Murder Most Unladylike: A Wells and Wong Mystery (2 page)

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.

You see, at the end of last year Miss Nelson, the Deputy Headmistress and our dull old Music and Art mistress, retired. We were expecting her to be replaced by someone else quite as uninteresting – but the new Music and Art master, Mr Reid, was not uninteresting at all. He was also not old.

Mr Reid had rugged cheekbones and a dashing moustache, and he slicked his hair back with brillantine. He looked exactly like a film star, although nobody could agree on which one. Kitty thought Douglas Fairbanks Jr, and Clementine said Clark Gable, but only because Clementine is obsessed with Clark Gable. Really though, it did not matter. Mr Reid was a man, and he was not Mr MacLean (our dotty, unwashed old Reverend whom Kitty calls Mr MacDirty), and so the whole school fell in love with him at once.

A deadly serious half-secret Society dedicated to the worship of Mr Reid was established by Kitty. At its first meeting, he was rechristened The One. We all had to go about making the secret signal at each other (index finger raised, right eye winking) whenever we were in His Presence.

The One had barely been at Deepdean for a week when he caused the biggest shock since Verity last year.

You see, before this term, the whole school knew that Miss Bell (our Science mistress) and Miss Parker (our Maths mistress) had a secret. They lived together in Miss Parker’s little flat in town, which had a spare room in it. The spare room was the secret. I did not understand when Daisy first told me about the spare room; now we are in the third form, though, of course I see exactly what it must mean. It has something to do with Miss Parker’s hair, cut far too short even to be fashionable, and the way she and Miss Bell used to pass their cigarettes from one to the other during bunbreaks last year.

There were no cigarettes being passed this term, though, because on the first day Miss Bell took one look at The One and fell for him as madly as Kitty did. This was a terrible shock. Miss Bell was not considered a beauty. She was very tucked-in and buttoned-up and severe in her white lab coat. And she was poor. Miss Bell wore the same three threadbare blouses on rotation, cut her own hair and did secretarial work for Miss Griffin after school hours for extra pay. Everyone rather pitied her, and we assumed The One would too. We were astonished when he did not.

‘Something has clearly
happened
between them,’ Clementine told our form at the end of the first week of term. ‘I went to the science lab during bunbreak and I came upon Miss Bell and The One
canoodling
. It was really shocking!’

‘I bet they weren’t, really,’ said Lavinia scornfully. Lavinia is part of our dorm, too – she is a big, heavy girl with a stubborn mop of dark hair, and most of the time she is unhappy.

‘They were!’ said Clementine. ‘I know what it looks like. I saw my brother doing the same thing last month.’

I couldn’t stop myself blushing. Imagining stiff, well-starched Miss Bell
canoodling
(whatever that meant) was extraordinarily awkward.

Then Miss Parker got to hear about it. Miss Parker is truly ferocious, with chopped-short black hair and a furious voice that comes bellowing out of her tiny body like a foghorn. The row was immense. Almost the whole school heard it, and the upshot was that Miss Bell was not allowed to live in the little flat any more.

Then, at the beginning of the second week of term, everything changed again. We could barely keep up with it all. Suddenly The One no longer seemed to want to spend time with Miss Bell. Instead, he began to take up with Miss Hopkins.

Miss Hopkins is our Games mistress. She is round and relentlessly cheerful (unless you happen not to be good at Games) and she marches about the school corridors brandishing a hockey stick, her athletic brown hair always coming down from its fashionable clipped-back waves. She
is
pretty, and (I think) quite young, so it was not at all surprising that The One should notice her – it was only shocking that he should jilt Miss Bell to do it.

So now it was The One and Miss Hopkins seen canoodling in form rooms, and all Miss Bell could do was storm past them whenever she saw them, her lips pursed and her glare freezing.

General Deepdean opinion was against Miss Bell. Miss Hopkins was pretty while Miss Bell was not, and Miss Hopkins’s father was a very important magistrate in Gloucestershire while Miss Bell’s was nothing important at all. But I could not help being on Miss Bell’s side. After all, it was not
her
fault that The One had jilted her, and she could not help being poor. Now that she could not stay in the flat, of course, she was poorer than ever, and that made me worry.

The only thing Miss Bell had to cheer her up was the Deputy Headmistress job, and even that was not the consolation it should have been. You see, Miss Griffin had to appoint a new Deputy, and after a few weeks the rumour went round that Miss Bell was about to be chosen. This ought to have been lucky – once she was formally appointed, Miss Bell’s money worries would vanish for good – but all it really meant was that the mistresses who were not chosen began to despise her. There were two others really in the running. The first was Miss Tennyson, our English mistress – that is her name, really, although she is no relation to the famous one. If you’ve seen that painting of the Lady of Shalott drooping in her boat, you have seen Miss Tennyson. Her hair is always down round her face, and she is as drippy as underdone cake. The second was Miss Lappet, our History and Latin mistress, who is grey and useless and shaped like an overstuffed cushion, but
thinks
she is Miss Griffin’s most trusted adviser. They were both simply fuming about the Deputy Headmistress job, and snubbed Miss Bell in the corridor whenever they saw her.

And then the murder happened.

3

I say that it was me who found the body of Miss Bell, and it was, but I never would have been there at all if it hadn’t been for those crime novels of Daisy’s. Matron’s fondness for confiscation meant that it was no good trying to read them up at House, so Daisy took to hanging around down at school in the evenings. She joined the Literature Society, slipped
Whose Body?
between the pages of
Paradise Lost
, and sat there peacefully reading it while the others talked. I joined too, and sat at the back of the room writing up my Detective Society case notes. Everyone thought I was writing poetry.

It was after Lit. Soc, on Monday 29th October, that it happened. After-school societies end at 5.20, but afterwards Daisy and I hung back in the empty form room so that she could finish
The Man in the Queue
. Daisy was absorbed, but I was jumpy with worry that we might be late for dinner up at House and thus incur the awful wrath of Matron. I looked about for my pullover and then remembered with annoyance where I had left it.

‘Bother,’ I said. ‘Daisy, my pullover’s in the Gym. Wait for me, I’ll just be a minute.’

Daisy, nose in her book as usual, shrugged vaguely to show that she had heard and continued reading. I looked at my wristwatch again and saw that it was 5.40. If I ran, I’d have just enough time, as getting up to House from Old Wing Entrance takes seven minutes, and dinner is at six o’clock exactly.

I pelted along the empty, chalk-smelling corridor of Old Wing, and then turned right down the high, black and white tiled Library corridor, my feet echoing in the hush and my chest heaving. Even after a year at Deepdean, when I run, I still huff and puff in a way that rude Miss Hopkins calls ‘determinedly unladylike’.

I passed the mistresses’ common room, the library, Mr MacLean’s study, The One’s cubby and the Hall, and then turned right again onto the corridor that leads to the Gym. There’s a school legend that the Gym is haunted by the ghost of Verity Abraham. When I first heard it I was younger, and I believed it. I imagined Verity all bloody, with her long hair hanging down in front of her face, wearing her pinafore and tie and holding a lacrosse stick.

Even now that I am older and not a shrimp any more, just knowing that I am on my way to the Gym gives me the shivers. It does not help that the Gym corridor is awful. It’s packed full of dusty, broken bits of old school furniture that stand up like people in the gloom. That evening all the lights were off, and everything was smudged in murky shades of grey and brown. I ran very fast down the corridor, pushed open the doors to the Gym and galumphed in, wheezing.

And there on the floor was Miss Bell.

Our Gym, in case you have not seen it for yourself, is very large, with bars and beams all folded up against the walls and wide glass windows. There’s a terrifyingly high-up viewing balcony on the side nearest the main door (we are not allowed to go up there alone in case we fall, but since Verity jumped off it no one wants to), and a little room under that for us to change and leave kit in, which we call the Cupboard.

Miss Bell was lying beneath the balcony, quite still, with her arm thrown back behind her head, and her legs folded under her. In my first moment of shock it did not occur to me that she was dead. I thought I was about to get an awful ticking-off for being somewhere I oughtn’t, and nearly ran away again before she caught sight of me. But then I wondered – what was Miss Bell doing, lying there like that?

I ran forward and knelt down beside her. I hesitated before touching her, because I had never touched a mistress before, but in the event it only felt like touching a human being.

I patted the shoulder of her white lab coat, hoping most awfully that she would open her eyes and sit up and scold me for being in the Gym after hours. But instead, my patting made Miss Bell’s head loll away from me. Her glasses slid down off her nose and I saw that what I had thought was only a shadow behind her head was actually a dark stain the size of my handkerchief. Some of the stain had spread to the collar of her lab coat, and that part of it was red. I put out my finger and touched the stain, and my finger came away covered in blood.

I scrambled backwards, scrubbing my hand against my skirt in horror. It left a long dark smear, and I looked at that and then at Miss Bell, who had still not moved, and felt sick as anything. I had never seen a dead body up close before, but I was quite certain now that Miss Bell was dead.

What I ought to do in the circumstances was scream, I thought, but everything was so dark and quiet around me that I couldn’t. What I truly wanted to do was tear off my skirt, just to get that blood away from me, but my Deepdean training rose up inside me, making the thought of running about the school half naked somehow far worse than being alone with a corpse.

As I thought this, I realized that Miss Bell really
was
dead, and I was alone with her body. I suddenly remembered the ghost of Verity Abraham, and thought that perhaps it was
her
who had killed Miss Bell, pushing her off from exactly the same spot she had jumped from a year ago . . . and now she might be waiting to do the same to me. It was silly and childish, but all the hairs prickled up on the back of my neck and, Deepdean training or no, I jumped to my feet and ran out of the Gym as fast as I could – as if Miss Bell was going to leap up and run after me.

4

I was in such a tearing hurry that as I ran back along the corridor I crashed into several abandoned chairs and scraped my knee quite badly. But I hardly noticed until later. My footsteps were echoing all around me, and dark odd-shaped shadows rose up at the edges of my vision; my breath caught in my throat. I ran all the way back along Library corridor to Old Wing and found Daisy, at last, coming out of the form room where I’d left her.