Murder Most Unladylike: A Wells and Wong Mystery

by Robin Stevens

  ‘But won’t everywhere be locked?’ I objected.

  ‘Not if I steal Jones’s spare keys, you chump,’ said Daisy.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘All right, I’ll do it. But only if you explain why Miss Hopkins and The One aren’t guilty of the murder.’

  ‘Because Miss Tennyson did it, of course,’ said Daisy. ‘Oh, I haven’t told you my findings from today yet, have I?’

  ‘No,’ I said furiously. ‘No, you haven’t.’

  ‘Well, she’s an absolute wreck. She might as well be wandering the corridors muttering, Out, damned spot! I think our séance rumour has spooked her. While I was following her one of the Big Girls tapped her on the shoulder and she shrieked. But here’s the important bit: there I was, minding my own business in an opportune listening place on Library corridor, when Miss Griffin came up to Miss Tennyson. “Miss Tennyson,” she said, “I need to talk to you. You haven’t quite finished helping me with that little project of ours. You were so late to my office on Monday evening that we barely got a thing done.”

  ‘“Yes, but I made up for it on Tuesday and Wednesday,” said Miss Tennyson nervously.

  ‘“Ah, but not quite,” replied Miss Griffin. “There’s still a bit of work that needs to be finished.” Honestly, Hazel, Miss Tennyson went as white as a sheet. She was shaking. “Can we perhaps schedule another session?” asked Miss Griffin. “There’s just a little more work I’d like you to do – perhaps this evening?”’

  ‘So what?’ I asked. ‘Miss Tennyson and Miss Griffin are going to mark books together after school today. That doesn’t have anything to do with the murder.’

  ‘Hazel,’ said Daisy, rolling her eyes, ‘sometimes you are a bit stupid. Miss Griffin had an appointment with Miss Tennyson on Monday night, but Miss Tennyson was late. Miss Tennyson takes English Soc until five twenty, so the appointment must have been for after that – for exactly the time when Miss Bell was being murdered. And I’m sure the way Miss Tennyson behaved when Miss Griffin mentioned Monday was a sign. Hazel, it’s her guilty conscience! She must have done it!’

  ‘If you say so,’ I said. I was still annoyed. Here was Daisy again, sure that her idea was the important one.

  ‘Oh, Hazel, don’t be like that,’ said Daisy, butting her head against my shoulder and staring at me wide-eyed. ‘Hazel, Hazel, Hazel, Hazel, Hazel—’

  ‘Ow!’ I said, scowling. ‘I’m not smiling.’

  ‘Yes you are,’ said Daisy, leaping up off the bed and grabbing hold of my arm. ‘Come on, come on, let’s go downstairs before Matron wonders where we’ve got to. Oh, and meet me in the cloakroom before French and we’ll take this disgusting stuff.’ She brandished the bottle of ipecac at me, stuffed it into her book bag and galloped out of the dorm.

  9

  Daisy can be really insufferable sometimes, but I suppose, given what happened on my first night at Deepdean, I shouldn’t be surprised.

  After our first meeting on the games fields I came back to House, shivering and pink with cold, to the tall and chilly walls of the second-form dorm room. I sat on my strict grey bed and stared about me at the rows of identical bedsteads and the dismally scratchy and grey bedspreads. I was quite upset by the sight of it, and I remember wondering whether Deepdean might not be doing so well for itself after all. (I had not yet discovered that in England, the way of showing that you are very rich is to pretend that you are very poor and cannot afford things like heating or new shoes.)

  One of the maids had unpacked my trunk, and all my things were folded up in the chipped chest of drawers next to my bed. The trunk itself was standing open and empty on the carpet, still with customs stamps all over it, and I looked at it and felt just as empty and out of place. The other girls in the dorm were ignoring me, huddled into a group at the other end of the room. Then one of them, the girl with the long gold hair who had run into me earlier, turned abruptly and made her way over to me. The others all followed in a gaggle and grouped themselves behind her, like a pack of crows or a monster with four heads and eight hard, staring eyes.

  ‘Hallo, foreign girl,’ said Daisy – for, of course, that golden-haired girl was Daisy.

  ‘Hallo,’ I said shyly.

  All the girls giggled. ‘She can speak English!’ someone I later learned was Kitty whispered. ‘Lavinia, you owe me five bob.’

  ‘Foreign girl,’ said Daisy, ‘we’re going to play a game. We’ve decided to let you join in – and that’s unusual for us.’ My heart jumped. ‘It’s a test, really – we want to see who can stick it out longest in that trunk. Kitty thinks no one could do it for more than ten minutes, but I think it’d be easy. And we want you to go first. It is your trunk, after all. What do you say?’

  Today, I can’t think how I could ever have fallen for it. But at the time I was simply excited to think that I might be making friends already – and that someone so beautiful should want me to be friends with her. So I nodded.

  ‘All right, then,’ said Daisy, ‘get in.’ And while the rest of the dorm watched breathlessly, I stepped into my trunk and crouched down with my arms about my knees.

  ‘Now,’ said Daisy, ‘we’re going to shut the lid. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a proper test, would it? Lavinia, you time her. Remember, foreign girl, you’ve got to stick it out for as long as you can. All right?’

  I nodded again, squeezing my hands together. I hate the dark, and I hated it even more then, but I didn’t want to say so to someone so obviously faultless.

  Daisy bent down over me, so close I could feel her breath warm against my forehead. ‘Enjoy, foreign girl,’ she hissed, and then the lid of the trunk slammed shut and I was left in the dark. I heard giggles, a clicking noise, then squeals of laughter and the thump of running feet, which faded away and became part of a larger clatter of feet going down the stairs. A gong boomed somewhere below me, the feet sped up in a rush, and then at last they died away.

  House was very quiet. Crouching in my trunk, I began to suspect that something was not right. I had been told that the gong meant a meal, and I knew I must never be late to a meal. And I was hungry. But, I thought, I had also been told to stick it out, and so that was what I would do. I was in England, and in England, I knew, you kept quiet and endured things.

  So that is what I did. It took Matron three hours to find me, and when she finally did, she was almost frying with rage. She asked me who had been responsible – but, of course, I knew I could not tell her without being a rat. For a week I had to spend my lunch breaks sitting beside her and sewing up holes in socks – but it was worth it when Daisy clapped me on the back and said, with admiration in her voice, ‘Not bad, foreign girl.’

  I suppose, in a way, I have been getting into trunks for Daisy ever since, without stopping to ask why. This is the first time I have wondered if it is really all worth it.

  1

  On Friday afternoon I arrived in the cloakroom rather before Daisy. I had decided, for the time being, to forgive her – at least until I had seen more of her plan. I was hunched up behind a thick grey row of coats, rubbing my ankle, and was just beginning to feel nervous about what we were about to do when I heard Daisy’s voice say, ‘Psst! Hazel!’

  ‘Here!’ I whispered, sticking my head round the end of my coat rack.

  ‘Well lurked, Watson,’ said Daisy, sitting down next to me with a thump. She pulled the little bottle out of her bag with a flourish and held it up in front of us. ‘Now, are you ready to begin investigating?’

  We both looked at the bottle. I was quite ready to investigate, but not sure whether I wanted to go to San first.

  ‘We must be careful not to take too much,’ said Daisy. ‘I remember Nanny saying that it could be dangerous.’

  ‘How much is too much?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ said Daisy cheerfully. ‘We’ll just have to swig it and hope. Well, bottoms up!’

  She took a gulp, made a face and handed the bottle to me. I sipped at it nervously. It tasted sticky and sugary-sweet,
not at all the way I thought it would.

  ‘Now water from the taps, quick,’ Daisy said. I hurried after her and drank. Afterwards my mouth still felt gluey with sugar.

  ‘What do we do now?’ I asked.

  ‘We wait. It shouldn’t take too long. Don’t worry, it’s not so bad.’

  2

  That was a lie.

  I had barely sat down in French before my stomach began to make the most extraordinary jumps and heaves inside me. I clapped my hand over my mouth in horror.

  ‘Oh, Mamzelle,’ cried Daisy dramatically from next to me, ‘I think I’m going to be sick!’

  And she was, spectacularly. After that, so was I, but since most people were already crowding round Daisy it was not so noticeable. We were both rushed to San, leaving nasty splotches behind us as we ran, and when we arrived Nurse Minn took one look at us, stuck our heads over two buckets and left us to it.

  ‘At least we’re missing Deportment,’ I said between heaves, an hour later. I hate Deportment, which is an hour of walking about with piles of books on your head.

  ‘I don’t mind Deportment,’ said Daisy hollowly from within her bucket.

  ‘I know you don’t. I do,’ I said, and heaved again.

  But even missing Deportment was little comfort. I heaved for hours, all the way through tea and dinner, without wanting them at all. My stomach felt as though it had been turned inside out.

  ‘I must say, this is rather worse than I remembered,’ gasped Daisy. ‘What I wouldn’t give to stop so I could have a bun.’

  The thought of that made me heave again, and then Daisy heaved too. It was all very miserable, and I decided in the middle of a particularly nasty retch that after this we deserved to find some really excellent clues.

  ‘The two of you had better stay the night, I think,’ said Minny, coming in to look at us. ‘I’ve some things you can use to sleep in. Goodness, you did eat something that disagreed with you, didn’t you?’

  At last, after hours of being ill, the heaving stopped, and I was able to get up and put on the pyjamas Minny had left out for me. They managed to be both long in the legs and tight in the waist, and I saw in the San mirror that I looked like an enormous, ill baby, with a pale round face and ugly damp hair. Daisy’s pyjamas, of course, fitted her perfectly, and being sick had only made her cheeks pink and her eyes bright, like a nice china doll.

  I dragged myself into my cool white-sheeted San bed. I felt as though someone had squeezed me through a mangle. All I wanted to do was sleep, for years and years.

  Daisy, though, had different ideas.

  ‘As soon as Minny’s asleep we can begin,’ she whispered to me from the next bed, sounding not at all like someone who had just been sick for six hours straight.

  ‘Yes, Daisy,’ I said, and I turned over and went to sleep.

  3

  It only seemed a moment later that I was woken up by someone shaking me hard. I opened my eyes to see Daisy’s shadowy face looming over mine.

  ‘Get up, you lazy thing!’ she hissed. ‘It’s time!’

  Grumbling, and still feeling mangled inside, I got up and pulled on the dressing gown that Minny had helpfully laid across the foot of my bed.

  ‘I already have Jones’s spare keys,’ said Daisy, dangling them before me. ‘I went and picked them up while you were waiting in the cloakroom. He never notices they’re gone – I’ve taken them heaps of times before.’

  ‘How nice for you,’ I said. I was still struggling not to argue.

  ‘Sourpuss,’ said Daisy, sticking out her tongue. ‘Don’t be. Let’s get on with it.’

  It was quite easy to escape San. We unlocked the main door and crept out, holding the torches that Daisy had hidden for us in the bottom of her bag.

  ‘Where do we go now?’ I glanced about the dark corridor and couldn’t stop myself shivering. For the moment it was empty, and we were alone, but what would we do if the murderer – made nervous by Daisy’s rumour – appeared?

  ‘We’re off to the Gym, of course,’ said Daisy. ‘Scene of the crime. Careful – keep your torch low. We can’t afford to have someone notice the light.’

  I shivered again, but off we went.

  4

  The skin on the back of my neck prickled. We were heading towards the Gym, to the place where the murder had happened. In the dark night, it was not only the murderer I found myself afraid of – all my silly, babyish fears appeared again, stronger than ever. Verity’s ghost still lurked in the Gym, and who knew whether Miss Bell’s had joined her? I stayed just behind Daisy and did not look round. I kept my eyes fixed on the little puddle of moving light cast by her torch, because I was terrified that it was too bright. Would someone else notice it?

  At last we arrived at the door to the Gym, but instead of going out onto the floor, Daisy turned right and started up the steep flight of wooden stairs that led to the balcony. Soon the empty Gym was stretched out below us.

  I didn’t like it. I am not fond of heights at the best of times, and the Gym at night was a horrid place. It was dim and murky, and black shadows crouched at its edges. This was how Miss Bell had seen it, I thought, just before she fell. The ground suddenly seemed very far below me, and the narrow balcony with its rows of wooden benches swayed in front of me.

  ‘Why are we up here?’ I asked, clutching the railing.

  ‘Don’t be slow, Hazel,’ said Daisy. ‘We’re going to reconstruct the crime.’

  ‘But we know what happened,’ I said. ‘Someone pushed Miss Bell off the balcony. You – you don’t want . . .?’ For one dreadful second I actually thought that Daisy was asking me to jump off the balcony while she watched.

  ‘Don’t be a chump, Hazel,’ said Daisy. ‘We’re not actually going to push anything off. Goodness! I want you to go downstairs and show me exactly where you found Miss Bell. I’ll stay up here and look.’

  I went back down extremely thankfully, but going into the Gym again made my skin crawl worse than ever. It was exactly the way it had been on Monday night – although, of course, without Miss Bell lying there. I went over to where I had found her and looked up to see Daisy peering down at me from the balcony. All I could see was her face with her blonde hair hanging down around it and her eyes staring at me. For a moment she looked horribly like my idea of Verity Abraham’s ghost. My heart jumped.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Daisy called. ‘How was she lying?’

  ‘Her arm was back, like this,’ I said, trying to demonstrate. ‘And she was a bit curled up—’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ said Daisy, ‘lie down yourself and show me. I’ll never be able to understand it otherwise.’

  I did not like the idea at all. Pretending to be Miss Bell felt all wrong and quite horrible, but Daisy was glaring down at me and I knew there was nothing else for it. Reluctantly, I lay down on the wooden floor and stretched myself out in an imitation of Miss Bell’s position. I closed my eyes and Daisy’s torch flickered across my eyelids.

  ‘Is that all right?’ I asked after a while.

  ‘Perfectly,’ said Daisy from next to my ear. My eyes flew open. She was crouching down next to me, staring up at the wall and the edge of the balcony above.

  ‘This was exactly how she was lying?’ Daisy asked, peering at me.

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘So?’

  ‘So, from the way she was lying, she must have gone over the balcony railing backwards.’

  ‘She was facing the murderer,’ I said, shuddering. I had a sudden image of a pair of hands reaching out and shoving Miss Bell off the balcony.

  ‘Exactly, Hazel. So, to continue with our reconstruction. You’ve just murdered Miss Bell. She’s lying on the floor, dead. What do you do next?’

  ‘Find somewhere to hide the body,’ I said.

  ‘Yes indeed. The fact that the body was still there when you came in does rather suggest that the deed had only just been done. And the fact that the body was gone when we came back again – well, that suggests that the b
ody and the murderer were hidden somewhere very close indeed. They really must have been in the Cupboard, like we said – and, golly, that must have been where the murderer hid when you first came in too!’

  My mouth went dry. I remembered running into the Gym. It had seemed so empty and quiet – and the murderer had been just a few feet away from me!

  ‘But the body couldn’t have stayed there!’ I said.

  Daisy rolled her eyes. ‘Of course it couldn’t,’ she said. ‘The girls changing in there before first lesson on Tuesday morning would’ve noticed a dead body among the gym slips. But all the same, it must have been used as the temporary hiding place. Nothing else makes sense. And remember that smash-up yesterday? I’m sure I’m right that it was caused by that trolley, the one that Jones keeps in there. So all in all, the Cupboard is crucial to this case. We can’t put off looking inside it any more. Come on!’

  She dug her fingers into my arm and dragged me, stumbling, across the floor towards the musty storeroom. I felt clammy and cold all over, as though I was going to be sick again. I did not want to look in the Cupboard.

  But Daisy left me no choice. She threw open the door and flashed her torch about inside. I had to admit that it looked just the same as it always did – spiderwebbed white walls and piled-up mounds of fencing whites, badminton rackets, croquet mallets, calisthenics mats and gym slips – but all the same I was terrified.

  Daisy leaped straight for the trolley, which was standing innocently beside the door, draped in discarded clothes, and began throwing things off it with frantic excitement. I turned away and dug through what I hoped was a harmless old pile of gym slips, of the sort that we hardly wear any more.