Jolly Foul Play: A Murder Most Unladylike Mystery

by Stevens, Robin

  ‘Daisy!’ I said, letting go of her.

  ‘Do stop fussing!’ said Daisy. She turned her head to look at me, and I saw her face blazing with excitement. She seemed to have forgotten to be annoyed at me for a moment, but I had not lost the upset in my stomach. There was something wrong between us, I knew it. ‘Now, are you ready? We are about to embark on a most exciting and important mission.’

  I swallowed, and nodded.

  ‘Hazel,’ said Daisy, and she leaned forward until her nose was almost level with mine, staring into my eyes intently. ‘Watson – Detective Society for ever, yes?’

  ‘Detective Society for ever,’ I said, and my heart jumped with guilt. It felt like a test, but I did not know if I had passed.

  ‘Good,’ said Daisy, pulling away. ‘I’ll go first. Wait five minutes, and then follow. All right, wish me luck.’

  And in one swift movement she stood up on the windowsill, spun, bent forward and launched herself out onto the drainpipe. I had one sheer dreadful moment when I thought she had not done it, but then there was a small ladylike clank and I saw that she was gripping onto it, arms and knees wrapped around it like a monkey. Then she began to climb.

  Up and up she went, the white from her socks flashing like semaphore. I had a heart-in-my-throat second as she reached the place where the roof turns out, but she was up and over like a cat. Then I could not see her any more. The prefects’ dorm is at the very top of the House, and its window is hidden from us down below by the lip of the roof. So there was nothing for me to do but wait. I couldn’t concentrate on anything but what was ahead of me. For once I could not even draft a letter in my head.

  I waited for what felt like five years, which were only five minutes by my wristwatch, and then it was time for me to follow. I tucked this casebook into my pyjamas, took a deep breath, and leaned out of the window.

  5

  I craned upwards. Daisy had made it look easy and not perilous at all, as though it was quite ordinary to be clambering up the side of a building in the middle of an English winter night, on the way to spy on five murder suspects. It was not. When I launched myself at the drainpipe, I nearly missed it, and had to scramble and clank, shaking, for what seemed an endless minute. I began climbing, and my legs ached and my arms twisted and my fingers scratched against the peeling paint of the pipe. I felt my whole body tremble, but I could not stop or let go, so I hauled myself upwards, inch by grim inch, trying not to make too much noise, or slip, or cry. At last, and I thought the moment would never come, my hands found the lip of the roof and I dragged myself over it to safety, washed through with nerves.

  I had only ever seen the roof of our House from the road before, and I had only the vaguest impression of it as being rather normally roof-shaped. Now that I was up on it, though, it seemed as though there was not a flat place on the whole roof space. It was all peaks and dips and turrets, and I was tremblingly certain that if I let go my hold for even a second, I would simply roll off again. I also knew that Daisy would have had no difficulty with it at all. She does have quite marvellous balance. That is why she is so good at Deportment.

  Once I straightened up (shaking) I looked for her, but found myself quite alone. Daisy had not waited. The prefects’ dorm was on the other side of House, and so I had to creep my way across the roof on my own; it seemed suddenly as large as the world and twice as confusing. I was trying desperately not to breathe too loudly as I inched round a particularly pointy outcrop – and there in front of me was the peak of the window of the Five’s dorm. Crouched over it, like a gravestone angel, was Daisy. She was bent away from me, her head inclined downwards, so I could see the edge of her hair, paler in the darkness, and the outline of her fingers gripping the tiles. I crept over to her and nudged her shoulder, and she nudged back automatically, without looking at me. She was already listening, and so I pulled this casebook out and began to listen too.

  We were helped, once again, by Matron’s obsession with fresh air. Like every window in House, the Five’s dorm window was open, and the blowing wind that raised the hairs on my arms and made me shiver (Daisy held still as a statue) also whipped their conversation straight past our waiting ears.

  And it was a conversation worth hearing. It must have begun before I arrived, before even Daisy had, but now it was in full swing.

  ‘They hate us!’ That was Lettice, her voice high and worried. ‘Since Elizabeth … something’s changed, haven’t you noticed? They won’t take orders.’

  ‘Oh, let them,’ said Florence’s voice, snorting. ‘They can’t hurt us.’

  ‘Yes they can,’ Una said. ‘If they knew—’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about this,’ snapped Enid. ‘Can’t we go to bed?’

  ‘Not until we’ve discussed Elizabeth’s Scandal Book,’ said Florence.

  Daisy and I both heard those words hit home. There was a hiss from Enid, and a whimper from Lettice. Daisy sat up, and I leaned further forward. What did she mean? What was the Scandal Book?

  ‘What about it?’ asked Una coldly, and I heard the way that she and Florence were taking over leadership of the Five, now that Elizabeth had gone, trying to fill the space that she had left and not quite managing it. I made a note, next to my shorthand dictation.

  ‘What about it?’ echoed Enid sharply, when Florence did not answer. ‘Don’t you know that pages from it are being spread all over school? Who’s doing it? Who’s got it? Is it one of you?’

  There was a silence.

  ‘None of us has it?’ asked Lettice. ‘Really?’

  ‘Would those secrets be getting out if it was one of us?’ snapped Florence. ‘Someone else has found it, somehow. It must have fallen out of Elizabeth’s pocket on Tuesday evening. She was taunting us with it earlier that day, after all. Or—’

  ‘Or it was stolen,’ said Una.

  ‘We have to get it back!’ said Lettice. ‘We must!’ She sounded quite panicked.

  ‘And how do you propose we do that, Lettice?’ asked Enid. ‘Do we go up to the thief and ask nicely? Excuse me, may I have our secrets back? You’re mad if you think—’

  ‘Stop it,’ said Una. ‘We shall all suffer if that book isn’t brought back safely. It must be one of the younger years. You’ve seen how unruly they’ve been. And none of their secrets have been revealed.’

  ‘I’d watch the second formers,’ said Enid. ‘Betsy North, especially.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Margaret. ‘She found those first two pages. And if not her, one of those first formers. They’re terribly forward.’

  ‘Good,’ said Florence. ‘Watch them all. Punish them if necessary. One of them must have it, and we’ll get it back. We must stick together until this is cleared up. Oh, Elizabeth! Even the accident hasn’t stopped her secrets getting out.’

  ‘An accident!’ said Una. ‘You really think it was an accident?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Lettice in a strangled voice.

  ‘Of course it wasn’t an accident,’ said Margaret scathingly. ‘We wanted to step down as prefects, stop helping her. We didn’t want to do what she said any more, we made that quite clear. And she was going to punish us for it. She would have, if she hadn’t died. Quite lucky for us, wasn’t it, that she never got the chance?’

  There was a cold, cold silence as Margaret’s words sank in. I was writing so quickly the symbols blurred.

  ‘I didn’t kill her!’ said Lettice shrilly. ‘I would never!’

  ‘It goes without saying that none of us are going to admit to it, anyway,’ Enid said, after a pause.

  Lettice made a strange noise, as though she was about to cry. I flinched, and under my feet a tile suddenly slipped. I gasped, and Margaret said, ‘What’s that? Outside the window?’

  ‘There’s someone there!’ cried Florence. I heard a noise, and then a rattle. Florence must be sticking her head out into the night. Then – ‘It isn’t anything,’ she said. ‘Must have been leaves off a tree. It’s quite all right.’

 
Then she slammed the window shut, and our way into the Five’s conversation was quite cut off.

  6

  ‘Hazel,’ breathed Daisy. ‘The Scandal Book! Oh, but – how, Hazel, how could this happen? How could there be a book, an actual book of secrets, at Deepdean? How could I not have known about it?’

  She was gripping my arm really quite tightly.

  ‘Daisy!’ I said. ‘Daisy! Ow!’

  ‘Do be quiet, Hazel, this is important. Hazel, a book!’ She was reeling, as though she had suffered a blow, and I suppose she had. The world of Deepdean had burst open. There was a whole side of the school that was a surprise to her. ‘We have to find it!’ Daisy was rattling on, and I was glad that the window was closed. ‘We have to get it back from whoever has it. Before the Five do, we must!’

  ‘Of course we must,’ I said, trying to be comforting.

  ‘But Hazel, you don’t understand, we must!’

  ‘I know we must! Daisy, I have been listening.’

  ‘We must actually get into the Five’s dorm too, tomorrow, while they’re out. We must make sure that the book isn’t there, that they aren’t lying. One of them must have been lying about the murder, after all.’

  ‘But I don’t think they were lying about the book,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘If one of the Five killed Elizabeth to stop her spreading their secret – and I’m sure one them did – then why would she start letting out other girls’ secrets? The killer doesn’t need to throw suspicion onto any other girl at Deepdean, after all. Miss Barnard believes Elizabeth’s death was an accident, so no one apart from us is looking for a killer. It’s what we thought, that it doesn’t make sense for them to begin spreading other people’s secrets.’

  ‘Yes, Watson,’ said Daisy. ‘They all seemed genuinely afraid, didn’t they? They all have secrets, and they all know each other’s, you could tell. If one girl’s secret gets out, then she can drag the others down. So someone else has the book. It really does seem as though we are dealing with two quite separate crimes, which is terribly interesting. Goodness, what a complex case! We are dealing with a murderer and a thief.’

  ‘Let’s go back down,’ I said. I really was beginning to shiver in the night. ‘Tell the others.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Daisy vaguely. I could tell that her brain was clicking away like a calculating machine – in the excitement of the case, she had forgotten to be short with me. ‘All right. I’ll go first.’

  Without waiting for my reply she rushed away across the roof, moving fast and gracefully. I heard a clank and a rattle as Daisy clambered down the drainpipe, and then a light click as she stepped over onto our dorm’s windowsill. I waited again, and then crawled over to the pipe myself, struggling down it clumsily. I was so distracted that I almost missed my footing twice, and almost did not care. I had not forgotten how Daisy had been behaving, even if she had, and I also had the Five’s conversation to worry about.

  I stepped onto the sill, and there was the open window, the curtain waving in the breeze. I climbed back into the warm, breathing dorm with a gasp of relief. Hands reached out to catch me – Beanie and Kitty – and I was safe again.

  7

  ‘I can’t believe you were nearly caught!’ gasped Beanie.

  ‘We were not!’ said Daisy, taking a large bite of cake. We were both wrapped in blankets, plates of cake on our laps. My fingers were sticky with Turkish Delight, and I was leaning against Beanie’s bed. ‘We were quite safe, really. Spies never get caught, not if they’re really good. And I am an excellent spy. And anyway, look at what we’ve uncovered! The Scandal Book.’

  Daisy and I had explained what we had discovered: that something called the Scandal Book existed, and that it was missing; and that we were looking not only for a murderer, but a thief.

  Beanie shuddered. ‘What if the Five find the person who stole the book? What will they do?’

  There was a very loud pause. I took a large bite of cake, and choked a little. What if the Five did discover who had been releasing the secrets before we did? If it was a shrimp, as they guessed it was, how could she hope to stand up to the Five, and how could she stay safe from the murderer? I shivered. For once, it was not us who were in the most danger. It was the unknown thief.

  ‘We shall just have to find them first,’ said Daisy briskly.

  ‘Oh, of course,’ muttered Lavinia.

  ‘We shall!’ said Daisy. ‘We are very good at finding things, aren’t we, Hazel? Really excellent. We must look for the book as hard as we can. And we must also do something else we planned: now that we have confirmed that the Five all have secrets, we have to discover exactly what they are.’

  I could see Kitty perking up at that.

  ‘And the easiest way to do that is to keep watch on them. Tomorrow, between lessons, we must tail them. It’s quite neat, really: five of us and five of them. I’ll take Enid, Beanie takes Florence, Kitty can stay on Una, and Lavinia can have Lettice. And Hazel, you take Margaret.’

  I thought about this. As always, Daisy is clever with people. Florence would not notice Beanie, Lavinia is too slow to get on Lettice’s nerves, and Kitty and Una have the same sort of sniffishness about younger girls. Was giving me Margaret a jibe – saying that I was slow and dull? I swallowed unhappily and pushed my mind back to the case. Daisy had given herself Enid, which was interesting. She always liked to follow the person she considered the most likely suspect. Could she be right? I was not sure. As I had thought before, Enid seemed far too small and mousy to hit anyone over the head.

  ‘Ooh!’ said Beanie, wriggling. ‘Exciting!’

  ‘It’s crucially important that we watch them!’ said Daisy. ‘We must convene at bunbreak to discuss what we have discovered. Once we know their secrets … why, we’ll have practically found the murderer!’

  Daisy always does make things seem so easy.

  8

  In Prayers the next day the rumours about Elizabeth’s death – her murder, it was still being whispered – were unabated, and I saw more clearly than ever why the Five were so sure that a younger girl had the Scandal Book. The littler girls were giddy, nudging each other and gazing at the Big Girls far more boldly than they would have dared to on Tuesday. The older girls, though, were silent, withdrawn, nervous. Those of them who were already the subject of gossip – Astrid, who kept on touching her blonde head nervously; Heather Montefiore, pale and tragic – hunched into themselves in shame, and all the others were almost as bad. I knew why. It was that they were all afraid that they would be next.

  Suddenly the younger years held the power, and they knew they did. It was as though the whole Deepdean system had been put on its head, the shrimps sure of themselves and the older years wavering. The gold had cracked off the older girls, and what was revealed was that beneath it they were only skin after all, like the rest of us. It was a shock, and that, I understood that morning like never before, was the power of secrets. They could change a person, change the very shape they made in your head. Until yesterday we had all known that Sophie Croke-Finchley was a musical prodigy, but now we looked at her and saw a new girl, one who did not think in waltzes. Whether the secrets were true or not had almost nothing to do with it. The rumour about me was a lie, and I was almost sure that Astrid’s hair really was naturally golden, but that did not matter. Once it had been said, there was no taking it back.

  I suppose this is something that Daisy has understood for a long time, and why she was so upset after what happened at Fallingford last spring. She trades on her reputation, and you cannot trade on a reputation that is broken. I imagined the secrets of the Scandal Book dripping out one by one and rising to fill the school with rumour.

  Miss Barnard was reading the announcements. ‘Girls,’ she said. ‘It has been decided that the memorial service for Elizabeth will take place on Saturday morning, here in the Hall. In the meantime, there will be a condolence book open in my office, for any girl to sign if she would like. I will also be on hand to speak to any one of you who
wants to talk about Elizabeth. I do appreciate that this is a difficult time for many of you, and though I know that the school will carry on, you must all feel this loss greatly.’

  Once again, I did not recognize the Elizabeth in Miss Barnard’s speech at all, the Elizabeth who was missed, and who ought to be celebrated. That was the Elizabeth she had known, but the Elizabeth whose death we were investigating had schemed and hurt until she had been killed for it.

  Then the organ blared and we began to file away to lessons. As we left the Hall, I slid from our line into the line of third formers next to us, who were being led out by Margaret. Her face was flushed red. I wondered whether Miss Barnard’s words were what had upset her. Binny and her friends were whispering about something as usual, causing a stir, and Margaret, hearing it, swung about in annoyance. ‘You!’ she growled. ‘Stop it at once!’

  The third formers hushed for a moment, and then the whispering carried on. As Binny snickered and whispered something, I saw Margaret’s fists clench and her jaw set – and her eyes shine. She was near tears. Did this mean she was upset about Elizabeth’s death after all, or that she was guilty, and regretting what she had done?

  I made sure to keep following Margaret as she left the third formers at the door of their form and started back down Library corridor, towards Big Girls’ Wing. She wiped her eyes on her jumper and squeezed her fingers together tightly, so busy with her own thoughts that she did not notice me.

  Then, just ahead of us, I caught sight of Astrid Frith. I saw Margaret give a start – at last, she came out of whatever funk she had been in. She sped up to reach Astrid, and as she did so Astrid jumped and stopped in her tracks. I pulled back, hovering next to one of the windows and pretending to be hunting through my school bag for something.