Arsenic For Tea: A Murder Most Unladylike Mystery (A Wells and Wong Mystery) (16 page)

‘Who?’ asked Beanie, wide-eyed. ‘Who do you mean?’

Daisy and I looked at each other – and thankfully, at that moment, it began to rain. At first it was only a soft stumble on the leaves high above us, but then it gathered to a sigh, a swish, and finally a roar.

‘Inside!’ cried Daisy as Kitty held up her hands to cover her hair. She is fearfully vain sometimes, and Daisy knows that. We were saved.

We scrambled down the tree trunk, slipping and sliding and getting our hands all smeared with horrid black mould. ‘This meeting is adjourned!’ shrieked Daisy. ‘Now to move on to the next part of our investigation – ruling out suspects! Oh, I do like this bit!’

We pelted across the lawn. My hair draggled about my face and the rain blurred everything in front of me like mist. As we dashed through the lashes of rain towards the front door, I wondered again whether we really
wanted
to know what had happened to Mr Curtis. After all, he was a very nasty person. Whoever had killed him was far nicer than he could ever be – and they might be someone very important to Daisy. I felt guilty for thinking it – but how could Mr Curtis’s murderer deserve to be hanged?

We came stumbling into the hall, shrieking and spilling water onto the stone floor, Daisy shaking her golden head like a dog – just in time to see something extremely curious. Miss Alston was standing at the foot of the main stairs speaking to Stephen. She was leaning forward in quite an intense manner, eyes fixed on him, and although she kept her voice down I managed to catch the phrase, ‘
If you saw anything
 . . .’

Stephen looked terrified. His face was white, and his freckles stood out, livid. I was alarmed. What had we overheard? I glanced at Daisy, eyes wide, to see what she made of it. This certainly was even more suspicious behaviour from Miss Alston. It sounded to me as though she was threatening Stephen. Why? Did she think he had seen something crucial to the mystery? Was she trying to make him reveal what he knew? Or . . . did she want to make sure he kept silent?

Miss Alston spun round and stared at us. Her brown handbag was, as always, clutched to her chest, and I wondered how on earth Daisy thought we would ever be able to get it away from her. ‘What’s all this noise?’ she asked. ‘Girls, what were you doing outside in the rain? You’ll catch your deaths!’

Beanie shrieked. Kitty slapped her. I could not help gasping a little. After all the things we had been thinking about Miss Alston, this turn of phrase sounded most sinister. If she was the murderer,
catching our deaths
was exactly what she wanted us to do. The idea of sitting with her for a lesson made me feel utterly terrified.

Miss Alston narrowed her eyes at us, and I tried to breathe normally. ‘Hmm,’ she said at last. ‘I shall call Mrs Doherty to come and help you get dried off. And then lessons, girls! Daisy, your mother doesn’t want you sitting about moping.’

‘We’re not moping!’ she said quickly. ‘We’re busy. Can’t we have just a few more hours? I don’t think I could bear a lesson now.’

Miss Alston puffed out a breath. ‘Oh, very well,’ she said. ‘Two hours. But I want you in the music room at five o’clock precisely, otherwise I shall come and
find
you.’

We all took a step backwards. Miss Alston frowned. ‘
Mrs Doherty!
’ she called, and Mrs Doherty came running out of the kitchens.

She gasped when she saw us. ‘Good Lord!’ she cried. ‘Hetty! Towels, quick!’

We were wrapped up in piles of faded and slightly horsy-smelling towels.

‘Whatever were you doing?’ asked Mrs Doherty, scrubbing away at Daisy’s hair.

Miss Alston waited to see that we were being attended to, and then she went up the stairs, handbag swinging from her arm as always. I was glad that she was gone – but where was she going? What was she going to do with the time until five o’clock?

Stephen was turning away too. ‘Stephen!’ I called, as quietly as I could. ‘Are you . . . are you all right?’ I wanted to ask,
Was Miss Alston threatening you?
– but of course I couldn’t, and so what came out sounded weak and strange.

‘Oh yes,’ said Stephen, coming towards me so that we could talk without the others hearing. ‘Rather looking forward to going back to school, though, after all this.’

I nodded fervently. I couldn’t even say how much I agreed with him.

‘Funny,’ he went on, smiling. ‘I never thought I’d say that. Scholarship boy, you know. It can be rather hard when you’re sharing a dorm with two lords and a viscount. If Bertie hadn’t taken up with me I’d have run away years ago.’

‘I didn’t know you were on a scholarship,’ I said. My heart was hammering. What I was discovering was quite the opposite of what I had expected. ‘Will you . . . What happens about university?’

‘Scholarship again,’ said Stephen. ‘I only heard last month. I’m disgustingly lucky, really.’ He made a funny face, half ashamed, half happy. ‘We aren’t rich, not like
here
, but we get by.
You
know.’

I blushed. I didn’t know. As well as the wedding-cake compound, my father has a yacht and his own office building in the middle of Hong Kong, and we have ten times more servants than Daisy’s family. But it is easy to hide that under the skin of not being English.

‘Er, yes,’ I said, hating myself a bit. ‘Of course. I’m glad you’re all right.’

Stephen smiled at me, and then went hurrying up the stairs to find Bertie. I could hardly believe my luck. Stephen had a scholarship now, and another for university next year. He didn’t need money. There was no reason for him to steal the watch – and therefore no reason for him to kill Mr Curtis. I was flooded with relief.

As soon as Mrs Doherty and Hetty had gone, Daisy spun around. ‘Quick!’ she hissed. ‘Now, while we still can! It’s the perfect opportunity!’

‘For what?’ asked Kitty.

‘
To do some more investigating
,’ whispered Daisy. ‘After all, we agreed we needed to look in Aunt Saskia’s room, didn’t we?’

We slipped up the stairs, holding our breath and trying not to bump into each other. I took hold of Daisy’s sleeve as we climbed.

‘Daisy!’ I whispered. ‘Did you hear what Stephen just said to me? He’s on a scholarship, and he’ll have another one at university. He doesn’t need money! I think we can rule him out.’

Daisy looked at me, and the wrinkle appeared at the top of her nose.

‘You ought to be pleased,’ I said, a bit crossly – though as soon as I had said it, I saw that it was me who was pleased, and me only. If it wasn’t Stephen, then there was more chance that it was someone in Daisy’s family. I flushed, and let go of her arm again.

Aunt Saskia’s little room was just at the top of the stairs, but as I turned towards it I stared across the landing at Mr Curtis’s locked door, and couldn’t help shuddering. To think that there was a dead body in there!

Aunt Saskia’s door was unlocked. When Daisy pushed it, it gaped open, and the room beyond was dark, curtains still pulled across the windows.

‘Golly!’ breathed Kitty. ‘Look at these
things
!’

Silk scarves and crushed velvet skirts lay scattered across the floor or draped across chairs, drooping down to brush the green carpet. Mangy furs lay everywhere, looking unpleasantly dead, and on the dressing table groups of bottles and jars and pots were covered with dirty handkerchiefs and powder puffs.

I had thought the rest of Fallingford rather untidy, but this was beyond anything. I could hardly believe that Aunt Saskia had only been here two days.

‘All right, Detectives,’ said Daisy. ‘Let’s hunt. Our targets, as discussed, are Mr Curtis’s watch and his teacup. And, if possible, a book with a torn-out page.’

I looked around – and didn’t quite know where to begin. I couldn’t imagine anywhere less like Miss Alston’s tidy room. There could have been an army of watches and cups hidden under these clothes. But Daisy dived into a pile of blouses with gusto, and soon Kitty was following her lead. While Beanie sifted uneasily through the contents of the dressing table, poking at a pile of lipstick-smeared tissues, I began to peek under the pillows. The bed smelled of stale old lady, and I wrinkled my nose unhappily.

‘Oh, hurry up, Hazel.’ said Daisy, and she came up beside me, shoved aside the bolster and then wormed her fingers under Aunt Saskia’s mattress.

‘Nothing here,’ she grunted, wriggling further and further in, until her shoulder was almost swallowed up by the heavy mattress. ‘Nothing . . . nothing . . . Ooh, what’s
this
?’

The rest of us stopped searching and looked over at her.

‘Is it the watch?’ Kitty asked.

‘No!’ said Daisy. ‘At least – it doesn’t seem like the right shape . . . Wait a moment!’

She backed out from under the mattress, and spilling out of her hands was a glitter of jewels, a shine of gold, a jangling pile of necklaces and earrings and bracelets.

‘Mummy’s necklace!’ said Daisy. ‘Daddy’s cufflinks! And – oh, look, she’s even pinched the silver decanter tags! Goodness, I thought she only stole spoons!’

‘I can’t see Mr Curtis’s watch,’ I said.

‘That’s because it isn’t here,’ said Daisy, shifting her hands. ‘
Bother!
Mind you, I think everything else is. Some of these things aren’t even ours! Lord, I never knew she’d got this bad.’

‘What does it mean?’ asked Kitty.

‘It means that we now know the reason why Aunt Saskia doesn’t want Mummy to call the police. She’s a kleptomaniac!’

‘Someone who can’t resist stealing things,’ I whispered to Beanie, who was wrinkling up her brow.

‘Imagine if the police found all this! Not even Daddy could save Aunt Saskia from being arrested. She’s obviously quite unhinged – why, some of these things are worth simply pots and pots of money. They must be fearfully important to her – I couldn’t before, but now I really can imagine her killing a person for a beautiful thing she wanted. And we all saw that she wanted the watch.’

Kitty and Beanie looked fearfully at each other, and I saw Kitty shiver. What horrible things people did, I thought. Being a detective meant that you had to face some truly dreadful crimes.

‘But if the cup and watch aren’t here, doesn’t that rule her out?’ asked Beanie.

‘No, worse luck!’ said Daisy, shifting from foot to foot restlessly. ‘She might simply have hidden them somewhere else. Botheration! Most of our suspects seem more guilty, not less, the more we discover about them. What to do?’

It was not the sort of question you answered – but Kitty didn’t know that.

‘I think we should do that re-creation of the crime you were talking about,’ she said. ‘It sounds better than ferreting about in people’s rooms, even if we do find jewels.’

‘Oh yes, can we stop doing illegal things for a while?’ asked Beanie. ‘It gives me the funnies. I’m
sure
we’ll be caught!’

‘Assistant members of the Detective Society’ – Daisy saw me making a face – ‘can sometimes come up with ideas that aren’t
entirely
terrible,’ she finished. ‘In fact, Kitty, that was exactly what I was about to suggest.’

‘But how are we going to do it?’ I remembered our re-creation in the Deepdean Gym last year. ‘If we go into the dining room, we might be seen!’

‘We can’t go into the
real
dining room,’ said Daisy, ‘but I happen to have a secret weapon. For my eighth birthday Mummy had a Fallingford doll’s house made for me – an absolutely perfect replica, with all the furniture and the back stairs, and a tiny me and Mummy and Daddy and Bertie to live in it. It’s still up in the nursery.’

‘Oh, I know!’ said Beanie, beaming. ‘Kitty was playing with it when you were out of the room.’

‘I was
not
!’ cried Kitty, going red. ‘I was only admiring it.’

‘Anyway, we can use the replica dining room to set up our murder scene. There’s a tiny Aunt Saskia and a tiny Uncle Felix too, and a Chapman, and we can use some of the other dolls to stand in for Stephen, Miss Alston and Mr Curtis.’

It was a very good plan – and importantly, it would get us out of Aunt Saskia’s room. Daisy stuffed the jewels back under the mattress and we all went galloping up the front stairs – no need for quiet this time – to the nursery.

The doll’s house was pushed to the very edge of the room, its heavy wooden front hanging open in a lonely way, its painted outside walls peeling. It was like Fallingford in miniature, dusty but absolutely perfect. I stared down at the stairs and doors and rooms all piled on top of each other, and felt like a giant, or a god, or both.

As we watched, Daisy crouched down busily in front of the house and shifted furniture about with a series of loud clicks.

‘There!’ she said at last, sitting back on her heels, and we peered over her shoulder at the tiny dining room. I saw everything the way it had been on Saturday afternoon: tiny chairs, tiny lamps and even a tiny toy tea laid out on the little table. I saw a plate of cakes smaller than my fingernail, and teacups I barely wanted to breathe on in case I blew them away. It gave me quite a creepy feeling, as though I were seeing backwards in time. I hoped that none of the grown-ups (and here I was really thinking of Miss Alston) came in to see what we were doing.