It's Murder at St. Basket's (11 page)

“Huh?” he said.

“Wake up, we're taking David to the hospital.”

He sat up. “Did he change his mind?”

“No,” I whispered. “We're just going to make him. Put your clothes on.”

“All right,” he said.

Then I went over and shook David. “I'm awake,” he said.

“We're taking you to the hospital,” I said.

“Isn't this the hospital?”

That gave me a creepy feeling. “No, this is St. Basket's School.”

He didn't say anything.

“David, you have to wake up.”

“Where's my father?” he said. “I want to see my father.”

He wasn't making much sense. “Come on, David, wake up.”

“I want to see my father. I want to tell him something.”

Leslie was dressing pretty fast. “Cor, he's off his nut,” he whispered.

“Come on, Leslie, let's hurry.”

But I could see that he was dressing as fast as he could, and I knew he was as scared as I was, because we both thought that David was going to die right there, and we would be carrying a dead person.

I explained my plan, and then I pulled down the sheet that was on top of David. I took a
look
at his leg. It was swollen as big around practically as a watermelon, only sort of gray and shiny with skin so tight there weren't any wrinkles or marks on it at all. It scared me to death to look at it. Leslie stared, too. “Are you frightened, Christopher?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

“I am, too.” It was the first time he'd ever admitted it. We stood next to each other, with the sheet over our shoulders, each of us holding it with our outside hand. A loop of the sheet hung down between us. We maneuvered over to the bed, and sat David up. He moaned. “Where's my father?” he said. “I have to tell my father something.”

“Quiet, David,” I said. “Everything's going to be all right.”

“I have to tell my father.”

Gently, we sort of slid him out of the bed toward us. In a way it was a good thing he was out of his head, because he didn't know what was happening, and he didn't put up any fight. We slid him carefully sort of backwards until his rear was in the sling, and we raised the sling up until he was high enough so that his feet wouldn't dangle on the ground. Then we just backed away from the bed. He groaned when his leg slid and dropped off the bed, but we'd got him up high enough so that it wasn't touching anything. And we started.

It was easier than I had thought it was going to be. He was pretty light, and Leslie and I were in pretty good shape from football, and we just sidled along out of the room and into the hall.

Margaret was standing in the door to her room. That made me nervous, because it meant that we were making enough noise to wake people up. “Good luck, chaps,” she whispered. We nodded, and started down the stairs.

That wasn't so easy. The stairs were narrow, and we had to go one at a time, with Leslie going first because he was taller than me and could hold that side of David up a little higher. Still, Choudhry was sort of tipped, and I was worried that we'd drop him. But what worried me worse was that every once in a while he started talking. He was already in the hospital, he believed, and he must have thought we were doctors or nurses or something, because he kept asking for water, and when his father was going to come. To shut him up, I whispered, “He'll be here in a few minutes, David. Just go to sleep.” He closed his eyes, but it didn't last, for at the bottom of those stairs, when we hit the floor where the masters lived, he said all over again, “When is my father coming? I have to tell him something.”

This
time I didn't answer. I just nodded at Leslie, and we turned the landing and started down the next flight of stairs, which led to the floor where the Grimes lived. We had to go slow. There was only a tiny light at the bottom and we could hardly see the steps. They had carpets on them, old and worn, and I could smell the mustiness. The light gleamed faintly on the banister, making little shine spots on the varnish. We went on down, step by step. Try as we might, we couldn't keep David from shifting around as we took each step, and the movement kept him talking. Sometimes it was just a mumble, but sometimes he would really speak out in a regular voice. I tried sort of holding my hand over his mouth, but he kept jerking his face away, and I stopped, because I was afraid he might make us stumble. We were near the bottom of the stairs. Once we got past this floor and down onto the ground floor I figured we'd be pretty safe, because there was nobody asleep down there. “Let's hurry, Leslie,” I whispered.

I wished I hadn't, because it got David talking again. “Where's my father?” he said. “I want to tell him something.”

We reached the bottom step. My heart was thumping like a drum, fast as it could go, and I was dripping with sweat, even though it was pretty cool in there. We stepped onto the landing, and just then I heard a kind of a thump, sort of a distant noise from somewhere. We stopped dead still. “What was that?” Leslie whispered.

And just as he said it the light from a huge flashlight blinded us and the booming voice of Miss Grime ripped out, “Mr. Grime, take that child away from those two fools.”

Mr. Grime came into the flashlight and picked David up out of the sling. David stared at Miss Grime with those funny eyes. “Father,” he shouted, “father!”

“Put him in my room, Mr. Grime,” she ripped. “He'll spend the night with me.” She switched on the hall light, and turned off the flashlight. She was dressed in a kind of huge purple bathrobe, with a lace nightcap over her head. Leslie and I just stood there with the sheet over our shoulders, scared to death.

Mr. Grime had got David cradled in his arms the way you carry a baby. He began to struggle, kicking his legs around, and trying to jerk loose from Mr. Grime's arms. Mr. Grime squeezed him tighter. David kept on staring at Miss Grime.

“Take him away,” Miss Grime boomed out. “As for you two fools—”

“Father!” David screamed. Mr. Grime carried him to the door, twisted the knob with one hand, and kicked the door open. “Father!” David shouted, and waved his arms at Miss Grime.
“
Father, I know where they buried my brother.” Then Mr. Grime carried him through the door, and kicked it closed behind him.

CHAPTER
9

S
HE LOCKED US
in our room for the night; but she didn't say anything to us except, “I expect I will have to teach you two fools a lesson.” In the morning, Shrimpton let us out. All he said was, “What sort of lark have you chaps been up to?” and we went down to breakfast.

I felt mostly just numb. The whole thing was so unbelievable. Now, with the morning light streaming in on our oatmeal and cold toast and usual marmalade, it seemed as if it couldn't really have happened, as if it was just a specially scary movie we'd seen. You know how something like a movie or a dream can hang on for a while after you get done with it; well, it seemed as if it was just something like that, and in a few minutes it would be gone.

But I knew that wasn't true. All along, I'd had the feeling that there was something bad underneath all of this, and now I knew what it was; and I wished I hadn't found out.

At breakfast, Margaret wanted to know what had happened. She hadn't gone back to bed, but had been standing by her window looking out into the backyard, waiting to see if we got away all right. Of course, she'd heard the noise of Miss Grime's voice come booming out, and she'd torn back into bed, and had lain there listening while Miss Grime clomped us back upstairs and locked us in. She hadn't a very good idea of what had happened, but we didn't dare tell her very much at breakfast because of Mrs. Rabbit. I had a feeling that Mrs. Rabbit would be on our side if it came down to it; but she had to be careful about getting fired, too, and the best thing was to not let her know what we knew right away.

During the day, the word began to go around the school that something funny had happened during the night. Some of the fifth formers heard Shrimpton and the French master, Pué, talking about it, and they came around and bothered me and Leslie to tell them what had happened. But we wouldn't. We just said we'd heard some kind of noise during the night, but we didn't know what it was. The trouble was, we couldn't tell the truth because nobody would have believed it. We couldn't say, “Oh, it's just the usual thing, the Grimes murdered David Choudhry's brother, and David just found out where they buried him; and now they're going to murder David, too, to keep him from talking.” You couldn't say a thing like that with a straight face. Everybody would burst out laughing.

Besides, we didn't know for sure if it was true. You couldn't trust what somebody
shouted
out when they were delirious. It could have been sort of like a nightmare. We didn't know whether David had ever had a brother, and if he had, we didn't know if he had anything to do with the suicide boy. We could have been imagining the whole thing. Leslie bummed a fag from somebody after French, and we slipped off into the bog and talked about it.

“When you visited him in Paris, nobody mentioned anything about a brother?” Leslie asked.

“Come to think of it, no,” I said. “That's kind of funny. If he'd had a brother who'd died young you'd have thought there'd be a picture of him up, at least. You know, with some black cloth around it, or something.”

“You'd expect a large portrait or even a statue, considering the lolly they have.”

“Back home if somebody in the family's been killed in a war or something, they always have a picture up, with maybe his medal hanging underneath it or something.”

So there was a lot about it that didn't make sense; but there was a lot about it that did: the suicide boy, and the funny way Mrs. Rabbit had warned us, and the way David had acted about not wanting to leave the place, and of course shouting that out about his brother when he saw Miss Grime.

But we really didn't get much of a chance to discuss it until nearly suppertime because Leslie and I had football practice which we couldn't get out of. By the time we got back up to our room all covered with mud and feeling tired and beat up, it was almost six o'clock. We flopped down on the floor because we didn't want to get our beds all covered with mud, and just sort of sat there, until suddenly Leslie said, “I say, all of David's things are gone.”

We jumped up. It was true. It was as if he'd never been there. His clothes, his books, his shoes, his pictures from the wall—everything was gone. Even the sheets were gone from his bed, with only the blankets folded up at the foot.

“Wow,” I said.

“What do you suppose they're going to do to him, Christopher?”

I didn't answer that for a while. Then I said, “Probably they've taken him to the hospital.”

He nodded. “Probably. Yes, surely that's what they've done.”

But neither of us believed it, and neither did Margaret when we went across the hall and told her. She just put her hands over her face and began crying.

“
Stop your bloody noise, Margaret,” Leslie said. She tried to stop, but every once in a while she made a sniffle. To tell you the truth, I felt like crying myself. I felt scared and homesick, and all I wanted to do was be back in New York with my parents and my sister, away from all this crazy stuff. But there wasn't any hope of that; I could no more get my father to believe that people at St. Basket's murdered students and buried them on the grounds than I could have got the fifth formers to swallow it. I didn't have any reason for getting him to send me a plane ticket. If I wrote him with some excuse—I was sick or hated it—which wasn't an excuse because it was true—he'd write back to stick it out until end of term, and so forth. There just wasn't any point in it.

So what we did was to try to cheer each other up, and by the time we went down to supper we all felt a little better. It was the usual slop—pork pies, which I wouldn't even dare describe to you, and the pale peas, and chips, which is what they call French fries. After a while we began to feel a little normal again; and Plainfield had just got finished snapping a few French fries through Mrs. Rabbit's window with his spoon when Miss Grime came in.

She had on one of her huge orange dresses, and she'd got her face kind of cranked up into a smile. That surprised me, because I'd expected she was going to have us birched. But she stood down by the end of the table, smiling around at us, and we stood up the way we were supposed to when she came in, and sat down again.

“I have good news for you, children,” she boomed out. “I've just come from visiting David Choudhry in the hospital. He's feeling quite bright, quite on the mend, and sends you his greetings. He should be fit as a fiddle shortly.”

“He's in hospital, M'am?” Margaret said.

“Yes, yes, he went off first thing this morning. I must confess I didn't reckon he was quite so bad as he turned out to be. An error on the school's part, and we shall make amends to him for it. The bone wasn't broken, of course, Mr. Jaggers was quite right about that, but apparently it had gotten infected somehow.

The poor little chap was quite out of his head last night, spewing all manner of nonsense, but once they'd lanced the leg and he had a bit of a rest, he came right around. Quite his old self now.”

“M'am,” Leslie asked, “can we visit him at the hospital?”

“Not possible, I'm afraid. They're not allowing him visitors just at present. I sympathize
with
your concern for your schoolmate, nonetheless. And because I consider your behavior last night good-spirited, if misguided, I am quite willing to forget the whole matter. We shall wipe the slate clean and carry on as before.”

“Then could you tell us what hospital it is?” I asked. “So we could write him letters, I mean?”