Arsenic For Tea: A Murder Most Unladylike Mystery (A Wells and Wong Mystery) (10 page)

There was a murderer on the loose again; and they were very close to us. If we went hunting them, would we be safe?

It was still raining too. As I wrote I heard the water bucketing down, hammering against the roof above me like fists. Water leaked through into buckets on the nursery landing,
drip-drip-drip
like soft footsteps. What if we
were
trapped here? Fallingford House was on a hill, and Dr Cooper had said that the countryside around it was flooding. What if the police couldn’t get to us? I wrote and wrote, but all I wanted to do was talk to Daisy.

At last Beanie and Kitty were quiet. They were huddled together in Beanie’s bed, and Beanie was making little snuffling noises as she slept. Daisy had been pretending to sleep too, but as soon as we heard Beanie’s snores she sat up in bed, eyes wide.

Watson!
she mouthed.
Detective Society meeting. Outside. Now!
It is a very good thing I have been practising my lip-reading.

I crept out of bed (the old broken floorboard halfway across the nursery groaned, and I made an apologetic face at Daisy), and together we slipped out. We heard snoring from Miss Alston’s little room, and a creak as she rolled over in bed.

It was a very cold, early hour of the morning, and the house was a little circle of calm within the howling storm outside. Daisy motioned towards the servants’ stairs. In the darkness they did look like a secret passage. I imagined us vanishing down them and never coming out – but that was silly, shrimp-like fear, of course. I took a deep breath and followed Daisy carefully down twenty steps. On the twenty-first (I counted) she stopped, and I bumped into her in the darkness.

‘Halfway down,’ she breathed, clicking on her torch so that it lit her face eerily. I jumped. ‘Perfect. Mrs D, Hetty and Chapman are asleep. No one else even remembers these stairs are here – Mummy doesn’t like thinking about them: she says they’re too dirty to bear. So we won’t be disturbed. Sit down, Hazel. It’s time to go over the facts of the case.’

‘All right,’ I said, sitting down on a very hard and uncomfortable stair.

‘We know that Mr Curtis is dead,’ said Daisy, ticking things off on the fingers of her free hand. ‘That’s quite unarguable. And what we
think
is that he has been murdered. What Dr Cooper said suggests that he was poisoned. We know there’s arsenic in the hall cupboard, and we know that arsenic poisoning fits with his symptoms. That must be the most likely cause. But how do we
prove
it? And if he was poisoned, who did it?’

‘If Mr Curtis was poisoned, I think it must have been someone in the house,’ I said. ‘It’s awful, but nothing else fits. If he had been poisoned at breakfast or lunch, he would have begun to feel ill hours before he did – so he must have been poisoned at tea. It was raining by then, and we didn’t see any wet tracks, did we, the way we would if someone from outside had crept in through the French windows and poisoned the tea things before we went into the dining room? Besides, he didn’t eat anything, and the only thing he drank was that cup of tea. Since no one else is ill, it must just have been that cup that was poisoned, rather than the whole teapot – and that means that the murderer must have been in the room when he drank it. Everyone was crowding round the tea table – any of them could have dropped something into the cup before it was handed to him, couldn’t they? They’re all suspects, Daisy!’

I stopped and took a deep breath. It was an unusually long speech for me, and my stomach had been turning over as I said it. I was telling Daisy that any of her family might be a murderer, and I was terribly afraid that she was going to shout at me, or tell me that I was wrong. Even after more than a year of being friends, I never quite know how Daisy will take things.

‘Golly!’ she said, after a pause. ‘Yes. Remember Mr Curtis saying that the tea tasted foul?’

‘Exactly,’ I said, breathing a very quiet sigh of relief. ‘It’s awful, but it must be true. So what do we do now?’

‘Do? Why, Hazel, you chump, it’s perfectly obvious. You may be all right at thinking, but you’re absolutely no good at all at
doing
. You’ve just confirmed the scene of the crime, and we believe we’ve identified arsenic as the murder weapon. We must visit the dining room immediately and recover that cup – it will certainly still retain traces of arsenic, and it may even have the murderer’s fingerprints on it.’

I peered at her. ‘But the door’s locked, Daisy!’

‘I know
that
,’ said Daisy. ‘And I know Uncle Felix still has the key. But we don’t have to use that one. There’s a whole set hidden in the umbrella stand for when we want to break into the pantry after Mrs D has gone home for the night. Come on – all we need to do is fish out the ones in the stand and we’ll be in that room in a trice.’

Of course, Daisy is always right about this sort of thing – but as I stood up and followed her down the stairs I couldn’t help worrying. We were starting off on our detective path, just as we had last year – and at the end of that path, once again, was a real murderer. What if they noticed that we were investigating, and came after us next? I remembered our last murder case, and shuddered. I never wanted to feel so frightened again. But of course, I couldn’t say this to Daisy. The less safe Daisy is, the happier she is about it.

Down the little back stairs we crept – Daisy as daintily as Raffles, heel-toe, heel-toe, and me like a baby elephant – then across the first-floor landing, holding our breath, and down the main stairs.

We crept (and I stumbled), and at last we were down in the hall, the grandfather clock ticking like the beat of a heart. Fallingford is so full of
things
that walking through it at night is a dangerous activity – there are bits of furniture and stray carpets everywhere. They made horrible shadows across the walls, and whenever I saw them out of the corner of my eye my heart pounded. The suit of armour looked like a person in the dark, and I gasped before I could stop myself. But Daisy remained calm. She went towards the umbrella stand (an elephant’s foot – a real one, all leathery and cracking: it gives me the horrors) while I stood nervously beside the dining-room door. I pushed the handle, just to pass the time, and to my great surprise it gave, and the door swung open.

‘Daisy!’ I hissed. ‘Look! It isn’t locked after all!’

Daisy turned, hand still outstretched towards the umbrella stand. ‘Goodness!’ she said in surprise, ‘Uncle Felix
is
slipping. Well, that makes this far simpler for us.’

It was just as we had left it – curtains open and tea things laid out. Dimly, I saw the remains of cakes and sandwiches, spilling crumbs all over the table. Cups were tilted over, and dark tea stains crept across the pale tablecloth. My stomach lurched, so that for a foolish moment I wondered if I had been poisoned too. Dying from eating tea was such a horrible way to go – like being tricked by something that ought to be nice.

I picked up a scrap of paper that was sitting on the tablecloth and fiddled with it nervously. It was a bit of a printed page – at first I thought it was newspaper, but it was too thick and smooth under my fingers, like paper from a book. I peered at it, trying to make out words, but then Daisy seized my arm. I stuffed it into my pocket and turned to her.

‘Hazel!’ hissed Daisy, pointing to the chair where Mr Curtis had been sitting. ‘Look!’

I squinted – and saw that the room was not quite as it had been after all. The tea might be all there, and the furniture might be pulled out the way it had been that afternoon – but there were two things missing. The teacup that Mr Curtis had drunk from, and his gold watch. It was like one of Miss Alston’s memory games come to life.

‘Might they have been moved by someone when Mr Curtis was taken ill?’ I asked doubtfully. But I knew that they had been next to Mr Curtis’s chair when Uncle Felix locked the door. And the more I thought about it, the more sure I was that Uncle Felix
had
locked the door.

Daisy clicked on her torch and flashed it about the room in jumpy patterns – at the dining table, at the other chairs, at the sideboard – but the fat gold watch and the thin golden cup were nowhere to be seen.

‘Daisy, if they’re not here now . . .’

I did not even have to finish my sentence. It meant, of course, that since we were all in the dining room, someone had come in and taken away Mr Curtis’s cup and watch – and
only
the cup and the watch. And that meant that our suspicions were absolutely right: Mr Curtis really
had
been poisoned.

I took a deep, steadying breath.

And then something at the other end of the dining room rustled.

Other than Daisy’s torch, there was only the wet half-light filtering through from outside to see by. Beyond its beam we could only make out shadows and shapes – and the dining room was long and crowded with tables and chairs.

‘
Who’s there?
’ asked Daisy. She is exceedingly brave sometimes. I couldn’t have spoken, even if I’d wanted to.

The room had gone very quiet, apart from the patter of the rain, but I could feel that someone – whoever it was – was crouching at the far end, not moving, not making a sound. I remembered the unlocked door, and cold rushed down my spine.

‘
Who’s there?
’ hissed Daisy again.

The person pushed over a chair.

We screamed, and then we turned round and ran as though vicious dogs were snapping at our heels, out of the dining room and all the way up to the nursery. The stairs crunched and creaked as we did so, and I was terrified that someone would hear – but the pounding rain must have drowned out all noise.

Shaking, we crept back into the little nursery bathroom; it really was becoming our headquarters for this case, I thought. Daisy bolted the door, and we both sank down against it. For a while we were silent.

‘I can’t believe you screamed, Hazel,’ said Daisy at last. ‘You nearly gave the game away!’

I opened my mouth indignantly, and then closed it again. Daisy was just being Daisy, and did not mean it in the least.

‘It was quite a
quiet
scream,’ I said. My voice came out all wobbly. ‘No one heard.’

‘Hazel,’ said Daisy, after another little while, ‘I think our case has just become
exceedingly
interesting. There is only one reason why someone who isn’t us would be creeping about in the dining room in the dark, stealing the cup that Mr Curtis was drinking from: because they murdered him, and they want to hide the evidence.’

‘But how did they unlock the door?’ I asked. ‘Hardly anyone else knows about the keys in the umbrella stand, do they?’

‘Daddy and Bertie do,’ said Daisy. ‘And anyone else might have crept into Uncle Felix’s room while he was out of it and pinched the dining room key from his jacket pocket. The bother is that they’ll have put it back by now – either in the umbrella stand or by sliding the key under Uncle Felix’s door – so we won’t be able to discover anything that way.’

‘So they really do have to be from Fallingford House! And they know we’re after them.’ I gulped. I was beginning to feel as though I had been sucked back into last autumn. It was all happening again: a hidden murder, and a murderer who knew that we were investigating the case.

‘Well, that can’t be avoided,’ said Daisy. ‘Sometimes detectives have to face terrible danger. Buck up, Hazel, and think about the important things. We’re right about this being a case of murder!’

Something else occurred to me. ‘If they were there for the cup, why did they take the watch too?’ I asked.

‘Oh, exactly, Watson!’ said Daisy. ‘That’s an important line of investigation to follow. It’s obvious why the murderer would take the cup – fingerprints and incriminating white residue, of course – but why would they take the watch? I—’

Someone rattled the doorknob. We both jumped to our feet in panic. My heart was in my mouth. How could the murderer have found us so soon?

‘Squashy!’ said Bertie’s voice. ‘What are you doing in there again? Come out and stop being such an idiot. I need to, er . . .’

We were safe after all – but there was nothing for it: we crept out sheepishly to find Bertie standing there in his dressing gown, looking cross.

‘Sorry,’ I said to him.

‘Not sorry,’ said Daisy, sticking out her tongue. Bertie made a horrible face, and swept past us into the bathroom.

We crept back to our beds again. I lay there, thinking. Why would the murderer steal the watch? Was it important somehow? Or was it simply valuable?

I remembered the way Aunt Saskia had looked at it the day before. Surely she wouldn’t kill anyone for a watch, no matter how beautiful it was? But I couldn’t be sure about anything. After all, someone in this house – perhaps even one of Daisy’s family – must be the murderer.

It was becoming clear that this was a case where the truth might be even more awful than what we were imagining.

The next morning it was still raining; it poured and poured as though it would never stop. I knelt up on my bed and peered through the window bars at a countryside that was brown and heaving with water. It was as if, up on Fallingford’s hill, we really were on a boat, sailing through a hostile ocean.

‘Gosh,’ said Kitty, coming over and kneeling beside me. ‘At this rate we shan’t be able to leave for
days
. Ugh. What if Mr Curtis begins to rot?’

The thought of that made me feel ill. We were dealing with bodies again, and I know that, despite what Daisy’s detective novels say, bodies are horrid things even when they are quite new. But the body, nasty though it was, was not the worst thing about being stuck at Fallingford. We knew now that we were trapped in a house
with a murderer
.

We had breakfast in the drawing room, as the dining room was still out of bounds. There was a mountain of food, as usual – toast and eggs and bacon and sausages – but the change of room made everything feel odd and wrong, and everyone was subdued. At least the food tasted the same.

Bertie chewed furiously through a mountain of toast, while Stephen only stared at his plate. Aunt Saskia hunched over and gulped down poached eggs without even glancing at the silver butter-knife next to her plate, and Miss Alston cut a pear into smaller and smaller segments until it practically vanished. Uncle Felix bit into his napkin instead of his bacon, and seemed not to even notice. Lord Hastings only picked at his kedgeree, looking grey, and shifted about in his chair as though he were sitting on a spider. Chapman was behaving oddly too. He kept glancing at Lord Hastings, and then looking away again, as though desperate to say something but unable to get it out.