It's Murder at St. Basket's

by James Lincoln Collier

  “Not as much as you and Leslie do.”

  “You do too,” she said. Leslie said,

  “Must you argue all the time, you two silly asses?”

  By this time we’d reached the Heath. There were only a few cars in the parking lot, and not too many people around, although I knew that there would be people on Parliament Hill. We walked a little way along a gravel path, and then we stopped, and I maneuvered myself around to have a look at Jaggers. He was standing at the edge of the Heath, staring at us. But he didn’t have his hands behind him anymore. Instead, he was holding a stick—the branch of a tree he’d picked up along the way. It was about four feet long, and as big around as the small end of a baseball bat.

  “He’s just trying to scare us,” I said. “Don’t worry.” But I was worried. I was beginning to get the idea that there was something behind this that we didn’t know about. Jaggers was certainly going to a tremendous amount of trouble, keeping a watch on us like this. Telling all these lies about David Choudhry, and keeping this watch on us and so forth, didn’t make sense. There had to be something more to it; but I didn’t know what.

  “All right, let’s go over by that tree there and start the race. Margaret, give us a big ‘On your mark, get set, go.”

  We got by the tree and Leslie and I crouched down. “Margaret, can you see what Jaggers is doing?”

  “He’s coming, he’s coming, I’m scared.”

  I glanced over my shoulder. He’d spotted what we were up to, and he was coming along quickly, almost trotting. “Quick, Margaret,” I said.

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “Margaret,” I snapped out.

  “On your mark, get set—”

  “Let’s go, Leslie,” I said, and we took off. Being March, the ground was pretty sloppy, even on the gravel paths, and I knew we were going to be covered with mud when we got finished. I let Leslie get a little bit in the lead, so Jaggers would focus on me. We ran on, our feet going slurp, slurp on the sticky ground. In a minute we were thumping across the dam. The people fishing didn’t look up—they were used to kids riding bicycles there or running by. We got halfway across, and then all of a sudden I heard a rough voice shout: “Plainfield! Quincy!”

  “Don’t look back,” I said. “Pretend you didn’t hear.”

  Leslie nodded. We dashed across the dam. At the other side there was a bend and the path began to run up through trees. Jaggers shouted again: “Stop, you two!” Suddenly we began to hear running footsteps on the hard surface of the dam. “He’s chasing us,” Leslie said. Being the games master, he was a pretty good runner.

  We rounded the bend and entered the woods. Just ahead there was a fork in the path. “Go left, Leslie,” I panted out. “And then run like hell.”

  He nodded, panting, and said nothing. I heard Jaggers shout again. I stopped and spun around. He was not in sight. “Quick,” I gasped out. Leslie tore on up the path and dashed off to the left; and just then Jaggers rounded the corner and came into sight. I couldn’t tell if he had seen Leslie or not.

  But he saw me standing there, waiting for him, and he slowed down and jogged the rest of the way. I noticed that he was still carrying the stick. I felt pretty scared. I didn’t think he’d actually try to hit me, but he’d hit David, hadn’t he? I remembered the cracking sound the hockey stick had made on David’s leg. But I just stood there panting, to delay him as much as possible.

  He came up, and smacked the stick on the ground. “Didn’t you hear me, Quincy?” His face was all twisted around with anger.

  “Yes, Sir. That’s why I stopped.”

  “You must be deaf. I hollered two or three times, Quincy.” He smacked the stick on the ground again, and I knew he wished it were me he was hitting instead of the mud.

  “I’m sorry, Sir,” I said. “I guess we were running and couldn’t hear you.”

  “Where’s Plainfield?” he snapped out.

  I pointed up the right fork toward Parliament Hill. “He went on ahead. I guess he didn’t hear you.”

  He smacked the stick on the ground once more. “Would you mind telling me how you heard and he didn’t, Quincy?”

  “He was ahead of me. Maybe I kind of blocked your voice.” I was feeling a little relieved. It didn’t seem as if he was going to hit me, and anyway, Leslie had got away. So at least we had got that done, and maybe would save David from having his leg amputated, after all.

  “Rubbish,” he said. “Bloody rubbish. I don’t suppose it occurred to you that I had a reason for calling?”

  “Yes, Sir,” I said.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pound note. “Which one of you dropped this?” It surprised me. “Not me, Sir. None of us had any money but our tenpences.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Quincy. I saw it with my own eyes flutter down from somebody’s pocket. Now, which one was it?”

  “Honest, Sir, I know I didn’t have any money, and I don’t think the others did, either.”

  “I think we’d better find out about that.” He turned around and faced down the path. Margaret was standing there at the corner, looking up at us. I guess she had been standing there for a few minutes, afraid to come up and afraid to go away. Jaggers gestured. “Come up here,” he shouted. She came up the path, her head down, looking scared. When she got there he waved the pound note at her. “Is this yours?”

  She shook her head. “No, Sir,” she said in a quiet voice.

  “All right, I reckon we’d better find out who’s lying. We’ll go find Plainfìeld and all trot right back to school until somebody confesses.”

  And of course that was his trick: accusing us of having extra money was just an excuse to order us back to school. We’d only had forty-five minutes out. It made me mad to be cheated out of our little time off, and I felt like mouthing off, but to tell the truth, with that stick Jaggers had me scared. Anyway, we’d accomplished what we set out to do, so there was at least that.

  Jaggers marched us up the path to Parliament Hill, and then he made us sit on a bench while he walked around looking for Leslie. Of course he didn’t find him, and so after a while he marched us down the other side of the hill, and into St. Basket’s through the rear gate. Going back to jail so soon made me furious. I wanted to throw something. But I didn’t. Jaggers just sent us up to our rooms. I was pretty sure he was going out to look for Leslie. I felt pretty sorry for Leslie. Jaggers was going to throw a real scare into him when he finally came back. I hoped he had a good story worked up.

  He had. When he finally got up to the dorm he looked pretty nervous, but okay. “What did you tell Jaggers?” I asked him.

  “I said I saw a boy I knew from Kent and went with him to have tea in the caff near the football fields. He said I was a bloody liar because he’d looked there, but I said probably we’d already left by then. He was frightfully angry, though.”

  “I would have been scared, Leslie,” Margaret said. “Were you?”

  “You’re joking, surely, Margaret.”

  “Yeah, right, Leslie,” I said sarcastically.

  “Quincy, I’ll bash you—”

  “What about the phone?”

  “Oh, yes, that was easy. I just ran up through the Heath, and across East Heath Street and up Willow Road to the High Street. There’s a call box about halfway up.”

  “So at least there’s that. What did your father say?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Nobody was at home.”

  CHAPTER 6

  WHEN YOU’RE IN prison what you look forward to mostly is getting out. At St. Basket’s we got reprieved six times a year. English vacations aren’t like American ones. You only get around six weeks off in the summer, from around the middle of July until September, but you make it up by getting a month off at Christmastime, and a couple of weeks at Easter, and a couple more in February at mid-terms. And then there are Bank Holidays. They have four Bank Holidays scattered around the year. A Bank Holiday is just a four-day weekend for no reason—not Henry the
Eighth’s birthday or the Magna Carta or anything. I guess it must have had something to do with the banks. I asked Mrs. Rabbit about it once, and she told me it had to do with a murderer named Fred Banks, where the king was so glad when they hanged him he gave everybody a holiday. I was pretty suspicious of that, because of Mrs. Rabbit always getting everything wrong, and I said, “How come they don’t call it Banks Holiday, then?”

  “Banks Holiday don’t sound right, innit?” She really thought that explained it.

  Of course, for me, getting a reprieve wasn’t such a big thing, because I didn’t have any place to go. The first Bank Holiday we had was right after I got to St. Basket’s. I didn’t know anybody much, and all I could do was hang around the school. I felt so bad I pretty nearly cried, although at the last minute I stopped myself because I didn’t want to be weak. Then at Christmastime I flew home, as I said, and by the time the mid-term vacation came around I knew enough kids so I had places to go. Actually, my father arranged for me to visit some English businessman he knew, but I only went there for a couple of days, just to be polite. The rest of the time I spent with some kids—part of it down at the Plainfields’ in Kent and part with some other kids. And then Choudhry invited me to stay with him and his father in Paris for three days. That was pretty terrific. Choudhry’s father is rich because of David’s grandfather being an Indian Maharajah. I’m not sure I have that right, but it’s something like that, because David’s father has a different last name from David, which I guess had something to do with being a former prince. The way it worked, David said he wanted me to visit, so his father just phoned up a limo service in London and they came around with a Rolls-Royce with my airplane ticket and drove me out to the airport. I mean, they’d called me up in advance, so I would be ready and waiting. And then David came out to meet me with the chauffeur at Orly Field, which is the airport for Paris. They have this huge apartment, filled with fancy furniture. You can see the Eiffel Tower in the distance out the window. It seemed like there was always a party going on—people going in and out and champagne being passed around all the time. Nobody paid much attention to us, and we could do whatever we wanted. Except that David’s father took us out to lunch once in a restaurant halfway up the Eiffel Tower, and another time he took us to a professional football match—that’s soccer, remember. In France they don’t care if the kids drink. David and I got drunk on champagne twice. We just kept taking glasses when they passed it around. Nobody thought there was anything funny about it.

  The reason why I bring this up is because of something funny David’s father said while we were there. One time David had to go with one of the butlers or whatever they were to get his hair cut. I was just lying around in his room trying to read a French comic book, when Mr. Choudhry sort of stuck his head in the door. “Being properly looked after, Christopher?” he said.

  “Yes, Sir,” I said. I didn’t have to call him Sir, but I’d got into the habit of it.

  “Good,” he said. “If there’s anything you need, just ask.”

  “Yes, Sir,” I said.

  He pulled his head out of the door and started to go away, but then he turned and put it back again. “Christopher, how does David seem to be getting along at school?”

  “I guess he’s passing everything, Sir,” I said, which wasn’t exactly true, because he was only barely passing maths.

  “I don’t mean his school work. I mean with his mates—and the masters.”

  “Fine, Sir, I guess.” Of course, that was before he got bashed by Jaggers.

  Mr. Choudhry looked kind of worried. “He was very keen on going to St. Basket’s, you know. He virtually insisted on it. I confess I wasn’t in favor of it. Keep an eye on him, Christopher. If he seems to become depressed, let me know. Don’t hesitate to telephone me.”

  “Right, Sir, fine,” I said.

  I didn’t understand what he meant by all that then, and I didn’t understand it now, either. The idea crossed my mind that I ought to do something about it. Maybe David had done something he wasn’t supposed to do, and didn’t want his father to know about it. I wanted to ask him about that, but I didn’t. It didn’t seem right.

  Anyway, we had a Bank Holiday coming up in a couple of weeks. It was already arranged that I was supposed to go down to Plainfield’s. We discussed it with David on Sunday night.

  “Say, Choudhry,” Leslie said. “Why don’t you come down with us and I can get our own doctor to look at your leg. Could you do that?”

  “I could,” he said.

  “Do you think you can stand it that long?” I said.

  “I think I can,” he said.

  But I didn’t think he could, and I told Plainfield and Margaret that later at tea. Nobody was around; Sunday nights Mrs. Rabbit just puts out the tea things and says, “I’ve got better things to do than sit about watchin’ you lot stuff yerselves,” and goes off to the Belsize Odeon, where they show more her type of movie than at the Hampstead Classic. So we sat around by ourselves, feeling pretty gloomy at being imprisoned again. We made Margaret serve the tea, which was all right, because English girls expect they’re supposed to wait on the men. Leslie was so down, he didn’t even bother to scale any bread around. Usually he tries to scale one through the window where Mrs. Rabbit serves the food. Once we even got up a game of Frisbie with a cucumber sandwich, which was pretty good because it flew apart about the third time we threw it and flung cucumbers and mayonnaise all over the place.

  But we were too worried about David to fling anything. “If you ask me, he looks worse,” I said. “He looks pretty sweaty.”

  “Perhaps he has a fever,” Margaret said. “We should take his temperature.”

  “If he has got a fever,” Leslie said, “that means he’s quite ill. It means it’s getting infected.”

  “What about getting one of the day boys to tell his parents about it?” I said. “Beverley Russell or somebody.” I already told you that Beverley was a boy.

  We thought about that. It didn’t seem like it would work. “Nobody’s going to believe them. Or if they do they’ll just call up Miss Grime and ask, and she’ll lie about it,” Leslie said.

  “We’ve got to call your father, Leslie,” I said.

  “We could ring him at work, I suppose,” Leslie said. “Actually, if we got off the grounds we could go to his office and see him.”

  “Okay, we’ve got to escape.”

  It made us pretty nervous to think about it, but we had to do it. Everybody had shut up about David dying, and the reason was, it had suddenly come to us, that maybe he would. You couldn’t die from a broken leg, but if it got infected you could die from that without too much trouble.

  The plan we worked out was pretty simple. The day boys all left at 3:00. They just sort of mobbed out through the front gate. It wouldn’t be too hard to just mix in with them and shoot off. With everybody wearing these same maroon blazers and maroon Cub Scout type caps you couldn’t tell anybody apart anyway, unless you actually saw their faces. Our idea was that we’d just go out with the rest. We’d go sort of separately so that if one of us got caught the other one might get away. Of course, we knew it would be better if Leslie got away. It was his father. But just to be safe, he wrote down his father’s office number and how to get there on a piece of paper, and I stuck it in my jacket pocket before I went to bed.

  Leslie and I were pretty nervous about it. Of course, Leslie didn’t say anything about being nervous, because of the way the English are about not saying what they feel. But I could tell he was. And anyway, he knew I was nervous, because I admitted it. In the United States, skipping out of school isn’t such a terrible crime, but at one of these English boarding prisons it’s pretty bad. You can get into lots of trouble for it; they can even expel you, although I didn’t think they would do that to us, seeing all the trouble they were going to, to keep us there. But if they caught us, it would give them an excuse to keep us there during the Bank Holiday.

  Of course, there was the
problem of money: we’d need at least enough for subway fare to Leslie’s father’s office and bank. Leslie said it was tenpence, so we spent Monday morning borrowing pennies here and there from the day boys.

  At 3:00, when the day boys were getting ready to leave, instead of going out back to kick the football around, we lingered around the front hall, where everybody was milling around getting their coats and stuff from the rack that’s there. The front door is big and has stained glass scenes of Moses and Jesus in it. Outside there’s a little yard and then the gate onto Tanza Road. Once we got through the gate we’d be pretty safe.

  You’d think it would be pretty easy to hide in a milling crowd of thirty kids, but, to tell the truth, I felt pretty conspicuous. Mr. Shrimpton kept going up and down the hall through the crowd, clapping his hands and saying, “Come along, you lazy sods, you can’t remain until midnight.” Then he saw me and Leslie. “What are you lot doing here? Push off, no need to add to the confusion. You might, in fact, have a go at tidying that dusthole you sleep in. I put my head in this morning and I was simply staggered by the sight. The blood quite drained from my face. I had to lie down for fifteen minutes before I was fit again. Now push off.”

  But he didn’t really pay any attention to us. Shrimpton was like that: if he got a good remark off at you, he didn’t really care if you obeyed or not. He turned and went back through the mob. “We’d better split up,” I said.

  “Right,” Leslie said.

  He was closer to the front door so he began to move toward it, and I began to kind of saunter back down the hall to the rear, keeping my eyes down at the floor as if I were looking for something. I got halfway down the hall and stopped, and then I turned around to watch for when Leslie slipped through the door. Just as I did that, there boomed out from the back of the hall a heavy voice that made me jump and a cold line seemed to run up my back: “Plainfield.” It was Miss Grime.

  Leslie was at the door with two other guys just about to go through, but that voice had jerked him back as if somebody had lassooed him. I dropped down into a crouch amidst the crowd, pretending I was looking for something on the floor.