Murder Most Unladylike: A Wells and Wong Mystery (8 page)

Or at least, she used to. Daisy arrived to find that several of the Muses were no more. Something had smashed into the lower panels, hard. Six-toed Clio was gone, and what had been a painting of Terpsichore being attacked by blue lilies was now just a jagged hole. Jones had started to hammer bits of board over the archway.

‘Hallo, Jones!’ said Daisy.

‘Hello, Miss Daisy,’ said Jones. ‘Not in lessons, then?’

‘I came to see
you
, Jones,’ said Daisy in her most friendly voice. ‘I heard there was a burglary and I wanted to help.’

Jones frowned. ‘Ah, but I don’t think it
was
burglars now,’ he said. ‘Nothing’s missing, you see. There’s just chaos everywhere. And poor Miss Henrietta’s hurt her foot! I blame those shrimps.’ And he launched into a long complaint about the state of the school during the past few days. ‘But when I spoke to Miss Griffin about it, she told me not to worry! Not worry, I ask you! The only consolation is this – come and look!’ He beckoned Daisy over to one of the panels. ‘See this?’ he asked her. ‘This says to me that whatever vandal did it is already getting their comeuppance.’

He pointed, and Daisy bent in to see. There, on a bit of blue glass, was a long rusty stain.

‘Blood!’ said Jones triumphantly. ‘They cut themselves good and proper. Well, I hope it hurt, because I shall be cleaning up their mess all day at this rate.’

It was at this point that Miss Griffin came striding down New Wing stairs, her neat pale legs encased as usual in her silk stockings and grey tweed skirt. She was coming from her office, which is on the upper floor of the wing, and she looked very annoyed when she saw Daisy standing there.

‘Daisy Wells!’ she said, pausing majestically halfway down. ‘Whatever are you doing out of lessons?’

‘Taking a message to Mr Reid,’ said Daisy promptly. ‘From Miss Lappet. She wants to know if he could take her second-form class next lesson, because she has to cover Science now that, you know, Miss Bell has gone.’

Miss Griffin was not impressed. ‘Well, you had better not waste any more time talking to Jones, had you?’ she snapped.

‘Yes, Miss Griffin,’ said Daisy, then, ‘No, Miss Griffin. Sorry, Miss Griffin!’

‘Run along then,’ said Miss Griffin, waving her hand like the Queen. Daisy ran along.

If there is one thing that makes Daisy such a good liar, it is that when she lies, she lies
thoroughly
. By the time she came back to where I was waiting for her in San – with my left ankle well wrapped up and two extra biscuits from Nurse Minn in my pocket – The One had agreed to Miss Lappet’s phantom request, and five minutes after I hobbled into our History lesson Daisy had Miss Lappet convinced that she had actually asked Daisy to take the message in the first place. ‘You are a treasure, Daisy,’ said Miss Lappet, folding her arms over her massive bosom (her cardigan had been buttoned up wrong that day, and it made her look even more misshapen than usual) and blinking down at Daisy through her little glasses. ‘Whatever would the school do without you?’

‘I don’t know, Miss,’ said Daisy primly. ‘I’m sure everyone would manage
somehow
.’

6

‘I don’t understand,’ I said to Daisy, on our way up to House at the end of the day (slowly, because of my ankle), ‘what Jones’s broken window has to do with the murder.’

‘Well,’ said Daisy, stepping aside to let Lavinia rush past after a second-form shrimp, – ‘first of all, it’s out of the ordinary. And isn’t the first rule of detection to consider everything out of the ordinary as potentially important?’

I thought of Miss Hopkins, but I knew that even if I reminded Daisy of her odd behaviour, it still wouldn’t count.

‘And secondly, there’s what
hasn’t
happened. No one apart from King Henry has gone to Minny’s with a cut that could have been caused by that glass.’

‘How do you know?’ I objected.

‘Hazel,’ said Daisy, ‘have you
ever
known Nurse Minn to hear about something and not tell the story ten times over? If someone had come in earlier, with exactly the same sort of cut, King Henry’s injury would have reminded her of it. If she didn’t tell you about the amazing coincidence—’

‘Which she didn’t,’ I admitted, thinking this was exactly why Daisy was the President of the Detective Society, and I was only the Secretary.

‘—then it certainly didn’t happen. Which means that whoever cut themselves hasn’t reported it, and
that
means they were too afraid to. And we know it must be someone from school – if it had been robbers, Jones would have found other signs of a break-in from outside, and told us about it. What I think is this: last night the murderer came back to move Miss Bell’s body out of the school from wherever it had been hidden since Monday evening. They used the Cupboard trolley again, crashed it into the archway, smashed the glass and cut themselves.’

‘But,’ I said, ‘why wasn’t Miss Bell moved on Monday evening?’

‘The murderer had to decide what to do with the body. Perhaps they planned to keep it in school, and then realized they couldn’t?’

‘But nobody found it yesterday!’ I said. ‘It can’t have been that bad a hiding place.’

‘Indeed,’ said Daisy. ‘Actually, I’ve been thinking about that. It ought to be the next part of our mission: the Hunt for the Hiding Place of Miss Bell’s Body. That sounds just like a treasure hunt, doesn’t it? Like hunt the slipper, but with a body.’

‘Oh,
no
,’ I said. I knew perfectly well that looking for a body would be nothing like hunting for a slipper. ‘Daisy, I—’

At this point we were interrupted by Beanie scurrying up to us. ‘Hello,’ she said eagerly, skipping along beside Daisy. ‘What’s up?’

‘Er,’ I said. ‘We were—’

‘We were just discussing Miss Bell,’ Daisy finished smoothly.

‘Ooh!’ said Beanie, wrapping her red and blue House scarf round her hands and nearly dropping her school bag. ‘Exciting. D’you really think she’s been kidnapped by the East— Oh sorry, Hazel.’

Beanie is one of the only people at Deepdean who would have thought to apologize for that.

‘I heard she’d resigned,’ I said, to thank her.

‘No!’ said Beanie, who in her own kind-hearted way was as much of a gossip as Kitty. ‘But Miss Griffin was going to announce her as the new Deputy! Unless she was too upset by The One jilting her to care . . .’

‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘Perhaps.’

‘Oh, I do hate it when people quarrel,’ said Beanie unhappily. ‘I almost wish she
had
been kidnapped by a gang – or would that be worse?’

‘
Much
worse,’ said Daisy, hitching her bag up onto her shoulder and elbowing Beanie to cheer her up. Beanie is so like a little dog that not even Daisy, who doesn’t usually bother much about other people’s feelings, can bear seeing her disappointed. ‘I heard they go about stabbing knives into gang members who are disloyal, and then they leave horrible messages for the family in their loved one’s blood.’

Beanie’s good-natured brown eyes widened in fascinated horror.

‘Stabbing and that sort of thing is absolutely rife in Russia, my uncle says,’ Daisy continued.

‘Wells!’ said Virginia Overton, who was walking past and heard Daisy. ‘That’s a fearful lie! Don’t you believe her, Martineau.’

‘I didn’t,’ said Beanie quickly. ‘I’m perfectly all right.’

Virginia sniffed. ‘I hope so,’ she said. ‘I’ve got my eye on you, Wells.’

We finished the walk up to House talking about Beanie’s pony, Boggles, whom she had left at home and missed passionately. Daisy, in turn, began to tell a story about her pony, Gladstone, who was a genius and had once jumped a six-foot hedge. They chattered away, and I stared up through the empty tree branches at the tall houses and the darkening sky, and worried and worried about the murder.

Was it really the murderer who had smashed those windows? And if so, was it while they were removing Miss Bell’s body from the school? Where had it been hidden in the meantime? . . . And, most importantly of all, who was the murderer? We had established alibis for Mamzelle, Mr MacLean, and Miss Hopkins, but Miss Lappet, Miss Parker, Miss Tennyson and The One still had no alibis at all, and they had all been near the Gym at the right time. Which of them had done it?

1

In Prayers on Thursday morning, after a stern notice about the value of the windows in New Wing corridor and the importance of owning up to mistakes, as an honourable Deepdean girl ought, Miss Griffin finally broke the news that we had all been waiting for.

‘As you may have noticed,’ she said from the lectern, ‘Miss Bell has not been in attendance this week. Unfortunately, I must now inform you that she has resigned her post. Until a suitable replacement can be found, the other masters and mistresses will be taking your Science lessons. I ask you all to be mindful of the additional work that they will be doing, and I hope that this will put an end to the rather irresponsible gossip that I have been hearing lately regarding Miss Bell’s absence.’ She stared severely down at us over her little gold-rimmed reading glasses, and several girls looked away. For a moment even I felt rather guilty.

Then everyone woke up to what she had said, and up and down the rows, girls began nudging one another in excitement. The ‘irresponsible gossip’ had not been stopped at all. King Henry looked around, her face pale with fury. I wondered if her foot was still hurting. Her glare made the nudging die down for a bit, but it started up again as soon as she looked away.

‘Are you sure we ought to still be investigating?’ I asked Daisy as we filed out of Prayers.

‘Don’t be stupid, Hazel!’ she hissed back at me. ‘You
know
the Bell hasn’t really resigned. She’s still just as dead as she ever was, and we’re the only ones who know the truth. Think of her family, Hazel. If we don’t find out what really happened, no one ever will.’

It was awful of Daisy, bringing up Miss Bell’s family like that – and just like her too. She knew it would make me worry, and of course it did. I imagined Miss Bell’s mother. She was probably widowed, living alone in a single cold room, just as poor as Miss Bell had been.

This was very upsetting. I much preferred assuming that mistresses had no lives at all; that if I went into Deepdean during the hols I would find them all wandering about in the corridors, giving lessons in empty rooms. But once I had imagined Miss Bell’s tragic mother, I could not make her vanish.

And of course, Daisy knew it.

As we marched along the marble chessboard of Library corridor in our neat grey two-by-two rows, both Daisy and I were quiet. I was thinking about Miss Bell’s mother and getting more and more upset. Daisy was probably thinking about the murder, and fashionable hats, and who cheated in the Maths test, all at once, as though she is really three people instead of one.

Two rows behind us, Kitty whispered something to Beanie just as we passed Miss Parker, who was on duty outside the mistresses’ common room, and who began bellowing at them as though they had been caught spitting on the Bible.

Our row faltered to a stop, and the girls directly behind us began to bunch up and crane over each other in excitement as Miss Parker tore her hands through her hair and howled in red-faced fury. Of course, we are all used to Miss Parker’s rages, but this was something quite different. Bawling about disgraces to the school, she gave Kitty and Beanie detention twice and then forgot what she had already said and gave them another one for good measure.

We all stayed very quiet and still so as not to attract her attention, the way you would with a tiger in the zoo. But all the same she caught Lavinia goggling at her and howled: ‘ALL of you others, MOVE OFF! Hurry up or I’ll have the lot of you, I’ll—’

At this point, though, Miss Griffin came through the packed corridor and put a calming hand on Miss Parker’s shoulder. Miss Griffin has an eerie way of knowing where she is needed, and being there.

Miss Parker gasped at the touch, and all the fight went out of her. Even her hair sagged.

‘Come along, Miss Parker,’ said Miss Griffin cheerfully, as though they were both at a garden party and late for the tea. ‘Move along, girls, otherwise you’ll be late for your lessons.’ And that was that. If Miss Griffin tells you to do something, you had better do it. Everyone drifted away, quickly but reluctantly, and the corridor was soon back to normal again. But Daisy, walking in very proper silence next to me, turned her head and widened her eyes at me in a way that I knew meant,
Suspicious behaviour from Parker again
.

2

Miss Parker was not the only one of our prime suspects to be behaving suspiciously. Our second lesson on Thursdays is English with Miss Tennyson, who wanted the Deputy job but was beaten to it by Miss Bell. Miss Tennyson, as I have said, is a fearful drip, and terribly nervous. Her large soppy eyes well up like a squeezed sponge at everything from poetry to animals, and because we are doing the great poets this term, we had to endure a weeping fit from Miss Tennyson nearly every lesson.

That day, she had Daisy read out Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’. From the shape her mouth made, I knew Daisy found it utter tosh, but she read it well, as she always does, in a clear, calm voice that did not betray what she was thinking.