Murder Most Unladylike: A Wells and Wong Mystery (4 page)

‘But we came back! What about then? How do you know for certain that they won’t be after us both now that we know?’

‘VO didn’t say our names,’ said Daisy wearily. ‘I’m sure she didn’t. Therefore the murderer will have no idea who either of us is. I promise you, Hazel, on my word as an excellent detective. Say it. I am an excellent detective.’

‘You are an excellent detective,’ I said, because she was digging her fingers into my arm.

‘You see? It’s quite all right. There’s nothing to be worried about.’

I tried to make myself believe her.

‘Unless, of course,’ said Daisy casually, ‘the murderer is just biding their time; waiting to find out exactly who we are and how much we saw before they come after us both. But that’s not particularly likely. Now go back to your own bed, Watson, you’re squashing me. We’ve got important work to do tomorrow.’

I went back to my bed, but it was a very long time before I got to sleep. I could hear Daisy breathing peacefully next to me, and thumping from Lavinia’s bed as she rolled to and fro in her sleep. But then there were other noises I was not so sure about. The House pipes squealed and groaned louder than I had ever heard them before, and then there was a squeak below me, rattles and rustles in the walls; a soft sigh just outside the door. A floorboard, I told myself – mice . . . Matron on her rounds – but I was most shamefully afraid. I squeezed my eyes tight shut, to stop myself looking at the curtain floating in the breeze from our open window (Matron believes that fresh air is good for children), and tried to be brave. But I kept seeing Miss Bell’s head lolling away from me, and when I did get to sleep my dreams were awful.

2

We began our detective work the next day.

We filed into Prayers, The One blaring away at the organ, to find that Miss Bell was not in her usual seat. This was just as Daisy and I expected, of course, but shocking for the rest of the school. You see, Miss Bell had never been late for anything before. She had always been perfectly punctual, so her absence from Prayers seemed as impossible as the Hall simply falling down around our heads. The wooden pews filled, and although the rule in Prayers is dead silence, punishable by detention, a whisper rose up like a shell pressed against your ear, making all the mistresses and prefects frown and glare about them.

‘Where’s Miss Bell?’ breathed Beanie. ‘She’s
never
ill!’

‘Perhaps this is the day Miss Griffin is going to announce that she’s the new Deputy,’ Kitty whispered back, louder than she meant to. ‘I’ll bet anything they’re about to come onto the stage together.’

‘Girls!’ snarled Mamzelle, whipping round from the row in front to glare at the third form. Her sharp face was looking particularly sour, and we quietened down at once. ‘
Silence
. Contemplate ’eaven, eef you please.’

The third form was quiet. But then Miss Griffin walked onto the stage, making us all rise to our feet, and she was alone. Kitty nudged Beanie in amazement, but then Miss Griffin began to speak and it was impossible not to pay attention to what she was saying.

I have not yet said much about Miss Griffin, other than that she is our Headmistress. That is because it is quite difficult to remember that Miss Griffin might need describing. Miss Griffin is a presence. I cannot imagine Deepdean without Miss Griffin, or Miss Griffin without Deepdean. If the school was a person, it would wear Miss Griffin’s neat swooped-back grey hair and immaculate Harris tweed.

Every day she glides along the corridors in sensible shoes that are just high enough to click. When I heard her during lessons I used to vaguely connect her with an automaton from the future. Even though I know it is shrimp-like foolishness, I still rather think that if you peeled away Miss Griffin’s tidy outside you would find rows of gleaming clockwork wheels, busily ticking over to keep Deepdean going. It is very difficult to have an emotion about her, the way I like Mamzelle (despite her incomprehensible accent) and despise hockey-playing Miss Hopkins. Miss Griffin is simply
there
, as much a part of Deepdean School as the building itself. You only ever get to know her if you are one of the particularly promising Big Girls, whom she tutors for university entrance exams, or a prefect – who are not at all like the rest of us.

Miss Griffin gave her sermon, all about honour and striving which are the themes most Tuesdays. As soon as she began to run through the daily messages, you could feel the whole school waiting to hear news about Miss Bell, but there was only a reminder about the fourth form’s visit to a museum next Wednesday and then a scolding little notice about mess in The One’s art room.

It may seem a bit odd, since Miss Griffin did not say anything at all about Miss Bell, but that was how I
knew
that she had been murdered. If even Miss Griffin did not know what had happened to Miss Bell, then the murderer really had managed to hide what they had done. Just as Daisy had said, it was up to us to detect it. The Detective Society’s first real case! My stomach jumped like one of Lavinia’s Mexican beans, and I couldn’t tell whether I was terrified or wildly excited.

Miss Griffin, of course, had no idea about the state of my insides. ‘And now, the hymn,’ she said.

It was ‘Lift Up Your Hearts’. The One pounded away with gusto, and under cover of the organ’s enormous trumpeting blares Daisy leaned over to me.

‘
E’en so, with one accord
– so, nothing about the Bell, then,’ she sang.

‘I know –
we lift them to the Lord
,’ I replied. ‘What shall we do?’

‘Detect, of course,’ warbled Daisy. ‘We’ll talk about our first lines of enquiry later –
The mire of sin, the weight of guilty fears
– isn’t this song apt, though!’

Miss Griffin glared out from her podium, as though she had heard us, and I gulped and went back to singing the proper words.

3

It seemed that the masters and mistresses were determined to carry on as though nothing had changed. I wondered who would be waiting for us when we arrived for Science in second hour, but even I was amazed when we found Mamzelle waiting in Miss Bell’s usual place, with a white lab coat on over her silky blouse. The rest of the form were simply gobsmacked.

‘Bonjour, girls,’ Mamzelle said. ‘Mees Bell eez not ’ere
aujourd’hui, et alors
I will be taking you for ze lesson.’

‘Will we have to speak in French?’ asked Beanie in consternation.

‘Not unless you want to, Rebecca,’ said Mamzelle, shaking her hair and pursing her lips in amusement. ‘Fear not, in
la France
I was ze mistress for Science, and so I know about what I will be teaching.’

‘What’s happened to Miss Bell?’ asked Kitty.

‘I cannot tell you Mees Bell’s business, Kitty. I can only say that she eez not in school today and so I must take her lessons for her. Now sit down, all of you, and we will discuss ze cells of plants, which I gather eez what Mees Bell had planned for you.’

‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ whispered Daisy to me as we sat down. I could see everyone else around the room making surprised faces at each other behind their textbooks.

I really did feel as though I had fallen down Alice’s rabbit hole. Even if I had not seen Miss Bell lying there on the Gym floor, I would have known that something terrible had happened to her. Miss Bell, after all, had never been even a minute late for a single lesson, and now here she was, missing an entire morning of school. If I had been a master or mistress, I would have been ringing for the police directly, but it seemed none of them had. It was infuriating.

I was itching to speak to Daisy about it, and I could see, from the way that she was bouncing about on her chair, that she was dying to talk to me as well.

The bell for bunbreak rang, and Daisy spun round to face me. ‘All right, Watson, this is it! Mental casebook at the ready! Our first mission is to dig up all the idle gossip we can. Before we begin our investigation properly, I want to know what everyone
else
thinks is going on.’

I would have preferred to proceed straight to the investigation, but there is no use arguing with Daisy when she has a Detective Society mission in mind. So I summoned all my Watson-y thoughts, nodded, and followed her outside.

4

On the lawn, the whole school was buzzing with made-up news about Miss Bell. Unfortunately, none of it suggested that she might be dead. On the contrary, most people seemed to think she had decided to run away – generally because she had been jilted by The One, although there were odder theories. One of the shrimps was telling us that Miss Bell was on the run because the government was after her, (although the shrimp could not say why the government might be interested in a schoolmistress), and another shrimp insisted that it was not the government at all, but a secret organization that had something to do with
the East
. She looked at me rather fearfully as she said that, as though being from Hong Kong made me the East in human form and therefore untrustworthy. I hate all that. Usually, once they know me, English people simply pretend that I am not Oriental, and I simply do not remind them about it. But sometimes they slip, and little bits of nastiness that are usually hidden come sliding out of their mouths, which can be quite difficult to politely ignore.

That particular bunbreak I was doomed to have my difference noticed. I had several people hurriedly stop talking when we wandered past their groups, presumably in case I was a hostile agent of the East. Then a fifth former whom I had never spoken to before came up to ask me if it was really true that my father ran the opium trade. My father is a banker in Hong Kong, and I told her so. It was plain that she did not believe me.

‘She needn’t be snobbish about it,’ said Daisy to me when the fifth former had run off to join her friends. ‘Her father’s a dastardly smuggler. Everyone knows that.’

I was comforted by this, although I never quite know where Daisy gets this sort of information from. She is always coming out with things like that, but when I asked her once she only said, ‘Oh, you know, my uncle,’ and looked vague.

After that Daisy vanished into the crowd of people eating their buns on the North Lawn. She was gone some time. I craned my head around looking for her, but then someone seized the back of my pullover and I turned round to see Daisy again, looking very cheerful.

‘Listen to this!’ she hissed. ‘The rumour is that Miss Bell’s resigned. I just spoke to King Henry, and she told me.’

It might sound odd – that a third former like Daisy should be able to speak to the lofty Head Girl – but it is merely another absolutely English thing. The English have a habit of being related to nearly anyone you can mention, and King Henry turns out to be the fifth cousin of Daisy’s mother. She and Daisy go riding together in the hols and have tea visits and so on, which makes it all right for Daisy to talk to King Henry sometimes when they are at Deepdean.

‘There was a letter on the Headmistress’s desk this morning; King Henry read it because Miss Griffin showed her. Miss Griffin is still trying to decide the right time to break it to the girls. King Henry must have liked Miss Bell more than I thought: she was looking awfully distressed when she told me.’

‘But Miss Bell can’t have resigned!’ I exclaimed.

‘I know
that
,’ said Daisy irritably. ‘Miss Bell’s stone dead and therefore incapable of writing anything, let alone a resignation letter. But don’t you see what this means? It absolutely proves, once and for all, that what you discovered was a murder; and that the murderer is someone who knows Miss Bell’s handwriting well enough to forge it. It’s also got to be someone high up enough in the school to be able to march into Miss Griffin’s office and plant the letter on her desk.’

‘A master or mistress!’ I gasped, horrified. ‘
That’s
why they’re all pretending that nothing’s wrong!’

‘Well, not all of them did it,’ Daisy pointed out. ‘But the one who did – whoever it was – has managed to bamboozle the others with that note. That’s what Mamzelle meant about not “prying into Miss Bell’s affairs”. This is really it, Hazel. This means that it’s up to us! If the Detective Society doesn’t do something, nobody will!’

I had a momentary un-detective-like pang. ‘Are you sure we shouldn’t just go to the police?’ I asked.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Daisy severely. ‘We don’t have any evidence yet. We don’t even have a body. They’d simply laugh at us. No, we’re on our own. And anyway, this is
our
murder case.’

I was not sure I liked the sound of that. Daisy was talking as though the case was just another tuck theft, but I knew it wasn’t. What I had seen in the Gym had become, in my mind, my own personal ghost story in which bodies appeared and then vanished into thin air. Except that it wasn’t a story at all, but very real. I was still terrified at the thought that the murderer might know that I had seen Miss Bell’s body. What if I ended up a corpse myself? In a few years it might be
my
bloody ghost that all the Big Girls frightened the shrimps with, instead of Verity Abraham’s. The thought made me shudder.

‘But I thought you didn’t even
like
Miss Bell,’ I said, to make myself stop thinking about it.

‘It’s not about liking,’ said Daisy sternly. ‘It’s the principle of the thing. People can’t be allowed to get away with murder at Deepdean. Oh Hazel, it’ll be so exciting! The Detective Society will be real at last!’

At this point, the bell rang for the end of bunbreak.

‘Right,’ said Daisy. ‘I move for our first official meeting to be held after Prep this evening. In the meantime, since the murder of Miss Bell is now a proper Wells and Wong Detective Society case, you can keep on writing up notes, and I’ll start planning our course of action. And we can both keep our eyes and ears open. Detective Society handshake?’

We shook hands, clicked our fingers, shook again, made the Mystery Gesture, and then rushed off for Art with The One.

5