Murder Most Unladylike: A Wells and Wong Mystery (10 page)

It was late on a Thursday afternoon, and Miss Lappet was struggling to give us a lesson about Charles I. ‘Don’t be so slow,’ she snapped at Beanie, who had just given her third wrong answer in a row. ‘Great heavens, I might as well be speaking Hottentot. Before I go quite mad – and I
shall
, mark my words – I don’t suppose by some miracle Daisy will prove to know when – Lord grant me patience – the Long Parliament was first called?’

Daisy was idly drawing something in her exercise book. Caught off guard, she looked up. ‘Third of November 1640,’ she said without even pausing to think.

Miss Lappet gaped at her. ‘Why – Daisy!’ she gasped, amazed, sitting down in her chair with a heavy plump. ‘That’s the very day! However did you remember that?’

I happened to be looking at Daisy at the time, and for the merest of seconds something rather like panic flashed across her face. Then she blinked and the look disappeared, replaced by vague wide-eyed surprise. ‘Oh! Did I really?’ she asked breathlessly. ‘What luck! Fancy that, Miss Lappet. I must be learning something after all.’

‘Wonders shall never cease,’ said Miss Lappet. ‘Now if you could only recreate that in your essays they might become almost respectable.’

Daisy blinked up at Miss Lappet. ‘I’m afraid that’s
quite
out of the question, Miss,’ she said in tones of deep despair.

‘Of course it is,’ sighed Miss Lappet as the rest of the second form giggled supportively.

The lesson continued, but I was thinking about Daisy’s answer. She had known it so very quickly – quicker than even I could manage. If it had been anyone else, I would have thought them a swot – but Daisy Wells did not swot. Everyone knew that.

Nevertheless, I could not help suspecting that she had known the answer. It had not just been a lucky guess. Over the next few weeks I watched Daisy closely in all our lessons, and as I did so I became convinced that, far from being someone who struggled just enough for the mistresses to be encouraging and the other girls to think her a card, Daisy knew everything she was ever asked.

She wanted to seem a fool, and she was pausing or flubbing her responses because she had decided that a particular fact was not something she ought to remember. The Daisy Wells we all pashed on was, in short, not real at all, but a very clever part. I watched her running about, shrieking, turning cartwheels and looking as though she did not care about anything apart from beating St Simmonds at lacrosse on Saturday, and I began to see that all the time there was a different Daisy underneath. A Daisy who not only knew the name of every one of the men who had helped Guy Fawkes in his plot but the reason why Belinda Vance in the fifth form was staying so late at school, and what Elsie Drew-Peters said to Heather Montefiore to make her cry. She was always gathering up information on people – not to blackmail them or do anything awful like that, that’s not Daisy at all – but just to know things.

Daisy always has to
know
things.

5

As soon as we got back up to House after Games that afternoon, Daisy began to work on her top-secret plan. Thursday afternoon tea, which is served in the House Dining Room to all girls not at Socs that day, is cream buns. I had two, which was blissful, but I could not help noticing that Daisy spent most of her tea not eating at all. She was deep in conversation with the fifth former Alice Murgatroyd. This was odd. There were lots of rumours going round about Alice – that she has a secret cigarette stash in her tuck box, for example – and it is simply not usual for girls from different forms to spend afternoon tea together. But just as other people began to wonder at what was going on, Daisy and Alice nodded to each other and Daisy came back to sit down at the third-form table. She nudged Kitty, and whispered something, and Kitty whispered to Beanie.

‘Psst!’ hissed Beanie, leaning over to me. ‘Midnight feast tonight! Daisy says so.’

I nudged Lavinia, and passed the message on, but inside I was surprised. Surely Daisy was too busy with her plan to bother about things like midnight feasts. There is an awful lot to decide on for a midnight feast – what prank to play on which other dorm, what cakes to ask everyone to bring, and when to set the alarm clock under your pillow for. Then there is the matter of secrecy. At Deepdean I have learned that it is very important, when you are having a midnight feast, not to let anything slip about it. Otherwise the other dorms know that a prank is coming and prepare themselves – or, worse, plan a counter-prank. But that afternoon Daisy fired off order after whispered order, and soon all five of us knew exactly what we had to do.

The whole of our dorm kept exemplary silence about the upcoming feast, although at toothbrushes Beanie got quite giggly when the prefect on duty (it was King Henry that evening) told us to go to bed. Daisy had to wink sternly to quieten her down, and we were lucky that King Henry was too preoccupied to notice. Then we all lay down in our beds demurely, and King Henry clicked off the light and closed the door. The block of yellow light falling onto Lavinia’s bed vanished, and the dorm went dark.

I must have fallen asleep at once.

I was woken by people shuffling about. There was a
thump
and a giggle from Beanie, then Lavinia hissed, ‘Beans! Don’t knock into me like that, you idiot!’

‘Sorry, Lavinia,’ whispered Beanie, and tripped over something else.

I sat up. Someone had pulled back the curtain at the far end of the dorm, and in the moonlight (rather dim, as the moon was mostly behind the clouds) I could see several people huddled round Daisy’s bed. Beanie must have fallen over Lavinia on the way there; they were now crouched on the floor picking up their cakes.

I climbed out of bed, put on my slippers and pulled open my tuck box. The week before I had received two parcels. One was a green and gold Fortnum and Mason’s gift box with a note that said,
From your father. Don’t tell your mother.
The other was wrapped in brown paper, smothered with stamps, and had come with a note in our chauffeur’s painstaking print:
Your esteemed mother sends you this gift. She wishes you to not inform your esteemed father
. My mother always makes the servants write for her – I don’t know why, she can write perfectly well herself since my father taught her.

The brown paper parcel was full of lotus-paste moon cakes from our kitchen. They are my favourite food, sweet and heavy on my tongue, like nothing here in England; but all the same I wish my mother would not send them. Lavinia saw one once, and for weeks after told everyone that I ate heathen pies. Luckily, the Fortnum’s box had proper English walnut cake in it, and not even Lavinia could sniff at that. I took it out, stuffed the moon cakes back into my tuck box, under a pile of Angela Brazil books, and went to join the feast.

‘Welcome,’ whispered Daisy, waving her torch in my face. ‘What have you got?’

‘Walnut cake,’ I whispered back.

‘Excellent,’ said Daisy. ‘Add it to the rest of the pile. Once Beanie and Lavinia get over here – come
on
, Beanie – we can begin.’

‘Sorry,’ whispered Beanie, hurrying over. ‘I’ve got chocolate cake and tongue, if that helps.’

‘It does,’ said Daisy grandly. ‘Now let’s eat – I’m starving.’

For a while, everyone ate in silence.

‘Pass the tongue,’ said Daisy, with her mouth full.

(Privately, I cannot understand the way English people eat their meat – in dull sauceless lumps which all taste exactly the same – but I have learned to swallow it down as quickly as possible and say ‘Delicious!’ at the end of it.)

Lavinia passed over the tin. ‘Tongue is nice with chocolate cake,’ she said as she did so. ‘You wouldn’t think it would be, but it is. You should try it.’

‘I like it on biscuits,’ said Kitty, munching. ‘Daisy, what are we doing for a prank?’

‘Ah,’ said Daisy, ‘well. That’s been taken care of already. At this very moment there’s a nice cold bucket of water balanced above the washroom door. It’ll give the other third-form dorm a nice surprise tomorrow morning when they go for their showers!’

We all giggled appreciatively. The other dorm had taken to leaping up as soon as the wake-up bell rang and hogging the showers just so they could be down at breakfast first and get dorm points from Matron for promptness. It was odious of them and we had all been dying to get them back for it.

‘We ought to do something else, though,’ said Kitty. ‘Right now. Otherwise it’s not a proper midnight feast.’

‘If only it was last year,’ said Daisy offhandedly. ‘Remember all those creepy things we used to do? Of course they were quite silly really, and we couldn’t do them
now
, but—’

‘Oh, but why not?’ cried Kitty. ‘We could try levitating Beanie again – remember when we did that?’

‘Oh no,’ wailed Beanie. ‘Why is it always me who’s the one being levitated? I hate it—’

‘Because you’re the littlest, Beans,’ said Lavinia. ‘And besides, it’s such fun when you squeal.’

‘Well, I won’t do it,’ said Beanie, trying to be firm. ‘I won’t. You can’t make me.’

‘You know,’ said Kitty, ‘I’ve still got that old Ouija board in the bottom of my tuck box. We could have a go with that, if you like.’

‘Oh no,’ gasped Beanie, ‘not a séance, please. It gives me the creeps.’

‘Then you oughtn’t to have said no to the levitating, Beanie,’ said Lavinia. ‘Kitty, get out the board.’

‘Oh please,’ wailed Beanie. ‘Please no!’

‘Shh!’ said Kitty. ‘You’ll wake Matron!’

They both quietened down at once. Nobody wanted to have the midnight feast ruined by an angry Matron.

Daisy, I noticed, had taken no part in this. She was sitting back on her heels watching the argument. As I knew perfectly well, this meant that she was Up To Something.

Kitty went rooting through her tuck box, and after a minute or so gave a satisfied cry. Her Ouija board is from our Spiritualist Society days. It is just a bit of red cardboard, really, with black curly letters and numbers painted on it; and a yellow eye in the very middle of the board where the sharp triangular counter rests at the beginning. I always hated that eye, which glares up from the board as though it is watching you. To be truthful, I feel quite the same as Beanie about séances, although I never let on to Daisy about it.

Anyway, Daisy balanced her torch on her knees, so that its light fell onto the board, and we all rested our fingers on the counter, as you are supposed to. For a while, nothing happened. I listened to us all breathing, and stared and stared at the counter until the painted eye beneath it seemed to glow up at me.

Then, all at once, the counter moved. Kitty gave a little squeal, and quite a few of us jumped, so the counter jiggled about and the torchlight jolted.

‘I don’t like it,’ Beanie whispered as we all watched the counter begin to slide upwards. ‘I don’t like it, I don’t like it, I don’t—’

‘Shut it, Beanie,’ hissed Lavinia fiercely, and Beanie was silent. The counter gave a little jump and came to rest over the letter H.

‘H!’ said Daisy. ‘Something at last! Quick, Hazel, write it down!’

I sat back and snatched up my casebook, very glad to look away from that eye.

H
, I wrote.

Meanwhile, the counter had moved left, to E, and was now on its way right again. I barely needed to wait for it to stop – L, of course. But then, just as I was about to automatically put down a second L, the counter gave a jerk and went surging off to the left to land, clear as anything, on the P.

Beanie let out a little squeak, and Kitty shushed her. My mouth felt very dry. But the board was not finished yet. Right it went, all the way, to M, U, R, and then back again to D, E, and finally came to rest on the R.

HELP. MURDER.

We looked around at each other. We were all pale, even Daisy – although, as I know well, it is never any good trying to work out what Daisy is really thinking.

It was Kitty who finally spoke.

‘Who is this?’ she whispered. ‘Who are you?’

The counter wobbled. Then off it went again, slower this time:
M-I-S-S-B-E-L
—

I had a single moment of utter horror – and then, of course, I realized what was going on: Daisy must be moving the counter. I felt strangely cheated – just as I did when my father took me to the circus in Kowloon and I realized that their mermaid was only a sad little hairless monkey with a fish tail attached. As much as I didn’t want the shade of Miss Bell to come back and haunt me, I was annoyed when I realized that our ghost was in fact just Daisy. So
this
was her secret plan! I wished, once again, that she would tell me things beforehand.

The counter was still moving.

‘Miss Bell!’ said Kitty, who always liked to be the one to communicate with the other side. ‘But you resigned – you’re not dead.’

YES. DEAD.

Beanie squeaked.

‘Shush, Beanie! You’ll have Matron up here! How—’

NO TIME. HELP. MURDER.

‘You were murdered?’

MURDER.

‘By who?’

WHOM.

‘I think she means,
by whom
,’ said Daisy. She must have thought she was being very funny.

‘It really
is
Miss Bell!’ whispered Beanie. ‘Oh . . .’

Then she fainted, very quietly, onto Kitty’s shoulder.

NO TIME. MURDERER UNKNOWN. CANNOT REST.

‘But what can we do?’ asked Kitty.

TELL ALL. GUILT WILL OUT. HELP – Q – T – B – N – 2 –

After that the counter slid off the bottom of the board and no one could get any more sense out of it. Beanie had come out of her faint and was crying quietly.

‘You’re all babies. I wasn’t afraid at all,’ said Lavinia, and then she climbed into her bed, pulled her blanket all the way up over her head and refused to say anything more.

The midnight feast seemed to be over and I crept back to my own bed. Beanie refused to sleep alone and had to be let into Kitty’s bed for comfort. We could hear them whispering quietly to each other under the bedclothes.