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

they’re all pretending that nothing’s wrong!’
    ‘Well, not all of them did it,’ Daisy pointed out. ‘But the one who did – whoever it was – has managed to bamboozle the others with that note. That’s what Mamzelle meant about not “prying into Miss Bell’s affairs”. This is really it, Hazel. This means that it’s up to us! If the Detective Society doesn’t do something, nobody will!’
    I had a momentary un-detective-like pang. ‘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. No, we’re on our own. And anyway, this is our murder case.’
    I was not sure I liked the sound of that. Daisy was talking as though the case was just another tuck theft, but I knew it wasn’t. What I had seen in the Gym had become, in my mind, my own personal ghost story in which bodies appeared and then vanished into thin air. Except that it wasn’t a story at all, but very real. I was still terrified at the thought that the murderer might know that I had seen Miss Bell’s body. What if I ended up a corpse myself? In a few years it might be my bloody ghost that all the Big Girls frightened the shrimps with, instead of Verity Abraham’s. The thought made me shudder.
    ‘But I thought you didn’t even like Miss Bell,’ I said, to make myself stop thinking about it.
    ‘It’s not about liking,’ said Daisy sternly. ‘It’s the principle of the thing. People can’t be allowed to get away with murder at Deepdean. Oh Hazel, it’ll be so exciting! The Detective Society will be real at last!’
    At this point, the bell rang for the end of bunbreak.
    ‘Right,’ said Daisy. ‘I move for our first official meeting to be held after Prep this evening. In the meantime, since the murder of Miss Bell is now a proper Wells and Wong Detective Society case, you can keep on writing up notes, and I’ll start planning our course of action. And we can both keep our eyes and ears open. Detective Society handshake?’
    We shook hands, clicked our fingers, shook again, made the Mystery Gesture, and then rushed off for Art with The One.

5
    I gave up on the rest of Tuesday’s lessons. I spent all my lunch break scribbling case notes, and then tucked this casebook into my French textbook and carried on writing. Daisy, sitting next to me, covered for me beautifully (and only nudged me when she didn’t agree with what I was writing). She was stewing away at the problem too.
    Usually Daisy takes care to dawdle over her prep, and sigh, and look puzzled, and pass notes to people about the second part of question four. That evening, though, she flew through it and then sat gazing raptly at a chip of paint on the wall until Virginia Overton who, unluckily for us, was taking Prep that evening, snapped, ‘Wells! Nose back in your book.’
    After that, Daisy bent her head over her exercise book and spent the next fifteen minutes pretending to write. On my other side, Beanie was stuck in the tortures of her French assignment, her face screwed up and the end of her plait jammed into her mouth. Beyond her, Lavinia was plodding angrily through a Latin exercise. From behind us, Kitty kicked Beanie’s chair and passed up a note. Beanie looked at it and squeaked with laughter, and the noise made Virginia look up – just in time to see Daisy slip a folded up piece of paper onto my desk.
    ‘Wells!’ said Virginia. ‘ No passing notes , you know the rules. If it’s so important, you can jolly well come up here and read it out to all of us.’
    Daisy did not look alarmed by this at all. She stood up, took the paper back from me and walked to the front of the prep room. At Virginia’s desk she turned to face us all, opened up the piece of paper and, in a solemn voice, read out, ‘ I wish Cook would give us something other than sprouts for dinner; they disagree with me awfully. ’
    ‘Wells, you