8 Top Marks for Murder
Page 23
My school friends and I suffered through many gala weekends and Leaving Prayers, which is where Deepdean’s Anniversary weekend came from. We also observed and took part in several pranks – not nearly as successful as the ones described in this book, though, and we were very much told off afterwards. So don’t get any ideas!
I loved studying poetry at school, primarily because so many old poems are about murders. Notable examples include Wordsworth’s Prelude (several good bits with dead bodies – eagle-eyed readers will have seen this one pop up already, in Arsenic For Tea), Tennyson’s Maud (many of Tennyson’s poems are about murder, actually – he’s a man after my own heart) and Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci (a female serial killer? I loved her at once). The particular poem referred to in this story is both brilliantly creepy and a good reminder that you can find out useful facts anywhere. Never stop paying attention and you’ll be amazed at what weird things you can discover …
By the way: British schools had a habit of creating offshoot schools across the world in the first part of the twentieth century. The school Amina went to in Cairo would have been one of those – and pupils there would emerge from it using very British idioms, as she does. The Sato that Mrs Thompson-Bates mentions is Jiro Sato, Japanese tennis star, and the two women Daisy refers to in her list of famous Deepdeanites are based on real heroines Dorothy Levitt, one of the first female racing drivers and known as the ‘fastest girl on earth’, and Joan Procter, Komodo dragon enthusiast and creator of London Zoo’s lizard house.
And so, on to the list of heroes and heroines who have made this book what it is.
Thank you to my experts and readers: Derrick Pounder, who told me very kindly that I was wrong about science; Alison Wong and Sarah Warry, who reminded me about nice napkins and the proper way to walk; Clare Rees, who pointed out that etiquette is NOT deportment; Dalia Elashry, Amina Youssef and Sara Sioufi, who helped bring Amina to life; Debora Robertson, who knows how things should be done; Melly Carr, the Inspector’s official cheerleader; Charlie Morris, who loves this world almost as much as I do; Wei Ming Kam, whose comments always make me laugh; Anne Miller, the queen of logic; and Kathie Booth Stevens, my most faithful reader.
Thank you to my wonderful fans, who continue to bowl me over with their commitment to the books I write! Ella Turnbull won the right to see herself at Deepdean in the Death in the Spotlight pre-order competition. My interpretation of course bears no resemblance to the real Ella or her family, but I hope she enjoys seeing her name in this book. Thanks to fan Aaminah for giving me the idea for Amina’s name (it now has a different spelling, but it’s still the same one really!). And thanks to my teacher, Mr Dow, who saved my life when I was seven, and who has nothing in common with the Mr Dow in this book apart from his name. Finally, I always enjoy hearing fans’ ideas about what the new book’s title should be – and I liked Eliza’s so much that I made it the title of Part Four.
Thanks to my wonderful Puffin Team Bunbreak, including (but not restricted to) my tireless champion of an editor Nat, my fab publicity team Harriet and Jasmine, my marketing superstar Sonia, my dazzling designer Dom, copyeditor Sarah, proofreader Sophie, editorial ninjas Steph and Wendy, and production controller Emma. Thank you to Nina Tara for another fantastic cover, and thank you to the wonderful Fritha Lindqvist, who has saved my bacon more times this year than I can count. Thanks also to the queen of agents, Gemma Cooper, who I’m so lucky to have on my side.
Thank you to all of my loving, supportive friends, especially my partner in crime Non Pratt, and to my fantastic family. Thanks especially (and again!) to my mother, Kathie Booth Stevens, who I hope I grow up to be half as good as, and to my husband, David Stevens, who absolutely did not have time to listen to me panic about this book, but who always made me feel as though he did. Oh, and one more thing: thank you to Watson the bearded dragon, my prickly little sidekick for the past ten years. I’ve never thanked her in a book before, but she’s always deserved it.
Robin Stevens, Oxford, March 2019
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1
This is the first murder that the Wells & Wong Detective Society has ever investigated, so it is a good thing Daisy bought me a new casebook. The last one was finished after we solved The Case of Lavinia’s Missing Tie. The solution to that, of course, was that Clementine stole it in revenge for Lavinia punching her in the stomach during lacrosse, which was Lavinia’s revenge for Clementine telling everyone Lavinia came from a broken home. I suspect that the solution to this new case may be more complex.
I suppose I ought to give some explanation of ourselves, in honour of the new casebook. Daisy Wells is the President of the Detective Society, and I, Hazel Wong, am its Secretary. Daisy says that this makes her Sherlock Holmes, and me Watson. This is probably fair. After all, I am much too short to be the heroine of this story, and who ever heard of a Chinese Sherlock Holmes?
That’s why it’s so funny that it was me who found Miss Bell’s dead body. In fact, I think Daisy is still upset about it, though of course she pretends not to be. You see, Daisy is a heroine-like person, and so it should be her that these things happen to.
Look at Daisy and you think you know exactly the sort of person she is – one of those dainty, absolutely English girls with blue eyes and golden hair; the kind who’ll gallop across muddy fields in the rain clutching hockey sticks and then sit down and eat ten iced buns at tea. I, on the other hand, bulge all over like Bibendum the Michelin Man; my cheeks are moony-round and my hair and eyes are stubbornly dark brown.
I arrived from Hong Kong part way through second form, and even then, when we were all still shrimps (shrimps, for this new casebook, is what we call the little lower-form girls), Daisy was already famous throughout Deepdean School. She rode horses, was part of the lacrosse team, and was a member of the Drama Society. The Big Girls took notice of her, and by May the entire school knew that the Head Girl herself had called Daisy a ‘good sport’.
But that is only the outside of Daisy, the jolly-good-show part that everyone sees. The inside of her is not jolly-good-show at all.
It took me quite a while to discover that.
2
Daisy wants me to explain what happened this term up to the time I found the body. She says that is what proper detectives do – add up the evidence first – so I will. She also says that a good Secretary should keep her casebook on her at all times to be ready to write up important events as they happen. It was no good reminding her that I do that anyway.
The most important thing to happen in those first few weeks of the autumn term was the Detective Society, and it was Daisy who began that. Daisy is all for making up societies for things. Last year we had the Pacifism Society (dull) and then the Spiritualism Society (less dull, but then Lavinia smashed her mug during a séance, Beanie fainted and Matron banned spiritualism altogether).
But that was all last year, when we were still shrimps. We can’t be messing about with silly things like ghosts now that we are grown-up third formers – that was what Daisy said when she came back at the beginning of this term having discovered crime.
I was quite glad. Not that I was ever afraid of ghosts, exactly. Everyone knows there aren’t any. Even so, there are enough ghost stories going round our school to horrify anybody. The most famous of our ghosts is Verity Abraham, the girl who committed suicide off the Gym balcony the term before I arrived at Deepdean, but there are also ghosts of an ex-mistress who locked herself into one of the music rooms and starved herself to death, and a little first-form shrimp who drowned in the pond.
As I said, Daisy decided that this year we were going to be detectives. She arrived at House with her tuck box full of books with sinister, shadowy covers and titles like Peril at End House and Mystery Mile. Matron confiscated them one by one, but Daisy always managed to find more.
We started the Detective Society in the first week of term. The two
of us made a deadly secret pact that no one else, not even our dorm mates, Kitty, Beanie and Lavinia, could be told about it. It did make me feel proud, just me and Daisy having a secret. It was awfully fun too, creeping about behind the others’ backs and pretending to be ordinary when all the time we knew we were detectives on a secret mission to obtain information.
Daisy set all our first detective missions. In that first week we crept into the other third-form dorm and read Clementine’s secret journal, and then Daisy chose a first former and set us to find out everything we could about her. This, Daisy told me, was practice – just like memorizing the licences of every motor car we saw.
In our second week there was the case of why King Henry (our name for this year’s Head Girl, Henrietta Trilling, because she is so remote and regal, and has such beautiful chestnut curls) wasn’t at Prayers one morning. But it only took a few hours before everyone, not just us, knew that she had been sent a telegram saying that her aunt had died suddenly that morning.
‘Poor thing,’ said Kitty, when we found out. Kitty has the next-door bed to Daisy’s in our dorm, and Daisy has designated her a Friend of the Detective Society, even though she is still not allowed to know about it. She has smooth, light brown hair and masses of freckles, and she keeps something hidden in the bottom of her tuck box that I thought at first was a torture device but turned out to be eyelash curlers. She is as mad about gossip as Daisy, though for less scientific reasons. ‘Poor old King Henry. She hasn’t had much luck. She was Verity Abraham’s best friend, after all, and you know what happened to Verity. She hasn’t been the same since’.
‘I don’t,’ said Beanie, who sleeps next to me. Her real name is Rebecca but we call her Beanie because she is very small, and everything frightens her. Lessons frighten her most of all, though. She says that when she looks at a page all the letters and numbers get up and do a jig until she can’t think straight. ‘What did happen to Verity?’
‘She killed herself,’ said Kitty in annoyance. ‘Jumped off the Gym balcony last year. Come on, Beans.’
‘Oh!’ said Beanie. ‘Of course. I always thought she tripped.’
Sometimes Beanie is quite slow.
Something else happened at the beginning of term that turned out to be very important indeed: The One arrived.
THE BEGINNING
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First published 2019
Text copyright © Robin Stevens, 2019
Cover, maps and illustrations copyright © Nina Tara, 2019
The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted.
Illustrations and type by www.ninataradesign.com
The featured poem is ‘Terence, this is stupid stuff’, poem LXII of A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman, first published by Treubner in 1896
ISBN: 978-0-241-34841-3
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