It's Murder at St. Basket's

by James Lincoln Collier

  But the first thing was the jackknife. It made me pretty nervous to think about stealing it. I wished I didn’t have to do it.

  But there wasn’t any way out of it. I took a look inside the store through the window. It was pretty small, which was going to make it harder to swipe the knife. For shoplifting, you need a big store with lots of crowds around. There wasn’t anybody in this store at all. I realized that I’d probably be better off at one of the big department stores like Harrod’s, and I started to turn around and go away, when a customer went into the knife store. I knew it was now or never. He went over and said something to the clerk. I went in. The clerk looked at me, and went on talking to the customer. The knives were all lined up in the glass case. I stood there staring down at them. After a couple of minutes the customer went out, and the clerk walked over to me. Trying to act as natural as I could, I said, “How much are those knives? The big ones?” The English think that all American kids are spoiled and have lots of money. He’d know I was American by my voice, and he wouldn’t think it was funny that I’d have lots of money to spend.

  “Five pounds, tenpence,” he said.

  “Could I see one, please?”

  He took it out of the case, and handed it to me. I picked it up in my hand and held it. It was big and heavy and felt good, and I wanted it. If I ever got out of this, I decided, some day I’d buy one for myself to keep. The clerk stood there, drumming on the glass counter top with his fingers. I guess he figured even though I was a rich, spoiled American kid, I wasn’t likely to buy a knife for five quid, and he wished I’d go away and stop wasting his time. I had to stall until some other customer came in and got his attention, so I began slowly opening the blades one at a time, looking them over carefully, and then shutting them up again. And I’d pretty nearly gotten down to the last blade, when a woman came in. The clerk went over to her. I twisted around a bit, so I was facing the door with my back to the clerk and the customer. I heard her ask something about some big shears they had on display. I edged toward the door, and took a casual look around at the clerk. He was bending over, getting something out of the case. I took two quick steps and I was out of the shop, the jackknife in my hand. But just as the door swung shut behind me I heard the clerk shout, “Oy, you!” and I began to run down the Burlington Arcade, jamming the jackknife in my pocket as I went.

  CHAPTER 11

  THEY CAUGHT ME at the corner, where the Burlington Arcade runs into Piccadilly. If I’d had a little luck I might have gotten away; it’s pretty hard to catch somebody running along a crowded street, especially in London, where once you get off the main avenues like Piccadilly, you’re into little streets that wind around and have lots of turnings, like a maze; and if I’d had another couple of minutes I could have swung up into the back streets behind Piccadilly and easily got lost. But I didn’t have any luck, because there was a bobby lounging along Piccadilly just as I tore out of the Burlington Arcade. He took one look at me running and the store clerk racing along behind, and he just shot out his hand and grabbed the back of my collar as I went by, and I came to a screaming halt.

  Of course they found the jackknife first thing, so they took me to the police station, and made me sit down at a table, and then they asked me what my name was.

  But I didn’t dare tell them. If you’re an American living in London for longer than three months you have to register with the police. They’d know I was American from the way I talked, and once they had my name, all they’d have to do was check the records, and find out I was from St. Basket’s. The last thing I wanted was to go back there: Jaggers would kill me for sure. “I can’t tell you, Sir.”

  “American, is it?”

  “Yes, Sir.” I planned to be as polite as I could.

  “All right then, laddie, let’s have the name.”

  “I can’t tell you, Sir.”

  He shook his head wearily, reached across the table and grabbed at the front of my blazer. Of course I’d completely forgotten about that emblem. “St. Basket’s School, is it? Shouldn’t be hard to find you out, now should it, lad?”

  But I still wouldn’t tell them, because I didn’t want them to call the school and say they’d found me. That would have Jaggers coming down for me. I figured I had a better chance of escape with the cops.

  They put me in the police car and we started off through London toward Hampstead. I just sat there in the back with the policeman, staring out the windows, feeling as sick and scared as I’d ever been in my life. My face was covered with cold sweat and I kept feeling that I was going to throw up, even though I hadn’t had anything to eat but that cup of tea. I didn’t know what Jaggers and the Grimes would do with me, but at the least, Jaggers was going to beat the devil out of me, and not just with a birch, but with his fists. If they had to, I knew that they’d kill me. Once somebody’s killed one person, they’ll always kill another one to keep from getting caught.

  I tried to make myself think of something, but I couldn’t. When you’re scared like that your mind just goes blank, and you can’t put anything together. All that would come to me was to somehow convince the Grimes that I didn’t know anything about David Choudhry or his brother, or if I did, that I wouldn’t say anything. I thought maybe that if I begged and pleaded, maybe they would just put me on a plane for New York, and wire my father that I’d been expelled and to pick me up at Kennedy Airport. Maybe if they knew I was going to be in the States, they would figure I couldn’t squeal. But in my heart I didn’t know how I was going to convince them of that. So I just sat there, numb and scared, staring out at the people thronging along the street and praying that we’d have a car accident or anything that would stop us from getting closer and closer to Tanza Road.

  And then suddenly something came to me from I don’t know where in my brain, and I said, “Okay, I’ll tell you. My name’s Leslie Plainfìeld.”

  “Blimey, now is it.”

  “Yes, Sir. You can ring my father at his office and see. He works at Six Poultry Street.”

  So they swung the car around and took me back to the station, and sat me back down at the same table. One of the bobbies went away and came back in about five minutes. “Yer guv’nor was just tickled pink when I told ‘im you’ve been ‘ad up for pinching pocketknives, laddie. ‘E’s comin’ round quick as ‘e can get ‘ere. You’ll catch it ‘ot, I should judge by ‘is tone.”

  So I waited and waited, and about a half hour later, Mr. Plainfìeld whipped into the room, and I stood up and said, “I’m sorry to be so much bother, Sir.”

  “Quincy,” he said.

  The bobby stepped forward. “This ‘ere yer lad, Sir?”

  Mr. Plainfield stared at me for a moment. Then very slowly he nodded his head. “Yes, he’s my boy.”

  “‘Ated to trouble yer about it, Sir, but ‘e’s pinched a pocketknife. If yer’ll ‘ave a word with the sergeant I think ‘e might have a mind to overlook it this time.” Mr. Plainfield gave me a tough look; he wasn’t very happy about any of it, but I was. Then he went into another room, and in a couple of minutes came out, and said, “We’re off, then,” and we went out of the stationhouse and got into Mr. Plainfìeld’s Mercedes. He started the motor and we drove off.

  “All right, Christopher,” he said. “Let’s have the tale.”

  “Sir, I know you’re still not going to believe this, but please, please, I’m begging you, can we go to your office and call up David Choudhry’s father? It really is important, Sir, I’m not kidding you.”

  I was almost crying, and he knew it, because of the way my voice was wobbling, and he said, more gently, “It’s about David Choudhry’s being ill, is it?”

  “It’s worse than that, Sir. They murdered his brother.”

  He turned and stared at me quickly to see how crazy I looked, and then he looked back at the road. “All right, Christopher, we’ll call Paris.”

  It only took us ten minutes to get back to Mr. Plainfield’s office. He got the switchboard operator to put t
he phone call through, and I sat there and waited. Oh boy, was I nervous—nervous that Mr. Choudhry wouldn’t be there, or that he wouldn’t believe me, or anything else. It seemed to take them hours to get the phone call through, although I guess it was only fifteen minutes. Finally Mr. Plainfìeld’s phone rang, and the operator said she’d got Paris; and then Mr. Plainfield was talking.

  “I say, I’m frightfully sorry to trouble you, but I’ve got a boy in my office named Christopher Quincy with some rather muddled story about your son David. I’m not quite in the picture, I’m afraid, but it’s something about knowing where David’s brother is. Am I making sense? Do you want to talk to him? Surely, I’ll put him on.”

  “Christopher,” Mr. Choudhry said, “what’s happened?”

  “David’s really sick,” I said. “They’ve got him locked up in the old stable at St. Basket’s. And I think he found out where his brother is bur—where he is.”

  There was a silence. And then he said: “I’ll charter a plane to London.”

  So then he talked to Mr. Plainfìeld again, and we arranged to meet at 1:00 at South End Green. And at 12:45 Mr. Plainfìeld and I were parked in front of the Hampstead Classic in South End Green, and at 1:00 Mr. Choudhry drove up in a Rolls-Royce. Behind him were about six police cars. I got into one of the police cars, to show them where David was. The other cars drove off slowly, stationing themselves at various corners near the school, but out of sight, and I guess some of the bobbies went out on the Heath to cover that side, too, because I saw them there later. Then the one cop car with me in it drove up Tanza Road, with only Mr. Choudhry coming along behind. We pulled up at the school, and the cop and I got out. We’d hardly got through the front gate and onto the walk, when Miss Grime came out of the door.

  “Officer,” she boomed out, “frightfully good of you to bring this outrageous boy back. I’m terribly sorry he’s been such a bother.”

  “No trouble, M’am,” he said. “I got this ‘ere warrant for search of these premises,” and just as he got about that far two more police cars pulled up and a bunch of bobbies got out. She just stood there with her mouth open, staring at me like she’d wished she could kill me, her face puffing out and getting redder and redder as if it were going to swell up and burst like a balloon. And the next thing I knew, Leslie was coming out trying to act casual, but about to cry, and Margaret was just behind him sobbing like mad. And then when they carried David out on a stretcher, his eyes closed, and very sick, but still breathing, I began to cry myself. It was weak, but I couldn’t help it.

  So that was the end of it. They dug up poor old David’s brother’s bones from behind the carriage house, right where Mrs. Rabbit said they’d be. And of course they hauled the Grimes and Jaggers off to jail—the lockup, they call it in England—and the newspapers got onto the story, and finally there was a trial, and the whole thing came out.

  What happened was that years before, Mr. Grime had lost a lot of money playing the stock market. To get even, he’d taken some of the school’s money, but he had lost that, too. Well, they were desperate, they knew they’d have to close the school if they didn’t get a lot of money somewhere; and once they closed the school it would all come out and they’d be in a lot of trouble and disgrace. So they decided to kidnap David’s brother, because his father was rich. They hired Jaggers to do it, who wasn’t really a games master at all, but an ex-con who’d been in jail a couple of times for stealing cars. Jaggers blindfolded David’s brother, drove him around for a while and brought him back and hid him in the stable. Then one day he lost his temper the way he did, and hit David’s brother with a stick or something and killed him. So then they gave out this phony story about David’s brother running away. Mr. Choudhry trusted them, and when they asked for money to help with the search he gave it to them. When they’d got enough to pay off some of Mr. Grime’s debts, they took some of David’s clothes down to Margate and worked up the suicide story.

  But David didn’t believe it. He told me later, “I knew my brother wouldn’t commit suicide. I just knew it. He would never do anything like that. So I decided I would go to St. Basket’s and find out. My father didn’t want me to go, he hated the idea, but I told him if he sent me to some other school I would run away, and I would keep running away from schools until he sent me to St. Basket’s. So finally he said I could try it for a year.”

  So David signed up at St. Basket’s under the name of Choudhry, which was one of his father’s names, and began doing detective work. The trouble was that the Grimes suspected him. They had Jaggers keep a watch on him, and only a couple of weeks before all of this, Jaggers saw him go out behind the stable and start poking around with a stick.

  That was enough for them. So Jaggers deliberately broke David’s leg so he couldn’t go to the police or run away and get his father or anything. Oh, they were clever. They were waiting until he got into a coma and couldn’t talk and was about to die, and then they were going to take him to the hospital and let him die there: and nobody would know a thing. That was the reason why David didn’t want to leave the school. He was afraid they’d kill him if he got to somewhere he could tell his father.

  And you know how David found out where his brother was—of course you do. Mrs. Rabbit told him. After agonizing over it all those years, she decided to tell him to relieve her conscience. And then when she realized she’d gotten him into trouble, she told me, in hopes I would call the police. So she was the real hero of it, next to David, of course, and the papers made a big fuss over her. They had headlines like, COULDN’T KEEP HER AWFUL SECRET ANY LONGER, and naturally they got most of the facts wrong, the way the English papers always do. Right in the first story, it said, “Two brave English school children helped reopen a six-year-old murder case this morning, when they grew suspicious of activities at their school, and urged the father of one, Philip St. John Plainfield, stockbroker, of Kent, to go to police. The school children, Lester Plainfield and Margaret Barrows, were aided in their feat by a young Canadian visitor.” That was all there was about us in the whole thing.

  But to tell the truth, I didn’t much care. Mr. Plainfield took me down to Kent with Leslie, and called my father; and he flew over the next day. And I suppose you think that was the end of St. Basket’s School for me? You don’t know my father. I’m right back at the old stand—football, maths, and all the rest of it. Of course, there are a few changes, which help a lot. Jaggers is in jail for life so we’ve got a new games master called Smasher Fitz-Bircher. And of course the Grimes are in jail, too. Guess who’s the new head? Shrimpton, of all people. He loves being head, too. He says things like, “Quincy, I am going to make a gentleman of you if it costs you your life,” and “Quincy, you blithering Yankee sod, I have never known a boy to rouse my sadistic nature so satisfactorily,” but it’s all talk.

  David didn’t come back to school. You can’t blame him. He goes to some school in Paris now. He came over to London once during the summer, but I was in New York on vacation, and didn’t see him. He wrote me a letter, though, inviting me to visit him in Paris on the next Bank Holiday. Probably we’ll get more champagne.

  My campaign to get Margaret to stop being good all the time is beginning to work out. The way I explained it to her was, “Look here, Margaret, the Grimes were breaking all kinds of rules, and so was Jaggers. Why should we obey the rules when they don’t?” That kind of got her, and I noticed that a couple of days ago she got into an argument with Shrimpton about the math homework. She didn’t win, but at least she argued.

  We’ve got two new kids in the dorm now, but otherwise everything’s the same. That’s the thing you’ve got to understand about the English: they don’t let anything change. They can have a war or a murder or go broke or any kind of trouble you can name, and still they go on the same. So here Leslie and I are in the same dorm, with our stuff dumped all over the place in our traditional way. We’ve just come up from supper, which was the usual slop, shepherd’s pie and pale peas and some buns th
at weren’t much good for eating, but weren’t too bad for throwing purposes. Leslie and I got up a contest to see if we could throw a bun so the other person would have to catch it on the butter side, but Mrs. Rabbit waddled out and said, “ ‘Ere, you lot, stop it or no sweet. Poor Mrs. Rabbit.”

  And now I’m sitting at my same old desk, with my same old ancient St. Basket’s textbooks junked around, writing this. I’m glad it’s finished, too. I hope you don’t think I’m doing this for fun? Shrimpton told me I had to write something as a punishment, and so I decided to write about what a wreck St. Basket’s was; but it got too long. It’s pretty tough writing this much stuff, even when it’s about yourself and you can throw in a few boasts. And now at last I can put

  THE END

  Oh yes, I forgot. David’s father bought me a Swiss Army knife—the kind that costs five pounds, tenpence.

  THE END