Murder Most Unladylike: A Wells and Wong Mystery (20 page)

2

Daisy plunged along so fast that I could not keep up with her. I was still puffing along Library corridor when she reached the end and flicked round the corner into New Wing. There was a shriek, a
thump
, then a chorus of horrified gasps, and I heard Daisy’s voice, high with panic, crying, ‘Oh, I’m so terribly sorry . . . Oh, Miss Griffin – oh, oh, here, let me—’

I dashed round the corner and came face to face with a catastrophe. The corridor was absolutely littered with things – papers and exercise books, hairpins and bull’s eyes and pencils – all clattering and rolling about. Daisy, in her haste, had careened straight into the neat and tidy form of Miss Griffin. I gaped in horror.

Daisy was on her knees, frantically scooping things up again. Miss Griffin’s carefully set hair was disarranged and her expression was horrible to see. Everyone began to gather round, but Miss Griffin rapped out, ‘Move along, girls,’ and they all fled in terror.

I got down next to Daisy. She was sliding about over the tiles, picking up papers and stammering, ‘Miss Griffin, I am so terribly sorry, please believe me,’ but Miss Griffin did not look as though she believed anything much.

I picked up a letter, bending its corner, and Miss Griffin snapped, ‘Don’t touch that, Wong. Oh, out of the way, both of you, so you don’t cause any more damage.’ I could tell she was terribly angry. I had never heard her snarl at a girl like that before.

Daisy, trembling, presented Miss Griffin with the pile of papers she had already collected and we both shuffled backwards to begin scooping up the things from Daisy’s bag. Miss Griffin, meanwhile, knelt down in her impeccable tweed skirt and gathered up papers as though she was one of Deepdean’s maids. It made me burn with shame. I felt as if we had both let the school down terribly. Daisy kept stammering out how sorry she was, but Miss Griffin was in no mood to listen.

‘Wells,
enough
. This does not become you at all. Deepdean girls should accept the blame for their mistakes with the same grace and quiet dignity that they show in the rest of their lives. I do not expect to see my girls tearing about the school like barbarians. Quite frankly, I am disappointed in you. You may go.’

‘Yes, Miss Griffin,’ said Daisy weakly, and she curtseyed, though slightly lopsidedly, because she had the contents of her book bag loose in her arms. Then we both scuttled away, feeling like the smallest of small shrimps.

‘I thought I was for it,’ Daisy whispered to me once we were far enough down the corridor. ‘Oh Lord, though, look at the time. We shall be fearfully late for Art.’

We looked round once more, to make sure that Miss Griffin was not watching us (she wasn’t – she had just bent down to pick up something else), and then we ran for it.

I always enjoy Art. This is less to do with the Art itself, and more to do with the fact that to The One, Hong Kong is part of a magical, made-up place called The Orient; because I am from there, he thinks I must be a natural artist. He seems to imagine that everyone in Hong Kong lies about on bright purple divans, in rooms papered with that Chinese print you can get in Woolworth’s, with peacocks wandering about at our feet. Of course this is not true, and I am not a natural artist at all, but The One hasn’t noticed. So I copy Chinese dragons out of books I find in the library, and The One is delighted.

That day I was busily colouring in one of my dragons when I noticed that Daisy had stopped work and was scrabbling about in her book bag with an awful expression on her face.

‘Is something wrong?’ I whispered.

In answer, Daisy took her bag and tipped the whole thing up over her desk. Pencils, rubbers and bits of string rained down, and Daisy began to hunt through them, picking each thing up and then tossing it aside again a moment later.

‘Hazel,’ she said, still hunting away frantically, ‘Hazel,
I can’t find the earring
.’

I went cold. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure,’ Daisy hissed, gesturing at the contents of her bag. There certainly was no gold earring to be seen.

My last look back at Miss Griffin played like a film-reel in my head. She had been bending down over something small lying on the tiles, looking at it intently. I glanced at Daisy, and saw that she was having exactly the same thought as me.

‘What shall we do?’ she gasped. ‘Miss Griffin will put it straight into Davey Jones.’
Davey Jones
is our name for Miss Griffin’s box of confiscated items. It sits in her office and we call it that because you know that once something’s gone in there you’ll never see it again. ‘We’ll never get it back. How will we confront our suspects if we don’t have the earring? Oh, Hazel, our beautiful case. It’s ruined!’

‘Well,’ I said, surprising myself by what came out of my mouth next, ‘if we need it, we’ll just have to get it back. We’ll go to Miss Griffin’s office at lunch and you can tell her that it’s a present for your mother, or something. It’s worth a try, anyway. After all, Miss Griffin likes you.’

‘She did until I ran into her half an hour ago,’ said Daisy. ‘But still, it’s an excellent idea, Hazel! Whatever has got into you?’

‘I want to solve the case,’ I said. ‘I want the person who killed Miss Bell and Miss Tennyson punished. You said yourself how important it was.’

Daisy raised her eyebrows. ‘Yes, but – Hazel Wong, encouraging
me
to tell a lie! I never thought I’d see the day. You’re right, though. We need that earring, and we’re going to get it back!’

3

Daisy and I made for Miss Griffin’s office, on the top floor of New Wing, at the end of lunch. We should not really have been in New Wing out of lesson time, of course, but things were still so mixed up after Miss Tennyson’s death that no one had time to notice us running by except the dark-haired chief of police, who gave us a
look
as we passed him on our way up the stairs by the founder’s portrait. I hoped we were looking innocent.

The door to Miss Griffin’s office was closed. Daisy and I grimaced at each other encouragingly and then Daisy knocked on the door. My heart was hammering as we waited to hear Miss Griffin’s voice, but the person who answered our knock was not Miss Griffin at all. It was Miss Lappet.

‘Come in!’ she called, and there was a hurried clinking noise. Daisy and I looked at each other in a panic. Neither of us had expected this. Asking Miss Griffin for the earring was terrifying enough, but asking one of our three remaining suspects for the evidence that might prove that she had done it – that was more frightening altogether.

‘Come in!’ Miss Lappet called again, and this time her voice was tinged with annoyance.

‘We’ll just have to bluff it!’ Daisy whispered to me. ‘This could be a way to finally eliminate her!’

Or prove that she did the murders
, I thought. I was about to tell Daisy not to go in, but she was already pushing open the door.

Daisy is a marvellous actress, and at that moment I was glad. My heart was drumming painfully in my chest, and my knees were wobbling, but Daisy behaved as though nothing was wrong at all. ‘Oh! Miss Lappet!’ she said, as though it was a jolly surprise. ‘Good afternoon!’

‘Good afternoon, Daisy, Hazel,’ said Miss Lappet. She was at the desk where Miss Bell used to work, next to Miss Griffin’s big green leather one, and she was squinting at us. Her grey hair was fluffy, her glasses were askew and there was a stain on her enormous blouse front. She looked a harmless fright. But appearances, I had learned, could be deceptive. I made sure to stop a safe distance away from her, halfway across Miss Griffin’s green and blue patterned carpet, and let Daisy speak.

‘Miss Lappet,’ she said, ‘this is a terribly awful thing to ask of you. I really ought to wait until Miss Griffin comes back – it’s a rather difficult request—’

That got to Miss Lappet, of course.

‘As you can see, today I am acting as Miss Griffin’s secretary while she deals with the police. Anything you can say to Miss Griffin, you can say to me, dear,’ she said.

‘Oh!’ Daisy said, ‘In that case . . . I’m sure Miss Griffin told you that I bumped into her this morning. I feel like such an imbecile, I shall
never
forgive myself for it, but – well, I dropped something when I crashed into her. It was something I oughtn’t to have had, but Mummy’s birthday is next week. I know it was terribly wrong of me to have her present down at school, and as soon as I found it was missing I realized that the only thing to do was come to Miss Griffin and simply beg her to let me have it back.’

‘How sweet,’ said Miss Lappet, slurring the W slightly. ‘What was it, exactly?’

I braced myself, feeling as though I was about to be tackled by a very large Big Girl wielding a hockey stick.

‘Well, I bought Mummy a pair of gold earrings, but when I looked in Art I could only find one of them still in their box. It’s two long teardrops, one above the other.’

I waited for Miss Lappet to jump up from her seat and shout, or faint, or hurl Miss Griffin’s paperweight at us. Instead, she merely looked confused. ‘But, Daisy dear, what an odd coincidence. How strange. Are you sure? Miss Griffin has just found her own earring that has been missing all week – a gold one just like that. She showed it to me a minute ago, and here it is still in her desk.’

And she took something out of one of the desk’s many drawers and held it out for us to see. There on her palm sat the earring that we had found in the tunnel, its two gold tears shining. ‘You see, this is Miss Griffin’s, dear,’ Miss Lappet told Daisy. ‘Are you sure the earring you lost was like this one?’

Daisy blinked. Then she said, very quickly, ‘Oh no, you’re right. How annoying! I’m terribly sorry to have bothered you. Come along, Hazel, we ought to be going. I’m sure Miss Lappet is very busy. Come
along
, Hazel.’

She had to drag me out of the room. I couldn’t take my eyes off the gold earring in Miss Lappet’s hand.
It couldn’t be
, I thought,
It couldn’t be!
But it was. There the earring sat, looking ordinary as anything, except that what it meant was something utterly terrible.

Miss Lappet was not the murderer.

Neither were Miss Hopkins or The One.

It was
Miss Griffin
.

4

Miss Griffin had done it. Why hadn’t we thought of her as a suspect?

Daisy had me by the wrist. She was dragging me along somewhere, and I let her. I didn’t much care about anything except what was going on in my head.

Miss Griffin had done it
. Of course, as soon as we knew that Miss Lappet’s supposed alibi was useless, we should have realized that Miss Griffin’s had vanished as well – but we had never even considered her. I thought again about that conversation Daisy had overheard between Miss Griffin and Miss Tennyson. Why hadn’t we realized how sinister Miss Griffin’s request had been?

There I was, minding my own business in an opportune listening place in Library corridor
, Daisy had told me,
and Miss Griffin came up to Miss Tennyson. ‘Miss Tennyson,’ she said, ‘I need to talk to you. You haven’t quite finished helping me with that little project of ours. You were so late to my office on Monday evening that we barely got a thing done.’

‘Yes, but I made up for it on Tuesday and Wednesday,’ Miss Tennyson had said nervously.

‘Ah, but not quite,’ replied Miss Griffin. ‘There’s still just a bit of work that needs to be finished.’

Honestly, Hazel, Miss Tennyson went as white as a sheet. She was shaking. ‘Can we perhaps schedule another session?’ asked Miss Griffin. ‘There’s just a little more work I’d like you to do – perhaps this evening?’

If it had been any other mistress, we might have been more suspicious. But somehow Miss Griffin had always seemed so remote from the other masters and mistresses, so above everything that went on at Deepdean. And Miss Lappet, Miss Hopkins and The One had all been such good suspects – so had Miss Tennyson and Miss Parker, to start with. They’d all had motives for killing Miss Bell, while Miss Griffin didn’t appear to have any motive at all.

But Miss Griffin
had
done it.
Why?

I felt Daisy shaking my arm.

‘Hazel,’ she said. ‘You’re talking to yourself.’

I blinked, and found that somehow we had ended up in Old Wing cloakroom. The bell for the end of lunch break was ringing.

‘Come on,’ said Daisy. ‘Hide.’

She dragged me into one of the very far corners, which was full of the coats that girls from years ago lost and never bothered to find again. They smelled slightly rotten, and their grey fabric had gone a bit green with age.

I squeezed myself in next to Daisy. We sat there in the dimness, trying not to breathe in the old coat smell too much. Then Daisy reached out her hand and took hold of mine. I could feel it shaking.

‘I never guessed it would be Miss Griffin,’ she said quietly. ‘I didn’t want to tell you, but I was nearly sure that it was Miss Hopkins and The One. It was all beginning to fit – motive, means, even the earring. But – oh, Miss Griffin!’

I nodded, making the coats in front of my face sway. ‘She doesn’t seem real, does she?’ I asked.

‘She isn’t human,’ said Daisy. ‘She’s a Headmistress through and through. I thought so, anyway. Well! Now we know how the murderer got Miss Tennyson to help – Miss Griffin must have offered the Deputy job in exchange for her services. And that conversation I overheard on Friday makes sense now! Miss Griffin was reminding Miss Tennyson that they were in it together; she must have been asking her to help search the school again that evening, for the lost earring! The torch we saw when we were creeping about on Friday night – well, I suppose that must have been
them
, hunting. Heavens.

‘I wonder why she did it, though? What on earth would be worth murdering two people for, if you are already the Headmistress of Deepdean? Miss Tennyson had to be bumped off because she was on the verge of telling the police, but why ever kill Miss Bell in the first place?’