Murder Most Unladylike: A Wells and Wong Mystery

  Daisy raised her eyebrows. ‘Yes, but – Hazel Wong, encouraging me to tell a lie! I never thought I’d see the day. You’re right, though. We need that earring, and we’re going to get it back!’

  3

  Daisy and I made for Miss Griffin’s office, on the top floor of New Wing, at the end of lunch. We should not really have been in New Wing out of lesson time, of course, but things were still so mixed up after Miss Tennyson’s death that no one had time to notice us running by except the dark-haired chief of police, who gave us a look as we passed him on our way up the stairs by the founder’s portrait. I hoped we were looking innocent.

  The door to Miss Griffin’s office was closed. Daisy and I grimaced at each other encouragingly and then Daisy knocked on the door. My heart was hammering as we waited to hear Miss Griffin’s voice, but the person who answered our knock was not Miss Griffin at all. It was Miss Lappet.

  ‘Come in!’ she called, and there was a hurried clinking noise. Daisy and I looked at each other in a panic. Neither of us had expected this. Asking Miss Griffin for the earring was terrifying enough, but asking one of our three remaining suspects for the evidence that might prove that she had done it – that was more frightening altogether.

  ‘Come in!’ Miss Lappet called again, and this time her voice was tinged with annoyance.

  ‘We’ll just have to bluff it!’ Daisy whispered to me. ‘This could be a way to finally eliminate her!’

  Or prove that she did the murders, I thought. I was about to tell Daisy not to go in, but she was already pushing open the door.

  Daisy is a marvellous actress, and at that moment I was glad. My heart was drumming painfully in my chest, and my knees were wobbling, but Daisy behaved as though nothing was wrong at all. ‘Oh! Miss Lappet!’ she said, as though it was a jolly surprise. ‘Good afternoon!’

  ‘Good afternoon, Daisy, Hazel,’ said Miss Lappet. She was at the desk where Miss Bell used to work, next to Miss Griffin’s big green leather one, and she was squinting at us. Her grey hair was fluffy, her glasses were askew and there was a stain on her enormous blouse front. She looked a harmless fright. But appearances, I had learned, could be deceptive. I made sure to stop a safe distance away from her, halfway across Miss Griffin’s green and blue patterned carpet, and let Daisy speak.

  ‘Miss Lappet,’ she said, ‘this is a terribly awful thing to ask of you. I really ought to wait until Miss Griffin comes back – it’s a rather difficult request—’

  That got to Miss Lappet, of course.

  ‘As you can see, today I am acting as Miss Griffin’s secretary while she deals with the police. Anything you can say to Miss Griffin, you can say to me, dear,’ she said.

  ‘Oh!’ Daisy said, ‘In that case . . . I’m sure Miss Griffin told you that I bumped into her this morning. I feel like such an imbecile, I shall never forgive myself for it, but – well, I dropped something when I crashed into her. It was something I oughtn’t to have had, but Mummy’s birthday is next week. I know it was terribly wrong of me to have her present down at school, and as soon as I found it was missing I realized that the only thing to do was come to Miss Griffin and simply beg her to let me have it back.’

  ‘How sweet,’ said Miss Lappet, slurring the W slightly. ‘What was it, exactly?’

  I braced myself, feeling as though I was about to be tackled by a very large Big Girl wielding a hockey stick.

  ‘Well, I bought Mummy a pair of gold earrings, but when I looked in Art I could only find one of them still in their box. It’s two long teardrops, one above the other.’

  I waited for Miss Lappet to jump up from her seat and shout, or faint, or hurl Miss Griffin’s paperweight at us. Instead, she merely looked confused. ‘But, Daisy dear, what an odd coincidence. How strange. Are you sure? Miss Griffin has just found her own earring that has been missing all week – a gold one just like that. She showed it to me a minute ago, and here it is still in her desk.’

  And she took something out of one of the desk’s many drawers and held it out for us to see. There on her palm sat the earring that we had found in the tunnel, its two gold tears shining. ‘You see, this is Miss Griffin’s, dear,’ Miss Lappet told Daisy. ‘Are you sure the earring you lost was like this one?’

  Daisy blinked. Then she said, very quickly, ‘Oh no, you’re right. How annoying! I’m terribly sorry to have bothered you. Come along, Hazel, we ought to be going. I’m sure Miss Lappet is very busy. Come along, Hazel.’

  She had to drag me out of the room. I couldn’t take my eyes off the gold earring in Miss Lappet’s hand. It couldn’t be, I thought, It couldn’t be! But it was. There the earring sat, looking ordinary as anything, except that what it meant was something utterly terrible.

  Miss Lappet was not the murderer.

  Neither were Miss Hopkins or The One.

  It was Miss Griffin.

  4

  Miss Griffin had done it. Why hadn’t we thought of her as a suspect?

  Daisy had me by the wrist. She was dragging me along somewhere, and I let her. I didn’t much care about anything except what was going on in my head.

  Miss Griffin had done it. Of course, as soon as we knew that Miss Lappet’s supposed alibi was useless, we should have realized that Miss Griffin’s had vanished as well – but we had never even considered her. I thought again about that conversation Daisy had overheard between Miss Griffin and Miss Tennyson. Why hadn’t we realized how sinister Miss Griffin’s request had been?

  There I was, minding my own business in an opportune listening place in Library corridor, Daisy had told me, and Miss Griffin came up to Miss Tennyson. ‘Miss Tennyson,’ she said, ‘I need to talk to you. You haven’t quite finished helping me with that little project of ours. You were so late to my office on Monday evening that we barely got a thing done.’

  ‘Yes, but I made up for it on Tuesday and Wednesday,’ Miss Tennyson had said nervously.

  ‘Ah, but not quite,’ replied Miss Griffin. ‘There’s still just a bit of work that needs to be finished.’

  Honestly, Hazel, Miss Tennyson went as white as a sheet. She was shaking. ‘Can we perhaps schedule another session?’ asked Miss Griffin. ‘There’s just a little more work I’d like you to do – perhaps this evening?’

  If it had been any other mistress, we might have been more suspicious. But somehow Miss Griffin had always seemed so remote from the other masters and mistresses, so above everything that went on at Deepdean. And Miss Lappet, Miss Hopkins and The One had all been such good suspects – so had Miss Tennyson and Miss Parker, to start with. They’d all had motives for killing Miss Bell, while Miss Griffin didn’t appear to have any motive at all.

  But Miss Griffin had done it. Why?

  I felt Daisy shaking my arm.

  ‘Hazel,’ she said. ‘You’re talking to yourself.’

  I blinked, and found that somehow we had ended up in Old Wing cloakroom. The bell for the end of lunch break was ringing.

  ‘Come on,’ said Daisy. ‘Hide.’

  She dragged me into one of the very far corners, which was full of the coats that girls from years ago lost and never bothered to find again. They smelled slightly rotten, and their grey fabric had gone a bit green with age.

  I squeezed myself in next to Daisy. We sat there in the dimness, trying not to breathe in the old coat smell too much. Then Daisy reached out her hand and took hold of mine. I could feel it shaking.

  ‘I never guessed it would be Miss Griffin,’ she said quietly. ‘I didn’t want to tell you, but I was nearly sure that it was Miss Hopkins and The One. It was all beginning to fit – motive, means, even the earring. But – oh, Miss Griffin!’

  I nodded, making the coats in front of my face sway. ‘She doesn’t seem real, does she?’ I asked.

  ‘She isn’t human,’ said Daisy. ‘She’s a Headmistress through and through. I thought so, anyway. Well! Now we know how the murderer got Miss Tennyson to help – Miss Griffin must have offered the Deputy job in exchange for her serv
ices. And that conversation I overheard on Friday makes sense now! Miss Griffin was reminding Miss Tennyson that they were in it together; she must have been asking her to help search the school again that evening, for the lost earring! The torch we saw when we were creeping about on Friday night – well, I suppose that must have been them, hunting. Heavens.

  ‘I wonder why she did it, though? What on earth would be worth murdering two people for, if you are already the Headmistress of Deepdean? Miss Tennyson had to be bumped off because she was on the verge of telling the police, but why ever kill Miss Bell in the first place?’

  ‘She must have had a reason,’ I said, although my mind was as blank as Daisy’s. Miss Griffin seemed to have everything, to want for nothing. She ruled Deepdean, had all the other mistresses running after her, was perfectly well-off, and even quite good looking, for an old person. ‘I don’t know what, though,’ I admitted.

  ‘Let’s be logical about this,’ said Daisy, squeezing my hand. Hers was beginning to feel more steady, although mine was still trembling. ‘We know she did it. Just as you said, we know when and how. Now all we need is to know why. Why do people kill other people?’

  ‘Money,’ I said promptly. Daisy has drummed these reasons into me enough times for me to know them by heart. ‘Power. Love. Fear. Revenge. But Miss Griffin had more money and power than Miss Bell anyway, so it can’t have been those.’

  ‘Likewise,’ said Daisy, ‘revenge seems unlikely. Miss Griffin could have simply not given Miss Bell the Deputy job, or fired her, if she wanted revenge for something. So that leaves Love and Fear. Well, what if – Hazel, tell me if this doesn’t make sense – what if Miss Bell was blackmailing Miss Griffin? Asking for money – or, no, the Deputy job – in exchange for keeping quiet about something? That would explain why Miss Griffin couldn’t simply fire Miss Bell.’

  ‘But Miss Griffin seems so perfect!’ I objected. ‘What could she be blackmailed about?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Daisy, ‘but if she’s killed two people over it, it must be rather awful. What do you think, though? Am I right?’

  Even then, in the middle of everything else going on in my head, I had time to be amazed. Daisy Wells, asking me what I thought about her detective work!

  ‘It does make sense,’ I said. ‘If anything does.’

  ‘Pity we can’t just ask Miss Bell about it, isn’t it?’ asked Daisy with a little chuckle. ‘Excuse me, but why were you murdered?’

  ‘Perhaps she left a note,’ I said.

  Daisy chuckled again. Then she squeezed my fingers so hard that I yelped.

  ‘Hazel,’ she said, ‘that isn’t actually a stupid thing to say at all. As all my books point out, blackmailers do generally keep copies of incriminating documents in a safe place for insurance. What if Miss Bell did something like that?’

  ‘If she did,’ I said, squeezing back in excitement, ‘they might be down at school.’

  ‘Yes!’ said Daisy. ‘I bet Miss Griffin and Miss Tennyson were looking for them as well as the earring last week!’

  Then we both remembered that Deepdean was rather a large place. We sank back into the coats, sighing.

  ‘No, wait,’ said Daisy, sitting upright again. ‘Let’s deduce. Miss Bell and Miss Griffin must have prearranged their meeting in the Gym – they wouldn’t have met there by chance on a Monday evening. So Miss Bell would have had time to prepare for it – and hide any evidence she was using to blackmail Miss Griffin. She would have put it somewhere safe, somewhere Miss Griffin wouldn’t have thought of when she was looking for it.’

  ‘So not the mistresses’ common room,’ I said. ‘And not the science labs, either.’

  ‘Too obvious,’ Daisy agreed. ‘Well, where do we know Miss Bell went on Monday night?’

  ‘The Gym,’ I said. ‘But there’s nowhere to hide something in the Gym. Jones would find it if it was in the Cupboard, and besides, it’s too close to the meeting place.’

  Then, in a flash of something that Daisy would have called Sherlocky brilliance if it had happened to her, I saw the answer. ‘Daisy,’ I breathed. ‘The cloakroom. Right here! Remember the first former who found Miss Bell digging about behind the coats in here? We only used what she said to establish when Miss Bell left for the Gym, but what if Miss Bell was here to hide her evidence?’

  Daisy said something extremely unladylike. Then she hugged me. I glowed.

  ‘Coat pockets!’ she cried. ‘Nobody ever uses these ratty old ones, they stay here until they rot away! It’s the perfect hiding place! Quick, Hazel, dig!’

  And she began pawing through the pile of old coats that surrounded us.

  Shivering with excitement, I hunted with her. We were on the trail again, I thought, as I shoved my hand into ripped and dirty pockets, pulling out snapped pencils and coat-furry sweets. Then my fingertips bumped against something large and cardboard-stiff that crackled when I squeezed it.

  Holding my breath, I pulled it out and parted the coats in front of me to see that I was clutching a red notebook that said, in small precise letters on its cover,

  ‘Daisy,’ I said quietly. ‘I’ve got it.’

  5

  Daisy gave a whoop of triumph – but I couldn’t get past those two carefully inked words.

  I got a chill all the way down my spine. Verity Abraham. She seemed to be everywhere. I know it sounds stupid, but at that moment I really did wonder if she was haunting me. I imagined her with her hanging-down hair and her bloodstained clothes and a hot-and-cold shiver ran through me.

  Daisy didn’t see it that way at all. ‘Goodness,’ she said, peering at the book. ‘Verity. I say, that’s Verity Abraham!’

  ‘I know,’ I said shakily. It was funny to think that before Verity became my ghost girl she had been a real, ordinary schoolgirl at Deepdean, who ate biscuits and kept a diary. I took a deep breath, bent the spine open, and began to read.

  ‘Boring,’ said Daisy. ‘Skim to the racy bit. What? There must be one!’

  I stopped reading with a gasp, and Daisy gave an undignified squeal. ‘Really!’ she cried. ‘Really! Oh, Hazel, excitement!’

  And that was the last thing Verity wrote in her diary.

  But it wasn’t the last thing in the diary itself. When Daisy shook it, two pieces of paper fell out.

  The first was a short note, in Miss Griffin’s beautiful copperplate.

  The second was in Miss Bell’s angular handwriting.

  ‘Fancy!’ said Daisy gleefully. ‘I’d say that was a motive for murder, all right. It looks like Miss Bell got greedy and wanted to force Miss Griffin out of Deepdean altogether. She’d have lost everything! Oh, if the school only knew!’

  I was glowing pink with shock. I could barely take it in. Miss Griffin, the great Miss Griffin, had been involved in a shameful affair, and, as a result of this, had a baby. It was not the sort of thing that respectable schoolmistresses did! And Verity had been her daughter! Had Miss Griffin killed Verity on purpose, so that she would not talk? Or had it just been an accident? Whatever the truth was, Verity had not committed suicide at all. The person who had written that diary would never have killed herself. So it must have been Miss Griffin’s fault. The thought made my skin crawl with horror.

  Something occurred to me then. ‘The Henry that Verity mentioned – that’s King Henry, isn’t it? So she’s known all the time! That must be why she’s been looking so odd, and why she was coming to speak to Miss Tennyson at the Willow. I knew she had something to do with this!’

  Daisy nodded. ‘She can’t have known exactly what was going on, but I bet she suspected. Perhaps she realized that Miss Tennyson had something to do with it, and that’s why she was going to meet her on Saturday. But the important thing is that we’ve got all the evidence we need to accuse Miss Griffin. Whatever she says now, we’ve got her. Hazel, we’ve solved the case.’

  ‘Miss Bell solved the case,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot, Hazel,’ said Daisy. ‘She’s dead. She didn
’t solve anything.’

  I was just opening my mouth to argue – or perhaps to say something else about the extraordinary things we had discovered – when the cloakroom door creaked open.

  6

  Daisy and I both froze. You see, that was all wrong. It was the middle of a lesson (one which Daisy and I were missing), and so no one should have been wandering around school grounds so quietly.

  Luckily we were still hidden behind our rack of discarded coats, at the very back of the room. No one looking in could see us – and that was what saved us.

  The door opened all the way, there was a moment of utter silence, and then Miss Griffin said, ‘Daisy? Hazel? Where are you, girls?’

  I could feel Daisy’s hand gripping mine, and hear our breathing and our hearts. They sounded as loud as shouting, and I was shaking so hard that I imagined Miss Griffin seeing clouds of dust flying up off the coats around us.

  She had come to find us. She knew! Miss Lappet must have told her we had been looking for the earring. She was going to kill us, I thought frantically, and then bury us next to Miss Bell out in the woods and tell our parents that we had run away!

  I thought I had been afraid of the murderer before, during our investigation, but I never knew until that moment how much I did not want to be dead.

  ‘Girls?’ called Miss Griffin again. ‘Girls, are you in there? Come on out, I’ve got a lovely surprise for you!’

  I could not have felt more terrified if she had said, Come out so I can murder you!

  ‘Miss Lappet told me that there’d been a misunderstanding. She gave you a wrong impression earlier. Come out, girls, and I can explain.’

  It felt so strange to disobey a mistress. But we did not come out.

  At last, Miss Griffin sighed. She pulled the door to, and the room was quiet again.