Murder Most Unladylike: A Wells and Wong Mystery

by Robin Stevens

  When Daisy laid it out like that, it all seemed to make sense. I wondered if I were really just jealous of Daisy. Was I being a bad member of the Detective Society in not agreeing with the President? I was very confused.

  Just then we reached the Willow Tea Rooms. Unlike Lyons, the teashop where Daisy and I usually go, which has waxy potted palms and stacks of brightly iced cakes displayed behind its enormous glass shopfront, the Willow has little windowpanes shyly half covered with chintz curtains and a blue front door with a tinkling bell. It is a polite place, all draped in cloth, and the dainty little sugared cakes which arrive on matching blue-and-white patterned plates are so small that you can hardly get a proper bite of them.

  I paused on the doorstep. Even after being friends with Daisy for nearly a year, I still feel a guilty lurch in my stomach whenever we go somewhere we’re not allowed. Daisy, though, was cool as a cucumber about it. Things like that don’t worry her at all. She walked in as though she was going into the Dining Room at House.

  Miss Tennyson was sitting alone at a table near the door, her thick-waisted out-of-fashion tweed coat on her lap and her ugly old flat-brimmed wool hat crumpled up next to her plate. The chair next to her was empty. When we came in, she started and half turned round on her seat. Her eyes flicked over us, but I could tell that she wasn’t really seeing us at all.

  Daisy, very chic in her cloche hat and lipstick – which Kitty had swapped her for a diamond pin that looked very nearly real – managed to get us the table next to Miss Tennyson and order tea and a plate of sugar cakes. She was speaking loudly, but Miss Tennyson was so wrapped up in whatever her thoughts that she still did not notice us. I think Daisy was a bit cross about that. She made a great clattering of her spoon against her saucer, dropped her hat at Miss Tennyson’s feet, and at last cleared her throat, turned round on her chair and said, ‘Miss Tennyson!’

  Miss Tennyson jumped as though someone had shot her.

  3

  Miss Tennyson’s eyes flicked over Daisy’s face and she spoke in a small creaky voice that was quite unlike her usual one. ‘Daisy! What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve come to see you,’ said Daisy meaningfully.

  ‘Whatever for?’ asked Miss Tennyson. ‘Daisy, this is not a place for children. Does Matron know you’re here?’

  Then she caught sight of me for the first time. ‘Hazel,’ she said blankly. ‘What is this?’

  ‘We’re here,’ said Daisy, pausing to enjoy the moment, ‘because we know what you’ve done.’

  Miss Tennyson’s large bony hands, pressing tightly down on the flowery tablecloth, twitched. Then she clenched them together so hard her knuckles turned white. I could see the bones right through her skin. ‘Daisy,’ Miss Tennyson whispered, ‘whatever do you mean?’

  ‘We know!’ said Daisy, speaking very quickly. ‘We know you killed Miss Bell! We’ve seen the blood on the Gym cupboard trolley, and your footprints in the tunnel, and the blood in your car, and then there’s this . . .’ And she stuck out her hand and seized Miss Tennyson’s left arm in its shapeless knitted pullover.

  Miss Tennyson yelped in pain, so that the waitress turned and stared at our table curiously. The arm Daisy had taken hold of showed the faint lines of a bandage tied under Miss Tennyson’s pullover. No! I thought. Oh no!

  ‘The evidence against you is damning,’ continued Daisy. (I thought she might be drawing on her murder mysteries a little too heavily.) ‘And I haven’t even shown you the best bit – I mean, the most important piece of evidence – yet. Look!’ She put her hand in her pocket, drew out the earring and brandished it in front of Miss Tennyson’s trembling face.

  Miss Tennyson burst into tears. She put her face in her hands and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. My heart sank. I really had hoped that she would deny everything, but as a sign of guilt, this was unmistakable. I had to believe Daisy now.

  Through the sobbing, Miss Tennyson was trying to say something. ‘Sorry,’ we heard. ‘So sorry – I wish—’

  ‘At least she isn’t denying it,’ whispered Daisy to me over our willow-patterned plate of cakes. ‘I think this is going rather well, don’t you?’

  I did not.

  At last, Miss Tennyson sat up in her seat and stared at us both. She was looking extremely unlike a mistress by then. Her eyes were swollen and red, and her nose was red as well. I knew Daisy was thinking what an absolute fright she looked.

  ‘It’s utter hell,’ Miss Tennyson said quietly. ‘I’ve been in hell. The last few days – it’s all been a blur. I can’t think any more. How did you find out? No, no, don’t tell me. I can’t bear any more. I’m just so bloody tired.’

  It was the first time I had ever heard a mistress swear. It’s silly, but until then I had simply assumed that they must not know how to. Miss Tennyson saying bloody gave me the most dreadful shock.

  Daisy, of course, was thinking more practically. ‘You must give yourself up,’ she told Miss Tennyson sternly. ‘To the police, immediately. If you don’t go, we will.’

  Miss Tennyson was squeezing and squeezing that old hat of hers, as though she was trying to crush the life out of it, but her face had gone very calm. ‘I shall,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing else to be done, is there? It’s funny – I’ve read so much about guilt, and I always thought I understood it, but this – I can’t bear it any more, it’s as simple as that. Confessing is the only way to—’ Suddenly the peaceful look fell off her face and she looked terrified again. ‘But girls – you mustn’t be mixed up in all this. Don’t tell anyone you were here. If I go to the police, they won’t need your evidence; you won’t be dragged into it. Do you promise?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I promise.’ Then I looked at Daisy. She was obviously in the grip of a terrible personal struggle.

  ‘I promise,’ she said at last, rather sulkily. ‘But if you don’t go—’

  ‘I will!’ said Miss Tennyson sharply. ‘I will. Now leave, girls.’

  ‘We shall,’ said Daisy. ‘And you may pay our bill, if you please.’

  It was an utterly Daisy exit to make. In any other circumstances I would have laughed, but something was niggling away at me. Why had Miss Tennyson been so desperate for us to leave? Was it simply that she did not want us getting mixed up with the police, as she had said? Or – I remembered how she had jumped round in her chair as we had come in – had she been waiting for someone? Was she meeting someone in the Willow that she did not want us to know about?

  ‘Daisy,’ I said, turning to look at her as we stepped through the door outside, making the little bell chime as we did so, ‘do you think—’

  And then the rest of the sentence was knocked right out of me as I thumped straight into someone coming the other way down the street. I yelped and the other person exclaimed in annoyance. Then I gave a gasp of surprise. I was staring up at the chestnut curls and regal nose of King Henry.

  As soon as she saw us, she spun on her heel and marched away up the street again – but I was sure that she had been about to go into the Willow. What if – what if she was the person Miss Tennyson had been waiting for? And if she was, that meant that there was more to this mystery than Daisy’s solution. I had been right all along.

  ‘Daisy!’ I said. ‘I think King Henry was about to go into the Willow!’

  ‘So?’ asked Daisy.

  ‘So, I think she was going to meet Miss Tennyson! Daisy, I think she’s mixed up in this somehow. There’s something going on that we don’t understand yet!’

  ‘No there isn’t,’ snapped Daisy. ‘Don’t be stupid, Hazel! We’ve solved the murder and that’s that. Leave off, can’t you?’

  ‘No, I can’t,’ I said. ‘We haven’t solved the murder. King Henry as good as proves it. I tell you—’

  ‘Oh, DO BE QUIET!’ shouted Daisy. ‘I don’t want to hear another word about it. I’m thinking, can’t you see?’

  All I could see was that Daisy knew she had been wrong, and was being a terribly bad sport about it.

>   ‘All right,’ I said, ‘be like that.’ And I stormed back up to House without saying another word to her.

  4

  Things were still cold between us when we arrived back at House. We were greeted by the Marys, who mobbed Daisy to ask if they had helped.

  ‘Wonderfully,’ said Daisy acidly. ‘Although the hat remained elusive. You may carry my coat if you like.’ She flung her school coat and hat at the Marys, who bore them off to the cloakroom in raptures. I do not think they knew what elusive meant.

  We were not talking, and for a while I was glad about it. I decided that I was not going to speak to Daisy until she admitted that I had been right all along. When Kitty, Beanie and Lavinia came back from town, they asked Daisy to make up a fourth for cribbage and I was left sitting alone in an armchair in the common room, writing up my case notes and thinking about Daisy and me. It is difficult being best friends with someone, especially if that someone is Daisy Wells. She hates being wrong. It is infuriating. But every time I want to simply give up being the sensible one, and shake her, I remember that before Daisy and I became friends I was even worse off.

  You see, as I’ve already suggested, my time at Deepdean did not begin well. When I first came here I raised my hand every time I knew an answer, just the way my father had taught me. In return, though, I got cold little looks from the other girls, who inched their chairs away from me, as though I had an illness that might be catching. Girls who were meant to walk back to House with me would duck away and go running to where their friends were waiting, and when I sat down at the table for dinner, everyone pulled their trays back very slightly and bent their heads together, looking at me from out of the corner of their eyes.

  I thought I had to grin and bear it, but that was before I understood about the secret side of Daisy. When I did, though, I realized that if the great Daisy Wells could play a role, I could play one too. I could behave like a don’t-care girl on the outside, but inside I could still be me. The important thing about fitting in, I realized, was to look the part. And so I decided to do just that.

  Some things, of course, were beyond me. When I let it out of its plait, my hair will always fall straight down to my shoulders without any fetching natural waves in it at all, and my eyes will always be brown, instead of large and blue. So I saw that I would have to go about camouflaging myself another way.

  In a quiet moment in the dorm one day, when most of the second form were at hockey practice and the rest were in the common room, I filched Lavinia’s penknife from her tuck box and made a careful cut in one of my shoelaces. I tugged it and wiggled it about until the end snapped off entirely, leaving behind a satisfyingly authentic-looking frayed shoelace. Then, offering up a silent apology to my father for what I was about to do, I picked up my hockey stick, gripped it in both hands and whacked it as hard as I could against the side of my school bag. It hit home with a surprisingly heavy smack and the books inside of the bag thumped about against each other under the canvas. I had the uncomfortable feeling I had just hit something that was alive. I managed one more thwack before I completely lost heart, but that was good enough – my books were now bent about as though I had been mistreating them for months. I felt dreadfully guilty about the books, but I told myself firmly that it was worth it.

  The next morning, after Kitty and Lavinia ran off as usual and left me alone, I was careful to walk down to school very slowly, scuffing my clean, shiny shoes along the dirty path with every step and then knocking the mud against the outside of my bag. By the time I arrived late at Old Wing Entrance I was left with a perfectly weathered-looking bag and a pair of shoes that were more mud than polish.

  At bunbreak I sat on the low wall next to the lawn and worked on my shoes a little more by kicking them against the crumbling stonework. This gave them some very artistic scratches, which I was rather pleased with. I rubbed my fingernails across them, smearing my fingers about to catch all the dirt I could, and then held my hands up in front of me. They might, I thought, looking at the grime round my cuticles, almost be the hands of an English girl.

  My plan was going very well so far, and after lunch I decided to proceed with the next stage. Until then I had answered every question as soon as I knew it, but now I resolved to take a leaf out of Daisy’s book. In Maths, I added up a sum wrong three times in a row, and in my French composition I told Mamzelle that I had brown eyes and a long black horse.

  When I read this out, I got my first ever giggle from the second form, and after lessons Lavinia walked all the way back up to House with me – silently, but without leaving me behind at all. The next day I found the book I had asked Kitty if I could borrow weeks before lying on my bed, and at bunbreak, after I had confused my tenses four times in Latin, Beanie sympathetically gave me some of the spare Chelsea bun she had found lying on the floor.

  Two days in to my new act, I was feeling very smug with myself. In Science, I wiggled down in my seat and tried to look as don’t-care as possible – copying Lavinia, who was hunched over with her arms crossed and her feet curled round her chair legs in a way that, according to Miss Lappet, was extremely dangerous and could lead to broken limbs or worse. When Miss Bell came in I began to sit up straight before I remembered I mustn’t. To make up for it, I dropped a Bunsen burner and then said that Newton shot an apple at his son, which made Beanie squeal with laughter.

  ‘Whatever has happened to you today, Hazel?’ asked Miss Bell, raising an eyebrow. ‘I think you’ve been spending too much time around Beanie.’

  Beanie flushed deep red and looked down hurriedly at her textbook, and most of the second form glared at Miss Bell.

  There was one person, though, not looking at Miss Bell – when I glanced over at Daisy, I saw that her blue eyes were fixed on me, in an all-over searching way that made me turn almost as pink as Beanie and look down again as quickly as I could. I carefully spent the rest of the lesson fixing my eyes on everything but Daisy’s bench, and answered no more questions at all.

  As punishment for the Bunsen burner, Miss Bell made me tidy the lab at the end of our lesson. By the time I was finished I thought everyone would have hurried away to Latin, but the door banged to behind me and when I turned round, there was Daisy, leaning against a bench and waiting for me.

  I tried to walk past her.

  ‘Stop there,’ said Daisy, and she stuck her foot out in front of me. She had mud on her sock. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘I’m going to Latin,’ I said, rather weakly.

  ‘Not what I meant,’ said Daisy. ‘Look at your shoes. Until two days ago you might have been in the military, and now it looks as though you’ve been rolling in mud.’

  ‘I fell over,’ I said, more weakly still.

  All of a sudden, Daisy launched herself off her bench and crouched down at my feet. Her breath made my ankle itch, and I wriggled. ‘You’ve cut this shoelace,’ she declared after a moment, squinting up at me accusingly. ‘And all the scratches on your shoes are new as well. Before this week I’d never seen you with a button out of place. I was beginning to think they hadn’t heard of dirt in the East. So, what are you playing at?’

  That upset me. ‘I’m fitting in!’ I snapped. ‘Just like you do!’

  Daisy bobbed up again. She was taller than me, and she looked down on me ferociously. I backed away, thinking she was about to do something awful.

  ‘Whatever do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve seen you!’ I said. ‘You pretend not to know the answer when I know you do, all the time, just to make sure no one calls you a swot. Really, you’re cleverer than any of us. I’ve been watching you and I know it’s true. And if you tell anyone that I cut off my own lace I’ll tell everyone about you.’

  I expected Daisy to be furious. Instead, she laughed.

  ‘I doubt anyone would listen to you,’ she said. ‘You ought to be more careful, by the way. You’re making a dreadful job of it. You can’t just launch into this sort of thing with no warning. People
don’t change character like that outside of silly made-up stories. If you’re going to do it, you need to be more subtle about it. You don’t want people to look at you unless you’re very good at acting.’

  ‘But people look at you!’ I said.

  ‘I,’ said Daisy, ‘am very good at acting. But you mustn’t tell anyone or I shall have to have you killed. Now hurry up, or we’ll be late for Latin.’ And with that she put out her hand, hooked her arm through mine and dragged me out of the laboratory.

  And that was how Daisy Wells and I became best friends.

  1

  Daisy and I are still not talking, and I have been wondering whether this case will be the Detective Society’s last. Seeing King Henry yesterday made me certain that justice has not yet been done, and now I feel sure that something has gone very wrong with Miss Tennyson’s confession. I am worried.

  Today is Sunday, and this morning we woke up to find the day as grim and grey as I have been feeling. We all filed off to Sunday service in the Hall under spattering dark clouds. Everyone cringed and scurried, and Daisy and Kitty darted between the drops together, arm in arm. Evidently, Daisy did not mind that she and I were not speaking.

  Miss Tennyson was not at Sunday service.

  That was not odd. If she had gone to the police after we left her yesterday, she would still be there now – arrested, in her cell, and waiting for the trial, I suppose. Or for the police to find Miss Bell’s body. (When I try to imagine what happens after someone confesses to murder, I can’t seem to do it properly – I suppose because Daisy’s books are so coy about it.)

  But the really worrying thing was that the rest of the masters and mistresses were still behaving perfectly normally. It was as though they had not heard about Miss Tennyson confessing to a murder. Miss Hopkins, for example, was still wearing her smug, happy expression, while Miss Parker was still sizzling with bottled-up rage.