Murder Most Unladylike: A Wells and Wong Mystery by Robin Stevens Read Free Book Online

grand English mansions surrounded by large fields and very small farmers, of people riding beautiful brown horses or taking tea on green lawns. In the dining room we have a great big picture of the King wearing his moustache and medals, next to the Queen with her pearls and white dress. ‘It’s my little corner of England,’ says my father – and when I looked out over the top of our compound wall, at the rickshaw drivers in the loud, dusty streets below, and beyond to Victoria Harbour, jam-packed with its junks and steamers, our house seemed part of a different world entirely.
    The day I found out I was going to England I sat in our drawing room – its mahogany furniture a little warped and fuzzy from the heat, its wallpaper peeling – and imagined myself at school, arm-in-arm with a golden-haired girl, a friend who would turn me into a perfect English Miss, like her.
    But standing on the cold games field that morning, it seemed to me that all the English Misses were actually horrible and mad. I clutched my hockey stick harder than ever – and then someone ran into me, extremely hard. I wobbled and gasped (I am so solid that it is not easy to knock me over) and the someone said, ‘Oh, I say, I’m so very sorry.’
    And that, of course, was Daisy. Her hair was falling out of its plaits chaotically and her eyes were extremely blue, and although the rest of England was not exactly turning out as I had expected, here, at least, was one English ideal – my golden-haired friend come to life; a person absolutely made from the England of my books and paintings.
    When I think back to that moment, I realize how silly I was.



1
    On Wednesday morning, Miss Bell was (of course) still missing, and everyone was still very excited about the idea of a gang from the East. Lallie Thompson-Bates, a day girl from the second form, was telling anyone who would listen that her mother had spoken to a close friend who had seen a woman looking very much like Miss Bell in a shop in Abingdon, buying azaleas. Another girl who knew all about the language of flowers said that azaleas meant ‘Take care!’, and there was great excitement at that – until Lallie admitted that she had meant to say hydrangeas. Since hydrangeas turned out to mean ‘frigidity’, this did not seem right at all.
    ‘And I don’t know when she would have time for buying flowers if she was really on the run from a criminal gang,’ Daisy whispered to me scornfully, before turning to Kitty to discuss whether the people after Miss Bell might perhaps be from Russia.
    Daisy cultivates girls in the lower forms to bring her back gossip, and so she sent Betsy North and her other informants off to collect information, telling them quite truthfully that she wanted to know what Miss Bell had been doing on Monday before her mysterious disappearance. She and I canvassed the older girls.
    We discovered that, while it was difficult to stop people talking about Miss Bell, most of the things they said were utterly useless. But then Betsy came back to us with some much more useful news.
    One of Betsy’s little first-form friends had been to Cultural Soc on Monday with Mamzelle. This was useful already, since it reminded us that Mamzelle had a good alibi between 4.20 and 5.20, but then the story became even more interesting. The shrimp had been let out of Cultural Soc five minutes early because she had a slight stomach ache. At just after 5.15 she had arrived in Old Wing cloakroom to collect her hat and coat, and there she had unexpectedly come upon Miss Bell. Miss Bell was, according to the shrimp, digging through a pile of old coats; then she pulled out a battered copy of The Arabian Nights , snapped, ‘I’m confiscating this,’ and stalked off towards Library corridor.
    Daisy and I both realized what this meant at once. It brought the time during which the killer must have struck down to less than half an hour. If Miss Bell had been alive and in Old Wing cloakroom at 5.15, she