I pelted along the empty, chalk-smelling corridor of Old Wing, and then turned right down the high, black and white tiled Library corridor, my feet echoing in the hush and my chest heaving. Even after a year at Deepdean, when I run, I still huff and puff in a way that rude Miss Hopkins calls ‘determinedly unladylike’.
I passed the mistresses’ common room, the library, Mr MacLean’s study, The One’s cubby and the Hall, and then turned right again onto the corridor that leads to the Gym. There’s a school legend that the Gym is haunted by the ghost of Verity Abraham. When I first heard it I was younger, and I believed it. I imagined Verity all bloody, with her long hair hanging down in front of her face, wearing her pinafore and tie and holding a lacrosse stick.
Even now that I am older and not a shrimp any more, just knowing that I am on my way to the Gym gives me the shivers. It does not help that the Gym corridor is awful. It’s packed full of dusty, broken bits of old school furniture that stand up like people in the gloom. That evening all the lights were off, and everything was smudged in murky shades of grey and brown. I ran very fast down the corridor, pushed open the doors to the Gym and galumphed in, wheezing.
And there on the floor was Miss Bell.
Our Gym, in case you have not seen it for yourself, is very large, with bars and beams all folded up against the walls and wide glass windows. There’s a terrifyingly high-up viewing balcony on the side nearest the main door (we are not allowed to go up there alone in case we fall, but since Verity jumped off it no one wants to), and a little room under that for us to change and leave kit in, which we call the Cupboard.
Miss Bell was lying beneath the balcony, quite still, with her arm thrown back behind her head, and her legs folded under her. In my first moment of shock it did not occur to me that she was dead. I thought I was about to get an awful ticking-off for being somewhere I oughtn’t, and nearly ran away again before she caught sight of me. But then I wondered – what was Miss Bell doing, lying there like that?
I ran forward and knelt down beside her. I hesitated before touching her, because I had never touched a mistress before, but in the event it only felt like touching a human being.
I patted the shoulder of her white lab coat, hoping most awfully that she would open her eyes and sit up and scold me for being in the Gym after hours. But instead, my patting made Miss Bell’s head loll away from me. Her glasses slid down off her nose and I saw that what I had thought was only a shadow behind her head was actually a dark stain the size of my handkerchief. Some of the stain had spread to the collar of her lab coat, and that part of it was red. I put out my finger and touched the stain, and my finger came away covered in blood.
I scrambled backwards, scrubbing my hand against my skirt in horror. It left a long dark smear, and I looked at that and then at Miss Bell, who had still not moved, and felt sick as anything. I had never seen a dead body up close before, but I was quite certain now that Miss Bell was dead.
What I ought to do in the circumstances was scream, I thought, but everything was so dark and quiet around me that I couldn’t. What I truly wanted to do was tear off my skirt, just to get that blood away from me, but my Deepdean training rose up inside me, making the thought of running about the school half naked somehow far worse than being alone with a corpse.
As I thought this, I realized that Miss Bell really was dead, and I was alone with her body. I suddenly remembered the ghost of Verity Abraham, and thought that perhaps it was her who had killed Miss Bell, pushing her off from exactly the same spot she had jumped from a year ago . . . and now she might be waiting to do the same to me. It was silly and childish, but all the hairs prickled up on the back of my neck and, Deepdean training or no, I jumped to my feet and ran out of the Gym as fast as I could – as if Miss Bell was going to leap up and run after me.
4
I was in such a tearing hurry that as I ran back along the corridor I crashed into several abandoned chairs and scraped my knee quite badly. But I hardly noticed until later. My footsteps were echoing all around me, and dark odd-shaped shadows rose up at the edges of my vision; my breath caught in my throat. I ran all the way back along Library corridor to Old Wing and found Daisy, at last, coming out of the form room where I’d left her.
I must have looked a horrible sight, all pink and damp and heaving.
Daisy blinked at me curiously. ‘Whatever’s up with you? You’re bleeding. We’re going to be late for dinner. VO’s raging about it.’
I looked down at myself in surprise, and only then saw that I had blood running down my leg from a long cut on my knee. I could not feel it at all. It was as though it had happened to another person entirely.
‘Daisy,’ I gasped, ‘Miss Bell’s dead.’
Daisy laughed. ‘Oh, very funny, Hazel,’ she said. ‘Imagine!’
‘Daisy,’ I said, ‘this is real. She’s dead. She’s in the Gym, just lying there—’
Daisy stared at me for a moment, one eyebrow raised, and that was exactly when Virginia Overton came storming out of the classroom behind her and discovered us standing there.
Virginia Overton is who Daisy meant by VO. She is the Monday night prefect on duty, the Big Girl who makes sure we all get back up to House after socs, and she takes her duties very seriously. She pounds about on her fat flat feet like a policeman, and presses her clipboard to her chest like an officer’s notebook.
‘Wells!’ she snapped, looming out of the formroom doorway at us. ‘Wong! What do you think you’re doing? In exactly eight minutes you will both be late for dinner.’
‘In the Gym – it’s Miss – she’s—’ I spluttered.
‘Hazel thinks someone has hurt themselves in the Gym,’ said Daisy smoothly. ‘She ran back here to get help.’
Virginia scowled in annoyance. ‘Oh, honestly,’ she said. ‘You lot do make up the most corking fibs sometimes.’
‘You have to come and look!’ I gasped. ‘Please!’
Virginia looked from me to Daisy, and then back to me again. ‘If this is one of your games . . .’ she warned.
I dragged her back to the Gym with Daisy following. The English mistress, Miss Tennyson, was standing outside Mr MacLean’s study at the end of the corridor, talking to sharp-faced, red-haired Mamzelle, the French mistress (I don’t know how Miss Tennyson can understand her – Mamzelle has a dreadfully strong French accent; her lessons are a terrible struggle), and grubby old Mr MacLean himself. All three turned and watched us as we went by. In fact, we were making so much noise that The One stuck his head out of his little cubby to see what the fuss was. (The One has his own little office room on the hall end of Library corridor, just next to Mr MacLean’s study – he can’t use the mistresses’ common room at the other end, of course, because he is a man.)
‘Problem, Virginia?’ Mr MacLean called, and Virginia snapped, ‘I doubt it, sir.’
As Virginia and Daisy walked through the Gym door, I stopped and clicked the main light switch on triumphantly. ‘There she is,’ I said, pointing. ‘I told you—’
But then I looked down the line of my arm to the place where, a few minutes before, Miss Bell had been lying. Miss Bell was gone. The Gym was quite empty and still. There was only a little dark smear on the polished wooden floor to show where her head had been.
I was still gasping from the shock of it when Virginia spoke.
‘Good heavens,’ she said. ‘What a surprise. There is no one in here. That will be no dinner for either of you tonight – you, for lying, and you for encouraging her.’
‘But she was there!’ I cried. ‘Honest, she was! Look!’ I said, pointing to the dark smear. ‘That’s blood! Somebody must have come back and wiped it up, and—’
Virginia snorted. ‘And I’m the Emperor of Japan,’ she said in a superior tone of voice. ‘They did no such thing, because there never was any body – as you well know. And as for the blood, well, your knee is bleeding. I suppose you thought I wouldn’t notice? You’ve got it on your skirt as well. This is quite one of
the most elaborate pieces of nonsense I’ve ever come across. You really ought to be ashamed – but then, where you come from, I don’t suppose they teach you that it’s wrong to lie, do they?’
I bit my lip and wished as hard as I could that I had found Virginia Overton lying on the Gym floor.
‘Now, come along up to House, both of you. I hope Matron gives you a frightful rollicking for this later, that’s all I can say.’
And with that she seized us by the arm and frog-marched us out of the Gym, muttering about useless third formers. I was scarlet with rage and shame. I really had seen Miss Bell lying there, I knew it – but there was no evidence to show that I hadn’t made it all up.
Virginia walked us back past Mamzelle, Miss Tennyson and Mr MacLean. Mamzelle chuckled and said, ‘False alarm?’
‘Very,’ Virginia told her, and kept on walking.
I wondered for a bit if I were mad. This sort of thing simply did not happen outside of Daisy’s books. It was ridiculous.
But then, as Virginia rushed us out through the bright lights and wood panelling of Old Wing Entrance, I happened to glance down at my skirt and saw the dark stain streaked across it. I opened up the palm of my hand towards me and saw that my index finger still had a faint tidemark of red around its tip. I closed my hand up again into a tight ball, and I knew that I was not mad in the slightest.
5
Even at the furious pace Virginia was pulling us up the hill, we had still not quite reached House when the dinner gong sounded. I flinched automatically when I heard it in the distance, which was my Deepdean training coming out again. One of the first things you learn at Deepdean is that bells are sacred. Our lives are parcelled up into the spaces between one and the next, and to ignore the summons is simply criminal. The most important bell of all is the House dinner gong. If you hear it and do not respond to it, or, worse, if you are not there to hear it at all – well! There will be no dinner for you.
I knew, of course, that we were in much greater trouble than simply missing the dinner gong, but all the same I couldn’t help reacting to it.
People were still filing in as we came through the main House doors into the peeling old front hallway, but, ‘Wait here!’ snapped Virginia, and we were forced to loiter nervously beneath the big hallway clock – which informed us that we were a whole four minutes late – as she went storming upstairs to fetch Matron.
Matron did not look happy to hear what Virginia had to say. Her mean piggy eyes glared at us from beneath her regulation cap, and she breathed heavily through her nose. When Virginia had finished, there was a lull. I could hear the babble from the Dining Room through the closed swing doors. Then Matron came steaming up to us, whacked us both round the head (me harder than Daisy, because after all she had only abetted my lies), and sent us up to our dorm without dinner, to think about what we had done. As we trailed up the scuffed blue carpet of the front stairs I saw Matron going in to dinner with Virginia by her side. They were muttering together and giving us dark backward looks so we would know how out of favour we were.
I was feeling horribly depressed at not being believed. As well as that, thinking about what I had seen in the Gym gave me a nasty taste in my mouth, like the beginning of being sick. Daisy, though, was in very good spirits. As soon as the dorm door swung closed and we were properly alone, she sat down on her bed with a bounce and a crunch (our beds are not supposed to be comfortable), and said, ‘Explain.’
‘There’s nothing to explain,’ I said, sitting down next to her and feeling sicker than ever. ‘I saw Miss Bell lying in the gym. She must have fallen from the balcony. She was absolutely stone cold dead. I didn’t make it up!’
‘Well, I know you didn’t,’ said Daisy, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to come across the corpses of Science mistresses in deserted gymnasiums. ‘You’d never tell a lie like that. Perhaps Lavinia, but not you. Are you sure she was really dead, though?’
At that, I sat up indignantly, but then I remembered the way Miss Bell’s head had lolled and felt sick again. ‘I touched her and she was still warm, but dead as anything,’ I said. ‘She flopped. I told you, she must have fallen off the balcony.’
Daisy sniffed. ‘Fallen?’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. My skin crawled. I had been so busy being horrified at the fact that Miss Bell was dead that I had not thought properly about how it might have happened.
‘It’s quite obvious,’ said Daisy. ‘No one falls to their death and then gets up and tidies themselves away, do they? When you first found the body it could have just been an accident. But when we came racing back not five minutes later to find no body at all where one used to be – well. Someone must have pushed her, then got rid of the evidence.’
I gulped. ‘Do you mean she’s been murdered?’
‘Yes!’ said Daisy. ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t think of that before? Oh, Hazel, how exciting. A real murder, at Deepdean! Of course, there’s always a chance I’m quite wrong. Perhaps you came in just at the wrong moment and misunderstood things—’
‘I did not,’ I said, annoyed again.
‘Or we simply missed the rescue party somehow. Well. If it is that – and how I hope it isn’t – we’ll know as soon as we get in tomorrow morning. It’ll be all over school like the mumps.’
‘But if it isn’t?’ I asked, although I really knew the answer.
‘If it isn’t,’ said Daisy, bouncing on her bed again and beaming at me, ‘then our Detective Society has just found our best case yet.’
6
We heard the Dining-Room doors bang open downstairs. There was a gathering roar and a clatter of feet up the bare sides of the stairs, and thirty seconds later Kitty threw open the dorm door and came rushing in, Beanie and Lavinia at her heels.
‘What happened? Why weren’t you at dinner?’ gasped Beanie. ‘I saved you my pudding in case you haven’t eaten – it’s bakewell tart so it was easy to carry and you know I hate it.’
I knew that was a lie, and felt guilty, but before I could argue Daisy had graciously taken the crumbling slice of tart from Beanie and was breaking it in half. It had been wrapped in Beanie’s handkerchief, so was not entirely clean, but my stomach was rumbling. It tasted heavenly.
‘What happened?’ asked Kitty while we were eating. ‘What did you do? I must say, Matron and VO were both looking fearfully enraged about something.’
‘No change from the usual, then,’ said Daisy through a mouthful of tart. ‘It was nothing really. Hazel went back to the Gym to get her pullover, and VO caught her in there and decided she was loitering where she oughtn’t. We got into awful trouble with her.’
Everyone nodded knowingly. Virginia Overton’s rages were legendary.
To divert attention away from the Gym, and in thanks for Beanie’s offering, Daisy dug into the contents of her tuck box and came up with a bar of Fry’s chocolate. We were all still sitting on our beds munching it when the bell for homework – which we call Prep – rang loudly.
That evening, even though I had masses of prep, I couldn’t settle down to it at all. I kept on thinking about Miss Bell, and how Daisy and I now knew she had been murdered. For all Daisy’s talk, the Wells and Wong Detective Society had never really detected anything more important than very minor theft. But what if we managed to solve this case? We would be heroines. Miss Griffin might give us medals, and the mistresses, the masters and the Big Girls would all line up to clap us on the back – all, of course, apart from the murderer.
That thought brought me back down to earth with a thump. I put down my pen, and King Henry, who was taking Prep that evening, said, ‘Come on, Wong, buck up!’
Murders, unfortunately, always come with murderers attached. In Daisy’s books, they generally get quite angry about being investigated – and, in fact, dreadful things tend to happen to anyone who knows too much about the crime. I had been there, on the spot, straight after a murder had been committed. What if the murderer had seen me?
1
The thought kept on worrying me, all the way through Prep. I wanted to slip a note to Daisy about it, but King Henry was glaring at me too hard. What if the murderer had seen me? After all, it must have been a close-run thing to make Miss Bell vanish between the first time I had gone into the Gym and the second.
After we had lined up in the washroom for toothbrushes, three to each porcelain sink, we got into bed. I took advantage of a pillow fight between Kitty and Lavinia to creep over to Daisy’s narrow bed and climb in beside her.
‘Daisy,’ I whispered. ‘What if the murderer saw me?’
‘Saw you do what?’ Daisy asked, rolling over. ‘Ow, Hazel, your feet are blocks of ice.’
‘Saw me in the Gym. After the murder!’
Daisy sighed. ‘How on earth would they have seen you? They weren’t there when you came in the first time, were they?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But what if they were hiding? In the Cupboard perhaps?’
‘You’re a chump,’ said Daisy. ‘If they were in the Cupboard, they couldn’t have seen you through the closed door, could they? And you didn’t say anything, did you, so even if they were hiding they couldn’t have known it was you.’
‘But we came back! What about then? How do you know for certain that they won’t be after us both now that we know?’
‘VO didn’t say our names,’ said Daisy wearily. ‘I’m sure she didn’t. Therefore the murderer will have no idea who either of us is. I promise you, Hazel, on my word as an excellent detective. Say it. I am an excellent detective.’
‘You are an excellent detective,’ I said, because she was digging her fingers into my arm.
‘You see? It’s quite all right. There’s nothing to be worried about.’
I tried to make myself believe her.
‘Unless, of course,’ said Daisy casually, ‘the murderer is just biding their time; waiting to find out exactly who we are and how much we saw before they come after us both. But that’s not particularly likely. Now go back to your own bed, Watson, you’re squashing me. We’ve got important work to do tomorrow.’