1

This is the first murder that the Wells & Wong Detective Society has ever investigated, so it is a good thing Daisy bought me a new casebook. The last one was finished after we solved The Case of Lavinia’s Missing Tie. The solution to that, of course, was that Clementine stole it in revenge for Lavinia punching her in the stomach during lacrosse, which was Lavinia’s revenge for Clementine telling everyone Lavinia came from a broken home. I suspect that the solution to this new case may be more complex.

I suppose I ought to give some explanation of ourselves, in honour of the new casebook. Daisy Wells is the President of the Detective Society, and I, Hazel Wong, am its Secretary. Daisy says that this makes her Sherlock Holmes, and me Watson. This is probably fair. After all, I am much too short to be the heroine of this story, and who ever heard of a Chinese Sherlock Holmes?

That’s why it’s so funny that it was me who found Miss Bell’s dead body. In fact, I think Daisy is still upset about it, though of course she pretends not to be. You see, Daisy is a heroine-like person, and so it should be her that these things happen to.

Look at Daisy and you think you know exactly the sort of person she is – one of those dainty, absolutely English girls with blue eyes and golden hair; the kind who’ll gallop across muddy fields in the rain clutching hockey sticks and then sit down and eat ten iced buns at tea. I, on the other hand, bulge all over like Bibendum the Michelin Man; my cheeks are moony-round and my hair and eyes are stubbornly dark brown.

I arrived from Hong Kong part way through second form, and even then, when we were all still shrimps (shrimps, for this new casebook, is what we call the little lower-form girls), Daisy was already famous throughout Deepdean School. She rode horses, was part of the lacrosse team, and was a member of the Drama Society. The Big Girls took notice of her, and by May the entire school knew that the Head Girl herself had called Daisy a ‘good sport’.

But that is only the outside of Daisy, the jolly-good-show part that everyone sees. The inside of her is not jolly-good-show at all.

It took me quite a while to discover that.

2

Daisy wants me to explain what happened this term up to the time I found the body. She says that is what proper detectives do – add up the evidence first – so I will. She also says that a good Secretary should keep her casebook on her at all times to be ready to write up important events as they happen. It was no good reminding her that I do that anyway.

The most important thing to happen in those first few weeks of the autumn term was the Detective Society, and it was Daisy who began that. Daisy is all for making up societies for things. Last year we had the Pacifism Society (dull) and then the Spiritualism Society (less dull, but then Lavinia smashed her mug during a séance, Beanie fainted and Matron banned spiritualism altogether).

But that was all last year, when we were still shrimps. We can’t be messing about with silly things like ghosts now that we are grown-up third formers – that was what Daisy said when she came back at the beginning of this term having discovered crime.

I was quite glad. Not that I was ever afraid of ghosts, exactly. Everyone knows there aren’t any. Even so, there are enough ghost stories going round our school to horrify anybody. The most famous of our ghosts is Verity Abraham, the girl who committed suicide off the Gym balcony the term before I arrived at Deepdean, but there are also ghosts of an ex-mistress who locked herself into one of the music rooms and starved herself to death, and a little first-form shrimp who drowned in the pond.

As I said, Daisy decided that this year we were going to be detectives. She arrived at House with her tuck box full of books with sinister, shadowy covers and titles like Peril at End House and Mystery Mile. Matron confiscated them one by one, but Daisy always managed to find more.

We started the Detective Society in the first week of term. The two of us made a deadly secret pact that no one else, not even our dorm mates, Kitty, Beanie and Lavinia, could be told about it. It did make me feel proud, just me and Daisy having a secret. It was awfully fun too, creeping about behind the others’ backs and pretending to be ordinary when all the time we knew we were detectives on a secret mission to obtain information.

Daisy set all our first detective missions. In that first week we crept into the other third-form dorm and read Clementine’s secret journal, and then Daisy chose a first former and set us to find out everything we could about her. This, Daisy told me, was practice – just like memorizing the licences of every motor car we saw.

In our second week there was the case of why King Henry (our name for this year’s Head Girl, Henrietta Trilling, because she is so remote and regal, and has such beautiful chestnut curls) wasn’t at Prayers one morning. But it only took a few hours before everyone, not just us, knew that she had been sent a telegram saying that her aunt had died suddenly that morning.

‘Poor thing,’ said Kitty, when we found out. Kitty has the next-door bed to Daisy’s in our dorm, and Daisy has designated her a Friend of the Detective Society, even though she is still not allowed to know about it. She has smooth, light brown hair and masses of freckles, and she keeps something hidden in the bottom of her tuck box that I thought at first was a torture device but turned out to be eyelash curlers. She is as mad about gossip as Daisy, though for less scientific reasons. ‘Poor old King Henry. She hasn’t had much luck. She was Verity Abraham’s best friend, after all, and you know what happened to Verity. She hasn’t been the same since.’

‘I don’t,’ said Beanie, who sleeps next to me. Her real name is Rebecca but we call her Beanie because she is very small, and everything frightens her. Lessons frighten her most of all, though. She says that when she looks at a page all the letters and numbers get up and do a jig until she can’t think straight. ‘What did happen to Verity?’

‘She killed herself,’ said Kitty in annoyance. ‘Jumped off the Gym balcony last year. Come on, Beans.’

‘Oh!’ said Beanie. ‘Of course. I always thought she tripped.’

Sometimes Beanie is quite slow.

Something else happened at the beginning of term that turned out to be very important indeed: The One arrived.

You see, at the end of last year Miss Nelson, the Deputy Headmistress and our dull old Music and Art mistress, retired. We were expecting her to be replaced by someone else quite as uninteresting – but the new Music and Art master, Mr Reid, was not uninteresting at all. He was also not old.

Mr Reid had rugged cheekbones and a dashing moustache, and he slicked his hair back with brilliantine. He looked exactly like a film star, although nobody could agree on which one. Kitty thought Douglas Fairbanks Jr, and Clementine said Clark Gable, but only because Clementine is obsessed with Clark Gable. Really though, it did not matter. Mr Reid was a man, and he was not Mr MacLean (our dotty, unwashed old Reverend whom Kitty calls Mr MacDirty), and so the whole school fell in love with him at once.

A deadly serious half-secret Society dedicated to the worship of Mr Reid was established by Kitty. At its first meeting, he was rechristened The One. We all had to go about making the secret signal at each other (index finger raised, right eye winking) whenever we were in His Presence.

The One had barely been at Deepdean for a week when he caused the biggest shock since Verity last year.

You see, before this term, the whole school knew that Miss Bell (our Science mistress) and Miss Parker (our Maths mistress) had a secret. They lived together in Miss Parker’s little flat in town, which had a spare room in it. The spare room was the secret. I did not understand when Daisy first told me about the spare room; now we are in the third form, though, of course I see exactly what it must mean. It has something to do with Miss Parker’s hair, cut far too short even to be fashionable, and the way she and Miss Bell used to pass their cigarettes from one to the other during bunbreaks last year.

There were no cigarettes being passed this term, though, because on the first day Miss Bell took one look at The One and fell for him as madly as Kitty did. This was a terrible shock. Miss Bell was not considered a beauty. She was very tucked-in and buttoned-up and severe in her white lab coat. And she was poor. Miss Bell wore the same three threadbare blouses on rotation, cut her own hair and did secretarial work for Miss Griffin after school hours for extra pay. Everyone rather pitied her, and we assumed The One would too. We were astonished when he did not.

‘Something has clearly happened between them,’ Clementine told our form at the end of the first week of term. ‘I went to the science lab during bunbreak and I came upon Miss Bell and The One canoodling. It was really shocking!’

‘I bet they weren’t, really,’ said Lavinia scornfully. Lavinia is part of our dorm, too – she is a big, heavy girl with a stubborn mop of dark hair, and most of the time she is unhappy.

‘They were!’ said Clementine. ‘I know what it looks like. I saw my brother doing the same thing last month.’

I couldn’t stop myself blushing. Imagining stiff, well-starched Miss Bell canoodling (whatever that meant) was extraordinarily awkward.

Then Miss Parker got to hear about it. Miss Parker is truly ferocious, with chopped-short black hair and a furious voice that comes bellowing out of her tiny body like a foghorn. The row was immense. Almost the whole school heard it, and the upshot was that Miss Bell was not allowed to live in the little flat any more.

Then, at the beginning of the second week of term, everything changed again. We could barely keep up with it all. Suddenly The One no longer seemed to want to spend time with Miss Bell. Instead, he began to take up with Miss Hopkins.

Miss Hopkins is our Games mistress. She is round and relentlessly cheerful (unless you happen not to be good at Games) and she marches about the school corridors brandishing a hockey stick, her athletic brown hair always coming down from its fashionable clipped-back waves. She is pretty, and (I think) quite young, so it was not at all surprising that The One should notice her – it was only shocking that he should jilt Miss Bell to do it.

So now it was The One and Miss Hopkins seen canoodling in form rooms, and all Miss Bell could do was storm past them whenever she saw them, her lips pursed and her glare freezing.

General Deepdean opinion was against Miss Bell. Miss Hopkins was pretty while Miss Bell was not, and Miss Hopkins’s father was a very important magistrate in Gloucestershire while Miss Bell’s was nothing important at all. But I could not help being on Miss Bell’s side. After all, it was not her fault that The One had jilted her, and she could not help being poor. Now that she could not stay in the flat, of course, she was poorer than ever, and that made me worry.

The only thing Miss Bell had to cheer her up was the Deputy Headmistress job, and even that was not the consolation it should have been. You see, Miss Griffin had to appoint a new Deputy, and after a few weeks the rumour went round that Miss Bell was about to be chosen. This ought to have been lucky – once she was formally appointed, Miss Bell’s money worries would vanish for good – but all it really meant was that the mistresses who were not chosen began to despise her. There were two others really in the running. The first was Miss Tennyson, our English mistress – that is her name, really, although she is no relation to the famous one. If you’ve seen that painting of the Lady of Shalott drooping in her boat, you have seen Miss Tennyson. Her hair is always down round her face, and she is as drippy as underdone cake. The second was Miss Lappet, our History and Latin mistress, who is grey and useless and shaped like an overstuffed cushion, but thinks she is Miss Griffin’s most trusted adviser. They were both simply fuming about the Deputy Headmistress job, and snubbed Miss Bell in the corridor whenever they saw her.

And then the murder happened.

3

I say that it was me who found the body of Miss Bell, and it was, but I never would have been there at all if it hadn’t been for those crime novels of Daisy’s. Matron’s fondness for confiscation meant that it was no good trying to read them up at House, so Daisy took to hanging around down at school in the evenings. She joined the Literature Society, slipped Whose Body? between the pages of Paradise Lost, and sat there peacefully reading it while the others talked. I joined too, and sat at the back of the room writing up my Detective Society case notes. Everyone thought I was writing poetry.

It was after Lit. Soc, on Monday 29th October, that it happened. After-school societies end at 5.20, but afterwards Daisy and I hung back in the empty form room so that she could finish The Man in the Queue. Daisy was absorbed, but I was jumpy with worry that we might be late for dinner up at House and thus incur the awful wrath of Matron. I looked about for my pullover and then remembered with annoyance where I had left it.

‘Bother,’ I said. ‘Daisy, my pullover’s in the Gym. Wait for me, I’ll just be a minute.’

Daisy, nose in her book as usual, shrugged vaguely to show that she had heard and continued reading. I looked at my wristwatch again and saw that it was 5.40. If I ran, I’d have just enough time, as getting up to House from Old Wing Entrance takes seven minutes, and dinner is at six o’clock exactly.

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?’