Murder Is Bad Manners

by Robin Stevens

  What shall I do? I think she wanted me to leap into her arms and call her Mother. Of course, I couldn’t. I ran out of her office—I don’t ever want to go back.

  21st November 1933

  I told Henry what had happened. She couldn’t believe it either. She says I should wait before I tell anyone else, but I don’t see why. How could Miss Griffin do this to me? I want to talk to Mummy and Daddy, and make them say that it is all a lie.

  22nd November 1933

  Miss Griffin wants me to stay quiet too. I think she’s alarmed by my reaction. I don’t see why she should have expected anything different. She says I have to consider her position, that it should be our secret. But what about my position? This is not fair of her!

  23rd November 1933

  Note from Miss Griffin today, asking me to come and see her on the gym balcony after the end of school, to “discuss the situation.” I have stuck it in this book, just in case of—oh, I don’t know what. I will go, but it shan’t change my mind. I will talk to Mummy and Daddy about it when I go home for the holidays. She can’t stop me. She can’t tell me what to do.

  And that was the last thing Verity wrote in her diary.

  But it wasn’t the last thing in the diary itself. When Daisy shook it, two pieces of paper fell out.

  The first was a short note, in Miss Griffin’s beautiful copperplate.

  Miss Abraham,

  I request your company on the gym balcony at 5:30 this evening, the 23rd of November, to discuss the situation between us. Please do not be late.

  Rosemary Griffin

  The second was in Miss Bell’s angular handwriting.

  To whom it may concern.

  I have evidence to prove that the headmistress of Deepdean School for Girls, Rosemary Griffin, caused the death of her pupil Verity Abraham in November of 1933. Whether Miss Griffin attacked Verity with the intention of ending her life, or whether it was a tragic accident, I do not know, but the enclosed diary and note together prove that she was present at the moment of Verity’s death, and that she caused the incident by revealing to Verity that she was her natural mother. Rosemary Griffin is not fit to hold the post of headmistress any longer. She should be immediately removed from her position at Deepdean, and I submit myself for consideration as her replacement.

  Joan Bell, Monday, 29th October 1934

  “Fancy!” said Daisy gleefully. “I’d say that was a motive for murder, all right. It looks like Miss Bell got greedy and wanted to force Miss Griffin out of Deepdean altogether. She’d have lost everything! Oh, if the school only knew!”

  I was glowing pink with shock. I could barely take it in. Miss Griffin, the great Miss Griffin, had been involved in a shameful affair, and, as a result of this, had a baby. It was not the sort of thing that respectable schoolteachers did! And Verity had been her daughter! Had Miss Griffin killed Verity on purpose, so that she would not talk? Whatever the truth was, Verity’s death had not been an accident at all. It was Miss Griffin’s fault. The thought made my skin crawl with horror.

  Something occurred to me then. “The Henry that Verity mentioned—that’s King Henry, isn’t it? So she’s known all the time! That must be why she’s been looking so odd, and why she was coming to speak to Miss Tennyson at the Willow. I knew she had something to do with this!”

  Daisy nodded. “She can’t have known exactly what was going on, but I bet she suspected. Perhaps she realized that Miss Tennyson had something to do with it, and that’s why she was going to meet her on Saturday. But the important thing is that we’ve got all the evidence we need to accuse Miss Griffin. Whatever she says now, we’ve got her. Hazel, we’ve solved the case.”

  “Miss Bell solved the case,” I said.

  “Don’t be an idiot, Hazel,” said Daisy. “She’s dead. She didn’t solve anything.”

  I was just opening my mouth to argue—or perhaps to say something else about the extraordinary things we had discovered—when the cloakroom door creaked open.

  Daisy and I both froze. You see, that was all wrong. It was the middle of a lesson (one that Daisy and I were missing), and so no one should have been wandering around school grounds so quietly.

  Luckily, we were still hidden behind our rack of discarded coats, at the very back of the cloakroom. No one looking in could see us—and that was what saved us.

  The door opened all the way, there was a moment of utter silence, and then Miss Griffin said, “Daisy? Hazel? Where are you, girls?”

  I could feel Daisy’s hand gripping mine, and hear our breathing and our hearts. They sounded as loud as shouting, and I was shaking so hard that I imagined Miss Griffin seeing clouds of dust flying up off the coats around us.

  She had come to find us. She knew! Miss Lappet must have told her we had been looking for the earring. She was going to kill us, I thought frantically, and then bury us next to Miss Bell out in the woods and tell our parents that we had run away!

  I thought I had been afraid of the murderer before, during our investigation, but I never knew until that moment how much I did not want to be dead.

  “Girls?” called Miss Griffin again. “Girls, are you in there? Come on out, I’ve got a lovely surprise for you!”

  I could not have felt more terrified if she had said, Come out so I can murder you!

  “Miss Lappet told me that there’d been a misunderstanding. She gave you a wrong impression earlier. Come out, girls, and I can explain.”

  It felt so strange to disobey the headmistress. But we did not come out.

  At last, Miss Griffin sighed. She pulled the door closed, and the room was quiet again.

  I was about to jump out of our hiding place, but Daisy hissed, “Wait!”

  We waited, and waited, and then we heard Miss Griffin’s footsteps moving away.

  Daisy collapsed against me, shaking. “Quick!” she cried. “We have to get to lessons before she comes back!”

  “Really?” I asked doubtfully. My knees were like wet jelly. I wasn’t sure I wanted to move at all.

  “Do you want to wait for her here?” asked Daisy.

  I shook my head.

  Once we’d left the cloakroom I felt as though I had a spotlight trained on my head. I expected Miss Griffin to pounce on us at any second. I was clutching Verity’s diary to my chest like a shield, and when we turned a corner and almost walked into the dark-haired police chief coming the other way, I jumped so hard my teeth chattered.

  Daisy shied away from him, and I realized with horror that, despite what had happened, she still wanted to finish the case without help from the police—even though Miss Griffin might be just round the next corner, waiting to catch us. It took me only a moment to decide that it was time for me to stop behaving like a secretary, or even a second-in-command. It was up to me to save us.

  The policeman was already turning away.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Wait! We need your help.”

  The policeman turned to face me. “Yes?” he asked politely.

  “Hazel!” cried Daisy. “What are you doing?”

  I ought to have felt guilty. But once again, I did not feel guilty at all.

  “Please help us,” I said in a rush. “We know who killed Miss Tennyson. It was Miss Griffin, and she’s killed our science teacher, Miss Bell, as well, and now she’s coming after us! Please!”

  I could tell that he did not believe me. He frowned, and his face crinkled up with it. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said, “but what are you talking about?”

  “Miss Griffin is the murderer,” I said. “It’s true! Look! We’ve got evidence!”

  And I thrust Verity’s diary at his chest.

  “Hazel!” Daisy shouted again. “Don’t!”

  But the policeman was already flicking through it. At first he was only doing it to be polite—but then his eyebrows shot up and his forehead wrinkled, and he began to turn over the pages more quickly.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked.

  “Oh, never mind that!” I
said. “You have to help us! Miss Griffin is after us! She wants to kill us!”

  For one awful moment I thought he was going to turn us away. But instead, he took a deep breath, put his big hands on our shoulders, steered us toward the door of the nearest classroom, and pushed us inside.

  The policeman had saved us from Miss Griffin. I could have hugged him. Daisy, of course, was less pleased. I didn’t even need to look at her to know that she was about to be difficult.

  “All right,” said the policeman, turning to us with an extremely serious expression on his face. “What’s all this about?”

  Daisy sniffed. “Hazel’s said too much already,” she said, folding her arms and wrinkling her nose up. “I don’t see why I should tell you any more. Who are you, anyway? You’ve been here all day and you haven’t even introduced yourself.”

  I was horrified in case the policeman sent us back outside, but to my great relief Daisy’s speech seemed only to amuse him.

  “I am Inspector Priestley,” he told us. “And you are?”

  “I am Daisy Wells, daughter of Lord Hastings,” said Daisy, as though she were the queen, “and this is my friend Hazel Wong. And this is our murder case and we’ve solved it without you, thank you very much. No matter what Hazel says, we don’t need your help.”

  The Inspector raised his eyebrows at that, so that his whole forehead wrinkled up again. “Do you mean to say that you have more than the diary you’ve shown me?” he asked. “You can prove what Hazel has just told me about Miss Griffin?”

  Daisy squirmed. I could tell she was having a terrible inner struggle over whether to reveal our cleverness to the Inspector.

  But I did not want to face a murderous Miss Griffin on my own. We had solved the case, and now there was nothing more we could do. As much as Daisy hated it, we had to tell the police what we knew.

  “Yes!” I said. “We know that Miss Griffin killed Miss Bell. Miss Bell was blackmailing her over what happened with Verity Abraham last year, you see. It’s all in the diary. Miss Bell must have found it while she was doing Miss Griffin’s secretary work earlier this year. So Miss Griffin killed Miss Bell to silence her, and made Miss Tennyson help her dispose of the body. Then she killed Miss Tennyson too, because she was planning to go to the police. And she tried to kill us just now! I know it sounds insane, but we can prove it. We’ve got evidence. Show him, Daisy.”

  Daisy, after another moment’s wriggling, stuck her hand into her bag, pulled out the stained gym shirt, the piece of string, and the bit of Miss Bell’s lab coat, and said, “Oh, all right! But I hope you’ll remember later that we found these.”

  And then we both explained the whole of our investigation to the policeman. I found that once I had started, I couldn’t stop, though Daisy kept on butting in with better explanations. We told him about losing the earring—“Our most important piece of evidence!” said Daisy furiously—and how tracking it down had led us to Miss Griffin. I could tell that the Inspector was only listening politely at first, but as Daisy and I talked, he took a notebook out of his coat pocket and began to write in it. His face became more and more crumpled, and his eyebrows moved higher and higher up his forehead.

  When we had finished he put his pen down, rubbed his hand over his face, and laughed.

  “Not bad for your Detective Society’s first murder case,” he said.

  “You believe us?” said Daisy sharply.

  “You present a compelling, if slightly muddled, account of events. It’s rather difficult not to believe you. It’s a pity you don’t have that earring anymore, but I’m sure I can close the case without it.”

  Daisy made a face at muddled, but I was relieved.

  “And you’ll look for Miss Bell’s body?” I asked.

  “Yes, I’ll send my men out to Oakeshott Woods this afternoon. But until I wrap up the case”—his face became serious again—“I need to keep you safe from Miss Griffin. I don’t like the thought of the two of you roaming about carrying on your Young Miss Marple routine while she’s still a free woman.”

  “Miss Marple!” hissed Daisy under her breath. “Holmes and Watson, if you please.”

  “Is there anywhere you can go for a few hours?” asked Inspector Priestley, pretending he had not heard.

  “We could go to Nurse Minn in the infirmary,” I offered.

  The Inspector nodded. “Good. You can stay there until Miss Griffin’s been arrested. I’ll keep one of my men guarding you and put another on her tail. Remember—no heroics! You’ve already done quite enough.”

  “Well, we did solve your case for you,” said Daisy.

  The Inspector got up from his chair and smoothed down his dark hair. “Indeed you did, Chief Inspector Wells,” he said—which I think must have been a joke at Daisy’s expense, only she was too pleased to notice it.

  “Thank you,” she said, and she put out her hand for the Inspector to take. He shook it very solemnly (I was now more certain than ever that he was not being entirely serious), and then turned and held out his hand to me. I shook it, feeling suddenly rather shy. I looked up at him out of the corner of my eye and had a shock when I caught him winking at me. I dropped his hand, horribly embarrassed, but when I looked at him again his expression was as polite as ever.

  When we were safely in the infirmary (Nurse Minn took one fluttery look at the Inspector and made no objections at all to us becoming patients), tucked into two cool white beds next to each other, I suddenly felt very much like crying. I stared up at the ceiling and gulped as quietly as I could into my handkerchief while I shivered all over, as though I really was ill.

  Beside me Daisy was gabbing away, of course.

  “Do you think we’ll get a bravery medal from the police? We were brave, weren’t we?”

  “Very,” I said, my teeth chattering. Water kept leaking out of the sides of my eyes in the most shameful manner.

  “I say!” said Daisy, noticing me. “Are you all right, Watson?”

  “Yes!” I said, my teeth chattering all the more. “I’m quite all right. Only . . . I can’t stop—”

  And I burst into tears.

  “Hazel!” cried Daisy, and quick as a flash she leaped out of her bed and hurled herself onto mine. “Oh, poor Hazel!”

  “I’m sorry!” I stuttered. “I’m not . . . behaving . . . very much like a detective.”

  “Hazel,” said Daisy, putting her arms round my shoulders and leaning her forehead against mine, “don’t talk nonsense. Throughout this case, you have behaved like the most splendid detective in the world. In fact, because of your heroic and intelligent actions in The Case of the Murder of Miss Bell, I am going to promote you. From this moment on you are the vice president of the Detective Society.”

  I gulped. “Really?” I asked.

  “Really,” said Daisy. “Now for heavens’ sake, stop crying and start thinking about how to get past our police guard.”

  That made me stop crying at once.

  “What?” I asked. “But we’re safe here!”

  “Who wants to be safe?” asked Daisy scornfully. “I want to see the Inspector arrest Miss Griffin.”

  I was not sure I did. I felt cushioned by the lovely soft quiet of the infirmary, and terrified at the very thought of going back out into a school where Miss Griffin was still on the lookout for us.

  But Daisy, for all her changes in the past few weeks, was still Daisy, and her crazy plans were as crazy as ever.

  “Yes, but how?” I asked.

  “Wait,” said Daisy. “I’m thinking of a plan.”

  Then, outside the main the infirmary door, we heard voices.

  “Come on!” hissed Daisy. “Let’s go and see who it is!”

  As soon as we went out of our little room onto the small infirmary landing, into which Minny’s examination room and all the sickrooms open out, we could hear that it was two policemen. The one guarding the infirmary must have been joined by another, and they were talking.

  “. . . having a meeting
now,” said the first policeman as we crept up to the closed main door to the corridor and pressed our ears against it to listen. “The chief’s idea. Wants to get her to confess.”

  “Trust him to go for drama,” said the other. “Nice touch, though, I admit. Where are they?”

  “That music room, down the other end of the school. I’m off there now as reinforcement. You ought to come.”

  “Don’t I wish I could!” said our policeman. “But I’m on nanny duty. Little madams can’t get hurt—his orders.”

  Daisy flushed with annoyance. “All right,” she said to me. “An excellent plan has just come into my brain. Wait here.”

  She turned and ran into the other infirmary sickroom, and came back a moment later dragging a small shrimp behind her. It was Binny.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Got a bad stomach,” said Binny. Daisy glared at her. “Not really—I just wanted to get out of Latin.”

  “Don’t I know it,” said Daisy. “And if you want me to keep quiet for you, there’s something I need you to do.”

  “What?” asked Binny.

  “When I tell you,” said Daisy, “I want you to scream.”

  The landing outside the infirmary had gone quiet. The other policeman must have gone off to the meeting in the music room. “Ready?” whispered Daisy. We were crouching just behind the door. Binny, positioned in the very middle of the infirmary hallway, nodded.

  “Three, two, one,” whispered Daisy. “Scream!”

  Binny screamed.

  It sounded like an express train howling through a tunnel. There was a yell of shock from the policeman out on the landing, then he came bursting through the door, leaving it wide open and the landing beyond clear.

  With Binny’s screams still ringing in our ears, Daisy and I ran for it.

  We scurried along the corridor toward the Music Wing, but just as we were coming to the end of the Library corridor I looked behind us and saw the one sight I was hoping like anything we would avoid.