by Mona Marple
I recoiled. “I told you we’d find something unsavoury in here!”
Crystal giggled. “Thrush isn’t always caused by sex, Ellie!”
“But sometimes it is,” I said, hoping the topic of conversation would go no further. “I’m picturing things no former student should have to picture about the school staff!”
“You’re just jealous that this pair have had a more active…”
“Enough!” I exclaimed and covered my ears with my hands. I saw her mouth continue to move but couldn’t hear what she was saying. Finally, I removed my hands when I saw that Crystal’s attention had returned to the drawers.
The third drawer was twice as deep as the first two and, in my limited experience of desks, was the drawer that I’d unofficially named The Junk Drawer. If Helen Sculley had clutter, I was confident it would be in there.
“Bingo,” Crystal said as she pulled it open.
Inside the drawer was a hanging file system, neatly labelled in alphabetical order. Crystal reached in and pulled out the bulging file at the front of the drawer, the one labelled ACADEMY.
I raised an eyebrow and we both moved across to the settee, where Crystal split the papers in half and gave one half to me.
“What are we looking for?” Crystal asked.
“Anything that jumps out to you, I guess,” I said. “Things that don’t make sense, or shed light on anyone with a motive to kill.”
“That’ll be the whole school staff then,” Crystal muttered.
“Exactly,” I agreed. “We need to narrow it down.”
“I wonder how Violet’s getting on,” Crystal said as she skim read papers.
“She hasn’t solved the case,” I said, “or she’d have come and found us.”
“Unless something’s happened to her.”
“Don’t talk like that,” I scolded, “we need to stay focused.”
And with that, we each turned to our pile of papers in silence. Helen’s love of organisation appeared endless. The ACADEMY file papers were in chronological order, with page flags helpfully stuck on the first page of each new document. It was obsessive and I didn’t know whether to admire or fear the woman. She probably knew 15 different ways to kill a person with stationery.
The papers were mainly dull. Minutes from meetings, letters from lawyers, letters to lawyers, letters to lawyers from other lawyers and copied in to Winifred’s, a proposed transition action plan for after the school became an Academy, and page after page after mind-numbingly boring page of Winifred’s accounts. The financial health (or illness) of the school was mind-boggling. More was spent each year on maintenance work for the boat hand’s little bunker of a place than I earned in a year, and the place was falling apart.
“Look at this,” I said as I poked Crystal with my elbow. She looked up at me, her heavy eyelids suggesting she’d found nothing interesting in her own papers. “It’s the wages paid out. It goes back years.”
Crystal gazed at the numbers but I realised my error too late. They were just numbers to her. She had no idea what was a good or bad wage, or how much a regular person required to survive.
“They record all that, huh? Cool,” she said, finally, aware she was expected to provide some kind of response.
“The staff are all on pretty good wages,” I said as I scanned the numbers.
“The school has to attract good teaching staff or students won’t come,” Crystal pointed out. She was right.
“Oh, wow,” I said.
“It’s not that surprising.”
“No, look at this,” I said, and pointed out one entry in particular.
“What?” Crystal asked. She really was incapable of reading numbers.
“Helen Sculley, there’s a zero by her… she hasn’t taken a wage for…” I said, then flicked through the previous years’ records. “She hasn’t had a penny from the school in four years!”
Crystal gazed at me.
“Oh for goodness sake,” I said with a laugh. “You do realise people need to earn money, don’t you? That’s why most people work? That’s why I work?”
“Yeah…” Crystal said slowly, although it was clear she grasped the concept as clearly as if I were trying to explain the complex theory of Shrodinger’s cat to her.
“So this is interesting,” I said. “It could be useful information.”
“It could?” Crystal asked. “I mean, she has a husband, Ellie. Maybe she just doesn’t need her own money.”
I sighed. “I guess. It’s worth getting Violet to ask her, though.”
“Sure,” Crystal said, then let out a yawn. “Can we take a break? This is sending me to sleep.”
She tossed her papers on to the coffee table with nowhere near the care I suspected Helen would have showed them, and as she did, something flew out and landed under the table.
“What’s this?” I asked. I reached down and retrieved the image.
A photograph, faded in colour and bent at the corners. A young man, owlish, with a beautiful young woman draped on his lap. The woman laughed towards the camera with a glint of mischief in her eye while the man sat, head tilted with pride, as if the woman straddling him were a trophy he had won. Which I guess she was in a way.
“Is that…?” Crystal asked.
I turned the photograph over. The writing on the back was fresh, much more recent than the image itself. In neat, controlled handwriting, it said:
SS & HWS - in happier times.
21
Violet
I nodded approvingly as Ellie left me alone in the production booth. She was doing good work, and already I could feel her energy vibrations increase. Don’t laugh. I know it sounds woo-woo, and trust me when I say I can’t stand woo-woo. But it’s true.
It was quite the triumph for Ellie, since she’d previously given off as much magic energy as a bowl of custard.
I cleared my throat and called out the name of the person I needed to question next.
Helen Sculley appeared, not a patch of make-up out of place.
“Helen, I’m so sorry,” I said. She was a wily woman and I wanted to disarm her. I imagined that sympathy would do that better than a harsh interrogation. “You must be devastated. I know how… close… you and Sid were.”
She offered a mild smile. “He was a wonderful boss.”
“Oh, come now Helen, he was more than that to you,” I said. I leaned across towards her conspiratorially. “You don’t have to pretend. Not here. Not with me.”
But Helen was better than I gave her credit for. She simply met my gaze and offered that pathetic smile again. “He was a good man to work for.”
Ah. Stale mate.
Fair enough. If she wanted to play hard ball, game on.
“I see you have a separate office now,” I said.
“Is that a question?”
“The question is what fall out you had that made you leave his office?” I asked, eyebrow raised.
Helen pursed her lips. “I was asked to move into the room next door.”
Well, that was a surprise.
“When was that?”
“About three months before I knew he was in discussions about the Academy,” Helen said. She crossed her arms across her chest.
“Was it unusual for Sid not to discuss things like that with you?”
“Yes,” she said, having paused to consider the question. “He used me as a sounding board. That’s why he wanted me to share his office, so I was on hand to answer questions and offer advice.”
“It wasn’t your choice to share the room?”
She shrugged. “I assumed I’d have my own office. It’s why the room next door was always kept free, so in theory I did have my own space. I’ve been much happier in there. Everything took three times as long in that room with him. He had to share his thoughts out loud and get my opinion, and he never tidied a thing.”
“And yet he was less open about the Academy plans?”
“Downright secretive,” she said with a huff. “He dressed it up as
being in my best interests, of course, me moving into the other room. He said we should have more boundaries to separate work and… well, to, erm…”
“Helen, you must be aware of the rumours?” I asked, keeping my tone gentle.
She let out a laugh. “Of course I am.”
“Lots of people believe they’re true,” I said. “There’s no shame in developing an attraction… in a relationship developing.”
“Anyway,” Helen said, neither confirming nor denying the rumours. “Like I said, he wanted to separate things with some boundaries. So I had to knock to go in his office, he started managing his own paperwork although you’ve seen how good a job he was doing at that.”
“And he was doing that why?”
“Because he didn’t want me to find out,” she said. “He knew I’d do anything for this school. I’d never be convinced by the Academy plans.”
“Why not? Wouldn’t he have wanted your opinion on such a big change?”
“Oh!” Helen scoffed in bitterness. “He darn well knew my opinion about Academies! I’m the one in the management team who keeps up to date with the education industry. I know when the exam boards are changing, I know which schools we’re competing with to attract students, and I know that becoming an Academy is the kiss of death for most schools.”
“And he knew you felt that way?”
“The whole school knew I felt that way. I always have and I always will - because I’m right.”
“So he introduced all of these changes to make sure you wouldn’t find out. But you did. How?”
Helen sighed. “I couldn’t leave his office in that state any longer. I don’t want the job of tidying up after him. I’d be much happier if he’d have done it himself, but he just didn’t see mess. I ignored it as long as I could and then one night he left early, and I went in to tidy it all up. That’s when I saw the papers. The draft proposal. That’s how I found out, by tidying up his papers. The bloody man didn’t even have the guts to tell me to my face, after everything we’ve…”
“You were angry?”
“Angry?” She repeated. “I was devastated. It was a complete betrayal. How could I ever trust him again?”
“Some people might say that trusting your boss isn’t that important?”
She sighed. “Fine. You know it already. People are so obsessed with things, painting them all out to be sordid. It’s never been sordid. It’s been a love story, okay?”
“So you accept there was a personal relationship?”
“We were in a relationship, yes,” Helen said. “I’ve never wanted to shout about it because we’ve both got people at home, but you don’t understand unless you work long hours with someone. I’ve spent more time with Sid over the years than I have my husband. Things just, they just happened.”
“Lizette seems to have no idea,” I murmured.
“Well, as I now know, Sid was very good at concealing information.”
“How do you think she’d react if she found out?”
Helen glanced out of the window into the dining hall. Lizette had fallen asleep in her chair. “I really couldn’t say. I guess she’d be furious. She’d probably fly into a murderous rage.”
“Your husband doesn’t know?”
She shook her head.
“I noticed the photographs of him in your office. Are they there for any reason?”
She let out a bitter laugh. “Isn’t that what secretaries do? Put up photos of their loved ones? I could hardly have photos up when I was in Sid’s office, could I?”
“So they weren’t put up to hurt him after you discovered the Academy plans?”
“No,” Helen said with a sly smile, “although that would have been a cracking idea. The man always was insecure. They say that cheats always are. He couldn’t stand that I’d got a man at home, even though he’d got Lizette. But no, I put the photos up as soon as I moved into the other room. Maybe it were a little bit of a way to punish him for booting me out. I don’t know. They were up long before I knew about the Academy plans, though.”
“We’ve been through your office,” I said. Her expression gave nothing away. “Is there anything you’d worry about us finding in there?”
“A letter filed in the wrong place would be about as scandalous as my room would get,” she said with a wink.
“You have a folder of Academy papers. Does that mean that Sid started being more open with you about things?”
“Not exactly,” she admitted. “I tried my best to photocopy the important papers for my own records. He was so untidy and I didn’t want the paper trail to be lost.”
“We did find a photograph among the papers, something that perhaps forgets those boundaries and mixes work with… something else,” I said. I held up the image of the younger versions of her and Sid, and watched her face transform. The image clearly brought her deep joy.
“That’s my photo,” she said. “I gave it to him after it all kicked off with the Academy news. Guess I wanted to pull on his heartstrings a little, see if that could bring him round to my way of thinking. I was too scared he’d lose it, though. It’s special to me, this picture. I took it back.”
“You wrote on the back of it, Helen. When you gave this photo to Sid, you wrote a little note. I thought it was your handwriting when I saw it - you writing to him, not him writing to you. Do you remember doing that? Making the note?”
“Ah, yes,” Helen said. She gave a smile filled with nostalgia.
“HWS?” I pushed.
“Winifred,” she confirmed my suspicions. “My middle name is Winifred. He named the school after me.”
22
Ellie
Violet’s revelation about the school name didn’t surprise me as much as it maybe should have, but Crystal practically squealed when she heard about it.
“It’s so romantic!”
“Uh huh, I’m sure his wife agrees,” I quipped.
She had the decency to drop the grin from her face for a moment. “Well, obviously, not the whole sneaking around thing… but naming a school after her?! That’s the kind of grand gesture I’ve been waiting for my whole life!”
She had a point. I’d never so much as had a man buy me flowers before. In fact, Godiva was the closest I’d come to being showered with gifts, and those gifts were of a dead, headless variety - mice and baby birds left for me to discover. Ugh.
“It is romantic, I guess,” I admitted.
“At least we know which one it was now,” Crystal said with a cocked smile. “I’d have always guessed the other way.”
“What are you talking about?”
“In every relationship… and I’m clearly repeating the rumours because I don’t have my own experiences…”
“Huh?”
“There’s always one person who loves the other more,” Crystal said with an eye roll, as if it had been obvious what she was talking in code about. I laughed.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said.
“No, it isn’t,” she argued. “Name any couple.”
“Jay Z and Beyonce,” I muttered. I was a fairly laidback person but I couldn’t stand being forced to enter into guessing games.
“People we know,” she said with a raised eyebrow.
“Fine,” I said. If she wanted to play, I’d play. “Your parents!”
To my surprise she didn’t skip a beat. “Daddy, of course. See? There’s always one.”
“And this shows that Sid Snipe was the one?”
“With Helen, yes. With his wife, clearly she loved him more.”
“Clearly,” I said, glad we agreed on something.
“From the outside, I always thought it was Helen being taken advantage of a little bit, or being impressed by his role,” Crystal said with a shrug. “Anyway, what do we do now?”
I let out a sigh. “The storm’s still raging out there and Violet’s speaking to Bryan Derby next. I say we just sit back and wait for a bit.”
“How about the hair?” Crystal said.
“It’s dark like Bryan’s. Can you do a spell to see who it belongs to?”
“I’ve tried,” I admitted. “My magic isn’t working on it.”
“Shame.”
“Hey, why don’t you have a go?” I suggested.
Crystal looked at me with wide eyes. “I don’t know about that.”
“Come on, what’s the worst that could happen? I’ll stay right here with you.”
Crystal gave me a nervous smile. She was happy to use her powers to lift her dress so it didn’t get dirty, but I couldn’t remember the last time she’d used magic for anything serious. Her own visions were uncontrolled and scared her. Magic had become her party piece, a quick trick here and there to make her easy life even easier.
“Sure, I guess,” she agreed. We walked across to the far corner of the room and sat on two discarded chairs. As I lowered myself, I felt mine begin to wobble and stood back up just in time.
“They’re broken!” I said with a laugh. Each chair had a leg missing.
“I’m not sitting on the floor in this dress,” Crystal said with a pout. “I’ll just stand here. Come on, hand it over.”
I ignored her grouchiness, which I knew was only the nerves talking, and handed her the single hair.
“I don’t even know what to do,” she said after a few moments.
“Just close your eyes and focus on the hair, see if anything happens,” I suggested. That was exactly what I’d tried, with no success, so I was hardly the expert on the topic. I had no other ideas, though.
Crystal humoured me. Her eyes closed, revealing an intricate pattern of eyeshadow shades, a thick line of liquid eyeliner, and a dense forest of eyelashes. She was so beautiful I hated her sometimes.
After a few moments, her body stiffened and her eyes opened, but she didn’t look at me. Her gaze shot to the ceiling, leaving me to watch the white of her eyes and hope her unpredictable visions would for once be relevant.
The dining hall had fallen quiet as it grew later. The initial fear or excitement over the party turning into a real-life murder mystery evening had vanished as people had sobered up and realised it was past their bedtime. Whatever these people may have been in their school days, most of them had grown up to add children and responsibilities to their lives, and they were used to a respectable bedtime. A few women had lined up rows of chairs and lain down across them to sleep, their husbands’ blazer jackets draped across their bare shoulders. Others weren’t so quick to give in but had given up any interest in reliving their glory days and simply sat, exhausted, probably wishing they’d refused the invitation.
