Murder Most Unladylike: A Wells and Wong Mystery

by Robin Stevens

  ‘Of course we do!’ said Daisy. ‘Come on, Hazel, don’t give up before we’ve even started. We know there was a murder because you found the body. We know who was murdered – Miss Bell – and how she was murdered too.’

  ‘By being pushed off the Gym balcony!’ I agreed.

  ‘We can also make a jolly good stab at when it happened. Look – the last lesson of the day ends at four fifteen p.m. – which on Mondays happens to be second-form Dance. You went to the Gym—?’

  ‘At five forty-five,’ I said.

  ‘That means that Miss Bell must have been killed some time between four fifteen – after all, one of those second formers would have noticed the body if it was there during Dance – and five forty-five. There, you see? That’s what, who, where how and when. That wasn’t so difficult.’

  I realized she was right.

  ‘So, we do have some facts after all,’ Daisy went on. ‘And that brings us rather neatly to our second point: the suspects. Who might want to do away with Miss Bell – or rather, considering what’s happened this term, who wouldn’t?’

  ‘Do you really think it has to be a master or mistress?’ I asked.

  ‘I think what we’ve worked out already practically proves it,’ said Daisy. ‘The resignation note, left on Miss Griffin’s desk, in handwriting that looked like Miss Bell’s – only a master or mistress could have done that, after all. And we’ve worked out that Miss Bell was killed after school hours, by someone strong enough to shove her over the side of the Gym balcony. I’d say that was all quite conclusive. So, which of them could have done it?’

  ‘Well, Miss Parker,’ I said. ‘Because of what happened with Miss Bell and The One.’

  ‘The jealousy angle,’ said Daisy. ‘I like it. Think of all those rows they’ve been having!’

  I thought about Miss Parker in one of her legendary rages, dragging her fingers through her short black hair and shrieking, and decided that she was a very good suspect indeed.

  ‘Who else?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘What about Miss Hopkins? She might have been afraid The One would jilt her for Miss Bell.’

  ‘Now, that’s a silly suggestion,’ said Daisy. ‘For one thing, it’s a terribly weak motive. For another, I happen to know that Miss Hopkins was up in the Pavilion talking tactics with the hockey lot on Monday after school. They’ve got that match against St Chator’s this weekend, you know – they’re terrified about it, so the Hop was helping them prepare. She couldn’t have killed Miss Bell. And for a third – well, Miss Hopkins simply wouldn’t do a thing like murder. She couldn’t. She’s – she’s pukka.’

  It was my turn to sigh. Daisy is quite obsessed with Miss Hopkins, and I felt that she was ruling her out unfairly. But I couldn’t argue with such an alibi.

  ‘All right, then,’ I said. ‘Miss Lappet and Miss Tennyson. They both want the Deputy Head job, don’t they, but we all know that Miss Bell was about to be given it. What if one of them thought they’d get it by clearing Miss Bell out of the way?’

  ‘Much better,’ said Daisy, pleased. ‘Neither of them have alibis that I can think of – and we know that Miss Tennyson was around school at the right time, don’t we? After all, she took us for Lit. Soc yesterday, and societies all finish at five twenty. And then we saw her outside Mr MacLean’s study shortly after you discovered the body, not far from the Gym at all. So . . . who else? I suppose Mamzelle and Mr MacLean, because we saw them near the scene of the crime at the right time too. Though I can’t think of a motive for either of them, can you?’

  I shook my head. ‘Shouldn’t we add The One, for the same reason?’ I asked. ‘He was there – I saw him stick his head out of his cubby as we were going past.’

  ‘Very true,’ agreed Daisy, nodding. ‘Though, again, why ever would he kill Miss Bell? It’s not as though he’s even interested in her any more. Really, it ought to have been her killing him, and of course that didn’t happen.’

  ‘Rage?’ I suggested. ‘Blackmail? Remorse?’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Daisy. ‘Not yet proven. But lovely work otherwise. Just look, we’ve got six suspects for our list! Write them down, do. Then we can cross them off later as we discover their alibis.’

  I wrote them down.

  ‘All right, excellent work,’ said Daisy. ‘Now we must consider the matter of the body.’

  I did not like the sound of that at all. In fact, it gave me the shudders. There we were, back again to the horrible idea that the murderer might still have been in the Gym when I arrived.

  ‘Where did it go?’ asked Daisy, not noticing the look on my face. ‘How did the murderer move it? They wouldn’t have had long, after all. If you left the Gym at five forty-five and came back with me and Virginia at, well, let’s say five fifty-two – that seems about right – then they wouldn’t have been able to get far. Bodies are extraordinarily heavy, my uncle says.’

  I wished Daisy hadn’t said that. It might have been a joke, but it made my chills worse than ever.

  ‘I’d say that it was more than possible that your suggestion about the murderer hiding in the Cupboard is correct,’ said Daisy excitedly, sounding more and more like something from one of her detective novels. ‘And he or she could have dragged the body in there too! Imagine – you, me and Virginia, just a few steps away from the killer and the victim. But if it was there at that moment, where was it moved to afterwards? Since no one using the Gym today noticed a body, it must have been moved somewhere else after we left yesterday evening. Perhaps the murderer used the trolley that Jones stores in the Cupboard, to move it more easily. Anyway, that’s another of our tasks, to discover the current location of Miss Bell’s body.’

  ‘Ugh,’ I said, shivering. I didn’t want to see Miss Bell’s corpse ever again, and I couldn’t bear the thought that both it and the murderer might have been nearby when I returned to the Gym with Virginia and Daisy. Daisy, however, rolled her eyes at me. Things like that do not bother her at all. I don’t think she sees them in her imagination in quite the same way I do.

  ‘I think investigating the body’s whereabouts will involve more careful planning than we can manage right now. We can’t just go nosing about the school looking for a corpse, after all. I’ll have to think about that. But – Hazel, write this down – the plan for tomorrow is as follows: we must establish alibis for the masters and mistresses on our suspect list. We can try asking them directly, of course, but it may be easier simply to ask other girls. However, remember that this mission requires constant vigilance! Any answer may lead to the truth.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, fighting down my nerves. ‘I know. But – I still can’t believe that one of our masters or mistresses could have committed a murder.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly, Hazel. My uncle says anyone’s capable of murder, deep down. Only remember—’

  But at that moment, the door to the airing cupboard was wrenched open and Virginia Overton appeared before us, looking grim. As quickly as I could, I dropped my casebook onto the floor and sat on it. Luckily, Virginia is sometimes less than observant.

  ‘Whatever are you doing?’ she asked us furiously. ‘Come out of there at once.’

  Daisy was unperturbed. ‘The button just popped off my pyjama jacket. Hazel was helping me find a new one.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Virginia. ‘It’s nearly ten o’clock – you ought to have been in bed half an hour ago. Get back to your dorm immediately, and I shall be telling Matron about this later.’

  Under her baleful eye we scurried out of the cupboard towards our dorm, Daisy clutching a new pyjama jacket. ‘Beast,’ she said, as soon as we were round the corner. ‘She only wants us out of it so she and Belinda Vance can canoodle in there. Betsy North says she caught them at it last week.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘The problem with this place,’ said Daisy, pausing in the stairwell to wriggle out of her old pyjama jacket and into her new one, ‘is that there are far too many secrets wherever you turn. And most of them
are so pointless. It doesn’t make it easy for two detectives to do their jobs.’

  7

  It might seem strange that someone as popular as Daisy should have a secret like the Detective Society. Certainly, when I first met her I never suspected the sort of person she really is. The first time I met Daisy would be hard to forget. It was the first time I’d ever stepped onto a games field – and incidentally, also the first time I truly thought I might die.

  I had been at Deepdean for less than a day. My boat from Hong Kong had only docked in England a week before, and I still couldn’t understand how anywhere in the world could be so cold. I watched the English girls happily running out onto the field wearing skimpy games skirts, and decided that I would have nothing to do with such madness. But I found myself ordered outside anyway, my lumpy legs sticking out underneath my itchy grey games skirt and games knickers (according to the English, the only place you can get cold is your behind, so they make you put on extra underwear over your real underwear to keep warm), and my frozen pink hands clutching my shiny new hockey stick.

  Then Miss Hopkins blew her whistle, and suddenly all the other girls began to pound up and down in front of me, screaming and waving their sticks about as though they wanted to murder each other. It began to rain – not at all like the warm rain I was used to at home, but as though someone was shooting flakes of ice into my face and all up my bare, goose-pimply legs.

  That was the moment when I realized that England might not be exactly how it had seemed in my jolly school-story books.

  I had been hearing about England – and the boarding schools real English children went to – all my life. My father had studied at one when he was a little boy, and he never stops talking about it. He made me learn to read and write in English – and not only me but all our servants, even the mui jai – and then he gave me heaps and heaps of English books to read.

  All the same, I never thought I would go to an English school myself. All the boys from families like mine did, of course, but girls generally stayed on Hong Kong Island. I would have too, if two things had not happened: first, my father’s concubine had another daughter. This meant that my father’s dream of sending a son of his to school in England was ruined again. Secondly, a girl my family knows, Victoria Cheng, was sent away to Hampden School for Ladies, in Cairo. Her father showed mine a picture of Victoria standing stiffly next to lots of other pale little girls in pinafores, and my father decided on the spot that if the Chengs could do it, we could do it too, and better.

  The next thing I knew, my father was telling me that even though it was the middle of the year, I was going away to school myself – and not to Cairo, but to the real thing in England. ‘If Cheng thinks that he can get the better of me like that,’ said my father, ‘he’s wrong. Besides, no school in the world could change the fact that his daughter is stupid. My clever Hazel is worth ten Victoria Chengs, and now she’s going to prove it.’

  My mother was furious. She hates my father’s obsession with England. ‘Western school never did any Chinese person good,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, come now, Lin darling,’ said my father, laughing. ‘What about me?’

  ‘Exactly,’ snapped my mother, and for the next week she refused to speak anything but Cantonese in protest.

  Of course, I was wild with excitement. Like my father, I was obsessed with the real, original England. Our big white cake of a house, and the whole compound it sits in, is filled with Western things. We have a tidy green lawn bordered with pink roses (my mother is always complaining about all the watering they need), the Folio Society sends us heavy, beautiful-smelling parcels of books each month to fill up my father’s library, and in every room the patterned wallpaper is nearly hidden by paintings – of grand English mansions surrounded by large fields and very small farmers, of people riding beautiful brown horses or taking tea on green lawns. In the dining room we have a great big picture of the King wearing his moustache and medals, next to the Queen with her pearls and white dress. ‘It’s my little corner of England,’ says my father – and when I looked out over the top of our compound wall, at the rickshaw drivers in the loud, dusty streets below, and beyond to Victoria Harbour, jam-packed with its junks and steamers, our house seemed part of a different world entirely.

  The day I found out I was going to England I sat in our drawing room – its mahogany furniture a little warped and fuzzy from the heat, its wallpaper peeling – and imagined myself at school, arm-in-arm with a golden-haired girl, a friend who would turn me into a perfect English Miss, like her.

  But standing on the cold games field that morning, it seemed to me that all the English Misses were actually horrible and mad. I clutched my hockey stick harder than ever – and then someone ran into me, extremely hard. I wobbled and gasped (I am so solid that it is not easy to knock me over) and the someone said, ‘Oh, I say, I’m so very sorry.’

  And that, of course, was Daisy. Her hair was falling out of its plaits chaotically and her eyes were extremely blue, and although the rest of England was not exactly turning out as I had expected, here, at least, was one English ideal – my golden-haired friend come to life; a person absolutely made from the England of my books and paintings.

  When I think back to that moment, I realize how silly I was.

  1

  On Wednesday morning, Miss Bell was (of course) still missing, and everyone was still very excited about the idea of a gang from the East. Lallie Thompson-Bates, a day girl from the second form, was telling anyone who would listen that her mother had spoken to a close friend who had seen a woman looking very much like Miss Bell in a shop in Abingdon, buying azaleas. Another girl who knew all about the language of flowers said that azaleas meant ‘Take care!’, and there was great excitement at that – until Lallie admitted that she had meant to say hydrangeas. Since hydrangeas turned out to mean ‘frigidity’, this did not seem right at all.

  ‘And I don’t know when she would have time for buying flowers if she was really on the run from a criminal gang,’ Daisy whispered to me scornfully, before turning to Kitty to discuss whether the people after Miss Bell might perhaps be from Russia.

  Daisy cultivates girls in the lower forms to bring her back gossip, and so she sent Betsy North and her other informants off to collect information, telling them quite truthfully that she wanted to know what Miss Bell had been doing on Monday before her mysterious disappearance. She and I canvassed the older girls.

  We discovered that, while it was difficult to stop people talking about Miss Bell, most of the things they said were utterly useless. But then Betsy came back to us with some much more useful news.

  One of Betsy’s little first-form friends had been to Cultural Soc on Monday with Mamzelle. This was useful already, since it reminded us that Mamzelle had a good alibi between 4.20 and 5.20, but then the story became even more interesting. The shrimp had been let out of Cultural Soc five minutes early because she had a slight stomach ache. At just after 5.15 she had arrived in Old Wing cloakroom to collect her hat and coat, and there she had unexpectedly come upon Miss Bell. Miss Bell was, according to the shrimp, digging through a pile of old coats; then she pulled out a battered copy of The Arabian Nights, snapped, ‘I’m confiscating this,’ and stalked off towards Library corridor.

  Daisy and I both realized what this meant at once. It brought the time during which the killer must have struck down to less than half an hour. If Miss Bell had been alive and in Old Wing cloakroom at 5.15, she could not have even arrived in the Gym before 5.20, and that meant she must have been killed between 5.20 and 5.45.

  ‘Do you know,’ said Daisy to me, once Betsy had run off again, ‘detecting a murder is turning out to be rather easy. If we carry on like this we shall have solved it in no time.’

  I was not so sure. It seemed to me that we still had a great deal to discover. But I did agree that we seemed to be making a very good start, and soon we had even more information.

  A fourth former waiting about for confirmation
study with Mr MacLean had seen Miss Bell go into the mistresses’ common room on Library corridor, just after lessons ended but before socs began, followed by Miss Parker. A few minutes later they had come out again – both looking frightfully cross, Miss Bell’s face icy and Miss Parker’s hair all spiky with rage (the fourth former’s words) – and marched away together towards an empty form room. This sounded very much like the beginnings of another spectacular argument. That it had taken place on the evening Miss Bell died was extremely suspicious.

  Then Felicity Carrington (a fifth former, who was dreadfully disappointed that she had nothing to say about Miss Bell) mentioned that she had seen Miss Lappet going into Miss Griffin’s office just after half past four, her glasses wobbling and her enormous bosom heaving, looking terribly upset about something. Daisy was very excited. ‘What if she was complaining about Miss Bell being given the Deputy job?’ she asked me in a low voice. ‘And then, if Miss Griffin refused to listen to her, what if she decided to take matters into her own hands?’

  ‘Hmm,’ I said thoughtfully. We now knew that two more of our suspects had stayed at school after hours, and neither of them yet had any sort of alibi for the time of the murder. I noted it all down on our suspect list.

  2

  Things began to look very black for Miss Parker. In Maths, Daisy began talking loudly about a favourite fountain pen that she must have lost somewhere in the corridors after Lit. Soc on Monday evening. ‘You didn’t see it, did you?’ she asked Miss Parker.