8 Top Marks for Murder

by Robin Stevens

‘She is not anything like me!’ Daisy hissed back. ‘Only I am me. There is only one Daisy Wells. These foolish third formers will come back to the person they truly adore soon enough.’

  ‘Why should they?’ asked Lavinia, rather rudely.

  ‘Because … because people ought to have some respect!’ said Daisy furiously. ‘It’s not as though I’d died, is it? Everyone knew I was coming back! They’ll remember me, you’ll see.’

  But her voice sounded rather thin and unsure.

  ‘Clementine and Rose and Jose tried to bully her at first,’ said Kitty, from next to me. ‘You know, Daisy, to pull the trunk trick you did on Hazel. But she refused to get in, and then she ordered a hamper full of tuck from Fortnum’s and only gave it to Sophie because she’d been nice all along, and then everyone was nice to her.’

  ‘I admit, that is brilliant,’ said Daisy, her eyes narrowed as she studied Amina. ‘Hazel – I don’t like this girl in the slightest.’

  Binny and the other third formers came to find Daisy just before Prep.

  ‘We got your note,’ said Binny to Daisy, standing up straight and crossing her arms, while the Marys, Martha and Alma all arranged themselves behind her looking nervous but defiant. ‘And we don’t care. We’ll do what we like – and Amina is far nicer to us than you ever were!’

  ‘Nonsense! What about – what about loyalty?’ asked Daisy.

  ‘Loyalty!’ cried Binny. ‘When you used us for information all last year, but never let us into your secret society?’

  Daisy was so angry her eyes were flashing blue. ‘Why, you – traitor! All of you!’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Marie.

  ‘We still like you,’ said Marion.

  ‘But we don’t want to carry your coat any more,’ said Maria. ‘We’re carrying Amina’s instead.’

  They turned and walked away together. Kitty shouted, ‘YOU’RE A RAT, BINNY!’ after them, but it sounded hollow.

  ‘It’s the Marys that hurt the most,’ said Daisy, and she spent Prep slumped at her desk, staring miserably into space.

  The next day she discovered that her place on the equestrian team had been given to Amina, and there were no more parts for the Anniversary play. She pretended to everyone else that she did not mind about it, but privately she slipped into a funk so black that I did not know quite what to do with her.

  I had never seen Daisy like this before, for even when other dreadful things were happening to her, she knew in her heart that she had Deepdean. Now that she could not rule over Deepdean any more, it was as though a crucial part of her was missing.

  4

  I had to do something. I worried away at the problem for the next day, and then the answer came to me in a flash. It was a plan I could have never imagined carrying out last year, but, like everyone else at Deepdean, I have changed. I am more than the Hazel Wong I used to be.

  After Prep was over that evening, during the muddle of toothbrushes, I climbed up through House and knocked on the very highest door. It opened, and there, in her pyjamas, was the Head Girl.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked.

  ‘I’d like your help,’ I said, trying not to quail, for she looked very cross. ‘We – Daisy Wells and I, I mean – we helped you two terms ago, didn’t we?’

  ‘I suppose you did,’ said the Head Girl. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Can you make sure that Daisy is put back on the equestrian team, and gets a part in the play?’ I asked. ‘She’s … upset that she’s been taken off the team, and she’s a good actress, I promise she is. She won’t let the school down.’

  The Head Girl frowned. ‘She had better not,’ she said. ‘You know it’s a special one this year, for the Anniversary. It’s a walking play, where the cast moves around the school and the audience follows. We can’t have anything but the best.’

  ‘Daisy’s the best at anything she tries, you know that!’ I said. ‘She won’t let you down, honour bright. And she’s a real actress – she was in Romeo and Juliet at the Rue last month. In London!’

  The Head Girl sighed and shrugged. ‘All right, then,’ she said. ‘I’ll have words.’

  ‘But please don’t tell anyone that I asked you!’ I said hurriedly. ‘She can’t know.’

  ‘Go away, Wong,’ said the Head Girl, shutting the door on me – but I thought she said it good-naturedly, and, sure enough, the very next day it was discovered that Daisy had only been missed off the equestrian team list by mistake, and one more role was needed in the Anniversary play. A character called the Spirit of the School would watch over the proceedings as the company moved around the school and would bless the actors at the end.

  ‘The prefects asked me specially!’ Daisy told me blissfully. ‘They said they couldn’t do it without me, so of course I accepted.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ I said, straight-faced.

  ‘Thank you, Hazel Wong,’ said Daisy, with a wink. ‘Don’t lie, I know it was you really.’ Then her face fell. ‘All the same – oh, bother, but it shouldn’t have to be up to you! They ought to simply change the rules for me. That’s how it’s always been! This school has gone dreadfully downhill.’

  ‘You’re not the King, Daisy Wells,’ said Kitty, coming to sit on Daisy’s bed. ‘You just have to get used to being like the rest of us.’

  ‘But I’m not like the rest of you,’ said Daisy. She said it so emptily that it made my heart hurt.

  ‘Humph!’ said Kitty, and she jumped onto Daisy’s thin pillow, which made a crackling sound. Daisy went stiff all over and shoved Kitty away.

  ‘Ow!’ said Kitty. ‘Just because you can’t bear to hear the truth! What are you hiding under your pillow, anyway?’

  ‘Nothing!’ said Daisy. ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘Show me or I’ll find out anyway, Daisy Wells,’ said Kitty, poking her.

  ‘It’s the programme from my play, if you must know,’ said Daisy, teeth gritted, ‘Romeo and Juliet. I am using it to inspire me in my role as the Spirit of the School. That’s why it has to stay under my pillow at all times and if you move it I shall hurt you very badly.’

  I tensed myself too, ready for Kitty to prod at that quite obvious falsehood. But then …

  ‘That photo’s new,’ said Kitty, leaning over to look at the snap that was on my bedside table.

  ‘It’s of us with George and Alexander,’ I said quickly. ‘Uncle Felix took it just before we came back to school.’

  Kitty peered at it, and I looked too. Daisy and I were standing together on the London pavement with our arms round each other, the two boys behind us with their hands on our shoulders. We were all four squinting into the sunshine.

  ‘Isn’t Alexander handsome!’ Kitty cried. I blushed without meaning to. ‘So tall. Ooh, Hazel! If I wasn’t absolutely loyal to my boyfriend Hugo …’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Lavinia, leaning over both of us. ‘The blond one’s all right, but he’s more handsome.’ She pointed at George.

  ‘No he isn’t!’ I said, rather surprised, for I had never considered George that way. ‘He’s … he’s just George.’

  ‘They’re both just boys,’ said Daisy, shrugging. ‘There’s nothing else to say about them.’

  At that moment, Beanie came running into the dorm, startling us all. ‘I’ve just got a letter from Daddy!’ she cried. ‘He’s coming to the Anniversary, and he’s bringing Mummy!’

  5

  After that, the Anniversary weekend was all anyone could think about – and it is funny now to remember how excited everyone was. This year is the fiftieth anniversary of Deepdean’s opening, and so a long weekend of celebrations had been planned. The Anniversary was to begin with a music concert on Friday evening in which both current and old girls would perform, and then there were exhibition matches on Saturday, a gala dinner for Big Girls and parents on Saturday night, chapel on Sunday morning, the garden party on Sunday afternoon, the play on Sunday evening, and finally, to mark the end of the school year, Leaving Prayers on Monday morning.

  Most parent
s were coming down on Thursday evening or on Friday and staying until Monday. As well as Beanie’s parents, Kitty’s were coming, and Lavinia’s father with his fiancée as well as her mother, who he was divorcing. Even Clementine’s father had promised to make an appearance – and it was rumoured that Amina’s people were coming all the way from Egypt.

  In fact, Daisy and I were the only fourth formers set to be entirely on our own. I tried not to mind about that and to remember what my father had said during his last telephone call.

  ‘You must understand, Hazel,’ he had said to me down the crackling phone line. ‘The journey from Hong Kong would take far too long. You must be brave about this.’

  ‘Yes, Father,’ I said, thinking I had already been brave enough for a whole lifetime.

  ‘I will come for the Christmas holidays, I promise you,’ said my father. ‘And IF Rose and May are VERY GOOD, they MIGHT be able to come with me.’

  I heard Hong-Kong-faraway shrieks behind his voice, and I knew that my little sisters were in his study with him.

  I tried to be excited, but Christmas seemed oceans away, just like my family.

  ‘Buck up,’ said Daisy, who was being very don’t-care about it. ‘Who needs parents, anyway? I’m here, that ought to be enough for you.’ But I know Daisy too well by now to be tricked by her poses. I knew that she had telephoned London and come out of Matron’s office with her shoulders slumped. Uncle Felix and Aunt Lucy were both too busy with work to be able to come down, and Bertie was busy at Cambridge, and that cut Daisy deeply.

  ‘You’re lucky!’ grumbled Lavinia. ‘It’s far worse to have your people here embarrassing you. It’s going to be awful. My parents, in the same room – ugh! They hate each other. And my father’s bringing Patricia. If he makes me call her Mother, I think I might kill him.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Beanie, patting her, ‘but Patricia is nice, isn’t she?’

  Lavinia glared at her. ‘I hate her, and I hate my father, and I hate my mother. Ugh, I want to run away all over again.’

  Beanie looked quite shocked.

  ‘Hey, Beanie,’ said Kitty, poking her. ‘Cheer up. Your mum’s coming to the Anniversary, remember?’

  ‘She is!’ said Beanie, and her eyes lit up. We all knew that Beanie’s mother had not been well. It was the reason why Beanie had had to stay with Kitty last Christmas – but Mrs Martineau must be better now.

  Excitement buzzed about the school. The Games mistress, Miss Talent, was choosing girls for the exhibition matches and the English mistress, Miss Dodgson, was leading play rehearsals. (‘She’s hopeless,’ said Daisy, ‘not a patch on Inigo.’) The Music and Art mistress, Miss Morris, was choosing performers for the concert, including Sophie Croke-Finchley from the other fourth-form dorm, who was to play a piano solo. The thumping noises she produced as she played through her piece in the House common room became a constant noise in my head that I would find myself humming at odd moments. We practised walking and curtseying in Deportment, and the Big Girls were gathered in a room and quietly reminded of the niceties of dinner etiquette: holding their forks and knives correctly, passing the salt and pepper to the left at the same time and conversing in a manner both polite and amusing. (‘As if they wouldn’t already know all that!’ said Daisy scornfully. ‘We’re Deepdean girls, not animals!’)

  Miss Runcible, the Science mistress, stopped her lessons on solutes and distillation and had the third and fourth forms making fireworks for the display to be held at the end of the garden party on Sunday night. (This made me nervous – Deepdean does not have a good history with fireworks.) And everyone, from the Big Girls to the shrimps, began whispering about the end-of-year pranks. There is a tradition of playing them at Deepdean – but it could not be decided whether we ought to hold off, because of the Anniversary, or make them even more impressive than usual.

  ‘I heard the fifth formers are going to dye the Deepdean pond green during the Anniversary,’ said Kitty.

  ‘No, the third formers are going to blow up Miss Barnard’s lectern,’ said Lavinia.

  ‘That’s not a prank, that’s a crime,’ said Kitty scornfully. ‘They’d never.’

  ‘I think Amina and the other fourth-form dorm are plotting something,’ said Kitty. ‘I saw them all giggling together yesterday. And it’ll be spectacular, if Amina’s part of it! She’s so clever.’

  ‘Oh, do stop talking about Amina!’ snapped Daisy. ‘Pranks are stupid and childish and we ought to ignore them.’

  ‘Jealous,’ Lavinia mouthed at Kitty, and Kitty nodded.

  ‘I am going up to the dorm,’ said Daisy, her nose in the air. ‘Hazel, come with me. The rest of you are not invited.’

  I could see that, for all my hard work, her mood had not really lightened at all – nor would it, while Amina was at Deepdean. She was a constant reminder that Daisy’s grip on the school had loosened. At that moment, I wished that Amina had never come to Deepdean.

  But what I could not know was just how important Amina and her family would be during the Anniversary weekend – and to the mystery.

  June flew past my head like a rounders ball, in a whirl of lessons and activities and Saturday afternoons in Deepdean town, in Beanie losing Chutney the dormouse and then finding her again (heart-stoppingly) in Matron’s study, in Daisy and Beanie preparing for the roles they had been given in the play, and Lavinia for her exhibition tennis match.

  We had our last exams, and that was another whirl, a rather more sickening one, in which I realized that the lessons we had been getting from Aunt Lucy in London were not at all the sort of lessons we needed now we were back at school. I had to stop hiding my swottiness in a frantic rush to find out which kings had fought which battles and where Patagonia was, and even Daisy was seen reading a book that was not a murder mystery.

  And then it was July, the day the Anniversary celebrations began, and the sun was out and the trees of Oakeshott Woods behind House were green and rustling, and Beanie turned to us and said:

  ‘I – I think I’ve just seen a murder.’

  6

  It was Friday morning, the third of July, and the five members of the Detective Society were up in our dorm after breakfast. There were four minutes left until the first school bell, so we were busy piling books into our school bags and doing up our ties and chattering. Daisy, of course, was entirely ready, so she was lying on her bed with her hands pillowed behind her, staring thoughtfully at the cracks on the dorm ceiling. I was still making my bed, folding the scratchy blanket carefully over the neat sheets. Kitty was trying to get her hair to curl and Lavinia was struggling with her tie in front of the small mirror.

  Beanie had been standing by the open window, warm summer-morning air breathing over her, staring out at the green tangle of Oakeshott Woods as if in a dream – and then she turned round and made her announcement. She said it quietly, in rather an awed voice, as though she could not believe the words she was saying.

  We all stopped talking and stared at her.

  ‘WHAT did you say?’ asked Daisy, sitting bolt upright with a bounce.

  Beanie was frozen, her fingertips clutching the window frame, and then she gasped, and shook herself, and pointed her finger out at the woods. ‘Come and look! Come and look!’ she cried. ‘Oh, quickly! There he is, on the ridge, next to that tree with a bare branch!’

  We all rushed over and crowded round her at the window, staring out at the woods. Our House is on Oakeshott Hill, above Deepdean School, and our dorm faces away from the school buildings, towards the main wood itself. The road from school to House is on our right, and it winds back down again towards Deepdean town on our left, and so in front of our eyes was nothing but green leaves and blue sky, and the next high hill with trees standing up at the top of its ridge.

  ‘Where is he? Where?’ asked Daisy frantically, turning her head from side to side as though there might be a murderer behind each tree.

  ‘He’s gone!’ said Beanie with a little gasp. ‘He must have ducked
down after her – but he was there, and she was there, and then he put out his arms and— Oh! He choked her to death, I saw it!’

  She was shaking, I could see. Kitty put her arms round her in a comforting way, but Beanie stood rigid, breathing in short little pants.

  Daisy looked at me, swift and sharp. I knew what she meant – that she believed Beanie. It is true that Beanie does not lie, at least not on purpose. If she says something, it is at least true to her. And if Beanie had seen a crime … then this was a moment for the Detective Society.

  ‘Come away from the window, everyone,’ said Daisy, in her Detective Society President voice. Her eyes were suddenly brighter than they had been all term. ‘Except you, Lavinia. You stand guard and watch, in case anything else occurs or he appears again. Beanie, explain yourself at once. Hazel, you take notes.’

  ‘It was awful!’ Beanie kept on saying. ‘Awful!’

  ‘Yes, all right, what was?’ asked Daisy fiercely, as I rushed to my tuck box and pulled out a new casebook, my hands trembling just a little. I opened it to its first page and looked up at Beanie, my pencil hovering over the paper. ‘Time is of the essence,’ Daisy continued. ‘You’ll forget if you don’t tell us quickly!’

  ‘Start at the beginning, Beanie,’ I said, trying to sound reassuring (for Daisy, of course, is not reassuring in the slightest). ‘It’s all right. What happened?’

  Beanie chewed on the end of her plait and furrowed her brow. There was a long pause. At last she took a gasping breath and began.

  ‘We’d just come up from breakfast. Lavinia went to the mirror to put her tie on straight, and, Hazel, you were making your bed, and I was looking for my Maths book. Only I couldn’t find it, so I went to the window to look out at the woods and see if I could remember where it was. Then I began to think about Mummy seeing the woods this weekend and how much she’ll like them, and so I leaned out on the sill and I sort of stared into the distance and—’