“Small wonder, if she’s had a phone call from her godmother’s loathsome grandson, describing how he almost rode the girl down with his motorcycle.” I ground out the words. “How I’d love him to be the thief himself, trying to put the blame elsewhere. He’s perfectly cast as the villain of the piece.”
Dorcas’s response was muffled by more grinding of the gears. I’m not the best parker, but she—dear woman—is worse. The next minute or two incorporated several panicky nosedives and rocketing retreats between two cars that strove valiantly not to look frightened. I kept expecting them to collapse from fear into heaving heaps, which we would have to surreptitiously shovel over a hedge for the dustman to collect next Sunday. Then again, would it be so dreadful if a policeman complete with helmet and truncheon popped out of nowhere and I, nobly denying any involvement on Dorcas’s part, was hauled away and ordered never again to set foot within a hundred miles of St. Roberta’s?
My head was cleared by the final jolt, and I seized the moment to reach into my bag for my compact mirror. It was a pretty thing—engine-turned silver and jade-green enamel—but what really counted was that it had belonged to my mother and she had given it to me on my seventeenth birthday, only a month before she died. Just holding it when I was anxious or unsure of myself helped me feel better … calmer … more resolute. Within minutes of setting eyes on Aiden Loverly, I had sized him up as my favorite kind of suspect: spoiled, ruthless, and utterly cocksure that he could get away with murder … or in this case, a sports cup. But above the desire to bring him to justice there was another pull—my need to know more about what was going on in the lives of Gillian and Ms. Chips. Finally the car was stationary, if infringing on the personal space of the Honda to its left. I gave my head a shake and, on legs that trembled only infinitesimally, joined Dorcas in stepping out onto concrete that I hoped would do us the kindness of staying in place until we were safely inside St. Roberta’s.
“Feel the most frightful fool. Hit the bull’s-eye on a dartboard nine times out of ten but can’t park to save my life.”
I had been wondering how well Ariel Hopkins knew either Gillian or Carolyn, but refocused to say encouragingly, “Rubbish, you did a bang-up job!”
Aware that this term was not comforting, seeing how narrowly it missed being the truth, I got out of the car and was about to follow her toward the building when we were both jolted by a bellowing roar. A man was racing across the lawn in pursuit of two girls—one carrying the other on her back, a fair head pressed against a dark one. There was a sense of panic about them, heightened by the occasional stumble. I realized we were about to face a collision, unless it could be averted by Dorcas. Stepping forward in the nick of time, she placed a hand on the girl doing the carrying and brought her to a halt. Instantly the man was also there. Seen close up, he appeared a surly fellow in late middle age, a short sparse figure with small eyes peering darkly through narrowed lids and yellowed teeth biting down on lips stretched into a scowl.
“Hold on! What’s happening here?” Dorcas surveyed the threesome, but it was the man she addressed.
“I caught sight of the pair of ’em from the toolshed where I was doing some tidying up.” He grunted. “Making from the Dribbly Drop they was, skipping about and giggling like a pair of six-year-olds instead of acting their age.” From the look of them, both girls were about twelve. The one doing the carrying looked solidly strong; the one being piggybacked displayed skinny arms and legs.
“Miriam and Shirley, isn’t it?” Dorcas cocked an orange eyebrow. “Surprised at you both. Usually so well behaved. Those steps are out of bounds because they are dangerous. Easy to take a spill going down.”
“It was coming up that Shirley tripped,” said the sturdy girl. “We knew we shouldn’t have gone down, but we’d got the idea that the Loverly Cup might be hidden in the ruins. The stone bench just inside the refectory has a wide crack down it that would be the perfect place. But oh, Miss Critchley, we didn’t get that far because when we came down the last step and stood on the path we had the biggest fright. We saw someone crouched inside the ruins with this shawl thing on her head and a horrible old dress that looked like it was falling apart.”
“Miss Critchley, you can accuse us of lying, but we swear it was the Gray Nun!” The other girl spoke from around her neck. “It was hard to make her out because she was wrapped up in shadows and it was so quick. When we heard Mr. Mossop shouting, we turned to come back up. And then I fell and twisted my ankle, so Miriam told me to get on her back; luckily I’m pretty light. We thought if she ran fast we could get inside before he caught us and got us into huge trouble.”
“These legs is old, not useless.” The man’s glower struck me as malevolent, but then I do tend to dramatize a situation, and he couldn’t be faulted for wanting to prevent an accident.
“Shouldn’t have gone down the Dribbly Drop, whatever the reason.” Dorcas reddened, as is her wont when called upon to be stern.
“Accident waiting to happen is them steps,” Mr. Mossop said, with grim relish.
“Thanks awfully for looking out for their safety,” Dorcas was saying, when a short woman wearing a dark woolen sweater and pleated skirt unsuited to the heat of the day came through a door in the building and hurried toward us, anxiety evident in her clasped hands and darting eyes.
“There’s the missus,” said Mr. Mossop. “Even of a Sunday afternoon she finds reason to be in the school pushing a broom. Says if I’m at the toolshed what’s to keep her in the cottage? I’ve tried explaining to her that there’s a difference between me having a quiet hour to meself and her slaving away to no purpose when she could be watching the telly. Can’t sit still for a minute, that woman.” He stood scratching behind his ear, his lower lip thrust out as the woman reached us.
“Hello there, Mrs. Mossop!” Dorcas hailed her heartily. “Please accompany these two girls to Matron’s office and explain that Shirley tripped when out of the grounds and hurt her ankle.”
“I’ll do that, miss.” The woman ducked her head before turning to lead the girls toward the main door of the school. The man remained standing for a few moments before taking himself off with a shrug and a grunt in the opposite direction, presumably to return either to the toolshed or his cottage, which Dorcas informed me were both located behind a grove of trees about fifty yards up from the Chaplain’s House.
“So now you’ve met the school’s caretaker and his sad little wife. Afraid to say yes, and afraid to say no, that’s Mrs. Mossop. But a worker in a million! Building gleams. Spit and polish. She has helpers, of course, but she sees nothing is missed.”
Dorcas took my arm as we turned and made for a side door that gave entrance to the area of the building with flats for the staff members who lived in. These, she explained, were in the majority. The larger quarters were provided to those who were married, whether or not they had families. As should be expected, the exception was Mrs. Battle, whose widowhood predated her arrival on the scene as headmistress. I listened and nodded while thinking of Miriam and Shirley and their suspicion regarding the Loverly Cup and the stone bench in the refectory ruins. I remembered Susan dropping her watch down that gap during our own nocturnal visit. There would indeed have been room for a much larger object.
We were in a square lobby painted a rich hunter green with several handsome landscapes adorning the walls and golden parquet flooring that gave onto an ornately carved staircase, carpeted with a richly hued Turkish runner. It might have been the side entrance of a lovingly maintained manor house. On reaching the floor above, Dorcas led the way along a wainscoted corridor with stained-glass windows and ceiling-hung lanterns. There were more paintings, mostly portraits of women from different eras, dating possibly from the 1930s to the present day. I guessed these to be old girls who, given their handsome attire and faintly smug smiles, had made good.
“My flat.” Dorcas pointed at a door in passing.
“Nicely in the middle,” I said, seconds before she turned
a corner.
“Battle stations!” she announced brightly. Taking this to mean the doorbell she was now pressing would fetch forth Mrs. Battle, I fixed a smile on my face and started mentally reciting my nine times tables while trying to remember when the Gold Coast had been renamed Ghana. Before I could fail in either of these attempts it was too late to start testing my memory of French beyond ouvre la porte. The woman who greeted us did so with a smile, but I had little hope that I would be sitting on her knee and calling her “my dear old Battle-ax” anytime soon.
5
“Do come in.” Mrs. Battle stepped aside to enable us to do so. “Good of you, Miss Critchley, to fetch Mrs. Haskell.”
She must now have been in her fifties, a tall woman—a good five-foot-ten to my five-six—an unfair advantage that I tried nobly to convince myself was not intentional. A long bony hand was extended, to be heartily wrung by Dorcas, who had every right to make up in brute strength for being the shortest, and meekly clasped by myself. There followed the usual series of polite greetings, which drifted along with us down the short hall into a large living room.
My tremulous gaze took in the square floor, square windows, and ceiling, and I tried to convince myself I would soon feel as comfortable as a square peg in a square hole. Nothing was reminiscent of the manor house here. The furnishings were contemporary and minimalist in the extreme. The first words that registered with me came from Dorcas, who declined to take a seat on the grounds that she would instead return to the car and take my luggage along to the Chaplain’s House.
“We could do that later.” I twitched an eye at her, having never mastered a proper wink.
“I think Miss Critchley wants to give us a moment alone in which to discuss what I hope you can accomplish while giving up your undoubtedly valuable time, Mrs. Haskell, to help sort out this little trouble in which St. Roberta’s finds itself.”
Mrs. Battle’s smile was of the sort that comes from practicing as frequently as possible in front of a mirror, the equivalent of religiously using dental floss, tiresome though it might be. I found myself regretting not having faced this interview in her office. Before I could come to terms with this emotion, the room was empty of Dorcas, thereby losing its one charm. That she had promised to return for me within the hour was a reed to which I would cling till my fingers disintegrated.
Seated in a chair with a rigidly flat bottom, ramrod back, and square arms, I decided all the furnishings had been chosen with discomfort in mind, a wise choice if one doesn’t want visitors to linger. Mrs. Battle excused herself, saying she would fetch a pot of tea from the kitchenette. I thanked her and made up my mind to decline biscuits should she bring them. It would hardly do to get off on the wrong foot by appearing undisciplined.
While she was gone I studied the decor, the barest essentials of desk, coffee table, and chairs, no photos and no ornaments. Where did the woman keep her life, in a drawer? I was longing with the warm glow of nostalgia for the Middletons’ comfortably inviting house when Mrs. Battle returned with a tea tray. She did bring biscuits, two narrow rectangular ones on a square beige plate.
The whole room was beige. Perhaps—I was always eager to grasp where hope was not—she believed the innocuous color scheme flattered her looks.
Some hope! Mrs. Malloy’s voice almost took the lid off my head. Woman’s got a face like the back of a bus!
This—ill-put though it might be—was the unvarnished truth. Much as I hate to say it, Mrs. Battle would have needed one of the contestants to die on the runway not to come in last in a beauty pageant. Her dark hair was all right on its own, but in combination with hooded eyes, a sallow complexion, and jutting pitted nose it completed her crowlike appearance. Given those negatives, I noted—when she straightened up after setting the tea tray on the coffee table—that what she lost on the roundabouts she gained on the swings. Her slim figure, minus any helpful contribution from her navy skirt and cardigan, was superb, added to which her legs were long and shapely. Photographed from the neck down, she would have made Marilyn Monroe weep. That’s life, I thought, accepting the teacup handed to me; none of us gets it all. I have always considered my feet my one true beauty and, coming in second, my ears. Ben says—
“I hope your husband did not object to your responding to this rather peremptory summons.” Mrs. Battle sat across from me.
“Not at all.” I repositioned myself in an attempt to emulate her superior posture. “He was only too delighted to think I might be of help to you in this troubling situation.”
“How kind. What is his name?”
“Ben.”
“Short for Benjamin?”
“Bentley.” Were we working on English as a foreign language?
“Interesting.” She crossed her ankles and I followed suit—too quickly—knocking off a shoe.
“You have children?”
“Three. Two girls and a boy.”
“Ah!”
“They thought it most exciting that I was going back to school.” My cup rattled in my saucer as I squirmed my foot back into my shoe, not helped by hearing Mrs. Malloy ordering me to tell the old bugger to get down to the matter of the Loverly Cup.
“Do help yourself to a biscuit, Mrs. Haskell.”
It was a highly tempting offer, which I was forced to decline. Were I to reach for the plate, I would inevitably drop my tea and lose my other shoe. In a pathetic attempt at making up for what she might view as rank disobedience—to be punished by my not being allowed to visit the sweetshop—I requested that she call me Ellie.
“Certainly.” Mrs. Battle took a restrained sip of tea that to my flurried state of mind epitomized her entire character: conservative, reflective, disciplined. In a moment I would break under the pressure of this constrained small talk and start singing the national anthem or reciting “Hiawatha.” She was studying me intently—suspiciously might be a better word—from those dark hooded eyes. “I regret to say … Ellie … that I don’t recall seeing much of you during your time as a pupil.”
This was the moment to say Oh, whoops! That isn’t surprising because I’ve suddenly realized I’m at the wrong school. The St. Roberta’s I attended was in the Outer—far, far Outer—Hebrides, and if you wouldn’t be horribly offended, Mrs. Battle, I won’t stay to finish my cup of tea but scoot off in hopes of catching the next Bonnie Prince Charlie ferry so as not to be late for evensong in the chapel.
A happy thought but best scotched. Mrs. Battle’s eagle gaze informed me that she had long experience with prevaricators and my time would be better spent suggesting to the pope that I teach him his catechism than in trying to get a pack of nonsense past her. Counting myself lucky she hadn’t slapped my hand with a ruler for not paying attention in class—or rather, her flat—I accepted that I was stuck in an uncomfortable chair until she granted me permission to slink away.
“I was only here for three years.”
“Yes.” She wasn’t about to admit that she didn’t remember me from Adam—or, rather, Eve.
“I wasn’t memorable. Not remarkably good in any subject.”
“Now we mustn’t take the discouraged view.” Her tone was for the first time kindly; suggesting that she saw me as a student who needed to be persuaded there was still time for improvement were I to pull up my socks. “What about sports? Perhaps that was where you excelled?”
“No, I was hopeless at any sort of game.” Memory having taken me by the throat, I took a swig of tea to steady my nerves. “But I did like drawing.”
“That’s something, isn’t it?” She was in the process of smiling when her face darkened. “You weren’t the one who drew that nude—extremely rude—portrait of Mr. Bumbleton, chairman of the Board of Governors, on the refectory wall?”
“Certainly not.” The very suggestion accomplished some stiffening of my spine. “My interest at that time was in drawing flowers.”
“A great pity the artist did not include a bunch of them where most desperately needed. Mrs. Bumbleton, who
most unfortunately happened to be visiting the school that day, took particular exception to the portrait’s not having been done to scale.”
“Oh, dear!”
“I’m sorry if I offended you, Ellie.” As if by way of atonement Mrs. Battle handed me the plate of biscuits, and I, after the barest hesitation, took one. “You weren’t in my Greek class?” She made it into a casual question.
“Afraid not. Greek would have been … Greek to me.” I saw no point in jogging her memory by saying I had been happy to remain securely third from the bottom in Anatomy.
She permitted herself the narrowest of smiles. “But you did take A levels?”
“Not at St. Roberta’s. I left here before studying for them and did them later at art school.” Noting from Mrs. Battle’s dubious expression that to her mind this made them null and void, I decided it was high time I faced her woman to woman. The biscuit, tiny as it was, had helped enormously. “Shall we talk about the Loverly Cup and how I can help in locating it?” I said, with a briskness I thought deserving of congratulation from Mrs. Malloy, but she remained uncannily silent.
“Miss Critchley spoke highly of your success as a private detective. I understand she is a close friend of yours and would under those circumstances be partial, but we find ourselves in desperate straits.”
“I’ll do my very best.”
“No more can be expected of one of our girls, whether she is taking her end-of-term exams or being asked, as you are, to preserve the luster of St. Roberta’s good name.” Mrs. Battle inclined her head in my general direction. “As Miss Critchley will have told you, the cup’s disappearance, while seriously disturbing at any time, couldn’t have come at a worse one for the school.”
“She explained it has to be passed on shortly to another school and that failure to do so could put a blight on the ceremonial presentation of the new gymnasium.”
Goodbye, Ms. Chips Page 7