Murder Most Unladylike: A Wells and Wong Mystery Read online

  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, a
nd 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

  I gave up on the rest of Tuesday’s lessons. I spent all my lunch break scribbling case notes, and then tucked this casebook into my French textbook and carried on writing. Daisy, sitting next to me, covered for me beautifully (and only nudged me when she didn’t agree with what I was writing). She was stewing away at the problem too.

  Usually Daisy takes care to dawdle over her prep, and sigh, and look puzzled, and pass notes to people about the second part of question four. That evening, though, she flew through it and then sat gazing raptly at a chip of paint on the wall until Virginia Overton who, unluckily for us, was taking Prep that evening, snapped, ‘Wells! Nose back in your book.’

  After that, Daisy bent her head over her exercise book and spent the next fifteen minutes pretending to write. On my other side, Beanie was stuck in the tortures of her French assignment, her face screwed up and the end of her plait jammed into her mouth. Beyond her, Lavinia was plodding angrily through a Latin exercise. From behind us, Kitty kicked Beanie’s chair and passed up a note. Beanie looked at it and squeaked with laughter, and the noise made Virginia look up – just in time to see Daisy slip a folded up piece of paper onto my desk.

  ‘Wells!’ said Virginia. ‘No passing notes, you know the rules. If it’s so important, you can jolly well come up here and read it out to all of us.’

  Daisy did not look alarmed by this at all. She stood up, took the paper back from me and walked to the front of the prep room. At Virginia’s desk she turned to face us all, opened up the piece of paper and, in a solemn voice, read out, ‘I wish Cook would give us something other than sprouts for dinner; they disagree with me awfully.’

  ‘Wells, you little beast!’ cried Virginia as we all squealed with laughter. ‘Give that to me!’

  She snatched the page from Daisy’s hand and read it through, her face flushing with annoyance. ‘Oh, go and sit down, and if I hear anything more from you this evening I shall report you to Matron. And be quiet, the rest of you little horrors! Shush! Shush!’

  Daisy, triumphant, gave her audience the slightest of curtseys and then took her seat again amidst general delighted chaos and furious shushings from Virginia. As she sank down next to me, though, she leaned her head against mine for a moment and whispered, ‘Meeting in the airing cupboard tonight after toothbrushes to talk about you-know-what.’

  I went back to pretending to write an essay on the failings of George III. Classic Daisy, I thought. It was just like her. Then my stomach squished as I thought about what she had just said. Were we really ready for our first murder case?

  6

  Later, when all the prefects on duty were running about chasing shrimps who should have already been in bed (there were a great deal more of them than usual that evening, and I suspect that Daisy may have been behind it), I slipped out – with my casebook stuffed up my pyjama jacket and clutching my toothbrush for cover – and tiptoed down to the airing cupboard on the second-floor corridor. A moment later Daisy padded into view, in her slippers and regulation pyjamas, looking extremely casual. She peered up and down the dim corridor, then, satisfied that there was no one else in sight, seized my arm, more or less dragged me into the
airing cupboard and pulled the door shut behind her.

  The air inside was thick and damp and very dark – I stumbled against Daisy and she said, ‘Ow, Hazel, you clod.’

  There was a ripping noise and a snap, which made me jump. I said, ‘What’s that?’ and Daisy said, ‘Our cover. Oh, do stop flailing about . . . Here—’

  With a pop the electric light came on.

  Rows and rows of wooden racks piled with grey school clothes came into view, as did Daisy, who was leaning back against the racks and glaring at me. I saw that one of the buttons on her pyjama jacket had been ripped off, leaving the fabric poking through.

  ‘Well,’ said Daisy, ‘sit down.’

  I perched myself on a grey pile of games knickers. This made the wooden slats of the shelf creak dangerously, and I jumped off again.

  ‘All right,’ said Daisy, leaping up onto a rack with a cheerful bounce, and swinging her slippered feet as she spoke. ‘This meeting of the Detective Society is hereby called into session at ten minutes past eight on this, Tuesday the thirtieth of October. Present are Daisy Wells, President, and Hazel Wong, Secretary. Tonight we will be discussing the Case of the Murder of Miss Bell. Any objections?’

  ‘No,’ I said, writing busily.

  ‘Excellent, Watson,’ said Daisy. ‘All right, the order of the meeting is as follows: first, the facts of the case. Second, the suspect list. Third, the current location of the body. And fourth, our plan of action.’

  ‘Do we have any facts of the case?’ I asked, pausing and looking up at Daisy. It seemed to me that we were starting off without any of the things that detectives usually take for granted. The body had vanished (and even though I had seen it, I had been too busy behaving like a frightened little shrimp to pay proper attention to it), and what was left of the crime scene must by now have been tidied away by Jones the handyman on his rounds. We had no photographic snaps to look at, no police interviews to read and no coroner’s report to look at either. To me, the situation seemed rather bleak.