It's Murder at St. Basket's (7 page)

“Banks Holiday don't sound right, innit?” She really thought that explained it.

Of course, for me, getting a reprieve wasn't such a big thing, because I didn't have any place to go. The first Bank Holiday we had was right after I got to St. Basket's. I didn't know anybody much, and all I could do was hang around the school. I felt so bad I pretty nearly cried, although at the last minute I stopped myself because I didn't want to be weak. Then at Christmastime I flew home, as I said, and by the time the mid-term vacation came around I knew enough kids so I had places to go. Actually, my father arranged for me to visit some English businessman he knew, but I only went there for a couple of days, just to be polite. The rest of the time I spent with some kids—part of it down at the Plainfields' in Kent and part with some other kids. And then Choudhry invited me to stay with him and his father in Paris for three days. That was pretty terrific. Choudhry's father is rich because of David's grandfather being an Indian Maharajah. I'm not sure I have that right, but it's something like that, because David's father has a different last name from David, which I guess had something to do with being a former prince. The way it worked, David said he wanted me to visit, so his father just phoned up a limo service in London and they came around with a Rolls-Royce with my airplane ticket and drove me out to the airport. I mean, they'd called me up in advance, so I would be ready and waiting. And then David came out to meet me with the chauffeur at Orly Field, which is the airport for Paris. They
have
this huge apartment, filled with fancy furniture. You can see the Eiffel Tower in the distance out the window. It seemed like there was always a party going on—people going in and out and champagne being passed around all the time. Nobody paid much attention to us, and we could do whatever we wanted. Except that David's father took us out to lunch once in a restaurant halfway up the Eiffel Tower, and another time he took us to a professional football match—that's soccer, remember. In France they don't care if the kids drink. David and I got drunk on champagne twice. We just kept taking glasses when they passed it around. Nobody thought there was anything funny about it.

The reason why I bring this up is because of something funny David's father said while we were there. One time David had to go with one of the butlers or whatever they were to get his hair cut. I was just lying around in his room trying to read a French comic book, when Mr. Choudhry sort of stuck his head in the door. “Being properly looked after, Christopher?” he said.

“Yes, Sir,” I said. I didn't have to call him Sir, but I'd got into the habit of it.

“Good,” he said. “If there's anything you need, just ask.”

“Yes, Sir,” I said.

He pulled his head out of the door and started to go away, but then he turned and put it back again. “Christopher, how does David seem to be getting along at school?”

“I guess he's passing everything, Sir,” I said, which wasn't exactly true, because he was only barely passing maths.

“I don't mean his school work. I mean with his mates—and the masters.”

“Fine, Sir, I guess.” Of course, that was before he got bashed by Jaggers.

Mr. Choudhry looked kind of worried. “He was very keen on going to St. Basket's, you know. He virtually insisted on it. I confess I wasn't in favor of it. Keep an eye on him, Christopher. If he seems to become depressed, let me know. Don't hesitate to telephone me.”

“Right, Sir, fine,” I said.

I didn't understand what he meant by all that then, and I didn't understand it now, either. The idea crossed my mind that I ought to do something about it. Maybe David had done something he wasn't supposed to do, and didn't want his father to know about it. I wanted to ask him about that, but I didn't. It didn't seem right.

Anyway, we had a Bank Holiday coming up in a couple of weeks. It was already arranged that I was supposed to go down to Plainfield's. We discussed it with David on Sunday
night.

“Say, Choudhry,” Leslie said. “Why don't you come down with us and I can get our own doctor to look at your leg. Could you do that?”

“I could,” he said.

“Do you think you can stand it that long?” I said.

“I think I can,” he said.

But I didn't think he could, and I told Plainfield and Margaret that later at tea. Nobody was around; Sunday nights Mrs. Rabbit just puts out the tea things and says, “I've got better things to do than sit about watchin' you lot stuff yerselves,” and goes off to the Belsize Odeon, where they show more her type of movie than at the Hampstead Classic. So we sat around by ourselves, feeling pretty gloomy at being imprisoned again. We made Margaret serve the tea, which was all right, because English girls expect they're supposed to wait on the men. Leslie was so down, he didn't even bother to scale any bread around. Usually he tries to scale one through the window where Mrs. Rabbit serves the food. Once we even got up a game of Frisbie with a cucumber sandwich, which was pretty good because it flew apart about the third time we threw it and flung cucumbers and mayonnaise all over the place.

But we were too worried about David to fling anything. “If you ask me, he looks worse,” I said. “He looks pretty sweaty.”

“Perhaps he has a fever,” Margaret said. “We should take his temperature.”

“If he has got a fever,” Leslie said, “that means he's quite ill. It means it's getting infected.”

“What about getting one of the day boys to tell his parents about it?” I said. “Beverley Russell or somebody.” I already told you that Beverley was a boy.

We thought about that. It didn't seem like it would work. “Nobody's going to believe them. Or if they do they'll just call up Miss Grime and ask, and she'll lie about it,” Leslie said.

“We've got to call your father, Leslie,” I said.

“We could ring him at work, I suppose,” Leslie said. “Actually, if we got off the grounds we could go to his office and see him.”

“Okay, we've got to escape.”

It made us pretty nervous to think about it, but we had to do it. Everybody had shut up about David dying, and the reason was, it had suddenly come to us, that maybe he would. You
couldn't
die from a broken leg, but if it got infected you could die from that without too much trouble.

The plan we worked out was pretty simple. The day boys all left at 3:00. They just sort of mobbed out through the front gate. It wouldn't be too hard to just mix in with them and shoot off. With everybody wearing these same maroon blazers and maroon Cub Scout type caps you couldn't tell anybody apart anyway, unless you actually saw their faces. Our idea was that we'd just go out with the rest. We'd go sort of separately so that if one of us got caught the other one might get away. Of course, we knew it would be better if Leslie got away. It was his father. But just to be safe, he wrote down his father's office number and how to get there on a piece of paper, and I stuck it in my jacket pocket before I went to bed.

Leslie and I were pretty nervous about it. Of course, Leslie didn't say anything about being nervous, because of the way the English are about not saying what they feel. But I could tell he was. And anyway, he knew I was nervous, because I admitted it. In the United States, skipping out of school isn't such a terrible crime, but at one of these English boarding prisons it's pretty bad. You can get into lots of trouble for it; they can even expel you, although I didn't think they would do that to us, seeing all the trouble they were going to, to keep us there. But if they caught us, it would give them an excuse to keep us there during the Bank Holiday.

Of course, there was the problem of money: we'd need at least enough for subway fare to Leslie's father's office and bank. Leslie said it was tenpence, so we spent Monday morning borrowing pennies here and there from the day boys.

At 3:00, when the day boys were getting ready to leave, instead of going out back to kick the football around, we lingered around the front hall, where everybody was milling around getting their coats and stuff from the rack that's there. The front door is big and has stained glass scenes of Moses and Jesus in it. Outside there's a little yard and then the gate onto Tanza Road. Once we got through the gate we'd be pretty safe.

You'd think it would be pretty easy to hide in a milling crowd of thirty kids, but, to tell the truth, I felt pretty conspicuous. Mr. Shrimpton kept going up and down the hall through the crowd, clapping his hands and saying, “Come along, you lazy sods, you can't remain until midnight.” Then he saw me and Leslie. “What are you lot doing here? Push off, no need to add to the confusion. You might, in fact, have a go at tidying that dusthole you sleep in. I put my head in this morning and I was simply staggered by the sight. The blood quite drained from my
face.
I had to lie down for fifteen minutes before I was fit again. Now push off.”

But he didn't really pay any attention to us. Shrimpton was like that: if he got a good remark off at you, he didn't really care if you obeyed or not. He turned and went back through the mob. “We'd better split up,” I said.

“Right,” Leslie said.

He was closer to the front door so he began to move toward it, and I began to kind of saunter back down the hall to the rear, keeping my eyes down at the floor as if I were looking for something. I got halfway down the hall and stopped, and then I turned around to watch for when Leslie slipped through the door. Just as I did that, there boomed out from the back of the hall a heavy voice that made me jump and a cold line seemed to run up my back: “Plainfield.” It was Miss Grime.

Leslie was at the door with two other guys just about to go through, but that voice had jerked him back as if somebody had lassooed him. I dropped down into a crouch amidst the crowd, pretending I was looking for something on the floor.

“Plainfield,” that voice ripped out again. I tell you, the power she poured into that voice could really scare you. I looked up and saw Leslie coming through the crowd. He glanced down at me quickly, and then away.

That voice came again. “What do you mean by this, Plainfield?” A lot of the kids had turned around to see what was going on. She clapped her hands. “All right, everyone. Out, out quickly. Plainfield's inadequacies are no business of yours. Clear the hall, please.”

Everyone stopped looking. I stood up, carefully keeping my back to her, and began to move along towards the door. Most everybody was moving out now, pushed along by that booming voice. I kept myself a little hunched down and low and walked along as fast as I dared. The hall wasn't long—maybe thirty feet or something—but I had the feeling that any moment that booming voice was going to reach out and grab me the way it had Leslie. It made creepy fingers go all over my back. I got to the door, and started out, and just then that powerful boom ripped down the hall: “Plainfield, where is Quincy?” From just in back of me I heard the high voice of one of the younger kids say, “Here he is, M'am.” I jumped down the front steps, dashed across the yard, slammed through the gate and began running down Tanza Road. The kids were drifting along the sidewalk toward South End Green for the bus, or getting met by their chauffeurs in Rolls-Royce Silver Clouds. There wasn't anything funny about a kid running
someplace;
but some of the kids who knew me, the ones in my form, stared at me, because they knew I wasn't supposed to be out, and they could easily figure that I was running away. I didn't think they would squeal on me, but you couldn't be sure, because of the way they believed in obeying the Establishment. It was like the kid who said, “Here he is, M'am.” He wasn't being mean or anything: it was just that the idea of going against Miss Grime would never even cross his mind.

At the bottom of Tanza Road I stopped and took a look back up the hill. Nobody seemed to be following me. I couldn't see Miss Grime or any of the masters anywhere. So I slowed down a little, turned onto Nassington Road, and began walking quickly toward South End Green.

The trouble was, I didn't know very much about London. You would think that after living there for eight months I would know how the subways worked and so forth, but I didn't. Most of that time I'd been locked up at St. Basket's, and hadn't learned much about how to get places.

Mr. Plainfìeld worked in what they call the City of London, or mostly just “the City.” This doesn't mean all of London, just a part of it.

Mainly the City is a business place, kind of like Wall Street in New York, where there are stockbrokers and banks and things like that. Mr. Plainfìeld's office was on Poultry Street—the English say “in Poultry Street”—number Six. On the note Leslie had given me, he had written “St. Paul's, Central,” which meant that the closest subway stop was the one called St. Paul's, on the Central Line.

There weren't any tube stops—that's what they call subways in London—too near to St. Basket's. There was one up on Hampstead High Street where Leslie had gone to phone that day, and one at a section called Belsize Park, near the movie theatre where Mrs. Rabbit likes to go. I thought about it for a minute as I walked along, and then I realized I didn't really know which one was closest. I stopped, and took out one of the pennies I had collected, and flipped it: heads for Hampstead, tails for Belsize. I don't know what happened—maybe the wind hit it or something, because usually I'm a good catcher, but I dropped it. It bounced on the sidewalk and rolled off the curb and under one of the cars parked in a row along there. I cursed, and bent down, but I couldn't see it. I couldn't afford to waste any money, though, so I lay down flat and looked under the car. The penny was there. I reached it out, and got up on my knees; and that was when I realized that there was a car coming very slowly up Nassington Road.