Murder Has No Class (2 page)

Meredith narrowed her eyes and reminded herself that as a lady and a representative of authority it was imperative to hold her temper. “May I ask what you were doing in the building at that late hour? Your duties are supposed to be completed by seven o’clock.”

Roger nodded, his gaze flicking across her face, presumably to gauge her reaction to his tale. “I had trouble balancing the ledgers and had stayed late to finish them.” He tried a wobbly smile. “I thought that’s what you would want me to do.”

Aware that she was losing this particular battle only intensified Meredith’s frustration. She was certain that Roger Platt had been engaging in indiscreet behavior with Sophie Westchester, who was no angel herself.

Meredith was just as convinced that Roger knew that she knew, and was congratulating himself on having evaded a reprimand. Nevertheless, she could hardly accuse the young man of lying without some kind of evidence.

Eying him with as much menace as possible, she leaned forward to emphasize her unspoken warning. “I assume the lady in question will confirm your story?”

To her annoyance, Roger smiled with a little more enthusiasm. “I’m quite sure she will, Mrs. Llewellyn.”

About to inform him of the consequences should he be lying, she opened her mouth to speak. At that moment, however, something in the corner of the room caught her attention. Over by the filing cabinet she could see something glowing.

For a shocked moment she thought something was on fire as the misty patch of light deepened to a bright red, then flickered and faded to a pale pink. Just as she was about to point it out to Roger, it gradually dwindled away, leaving only the dark shadows in the corner of the room.

Shaken, Meredith stared at the empty space for several moments, until Roger’s sharp voice jerked her back.

“Is something wrong?” He turned his head to follow her gaze, his face registering confusion.

“No, of course not.” She backed away, one hand reaching for the door. “I thought I saw a mouse, that’s all. I’ll have to ask the maintenance man to set a trap. Reggie Tupper is very good at trapping mice.”

“A cat,” Roger announced, sounding insufferably smug.

“I beg your pardon?”

“A cat, that’s what you need. That’s what will get rid of them. We had three cats in the orphanage where I grew up. Overrun with mice there, we were.”

“Oh, dear.” Meredith’s hand touched the door and she grabbed the edge of it for support. “Yes, well, carry on, Mr. Platt. I will need all those accounts reconciled by this afternoon.”

“Yes, m’m.” Roger nodded and smiled, his brown eyes simmering with relief.

Meredith stepped out into the hallway and snapped the door shut with a little more force than she’d intended. Taking a deep breath, she focused on recovering her composure.

Her mind playing tricks, that’s all it was. Just because she’d been visited by a couple of ghosts in the past, it didn’t mean—it
couldn’t
mean—yet another apparition was hovering nearby, waiting to seek her help. It had been five months since the last encounter. She had just about convinced herself that her strange and unpredictable ability to see and communicate with departed beings was no longer in demand.

Giving herself a mental shake, she hurried down the hallway to her classroom. There was no time to worry about it now. She had twelve young ladies to instruct in the art of clay sculpture and she simply could not waste her precious time on what could well be a figment of her imagination.

 

 

Grace Parker picked up a fork and examined it with a critical eye. “This one’s got egg on it,” she announced. “You didn’t wash it properly.”

Standing at the sink, Olivia Bunting grunted. “Just go ahead and polish it. No one will ever notice.”

“Mrs. Wilkins will notice.”

“No, she won’t. We’ll have it out on the tables in the dining room before she gets back.”

Grace spat on the fork and rubbed it with a corner of her apron. “Where is she, anyhow?”

“She’s upstairs in Mona Fingle’s office, going over the weekly menus.” Olivia lifted a pile of silverware out of the soapy water and dumped it on the draining board. “I don’t know why she bothers. What the heck does Mona know about cooking, anyway?”

“Well, she
is
the housekeeper, after all. It’s her job to decide what to put on the menus.”

“Yeah, but Wilky’s the cook, and she knows what the girls like to eat.”

Grace examined the fork once more, then smeared silver polish over the egg-stained prongs. “And all we are is the housemaids, so we have to mind our own blinking business, don’t we.”

Olivia spun around, one dripping hand tucking stray dark hairs under her cap. “Gawd, hark at you. We’re not just housemaids, we’re suffragettes, so there.”

Grace laid the fork on the tray next to its gleaming companions and picked up another one from the pile waiting to be polished. “Fat lot of good that does us. We get into trouble every time we get anywhere near them suffragettes. Look what happened when we went to that protest with Christabel Pankhurst. You almost got thrown into prison and I had to come and rescue you.”

Olivia grinned. “Yeah, that was a lot of fun.”

“Fun?”
Grace shook the fork at her. “It wouldn’t have been so much fun if you’d been shoved in prison.”

Turning back to the sink, Olivia shrugged. “Well, I didn’t get shoved into prison, so there’s no need to get all stirred up about it, is there.”

Grace sighed. Sometimes she wondered why she paid attention to Olivia and her wild ideas. So far they’d been lucky, and although they had come close to being sacked by Mona, Mrs. Wilkins had come to their rescue and saved their jobs. Though they’d given up far too many of their precious days off as punishment for their escapades.

“Anyhow,” Olivia said, her voice muffled by the clinking of silverware in the sink, “this time I’ve got a better idea.”

Grace felt a pang of dismay. “Not again. After the last time I told you I wasn’t going on any more protests.”

Olivia dropped the last pile of wet silverware on the draining board, and wiped her hands on her apron. “The reason we got into trouble before was because we were with the WSPU. There was a lot of suffragettes there so they got a lot of attention from the bobbies.”

“I thought that was the idea.”

Olivia shook her head, dislodging her hair once more. She shoved it back with an impatient hand. “Well, I know that, but what if we organized our own protest, on a much smaller scale? We’d still be doing our part for the women’s movement, and if we do it in the village instead of in Witcheston, there’ll only be one bobby to stop us.”

Grace looked at her in horror. “A protest in Crickling Green? You must be mad. Everyone in the village knows us.”

“They won’t see us in the crowd.”

“What crowd? Where are we going to get a crowd of suffragettes who’ll come to the village to protest? Besides, I thought you said you didn’t want to use the WSPU.”

“I don’t.” Olivia looked awfully pleased with herself. “We’ll get
our
girls to do it with us.”

For a long moment Grace stared at her. “
Our
girls?”

Olivia nodded. “The students of Bellehaven.”

“Now I know you’ve gone bonkers.”

“Why?”

“For one thing, they won’t do it.”

“Course they will. They’ll do anything for a bit of excitement.”

“Well, if they do, they could be expelled.”

“Nah.” Olivia picked up the silverware from the draining board and carried it across the kitchen to the table. “They would have to catch us first, and like I said, there’s only one bobby in Crickling Green and he’s not too swift in the head.”

“P.C. Shipham can be really nasty when he’s cross.”

“Yeah, well, like I said, he’s got to catch us first.”

Grace fought back a sense of panic. This was a bad idea, she could feel it in her bones. She knew Olivia, though. Once her friend made up her mind there was no changing it.

As if reading her thoughts, Olivia fixed her with a determined stare. “You’re not going to let me down now, are you?”

Grace slowly shook her head. Olivia was not only her best friend, she was her only friend. That relationship rested on Olivia’s expectations of complete and unconditional loyalty. Do what Olivia wanted, or bugger off.

As always, Grace chose the friendship over good sense. “No,” she said, with a quiver of apprehension, “but I don’t have to like it.”

“Oh, come on, don’t be such a scaredy-cat. It’s going to be fun.”

Grace had to wonder how many more days off she’d lose to Olivia’s idea of fun. “Where are we going to hold the protest? We don’t have no town hall in the village.”

“No, but we have a pub.” Olivia’s smile was triumphant. “Just think about it. All those old geezers sipping beer in the public bar, telling us we’re not allowed in there. Blinking nerve of ’em. Who are they to tell us where we can and can’t go?” She flung out an arm in a dramatic gesture of defiance. “We’ll show ’em. I can just see their faces when we all march in there.” She started pumping her arm up and down. “We want the vote! We want the vote! Equal rights for women! We want the vote!”

Grace stared down at the fork in her hand. Disaster. That’s what this latest daft idea would bring. She could feel it in her bones.

 

 

All through her instruction that morning Meredith found herself glancing into the corners of the room, half expecting to see the red glow appear again. When the bell rang for the end of morning class with nothing untoward happening, she breathed a sigh of relief. She must have imagined it after all. No doubt brought on by the stress of Roger Platt’s unquenchable thirst for inappropriate female companionship.

The midday meal, as always, was a noisy affair. Each of the four tutors sat at the head of the long dining tables attempting to keep order, which was often a thankless and fruitless task. Many of Bellehaven’s pupils were head-strong, displaying a firm preference for the activities of militant suffragettes instead of learning how to conduct themselves with proper decorum.

Felicity Cross, the spirited, outspoken tutor of languages and literature, always with a heavy dash of modern day politics thrown in, had raised her voice and could be heard above the din admonishing her rowdy students with dire threats and warnings, most of which were blithely ignored.

Esmeralda Pickard, on the other hand, fair of face and delicate as a newly formed rose, seemed to have her students mesmerized as she addressed them in her soft voice. Essie, as everyone called her, was a firm believer in teaching by example.

Do as I say and as I do, was her motto.

The youngest of the tutors, and not too intellectual by academic standards, she had grown up in an elite environment and was well equipped to instruct the young ladies in the finer points of etiquette and social behavior. Being the closest in age to the young women in her charge, she enjoyed an affiliation with her students not shared by the other tutors.

The fourth tutor and home management expert, Sylvia Montrose, had been handpicked by Stuart Hamilton, and had immediately drawn battle lines between herself and Felicity. The language teacher, in Sylvia’s biased opinion, was contributing to the delinquency of her pupils by encouraging them to follow the dictates of the Women’s Social and Political Union, instead of teaching them how to become refined, dutiful wives, successful socialites, and a credit to their future husbands.

Meredith did not care for Sylvia’s methods or her attitude. She refused to admit, even to herself, that her disapproval might just be due to a touch of jealousy. Sylvia’s strawberry blond hair, green eyes, and girlish figure certainly seemed to capture Stuart Hamilton’s attention. Not, of course, that it mattered to Meredith one whit upon whom the owner lavished his regard.

Today, however, she was not thinking about Stuart Hamilton or his misguided affections. The memory of the red glow kept popping into her mind, and now she couldn’t wait until she could adjourn to the teacher’s lounge and share her concerns with her two best friends.

Chapter 2

The long mealtime eventually came to an end. With a sense of urgency now, Meredith dismissed the girls at her table and followed them out into the corridor. Felicity was several steps ahead of her, and paused to allow her to catch up.

“What bee have you got in your bonnet today?” she demanded, her rasping voice carrying down the hallway as always. “I could see the lines in your forehead from across the room.”

Meredith shook her head. “Not now. Let’s wait until we are in the lounge.”

Felicity’s eyes lit up. “Something juicy?”

Meredith had to smile. “You are incorrigible, Felicity. Always thinking the worst.”

Her comment drew a grin from her friend. “That’s the only kind of news that’s exciting.”

Raised voices farther down the corridor wiped Felicity’s grin from her face. Striding forward, she reached a group of students, two of whom were waving arms and spitting words at each other.