8 Top Marks for Murder

by Robin Stevens

  I knew she was right.

  ‘But Barny will be furious! It’ll look dreadful!’ It was my last, weak argument.

  ‘So she will, and so it will, but in this case, solving the crime and saving the school is more important!’ said Daisy.

  I gave up.

  Daisy motioned Kitty, Lavinia and Beanie to her and whispered in their ears. They both gasped at her, and Kitty said, ‘We CAN’T!’

  ‘We can!’ hissed Daisy. ‘We have to!’

  I sat, tense and nervous, the clapping and cheering ringing in my ears tinnily, as though I was slightly elsewhere. The Inspector was trying to catch my eye, his face worried – of course he could tell that we were up to something.

  ‘… And the Fitzgerald Award for Most Improved Girl goes to … REBECCA MARTINEAU,’ said Miss Barnard.

  10

  ‘Oh NO,’ said Beanie.

  ‘What is wrong with you all today?’ grumbled Sophie Croke-Finchley – who, I thought, looked as though she had rather expected to win the award herself. ‘Why are you behaving so oddly? Go up and get your award!’

  ‘Go on, Beans, go on!’ whispered Kitty, shoving her forwards.

  ‘I don’t want to! I can’t! Help!’ gasped Beanie.

  ‘You can,’ I said to her. ‘I know you can. Just focus above everyone’s heads so you can’t see them. Go on, Beanie!’

  Beanie gave us one last despairing look and then went staggering up through the rows of seats to the stage, looking like a lamb going to the slaughter.

  ‘Congratulations, Rebecca,’ said Miss Barnard, holding her hand out to Beanie to shake.

  ‘Um,’ said Beanie.

  ‘GO ON, BEANIE!’ roared Lavinia.

  ‘Um, excuse me,’ said Beanie. ‘Could I say something?’

  ‘Certainly not, Miss Martineau,’ said Miss Barnard. ‘Go back and sit down, and well done.’

  ‘But I do need to say something,’ said Beanie desperately. I could see her hands trembling.

  ‘Sit. Down,’ said Miss Barnard, her lips thinning. I could see parents and girls looking about at each other in confusion. Amina was giggling. This was not planned – what was going on?

  ‘No!’ said Beanie. ‘I’m terribly sorry, Miss Barnard, I will in a moment, but I just need to say that, er – I’m so sorry, but I think that Mrs Thompson-Bates was the person who killed Mrs Rivers on Saturday.’

  The Hall went so still that it seemed under a fairy-tale spell. But Mrs Thompson-Bates twitched, a whole-body involuntary shiver, and Mr Thompson-Bates snapped his head round to stare at her. I saw that, and I knew – I knew we were right.

  ‘This is no time for pranks. Sit down or I shall have you expelled,’ said Miss Barnard into the pool of silence that had filled the Hall.

  Only Daisy was unaffected. She stood, and put up her hand.

  ‘Miss Barnard!’ she said. ‘It’s true!’

  ‘Miss Wells, I am disappointed in you,’ said Miss Barnard. ‘If you do not sit down and be quiet, I will have to ask you to leave.’

  Daisy turned and looked at me, her eyes huge and bright blue – and then I found that I was standing up. My cheeks burned and I could hear my own breath stuttering in my ears. I locked arms with Daisy, and then Kitty was standing too, and Lavinia.

  Amina looked at me and Daisy and smiled – and then up she got, dragging Clementine with her.

  ‘Fourth form!’ cried Miss Barnard. ‘Leave the Hall at once. Miss Martineau, give me back your award. This is too much!’

  I saw Miss Lappet shaking her head and tutting, and Mamzelle staring at us, her face puzzled. And then, through a blur of shame, I saw someone else stand up too. I blinked my eyes clear, just as Beanie made a small shrill noise.

  The person who was standing was a bird-thin woman with skin so pale it looked quite translucent. Her shoulders were hunched, and she flinched away from herself as though her very clothes hurt her. She was dragging on the arm of the man next to her – and when he stood up as well, I saw that it was Mr Martineau, looking half embarrassed and half stern.

  ‘Mummy!’ cried Beanie. ‘MUMMY! What are you doing here? What are you doing?’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Beanie’s mother to Miss Barnard, calling up through the well of the Hall. ‘Excuse me! Please … Becky wouldn’t have stood up and said something she didn’t believe. Please, could you listen to her?’

  ‘Hear, hear!’ said Mr Freebody, and he got up as well. ‘Let the girls be heard!’

  Kitty went scarlet.

  ‘Ooh, YES!’ said Patricia, bouncing to her feet and dragging on Mr Temple’s sleeve. ‘Get up, darling, let’s be supportive.’ Mr and Mrs Temple stood up at exactly the same time, and glared at each other.

  Miss Barnard gripped the lectern, looking absolutely grey with distress. I could feel the situation slipping away from her, and I knew she could too. The Hall seemed to be half full of standing people now.

  ‘If I may,’ said the Inspector, getting to his feet. He spoke quietly, but, all the same, everyone turned to look at him. ‘Although I was not here in an official capacity this morning, I am a police officer. Let me take the fourth form – and any other interested parties – into another room to work this problem out. You can continue your ceremony without further disruptions.’

  ‘That,’ said Miss Barnard shakily, ‘is an excellent idea. Mr and Mrs Thompson-Bates, would you go with them, please?’

  As Daisy led us from the Hall like a queen processing before her courtiers, we looked about at each other in amazement. Had we – had we really – taken on Deepdean traditions and won?

  11

  We ended up in Reverend MacLean’s cubby – a rather odd sensation, being on the other side of the door for once. But the rules really had shifted today. I remembered our very first mystery, when Daisy and I hid behind the Music Room curtain to listen to the Inspector revealing the solution of the mystery to its suspects. And now here we were, unravelling the case ourselves to a room of concerned grown-ups – and Mr and Mrs Thompson-Bates. He stood up straight, glaring at us, and she was huddled on a chair at the edge of the room, wincing and darting us furious glances. The Inspector stood between them and the door, and I smiled at him gratefully.

  There was one thing we had to discuss before we began, and that was the presence of Mrs Martineau. She clung to Mr Martineau, and Beanie clung to her, so they made one lumpy, adoring figure.

  ‘I wanted to surprise you, Becky,’ she said. ‘I hoped you might win a prize – and look, you did! I said you were clever, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes, but – you’re ill, Mummy,’ said Beanie. ‘What if you get worse?’

  ‘Oh, sweetheart, it’s a bit past that,’ said Mrs Martineau. ‘I know your father was against it, but I wanted to see my lovely girl – I couldn’t miss the whole weekend, could I? Now, what’s all this about you knowing who killed that poor woman?’

  ‘They don’t,’ said Mr Thompson-Bates.

  ‘Be quiet,’ said the Inspector.

  ‘I was the one who found out about it first!’ said Beanie, drawing herself up. ‘We’ve been detecting the case all weekend, and now Daisy and Hazel have solved it.’

  ‘That remains to be seen,’ said the Inspector drily.

  ‘For your sake, it had better be properly explained,’ said Mr Freebody to Kitty. ‘What a thing to do to your poor headmistress!’

  ‘Really, darling,’ said Mrs Freebody, her face creased up with worry. ‘Was this to punish us for – you know?’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with you!’ hissed Kitty. ‘We’ve really solved Mrs Rivers’ murder!’

  ‘This all sounds like one of Lavinia’s lies,’ said Mr Temple.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure it isn’t! Do tell!’ said Patricia.

  ‘I quite agree. Come along, Detectives,’ said the Inspector. ‘State your case.’

  We all looked at Daisy, who beamed, took a deep breath and began.

  ‘It all started because of a poem,’ she said. ‘That is – I don’t suppose it re
ally started there, but that’s how Hazel and I discovered the truth.’

  ‘A poem!’ said Lavinia.

  ‘Yes, A Shropshire Lad. You ought to try listening in English lessons sometimes,’ said Daisy, as though she had not forgotten all about the poem until Amina reminded us. ‘Poetry can be terribly useful – although, as it happens, this is stupid stuff is not part of a poem we were ever supposed to be taught. It’s on the Big Girls’ curriculum, though – and I suppose it must be on the curriculum at Weston School as well.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it!’ said Mr Thompson-Bates.

  ‘Oh, do be quiet!’ cried Mrs Thompson-Bates suddenly. ‘You own two copies, James.’

  ‘You be quiet,’ growled Mr Thompson-Bates. ‘She’s lying.’

  ‘It was actually Beanie who began everything,’ I said. ‘She ought to start.’

  ‘I – I saw what I thought was a murder in Oakeshott Woods on Friday morning,’ said Beanie, blushing. ‘Far off on the ridge, so I couldn’t see who it was exactly. But I did see a man and a woman arguing, and the man choking her. She fell to the ground and I thought he’d killed her.’

  ‘Yes, yes, indeed,’ said Daisy, waving her hand. ‘Beanie told us that, and so we began to investigate the case as a murder. We were looking about for a male guest at the Anniversary who was there without his wife, and our attention became fixed on two people: Mr Turnbull and Mr Stone. So Hazel and I decided to watch them at the gala dinner on Saturday evening, in case they did something that would point to their guilt. What we weren’t expecting at all was that Mrs Rivers would be murdered during dinner – but when she was, the whole investigation changed.’

  ‘Because of Mrs Rivers’ death, we began to suspect that what Beanie had seen had only been attempted murder,’ I said. ‘We thought that a man on Mrs Rivers’ table, Table Four, must have tried to kill her in the woods and then finally managed it at dinner. We never did manage to work out why Mrs Rivers didn’t go straight to the police about the attack, though – it was a piece of the puzzle that we couldn’t make fit.

  ‘Anyway, there were five men on Table Four: Mr Turnbull, Mr El Maghrabi, Mr Dow, Mr Stone and Mr Thompson-Bates. We staged a re-enactment of the crime and ruled out Mr Turnbull, as there was no moment when he got close enough to Mrs Rivers to poison her. We also realized that Mr Dow could only be guilty if he’d used his wife to administer the poison, since only she got up from her seat during dinner.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Daisy. ‘Now, you must remember, we thought we were chasing a man, or at least a male mastermind. The poisoning of Mrs Thompson-Bates at the garden party, and the evidence of the smashed and poisoned glass – which was Mr Thompson-Bates’s, not his wife’s, although their glasses were swapped – led us to believe that Mr Thompson-Bates, who had been sitting next to Mrs Rivers at dinner on Saturday night, had seen something important, and was in fact the intended victim of that second poisoning. Mr El Maghrabi never went near enough to Mr Thompson-Bates to have been able to poison his drink, so we were down to two suspects: Mr Stone and the Dows. A further re-creation of the crime showed that only one person – Mr Stone – would have been able to slip poison into Mr Thompson-Bates’s glass at the correct time, and so we thought we had our answer.

  ‘We decided to set a trap for the murderer. But it wasn’t Mr Stone who was caught by it – it was Mr Thompson-Bates! When he attacked Hazel in the tower, we realized that he had been the man responsible for the attack that Beanie saw in the woods, and so we thought we had found our culprit. But what Hazel and I discovered this morning is that although Mr Thompson-Bates is a brute and a bully, and he was the man we saw in the woods that day, he didn’t cause Mrs Rivers’ death. Because— Oh, tell them, Hazel!’

  ‘Because he was the intended victim, only not of the second poisoning, of the first,’ I said.

  Several people exclaimed.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t follow,’ said the Inspector, quirking his eyebrows at us both.

  ‘This is nonsense,’ said Mrs Thompson-Bates, who had gone deathly pale.

  ‘I quite agree,’ said Mr Thompson-Bates. ‘You ought to look at Tom Stone again. He’s a criminal, after all!’

  ‘When you think about it, it’s odd,’ said Daisy. ‘That a man whose first impulse is to strangle a woman – a violent, angry sort of thing to do – should move on to poisoning so soon afterwards. Poisoning is a crime that’s about clever concealment and planning – Mrs Rivers’ murderer would have had to come to the gala dinner knowing that they were going to kill, since there’s no poison to be found on a dinner table!’

  ‘And Mr Stone – who is innocent – gave us a hint that this crime was very well planned,’ I said. ‘He mentioned Mr Thompson-Bates picking up a salt cellar as everyone crowded around Mrs Rivers, and slipping it in his pocket. We realized that must be how the poison had got into Mrs Rivers’ food – a doctored salt cellar! There were two salt cellars going round the table at the same time – not something anyone would particularly notice. We hadn’t been able to work it out before, you see.’

  ‘Beanie – who I admit has been rather clever during this investigation – suggested that the murderer might have passed Mrs Rivers the poison in the guise of something like salt or pepper,’ Daisy put in. ‘But we thought that must be nonsense, because of the simple fact that only Mrs Rivers was poisoned. If the poison was in a condiment, travelling all round the table, then why didn’t anyone else get ill?’

  ‘Because this is utter fantasy!’ said Mrs Thompson-Bates. ‘This is nonsense, this is—’

  ‘Because we were looking at it all wrong!’ I said, cutting her off. ‘We assumed that Mrs Rivers must have been the target, but instead she was simply extremely unlucky.’

  ‘And it really was luck!’ Daisy butted in. ‘It was sheer and absolute chance that Mrs Rivers was the only person on the table taken ill. The murderer had absolutely no way of knowing that Mr Dow loved bland school food, and so would refuse salt. They also couldn’t know beforehand that Mrs Turnbull would be missing from the table, that Mr and Mrs El Maghrabi would refuse to eat the starter at all, because it contained pork, or that Mrs Dow would leave the table in tears before the meal even began. In fact, they knew only one thing: that Mr Thompson-Bates would salt his food. I saw him do it, I remember! The murderer expected him to take the salt cellar and pour enough poison over his food to kill him. It’s much cleverer than trying it anywhere else, when you think about it! The murderer could claim that the kitchens had made a mistake. A public dinner would be the perfect place to hide a very personal crime!

  ‘But what happened was – not exactly what was supposed to. Mr T-B did dose his food liberally before passing the salt cellar to Mrs Rivers, who did the same. But although she died, he did not, because there was one thing that the poisoner could not know: that somehow Mr T-B had already discovered the plan, and had been preparing for it for months. Hazel, recite the poem we found, the one by Housman.’

  I cleared my throat. I felt jumpy with excitement, and the words tumbled out of my mouth.

  ‘They put arsenic in his meat

  And stared aghast to watch him eat;

  They poured strychnine in his cup

  And shook to see him drink it up:

  They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:

  Them it was their poison hurt.’

  ‘Don’t you see!’ said Daisy. ‘Mr Thompson-Bates is an arsenic-eater! He’s been doing it for months. That was why his form suffered, and why he’d been crashing out of tennis tournaments so early – he was feeling ill, because he was poisoning himself on purpose. And, of course, if that’s true, then it’s quite obvious who the murderer is: the only person who could have killed him at any time. Mr Thompson-Bates couldn’t trust any food or drink, you see – I’m sure he didn’t even know he had been poisoned on Saturday until Mrs Rivers began to be ill. The killer must have been close enough to him to know how much he likes to salt his food – and there’s only one person who would know som
ething like that. His wife, Mrs Thompson-Bates.’

  12

  Mrs Thompson-Bates took a gasping breath.

  ‘The key to this whole mystery is closeness,’ said Daisy, nodding. ‘We know from Lavinia’s tennis magazines that Mrs Thompson-Bates never used to go on tour with her husband before this year – but now she does. Mrs Thompson-Bates might have discovered some rather unpleasant things about her husband – that he gambles, for instance, and goes dancing with other women.’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it!’ said Mrs Thompson-Bates. ‘If you did – you ought to feel sorry for me. He’s an unfeeling brute, and he’s using my money to enjoy himself. When it could have been my tennis career, if I hadn’t married him! He doesn’t know what I’ve done for him. I’ve sacrificed so much! So I decided – I decided I wouldn’t have it any longer. We Deepdean girls have more respect for ourselves than that! I did something about it.’

  ‘I knew months ago,’ said Mr Thompson-Bates, sneering. ‘I found fly papers soaking in her room. I knew she wasn’t intending to use them for her face, and I knew what to do about it. I remembered my Housman! Cordy can’t outwit me! I know her too well.’

  ‘What about the woods?’ Daisy asked. ‘Why did you nearly strangle her?’

  ‘Because I told him I’d be going to Wimbledon this year – as a player,’ said Mrs Thompson-Bates wildly. She seemed to have decided there was nothing to lose at this point. ‘And – and he snapped!’

  She reached up and untied the scarf from around her neck, revealing a dark pattern of bruises printed across her skin. ‘He’s a beast, I tell you! I knew then that it was all over. I had to get rid of him once and for all, I tell you! I thought – I thought the gala dinner that night would be perfect.’

  ‘So Mrs Thompson-Bates put arsenic in a salt cellar,’ said Daisy. ‘She got it out of her clutch bag and put it on the table when no one was watching – Hazel and I did see her fiddling with her clutch, but we thought nothing of it, because there are plenty of innocent reasons why a lady might need to get something from her bag. Then she passed it to her left, quite innocently. Mr Dow didn’t take it, but Mr Thompson-Bates did, and so did Mrs Rivers. Mrs Thompson-Bates then sat there, waiting for her husband to drop dead – only he didn’t. It was Mrs Rivers who died instead.’