here in a receptacle in the room.’
‘The tablets definitely aren’t here,’ said Melanie. She was examining the rubbish too, although she wasn’t getting quite as close to it as Friday. Friday had put on a pair of rubber gloves and was picking up each piece of rubbish and sniffing it. Melanie had seen Friday do this many times, but she nevertheless still found it shockingly disgusting.
‘Anything interesting?’ asked Melanie.
‘The Headmaster’s wife wants him to bring home two litres of low-fat milk,’ said Friday.
‘That’s not interesting,’ said Melanie.
‘From the way he scrunched the note up into a tiny ball and threw it away it suggests that it is,’ said Friday. ‘There is clearly something about his wife and milk that makes him angry.’
‘And what’s this?’ said Friday to herself as she picked up a bent piece of wire.
‘It looks like it was at one time a hairpin,’ said Melanie, peering over Friday’s shoulder.
‘Dr Wallace uses this type of hairpin,’ said Friday.
‘She can’t have been in here,’ said Melanie. ‘She’s been sick in bed.’
‘Why would someone take her hairpin and bring it in here?’ asked Friday.
‘To pick a lock?’ said Melanie.
‘And is she really sick?’ asked Friday.
‘You saw her throw up,’ said Melanie.
‘No, I heard and smelled her throw up,’ said Friday. ‘You could easily emulate the sound of groaning then tip a bowl of water into the toilet. It would make the same sound.’
‘But you can’t fake the smell,’ said Melanie. ‘That is a distinctive smell.’
‘Actually, there is a substance with the same chemical components as vomit,’ said Friday.
‘I don’t want to know,’ said Melanie.
‘Parmesan cheese,’ said Friday. ‘They both contain butyric acid which give both vomit and parmesan cheese their distinctive smell.’
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ said Melanie.
‘And I found an empty parmesan cheese wrapper in her room,’ said Friday.
‘Are you suggesting that Dr Wallace isn’t sick at all?’ said Melanie. ‘That she is secretly perfectly healthy and rubbed parmesan cheese on herself so that she would smell sick?’
‘It sounds silly when you put it that way,’ said Friday, ‘but it is possible.’
Friday stood up and looked about the room. There was a wall of bookcases on one side and four filing cabinets lined up on the other. Friday went over to the bookcase and started taking down books and shaking them out one at a time.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Melanie.
‘If you need to hide a needle you put it in a haystack,’ said Friday. ‘The book collection has the largest number of objects in the room so it is logically the best place to hide something. It’s what I would do.’
Five
minutes later, every book had been shaken out and dumped on the floor but no aspirin had been found. Friday considered the problem. ‘So our perpetrator obviously doesn’t think like me.’
‘No-one does,’ said Melanie.
‘Maybe they think like you,’ said Friday. ‘If you were going to hide someone else’s medicine, where would you put it?’
‘Why was I hiding it?’ asked Melanie. ‘To annoy them? That doesn’t sound like the type of thing I’d do.’
‘No, you were hiding it to hinder him,’ said Friday, ‘but you would want him to find it eventually.’
‘If you’re going to put something away but you want them to find it, then you should file it,’ said Melanie. ‘Isn’t that what secretaries do? I’ve heard my mother yell that at her secretary often enough.’
Friday went over to the filing cabinets. She opened the top left drawer and flicked back through several hanging dividers, then pulled one out. ‘I don’t believe it! They’re here,’ said Friday, opening the folder and taking out a slim box of tablets. ‘They were filed under A for aspirin.’
‘How odd,’ said Melanie. ‘It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that Miss Priddock would do.’
‘No,’ agreed Friday. ‘I’m not convinced she knows the alphabet.’
In the distance a bell started to clang.
‘Yay, lunchtime!’ said Melanie happily. ‘I hope Mrs Marigold isn’t serving parmesan cheese.’
‘It can’t be lunchtime, it’s 10.17,’ said Friday, glancing at her watch.
‘But the clock only strikes at noon,’ said Melanie.
‘The Headmaster!’ exclaimed Friday. ‘He’s in the clock tower.’
Friday took off running. Melanie followed as fast as a deeply unathletic girl with lingering African sleeping sickness could.
Friday ran up the steep spiral staircase at full speed, which wasn’t easy. The clock tower was the oldest part of the school, in fact, it predated the school and was built when the building had been a monastery. The monks had hand-carved each stone step themselves.
Unfortunately, while the monks were no doubt great biblical scholars, they were not great masons and each step was subtly different in height, which meant rushing was rewarded with stumbling. Added to that was the spiral nature of the staircase, which had a very discombobulating effect on the inner ear. As Friday rushed upward her shins were get ting increasingly scraped and her brain was getting increasingly dizzy. Finally, she could see a glimmer of sunlight above her. She was reaching the top. She tried to move faster but only ended up tripping over the last step and landing face-first on top of the Headmaster’s stomach.
‘Oomph,’ said the Headmaster.
‘Thank you for breaking my fall, sir,’ said Friday, as she scrambled to stand up. Now that she looked at the Headmaster, she noticed that his face had gone a horrible grey colour. He was sweaty profusely and his breath was shallow and laboured.
‘Sir, are you all right?’ asked Friday.
‘Of course I’m not, you stupid girl,’ mumbled the Headmaster breathlessly.
‘I guess that explains why you’re lying on the ground,’ said Friday, noting that the bell rope was just inches from the Headmaster’s hand. ‘You rang the bell to call for help.’
The Headmaster just nodded.
‘I noticed you rubbing your left arm in the office,’ said Friday. ‘I didn’t think much of it at the time, but that, combined with your urgency to find your aspirin – not regular aspirin, but your own specific dose – your inexplicable anger towards low-fat milk and the fact that you are now lying flat on your back, a pasty grey, having trouble breathing, means you’re having a heart attack, doesn’t it?’
The Headmaster nodded again.
‘Don’t worry, sir,’ said Friday, reaching over to loosen his tie. ‘We’ll take care of you.’
Melanie made it through the doorway.
‘Mel, sit with the Headmaster and hold his hand,’ said Friday. ‘He’s having a heart attack.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Melanie, sitting alongside the Headmaster. ‘Don’t worry, sir, you’ll be fine. Our maid Marta has heart attacks all the time. Especially when it’s her birthday and she wants a couple of weeks off to go on a beach holiday.’
Friday went over to the edge of the parapet and peered down. Her eyesight wasn’t great but she could see the distinctive gait of someone she knew swaggering across the quadrangle. Friday reached under the bell, grabbed the clapper and banged it hard against the rim. It made a clang that was deafening for those in close proximity.
‘You could have warned us first,’ griped the Headmaster between shallow breaths.
Friday looked out over the quadrangle again. Everyone down there was staring up at her.
‘Ian!’ yelled Friday. ‘Call an ambulance, hurry! Someone has tried to kill the Headmaster!’
Friday and Melanie were sitting in the Headmaster’s office while Sergeant Crowley took their statements. The girls were clearly upset. They were both very fond of the Headmaster. He was a grumpy man, but he had always been an ally of Friday’s. He called on her when he needed help, and he had protected her from less sympathetic authority figures. Friday looked close to tears. Sergeant Crowley had been on several police sensitivity training courses, so he was valiantly doing his best to keep his temper and not yell at his two interviewees.
‘You can’t go around accusing people of murder,’ said Sergeant Crowley in measured tones.
‘I haven’t accused anyone specifically,’ said Friday. ‘Not yet.’
‘The Headmaster is an overweight, aging man with a very stressful job and a heart condition,’ said Sergeant Crowley.
‘And he eats too many chocolate biscuits,’ added Melanie.
‘Exactly, an unhealthy diet,’ said Sergeant Crowley. ‘The only thing that is hard to believe is that it’s taken him this long to have a heart attack.’
‘That’s exactly what his attacker wants you to think,’ said Friday. ‘It’s the perfect crime.’
‘There is no crime,’ said Sergeant Crowley. ‘He walked up a staircase and he had a heart attack.’
‘But someone tricked him into walking up the staircase,’ said Friday. ‘They rang up and complained about boys throwing acorns, but there were no boys when he got there. I inspected the ground below and there were no acorns to be seen except for the ones under the oak tree, and they would have been there anyway.’
‘So someone sent him on a wild goose chase,’ said Sergeant Crowley. ‘At worst, that is a prank gone wrong. Some kid playing a joke. That’s not attempted murder. To bring charges of murder there would have to be premeditation. They had no way of knowing the Headmaster would have a heart attack.’
‘But there was premeditation,’ said Friday. ‘Somebody hid his heart medicine.’
‘What?’ said Sergeant Crowley.
‘They did?’ asked Melanie.
‘The aspirin,’ said Friday. ‘The Headmaster called us to his office because he wanted me to find his aspirin.’
Sergeant Crowley ran his hand through his hair. He was getting exasperated with Friday. ‘What has that got to do with it?’
‘People with heart conditions take low-dose aspirin on a daily basis,’ said Friday. ‘The Headmaster was extremely agitated that he couldn’t find his aspirin. He didn’t want to take some from the nurse, because that would be a regular dose tablet. He specifically wanted his own. He was rubbing his left arm and looking sweaty. Those are early warning signs of a heart attack.’
‘It would be impossible to know that sending him up a staircase would trigger a heart attack,’ said Sergeant Crowley.
‘Not at all,’ said Friday. ‘The pieces fell into place one after another. He already had a heart condition. It had gotten worse recently. He came under an enormous amount of stress from the other headmasters being here. Then there was the accident where he fell in the swamp himself, even more stressful. Then he couldn’t find his medication and he became agitated. He was like a champa
gne bottle that had been shaken up. He was all ready to pop. He just needed one little trigger.’
‘The staircase,’ said Sergeant Crowley.
‘Exactly,’ said Friday.
‘You could never prove it,’ said the sergeant.
‘We have several leads,’ said Friday. ‘First there was the phone call. You should be able to trace that.’
‘Actually, we can’t,’ said Sergeant Crowley. ‘It wasn’t an external call. It came from within the grounds, so there is no phone company record.’
‘That’s disappointing,’ said Friday, ‘but I did go through the Headmaster’s pockets in between performing first aid and I found these – chocolate-coated macadamia nuts. Someone has been deliberately feeding him high-fat, high-salt food. Someone who knows he has a heart condition and is trying to make it worse.’
‘Someone is bumping off the headmasters of Highcrest?’ marvelled Melanie. ‘First Mrs Thompson, now the current headmaster. I wonder who it will be next. I hope it’s the Colonel. I don’t like how he yells all the time.’
‘Hold it right there,’ said Sergeant Crowley. ‘You can’t suggest that this is a pattern.’
‘It’s more than just a coincidence,’ said Friday.
The sergeant sighed. ‘The doctors say the Headmaster will be fine. They are going to put in stents to unblock his arteries. After a couple of weeks of bed rest he will be back to his old self. I’ll look into this, but there is no harm done. All the evidence is circumstantial so it will be very difficult to prove wrong doing.’
‘There was no harm this time,’ said Friday. ‘What if the culprit makes a third or even fourth attempt?’
‘You’re letting your imagination run away with you,’ said the sergeant. ‘This is just a school. A lot of weird stuff happens here, but not that weird.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ said Friday.
‘That means she doesn’t think you are,’ explained Melanie.
The worst thing about the Headmaster being in hospital was that it meant that Vice Principal Dean was now in charge. The problem was not that the Vice Principal was a bad man, although he was. Like many low-level bureaucrats, he was a self-serving coward. But the greater difficulty was that when the school had fallen into anarchy the previous year, the Vice Principal had been unable to cope with the chaos. He’d had a breakdown. Since then he was a fragile man. Making decisions, any decisions, even how he took his coffee, made him anxious.
