I say that it was me who found the body of Miss Bell, and it was, but I never would have been there at all if it hadn’t been for those crime novels of Daisy’s. Matron’s fondness for confiscation meant that it was no good trying to read them up at House, so Daisy took to hanging around down at school in the evenings. She joined the Literature Society, slipped Whose Body? between the pages of Paradise Lost, and sat there peacefully reading it while the others talked. I joined too, and sat at the back of the room writing up my Detective Society case notes. Everyone thought I was writing poetry. It was after Lit Soc, on Monday, October 29, that it happened.
After-school societies end at 5.20, but afterwards Daisy and I hung back in the empty form room so that she could finish The Man in the Queue. Daisy was absorbed, but I was jumpy with worry that we might be late for dinner up at House and thus incur the awful wrath of Matron. I looked about for my pullover and then remembered with annoyance where I had left it.
“Bother,” I said. “Daisy, my pullover’s in the Gym. Wait for me, I’ll just be a minute.” Daisy, nose in her book as usual, shrugged vaguely to show that she had heard and continued reading. I looked at my wristwatch again and saw that it was 5.40. If I ran, I’d have just enough time, as getting up to House from Old Wing Entrance takes seven minutes, and dinner is at six o’clock exactly.
I pelted along the empty, chalk-smelling corridor of Old Wing, and then turned right down the high, black and white tiled Library corridor, my feet echoing in the hush and my chest heaving. Even after a year at Deepdean, when I run, I still huff and puff in a way that rude Miss Hopkins calls “determinedly unladylike”. I passed the mistresses’ common room, the library, Mr MacLean’s study, The One’s cubby and the Hall, and then turned right again onto the corridor that leads to the Gym. There’s a school legend that the Gym is haunted by the ghost of Verity Abraham.
When I first heard it I was younger, and I believed it. I imagined Verity all bloody, with her long hair hanging down in front of her face, wearing her pinafore and tie and holding a lacrosse stick. Even now that I am older and not a shrimp any more, just knowing that I am on my way to the Gym gives me the shivers. It does not help that the Gym corridor is awful. It’s packed full of dusty, broken bits of old school furniture that stand up like people in the gloom. That evening all the lights were off, and everything was smudged in murky shades of grey and brown. I ran very fast down the corridor, pushed open the doors to the Gym and galumphed in, wheezing.
And there on the floor was Miss Bell.
Our Gym, in case you have not seen it for yourself, is very large, with bars and beams all folded up against the walls and wide glass windows. There’s a terrifyingly high-up viewing balcony on the side nearest the main door (we are not allowed to go up there alone in case we fall, but since Verity jumped off it no one wants to), and a little room under that for us to change and leave kit in, which we call the Cupboard. Miss Bell was lying beneath the balcony, quite still, with her arm thrown back behind her head, and her legs folded under her. In my first moment of shock it did not occur to me that she was dead.
I thought I was about to get an awful ticking-off for being somewhere I oughtn’t, and nearly ran away again before she caught sight of me. But then I wondered – what was Miss Bell doing, lying there like that? I ran forward and knelt down beside her. I hesitated before touching her, because I had never touched a mistress before, but in the event it only felt like touching a human being.
I patted the shoulder of her white lab coat, hoping most awfully that she would open her eyes and sit up and scold me for being in the Gym after hours. But instead, my patting made Miss Bell’s head loll away from me. Her glasses slid down off her nose and I saw that what I had thought was only a shadow behind her head was actually a dark stain the size of my handkerchief. Some of the stain had spread to the collar of her lab coat, and that part of it was red. I put out my finger and touched the stain, and my finger came away covered in blood. I scrambled backwards, scrubbing my hand against my skirt in horror. It left a long dark smear, and I looked at that and then at Miss Bell, who had still not moved, and felt sick as anything. I had never seen a dead body up close before, but I was quite certain now that Miss Bell was dead.
Excerpted with permission from Murder Most Unladylike, Robin Stevens, Puffin.
