Kiss of Death (5 page)

“Who’s in charge here?” bellows one of the firefighters who entered the school building, emerging back outside, walking so heavily in his big boots that it looks as if he’s wading through a river.

“I am!” Miss Carter, Aunt Gwen, and Ms. Burton-Race all chorus.

“Well, ladies,” he says, waddling over to them, “I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that you never had much of a fire here. Just a lot of smoke. The bad news is that you’ve got some naughty girls playing silly buggers. Someone’s been putting firelighters into those metal bins you have and setting them on fire.”

He rolls his
r
s so heavily that
girls
comes out as
gurrrls
, and the word
fire
seems to last forever.

“Not just firelighters, Stew,” says the other one, coming through the doors, waving a couple of long tubes in one yellow-gloved hand. “Some eejit’s been playing around with smoke bombs.”

“What?”
Aunt Gwen and Miss Carter exclaim in shock.

“Smoke bombs?”
Ms. Burton-Race echoes.

“They’re smoke sticks,” the second fireman informs us all. “Set off a few of these at once, you’ll get a roomful of smoke. And if all the windows are closed, as they would be on a nasty damp night like this, you’ll find that smoke hangs around for a long time.”

“I can’t
believe
this!” Ms. Burton-Race mutters furiously as the firefighter jumps down from the cab of one of the engines and comes over to me with a water bottle. I drink very gratefully; I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was.

“You can all go back inside,” says Stew, waving a huge yellow hand toward the front door. “And if I were you, ladies, I’d stage a major investigation, pronto, to find out which of these young women did something this stupid.” He folds his arms over his chest. “Because playing with fire is verra, verra stupid, lassies. Someone could have got seriously hurt from smoke inhalation. Believe it or not, fifty to eighty percent of deaths from fires are down to smoke inhalation. Did you know that?”

We all shake our heads dutifully, eyes wide and fixed on Stewart; his voice is so booming and serious you can’t help being impressed by him. Even Plum and Nadia, I notice, are focusing completely.

“And think about someone taking a nasty fall because they couldn’t see where they were going!” he continues. “Think about someone going head over heels and breaking their neck! How would you feel if you’d played a silly trick like this and someone—one of your chums—got paralyzed for life? Or worse—died? Don’t make me tell you how many corpses we’ve had to carry out of buildings! And what if one of those bins had overturned? You could have started a fire for real!”

Even though he pronounces
died
in a funny way, no one laughs. No one even sniggers. Stewart’s manner is totally serious, and it makes us equally so. Looming over us, huge in his dark uniform, his shoulders looking wide as a house, the bright flashes of reflective strips gleaming, he’s as imposing as the school building itself.

The lights in the hall come on. It’s a shock, the harsh white fluorescent light flaming out into a long pale rectangle down the steps of Fetters like a theatrical effect; a couple of the girls yelp in surprise.

“All clear,” says a firefighter, coming outside. “Safe for everyone to go back in now.”

“We take what you just said
very
seriously, believe me, Officer,” Miss Carter assures Stewart. “When we find out who did this, she will be very severely disciplined.”

“Glad to hear it, miss,” he says, standing aside as the teachers start shepherding the girls back into the school again.

Taylor helps me up; I’m surprisingly unsteady on my feet.

“Shock,” the firefighter who looked after me says to us laconically. “Go slowly, lassie. And get some sleep.”

“Thank you,” I say, handing him back his water bottle.

It’s so bright inside I find myself shading my eyes again with my hand. My throat’s sore, even after drinking the water. Taylor’s by my side as we follow the rest of the girls upstairs, one hand cupped under my elbow. Just in case.

“Ooh, look at Scarlett and Taylor,” Plum coos, “all cozy and—”

“Shut
up,
Plum!” every single girl in earshot snaps simultaneously.

Small mercies,
I think, managing to smile.

“Go to your rooms, all of you,” Aunt Gwen says to us grimly. “We’ll talk about this in the morning. And if I hear one peep out of any of you …”

She doesn’t need to finish the sentence.

“I’m
so tired,
” I say as I push open the door to our room. “I could sleep for a
week
.”

There’s a piece of paper on the floor. It must have fallen there, knocked off the desk when Taylor and I were evacuating the room, bleary-eyed and stumbling. Automatically, I bend over to pick it up.

“What is it?” Taylor asks, seeing me stare down at it, unable to believe what I’m reading.

Silently, I hand it to her. It’s been torn from a notebook, white paper with faint gray lines making little boxes all over the background. Something about the paper’s very familiar, but I can’t access that memory right now, because I’m focusing on the thick black letters very carefully printed across the center of the page.

No
, I realize
. Not printed; stenciled.

Clever
.
You can’t trace handwriting from a stencil.

And it reads, in capital letters:

YOU CAN’T RUN AWAY FROM THE PAST, SCARLETT.

five
“IN AUSTRIA THERE ARE MANY PRINCESSES”

We’re all very, very subdued on the coach the next morning, for many reasons. Breakfast was delayed, to give us a chance to catch up on our sleep, but it turned out to be porridge, with a choice of raisins, golden syrup, jam, or stewed prunes. Very traditional and Scottish, and Miss Carter lectured us all about how porridge is the best way to start the day, but we’re not used to eating that heavily in the morning (some of us aren’t used to eating that many calories in a whole day), and now we’re all slumped in our tartan-upholstered seats in a carbohydrate coma.

And, of course, that wasn’t the only lecture we got this morning. Aunt Gwen, cold as an iceberg and much scarier, subjected us all to one of those “if the guilty party owns up now she will be dealt with leniently, but if she doesn’t you will all undergo horrible punishment” speeches that never,
ever,
result in one girl standing up bravely, her hand on her heart, and saying:

“It was me, Miss Wakefield! I cannot see my fellow students suffer for a crime I myself committed! Please—rain down whatever retribution you choose on me, but spare my innocent sisters!”

No one was idiot enough to confess to setting off the fire alarms and smoke bombs. So we’re all waiting for the axe of punishment to descend on our necks, which is never a pleasant feeling.

But it does bring us nicely to Mary, Queen of Scots, who only reigned in Scotland for about five years before fleeing to England because lots of sexist old Scottish noblemen didn’t like a woman being in charge of them and rose up against her. Then she was imprisoned by Elizabeth I and spent the next twenty years or so trying to escape, being moved around a series of castles, waiting for Elizabeth to decide she was too much trouble to keep alive, before having her head chopped off in 1587. With a sword, actually. Not an axe.

(We’re doing the Tudors for history A-level. And we’re on our way to Holyroodhouse, the Edinburgh royal palace, where poor old Mary lived most of the time when she was queen of Scotland.)

“I must say,” I observe to Taylor, who naturally is sitting next to me, “being a princess isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

Taylor raises an eyebrow.

“Who ever said it was?” she asks.

“Oh, I was desperate to be a princess when I was little!” I say, thinking of my obsession with the Little Mermaid and (God help me) Sleeping Beauty. “Isn’t everyone? But look at Princess Diana. And Mary, Queen of Scots. And Elizabeth the First—I mean, she was a great queen, but she couldn’t even get married because she didn’t trust a guy not to try to take over her throne.”

“I never wanted to be a princess,” Taylor says flatly. “I wanted to be SpongeBob SquarePants.” She considers for a moment. “Or Pippi Longstocking,” she adds. “She was cool.”

“I’m glad you identified with
one
girl,” I say, not entirely sure whether Taylor’s joking about SpongeBob. For an American, she has a really dry sense of humor.

“She was superstrong! And a pirate!” Taylor says. “Of course I liked her!”

“But they had fabulous dresses!” Lizzie’s head pops up above the back of the seat in front. As usual, she’s wearing a whole applicator pen’s worth of eyeliner. It doesn’t suit her, but it’s fashionable, and that’s all she cares about.

“SpongeBob SquarePants?” I ask, baffled. “Pippi Longstocking?”

“Princess Diana! Mary, Queen of Scots!”
Lizzie chants, her eyes bright. “And they had lots of lovers and they were really beautiful!”

“They had miserable lives and they died young,” Taylor says flatly.

Lizzie pouts.

“You ruin everything, Taylor,” she complains.

“In Austria,” Sophia von und zu Whatsit observes, popping her head up next to Lizzie’s, “there are many princesses, and some of them have very good lives.”

As always when Sophia says something, I have absolutely no idea how to reply. She can kill a conversation dead at thirty paces.

Even Lizzie, Little Miss Chatterbox, is slightly flummoxed by this one.

“Do you know any princesses?” she asks eventually.

“Oh yes,” Sophia says, her blue eyes opening wide like a really expensive doll’s. She could be a china doll in almost every respect, I think: golden curls, round face, perfectly smooth white skin, brains made of hardened ceramic. “They are often guests at my parents’
schloss,
” she continues.

“Your parents’
what
?” Taylor says incredulously.

“
Schloss!
It means ‘castle’ in German,” Sophia informs her as I stifle a giggle. I know it’s very immature of me to laugh at words in foreign languages, but there’s no denying that
schloss
sounds pretty silly to English ears.

“Wow,” Taylor says. “What’s the plural of that?”

“
Schlosser,
of course!” Sophia says quite seriously.

I gulp as hard as I can, pressing my lips tightly together, and stare out the window. The coach has been chugging up one of the steep inclines that seem to characterize Edinburgh, and now it’s diving down the other side, round a wide curve with a high, gracious crescent of houses on the right and a breathtaking view on the left: a drop that rises to rolling high hills beyond, grassy and green, the highest one peaked like a mountain, its top gray and craggy with stone outcroppings.

At least the talk about princesses and
schlosser
has distracted me for a little while from my speculation about who was behind last night’s drama. That note just confirmed my suspicion that the entire thing was staged to lure me into the stairwell and give someone a chance to push me over the rail, making it look as if I were injured in a freak accident while I was trying to escape from what we all thought was a burning building.

I say “injured,” but what I really mean is “killed.” Because I don’t know what my assailant meant to do to me—whether she really set out to kill me—but that was such a likely result of toppling me down the stairs that I shiver when I think about it. I have bruises on my arms where I whacked into the side of the staircase as a vivid reminder; not that I need one.

Someone has tried to kill me before. I’ve had a shotgun pointed at my face. But, weird though this sounds, that time it wasn’t personal. I wasn’t the intended target; I just got in the way.

This was personal. No question. That girl was calling my name. She knew exactly who she was shoving over that rail. And she wanted me to know she was nursing a huge grudge against me, a grudge that goes back into the past, because she left me a note to tell me so.

I shiver.

Alison? Luce? But this happened the very first night we found ourselves all staying at Fetters together. I refuse to believe that one of them has been traveling with firelighters and smoke bombs in her luggage for the past year, just in case she runs into me. Still, I suppose it’s by no means impossible that someone could have overheard Ms. Burton-Race at St. Tabby’s talking to another teacher about her plans to meet up with Miss Carter and the Wakefield Hall contingent in Edinburgh.…

Plum? I just don’t see Plum, with her smooth hands and French manicure, painstakingly collecting metal rubbish bins and lighting firelighters in them. Or, strangely, being able to disguise her voice enough to trick me: Plum is always so much herself I don’t believe she’d be capable of taking on another persona.

But I do believe that Plum would be able to talk or blackmail or bully someone else into doing it for her.

Then I wonder about Nadia. She’s shown herself to be much sneakier than either Taylor or I thought she was. But I can’t think of a motive for Nadia to go after me. Certainly nothing strong enough to make her want to see me badly injured. Or dead.

And so the spinning wheel of my thoughts returns to where it started: someone, last night, wanted to do me serious harm.

I just can’t think of one thing I’ve ever done in my life that was bad enough for anyone to want to kill me.

“
It is a house of many memories.… Wars have been plotted, dancing has lasted deep into the night, murder has been done in its chambers,”
Ms. Burton-Race intones into the coach microphone, making us all jump. “Robert Louis Stevenson wrote those words about Holyrood in his ‘Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes’ in 1878. So now let’s go and see the chamber where murder was committed for ourselves!
And
the bed slept in by Mary, Queen of Scots, plus the famous Darnley jewel!”

The coach is pulling up outside the golden-stone wall of what must be Holyroodhouse. And I have to give Ms. Burton-Race credit: I never had her for history at St. Tabby’s, but she certainly knows how to grab your attention and get you interested. The porridge-induced carb coma is forgotten; the girls pile out almost before we’ve come to a stop, eager to see where a murder happened. Plus, of course, anything to do with Mary, Queen of Scots. And jewelry.

Famous jewelry. That’s what’s got us moving. Ms. Burton-Race really does know sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls.

“It’s rather small for a palace, isn’t it?” Plum says disdainfully as we walk through the high stone gateway into the central quadrangle of Holyroodhouse, a huge green grass square. High, symmetrical windows run all around the encircling golden-gray stone walls; it’s beautiful, but you’d always feel watched. “I mean, I’ve
stayed
in ones that were much bigger.”

A couple of women who work here, bustling past in their neat uniforms, shoot Plum killing looks at this insult. But she’s oblivious, of course, as she is to pretty much anyone who has to work for a living.

“It is small, isn’t it?” Nadia agrees, tilting her head back to look as Ms. Burton-Race points out the royal coat of arms carved on the part of the facade that hosts the royal apartments. “It’s really more like a
stately home
.”

“They’re going to get stabbed,” Taylor hisses to me as a tour group of Scottish people on the other side of the quadrangle stare across at Plum and Nadia and then start talking to each other with a lot of shaking heads and pursed mouths of disapproval. It’s very unfortunate that both the girls have those high-pitched, clear, posh voices, which bounce around the stone walls, carrying their message of disdain to everyone within a hundred yards of them.

“ ‘Murder has been done in its chambers,’ ” I quote to Taylor cheerfully. “And if someone
does
stab Plum, I for one am not investigating that.”

“Jeez, no,” Taylor agrees. “They’d be doing the world a service.” She looks over at Plum and Nadia, who are rolling their eyes at each other, energized by having something to patronize. “Hey—did you know they were talking to each other again?” she asks me, frowning. “When did that happen?”

She’s absolutely right.

“Good point,” I say, thinking hard, as Ms. Burton-Race leads us inside the palace and immediately starts babbling enthusiastically about cantilevered stairs, fresco panels, and impressive plasterwork ceilings; there’s a gigantic oak staircase, wide enough to ride a horse up, wrapping round the walls, rising three stories high to a ceiling that looks like wedding cake icing gone completely mad.

I tune out Ms. Burton-Race’s commentary as we go up the stairs and into the royal apartments, that, of course, being the bit we’re here to goggle at. Taylor’s observation is bang-on: Plum and Nadia, as far as we know, are deadly enemies.

So why are they exchanging any kind of civil conversation, rather than scuttling around putting hair removal cream in each other’s shampoo or—more likely—planting drugs on each other someplace where a teacher’s bound to find it?

“This, of course, is the throne room,” Ms. Burton-Race says, leading us into a large, red-carpeted room with shiny wood-paneled walls hung with portraits and chandeliers. We all draw in our breaths with excitement and then let them out again in disappointment. I’ve never seen a throne room, but I was expecting something really majestic: a carved golden seat high up on a dais, a bit like the ones in the film
The Slipper and the Rose
(a musical about Cinderella that is my all-time-favorite guilty pleasure. Taylor totally doesn’t get it).

Instead, the thrones are smallish wooden seats, almost like folding chairs, upholstered in embroidered red velvet with golden tassels, low matching footstools placed in front of them. They’re barely even elevated, just placed in a small alcove at the far end of the room, up a couple of red-carpeted steps.

“Scottish people,” Taylor comments dryly, “aren’t exactly show-offs.”

“This is the official residence of the Queen when she comes to Scotland,” Ms. Burton-Race says loudly, sensing our feelings of anticlimax. “She has an annual garden party here each July. And Prince Charles is resident here for a week every year too.”

“Does that mean William and Harry have stayed here?” Lizzie says excitedly. “Oh my God! I
love
Harry!”

“How
can
you? He’s a
ginge
!” Plum says disdainfully, slanting her eyes over at redheaded Alison.

“Plum!” Ms. Burton-Race says angrily. “That is a
very
discriminatory way to refer to redheads!”