Jolly Foul Play: A Murder Most Unladylike Mystery

by Stevens, Robin

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked, once we were sat, being stung by the wind and by little speckles of rain. It was a hard night to be outside. I thought of Rose, hiding somewhere in Oakeshott Woods, and then I thought of Binny. Where was she? Was she safe?

  ‘I needed to speak to you, Hazel,’ said Daisy. ‘Alone.’

  ‘Now?’ I said. I was cross. ‘Not before? It’s your fault – it’s our fault that Binny’s gone. If we hadn’t been so busy arguing, this would never have happened. What if something’s happened to her?’

  ‘If something’s happened to her, it’s too late,’ said Daisy. ‘But if it hasn’t yet, then it’s up to us to find her before it does. I know you’d rather detect with someone else, but can’t you pretend, Watson? Just for a while?’ Her voice had gone very fierce, and even in the dark I could make out the wrinkle at the top of her nose.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘You’d rather detect with Alexander than me!’ said Daisy. ‘You’re writing to him, and asking him for help and … not me!’

  I opened my mouth and then closed it again. ‘He’s my friend,’ I said.

  ‘You’re my friend!’ said Daisy furiously. ‘My best friend – or at least, you were! You’ve been betraying me with a boy, and it isn’t fair!’

  ‘Why do you have to say things like that?’ I asked. ‘That’s horrid. I can be friends with you as well as him. One doesn’t have anything to do with the other.’

  ‘Really?’ asked Daisy. She sounded puzzled. ‘I don’t—Are you sure? You’ve changed.’

  I looked at her, and suddenly I saw the last few months from her point of view. Daisy was Daisy still, with her peculiar Daisy-ishness the same as ever, and she had not known what to do while I had been writing letters and thinking about someone other than her. To her, I had gone away and left her lost.

  ‘Of course!’ I said, and my eyes stung. ‘You’re Daisy, you’re my best friend in the world. Or you were, until you said those horrid things about me and Alexander.’

  There was a pause. The wind licked around us and ruffled my hair, and a spatter of rain cooled my face.

  ‘Hazel,’ said Daisy, after a while. ‘Have you not been explaining things properly to me? Is Alexander not your best friend now?’

  It was such an absolutely Daisy-ish thing to say that I had to stifle a gulp. ‘Of course not!’ I said. ‘You idiot. Alexander is a boy, and my friend. But he isn’t you. Neither are Kitty or Beanie or Lavinia. And you ought to know that. You shouldn’t be angry with me for writing to him.’

  ‘Oh, of course I am,’ said Daisy matter-of-factly. ‘But I see now that you were only hiding the letters because you thought I would disapprove. And I – I overreacted, I suppose. I ought never have said what I did. It wasn’t good form. Can’t you forget it? What matters now is Binny. She is missing, and I am sure that her disappearance has everything to do with Elizabeth’s murder. It is reasonable to assume that the person who killed Elizabeth has taken her, to stop her revealing their secret. So to find her, we must solve the case. And I can’t do it without you, Watson.’

  I blinked, hard. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘All right, then. I’m sorry, Daisy. I shouldn’t have gone behind your back.’

  ‘Detective Society for ever?’ asked Daisy.

  ‘For ever,’ I said, and almost before I knew what I was doing, I put out my hand, and we shook. We leaned together, with the rain on our cheeks and the cold dark of the evening all around us, and I was happier than I had been all term.

  4

  ‘Now,’ said Daisy, leaning back against the bricks of House. ‘How are we going to go about solving the case?’

  I knew she was smiling. So was I.

  ‘I’ve realized something,’ I said. ‘We’ve been going on and on about motives and secrets. But they don’t matter, not really. We know all the Five have motives, and that’s enough. The important thing is who had the opportunity. That’s how we’ll solve the case, and how we’ll get to Binny. We need to do a re-creation of the crime.’

  ‘Lord!’ said Daisy. ‘You’re right! We’ve been so focused on the secrets, when— Why, Watson, we’ve been chumps! Why didn’t we think of it before now?’

  ‘It wasn’t me who thought of it at all.’ I stared her straight in the eye. ‘It was Alexander. He can be useful, don’t you see? He isn’t here, so he can see things differently. I think he can help us, just like he did before.’

  Daisy flinched. There was a silence. ‘All right,’ she said, at last. ‘I see what you mean. We must do a re-creation of the crime. Oh, if only we hadn’t had to leave that hockey stick!’

  ‘We know it exists, though, and anyway, we don’t have a fingerprint kit!’ I said. ‘What could we tell from it, even if we had it?’

  Daisy sighed. ‘It is a problem that we don’t have a proper kit,’ she said. ‘I mean to ask for one for Christmas.’

  I grinned. ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘I found something during Games yesterday. Remember when Kitty sent the ball flying into the woods? I think it might be a clue. I put it in my games knickers for safekeeping, and then my pocket.’

  I took out the clip, and showed it to her. The little silver flower glinted dully, although there was not much to make it shine – no moon, and only the dimmest light filtering through the heavy House curtains behind us.

  Daisy, though, gasped. ‘Hazel!’ she said. ‘You had this all the time? Don’t you know whose this is? Oh, why don’t people ever see?’

  I thought that was rather rich, for we had come upon just such a clue during the case of Miss Bell, and Daisy had not known who it belonged to then, until it was almost too late.

  ‘All right, whose is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Lettice’s,’ Daisy breathed. ‘I know it, she wears it all the time. And let me see …’ She closed her eyes and frowned, as if thinking hard. ‘Yes, I’m almost certain I remember her wearing it when she was handing out sparklers, just before the fireworks. But I can’t recall seeing it since then. And if it was in the woods, why, that means that Lettice was there on Tuesday.’

  ‘She must have been the person running away just before the fireworks began!’ I said. ‘Her Deepdean coat does make her look bulkier. I suppose that’s why Martha didn’t recognize her. Oh, and – I remember now! When Lettice came into House after Elizabeth had died, she had a leaf on her sock, exactly like Lavinia did when she came out of the woods during Games. It all fits!’

  ‘Yes! What if she got so upset after her argument with Elizabeth that she ran away? If so, she couldn’t have done the murder!’ cried Daisy. We beamed. We were catching each other’s thoughts again, and it felt wonderfully right.

  ‘We’ve ruled someone out!’ I said.

  ‘At last!’ Daisy agreed. ‘My goodness, that was unexpectedly easy, after all this time. There, that’s the lovely thing about having clues! So – pax? For good?’

  ‘Pax,’ I said, still smiling.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Daisy. ‘Now, let’s go down to the dorm and inform them of our fantastic deduction and of the reconstruction we are planning. I think I know the perfect time. On Saturday, when we go to the sports field for the match against Fareham Ladies’ School, everyone will be distracted. No one will be looking at us. Goodness, in a way it’s just like it was on the night of the murder.’

  ‘That’s awful,’ I said, suppressing a shudder. ‘I know,’ said Daisy gleefully. ‘But it is most important.

  If we want to find Binny, we must solve Elizabeth’s murder. And that means discovering the alibis of our remaining suspects. Actually, Hazel, I have had an excellent idea about that.’

  5

  Daisy and I came back into the dorm, and Beanie took one look at us and squealed with happiness. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘You’re friends again! Oh, goody!’

  Kitty burst out laughing, and even Lavinia made a snort that sounded almost friendly.

  ‘I suppose we are,’ said Daisy, and she grinned at me. I grinned back. ‘Now, assistants, shall we all find Binny toget
her?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kitty said. ‘Please. I know she’s a toad, but she is my sister. You know.’

  We all nodded. I thought of my little half-sisters, back in Hong Kong. They had really been very small when I came to Deepdean the year before last, and I had not seen them much since then, but all the same, I understood. They were part of the very centre of me, just like my mother and my father, and hurting them meant hurting me. And, I realized with a little jolt, it was the same with Daisy. She was my family too, my family in England. I realized that the sickness in my stomach I had been feeling had come from that. I had only been pretending not to care.

  I felt terribly ashamed, but also better, just like the time I had woken up after a fever and felt cool again for the first time in weeks.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Daisy. ‘Now, Hazel and I have been doing some detecting together, which we are allowed to do, because we founded the Detective Society. It is ours. We have realized some very important things. First, that Binny has most likely not run away. She has been taken, and we believe that she was taken by the person who killed Elizabeth, because they realized that she was the one spreading the Scandal Book’s secrets and they feared that she was about to reveal theirs.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Kitty. ‘That fool Binny! Why, if I’d known …’ She lapsed into miserable silence.

  ‘Therefore it is crucial that we work on solving Elizabeth’s murder, and the next step in that is reconstructing the crime. Tomorrow’s match against Fareham Ladies will be the perfect opportunity. But there is one of the Five that we will not need to consider. Hazel’s excellent detective work has ruled out the first of our suspects!’

  ‘I found something in the woods,’ I said. ‘A hairclip. And Daisy recognized it: it’s Lettice’s. She was wearing it on Tuesday, so she must have dropped it then – and I remember seeing her with a leaf on her sock when she came back to House that evening. She must have been in the woods, and since we all saw her beside the bonfire before the fireworks—’

  ‘She must have been the person Martha saw running away into the woods just before the display!’ Daisy butted in. ‘And that means she can’t have killed Elizabeth during the display. She wasn’t in the right place to do it!’

  ‘Oh!’ said Beanie. ‘Oh, I’m glad!’

  ‘You’re soft-hearted, Beans,’ said Kitty. ‘We know one of the Five did it, even if it wasn’t Lettice.’

  ‘I know,’ said Beanie with a frown. ‘I wish it wasn’t true, though.’

  ‘So now we have to narrow down our four suspects to one,’ said Daisy. ‘And to make sure that tomorrow’s reconstruction is as good as it can be, and we stand the best chance of discovering the murderer and finding Binny, we must look again at the facts we have about the movements of Una, Florence, Enid and Margaret on Tuesday night. It’s crucial that we understand as much as we can!’

  We looked again at my notes from Wednesday, and a pattern emerged. As we knew, the Five had spent the evening bringing fuel to the bonfire, and they had done it in shifts, with a strict order and in five-minute intervals. Enid, of course, had taken several loads at the beginning of the evening, between 7.05 and 7.10, during which time she had paused to speak to Elizabeth. She had been replaced by Florence at about 7.10, then Lettice at 7.15. Margaret had stoked the fire at 7.20, and then Una had taken over at 7.25, while Lettice and Enid handed out sparklers – which, of course, was when Una had spoken to Elizabeth.

  During Miss Barnard’s speech at 7.30, the Five had all paused to listen, and the fire had dipped slightly. Then the round had begun again. Enid had taken the next shift at 7.35, as we were all being lined up by Una, Florence and Margaret. That, of course, was when Elizabeth and Lettice had had their argument, and Martha had seen the figure running into the woods, the figure we now knew was Lettice. Enid had been taking a last load of wood to the fire when the display began at 7.40; Florence should have then taken over (of course, we could not confirm this). Lettice was due to take over at 7.45 – but, of course, she could not have been there. Then it was Margaret’s turn at 7.50, and Una’s at 7.55.

  ‘Well,’ said Daisy as we all stared at the list of timings we had made, ‘we know exactly when the murder took place, at last.’

  We all realized what she meant. Although both Florence and Enid had the opportunity to kill Elizabeth during their shifts, Lettice’s absence meant that there was a much more promising gap of five minutes in the rota. No one else was supposed to be near the fire, which meant any of our four suspects could have used that window at 7.45 to creep over to where Elizabeth was standing and hit her with the hockey stick.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘There’s something else too. Look at what Charlotte says, here. When the display was over, she went over to the bonfire and Una was there. Not Margaret. Then Charlotte tripped over Elizabeth’s body …’

  ‘Una might have just taken over from Margaret,’ said Kitty. ‘It was nearly her time, after all.’

  ‘She might,’ said Daisy. ‘She might, but none of the others took over early. If anything, the schedule was running slightly behind. That’s why Enid was still working when the display began. And see what Charlotte said, that Una was flustered. She would be, if she noticed that the fire was burning down, and had to step in unexpectedly. Put that together with the murder weapon – remember how it wasn’t burned properly? What if Lettice and Margaret both missed their places in the rota, and that’s why the fire died down?’

  ‘That’s all guesswork!’ said Lavinia.

  ‘So it is,’ said Daisy. ‘But there’s someone else we can ask to confirm what I’m suggesting, someone we know must have been near the bonfire, and Elizabeth’s body, after the display. Martha.’

  ‘Martha?’ said Kitty. ‘But—’

  ‘Be logical,’ said Daisy. ‘Elizabeth kept the Scandal Book on her person all the time. We heard the Five say that. Let us assume that the murderer stole it from her as they killed her, and then dropped it somewhere in the dark between Elizabeth’s body and the fire. Binny must have found it wherever it fell, so she must have been near the fire, and Martha is most likely to have been with her at the time. Therefore we need to speak to Martha again. Do you see?’

  Lavinia nodded grudgingly. Beanie beamed. ‘You are clever, Daisy!’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ said Daisy. ‘Bring in Martha Grey!’

  6

  Martha was called in again, and she backed up everything Daisy had assumed. Daisy really does have all the luck, sometimes.

  ‘We went to the bonfire just after the display was over,’ Martha said. ‘It had died down a bit, and Binny wanted to get close to it to make it flare up again. She was being awful, kicking it with her foot and making sparks fly up. The prefect stoking the fire, Una, shouted at us. She looked awfully hot and bothered, and I turned to her to say sorry. When I looked back, Binny was bent over something on the ground, near the fire. She stood up when she saw me looking. I asked her what she’d found, and she said it wasn’t anything. Oh, I wish I had made her tell me! If she had—’

  ‘It’s a very good thing you didn’t ask,’ said Daisy. ‘Otherwise you might be missing now as well. Was that when Binny began to behave strangely?’

  ‘Yes!’ said Martha. ‘Although I didn’t really begin to notice until the next day, when the first secrets were found.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Daisy to Martha, very queenly. ‘You have been terribly helpful, you know.’

  ‘But will you find Binny?’ asked Martha. ‘She’s still missing!’

  ‘Of course we will! But now you must go away so we can do it. All right?’

  ‘All right,’ said Martha obediently, and left us.

  ‘Well!’ said Lavinia. ‘What do we do with that?’

  ‘It ought to be perfectly obvious,’ said Daisy, ‘We have another witness saying that the fire was low, and Una was flustered after the end of the display. We know that Lettice missed her turn, so it would have burned down, but why didn’t Margaret come after her, and build it up again
? It’s a crucial question, and one that we must discover the answer to. And to do that, we must go straight to the source.’

  ‘Margaret?’ asked Kitty, shocked.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Daisy. ‘She wasn’t where she ought to have been.’

  ‘But she could be a murderer!’ said Lavinia. ‘This is a stupid plan.’

  ‘It is not!’ said Daisy. ‘Don’t disrespect your president, Assistant Temple. I say it’s a good idea, and it is. Anyway, you don’t have to do it. Hazel and I will speak to her.’

  ‘We will?’ I said. ‘I mean – of course we will.’

  ‘But what if she kills you?’ asked Kitty nervously.

  ‘She won’t,’ said Daisy. ‘Because we know her secret.’

  That made me uncomfortable. It seemed to me that if Margaret was the murderer, and we came to her with the secret that she was so desperate to protect, she might do something awful. As far as Daisy’s ideas went, this was one of my least favourites.

  So as Daisy and I set off together to find Margaret, I was feeling distinctly unhappy. Were we about to make a terrible mistake?

  7

  We found Margaret trying to tell off one of the younger girls – who, of course, was ignoring her. Daisy cleared her throat, and Margaret swung round to face us. The bottom dropped out of my stomach.

  ‘What do you want?’ Margaret asked.

  Now, Daisy is very good at confrontations. She always seems to know the right thing to say, and the right wedge to drive straight into the heart of the person (not a real wedge, that would be too much, even for Daisy). This time, she merely stared at Margaret, sharp and blue, and it was Margaret who blinked first.

  ‘What do you want?’ she repeated, flushing angrily. ‘Stop that.’