Jolly Foul Play

by Robin Stevens

  ‘I found this one in a flowerbed,’ said Betsy. ‘By the entrance to House. Someone must have dropped it just before I came by. Here! Don’t!’

  She had cried out because Lettice was ripping the paper to shreds. Her long, slim fingers tore it into smaller and smaller slivers until they fell to the floor in a shower of white.

  ‘Clean that up,’ she said to Betsy, so quietly that we could barely hear her. ‘Clean it up now, you horrid thing. That’ll teach you to go about picking up things you oughtn’t.’

  She had destroyed it, I realized, to stop anyone seeing Elizabeth’s handwriting. Our suspicions must be right – this must be a part of the mystery, part of the reason why Elizabeth was dead.

  I saw the rest of the Five exchanging looks, and then Florence got to her feet. ‘Listen, you lot! If you see any more papers like that, you just leave them be. They’re not for you, so you oughtn’t to have them. In fact, if we find anyone else with a piece of paper like this, we shall put you in detention all term, and we’ll let Miss Barnard know about it!’

  It ought to have been an awful threat – it would have been, before Elizabeth died. But now I could feel everyone in the Dining Room not caring. They wanted to know what had been on that bit of paper, and what might be on others that were yet to be discovered. Florence’s warning had simply proved that there were more bits of paper and more revelations to come. I knew that after lunch, everyone would be ferociously on the hunt for secrets. It was no good the Five trying to hide them.

  ‘What was on it?’ whispered Kitty, craning about. ‘What was it this time?’

  Lettice shrieked, ‘Quiet! No speaking!’ but all the same I heard the news pass along the second-form table to the third in a few soft breaths, then along the row and across again, to the person on the end of our table. It happened to be Clementine. She narrowed her eyes in concentration … and then she burst out laughing. ‘But we know that,’ she said. ‘Everyone knows that.’

  ‘What is it?’ cried Beanie, bouncing and infected with Kitty’s enthusiasm.

  ‘Why,’ said Clementine, and she narrowed her eyes like a cat, ‘it’s perfectly obvious information. It says that Lavinia Temple comes from a broken home.’

  Now, Clementine does not like Lavinia (their feud was the cause of last year’s Case of Lavinia’s Missing Tie), and it is true that Lavinia can sometimes be a beast – but there is such a thing as form solidarity, and this was quite shockingly against it. Clementine ought not to have passed on gossip like that, much less seemed to relish it so much.

  We all gaped, and Lavinia gave a cry. She raised a fist, but quick as anything Kitty caught her wrist and stopped her. She rounded on Clementine.

  ‘How dare you!’ she cried. ‘How dare you say such a thing!’

  ‘You all know that it’s true,’ said Clementine, rolling her eyes. ‘It isn’t a secret!’

  Lavinia was making a sort of low animal growl.

  ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter if I keep mum about it or not. It was written on that bit of paper, and that means that everyone knows about it now. It’ll be all around the school.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Beanie, with a sob in her voice. ‘How beastly!’

  ‘You think you’re so special in your dorm,’ Clementine went on fiercely. ‘You think you’re better than us. When everyone knows that Hazel Wong’s father is an opium trader, and Beanie Martineau’s never even went to school, and Daisy Wells had a murder happen in her house.’

  At that, Daisy simply pushed back her chair, stood up and walked out of the Dining Room. Clementine looked gleeful.

  ‘If you say another word I shall let Lavinia hit you,’ snarled Kitty, in a tone of voice that I had never heard before. ‘Hazel, let’s leave as well.’

  And all four of us stood up and followed Daisy. I was so angry that I only thought about the sticky toffee pudding twice on the way out. I was also struggling with Lavinia – I had to help Kitty drag her along, as she had gone stiff with rage.

  The whole Dining Room watched us, and I could feel everything that Clementine had said swirling in their minds. I had forgotten how much gossip hurts when it is about you, how it makes your head spin and your eyes smart, and leaves you powerless and in pain. You want to stretch out your hands and snatch it back, but you cannot, and it is even worse when you know the story is untrue. My father, as I have said and said, is a banker, and absolutely honest. He would never touch opium in a thousand years, but it is no good protesting. The story is that he trades opium, and somehow, that is stronger than the truth. I have been followed about by the opium story ever since I arrived at Deepdean two years ago.

  I realized something as I walked past the half-open doors of the second-form dorms, the rows of beds inside them neatly made. If Elizabeth really had written down the secrets she knew, she must have written down secrets about the Five as well. And there, perfectly, were the Five’s motives for murder. Secrets are the most powerful things in the world – I had felt that in the Dining Room.

  I could easily imagine someone killing to keep a secret hidden.

  7

  ‘I could punch them,’ snarled Lavinia, up in the dorm. ‘I could hurt them, I could – I could—’

  ‘Really, don’t do that,’ said Kitty. ‘It’s all right, Beanie, we know she won’t. Oh, sit down, Lavinia, stop thrashing about, we’ve all been upset!’

  Daisy was perched on the edge of her bed. She was flexing her fingers, and narrowing her eyes, and I could tell that she was focused inwards, on the problem of the secrets.

  ‘I take it back,’ said Lavinia. ‘What I said earlier. All right, I do care now. I’ll do whatever you like.’

  What seeing Jones leave Deepdean could not do this morning, the scene at lunch had managed: Lavinia was now desperate to solve the mystery.

  ‘Of course we have to do something,’ said Kitty. ‘Dorm pride! Those horrid secrets – I admit, I was wrong. It isn’t just the puzzle this time. Come on. Detective Society Meeting?’

  I got out this casebook, and the rustle of its pages seemed to call Daisy back to herself.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Excellent. Watson, assistants, we must detect. We must! It’s a matter of honour.’

  ‘It’s a matter of lies!’ said Lavinia.

  ‘Yours isn’t a lie, Lavinia,’ said Kitty.

  Lavinia scowled at her. ‘Yes, all right,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t mean I want it said in public, does it?’

  ‘But where are the secrets coming from?’ asked Beanie.

  ‘We know that,’ said Daisy. ‘Elizabeth. We always thought that she stored them up in her head, the way I— I mean, the sensible way. But, as I confirmed this morning by matching the sample from Betsy with Elizabeth’s detention list, she appears to have written them all down. So, you see, we have a possible motive for our murderer – if Elizabeth knew something secret about one of the Five, and was threatening to reveal it, they might have killed her to stop it getting out.’

  Lavinia scowled. ‘They can’t all have secrets!’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’ Kitty asked. ‘Most of the rest of us do. Isn’t that what we’ve just been finding out?’

  ‘Yes, but even if that’s true, how are we supposed to narrow them down?’ asked Lavinia. ‘Isn’t that what detectives do? Rule out suspects?’

  ‘If they do all have secrets,’ said Daisy, ‘which, as Assistant Freebody happens to be correct about, is quite possible, the only way we shall rule them out is by discovering what they are.’

  ‘And how are we supposed to do that?’ asked Lavinia, curling her lip. ‘They’re Big Girls.’

  ‘Easy,’ said Daisy. ‘We must listen out for gossip. You never know what details they may have let slip.’

  ‘But what about the secrets being spread now?’ I asked. ‘Who’s doing that? How does it connect to the Five?’ This was a problem I had been stumbling over. If Elizabeth had been writing secrets down somewhere, how were they getting out now? It could not be the murderer, letting them out so freely, cou
ld it?

  ‘It can’t be the murderer,’ said Daisy, as though she had heard my thoughts. ‘The grown-ups think Elizabeth’s death was an accident and Jones is to blame, so there’s no need for the murderer to be dropping secrets to throw investigators off the scent. There won’t be any official investigators, and no one knows that we’ve taken on the case.’

  ‘So?’ asked Beanie, eyes wide.

  ‘So something else is going on, something we don’t understand yet. It seems such an odd thing to do, to let out secrets like this. It doesn’t make sense, and that’s important. If something’s untidy, there’s usually a reason for it. That’s what Hazel and I have learned in our career to date.’

  ‘So what do we do?’ asked Kitty.

  ‘Carry on with our plan of action,’ said Daisy smartly. ‘But with some additions. We know that Jones was framed, and that we are dealing with a murder. We believe we may know why Elizabeth was murdered – because she had a secret about the murderer, and was holding it over them. So although we must keep on listening for gossip, and collecting alibis, we can begin to be more precise. What do we know about the Five? What might their secrets be? And what more can we find out about Elizabeth and her collection of secrets? Where did these pages come from? How many more are there? And, most importantly, who is releasing them and why?’

  ‘I want to hurt whoever it is,’ growled Lavinia.

  ‘We can’t actually hurt them,’ I said. ‘But we can find them. That’s part of the plan of action.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Daisy, nodding. ‘Finally, we need to get back to the crime scene.’

  ‘But how?’ asked Beanie. ‘They won’t let us go up to the sports field! Miss Barnard said so.’

  ‘Of course they will!’ snorted Lavinia. ‘Miss B just said that for show. I heard her tell the other mistresses that we’ll still have Games tomorrow, and that Saturday’s match isn’t cancelled either. Worse luck.’

  ‘Oh, excellent!’ said Kitty. ‘You see, we’re good at this.’

  ‘Of course we’re good at this,’ said Daisy. ‘We are detectives!’

  8

  I knew what Daisy had said about not mentioning the case, but somehow I could not quite help myself. Alexander already knew there had been a murder, after all, so I owed it to him to keep him up to date with what we had discovered. During English with the new mistress, Miss Dodgson, when we ought to have been writing our compositions, I tucked this casebook on my lap, open on a fresh page. I took out my special pen with its lemon-juice ink, one of two (the other, of course, is in Alexander’s school bag), and began to write, the letters fading away almost as soon as I had put them down.

  Deepdean School, Wednesday 6th November

  Dear Alexander,

  The case has moved on since I wrote to you last night. First, it looks as though our handyman – Jones, do you remember? – is really being blamed for what happened. He’s been made to leave Deepdean. We know he couldn’t have done it. He’s a very careful sort of person, and he never would have left a rake lying about like that, especially not when he knew we were all going to be running around the field after dark. He can’t remember doing it, either, but because Miss Barnard is sure that Elizabeth’s death was an accident, she is blaming him. It makes me sure that the person who killed Elizabeth is truly awful. They are framing Jones, making him take the blame for it, and that is terrible. It’s quite wrong, and we can’t let it stand.

  And there is another reason why we must solve the case: people have begun to find secrets all over the school, the sort of secrets people want to keep for good reasons. They’re written on bits of paper, and we have discovered that the handwriting on them is Elizabeth’s. They must be hers, so they must connect to her death, but how did they get out, and why are they being shared around now? It makes sense to guess that this is the motive for murder – that Elizabeth knew something about one of the Five, and they killed her to keep it quiet – but if so, it can’t be the murderer who is behind the other secrets being shared. The Five are terrified, you can tell. They’ve quite lost control of the younger years, and the mood at school is so strange today.

  We’re going to try to understand more about the secrets, to find out what the Five could be hiding, and we’re also going back to the sports field at the next opportunity, tomorrow, to hunt for clues. Is there anything else you can think of that we ought to be doing?

  Hazel

  At that point, Miss Dodgson came walking down the rows of desks to see how we were getting on with our work, and I had to shuffle the pages of my letter under an old half-finished composition that I use for camouflage and pretend to be writing that. I looked over at Daisy, and saw with a shock that she was looking back at me, with her eyes very slightly narrowed. It felt like all the fizz in my chest had been sucked away. She must think I was working on this account, surely. But what would she do if she discovered that I was writing to Alexander about the case instead? I looked down as quickly as I could and told myself that I had every right to carry on. He was my friend, after all, and another detective.

  I quickly turned back to this casebook, and my usual blue-ink pen, and carried on writing until the bell went. But I was really thinking of something else. Writing the letter had somehow given me a plan, a rather Daisy-ish one, and I wanted to put it into practice.

  Now, the first formers happened to have a lesson in the room next door to ours, and so we all came flooding out together at the bell. Just as the crush became truly close, I spilled my books out of my hands, into Lavinia. As I knew she would, she growled, lashed out with her elbow and (I stepped aside as neatly as I could) knocked into one of the first formers, Emily Dow. Emily stumbled, and then Lavinia (being Lavinia) pushed her all the way over. Emily shrieked and fell.

  ‘Lavinia!’ Beanie cried, and rushed to help Emily up. ‘Don’t do that! Poor Emily!’ For a moment Beanie looked quite fierce. Emily burst into tears and Beanie put her arms around her protectively. I was glad that Beanie, at least, had not been infected by the nastiness of this year.

  ‘It’s Elizabeth,’ I said as Beanie and Emily stood up, and Daisy and Kitty pushed over to where we were. ‘That’s why we’re all upset. Lavinia didn’t mean it.’ (I felt rather guilty as I said that). Everything depended on what Emily said next, and she did not disappoint.

  ‘It’s horrid!’ said Emily, wiping her face. ‘I’ve been thinking and thinking about it, ever since last night. We were so near, after the end of the fireworks! What if we had stepped on that rake?’

  ‘But—’ said Beanie, and then she went red. She looked at us helplessly.

  ‘But you didn’t,’ Daisy said pointedly, and Beanie collected herself.

  ‘It was Charlotte who found her,’ said Emily, and I thought of what Daisy says: that if you give people room to talk, they will explain everything without you having to ask. ‘She – she tripped over her.’

  ‘She was just lying there,’ said Charlotte Waiting, a little first former with curly blonde hair and eyes even bigger than Beanie’s. Daisy made sympathetic noises, and as usual they did the trick.

  ‘It was awful,’ Charlotte went on passionately. ‘We went over to the bonfire after the display to warm our hands – it was awfully cold – but the prefect beside it—’

  ‘Enid, wasn’t it?’ asked Daisy casually.

  ‘Oh no, it was Una, she had just put another load of wood on – she told us to move along. She was terribly flustered and cross. So we went back beyond it, towards the pavilion, and that’s when we – when I – trod on Elizabeth.’

  I could have cheered. There we had the beginnings of our first suspect’s movements. Una had been at the bonfire just after the end of the fireworks, exactly on the spot to hurt Elizabeth.

  A group of third formers shoved past us then, giggling at something.

  ‘Watch it!’ shouted Kitty, and one of them (of course, it was Binny) turned and stuck out her tongue. Then all four of them shrieked with laughter and rushed away.

  ‘
I don’t like the way the younger years are behaving today,’ said Kitty crossly. ‘Why, if I was in charge, I should—’

  ‘You sound just like one of the Five!’ said Beanie rather reproachfully.

  Kitty froze. ‘I am nothing like the Five!’ she gasped.

  ‘Do you think another secret has been found?’ asked Emily shyly, looking rather more cheerful. ‘I never knew that the older girls had so many. I’m much less afraid of them now.’

  Kitty opened her mouth to say something snubbing, caught herself and shut it again. She blinked, as though she had just thought of something. ‘It is only the older girls’ secrets coming out,’ she said. ‘Goodness. Our form is the youngest that’s had anything revealed about them. What if the secret-spreader is one of the younger girls?’

  She was quite right. For a moment we all stared at each other in surprise. Had we discovered something else important?

  ‘It might be,’ said Daisy thoughtfully. ‘But it could also just be a blind. After all, there could be plenty of older girls whose secrets haven’t come out yet. I happen to know that Violet—’

  Just then, Betsy North came hurrying up to us. ‘Psst,’ she said. ‘Information.’

  ‘What is it, horrid little shrimp?’ said Daisy loudly, shooing the first formers away. Then, in a lower voice, ‘Go on, tell!’

  ‘Listen to this!’ whispered Betsy. ‘I heard one of the third formers saying it just now. They were standing near Elizabeth, just before we all formed up in rows for the fireworks, when Lettice came up to her. She was shaking, and she said something about secrets. And Elizabeth laughed at her. She told Lettice that she had better be careful, for the sake of her sanity. And Lettice looked terrified. She went rushing away, and that was when Una came by, to line them all up.’