‘I don’t want to marry Alexander!’ I said, and blushed.
‘Hazel, I don’t know why you insist on lying to me,’ said Daisy. ‘You’re quite mad about him. You gape at him like a fish. It’s exactly the way he looks at me.’ Then she blinked. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that, should I?’
I shook my head, ears ringing.
‘You see? I have learned something from what happened last term!’ Daisy cried. ‘I didn’t mean it, you know that. You are still my best friend in all the world, and the best detective I know who is not me.’
I could not help laughing, although what she had said still stung. She really did not mean anything by it. I hugged her.
‘Apology accepted!’ said Daisy, beaming. ‘D’you know, I feel I do want to dress for dinner. It is Christmas Eve, after all!’
5
Dinner that night was, as Daisy had suspected, very different from the elegant one we had at Maudlin. It was in the refectory, which still looked rather grim, although a tree had been set up in one corner, surrounded by a scattering of Bluestockings who were staying for Christmas and for Donald’s party. There was no glitter of silver and crystal here, or gold-liveried servants – instead there was a definite air of tins and bottles, and only one harried maid slamming plates down in front of us and splashing the sauce. The first course was sardines, so small that they were nearly lost under a soup of tomato sauce, and then pigeon, which was exciting until I found a ball of shot still in mine. I bit down and almost broke a tooth, and never quite recovered from the shock.
‘I do promise better fare for Christmas itself,’ said Aunt Eustacia, chewing her pigeon with a rather sour look on her face. We were sitting up on High Table with her, as a special treat. ‘Really, the kitchens are outdoing even themselves tonight! I shall have to go speak to them. Oh, and Daisy, I’ve just heard that that uncle of yours will be joining us for Christmas Day. He called me an hour ago. He’s motoring up from London this evening, and he ought to be with us by tomorrow morning at the latest. And he’ll have his fiancée with him.’
‘Fiancée?’ cried Daisy.
‘Indeed,’ said Aunt Eustacia, pursing her lips. ‘It’s quite typical of him to spring something like this on us. I thought there was something wrong with the line, when he said it at first. He intends to marry someone called Miss … Lovedon in London, on New Year’s Day. Do you know her?’
‘Miss Livedon!’ Daisy said, gaping.
But I was not surprised. It seemed meant to be. I imagined Miss Livedon and Uncle Felix running about the world hand in hand, catching spies and criminals and saving Britain. It was terribly romantic.
‘Ah, that’s it,’ said Aunt Eustacia. ‘He wants us all to be there, which I do appreciate. But such short notice! Now, this fiancée. Is she a good sort? Do you approve?’
‘Oh yes!’ I said.
‘She’s quite awful,’ said Daisy. ‘I think she’s exactly what he needs. And of course we shall be at the wedding.’
‘Of course you shall,’ said Aunt Eustacia, and Daisy nudged me gleefully. We were both so excited that we had to make an effort to keep on watching Amanda.
She was sitting down in the main part of the hall, and she was only picking at her food. She stared off into the distance, and jumped at small noises. The bags under her eyes were worse than ever, and she seemed utterly distracted. Was this her guilty conscience? I wondered.
She came up to us after the pudding plates (plum cake and custard from a tin) had been cleared away. There was another girl with her, thin and serious, with straight dark hair and large glasses.
‘I did what you asked,’ the girl said to Aunt Eustacia. ‘I made Amanda sit with me and play Snap and Beggar-my-neighbour all afternoon.’
‘Excellent work, Harriet,’ said Aunt Eustacia, nodding. ‘Amanda, I hope you are feeling better for it?’
‘I’m perfectly all right. I think I shall go to bed early,’ said Amanda crossly. I was rather concerned. She did look so peaky.
‘After the carols, I hope?’ said Aunt Eustacia.
I could tell that Amanda wanted to say no, but she sighed and said, ‘Of course, Miss Mountfitchet.’ She tugged restlessly at her hair as she walked away, though, and I was quite worried that she might pull some of it out. I was also sure that she was up to something. We had to watch her closely.
6
I was glad that Amanda stayed for the carols. It meant that we could too, and still keep watching her all evening. After the meal was done, all the students and dons gathered in a circle around the tree’s green branches and flickering candles and sang.
Daisy and I joined in (we had one hymn sheet to share, and Daisy took it), and the harmonies echoed around us in the cool dimness. It was so lovely that I got a shiver down my spine. Snow was falling outside again, in gentle little flurries, and the air itself felt silver with anticipation.
‘Goodnight, Aunt E,’ Daisy called cheerily, with a theatrical yawn, as she put down her hymn sheet after the final chorus of ‘Hark! The Herald Angels’ had died away. ‘See you on Christmas morning!’
Daisy and I walked back to King Henry’s rooms together, and although the corridors of St Lucy’s were cold and bare, and echoed as we went down them, I could not shake the Christmas feeling. I looked out of our sitting-room window and saw that the storm had died down, leaving behind a thick expanse of snow. It glowed with a ghostly radiance in the darkness, and I turned away from it, towards our bedroom.
‘Hazel,’ said Daisy, ‘whatever are you doing?’
‘Getting changed,’ I said.
‘Sometimes,’ said Daisy, ‘I think you have improved, and other times I think you are exactly the same trusting Hazel you always were. Surely you have realized that going to bed was merely a blind? Amanda is up to something, and we must follow her to discover what it is. But, of course, she must not know what we are up to. That is why we have pretended to go to bed like good little girls. Really, we are neither good nor little.’
‘I know!’ I said. ‘I was only going to put on my warm things, Daisy. I wasn’t getting ready for bed! Of course we’re following Amanda tonight.’
‘Oh!’ said Daisy. ‘In that case, remember to put on your coat, and another jumper for good measure. There’s no knowing where we may have to go!’
After we had changed, we waited, our noses pressed to the door leading out of King Henry’s rooms onto the staircase landing, for what seemed like an age. Amanda’s door was above ours, so if she was to leave her rooms, she ought to come past ours. Except—
The door to our bedroom was open a little way, and through it I heard a noise. It was a pinging, a gentle clang. I sat up, because I knew that sound. It was the noise a drainpipe made, when you were clambering hand over hand down it.
Daisy sat up and waved her hand at me. Then she began crawling forwards, on her hands and knees, towards the bedroom. I scuffled after her, holding my breath. Daisy went to the bedroom window, the one that looks out over the river, and Cambridge, and very carefully, without opening the catch, she raised her head up, so she was peering out.
She gasped.
‘What is it?’ I breathed. My stockings caught on a stray bit of wood, and I winced. I wanted to see what Daisy was seeing.
‘Come and look!’ hissed Daisy. ‘Hazel, we were right!’
I untangled my stocking (the wool ripped, and I cursed my clumsiness) and crawled up next to her to look. I raised my head cautiously at first, but Daisy was nudging me so hard that I realized I had nothing to fear. Outside, the world was white and blue. Everything was shadow and snow, mixed up together in the most confusing way, so at first I did not understand what I was looking at. There was a black blot at the edge of the unbroken white beneath the window – a tree? A statue? But then it moved.
‘It’s Amanda!’ said Daisy. ‘She’s climbed down out of her window. She really is a climber, just as Aunt E thought! She was at Maudlin last night, and now she’s going back to do somet
hing else dastardly!’
I watched as the figure in its coat and hat stood up and began to track carefully away from St Lucy’s, towards the bridge and Maudlin. It left behind heavy dark pockets where each foot had trodden, and I noticed something.
‘Daisy!’ I said. ‘It can’t be Amanda. That person’s wearing trousers!’
‘Of course she is,’ said Daisy dismissively. ‘Who’d go climbing in a skirt if they could put on bags? She must have a climbing uniform. It’s her all right. Look, she’s doing that trick with her hair.’
I looked, and sure enough, the person reached up and tucked away a flyaway bit of hair under its hat. It really was Amanda, after all. I was embarrassed. If a woman could be a climber, why was it such a stretch to believe that she might wear trousers to do it in?
‘What do we do?’ I asked – though I knew how Daisy would reply. And sure enough …
‘There is no time to waste!’ she said. ‘We must follow her. Quick, before something else awful happens!’
7
I looked at my wristwatch, and saw that it was almost eleven at night. That meant that in only a few hours, it would be Christmas. I tingled all over. Christmas in the snow! Christmas … with a murderer.
Luckily, we were already in our outside things. Daisy threw open the window (unnecessarily hard, but she does love to be dramatic), and I peered round her at the drainpipe. It looked dauntingly far away, and the night was freezing. A gust of cold air blew onto my face.
‘Daisy!’ I said. ‘We can’t. It’s snowing!’
‘Not any more,’ said Daisy. ‘And anyway, we’ve done this before. Hazel, haven’t I trained you for this? You ought to be pleased to have an opportunity to use your detective skills.’
It was quite true that I had gone down a drainpipe before, but not in the snow, the temperatures cold enough to freeze my fingers and feet. I was terrified; there was no other word for it. What if we should fall? Daisy’s plans are often quite mad, but this one seemed to have more than the usual chance of one or both of us dying.
‘Oh, come along, Hazel!’ cried Daisy. ‘Don’t be a coward. I know you’re brave really.’
‘I’m sensible,’ I said, through gritted teeth. ‘I don’t want us to freeze to death.’
‘We won’t! We’re only— Oh, Hazel, hurry up, otherwise we’ll lose Amanda! Look, if you don’t go, I shall have to do it without you. And then won’t you feel dreadful? Leaving your president to investigate on her own? Haven’t we agreed, after last term, that that’s a terribly bad idea?’
We had, rather – or, at least, we had really seen what happened when we tried to work without each other. But there was not wanting to go it alone, and then there was agreeing to climb out into the frozen night. We were twenty feet from the ground, which does not sound like such a lot. But it looked it. It was far enough to drop, and not get back up. Chummy had died from a ten-foot fall, after all. I had a sudden vivid vision of his last seconds, pitching forwards and finding nothing to catch him until he hit the stone of the landing. Daisy tells me that she dreams about flying quite often, but all my flying dreams turn into falling, and I wake in a sweat.
‘Hazel, enough of this!’ said Daisy. ‘I am going out there, and if you want to honour the Detective Society you will come out after me. It is up to you to make your decision!’
She scrambled up onto the window ledge, took one look back at me and swung like a monkey to the left, grabbing hold of the drainpipe.
In all my years with Daisy, this was the greatest test she had ever set me. Could I bear to follow her?
Of course I could.
The drainpipe was so cold that it burned. My palms ached, and I was trembling with cold and fear. In that moment, as I kicked with my feet and clawed with my hands and levered myself downwards, I cursed Daisy Wells, the Detective Society, and the last year of my life. I did not want to die on Christmas Eve. I did not want to die at all. I wanted to be safe in my bed, waiting to do all the ordinary things that an English girl at Christmas would. I wanted most desperately to be boring.
The drainpipe clanked and creaked under me and the breath caught in my throat. It was not very far down, but my hands were swollen with cold, more like paws than fingers, and I could barely make my legs move.
‘Come on, Hazel!’ whispered Daisy – but suddenly, I simply could not move any more. It was not at all a case of trying. I could not shift an inch. I clung, trembling, and I knew in that moment that I was about to die. It was the stupidest thing I had ever done in my life, and it would be the last. I hung, agonizingly, dangling in mid-air, and then I plummeted down.
Strong hands caught me about the waist. They broke my fall, and I dropped into a bank of snow, burning cold.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ hissed a voice above me. I looked up, my insides crawling with dread.
It was Amanda.
8
I stumbled upright, shaking.
‘I should ask you exactly the same question,’ said Daisy, as crisply as though she were in a drawing room, instead of outside a Cambridge college in the middle of the night, with a murder suspect. ‘Why are you out of St Lucy’s?’
‘That’s none of your business,’ said Amanda angrily. ‘What do you mean, following me like this?’
‘What do you mean, climbing out of your rooms? And why didn’t you tell us you were a climber? Does Bertie know?’
‘He— No,’ said Amanda. ‘It’s a secret. Women aren’t supposed to be climbers. Yet another thing we can’t do. I was going to tell him last night, but I never got the chance. It’s a good thing, really, considering what happened.’ She sounded very bitter.
‘So you were at Maudlin last night,’ said Daisy. ‘That’s why you knew about Chummy. There never was a phone call, was there? Donald didn’t ring you at all. You made it all up!’
For the thousandth time, I wished that Daisy were not so brave. We were facing up to someone who, although she had caught me to stop my fall, really might be the murderer. I moved to stand next to Daisy and wondered how on earth we could slip out of this bind.
Amanda opened her mouth.
‘Don’t deny it!’ said Daisy. ‘We saw the dirt and brick dust on your coat. And we found the bit of wood that you used to prop open the window. It was dropped in the dons’ garden!’
‘No, Donald didn’t call me. I was there yesterday evening. But I didn’t use any wood!’ said Amanda. ‘When I got to Bertie’s rooms, the window was already open. I left it like that when I went out again. I never dropped anything in the garden!’
‘Hah!’ said Daisy. ‘So you admit you were there? We’ve got you now!’
She was right. As she always says, there is nothing people enjoy so much as correcting you. But … I had an empty, worried feeling. What Amanda had said about the wood was not what we had been expecting. If Amanda had not dropped it, who had? Was it evidence, after all, or only a coincidence? And if Donald had not called Amanda, then why had he lied? Was it because he was the murderer? I opened my mouth to ask her, but Amanda suddenly began to talk.
‘I—’ she said. ‘I – oh, you infuriating things! Yes, I was in Maudlin last night. I climbed over the wall into the dons’ garden, and then up the pipe to Bertie’s rooms. I wanted to show him that I was a climber as well.’
I knew then that what I had seen in her face before was true. Amanda really was in love with Bertie.
‘I got there at about one in the morning,’ she continued. ‘All the lights on the staircase were on, so I thought Bertie must be in his rooms. I thought I’d knock on his window and surprise him, but when I got closer I saw that his window was already open. I realized that he must have gone out climbing, so I climbed in. The room was empty, and I sat down to wait. I didn’t know what else to do. It was warm by the fire, even though it was banked, and I didn’t know how long he’d be. I kept on thinking I heard him, but he never came through the window.
‘I closed my eyes. I thought it was only for a moment, but I was wo
ken up by a clattering noise, the most dreadful yell and then a horrid crash above. When I looked at my watch, it was just after two. I heard doors opening, and Alfred and Michael shouting at each other, and then Donald yelling too. I went to the door, and listened. I heard them shouting Chummy’s name, so I knew he was the one who had fallen. Then they said – Michael said, I think, “Take him in here – Monmouth’s away for the hols.” I heard the door above me open and close, and I knew that I had to leave at once. I got outside as quick as I could, and I managed to get over the wall and into the road without being seen.’
My heart was thumping. There were things in Amanda’s story that were new. I imagined how she must have stood in the cold garden, looking up at the rooms of staircase nine. All the lights on – all the lights. Was that important? My brain was clouded by cold. And the clattering she had heard … what was that? Could it be the murderer, running down the stairs? But – no, it was not quite right. Where had I heard clattering recently? I could not think.
‘And then you came back here and got us up,’ said Daisy.
‘I really wasn’t thinking clearly,’ said Amanda, rather bitterly. ‘The lie about the telephone call was stupid. I ought to have waited for the next morning, but I lay there stewing for hours. I wanted to get back into Maudlin, to find out what had happened, and I wanted Bertie to have his family there too. He told me about what happened at Easter and I knew another death would hit him hard. He really was friends with Chummy, you know. Why, what are you looking at me like that for? What’s wrong? Here, you don’t think I did it, do you?’
Daisy and I had moved closer together.
‘Did you do it?’ asked Daisy in a low voice. ‘If you did, you might as well confess now. There are more of us than there are of you!’
Amanda gave a bark of laughter. Her face was very pale and drawn, and her fists were clenched.
Mistletoe and Murder Page 15
