First Class Murder: A Murder Most Unladylike Mystery

by Stevens, Robin

  ‘You stood to gain by Mrs Daunt’s death,’ said Jocelyn, warming to his theme. ‘And you provided the scream that confused us as to the time of her death. I dare say you played another music-hall trick on us with that locked door. Madame, unless you can prove that you did not commit the murder—’

  ‘I did not kill Georgie!’ shrieked Madame Melinda. She sounded quite beside herself, and threw up her hands theatrically. ‘I tell you I am innocent. I did not kill Georgiana . . . HE did!’

  And she pointed, with a trembling finger, at Mr Daunt.

  6

  I could have cheered. I wanted to jump up and down and hug Daisy. Instead I stayed still – and watched.

  Mr Daunt swung his great bull-like head round to look at Madame Melinda. He had gone very red – puce was the word, I thought happily. He was puce with rage.

  ‘You . . .’ he growled. ‘You . . . you—’

  But Madame Melinda had clearly had quite enough. ‘It was you!’ she shrieked at him. ‘I know it – I can prove it. I never killed her – my hands are clean; it was you who did it – you murdered your wife!’

  ‘Because YOU told me to!’ roared Mr Daunt.

  Sarah gave a sort of strangled cry.

  ‘It was YOUR idea!’ he went on. ‘I’ve been following your wicked plan! I can prove it – I’m just the dupe!’

  ‘Dupe, nothing!’ cried Madame Melinda. ‘If you hadn’t wanted to get rid of her to marry your servant, I would never have suggested it. I was acting on your orders. I’ve lied for you, I’ve cleared up your mistakes – and it was you who held the knife. I’ll tell everyone – it wasn’t me, it wasn’t me!’

  There was chaos in the corridor. Sarah began to scream and sob. ‘It isn’t true!’ she shrieked. ‘It isn’t!’

  Mr Daunt ignored her. ‘You stupid woman!’ he shouted at Madame Melinda, and actually flailed out with his fists at her. Jocelyn had to dart between them, blowing his whistle to summon help. ‘You told me this would be foolproof!’

  Down the corridor came a gaggle of yawning, confused attendants, and behind them was Dr Sandwich. He looked bewildered, his robe only half on and his moustache fluffy.

  ‘What’s all this?’ he cried. ‘Good Lord! What a commotion!’

  ‘Mr Daunt and Madame Melinda have just confessed to that foolish woman’s murder,’ the Countess told him, with great satisfaction in her voice.

  ‘Nonsense – Mr Buri, what is all this?’

  ‘Countess Demidovskoy is quite right,’ said Jocelyn, rather wearily. ‘They have both confessed. Gentlemen, if you would please release Mr Strange from the guards’ van and put these two in their place?’

  ‘Mr Buri, this is quite . . . What is going on? How could they possibly have done it?’

  Dr Sandwich was obviously struggling with this new information. For a moment I felt almost sorry for him. How embarrassing to be so wrong!

  ‘Good Lord, man, they confessed!’ said the Countess, rather gleefully. ‘It’s as simple as that. We all heard them – didn’t we, Alexander?’

  ‘Yes, Grandmother,’ said Alexander, and he leaned back against the wall. Then he edged along towards us, as casually as he could; as soon as he was close enough he whispered, ‘Thank you! Thank you!’

  I smiled at him. I was so glad, I realized; so glad that he did not have to worry about his grandmother any more. Daisy merely nodded, and looked away.

  ‘You’ll . . . put it back?’ I breathed.

  ‘Already done,’ whispered Alexander. ‘Won’t they get a shock when they check Mrs Daunt’s room at Belgrade!’

  I was impressed with him all over again. He must have been so terrified – and he had kept his head.

  Alexander grinned irrepressibly. ‘I owe you,’ he said. ‘Have you looked at the papers I gave you yet? They’re terribly funny.’ And with that, he wriggled away back to the Countess. I saw him whispering something to her, and her exclaiming, and then they both disappeared into her compartment.

  Now Mr Daunt was bellowing and Madame Melinda was shrieking as they were led away down the corridor. They were both accusing each other of the most dreadful things – Mr Daunt blaming Madame Melinda for not getting rid of the scarf before the train stopped, Madame Melinda shrieking at Mr Daunt that he had not left the connecting door properly closed, so she had nearly fallen through as she pretended to unlock it.

  ‘Hazel,’ said my father, ‘Miss Wells, I think you have seen enough. Back to your compartment, if you please, and try to get some sleep before Belgrade. And once we are there – why, you deserve anything you want as a reward.’

  ‘Anything?’ asked Daisy. She nudged me, and I knew what I had to say.

  ‘We don’t want anything,’ I said. ‘Only . . . from now on, will you let us do what we like? We really can look after ourselves.’

  ‘That remains to be seen,’ said my father, ‘though you have certainly acquitted yourselves well here. I think I can give you a longer leash from now on. I always knew I had a clever daughter, but it pleases me when I discover just how clever she really is.’

  Back we went to our compartment, and his words rang in my ears like bells.

  7

  Of course, we did not get to sleep. I was writing everything up in my casebook, and Daisy was doodling on scraps of paper, trying to fill in the gaps.

  ‘Do you think they knew Mr Strange would be on the train?’ she asked. ‘Or perhaps they had planned to frame Il Mysterioso until Mr Strange got on the train too . . . Think what a perfect scapegoat Il Mysterioso would have been: a magician who knew all about locked-door tricks!’

  ‘What is in the papers Alexander gave us, by the way?’ I asked, not really listening.

  ‘Oh,’ said Daisy. ‘They are frightfully funny. They’re horribly badly written! Lots of heaving chests and bloodstained nighties. What a dreadful writer he is. It’s almost— Hazel!’

  Her voice had changed, and I looked up at last.

  Daisy was staring down at the paper on her lap, electrified. ‘I held one up to the light just now – and look!’

  She raised it again and put it against her lamp, rather dangerously close. I was worried it would singe. But as she did so, brilliant little pinpricks were picked out on its surface – a constellation of bright specks.

  ‘That’s odd,’ I said. ‘There are holes in it.’

  ‘And the holes,’ said Daisy, ‘correspond to letters in that rubbish he was writing. Look – there’s one over this b, and this a, and this t – and here’s another t, and an l, and an e, s, h, i, p – which spells—’

  ‘Battleship!’ I gasped. ‘Daisy!’

  ‘And look! This says secret, and this five thousand – Hazel, I do believe that, quite by accident, we have solved the mystery of Mrs Vitellius’s spy!’

  ‘It was Mr Strange!’ Suddenly it made sense – why he had been behaving so oddly; why he, just like Il Mysterioso, was so reluctant to let on what he had been doing the evening before; and why he could afford to be on the train. That was what he was doing to get money – spying for the Germans! We had cleared him of murder, but he had been guilty of something else the whole time. And to think that Alexander had given us the crucial evidence!

  Daisy and I both leaped out of our beds and dashed out into the corridor. A blue-jacketed Wagon Lit attendant was standing there, feet apart, on guard. He gazed at us rather ferociously.

  ‘Excuse me,’ gasped Daisy, ‘but we absolutely must go and see Mrs Vitellius immediately. We’ve been arguing for ages about what we should wear in Belgrade and she’s the only one who can help us. Please.’

  ‘It is two in the morning, miss,’ he pointed out.

  ‘Oh, I know!’ said Daisy. ‘We have no time to waste! Do excuse us.’

  And she hammered on Mrs Vitellius’s door.

  Mrs Vitellius was not asleep either, though she pretended to be, stretching and yawning as she opened the compartment door. But I could see books open on her bed behind her, and after she let us in she stood up straighter,
not sleepy at all.

  ‘Well, girls,’ she said, sounding slightly rueful, ‘I must admit, you have done it again. I didn’t like it, and I still don’t, but it would be remiss of me not to offer my congratulations.’

  Daisy accepted them with a nod. Of course, she thought they were only her due.

  ‘As I told you before,’ she said, ‘it is the most excellent luck for you that we were on this train. Not only did we discover the identity of the murderer – before you, I may add – but we have now uncovered the spy! It is—’

  ‘Mr Strange?’ said Mrs Vitellius. ‘Yes, indeed. Now that, I think, I knew before you. I should call our scores one all.’

  That took the wind out of Daisy’s sails. ‘But how did you know?’

  ‘I am a professional, Daisy. I can make deductions. If it wasn’t Il Mysterioso, there was really only one person who fitted the profile: a frequent traveller, someone in need of money, someone easily led, with a rather loose sense of personal loyalty,’ said Mrs Vitellius. ‘I have been suspicious of him for a while. And his comments about being released – he must have hoped to get in contact with his German masters once we reached Belgrade. I put two and two together and got my man. Now I’ve put a signal out of my window, where my contact will see it. He will know to arrest Mr Strange – but I do wish that I had found some of those papers he intends to hand over.’

  ‘Aha!’ cried Daisy, buoyant again. ‘We have them!’

  ‘Alexander gave them to us,’ I said, feeling I had to be honest, ‘though we were the ones who decoded them.’

  ‘Look – he’s been hiding his spy notes on the bits of paper he’s pretending to use to write his book. If you hold them up to the light, you’ll see . . . those dots! They’re code.’

  Mrs Vitellius, frowning, held up the piece of paper. Then her serious face broke into a smile. ‘Daisy Wells,’ she exclaimed. ‘You’ve done it again.’

  ‘Hazel and I did it together,’ said Daisy – to my surprise. ‘But we did! You see, without Hazel, I would never be on this train in the first place, and so you would all have been deprived of my brilliance.’

  I grinned. It was an utterly Daisy-ish thing to say.

  8

  We reached Belgrade at seven in the morning, under wet grey clouds that made the dark grey stones of the city look deeply gloomy. I was sticky-eyed from tiredness, but all the same I was quite overwhelmed with excitement. Our detective work had paid off again – that was three real cases that the Detective Society had solved! Now no one could claim that we were not proper detectives, not even my father.

  As soon as we pulled up in the echoing, smoky station, policemen swarmed around the train. They came rushing up the steps, muddying the lovely carpets with their boots and knocking against the beautiful wooden walls with the barrels of their guns.

  ‘Just like our English clodhoppers,’ said Daisy, mock-sorrowfully.

  Then on jumped one more policeman, raincoat flapping. The golden hair under his cap gleamed and there was the quirk of a smile on his handsome face. He looked down at us through his monocle, and his expression did not change at all, apart from one elegantly raised eyebrow. Daisy raised an eyebrow back. I tried not to grin. I had no idea how M had come here – but here he was.

  The golden policeman turned to Mrs Vitellius, who had come out of her compartment and was standing beside us. There was a brief moment when they stared at each other quite blankly, Mrs Vitellius squaring her chin and the policeman raising his eyebrow again. ‘Fetch Mr Strange,’ he barked to the two men behind him.

  Then he said, in quite a different tone, ‘Mrs Vitellius, I believe?’

  ‘Indeed,’ she replied. ‘And who might you be – so English and so far from home?’

  ‘Who I am is no concern of yours,’ said the policeman. ‘Although I could show you papers proving that, despite my accent, I am Serbian. But I have some news for you. Your husband, Mr Vitellius, has made some . . . rather unwise investments, and is therefore no longer waiting for you in Istanbul. Instead, he is in this city, under arrest. Given the situation, I would ask you to accompany me to where he is being held.’

  ‘Good heavens,’ said Mrs Vitellius, quite calmly. ‘How dreadful! At once, you say?’

  ‘Immediately,’ said the golden policeman. ‘Although it would be remiss of me if I did not allow you to collect your hats.’

  And he winked at her, just once.

  Mr Strange was heaved off the train, protesting, and five minutes later Mrs Vitellius and the policeman left together, her hand on his escorting arm – and as he passed us his free hand brushed against Daisy’s, just for a moment.

  Afterwards, in our compartment, Daisy opened the letter he had given her.

  Daisy folded it up and put it in her little bag.

  ‘Now will you tell me what your uncle does?’ I asked – for what I had just seen seemed to confirm more of the school legends I had heard.

  ‘Of course I won’t,’ said Daisy. ‘Official secrets. Really, though, if I had to be related to anyone – I’m glad it’s him.

  ‘This whole business of the spy – how odd that it was going on at the same time as our murder! It’s quite funny, really – all the things that are going on all the time. That’s what makes murder so cluttered. If other people were as logical as me, every one of our cases would be solved in five seconds flat. What are you smiling at?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, putting my arm through hers.

  9

  Madame Melinda and Mr Daunt were taken away by more police. Madame Melinda shrieked, and Mr Daunt bellowed, but Jocelyn was more resolute than I could ever have imagined. He stood to one side, his face set, while the other passengers poked their heads out of the train windows and looked scandalized.

  Off they went, in manacles, and there was peace.

  But then I looked out of the window again – and caught one brief, smoky glance of Il Mysterioso, fading away down the platform, his cloak wrapped tightly around him and his papers, in their magic box, quite safe in the case he swung from one powerful arm. It was almost like one last magic trick: I blinked, and he was gone. I wondered about those people, the ones he was taking those papers to . . . What would it mean to them, that Il Mysterioso was still free? I could not imagine not being safe in my own home – and then I thought that perhaps I could. Here in the middle of Europe I could float, neither English nor Chinese, but I would always be going to somewhere, from somewhere, and where those places were mattered.

  I turned back to our compartment – to Daisy, who was so good at pretending to fit in, but all the same was just as different as I was – and she smiled at me.

  ‘Why the long face, Hazel?’ she said. ‘You ought to be dreadfully pleased. After all, we solved a murder. Again! Although really I was the one who tumbled to the answer.’

  ‘I suppose you did,’ I said. For once, I decided, I would allow Daisy her triumph.

  ‘Although you were helpful,’ she conceded. ‘Good at hiding under tables, and so on. Excellent Watsoning.’

  ‘Idiot,’ I said, making a face. ‘I’m not sure my father will ever forgive me, really.’

  ‘Yes he will,’ said Daisy. ‘He’s ever so proud of you, I can tell. Lucky you, having a father who knows you like that.’

  For a moment I could not look at her.

  ‘But I suppose it’s back to holidaying properly now,’ said Daisy. ‘Hmm. I suppose I could holiday for a while.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, grinning. I thought of Alexander, and the Junior Pinkertons. Despite what Daisy said, I thought how nice it was to know that there were other detectives just like us. It made the world feel very wide, and very interesting. ‘We’ve still got almost a day before we reach Istanbul. Anything might happen.’

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express has fascinated me since I first read it fifteen years ago. I love its characters, I love its neat, astonishingly clever dénouement, and I’ve watched the 1974 Albert Finney
film version twenty times at least. So, of course, it took my wise editor Natalie Doherty asking whether Hazel and Daisy could solve a murder on a train for it to occur to me that I could write my own tribute to it. My first thanks, therefore, have to go to her – for the original idea, and for all the work she has done to shape the story since.

  As part of the research for First Class Murder, I decided that I needed to experience as much of the Orient Express as possible (minus the murder). So on 4 October 2014 I took a lunch excursion in an original British Pullman train, laid out just as the Orient Express dining cars of the 1930s would have been. Many thanks to the staff I met on my journey – especially Jeff Monks for answering all my strange questions (as a result of our conversation, I regretfully removed ice cream from my menu), and Arthur for looking after me so well. The meal Daisy and Hazel eat on the evening of the murder matches the lunch I was given – apart from the crêpes Suzette, for which I used my imagination.

  Hazel’s Chinese name appears in this book for the first time – it is Wong Fung Ying, or (Wong appears first here because Chinese convention is to put a person’s family name before their given name.) Literally translated, ‘Wong Fung Ying’ means ‘Royal Phoenix Brave’ or ‘Royal Phoenix England’. My friend Scarlett Fu did incredible research into Hong Kong naming conventions of the 1920s to come up with this name – many, many thanks to her for the time she took. She gave me several auspicious options, and I could not resist this one. It seemed to me that Mr Wong, with his fondness for England and his belief in the importance of knowledge, would have given his daughter a name that was not just beautiful, but extremely strong.

  As always, this book could not exist without the help of many fantastic people. Thank you to my agent, Gemma Cooper, who is quite simply one of the best people I have ever met. She has never come across a problem she could not defeat, and I am proud to be her client and a client of the Bent Agency. Thank you to early readers Kathie Booth Stevens and Melinda Salisbury (I took the liberty of borrowing Melinda’s first name for this book, though not, I promise, her character). Thank you to Harriet Reuter Hapgood for the excellent title, and to all of Team Cooper for their help, support and judicious provision of wine. Thank you to everyone at Penguin Random House, in the editorial, PR, marketing, design and sales teams, and especially to Natalie Doherty, Harriet Venn, Annie Eaton and Francesca Dow, for their work in creating and promoting my books. Thank you to Laura Bird and Nina Tara, for another gorgeous cover. Thank you also to all the other people who have supported me through this process: my friends, my family and my colleagues at Egmont, who are all so accepting of my author alter ego.