“About Brazenose—” I reminded her. “Feed me the facts.”
“I saw her last night.”
She paused to let the effect of her words sink in.
“Saw her? I thought she disappeared? I thought Miss Fawlthorne—or someone—murdered her. I thought she was dead.”
“So did I,” Scarlett said. “And so did everyone else.”
For a few seconds, my mind felt like one of those fence posts you see in the news photos: posts impaled by flying straws in a tornado as easily as if they were pincushions—the sheer power of the impossible.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Of course I’m sure,” Scarlett said, giving me the ghost of a dirty look. “I’d know her anywhere.” She said this with such certainty that I knew she was speaking the truth.
“Where was this?” I asked. “And when?”
“Last night. Just after study. She was coming out of the laundry.”
Good lord! This was like something out of one of Daffy’s Victorian chillers, The Lady in White or something—the specter briefly glimpsed which then promptly vanishes.
I seized Scarlett’s wrist and stopped her dabbing at my forehead, an action which had now become so mechanical that it seemed more likely to attract attention than to deflect it.
“Tell me,” I said. “From the beginning. Don’t leave anything out.”
Fifty yards away, the two groups of girls had combined into one, and having filled in the corrupted condensation pit, were now, under Jumbo’s supervision, rather lethargically digging another.
At the top of the embankment, Miss Moate had vanished from sight.
“It was just getting dark,” Scarlett said. “I remembered I had left my hockey stick in the grass behind the net. Miss Puddicombe would be furious if I let it warp.”
The very thought of the hatchet-faced games mistress made me shiver, in spite of the sunshine, which was now creeping under the tree as if to be with us.
“I had just come back across the field and was going round that bit of wall that sticks out beside the laundry, when the door opened. It was just dark enough that I saw the light thrown out onto the gravel path—and someone’s shadow. I ducked back before she could see me. But it was Clarissa Brazenose—I’m sure of it.”
“How could you tell, if she was no more than a silhouette?”
“I’d know her anywhere,” Scarlett said. “Besides, she turned toward the light as she turned to switch it off, and I had a good look at her face. Honest.”
Scarlett scratched a cross-my-heart promise on her blouse, and I believed her.
“And then?”
“She hurried round the laundry and into that little stone passageway beside the kitchen. It goes clear through to the street.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. “Did you follow her?”
“Of course I didn’t!” Scarlett scoffed. “I didn’t want to be caught, remember? Besides, I was petrified. I thought I’d seen a ghost.”
Here it was: ghosts again. The haunted convent.
“Do ghosts switch off lights behind themselves?” I asked. “Do they even need to turn them on?”
“Ha ha! Very clever, Miss Flavia de Luce. I told you this because your mother was supposedly such a brain. I thought you might be, too, but I can see that I was wrong. I wasn’t expecting you to poke fun at me.”
“I’m not poking fun,” I reassured her. “I was merely thinking aloud. Don’t be so touchy—I’m trying to help.”
We were silent for a moment, each of us licking her invisible wounds. On the one hand, I did not like having Harriet slighted—not even obliquely—but on the other, I could sympathize with Scarlett, who, like me, had probably been bundled up and shipped off to school without so much as a “Fare-thee-well-and-mind-the-flypaper.”
We were a couple of tender souls tossed together into a cement mixer.
“Look,” I said, taking a chance and hoping I wouldn’t regret it later. “We’re a team, you and I.”
I thought, just for an instant, of my other so-called partner, Adam Sowerby, even though I had never actually agreed verbally to a partnership with him. Adam was too secretive and, let’s face it, too old to be trusted fully. At
this very moment, he would be poking round some moldy, ivied ruin of an English castle pretending to be searching for seeds, yet all the while prying into Lord Somebody-or-another’s activities during the war, and all for some dark master whose identity he refused to reveal, even though it could well be, in fact, my own aunt Felicity.
Complicated?
I should say so. Just the thought of it drove me crazy.
Scarlett did not reply. But what she did was this: She reached for my hand and gave it a coded squeeze: one … two … (pause) … three … just like that.
And so the deal was sealed.
“Now, then,” I said. “About Clarissa Brazenose—when did you see her last? Apart from last night, I mean.”
“It was the night of the Beaux Arts Ball, so it must have been June, the year before last. I’m quite sure of that because I was wearing my Cinderella dress with short sleeves and long gloves. I remember thinking how odd I must look creeping round the hockey pitch in that getup. Not that many people would see me, of course—not with the ball going on, and not with it being after dark. It must have been well after nine: twenty past, perhaps.”
“The Beaux Arts Ball?” I asked.
“It’s a tradition. Everyone comes to it. Faculty, staff, students, the board of guardians. Even some of the parents come as chaperones. They hand out prizes for deportment and stuff like that. I got one for washing and ironing.”
“You’re joking.”
“No, I’m not. I’ll show it to you some time if you don’t believe me. It’s a little silver-plated mangle.”
“Thank you, but no,” I said. “I’ll take your word for it. Do you mean you saw Brazenose at the same spot last night as you did two years ago, just before she vanished?”
Scarlett nodded, biting her lower lip.
“But listen—why would Brazenose be in the laundry after dark? Two years ago, I mean. Why wasn’t she at the ball?”
Scarlett shrugged. “Brazenose was a sixth-former and she’d been here for donkey’s. She must have been sixteen. She could pretty well do as she liked as long as she didn’t attract too much attention.”
“Hmm,” I said, my mind milling the possibilities. One would not ordinarily go to a laundry after dark. If one did, it would almost certainly be to pick up some piece of clothing that had been forgotten: an item that had not been retrieved during normal working hours; one that had been suddenly, and perhaps unexpectedly, required. Perhaps something had happened that made Brazenose want to run away.
But would a girl of sixteen, who had been at the school for ages, be likely to do that? Not unless something unthinkable had happened.
Perhaps she had gone to the laundry, not to pick something up, but to drop something off. But what could be so urgent that she couldn’t leave it in her room until the next day?
“What day of the week was the ball held?” I asked.
“Saturday. It’s always on a Saturday.”
The laundry would almost certainly have been locked up for the weekend, which made it even more strange. Could it be that Brazenose had crept off from the Beaux Arts Ball to meet someone?
And why the laundry? Why not the common room—or the great hall, or any of the dozens of other places where two could talk without fear of interruption?
“Did Brazenose have any particular friends?” I asked.
“No,” Scarlett said. “She was rotten popular. She played badminton, squash, and tennis. She bicycled, knitted, sewed, sketched, and painted with watercolors. She was a member of the drama club and the debating society, and she was the editor of The New Broom—that’s our school newspaper.”
Was I detecting a note of resentment in Scarlett’s words? And I couldn’t help but notice her repeated use of the past tense. But perhaps that was unavoidable when referring to someone who hadn’t been seen for more than two years.
“How did you feel about her?” I asked. Daffy would have been proud of me. It was the kind of bear-trap question that her beloved Sigmund Freud would have asked.
“She was all right, I suppose,” Scarlett said. “She made the rest of us look bad, though.”