Murder Most Unladylike: A Wells and Wong Mystery
Read Murder Most Unladylike: A Wells and Wong Mystery Online
Authors: Robin Stevens
Tags: #Children's Books, #Mysteries & Detectives, #Children's eBooks, #Literature & Fiction
Contents
About the Book
‘Are you sure we shouldn’t just go to the police?’ I asked.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Daisy severely. ‘We don’t have any evidence yet. We don’t even have a body. They’d simply laugh at us. And anyway, this is our murder case.’
When Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong set up a secret detective agency at Deepdean School for Girls, they can’t find a truly exciting mystery to investigate. (Unless you count The Case of Lavinia’s Missing Tie. Which they don’t.)
Then Hazel discovers the body of the Science Mistress, Miss Bell – but when she and Daisy return five minutes later, the body has disappeared. Now the girls have to solve a murder, and prove a murder happened in the first place, before the killer strikes again (and before the police get there first, naturally).
But will they succeed? And can their friendship stand the test?
To all the school friends
who became my other family,
and to Miss Silk and Mrs Sanderson,
who would never have murdered anyone.
DEEPDEAN SCHOOL
THE STAFF
Miss Griffin –
Headmistress
Miss Lappet –
History and Latin mistress
Miss Bell –
Science mistress, also the victim
Miss Parker –
Maths mistress
Mr MacLean –
Reverend
Mr Reid, ‘The One’ –
Music and Art master
Miss Tennyson –
English mistress
Miss Hopkins –
Games mistress
Mademoiselle Renauld, ‘Mamzelle’ –
French mistress
Mrs Minn, ‘Minny’ –
Nurse
Mr Jones –
Handyman
Matron –
Matron
THE GIRLS
Daisy Wells –
Third former and President of the Wells
&
Wong Detective Society
Hazel Wong –
Third former and Secretary of the Wells
&
Wong Detective Society
THIRD FORMERS
Kitty Freebody
Rebecca ‘Beanie’ Martineau
Lavinia Temple
Clementine Delacroix
Sophie Croke-Finchley
FIRST FORMER
Betsy North
SECOND FORMERS
Binny Freebody
The Marys
FIFTH FORMER
Alice Murgatroyd
BIG GIRLS
Virginia Overton
Belinda Vance
HEAD GIRL
Henrietta Trilling, ‘King Henry’
Being an account of
The Case of the Murder of Miss Bell,
an investigation by the Wells and Wong Detective Society.
Written by Hazel Wong
(Detective Society Secretary), aged 13.
Begun Tuesday 30th October 1934.
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.