Murder Most Unladylike: A Wells and Wong Mystery (6 page)

‘Oh, don’t be silly, Hazel. My uncle says anyone’s capable of murder, deep down. Only remember—’

But at that moment, the door to the airing cupboard was wrenched open and Virginia Overton appeared before us, looking grim. As quickly as I could, I dropped my casebook onto the floor and sat on it. Luckily, Virginia is sometimes less than observant.

‘Whatever are you doing?’ she asked us furiously. ‘Come out of there at once.’

Daisy was unperturbed. ‘The button just popped off my pyjama jacket. Hazel was helping me find a new one.’

‘I
don’t
think so,’ said Virginia. ‘It’s nearly ten o’clock – you ought to have been in bed half an hour ago. Get back to your dorm immediately, and I shall be telling Matron about this later.’

Under her baleful eye we scurried out of the cupboard towards our dorm, Daisy clutching a new pyjama jacket. ‘Beast,’ she said, as soon as we were round the corner. ‘She only wants us out of it so she and Belinda Vance can canoodle in there. Betsy North says she caught them at it last week.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘The problem with this place,’ said Daisy, pausing in the stairwell to wriggle out of her old pyjama jacket and into her new one, ‘is that there are far too many secrets wherever you turn. And most of them are so
pointless
. It doesn’t make it easy for two detectives to do their jobs.’

7

It might seem strange that someone as popular as Daisy should have a secret like the Detective Society. Certainly, when I first met her I never suspected the sort of person she really is. The first time I met Daisy would be hard to forget. It was the first time I’d ever stepped onto a games field – and incidentally, also the first time I truly thought I might die.

I had been at Deepdean for less than a day. My boat from Hong Kong had only docked in England a week before, and I still couldn’t understand how anywhere in the world could be so cold. I watched the English girls happily running out onto the field wearing skimpy games skirts, and decided that I would have nothing to do with such madness. But I found myself ordered outside anyway, my lumpy legs sticking out underneath my itchy grey games skirt and games knickers (according to the English, the only place you can get cold is your behind, so they make you put on extra underwear over your real underwear to keep warm), and my frozen pink hands clutching my shiny new hockey stick.

Then Miss Hopkins blew her whistle, and suddenly all the other girls began to pound up and down in front of me, screaming and waving their sticks about as though they wanted to murder each other. It began to rain – not at all like the warm rain I was used to at home, but as though someone was shooting flakes of ice into my face and all up my bare, goose-pimply legs.

That was the moment when I realized that England might not be exactly how it had seemed in my jolly school-story books.

I had been hearing about England – and the boarding schools real English children went to – all my life. My father had studied at one when he was a little boy, and he never stops talking about it. He made me learn to read and write in English – and not only me but all our servants, even the
mui jai
– and then he gave me heaps and heaps of English books to read.

All the same, I never thought I would go to an English school myself. All the boys from families like mine did, of course, but girls generally stayed on Hong Kong Island. I would have too, if two things had not happened: first, my father’s concubine had another daughter. This meant that my father’s dream of sending a son of his to school in England was ruined again. Secondly, a girl my family knows, Victoria Cheng, was sent away to Hampden School for Ladies, in Cairo. Her father showed mine a picture of Victoria standing stiffly next to lots of other pale little girls in pinafores, and my father decided on the spot that if the Chengs could do it, we could do it too, and better.

The next thing I knew, my father was telling me that even though it was the middle of the year, I was going away to school myself – and not to Cairo, but to the real thing in England. ‘If Cheng thinks that he can get the better of me like that,’ said my father, ‘he’s wrong. Besides, no school in the world could change the fact that his daughter is stupid. My clever Hazel is worth ten Victoria Chengs, and now she’s going to prove it.’

My mother was furious. She hates my father’s obsession with England. ‘Western school never did any Chinese person good,’ she said.

‘Oh, come now, Lin darling,’ said my father, laughing. ‘What about me?’

‘Exactly,’ snapped my mother, and for the next week she refused to speak anything but Cantonese in protest.

Of course, I was wild with excitement. Like my father, I was obsessed with the real, original England. Our big white cake of a house, and the whole compound it sits in, is filled with Western things. We have a tidy green lawn bordered with pink roses (my mother is always complaining about all the watering they need), the Folio Society sends us heavy, beautiful-smelling parcels of books each month to fill up my father’s library, and in every room the patterned wallpaper is nearly hidden by paintings – of grand English mansions surrounded by large fields and very small farmers, of people riding beautiful brown horses or taking tea on green lawns. In the dining room we have a great big picture of the King wearing his moustache and medals, next to the Queen with her pearls and white dress. ‘It’s my little corner of England,’ says my father – and when I looked out over the top of our compound wall, at the rickshaw drivers in the loud, dusty streets below, and beyond to Victoria Harbour, jam-packed with its junks and steamers, our house seemed part of a different world entirely.

The day I found out I was going to England I sat in our drawing room – its mahogany furniture a little warped and fuzzy from the heat, its wallpaper peeling – and imagined myself at school, arm-in-arm with a golden-haired girl, a friend who would turn me into a perfect English Miss, like her.

But standing on the cold games field that morning, it seemed to me that all the English Misses were actually horrible and mad. I clutched my hockey stick harder than ever – and then someone ran into me, extremely hard. I wobbled and gasped (I am so solid that it is not easy to knock me over) and the someone said, ‘Oh, I say, I’m so very sorry.’

And that, of course, was Daisy. Her hair was falling out of its plaits chaotically and her eyes were extremely blue, and although the rest of England was not exactly turning out as I had expected, here, at least, was one English ideal – my golden-haired friend come to life; a person absolutely made from the England of my books and paintings.

When I think back to that moment, I realize how silly I was.

1

On Wednesday morning, Miss Bell was (of course) still missing, and everyone was still very excited about the idea of a gang from the East. Lallie Thompson-Bates, a day girl from the second form, was telling anyone who would listen that her mother had spoken to a close friend who had seen a woman looking very much like Miss Bell in a shop in Abingdon, buying azaleas. Another girl who knew all about the language of flowers said that azaleas meant ‘Take care!’, and there was great excitement at that – until Lallie admitted that she had meant to say hydrangeas. Since hydrangeas turned out to mean ‘frigidity’, this did not seem right at all.

‘And I don’t know when she would have time for buying flowers if she was really on the run from a criminal gang,’ Daisy whispered to me scornfully, before turning to Kitty to discuss whether the people after Miss Bell might perhaps be from Russia.

Daisy cultivates girls in the lower forms to bring her back gossip, and so she sent Betsy North and her other informants off to collect information, telling them quite truthfully that she wanted to know what Miss Bell had been doing on Monday before her mysterious disappearance. She and I canvassed the older girls.

We discovered that, while it was difficult to stop people talking about Miss Bell, most of the things they said were utterly useless. But then Betsy came back to us with some much more useful news.

One of Betsy’s little first-form friends had been to Cultural Soc on Monday with Mamzelle. This was useful already, since it reminded us that Mamzelle had a good alibi between 4.20 and 5.20, but then the story became even more interesting. The shrimp had been let out of Cultural Soc five minutes early because she had a slight stomach ache. At just after 5.15 she had arrived in Old Wing cloakroom to collect her hat and coat, and there she had unexpectedly come upon Miss Bell. Miss Bell was, according to the shrimp, digging through a pile of old coats; then she pulled out a battered copy of
The Arabian Nights
, snapped, ‘I’m confiscating this,’ and stalked off towards Library corridor.

Daisy and I both realized what this meant at once. It brought the time during which the killer must have struck down to less than half an hour. If Miss Bell had been alive and in Old Wing cloakroom at 5.15, she could not have even arrived in the Gym before 5.20, and that meant she must have been killed between 5.20 and 5.45.

‘Do you know,’ said Daisy to me, once Betsy had run off again, ‘detecting a murder is turning out to be rather easy. If we carry on like this we shall have solved it in no time.’

I was not so sure. It seemed to me that we still had a great deal to discover. But I did agree that we seemed to be making a very good start, and soon we had even more information.

A fourth former waiting about for confirmation study with Mr MacLean had seen Miss Bell go into the mistresses’ common room on Library corridor, just after lessons ended but before socs began, followed by Miss Parker. A few minutes later they had come out again – both looking frightfully cross, Miss Bell’s face icy and Miss Parker’s hair all spiky with rage (the fourth former’s words) – and marched away together towards an empty form room. This sounded very much like the beginnings of another spectacular argument. That it had taken place on the evening Miss Bell died was extremely suspicious.

Then Felicity Carrington (a fifth former, who was dreadfully disappointed that she had nothing to say about Miss Bell) mentioned that she had seen Miss Lappet going into Miss Griffin’s office just after half past four, her glasses wobbling and her enormous bosom heaving, looking terribly upset about something. Daisy was very excited. ‘What if she was complaining about Miss Bell being given the Deputy job?’ she asked me in a low voice. ‘And then, if Miss Griffin refused to listen to her, what if she decided to take matters into
her own hands
?’

‘Hmm,’ I said thoughtfully. We now knew that two more of our suspects had stayed at school after hours, and neither of them yet had any sort of alibi for the time of the murder. I noted it all down on our suspect list.

2

Things began to look very black for Miss Parker. In Maths, Daisy began talking loudly about a favourite fountain pen that she must have lost somewhere in the corridors after Lit. Soc on Monday evening. ‘
You
didn’t see it, did you?’ she asked Miss Parker.

‘You mustn’t be so careless with your possessions,’ Miss Parker told her crossly while she scribbled scarlet correction lines across her work. ‘You are a wickedly negligent girl sometimes. As it happens, I left school at the end of lessons on Monday, so I wouldn’t have come across it.’

She turned to give Beanie a telling off (she was gnawing her plait and staring despairingly at a page so covered in scored out numbers it was almost solid blue), and I spun round to Daisy in excitement. Kitty, however, got there first. She nudged Daisy, grinning.

‘Gosh, what a filthy liar she is!’ she whispered, glancing carefully over at Miss Parker, who was now shouting at Beanie. ‘What she said about leaving at the end of school’s a load of tosh. I saw her when I was walking back towards Library corridor after Cultural Soc ended. She was sitting in one of the empty form rooms, her face all angry scarlet. And her hair was in such a state! I’d bet anything that she and Miss Bell had been arguing again— I say! I wonder if she’s a secret agent for this Russian crime ring that’s kidnapped Miss Bell! Wouldn’t that be exciting?’

‘Hum,’ said Daisy, looking across the room. ‘If I were a Russian crime lord and wanted a secret agent’ – Miss Parker was holding her head in her hands and groaning in frustration as Beanie gave her a fifth wrong answer to the same question – ‘I wouldn’t choose
Miss Parker
. She’d refuse to do anything and then run off in a rage.’

‘Very true,’ said Kitty, and giggled.

I nudged Daisy, extremely impressed by her evasive tactics, and she winked back at me. We both knew that we were getting somewhere. Miss Parker’s alibi was becoming weaker and weaker – we now knew that she had been near the Gym, alone, close to the time when Miss Bell’s murder must have taken place, and she had lied about it. Had she really argued with Miss Bell again? If so, why was she trying to hide it? It was like a plot from one of Daisy’s books.

But all the same, I couldn’t help wondering whether Miss Parker could really
kill
someone. She was a very angry person, and we all knew it – but so is Lavinia, and for all her shouting she is really mostly harmless. It’s as if all that yelling and kicking gets the rage out of her and she has none left to do worse things. Was it the same for Miss Parker?