It's Murder at St. Basket's Read online

  She got up off the bed and began slugging him in the shoulder. “Don’t be rude, Leslie.”

  “Hey, stop it, Margaret.”

  “Don’t be rude anymore.”

  “Cut it out, Margaret,” I said. “I’m trying to worry about David.”

  She stopped and we sat and thought for a while. “Well, listen,” I said finally, “what about one of you calling up your parents and telling them?”

  “Oh, we couldn’t do that,” Margaret said. “Miss Grime would never let us phone.” There was Margaret being nice and blindly following the rules again. “Margaret,” I said, “can’t you understand that you don’t always have to do what people tell you?”

  “Surely everybody should have respect for the rules.”

  “In America the girls don’t always obey if they think the rule is wrong. In America the girls are just as rebellious as the boys.”

  “But this isn’t America,” she said.

  I couldn’t argue with that, and besides we had a more important thing to worry about, which was that it was against the rules to use the telephone.

  You weren’t allowed to call your parents unless it was an emergency, like somebody was dying. Of course, this was an emergency, but Miss Grime didn’t think so, and naturally she was the decider of emergencies. “We’d have to go down to South End Green and use the phone booth there.”

  “We’re not allowed to use call boxes, either.”

  Leslie and I groaned. “We know that, Margaret,” Leslie said.

  “I think you should call your father, Leslie,” I said.

  He frowned. “Actually, I don’t know what good my father could do. I don’t suppose he’d believe us in preference to Miss Grime.”

  “You’re his son,” I said. “If you really beg and insist, he’d believe you, wouldn’t he?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I should think he might.”

  I could see that Leslie didn’t really want to call his father. It was interfering with the bosses in the Establishment. “You sound like you’re scared to call up your own father, Plainfield.”

  He raised up one eyebrow. “Surely you’re joking, Quincy.”

  So that was decided. But it’s pretty easy to decide you’re going to do something, and not always so easy to actually do it. All around St. Basket’s are these typical red brick houses, mostly three or four stories high—the kind they have everywhere in Hampstead. Hampstead High Street, where the main part of Hampstead is, is about a mile away across a section of the Heath, but down at the bottom of the hill St. Basket’s is on there’s a kind of little shopping district called South End Green, where there’s the Hampstead Classic movie theatre, a few little restaurants, a couple of pubs and things like a newspaper store—which the English call a news agent’s—and a dress shop and so forth.

  There are also a couple of phone booths there, too, kind of like red sentry boxes. On Sunday afternoons, when we get to go out, we usually go down to South End Green and buy sweets, which is what the English call candy, or go into a tea shop for tea and some kind of cake. It sounds pretty boring, but when you’ve been cooped up in school all week it seems like an adventure.

  We hated to wait until Sunday to call Plainfìeld’s father. We didn’t know what kind of a mess David Choudhry might be in by that time. But there wasn’t anything else we could do.

  Saturday is a pretty good day around St. Basket’s. Sunday you have to get dressed up in your blazer and all that stuff, and walk up about a mile to church. It doesn’t matter what religion you belong to, or even if you’re religious at all, you have to go the Church of England, which is the official English religion.

  But on Saturday we didn’t have to do much, except, of course, clean up our rooms, which we never did anyway. So the first thing we did was bring David Choudhry some breakfast. Despite being in agony, he was pretty hungry, because he’d missed dinner the night before. Breakfast was the usual slop: two pieces of cold bacon, all the delicious ice cold toast you could eat, and a boiled egg. The English eat their eggs differently from us. They don’t dump it out into a dish, but they knock off the top of the shell and scoop out the bites with a tiny spoon. It takes about a year to eat an egg that way. You have to set it into a little egg cup so it stands up, and before I got the hang of it I kept knocking it over so that the yolk leaked all over the table. It wasn’t any great loss. You could always fill up on cold toast.

  Anyway, we skipped the egg and just brought David a pile of cold toast and some milk. Mrs. Rabbit said, “The lad is supposed to come to meals, not ‘ave ‘is meals come to ‘im,” but she didn’t really care.

  Then we sat around trying to figure out what to do. The leg was pretty swollen. First we discussed putting it in traction, which I knew how to do from my first aid course at the Y. Of course I’d never actually done it, but at least they’d told me how.

  “What’s traction, Quincy?’ David asked.

  “You sort of pull the leg out with a rope or something, and then tie it up in a splint so it heals right.”

  “Bloody hell,” David said.

  “I can’t help it, Choudhry, that’s what you have to do. That’s what the doctor would do.”

  “But he’d give me anesthetic first.”

  The next idea we had was to wrap it up with something. That was Margaret’s idea. “In battle pictures they always wrapped the legs of the wounded.”

  Leslie and I groaned. “Don’t be so stupid, Margaret,” Leslie said. “That’s to keep it from bleeding.”

  In the end, we didn’t do anything. Being swollen and all, it hurt a lot just when David had a sheet lying on it. He didn’t want anybody to touch it. “If I lie perfectly still and don’t move, it doesn’t hurt so much,” he said.

  So we put Margaret’s footstool down into the bed to make a kind of tent so the sheet would stay off his leg, gave him some more aspirin, and then Leslie and I went into the yard and kicked the football around— that’s soccer, remember—until we’d got pretty covered with mud. Everything gets pretty muddy in England during the winter, because the ground doesn’t freeze. You can get pretty slopped up playing football if you feel like it, and going to a place like St. Basket’s makes you feel like getting slopped up pretty often.

  At noon we fixed David some lunch, and just dribbled the day away doing nothing. He wasn’t feeling any better at suppertime, and because he hadn’t done anything to make him tired, he didn’t feel much like going to sleep at bedtime. We let him keep his light on so he could read. I woke up at one o’clock for some reason and he was still reading, but when Leslie and I got up in the morning he was asleep with his light still on and his hand still holding his book.

  The funny thing was, when we went to church Miss Grime didn’t say, “Where’s David Choudhry?” or anything like it at all. She just ignored the whole subject. And it made me feel that she knew more about what had happened to Choudhry than she was letting on. I mean, I didn’t guess that Jaggers told her he’d slugged David with the hockey stick; I didn’t think he would do that. But probably she had a pretty good idea of what had happened. And that confused me. Why not take Choudhry to see Corps-Deadly? I mean, what was the harm in that? She could always tell him that David had tripped or something when he was playing field hockey, and even if David said that Jaggers had hit him, nobody would believe him against Miss Grime. The whole thing didn’t make much sense. During church I kept puzzling over it, so that I missed most of what was going on, which wasn’t unusual for me, but I still couldn’t come up with anything.

  On Sunday, everybody in England has a big dinner of a roast, mashed potatoes and gravy and those pale white peas they like. Being big on traditions, we did it the same way at St. Basket’s, too. On account of the roast, the masters usually managed to put up with our table manners on Sunday, and all came streaming up from the Magdala—the Mag, they always called it—which was the pub they usually went to. Not that we wanted them there—they hogged the conversation and cut down on the bun t
hrowing.

  So there they were—Jaggers and Shrimpton and Monsieur Pué, the French master, and Forsythe Groin-Fortesque, the art master. Shrimpton made Plainfield say grace, and then we began belting away at the food. We always load up at dinner on Sunday, because Mrs. Rabbit is off Sunday afternoon and all we get for supper is a real tea—tea and bread and jam.

  When we put our heads up from grace Shrimpton looked around the table. “Where’s Choudhry?” he said.

  Nobody said anything. Jaggers just kept his face pointed down at his food and took a big mouthful of potatoes and gravy.

  “Quincy, you Yankee sod, dash upstairs and inform Choudhry that his presence is requested at dinner.”

  “He’s not feeling well, Sir.”

  “He’s not feeling well? He’ll be feeling a lot worse in a minute if he doesn’t bloody well get down here. Push off, Quin—”

  Groin-Fortesque nudged him in the ribs. Shrimpton looked around, puzzled. It was clear that nobody had clued him in. “What’s the matter with Choudhry?” he said. “If he’s ill, let’s have that senile fraud, Corps-Deadly, look at him. Although for myself I’d rather die than permit Corps-Deadly to practice medicine on me.”

  Nobody said anything. “Well?” he demanded.

  Suddenly I blurted out, “Sir, he’s got a broken—”

  “He’s got nothing of the kind,” Jaggers whipped in. He stared at me, his eyes narrowed and mean, and I knew he would have belted me half across the room if he’d dared. Then he made himself calm. “He sprained his ankle, Shrimpton. I’ve excused him from meals until it mends.”

  CHAPTER 5

  ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON we were allowed out from the end of dinner until five o’clock to see the sights of London. It gave us plenty of time to call Leslie’s father. London isn’t like New York or Chicago or, I guess, any other American cities, although I haven’t been to them. It’s made up of a lot of little sections all joined together. Once these sections were their own little towns, but London kept spreading out right over them, until they were all joined into one huge city. But they still kept the old names, so if you ask somebody where he lives he says Soho, which is where the artists go, or Camden Town, which is kind of a slum, and so forth. I mean, there aren’t any borders between these different sections of London or anything, but most of them have their sort of shopping district and main street—the high street, they call it—and I guess each section has its own special thing. At least, the people who live there like to think so, anyway.

  Actually, London is a pretty nice place in a lot of ways, if you discount the Limeys. Limey is an insulting term for an English person. It comes from limes, which English sailors used to eat to keep down the scurvy. The idea is that scurvy is caused by a vitamin deficiency, which the sailors got on long trips because all they ate was salt pork and hardtack. So finally somebody figured out about limes being full of vitamins, and the English got over the scurvy and went on to conquer the seas. I know that’s right, because if there’s anything you learn in England, it’s about limes and scurvy. The first thing that anybody thinks when they write a book on England is to put in about limes and scurvy. Naturally you get it in all your classes, too. I guess practically the first word an English kid learns how to spell is scurvy. They even put it into the math books: you know, if it takes seven bushels of limes to cure four sailors of scurvy, how many bushels does it take to cure sixty? As far as any English school is concerned, it doesn’t matter if you pass history or geography or anything else, so long as you pass limes and scurvy. It’s limes and scurvy that counts.

  Anyway, to get back on the track, London is really pretty nice to look at. There are parks everywhere, and because it rains a lot, the grass is fantastically green. The buildings are mostly low, so you don’t feel crowded in and you can get the sun, at least when it shines. It’s a heck of a lot cleaner than New York, too. There isn’t so much smog and people don’t fling papers and garbage on the streets the way they do in New York. Although the dogs are just as bad here.

  Because of the buildings being low, if you get up on a high place, like Parliament Hill, you can see for miles. It’s pretty terrific, I have to admit—at least when the weather is good.

  Actually, the weather in London isn’t as lousy as people say. It rains a lot, but the thing is that the rain is always very thin, so you don’t pay much attention to it, and go on with whatever you’re doing. Usually the sun comes out after a while, anyway.

  Hampstead, the part of London where St. Basket’s is, is pretty nice. There’s a big hill, which the main street goes up, and if you’ve heard about quaint little alleys, well, Hampstead has got them. Then there’s Hampstead Heath—the Heath, they just call it. It’s a great, huge place, miles big, partly park and fields and woods, and these huge lawns big as ten football fields, where lots of the schools go to play football. On our Sundays out, we spent a lot of time on the Heath. We didn’t have enough time to go anywhere else.

  Or money, either. In St. Basket’s prison you weren’t allowed to have your own money. They gave us each tenpence, which is worth about twenty-five American cents, although you can buy more with it. It wasn’t enough for the movies or anything, though. Mostly on Sundays we just wandered around for a while and then ended up spending our money for tea and cake. One time, though, Leslie found a pound lying in the street. A pound is worth about two dollars and a half. Margaret wanted us to spend it on the movies, but I felt like doing something bad for a change, so I talked Leslie into buying a bottle of sherry at an off-license, which is a liquor store. That cost most of the pound, and we gave Margaret the rest out of kindness; she spent it on candy, and we went up onto the Heath and hid in some bushes and drank the whole bottle of sherry. We all got drunk and threw up one at a time on the way home. The interesting thing was that as soon as Margaret got drunk on the sherry she stopped being nice. I mean, she was nice to us, but she began saying some pretty bad things about Miss Grime and St. Basket’s and a couple other of the masters, too; so I knew that there was still some hope I could teach her to be more rebellious if I kept after it. She felt terrifically embarrassed and stayed in bed all day Monday on some excuse, but I was glad we’d done it, at least, after I got over feeling guilty the next day and stopped promising myself I’d never do anything bad again.

  Anyway, at two-thirty we tore out through the gate, and down Parliament Hill Road to South End Green. It felt pretty good to get out, but we were worried about what Plainfìeld’s father would say, and we wanted to get that over with. There’s a kind of little cement park in the middle of South End Green, with a couple of trees in it and some benches. That’s where the phone booths are. We started to cross over to it, when we realized we needed change for the phones, so we went into the news agent’s, and milled around there for a few minutes trying to decide what to buy to get some change. In the end we settled on some cheap sourballs, and got our change and went out.

  Jaggers was standing across the street in front of a pub called the Railroad Tavern, staring at us. He had his hands behind his back in a sort of casual way, as if he was waiting for somebody, and he just stared, not trying to cover it up that he was watching us or anything. We stood looking at him, feeling sort of confused. Finally I said, “Start eating our sweets and pretend we’re walking up to the Heath.”

  So we turned and began walking slowly along South End Green Road, which leads to a part of the Heath where there are duck ponds, a kind of normal place for us to go. I wanted to know what Jaggers was doing, but we couldn’t look back. It was a problem all right: if he saw us going into a phone booth he could just stop us, because it wasn’t allowed. We walked along a little bit, and then I said in a low voice, “Stop at the next corner and pretend we’re arguing about which way to go.” We got to the corner and stopped, and I pointed up one street and Leslie pointed the other, and I kind of maneuvered myself around so I was facing back down toward where we’d come from.

  Jaggers was over on our side of the street. He was standing
in front of a little hardware store, but he wasn’t even bothering to pretend he was looking in the window. Instead, he was just staring toward us, his hands still behind his back, just as casual and cool as could be.

  “He’s following us,” I said.

  “I’m worried,” Margaret said. “He might try to hurt us.”

  “Shut up, Margaret,” Leslie said.

  I was beginning to get a plan. “There are call boxes up on Hampstead High Street, aren’t there?”

  “There are lots up there,” Leslie said.

  “All right, let’s just go on walking up toward the Heath and I’ll tell you my plan.” My idea was this. At the beginning of the Heath there’s kind of a parking lot and an open field and then there are these two ponds. Between them is a kind of dam, with a gravel pathway across it, where there are always lots of people fishing, and beyond that are some woods with paths in it, and then past that is the famous Parliament Hill, which is always pretty crowded on Sundays.

  My idea was that when we got out into the middle of the field, Leslie and I would get down our knees, as if we were starting a race, Margaret would suddenly say go, and we’d race off toward the ponds. When we got across the dam into the woods, Leslie would veer off on a side path, and cut across the Heath higher up to Hampstead High Street. Meanwhile, Margaret would just come trotting slowly along so Jaggers could see where she was going. She’d join up with me, and we’d go on up to Parliament Hill and hang around up there.

  “Not half bad,” Leslie said.

  “I’m scared to do it,” Margaret said. “He might overtake me and bash me the way he did David.”

  “Don’t be a bloody ass, Margaret,” Leslie said. “There are thousands of people all over the Heath. He isn’t going to bash anybody.”

  “Don’t call me a bloody ass, Leslie, I won’t have it.”

  “Don’t have it, then.”

  “For God’s sake,” I said, “will you two stop arguing all the time?”

  “You argue, Quincy,” Margaret said.