Unfortunately, the pile tipped over and spilled across the floor, and I saw that one of the gym shirts had a long, dark smear all down its front. I shone my flashlight on it, and it looked rusty in the light. While I was still standing there, hoping what I was seeing was not really true, Daisy gave a yelp.
“View-halloo!” she cried. “As suspected, blood on the barrow! I say, Hazel, look!”
I turned around, holding up the bloodied gym shirt.
Daisy could not understand why I was not more excited.
“Watson!” she cried, poking me jubilantly in the ribs. “The game’s afoot! We’re closing in!”
I bit my lip. The Case of the Murder of Miss Bell was feeling far too real. Miss Bell really was dead and was never coming back. I was holding a gym shirt with real blood on it—the gym shirt the murderer must have used to mop Miss Bell’s blood off the gym floor, and Daisy had found the wheelbarrow the murderer had used to transport Miss Bell’s body to its hiding place.
But Daisy was still galloping on, as excited about this case as she had been about The Case of the Mysterious Food Thief—as though Miss Bell was just another missing bag of peppermints. “We’re close!” she cried. “We’re very close! We’ve got the scent, and now we must run with it. Here’s the wheelbarrow, and a bloodied gym shirt, and here isn’t Miss Bell’s body. So, where was she moved to? The murderer must have stowed the Bell somewhere at school between Monday evening and Tuesday night, when they came back to move it to a safer hiding place, away from the school. So now we need to be clever; we need to put ourselves into the mind of the killer. If you had a body to hide in Deepdean, what would you do with it?”
“I wouldn’t kill anyone in the first place,” I said.
“All right, don’t be clever,” said Daisy. “Think. It needs to be somewhere safe, and it needs to be somewhere secure.”
“That doesn’t sound much like anywhere in Deepdean,” I said. Honestly, I couldn’t think of a single place that would fit. A safe and secure place in Deepdean? If I’d been in a rude mood—instead of feeling frightened—I’d have said, Not likely.
Daisy frowned. “Yes, I know,” she said. “It doesn’t, does it? Not for years, anyway. Years! Ever since they closed up the—”
She froze. I could see an idea occurring to her, like a firework going off in her head.
“Hazel! We’ve been the most utter chumps! Imagine us not thinking of that! Oh, I could kick myself!” And without any more explanation, she took my hand and dragged me out into the gym again, so that I had to gallop after her or fall over.
“Of what?” I asked, gasping as we jolted along. “What?”
“You’ll see!” shouted Daisy. “Come on, come on, quick!”
She towed me out into the corridor, then immediately dragged me left into a little passageway behind the hall. When Deepdean was first built there used to be an underground tunnel between the hall and the Old Wing, so that when it rained girls could go to prayers without getting wet. It was bricked up long ago, though, when the Library corridor was built, and now that little passageway only leads to a locked door.
At last I understood where Daisy was taking me.
“Oh!” I said, stopping so quickly that Daisy nearly jerked my wrist off before she noticed.
“Now do you see?” asked Daisy, wheeling round and letting go of me. “It has to be! There’s nowhere else even half so perfect.”
“But no one can get into it!”
“Jones can, and anyone who knows the school at all could take his spare keys, just like I did. I think this is really it, Hazel! We’ve found it!”
I thought of Miss Bell again. “You’re sure she’s not still down there?” I asked uncomfortably.
“I’ve told you she isn’t. She’s been moved out of the school by now,” said Daisy. “But even if she is—well, I’ve seen lots of dead animals and they’re not so bad. They just lie there.” I nearly reminded her that I had seen Miss Bell’s body quite recently, and it had not been like a dead animal at all. But Daisy was already trying Jones’s keys in the door. I thought it would be difficult to unlock, but when Daisy found the right key it turned with a neat little well-oiled click and the door swung inward.
“See?” asked Daisy smugly. “Someone’s been here recently.”
She shone her flashlight into the open doorway and we saw brickwork, broken bits of cobweb, and steps going down into darkness. They were dusty, but instead of lying in a smooth layer, the dust had been scuffed up and smudged about, and in the middle it had been rubbed away altogether in a sort of snaky track.
Daisy took my hand and squeezed it. I squeezed back. Her palm was cool and dry, and I remember being terribly worried she might notice how much I was sweating. She said nothing, though, and we went down into the tunnel hand in hand, both of us shining our flashlights into the dark.
“Do look at this floor,” said Daisy, stepping daintily through the dust. “That drag mark must be from Miss Bell.”
She sounded so casual about it! I shone my flashlight around the scuff mark, trying to avoid it, and that is when I caught sight of the sideways print of a shoe, just clear of the track. “Oh!” I said, pointing, and Daisy sprang at it with a yelp of excitement.
Drawing a bit of string and a pencil from the pocket of her dressing gown, Daisy crouched down over the print. I knelt next to her, shining my flashlight at it while she laid the string over the print and deftly marked it off with the pencil. It was the print of a flat shoe, and it was very long. When Daisy held up the string in the glare of my torch, it looked longer than ever.
“A man!” I exclaimed. “The One, it must be! Didn’t I tell you he had something to do with it?”
Daisy looked at me pityingly. “Don’t you ever notice anything, Hazel? This print isn’t from a man’s shoe at all. Look at the heel and the toe. Ugly as sin, but it’s made for a woman, and I know exactly which one.”
“Who?” I asked. “Miss Bell?”
“Hazel,” said Daisy, “that is the stupidest thing I have ever heard you say. I shall pretend I didn’t hear it. Haven’t you ever noticed those boats of Miss Tennyson’s?”
My stomach lurched. That was exactly what I had not wanted to find—real evidence to back up Daisy’s Miss Tennyson theory.
“Miss Tennyson?”
“Just you look at her shoes tomorrow. They’re simply enormous. She only has two pairs too. This is from one of her blue monstrosities. You know, the ones with the pointless bows.”
“But—someone else might have put on her shoes?” I suggested. I had felt so sure it must have been The One.
“Oh, don’t be an ass, Hazel. That sort of thing is too silly to happen in real life. Unless you think they crept into her boarding house and stole her shoes just to wear them in a passageway that no one ever uses?”
I blushed. I felt like an idiot, and I was glad it was so dark.
“We ought to move on,” said Daisy, getting up and tucking the curl of string back into her pocket. “We can’t be away from the infirmary too long. Besides, we need something else to prove what happened. That footprint’s no good on its own.”
She started off down the tunnel again, walking carefully along the drag line in the dust, and I followed her.
That night, everything seemed to be going Daisy’s way. She wanted another clue, and she found exactly what she was hoping for. I heard her give an exclamation, and saw her shine her flashlight onto a little wisp of whiteness that had been caught low down on a rough part of the tunnel’s brick wall. It was a little scrap of white fabric, plain and coarse, and we both recognized it at once.
“This is from the Bell’s lab coat!” whispered Daisy. “Now we know she was left here for a while. Oh, and look!” When she rushed forward to snatch up the bit of coat she had stirred up the dust on the floor, and now something glittered in the glow of the flashlight. “An earring! A lovely long gold one. Clues rain down upon us! This isn’t from Miss Bell.”
Grudgingly, I shook
my head. Miss Bell would never have worn a delicate gold earring like the one Daisy was holding.
“It must be Miss Tennyson’s,” said Daisy.
“It might be almost anyone’s,” I pointed out. Although Miss Bell didn’t wear earrings, almost all of the other female teachers did. This earring was a pretty gold double teardrop—I could quite well imagine Miss Lappet, Miss Parker, or Miss Hopkins all wearing something like it, as well as Miss Tennyson.
“It looks quite new,” said Daisy, examining it. “Good quality too. You can’t prove it’s not Tennyson’s, and if you put it with the shoe, things begin to look awfully bad for her.”
I wanted to protest that she was still not being open-minded, but the sight of all that evidence kept me quiet. Daisy was right. I could not prove that Miss Tennyson was not the owner of the earring, while Daisy might well be able to match that string to the length of her shoes. I told myself that it did not matter who had done it, as long as we unmasked them, but I still had a nagging worry in the back of my mind.
We went down the rest of the tunnel but found no more clues, and, much to my relief, no body either. Miss Bell was gone.
I wrapped the string, the bit of lab coat, and the earring in the stained gym shirt, while Daisy held the flashlights, and we began to creep back to the infirmary. I thought the night’s adventures were over.
They weren’t.
We had just turned onto the Library corridor when something flashed away to our right, down the New Wing corridor.
“Daisy!” I hissed. “Hold the flashlights down! They’re reflecting on something, look!”
“Don’t be stupid, Hazel, I am holding—Hazel. Hazel, that isn’t a reflection from our flashlights.”
All the hairs on my neck stood up in horror. She was right. That light was not being made by us at all. It was from a different flashlight, being held by someone walking down the New Wing corridor. There was someone else prowling around Deepdean in the middle of the night.
“Oh Lord, Hazel,” gasped Daisy, flicking off our flashlights, plunging us into darkness, and making the other light seem suddenly much larger and more menacing. “Run!”
I did not need to be told twice. We ran, scuffling and bumping into each other, our bare feet slapping on the marble tiles. I was shaking. The murderer was here, in Deepdean, now! Because, of course, it had to be the murderer. Had they seen our light? Worse, had they seen us? I’d thought we were in danger before, but it was nothing compared to the danger we were in now.
We ran all the way back to the infirmary, as though the murderer was panting at our heels, and when Daisy dragged the main infirmary door closed and locked it, my knees gave out beneath me and I slumped down on the floor. It was only then that I noticed my ankle was hurting fearfully again.
“Up!” said Daisy firmly. “Wash! Or Minny will smell a rat.”
So we went to the washroom to scrub off our filthy hands and feet, and then we crept back to our beds. I thought I would never get to sleep. I thought I might never sleep again. I said so to Daisy and she said, “Lord, I know!” and then began to snore. Even though I was frightened, somehow I must have slept as well, because the next thing I remember was Minny knocking on our open door and saying, “Rise and shine, girls! How are we feeling this morning?”
We sat up, and Minny felt our foreheads and looked down our throats with that flat stick nurses always have. Then she told us we seemed far better today.
It was Saturday. At Deepdean, we have lessons on Saturday morning—really, we do—but luckily Minny did not let us out of the infirmary until the morning was halfway through. Daisy managed to wrangle us a perfectly heavenly infirmary breakfast before we went too—three slices of toast instead of two, strawberry jam instead of marmalade, and a mug of cocoa, and we were let out of the infirmary just in time for bunbreak. It was almost enough to make me forget what had happened the night before.
Almost, but not quite.
“Oh!” Beanie squealed when she saw us, moving back so we could slip into the cookie queue. “I was so worried!”
“She was sure you were dying,” said Kitty, putting an arm around Beanie’s shoulder.
“I was not!”
“Good work, getting out of Latin like that,” said Lavinia as she pushed the shrimp in front of her out of the way. “Some people have all the luck.”
“We missed etiquette, though,” said Daisy regretfully. “Oh, I wish those shrimps would hurry up! I’m starving.”
Once we had collected our cookies—only raisin on Saturdays, which I think is hardly worth it, though Daisy loves them—Daisy and I shook off the rest of the eighth grade and went in search of Jones, to make certain that our nighttime quest had gone undetected and to return the borrowed keys. We found him out by the flower beds, telling off one of the gardeners.
“Hello, Miss Daisy—and . . . ah,” he said when he caught sight of us. “Feeling better today?”
“Nothing ever gets past you, Jones,” said Daisy in her best admiring voice. “However did you know we were ill?”
“Who do you think mopped up after you? Nasty mess you made. Feels like I’ve been cleaning up messes all week, though, so yours wasn’t so much of a bother.”
“Oh, have you?” asked Daisy. She sounded terribly sympathetic, but I could feel her arm tense up next to mine. Had we left dirty footprints behind us?
Jones huffed down his nose. “Indeed. Those smashed windows were the worst of it, but all week I’ve been finding little things out of place. This morning I come in and everything’s a mess in the New Wing, the gym cupboard’s all untidy, and these flower beds have been turned over. Look at them! All scratched up and the flowers ruined. We only put the new winter beds in on Monday too. If it is those shrimps, they need a good talking to.”
“Poor Jones,” said Daisy. “How awful for you. Here, look, you’ve dropped your keys.”
“It is awful,” said Jones forcefully, taking them from her without even looking. I admired Daisy’s cunning all over again. “Not that anyone else thinks of me. I complained to Miss Griffin again this morning and she told me it was nothing to worry about. Nothing! I ask you.”
The bell rang as he said that, and we had to run. We left him still scowling at his dirty flower beds.
“Good,” said Daisy, as soon as we were out of earshot. “He doesn’t know it was us.”
“But Daisy,” I said, “it wasn’t us. Not all of it! We messed about in the gym cupboard, but we weren’t anywhere near the New Wing last night, were we? And we never went outside, so the mess in the flower beds wasn’t us either. It must have been the murderer . . .”
Daisy stopped suddenly, her mouth open. “Lord, I know exactly what they were doing to make that mess! That earring we found—I bet they discovered they’d lost it, so they’ve been coming back in the evenings to hunt for it.”
She looked delighted. I still felt horrified at our narrow escape.
“Well, it’s a good thing we got to it first,” said Daisy, making the best of things, as usual. “This is getting quite exciting, isn’t it? Now come on, we’ll be late for prep.”
Saturday prep is a Deepdean institution, something that is meant to be good for our character, like boiled vegetables and phys ed. We go into our classrooms and struggle away at all the week’s undone work, which of course none of us except Daisy could ever finish—and she makes sure not to.
As luck would have it, we came into prep to see that Miss Tennyson was supervising it that day. I froze in the doorway, and Daisy had to kick me from behind to get me to move.
I realized Miss Tennyson was staring at me. I also realized we were so late that the only two seats left were the ones directly in front of her desk. I slid into the left-hand one, feeling as though her eyes were burning into the middle of my forehead. Was she really the murderer? I didn’t want her to be. But there were her big blue shoes, peeping out at me from under the desk. I got a sinking feeling in my stomach, as if the ipecac sickness was coming back.
r /> I tried to focus on my Latin translation. “The queen was in the woods,” I wrote. But, almost as though they were not under my control, my eyes kept sliding up off my work to stare at Miss Tennyson.
The third time I did it, I found her staring back at me. It gave me a nasty shock. Was Miss Tennyson remembering seeing our flashlights by the gym? Did she know it had been us, and was she plotting to kill me and Daisy, as she had Miss Bell? I shuddered. But then I really looked at her, and what I saw surprised me. For a moment she did not look like an evil murderer at all, or even a teacher, but just someone who was terribly, terribly afraid. She had dark rings under her eyes, which were red-rimmed as though she had just been crying.
Was this what a guilty conscience looked like?
But just then there was a scuffle, a scraping noise, and something thumped against my leg. I glanced down and saw—Daisy. She was wriggling across the wooden classroom floor between the desks, her hair in disarray and her arms outstretched. The marked bit of string was clutched in them, and she was inching determinedly towards Miss Tennyson’s feet.
I looked up at Miss Tennyson in horror. What if she noticed that Daisy was gone from her desk next to me? What if she glanced down and saw what Daisy was doing? But she didn’t. Her eyes were on the book she was reading, and she was crying again. Her tears scattered across the pages.
Meanwhile, Daisy had reached her goal. The piece of string was stretched out against one of Miss Tennyson’s shoes. It was exactly the right length. Daisy squirmed around triumphantly to look at me, and as she did so her hand bumped against Miss Tennyson’s leg. Miss Tennyson jumped.
“Good grief!” she said, looking down at last. “Daisy! Whatever are you doing?”
“Oh, Miss Tennyson—” said Daisy awkwardly, from the floor. “Oh, Miss Tennyson—I’m feeling, er, most dreadfully strange. I think I might be sick. Hazel and I were frightfully ill last night, and I don’t seem to be quite over it. Can I go back to the infirmary?”