I was about to jump out of our hiding place, but Daisy hissed, ‘Wait!’
We waited, and waited, and then we heard Miss Griffin’s footsteps moving away.
Daisy collapsed against me, shaking. ‘Quick!’ she cried. ‘We have to get to lessons before she comes back!’
‘Really?’ I asked doubtfully. My knees were like wet jelly. I wasn’t sure I wanted to move at all.
‘Do you want to wait for her here?’ asked Daisy.
I shook my head.
Once we’d left the cloakroom I felt as though I had a spotlight trained on my head. I expected Miss Griffin to pounce on us at any second. I was clutching Verity’s diary to my chest like a shield, and when we turned a corner and almost walked into the dark-haired police chief coming the other way, I jumped so hard my teeth chattered.
Daisy shied away from him, and I realized with horror that, despite what had happened, she still wanted to finish the case without help from the police – even though Miss Griffin might be just round the next corner, waiting to catch us. It only took me a moment to decide that it was time for me to stop behaving like a secretary, or even a second in command. It was up to me to save us.
The policeman was already turning away.
‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Wait! We need your help.’
The policeman turned to face me. ‘Yes?’ he asked politely.
‘Hazel!’ cried Daisy. ‘What are you doing?’
I ought to have felt guilty. But once again, I did not feel guilty at all.
‘Please help us,’ I said in a rush. ‘We know who killed Miss Tennyson. It was Miss Griffin, and she’s killed our Science mistress Miss Bell as well, and now she’s coming after us! Please!’
I could tell that he did not believe me. He frowned, and his face crinkled up with it. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said, ‘but what are you talking about?’
‘Miss Griffin is the murderer,’ I said. ‘It’s true! Look! We’ve got evidence!’
And I thrust Verity’s diary at his chest.
‘Hazel!’ Daisy shouted again. ‘Don’t!’
But the policeman was already flicking through it. At first he was only doing it to be polite – but then his eyebrows shot up, and his forehead wrinkled, and he began to turn over the pages more quickly.
‘Where did you get this?’ he asked.
‘Oh, never mind that!’ I said. ‘You have to help us! Miss Griffin is after us! She wants to kill us!’
For one awful moment I thought that he was going to turn us away. But instead, he took a deep breath, put his big hands on our shoulders, steered us towards the door of the nearest form room and pushed us inside.
The policeman had saved us from Miss Griffin. I could have hugged him. Daisy, of course, was less pleased. I didn’t even need to look at her to know that she was about to be difficult.
‘All right,’ said the policeman, turning to us with an extremely serious expression on his face. ‘What’s all this about?’
Daisy sniffed. ‘Hazel’s said too much already,’ she said, folding her arms and wrinkling her nose up. ‘I don’t see why I should tell you any more. Who are you, anyway? You’ve been here all day and you haven’t even introduced yourself.’
I was horrified in case the policeman sent us back outside, but to my great relief Daisy’s speech seemed only to amuse him.
‘I am Inspector Priestley,’ he told us. ‘And you are?’
‘I am Daisy Wells, daughter of Lord Hastings,’ said Daisy, as though she were the Queen, ‘and this is my friend Hazel Wong. And this is our murder case and we’ve solved it without you, thank you very much. No matter what Hazel says, we don’t need your help.’
The Inspector raised his eyebrows at that, so that his whole forehead wrinkled up again. ‘Do you mean to say that you have more than the diary you’ve shown me?’ he asked. ‘You can prove what Hazel has just told me about Miss Griffin?’
Daisy squirmed. I could tell that she was having a terrible inner struggle over whether to reveal our cleverness to the Inspector.
But I did not want to face a murderous Miss Griffin on my own. We had solved the case, and now there was nothing more we could do. As much as Daisy hated it, we had to tell the police what we knew.
‘Yes!’ I said. ‘We know that Miss Griffin killed Miss Bell. Miss Bell was blackmailing her over what had happened with Verity Abraham last year, you see. It’s all in the diary. Miss Bell must have found it while she was doing Miss Griffin’s secretary work earlier this year. So Miss Griffin killed Miss Bell to silence her, and made Miss Tennyson help her dispose of the body. Then she killed Miss Tennyson too, because she was planning to go to the police. And she tried to kill us just now! I know it sounds mad, but we can prove it. We’ve got evidence. Show him, Daisy.’
Daisy, after another moment’s wriggling, stuck her hand into her bag, pulled out the stained gym slip, the piece of string and the bit of Miss Bell’s lab coat, and said, ‘Oh, all right! But I hope you’ll remember later that we found these.’
And then we both explained the whole of our investigation to the policeman. I found that once I had started, I couldn’t stop, though Daisy kept on butting in with better explanations. We told him about losing the earring – ‘Our most important piece of evidence!’ said Daisy furiously – and how tracking it down had led us to Miss Griffin. I could tell that the Inspector was only listening politely at first, but as Daisy and I talked, he took a notebook out of his coat pocket and began to write in it. His face became more and more crumpled, and his eyebrows moved higher and higher up his forehead.
When we had finished he put his pen down, rubbed his hand over his face, and laughed.
‘Not bad for your Detective Society’s first murder case,’ he said.
‘You believe us?’ said Daisy sharply.
‘You present a compelling, if slightly muddled, account of events. It’s rather difficult not to believe you. It’s a pity you don’t have that earring any more, but I’m sure I can close the case without it.’
Daisy made a face at muddled, but I was relieved.
‘And you’ll look for Miss Bell’s body?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I’ll send my men out to Oakeshott Woods this afternoon. But until I wrap up the case’ – his face became serious again – ‘I need to keep you safe from Miss Griffin. I don’t like the thought of the two of you roaming about carrying on your Young Miss Marple routine while she’s still a free woman.’
‘Miss Marple!’ hissed Daisy under her breath. ‘Holmes and Watson, if you please.’
‘Is there anywhere you can go for a few hours?’ asked Inspector Priestley, pretending he had not heard.
‘We could go to Nurse Minn in San,’ I offered.
The Inspector nodded. ‘Good. You can stay there until Miss Griffin’s been arrested. I’ll keep one of my men guarding you and put another on her tail. Remember – no heroics! You’ve already done quite enough.’
‘Well, we did solve your case for you,’ said Daisy.
The Inspector got up from his chair and smoothed down his dark hair. ‘Indeed you did, Madam Super,’ he said – which I think must have been a joke at Daisy’s expense, only she was too pleased to notice it.
‘Thank you,’ she said, and she put out her hand for the Inspector to take. He shook it very solemnly (I was now more certain than ever that he was not being entirely serious), and then turned and held out his hand to me. I shook it, feeling suddenly rather shy. I looked up at him out of the corner of my eye and had a shock when I caught him winking at me. I dropped his hand, horribly embarrassed, but when I looked at him again his expression was as polite as ever.
7
When we were safely in San (Nurse Minn took one fluttery look at the Inspector and made no objections at all to us becoming patients), tucked into two cool white beds next to each other, I suddenly felt very much like crying. I stared up at the ceiling and gulped as quietly as I could into my handkerchief while I shivered all over, as though I really w
as ill.
Beside me Daisy was gabbling away, of course.
‘Do you think we’ll get a bravery medal from the police? We were brave, weren’t we?’
‘Very,’ I said, my teeth chattering. Water kept leaking out of the sides of my eyes in the most shameful manner.
‘I say!’ said Daisy, noticing me. ‘Are you all right, Watson?’
‘Yes!’ I said, my teeth chattering all the more. ‘I’m quite all right. Only – I can’t stop—’
And I burst into tears.
‘Hazel!’ cried Daisy, and quick as a flash she leaped out of her bed and hurled herself onto mine. ‘Oh, poor Hazel!’
‘I’m sorry!’ I stuttered. ‘I’m not – behaving – very much like a detective.’
‘Hazel,’ said Daisy, putting her arms round my shoulders and leaning her forehead against mine, ‘don’t talk nonsense. Throughout this case, you have behaved like the most splendid detective in the world. In fact, because of your heroic and intelligent actions in The Case of the Murder of Miss Bell I am going to promote you. From this moment on you are the Vice-President of the Detective Society.’
I gulped. ‘Really?’ I asked.
‘Really,’ said Daisy. ‘Now for heaven’s sake, stop crying and start thinking about how to get past our police guard.’
That made me stop crying at once.
‘What?’ I asked. ‘But we’re safe here!’
‘Who wants to be safe?’ asked Daisy scornfully. ‘I want to see the Inspector arrest Miss Griffin.’
I was not sure I did. I felt cushioned by the lovely soft quiet of San, and terrified at the very thought of going back out into a school where Miss Griffin was still on the lookout for us.
But Daisy, for all her changes in the past few weeks, was still Daisy, and her mad plans were as mad as ever.
‘Yes, but how?’ I asked.
‘Wait,’ said Daisy. ‘I’m thinking of a plan.’
Then, outside the main San door, we heard voices.
‘Come on!’ hissed Daisy. ‘Let’s go and see who it is!’
As soon as we went out of our little room onto the small San landing, where Minny’s examination room and all the sickrooms open out into, we could hear that it was two policemen. The one guarding San must have been joined by another, and they were talking.
‘. . . having a meeting now,’ said the first policeman as we crept up to the closed main door to the corridor and pressed our ears against it to listen. ‘The chief’s idea. Wants to get her to confess.’
‘Trust him to go for drama,’ said the other. ‘Nice touch, though, I admit. Where are they?’
‘That music room, down the other end of the school. I’m off there now as reinforcement. You ought to come.’
‘Don’t I wish I could!’ said our policeman. ‘But I’m on nanny duty. Little madams can’t get hurt – his orders.’
Daisy flushed with annoyance. ‘All right,’ she said to me. ‘An excellent plan has just come into my brain. Wait here.’
She turned and ran into the other San sick room, and came back a moment later dragging a small shrimp behind her. It was Binny.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.
‘Got a bad stomach,’ said Binny. Daisy glared at her. ‘Not really – I just wanted to get out of Latin.’
‘Don’t I know it,’ said Daisy. ‘And if you want me to keep mum for you, there’s something I need you to do.’
‘What?’ asked Binny.
‘When I tell you,’ said Daisy, ‘I want you to scream.’
8
The landing outside San had gone quiet. The other policeman must have gone off to the meeting in the music room. ‘Ready?’ whispered Daisy. We were crouching just behind the door. Binny, positioned in the very middle of the San hallway, nodded.
‘Three, two, one,’ whispered Daisy. ‘Scream!’
Binny screamed.
It sounded like an express train howling through a tunnel. There was a yell of shock from the policeman out on the landing, and then he came bursting through the door, leaving it wide open and the landing beyond clear.
With Binny’s screams still ringing in our ears, Daisy and I ran for it.
We scurried along the corridor towards Music Wing, but just as we were coming to the end of Library corridor I looked behind us and saw the one sight I was hoping like anything that we would avoid.
Miss Griffin was following us.
Daisy clutched my arm in panic, and I clutched at Daisy – and at that moment Miss Griffin realized that she had been seen. The most awful expression came over her face, a pounce like a cat on two mice, and she began to stride purposefully towards us.
‘Quick!’ hissed Daisy. ‘RUN!’
And, ignoring all the rules of Deepdean, we ran like hares down New Wing corridor.
I have never been so terrified in my life. I remember galloping along in a sweating awful panic, hearing our feet on the marble tiles – and behind them, the click, click, click of Miss Griffin’s shoes as she came after us. My heart was burning and hammering in my chest and my ankle throbbed along with it.
‘Girls!’ called Miss Griffin after us. ‘Come here at once! I want to talk to you! You are missing lessons without permission!’
‘Ignore her!’ panted Daisy.
I did not need to be told twice.
But then we turned the corner into Music Wing and almost crashed into Inspector Priestley.
He was standing in the hallway, a sheaf of papers in his large hands, and at that moment he seemed like the Angel Gabriel or one of the godlike Inspectors from Daisy’s novels, descended to earth to save our souls.
‘Help!’ gasped Daisy, gesturing behind us. ‘Miss Griffin!’
The Inspector acted at once.
‘Quick!’ he said. ‘In there!’ And he ushered us – or rather, almost shoved us – through the open door of the small music room, before slamming it shut.
He was only just in time. As we leaned against each other, panting as quietly as we could, I heard the clicking of Miss Griffin’s shoes once again. They hurried closer and closer – and then stopped. She must have seen the Inspector, I thought.
‘Ah, Miss Griffin,’ Inspector Priestley said, as though it was the most natural thing in the world that they should meet there. ‘You’re just in time for our meeting.’
‘What meeting?’ asked Miss Griffin, sounding extremely ungracious.
‘Didn’t my sergeant let you know? I’m terribly sorry. I’ve asked several of the mistresses to meet me here to discuss some developments in the case. In fact, now that you’ve arrived, we can begin. They’re all waiting for you in the music room.’
‘Inspector, I am busy. I am looking for two of my pupils. You didn’t see two girls pass by here just now, did you?’
I tensed up.
‘Ah yes, I did,’ said the Inspector. ‘They went out of North Entrance in a terrible hurry, I think you’ve lost them. At least you still have the meeting to console you.’
There was a pause.
‘Oh, very well, then,’ said Miss Griffin, with bad grace.
I breathed a very quiet sigh of relief.
There was the sound of a door opening and closing, silence outside in the hallway and voices next door to us.
Now, Daisy and I had been shoved into the small music room. It is separate from the big music room, but the two rooms connect by a door, covered with a heavy velvet curtain on the big music room side. Between the door and the curtain there’s a narrow little space – just big enough for two girl detectives to squeeze into.
I do wonder whether the Inspector had planned on us listening in. It may have just been a nice coincidence – he never said anything about it to us afterwards – but all the same, Daisy and I opened the connecting door, and slipped in behind the curtain. So we heard exactly what went on at Inspector Priestley’s meeting.
9
Daisy and I positioned ourselves one at each end of the curtain, so that we could peep round it in
to the room beyond. I squashed my cheek against the shivery-cold stone of the alcove wall and had a splendid view of the music room – with its high, white ceiling, and long, curved picture window that looks out onto the lawns and pond. The tall, severe policeman from Old Entrance was backed up against the far wall, looking official, and several hard classroom chairs had been set out in a semicircle facing the big window. Miss Lappet, Miss Hopkins, The One, Miss Parker and Mamzelle were sitting uncomfortably in these chairs, and standing in front of them just like a master in front of his form, was Inspector Priestley. Miss Griffin was still being ushered into an empty chair by Rogers, the spotty policeman. She looked put out, and he looked frankly terrified of her. I didn’t blame him.
‘Is all this strictly necessary?’ snapped Miss Griffin. ‘I do have a school to run, you know.’
‘I am quite aware of that,’ said the Inspector. ‘However, it could not be avoided. I do promise that I’ll try to take up as little of your time as I can.
‘Now, I have called this meeting because of certain developments in my investigation of the death of Miss Tennyson. But I have been made aware that this is not the only unfortunate event Deepdean has suffered recently. You are currently missing your Science mistress, are you not?’
I saw Miss Parker’s shoulders shake. I felt a surge of pity for her – she must have been nearly frantic with worry about Miss Bell.
‘I am not sure missing is the correct word,’ said Miss Griffin acidly. ‘I received Miss Bell’s resignation on my desk last Tuesday morning in the proper manner. She has left the school, and I wish her good luck. Surely that has no bearing on Miss Tennyson’s unfortunate suicide?’
The Inspector sighed. ‘I am afraid,’ he said, ‘that the whereabouts of Miss Bell have a great deal to do with this investigation. I am also afraid that those whereabouts are no longer in any doubt. Miss Bell did not resign last Monday at all. Nor did she leave school grounds of her own volition.’
‘What do you mean?’ cried Miss Parker.
‘I mean,’ said the Inspector, ‘that this afternoon my men discovered a body in Oakeshott Woods; a body that exactly matches the description I have of Miss Bell.’
Murder Most Unladylike: A Wells and Wong Mystery Page 16