Scarlet Wakefield 01 - Kiss Me Kill Me

by Lauren Henderson

  There’s a chorus of sympathy. I must say, girls at Wakefield Hall are a lot nicer than the ones at St. Tabby’s. They may be wary of me because my grandmother’s the headmistress, but in a genuine crisis, they all demonstrate that they’re fully-paid-up members of the human race. If this had happened at St. Tabby’s, only my immediate friends would have gathered round to coo and empathize. No one else would have cared. Unless it had happened to Plum, or one of her inner circle. In that case, it would have been played for as much drama as possible, and tons of sycophants would have crowded around Plum all day long, as she threw her hair around and pouted and played the situation for the maximum amount of attention.

  “What’s all this noise about?” Miss Newman booms from the doorway.

  We all jump. Miss Newman’s voice is like a bass drum, cutting through all the chatter with deep, terrifying authority.

  I open my mouth to explain, but to my surprise, Meena cuts in first.

  “Please, Miss Newman, Scarlett’s had a pen leak in her desk,” she says.

  Miss Newman’s phenomenally hairy eyebrows draw together so tightly they actually meet in a monobrow that wouldn’t look out of place on a Greek wrestler.

  “Very careless to leave your pens lying loose, Scarlett,” she says. “If they’d been in a pencil case, this wouldn’t have happened, would it?”

  My eyes roll despite myself. What decade does she think we’re living in? Who has pencil cases anymore?

  “Don’t pull faces at me, young lady!” Miss Newman shouts. “Now go and wash your hands! You’ve barely got five minutes before morning assembly!”

  “Here,” offers Susan. She pulls a plastic bag out of her desk, takes some stuff out of it and hands it along the row. “You can put the inky stuff in there, Scarlett,” she suggests. “That way it won’t go all over everything else.”

  “Thanks, Susan,” I say gratefully, taking the bag.

  Susan blushes and ducks her head. She’s extraordinarily pretty, but I don’t think she knows it. She never wears any makeup, nor does anything with her pale blond hair other than scrape it back into a tight ponytail. She actually reminds me a little bit of Luce, now I look at her more closely. Susan, like Luce, has a little-girl quality to her that conceals a very sharp mind. They both have a fragility that tends to make people—even teachers who ought to know better—underestimate how clever they are.

  God, I miss Luce and Alison, so much that it’s like a physical pain. It’s these flashes of memory that hurt the most, the reminders of friends I’ve lost through my own bad behavior.

  But I can’t think about anything now but the job at hand. I chuck the bag with the inky things into the dustbin, and nip out of the room and down the corridor to the big tiled loo to wash my hands. I don’t get them completely clean, though. I leave a good amount of ink still staining my fingers, enough so I can flash them around and complain, at every possible opportunity, about the leaky pen that ruined tons of stuff in my desk. Which will be Part A of Operation Inky Envelope successfully concluded. I check myself in the mirror. I’ve managed to get a small ink stain on my nose, which is perfect. Everyone will ask me about it.

  I know it sounds tragic. But believe me, if I spend the next few hours showing everyone the ink stains on my hands and whingeing about them, everyone will be discussing Scarlett’s Ink-Stain Misery. Not because it’s interesting in any way, shape, or form, but because there’s nothing else to talk about in this underage girls’ prison.

  Okay, that’s not quite true. There’s definitely something hot to talk about here, and his name is Jase Barnes. Mmm. I find myself picturing his wide shoulders, remembering the way he took my hands, and a rush of heat rises up through me and settles in my lower stomach and I start grinning like a lunatic. Before I know it something hard and cold bumps into my forehead. And I realize that I just went so moony over Jase Barnes that I must have leant forward in a daze, over the sink, until my forehead hit the mirror.

  I pull back, giggling a bit. Wow, I’m being such an idiot: just picturing Jase turns me to complete and utter mush. I have to pull myself together. I have to find out who left me that note, and what’s behind it, and how Dan died, before I can even think about Jase in any leaning-forward-toward-him-to-be-kissed kind of way. . . .

  Oh God, Dan. The giggles dissolve immediately. I look at myself in the mirror and see a guilty face staring back at me. Am I obsessed with solving the mystery of how Dan died just so I can go right out and kiss another boy without worrying that he’ll drop down dead at my feet? Am I making it all about me?

  But it isn’t, or it shouldn’t be. It’s about Dan. How he died. And who was responsible. Because if someone left me that note, it means that there’s more to this than came out at the inquest. At least one person knows more than they’re telling. And I’m not going to let things rest till I find out who they are and what really happened that night on Nadia’s terrace. I think about his family, and how upset they must be. I remember his parents being at the inquest, but I was so out of it with my own misery and confusion that I don’t remember them; I can’t picture them; I have no image of what they look like. But it must be the worst thing in the world to have your son dead and not even know how it happened.

  And right now, it looks as if I’m the only person with any chance of finding the answer to that mystery.

  Because whoever was responsible certainly isn’t telling.

  seventeen

  “EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON”

  The double bell, signifying classes are over for the day, rings at four. After that, the classroom wing stays open till six-thirty, for people doing extra classes or needing to get things from their desks. Then it’s locked up till eight-fifteen the next morning.

  So Part B of Operation Inky Envelope is tightly structured. I’m going to surveil (if that’s a word) my desk during lunch break and from four to six-thirty every evening. The rest of the time—before school starts, during class changeovers—I’ll be in the classroom, lurking close to my desk at all times, making sure no one slips something into it. Wakefield Hall is so old-fashioned that we still have the ancient wooden desks with lift-up tops and deep inside wells in which we store most of our books and notes. The students don’t move from classroom to classroom, unless we’re doing science and need to go to the lab; the teachers come to us, which means that we’re always sitting at the same desk, with all the stuff we need directly available. It’s not a terrible system. There are lockers downstairs for valuables, in the changing rooms where we hang our coats and gym stuff, but I don’t have a locker. I don’t need one, living so tragically close to school as I do.

  So that makes things very simple. If whoever left the envelope wants to leave me a second one, to make sure I got their message, they’ll have to leave it in my desk, like they did before. Aunt Gwen’s house is far enough away from the parts of the grounds where the girls are allowed to go to make it too risky for someone to put a note through the front door. And clearly the note-leaver doesn’t want to trust the post—they want to make absolutely sure that I get the envelope. So, my desk it is—during lunch break or after school, because those are the only opportunities they’ll have.

  Sending them straight into my cunning trap.

  The only trouble is, I have to get into it, too.

  I put my books into my desk, taking my time doing it. When I’ve finished, the classroom has practically cleared out. One of the good things about my desk being against the far wall is that I can linger at it until everyone else has left the room, making sure that no one can slip anything into it when my back’s turned. I wait till everyone else has long gone, and only then do I leave the classroom.

  Unlike everyone else, I don’t go toward the main stairs. Instead, I turn away and walk down the corridor in the direction no one wants to take this time of day unless they have to—the teachers’ block. It’s strictly out of bounds, unless you’re being called in there to be hauled over the carpet by some teacher—or, worst of
all, by my grandmother, whose palatial rooms stretch over the first floor of the building.

  To picture Wakefield Hall’s layout, imagine a capital E. Then take out the middle stroke of the E. What’s left is the shape of the main building, the ancient, historical, dating-back-to-the-sixteenth-century one. The schoolrooms are in the left-hand wing; the assembly hall-slash-theater, plus the teachers’ flats and my grandmother’s grand suite of rooms, are in the long main part, and the other wing, well, that’s where I’m going. Because the top two floors of the other wing are abandoned. My grandmother would call them “unoccupied,” but abandoned is what they are.

  She wanted to make them into a big flat for my parents and me, when my dad eventually decided to move back here from London. And then my parents died, and that was the end of that plan. I don’t like to think about that—what my life would have been like if my parents hadn’t died in that accident. What can’t be cured must be endured, as my grandmother would say.

  Still, she hasn’t exactly recovered from it either. Because she hasn’t touched that part of the building since then. It’s completely closed off.

  I doubt she’s even been in it.

  I run up the stairs that lead to the top floor of the teachers’ wing. I know it’s pretty unlikely I’ll bump into a teacher here this time of day—they’re all supervising play time, or teaching after-school special classes. Sure enough, there’s nobody around. I nip along the corridor until I reach the parallel staircase on the other side of the building, and the door that leads to the far wing. It’s padlocked shut. No going through there. So I have to use the window at the top of the staircase, which overlooks the fire escape.

  When I was checking this out yesterday, I didn’t want to open the door to the fire escape. It has a big ALARMED sign on it in red. So I boost myself up onto the window ledge, swing open the window—one of those old-fashioned ones that hinges open like a door—and climb through, onto the fire escape. I push the window nearly shut behind me, enough to look like it’s completely closed, but open just a crack, so that when I come back I can slip a finger between the window and the frame and ease it open to get back inside.

  And then I’m on the fire escape stairs, scampering up them to the roof, climbing over and dropping down behind the big stone castellations (Wakefield Hall, despite its name, has some very castlelike features). Phew. I breathe an enormous sigh of relief. Climbing out the window, being in open sight on the fire escape, a place that’s completely and utterly out of bounds to any student, even if she’s the headmistress’s granddaughter, is the most dangerous part of this entire escapade. Now that I’m on the roof, hidden behind the battlements, no one can see me.

  Still, I don’t have time to congratulate myself. I need to get into place as quickly as possible, in case envelope delivery is already taking place in Lower Sixth C. If I only had an accomplice, this would be so much easier. I could have her hang around the classroom, making sure anyone who wanted to slip an envelope into my desk would have to wait till she was gone, to give me enough time to get to my observation point. It’s so much harder planning and carrying this all out on my own. I dash across the roof to the skylight, which I levered open yesterday, and is cracked ajar a bit by the rope that’s tied to its hinge. I lift it up, grunting with the effort—it’s leaded glass and it weighs a ton—and lower it down to lie on the roof. Then I uncoil the rope and drop it down into the room below. And then I sit down on the edge, my feet dangling into the room, take a good grip on the rope, and swing myself off into empty space.

  Every time I do this, I think I’m going to fall, that my arms won’t hold me. Every time. I hang there for a long, scary moment, my feet scrabbling to find the rope, my right leg trying to hook around it to bring my right foot into position underneath it so my left foot can grab onto the rope and sandwich it between my feet to take some of my body weight. . . . Ow, my hands hurt. . . . My arms are aching with the drop and the strain of holding me up. . . . My feet feel completely uncoordinated. . . . The rope keeps slipping out of the hook of my right knee. . . .

  And then I’ve got it. Phew. Now my feet are in place, it’s infinitely easier. I lower myself down, hand over hand, feet taking enough weight so I don’t get rope burn, and drop lightly to the floor. I cross the huge, empty room to the window that looks onto the classroom wing. And there it is, across from me: the window of Lower Sixth C, with my desk right next to it.

  Aunt Gwen used to drive me mad by saying “Everything happens for a reason.” God, how I hate that expression. People only use it when something bad has happened to you, and it never makes you feel any better. I did notice that the one thing that Aunt Gwen did not say “Everything happens for a reason” about was Dan’s death. Even she didn’t manage to put a pious spin on that.

  But now, reluctantly, those very words are ringing in my head. As I pick up Aunt Gwen’s bird-watching binoculars, which I brought in yesterday, and hold them in front of my eyes, focusing on my desk by the window (one of the worst desks in the room, because its owner is trapped at the far end of a front row), I wonder if maybe everything does happen for a reason, as now I can focus perfectly on my desk, which is in full view—the best desk in the room for surveillance purposes . . .

  There’s always the chance that someone already nipped back into the classroom and sneaked a replacement envelope into my desk. But hopefully they haven’t done that yet. Hopefully they’ll be waiting till the floor empties out, and it’s nice and quiet, with much less chance of anyone else entering the classroom just as they lift the lid of my desk and slide that envelope in. . . .

  So I curl up as best as I can on the windowsill, and keep watching.

  My hands cramp on the binoculars. My feet go to sleep. My legs get pins and needles.

  No matter how much I shift position, I can’t get comfortable on this hard, cold stone windowsill.

  Half an hour goes by. And still there’s no one in the classroom. Bored, I start to train the binoculars on other windows, and then on the school grounds, checking back on the window next to my desk every minute or so just to make sure I don’t miss anything. Oh wow . . . Jase Barnes! When I’m sitting at that desk, I spend so much time looking out the window, trying to spot him. And now I’ve got my wish: I’m looking at him, and he doesn’t know. Spying on him feels weird, naughty, and wrong, but exciting at the same time. He’s walking round the side of the new extension, the big ugly wing my grandmother added in the seventies. Ted Barnes’s cottage is back there, off behind the new building, so maybe that’s where he’s coming from.

  It’s the first time I’ve seen Jase out of work clothes: he’s in jeans and a bright blue shirt that fits him really nicely, and as he strides, his steps long and loose, across the drive and in through the side door of Wakefield Hall, he looks so gorgeous that I completely forget that I’m supposed to be watching my classroom. Only when he disappears from view do I realize what I’m actually here for and guiltily whip the binoculars back to the classroom window again. Also, I realize that my mouth is actually hanging open. I may even be drooling a bit.

  Ooh, movement—someone in the classroom! I frantically focus on them, hoping to God that I haven’t missed anything while I was ogling Jase. It’s Lizzie. She’s carrying the most awful handbag—it’s gigantic and puke green, glinting with gold studs and tassels and buckles and decorative padlocks. I’m sure it’s the latest in designer clothes, but that doesn’t make it any less ugly. Lizzie looks exactly like a low-grade pupil at St. Tabby’s. She reminds me of the girls further down the social scale who slavishly copy everything that Plum and Nadia and Venetia wear, but who are just clones, without a personality or style of their own.

  Lizzie dumps the horrible handbag down onto her desk, and stares at it for a moment. Oh my God, I think, is it Lizzie? Is she about to reach inside it and pull out a replacement note for me? Then she does something really unexpected. She sits down behind her desk, puts her arms on it, pushing the bag away, and drops her head between her ar
ms. For a moment I can’t work out what’s happening. Then I focus in tighter on her body, and realize that her shoulders are bobbing up and down. She’s crying. Maybe she’s just realized how much money she threw away on that atrocity of a bag.

  I’m joking to make light of the fact that, truthfully, there’s something that creeps me out about silently watching someone else cry. I feel like a voyeur of someone else’s pain, and I don’t like it. I want to put down the binoculars, but I can’t, because of the very slim chance that it might be Lizzie after all, having a sob before she pulls herself together and leaves me another note after all. . . .

  I sigh. My attention slips from crying Lizzie, to wonder instead what Jase is doing in the Wakefield Hall main building. Reporting to my grandmother on the grounds maintenance, I assume, or something equally dull. But my imagination runs away with me, and I picture Jase taking his time as he walks through the school, on the alert to see if he’ll bump into me, and causing a raging hormonal stir in every girl he passes. . . . God, I’m being an idiot to think that Jase might be on the lookout for me. He could have his pick of any girl here, and he probably flirts with anyone who crosses his path.

  There’s more movement in the classroom. I snap my attention back, and when I see who’s just entered, I suck my breath in sharply.

  It’s Taylor.

  She takes in the scene in front of her, and says something. I see her lips move. Lizzie raises her head and turns to look at Taylor. I can’t see her face, but she must have said something, and something funny, to boot, because Taylor bursts out laughing. Weird. Why is Lizzie crying one minute and making jokes the next? Then Lizzie pushes her chair back and jumps up. She’s gesturing, her head is jerking back and forth: it looks like she’s shouting at Taylor.

  Taylor is frowning now, snapping out some sort of response, which just seems to wind Lizzie up further. She’s pointing at Taylor, her head’s still wobbling . . . I guess that she’s still yelling. I am so frustrated I can’t read lips! But even if I could, I’d only get one side of the interchange, because all I can see is the back of Lizzie’s head.