Murder Is Bad Manners

by Robin Stevens

  My last look back at Miss Griffin played like a film reel in my head. She had been bending down over something small lying on the tiles, looking at it intently. I glanced at Daisy, and saw that she was having exactly the same thought as me.

  “What shall we do?” she gasped. “Miss Griffin will put it straight into Davey Jones.” Davey Jones is our name for Miss Griffin’s box of confiscated items. It sits in her office and we call it that because you know that once something’s gone in there you’ll never see it again. “We’ll never get it back. How will we confront our suspects if we don’t have the earring? Oh, Hazel, our beautiful case. It’s ruined!”

  “Well,” I said, surprising myself by what came out of my mouth next, “if we need it, we’ll just have to get it back. We’ll go to Miss Griffin’s office at lunch and you can tell her that it’s a present for your mother or something. It’s worth a try, anyway. After all, Miss Griffin likes you.”

  “She did until I ran into her half an hour ago,” said Daisy. “But still, it’s an excellent idea, Hazel! Whatever has got into you?”

  “I want to solve the case,” I said. “I want the person who killed Miss Bell and Miss Tennyson punished. You said yourself how important it is.”

  Daisy raised her eyebrows. “Yes, but—Hazel Wong, encouraging me to tell a lie! I never thought I’d see the day. You’re right, though. We need that earring, and we’re going to get it back!”

  Daisy and I made for Miss Griffin’s office, on the top floor of the New Wing, as soon as we came back from lunch. We should not really have been in the New Wing outside of lesson time, of course, but things were still so mixed up after Miss Tennyson’s death that no one had time to notice us running by except the dark-haired chief of police, who gave us a look as we passed him on our way up the stairs by the Founder’s portrait. I hoped we were looking innocent.

  The door to Miss Griffin’s office was closed. Daisy and I grimaced at each other encouragingly and then Daisy knocked on the door. My heart was hammering as we waited to hear Miss Griffin’s voice, but the person who answered our knock was not Miss Griffin at all. It was Miss Lappet.

  “Come in!” she called, and there was a hurried clinking noise. Daisy and I looked at each other in a panic. Neither of us had expected this. Asking Miss Griffin for the earring was terrifying enough, but asking one of our three remaining suspects for the evidence that might prove she had done it—that was more frightening altogether.

  “Come in!” Miss Lappet called again, and this time her voice was tinged with annoyance.

  “We’ll just have to bluff it!” Daisy whispered to me. “This could be a way to finally eliminate her!”

  Or prove that she did the murders, I thought. I was about to tell Daisy not to go in, but she was already pushing open the door.

  Daisy is a marvelous actress, and at that moment I was glad. My heart was drumming painfully in my chest and my knees were wobbling, but Daisy behaved as though nothing was wrong at all. “Oh! Miss Lappet!” she said, as though it was a jolly surprise. “Good morning!”

  “Good morning, Daisy, Hazel,” said Miss Lappet. She was at the desk where Miss Bell used to work, next to Miss Griffin’s big green leather one, and she was squinting at us. Her gray hair was fluffy, her glasses were askew, and there was a stain on her enormous blouse front. She looked a harmless fright. But appearances, I had learned, could be deceptive. I made sure to stop a safe distance away from her, halfway across Miss Griffin’s green and blue patterned carpet, and let Daisy speak.

  “Miss Lappet,” she said, “this is a terribly awful thing to ask of you. I really ought to wait until Miss Griffin comes back—it’s a rather difficult request—”

  That got to Miss Lappet, of course.

  “As you can see, today I am acting as Miss Griffin’s secretary while she deals with the police. Anything you can say to Miss Griffin, you can say to me, dear,” she said.

  “Oh!” Daisy said, “In that case . . . I’m sure Miss Griffin told you that I bumped into her this morning. I feel like such an imbecile, I shall never forgive myself for it, but . . . well, I dropped something when I crashed into her. It was something I oughtn’t to have had, but Mummy’s birthday is next week. I know it was terribly wrong of me to have her present down at school, and as soon as I found it was missing I realized that the only thing to do was come to Miss Griffin and simply beg her to let me have it back.”

  “How sweet,” said Miss Lappet, slurring the Ws slightly. “What was it, exactly?”

  I braced myself, feeling as though I was about to be tackled by a very large Big Girl wielding a hockey stick.

  “Well, I bought Mummy a pair of gold earrings, but when I looked in art I could only find one of them still in their box. It’s two long teardrops, one above the other.”

  I waited for Miss Lappet to jump up from her seat and shout, or faint, or hurl Miss Griffin’s paperweight at us. Instead, she merely looked confused. “But, Daisy dear, what an odd coincidence. How strange. Are you sure? Miss Griffin has just found her own earring that has been missing all week—a gold one just like that. She showed it to me a minute ago, and here it is still in her desk.”

  And she took something out of one of the desk’s many drawers and held it out for us to see. There on her palm sat the earring that we had found in the tunnel, its two gold tears shining. “You see, this is Miss Griffin’s, dear,” Miss Lappet told Daisy. “Are you sure the earring you lost was like this one?”

  Daisy blinked. Then she said, very quickly, “Oh no, you’re right. How annoying! I’m terribly sorry to have bothered you. Come along, Hazel, we ought to be going. I’m sure Miss Lappet is very busy. Come along, Hazel.”

  She had to drag me out of the room. I couldn’t take my eyes off the gold earring in Miss Lappet’s hand. It couldn’t be, I thought. It couldn’t be! But it was. There the earring sat, looking ordinary as anything, except that what it meant was something utterly terrible.

  Miss Lappet was not the murderer.

  Neither were Miss Hopkins or The One.

  It was Miss Griffin.

  Miss Griffin had done it. Why hadn’t we thought of her as a suspect?

  Daisy had me by the wrist. She was dragging me along somewhere, and I let her. I didn’t much care about anything except what was going on in my head.

  Miss Griffin had done it. Of course, as soon as we knew that Miss Lappet’s supposed alibi was useless, we should have realized that Miss Griffin’s had vanished as well—but we had never even considered her. I thought again about that conversation Daisy had overheard between Miss Griffin and Miss Tennyson. Why hadn’t we realized how sinister Miss Griffin’s request had been?

  There I was, minding my own business in an opportune listening place in the Library corridor, Daisy had told me, when Miss Griffin came up to Miss Tennyson. “Miss Tennyson,” she said, “I need to talk to you. You haven’t quite finished helping me with that little project of ours. You were so late to my office on Monday evening that we barely got a thing done.”

  “Yes, but I made up for it on Tuesday and Wednesday,” said Miss Tennyson nervously.

  “Ah, but not quite,” replied Miss Griffin. “There’s still a bit of work that needs to be finished.”

  Honestly, Hazel, Miss Tennyson went as white as a sheet. She was shaking. “Can we perhaps schedule another session?” asked Miss Griffin. “There’s just a little more work I’d like you to do—perhaps this evening?”

  If it had been any other teacher, we might have been more suspicious. But somehow Miss Griffin had always seemed so remote from the other teachers, so above everything that went on at Deepdean. And Miss Lappet, Miss Hopkins, and The One had all been such good suspects—so had Miss Tennyson and Miss Parker, to start with. They’d all had motives for killing Miss Bell, while Miss Griffin didn’t appear to have any motive at all.

  But Miss Griffin had done it. Why?

  I felt Daisy shaking my arm.

  “Hazel,” she said. “You’re talking to your
self.”

  I blinked, and found that somehow we had ended up in the Old Wing cloakroom. The bell for the end of lunch break was ringing.

  “Come on,” said Daisy. “Hide.”

  She dragged me into one of the very far corners, which was full of the coats that girls from years ago had lost and never bothered to find again. They smelled slightly rotten, and their gray fabric had gone a bit green with age.

  I squeezed myself in next to Daisy. We sat there in the dimness, trying not to breathe in the old coat smell too much. Then Daisy reached out her hand and took hold of mine. I could feel it shaking.

  “I never guessed it would be Miss Griffin,” she said quietly. “I didn’t want to tell you, but I was nearly sure it was Miss Hopkins and The One. It was all beginning to fit—motive, means, even the earring. But—oh, Miss Griffin!”

  I nodded, making the coats in front of my face sway. “She doesn’t seem real, does she?” I asked.

  “She isn’t human,” said Daisy. “She’s a headmistress through and through. I thought so, anyway. Well! Now we know how the murderer got Miss Tennyson to help—Miss Griffin must have offered the deputy headmistress job in exchange for her services. And that conversation I overheard on Friday makes sense now! Miss Griffin was reminding Miss Tennyson that they were in it together; she must have been asking her to help search the school again that evening, for the lost earring! The flashlight we saw when we were creeping around on Friday night—well, I suppose that must have been them, hunting. Heavens!

  “I wonder why she did it, though? What on earth would be worth murdering two people for, if you are already the headmistress of Deepdean? Miss Tennyson had to be bumped off because she was on the verge of telling the police, but why ever kill Miss Bell in the first place?”

  “She must have had a reason,” I said, although my mind was as blank as Daisy’s. Miss Griffin seemed to have everything, to want for nothing. She ruled Deepdean, had all the other teachers running after her, was perfectly well-off, and even quite good-looking, for an old person. “I don’t know what, though,” I admitted.

  “Let’s be logical about this,” said Daisy, squeezing my hand. Hers was beginning to feel more steady, although mine was still trembling. “We know she did it. Just as you said, we know when and how. Now all we need is to know why. Why do people kill other people?”

  “Money,” I said promptly. Daisy has drummed these reasons into me enough times for me to know them by heart. “Power. Love. Fear. Revenge. But Miss Griffin had more money and power than Miss Bell anyway, so it can’t have been those.”

  “Likewise,” said Daisy, “revenge seems unlikely. Miss Griffin could have simply not given Miss Bell the deputy job, or fired her, if she wanted revenge for something. So that leaves love and fear. Well, what if—Hazel, tell me if this doesn’t make sense—what if Miss Bell was blackmailing Miss Griffin? Asking for money—or, no, the deputy headmistress job—in exchange for keeping quiet about something? That would explain why Miss Griffin couldn’t simply fire Miss Bell.”

  “But Miss Griffin seems so perfect!” I objected. “What could she be blackmailed about?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Daisy, “but if she’s killed two people over it, it must be rather awful. What do you think, though? Am I right?”

  Even then, in the middle of everything else going on in my head, I had time to be amazed. Daisy Wells, asking me what I thought about her detective work!

  “It does make sense,” I said. “If anything does.”

  “Pity we can’t just ask Miss Bell about it, isn’t it?” asked Daisy with a little chuckle. “Excuse me, but why were you murdered?”

  “Perhaps she left a note,” I said.

  Daisy chuckled again. Then she squeezed my fingers so hard that I yelped.

  “Hazel,” she said, “that isn’t actually a stupid thing to say at all. As all my books point out, blackmailers do generally keep copies of incriminating documents in a safe place for insurance. What if Miss Bell did something like that?”

  “If she did,” I said, squeezing back in excitement, “they might be down at school.”

  “Yes!” said Daisy. “I bet Miss Griffin and Miss Tennyson were looking for them as well as the earring last week!”

  Then we both remembered that Deepdean was rather a large place. We sank back into the coats, sighing.

  “No, wait,” said Daisy, sitting upright again. “Let’s deduce. Miss Bell and Miss Griffin must have prearranged their meeting in the gym; they wouldn’t have met there by chance on a Monday evening. So Miss Bell would have had time to prepare for it—and hide any evidence she was using to blackmail Miss Griffin. She would have put it somewhere safe, somewhere Miss Griffin wouldn’t have thought of when she was looking for it.”

  “So not the teachers’ common room,” I said. “And not the science labs, either.”

  “Too obvious,” Daisy agreed. “Well, where do we know Miss Bell went on Monday night?”

  “The gym,” I said. “But there’s nowhere to hide something in the gym. Jones would find it if it was in the cupboard, and besides, it’s too close to the meeting place.”

  Then, in a flash of something that Daisy would have called Sherlocky brilliance if it had happened to her, I saw the answer. “Daisy,” I breathed. “The cloakroom. Right here! Remember the sixth-grader who found Miss Bell digging around behind the coats in here? We only used what she said to establish when Miss Bell left for the gym, but what if Miss Bell was here to hide her evidence?”

  Daisy said something extremely unladylike. Then she hugged me. I glowed.

  “Coat pockets!” she cried. “Nobody ever uses these ratty old ones—they stay here until they rot away! It’s the perfect hiding place! Quick, Hazel, dig!”

  And she began pawing through the pile of old coats that surrounded us.

  Shivering with excitement, I hunted with her. We were on the trail again, I thought, as I shoved my hand into ripped and dirty pockets, pulling out snapped pencils and coat-furry sweets. Then my fingertips bumped against something large and cardboard-stiff that crackled when I squeezed it.

  Holding my breath, I pulled it out and parted the coats in front of me to see that I was clutching a red notebook that said, in small, precise letters on its cover:

  Verity’s Diary

  “Daisy,” I said quietly. “I’ve got it.”

  Daisy gave a whoop of triumph—but I couldn’t get past those two carefully inked words.

  I got a chill all the way down my spine. Verity Abraham. She seemed to be everywhere. I know it sounds stupid, but at that moment I really did wonder if she was haunting me. I imagined her with her hanging-down hair and her bloodstained clothes and a hot-and-cold shiver ran through me.

  Daisy didn’t see it that way at all. “Goodness,” she said, peering at the book. “Verity. I say, that’s Verity Abraham!”

  “I know,” I said shakily. It was funny to think that before Verity became my ghost girl, she had been a real, ordinary schoolgirl at Deepdean who ate cookies and kept a diary. I took a deep breath, bent the spine open, and began to read.

  25th September 1933

  The beginning of another year! And such an important year too. Daddy keeps on reminding me that this is the year I begin to prepare for my university entrance exam. It is terribly important, I know, and I am lucky enough to be coached by Miss Griffin herself! I am amazed to have been chosen by her. I always thought—well, I’m ashamed to say it now, but I always assumed that she did not like me very much. She always seemed to avoid me in the corridors. So I was simply amazed to be told that she had requested me specially! I have made a resolution to buck up and work as hard as I possibly can, so as to be worthy of her.

  “Boring,” said Daisy. “Skim to the racy bit. What? There must be one!”

  18th October 1933

  The exam prep is going—I wish I could say well. I hope it is. I am certainly doing my best, though I fear I am a little slow at times. But I am becoming more and more
puzzled by Miss Griffin. She is behaving so oddly. She always seems to be on the verge of saying—something—and when she is coaching me, certain things make her peculiarly twitchy. We were discussing Jocasta, , that mad lady who abandoned her son, Oedipus, and Miss Griffin kept on trying to justify what she did! I did not quite like to disagree with her, since she is the headmistress, but really! I wonder if she is quite all right.

  24th October 1933

  I am beginning to suspect that Miss Griffin has some sort of secret! In fact, I think she has a dark secret in her past. I told Henry the other day, and she thinks it’s nonsense, but I believe I am right. I wonder what it can be?

  16th November 1933

  I simply can’t be mistaken anymore. Miss Griffin has a secret—and I believe she is on the verge of revealing it to me! I feel quite honored, although I do hope it isn’t something horrible. Anyway, she keeps giving me the oddest looks, and half saying things . . . I said all this to Henry, and she said I was batty, that everyone knows teachers don’t have secrets, or at least not important ones. Henry is so boring sometimes.

  20th November 1933

  I was right. But, oh Lord—what shall I do? It simply can’t be. But it is. She showed me all the documents . . . she had them all laid out—she seemed to be hoping—Wait, I am not being methodical about this account. Let me begin again.

  Tonight, during our tutoring session, Miss Griffin finally told me her secret. Seventeen years ago, before she came to Deepdean, when she was a teacher at another school—she had a baby. She was not married, and so of course it was hushed up. The baby was given away to a very nice family.

  That baby was me.

  * * *

  I stopped reading with a gasp, and Daisy gave an undignified squeal. “Really!” she cried. “Really! Oh, Hazel, excitement!”

  I couldn’t believe it, but then she showed me all the certificates, with my parents’ signatures and her own. It really is true. Oh Lord, what shall I do? Mummy is not my mummy anymore, and Daddy is no relation to me either—instead, I’m the daughter of a schoolteacher. A schoolteacher! A nobody, and not even married!