Murder Most Unladylike: A Wells and Wong Mystery Read Online Free PDF Page A

everyone else thinks is going on.’
    I would have preferred to proceed straight to the investigation, but there is no use arguing with Daisy when she has a Detective Society mission in mind. So I summoned all my Watson-y thoughts, nodded, and followed her outside.

4
    On the lawn, the whole school was buzzing with made-up news about Miss Bell. Unfortunately, none of it suggested that she might be dead. On the contrary, most people seemed to think she had decided to run away – generally because she had been jilted by The One, although there were odder theories. One of the shrimps was telling us that Miss Bell was on the run because the government was after her, (although the shrimp could not say why the government might be interested in a schoolmistress), and another shrimp insisted that it was not the government at all, but a secret organization that had something to do with the East . She looked at me rather fearfully as she said that, as though being from Hong Kong made me the East in human form and therefore untrustworthy. I hate all that. Usually, once they know me, English people simply pretend that I am not Oriental, and I simply do not remind them about it. But sometimes they slip, and little bits of nastiness that are usually hidden come sliding out of their mouths, which can be quite difficult to politely ignore.
    That particular bunbreak I was doomed to have my difference noticed. I had several people hurriedly stop talking when we wandered past their groups, presumably in case I was a hostile agent of the East. Then a fifth former whom I had never spoken to before came up to ask me if it was really true that my father ran the opium trade. My father is a banker in Hong Kong, and I told her so. It was plain that she did not believe me.
    ‘She needn’t be snobbish about it,’ said Daisy to me when the fifth former had run off to join her friends. ‘Her father’s a dastardly smuggler. Everyone knows that.’
    I was comforted by this, although I never quite know where Daisy gets this sort of information from. She is always coming out with things like that, but when I asked her once she only said, ‘Oh, you know, my uncle,’ and looked vague.
    After that Daisy vanished into the crowd of people eating their buns on the North Lawn. She was gone some time. I craned my head around looking for her, but then someone seized the back of my pullover and I turned round to see Daisy again, looking very cheerful.
    ‘Listen to this!’ she hissed. ‘The rumour is that Miss Bell’s resigned. I just spoke to King Henry, and she told me.’
    It might sound odd – that a third former like Daisy should be able to speak to the lofty Head Girl – but it is merely another absolutely English thing. The English have a habit of being related to nearly anyone you can mention, and King Henry turns out to be the fifth cousin of Daisy’s mother. She and Daisy go riding together in the hols and have tea visits and so on, which makes it all right for Daisy to talk to King Henry sometimes when they are at Deepdean.
    ‘There was a letter on the Headmistress’s desk this morning; King Henry read it because Miss Griffin showed her. Miss Griffin is still trying to decide the right time to break it to the girls. King Henry must have liked Miss Bell more than I thought: she was looking awfully distressed when she told me.’
    ‘But Miss Bell can’t have resigned!’ I exclaimed.
    ‘I know that ,’ said Daisy irritably. ‘Miss Bell’s stone dead and therefore incapable of writing anything, let alone a resignation letter. But don’t you see what this means? It absolutely proves, once and for all, that what you discovered was a murder; and that the murderer is someone who knows Miss Bell’s handwriting well enough to forge it. It’s also got to be someone high up enough in the school to be able to march into Miss Griffin’s office and plant the letter on her desk.’
    ‘A master or mistress!’ I gasped, horrified. ‘ That’s why