Secrets at St Jude's: New Girl (21 page)

It was very quiet in the corridors once the rest of the St Jude’s girls were all settled into their first lesson of the afternoon. Deathly quiet.

Niffy went first on rubber-soled ballet pumps that were completely noiseless. Gina followed behind nervously, careful to walk on the balls of her feet so that her higher heels didn’t clack against the stone floor.

Down the wood-panelled side corridor they went, past the entrance to Mrs Henderson’s office and straight to the door with the brass plaque announcing: HEADMISTRESS.

Niffy tapped quietly on the wood – ‘Just in case,’ she whispered, ‘there’s been a change of plan.’

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There was no reply.

Gina looked at Niffy nervously. What if there was a change of plan in about ten minutes’ time and the Banshee appeared when they had their fingers in the files? She didn’t feel nearly as trusting of Niffy now; now that her mouth was dry, her hands were shaking and her heart was pounding like a criminal’s.

Niffy took the round brass handle in her hands and turned it. The door opened and the two girls stepped inside.

‘What are you doing?!’ Gina asked in a shocked whisper as Niffy went straight over to the headmistress’s desk and opened a small drawer on the left-hand side.

‘Getting the key,’ Niffy whispered back. ‘I told you.

I’ve done this before . . . just hope she hasn’t moved it.’

After a moment of rummaging, she held up a little brass key in triumph. ‘Ta-da!’

There was a door in the back wall of the Banshee’s office, and this is where Niffy fitted the key into the lock and turned. The door opened and Gina followed her friend into a surprisingly spacious room, bigger than the office, furnished entirely with grey metal filing cabinets.

‘Right, it’s nineteen eighty-two, isn’t it?’ Niffy asked, 237

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scanning the neat labels. ‘And W for Winkelmann.

Let’s see . . . let’s see . . . Nineteen fifty-two, nineteen fifty-four – maybe into the corner a bit further . . .’

Niffy and Gina couldn’t know that things weren’t going smoothly at the governors’ lunch. The creative arts were the subject of the afternoon’s discussion. A vibrant new art teacher and a new head of drama had been installed a year ago, and although the girls were very happy with the teachers, parents were grumbling about ‘results’.

Mrs Bannerman claimed that results in art and drama were as healthy as they’d ever been, but one of the governors was arguing that there had been a two per cent drop in As.

‘Mrs Henderson?’ Mrs Bannerman turned to her assistant. ‘I know you looked the past three years’

results out for me and put them on my desk, where I’m afraid I’ve left them . . . Would you mind terribly?’

She gave a little smile. ‘I just think it would be easier if we had them right in front of us in black and white.’

‘Here it is!’ Gina exclaimed. ‘Nineteen eighty-two!’ She pulled open the heavy metal drawer and looked at the neatly alphabetical files in front of her. Her hands 238

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went immediately to the ‘W’. Walker, Walker, Williams, Winkelmann. ‘I’ve got it!’ she whispered to Niffy. ‘I’ve got her file!’

She pulled out the cardboard document case and was surprised to find just three flimsy sheets of paper inside. Was that it? Her mother’s entire St Jude’s career summed up in three sheets?

Niffy was by her side, peering over her shoulder at the first page. ‘That’s a copy of her A-level results,’ she explained.

Three subjects were listed on the page: mathematics, physics and German.

Gina ran her finger down the results and felt a slight pang of disappointment. ‘A, A and A,’ she said.

‘No big surprise here then.’

‘What’s on the page behind then?’ Niffy asked. ‘It should have her standard grades. O-levels they were back then, I think.’

Gina turned over to reveal a row of eight subjects: mathematics, arithmetic, English, French, history, German, physics and biology. The big shock was the row of results: Bs, Cs, one lone A for German and, astonishingly, two Fs!

‘She failed two O-levels!’ Niffy’s surprise was evident. ‘History and chemistry! Look!’ She was 239

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pointing at the page. ‘No wonder Miss Ballantyne still goes on about it. St Jude’s girls never fail! Not even in the eighties! Blimey, that is shocking! What on earth was she doing? I told you she had white hair and eyeliner and was too cool for school.’

If Niffy was surprised, Gina was shocked. The blood drained from her head, the file in her hands was visibly shaking and tears were springing to her eyes: all she could think about was that her mother had lied to her. Lorelei had always told her what a brilliant straight-A pupil she’d been at school. And right here was the evidence that her mother had lied.
Lied!
And Gina had no idea why.

‘What’s the other paper behind this one?’ Niffy asked.

Gina, blinking hard, turned over the second page of results to find a typed letter, yellowed with age.

Both girls scanned quickly through it.

It was from Jan Winkelmann, Lorelei’s father, requesting that his daughter be considered for a place in the Upper Sixth to sit her A-levels.

She has re-taken all her O-levels and achieved outstanding marks. She has already begun her A-level
courses and is showing great promise.

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All she wishes is to be returned to the school so she
can study alongside her St Jude’s friends for this final,
vital year.

Obviously the distressing matter of her O-levels
year is long behind her now.

‘Oh my God!’ Gina whispered. Here was another thing she didn’t know about her mother.

‘She hasn’t told you anything about this, has she?’

Niffy asked, although from the shocked look on her friend’s face the answer to this was obvious.

Gina shook her head. She could not believe it.

Hadn’t her mother said on Sunday:
I always got
straight As, Gina. I considered a B a failure
? She closed the file wordlessly, put it back and pushed the drawer shut.

‘You’re not to tell anyone about this,’ Gina insisted, fixing Niffy with a look of deadly seriousness. ‘No one.

OK?’

Niffy nodded her agreement, and that’s when both girls heard the heavy wooden door to the Banshee’s office open.

‘Uh-oh!’ Niffy said under her breath and dropped to her haunches. ‘Get out there, Gina, you’ll be fine –

play the Yank card.’

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Gina looked at Niffy in utter incomprehension, but Niffy was waving her frantically towards the door.

Mrs Henderson was just wondering why the door to the records room was open and heading over to check what was going on in there, when a blonde girl walked out with a look of confusion across her face.

‘Oh! Hello – maybe you can help me? I’m so totally lost,’ the girl asked in a strong American accent, her face breaking into a pleasant smile.

‘Oh!’ was Mrs Henderson’s first response. This must be the Californian girl; she’d not come across her before. ‘And where are you supposed to be?’ she asked her in brisk Morningside. ‘I don’t expect to run into pupils wandering aimlessly about the headmistress’s office.’

‘I’ve been sent to the staff room,’ the girl explained.

‘I just seem to have got the directions completely confused.’

When Mrs Henderson began an explanation of how to find the staff room, Gina asked politely, ‘Do you think you could just point me in the right direction? It’s so confusing out there – so many corridors!’ in her best imitation of West Coast ditz.

Back in the head’s office, Mrs Henderson picked up 242

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the three pages of printout from Mrs Bannerman’s desk, then, catching sight of the key dangling in the lock to the filing room, she shut the door, locked it and replaced the key in Mrs Bannerman’s desk drawer.

Then she went out of the room and headed back to the governors’ lunch.

There were only two words Niffy could think of to express her feelings when she heard the filing-room door close and the key turn in the lock: ‘Oh
bum
!’

Squatting down on the floor, she waited until all sounds of Mrs Henderson had disappeared, then looked around the room for a possible means of escape. Well, she couldn’t stay here, could she? It might be days before the Banshee thought to look in her records room . . . And there was no point waiting for Gina to rescue her. Gina would be far too scared to do anything on her own.

No, Niffy had to hope that the small sash window, a good metre and a half off the ground, had not been painted shut.

She hoisted herself up onto the filing cabinet closest to the window and began to tug at the stiff catch. It took a few minutes to work it free, but finally she’d managed to force it aside. Now to try the 243

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window. She pulled hard at the bottom frame, trying to slide it up. There was some movement – it had not been painted irredeemably shut – but it was very stiff.

After heaving for long enough to make her break into a light sweat, she’d only managed to open it ten centimetres or so, not nearly enough to get out.

She glanced at her watch: it was already 2.45 p.m.

Bannerman’s lunch was scheduled to end at three. The thought of this gave Niffy enough strength to wrench at the window frame one more time. It opened just a bit further, giving her a gap about thirty centimetres high, forty wide. Enough surely?

She stuck out her head and began to wriggle and squeeze her shoulders through. Now she could see the problems facing her on the other side. Because the school was built on a slope with a substantial basement, although the window was only a metre and a half off the ground on the inside, it was over two metres up on the outside. Below it was a floral border with some softer, fall-breaking plants and some decidedly sharp and jaggy-looking rose bushes.

The window was small and there was no ledge, so Niffy knew she was going to have to dive out head first.

‘Big fluffy bum,’ she muttered, trying to tell herself that at least the earth looked as if it had been freshly 244

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dug. Nif knew from long experience of various daring physical scrapes that it was best not to think about the risks too long. Best just to take a deep breath, hope for a happy ending and get on with it.

So, using her hands to launch herself through the window, she scraped and wriggled out, then fell much faster than she’d intended.

Hands out in front to save herself, she headed for the ground, landing in a clumsy somersault which left her in a heap, momentarily dizzy and winded.

As she lay with her head in the soil, she registered that nothing felt worse than bruised and pricked: she seemed to have got away with it. Picking herself up slowly, she brushed the earth, leaves and prickles from her uniform and prepared to leave the scene of the crime as quickly as possible.

Suddenly Niffy heard voices approaching, but before she had time to register whose voices and where they could be coming from, Mrs Bannerman and Mrs Henderson walked briskly round the corner, leading a posse of governors on an inspection of the grounds.

‘Luella Nairn-Bassett,’ Mrs Bannerman shot out without hesitation. She prided herself on knowing the full name, age and details of every one of her 443

pupils. ‘What on earth are you doing?’

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Niffy smiled, looked quickly around the herbaceous border for inspiration and decided on: ‘I’m collecting larvae for biology, Mrs Bannerman . . . I thought the best place to try would be the rose bushes.’

Mrs Bannerman stared hard at Niffy. Niffy suspected that Mrs Bannerman’s knowledge of the school timetable was so intimate that she would tell her firmly:
But Year Four does not have a biology slot at
2 p.m. on Wednesdays; you, Luella Nairn-Bassett, are
supposed to be with Madame Bensimon studying
French
.

Mrs Bannerman stared a little longer, then said simply, ‘I see. Well, on your way, Luella.’

Niffy would have been delighted to go on her way, but there was a slight problem. In the fall, one of her slip-ons seemed to have slipped off. Her eyes were scanning the ground, frantically trying to locate it.

‘Erm . . . I’m actually just waiting for someone else to come round with . . . erm . . . a container. I was supposed to look for the larvae and they’re bringing a jar to scrape them into,’ Niffy managed.

Mrs Bannerman gave an irritated sigh. Her suspicions were aroused now, but she didn’t want the governors to listen to any more of this.

‘I see,’ she repeated huffily. ‘Well, I look forward to 246

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hearing more about this unusual experiment from Mrs MacDuff.’

And with that, she continued on her way, sweeping the governors and Mrs Henderson along with her.

Although one of the governors turned to look back at her suspiciously, Niffy dropped to a squat and began hunting for her shoe in earnest.

After a thorough search of the soil, the rose bushes, the entire border and even the surrounding path, Niffy was forced to admit that there was only one obvious place the ballet pump and its incriminating name label could be: on the floor of Banshee Bannerman’s records office.

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