It's Murder at St. Basket's (3 page)

Actually, I didn't really think that David was going to die, but it struck me in the back of
my
mind that he might; so after I realized it was up to me to tell Miss Grime, I left Margaret's room and went across the hall to the dorm where David and Leslie and I lived.

David was lying on his bed, propped up with a pillow. David still had his uniform on, but he'd pulled down the sock on his right leg. He looked pretty bad—all pale and sweaty.

“Does it still hurt?” I asked.

“It hurts awfully,” he said. “Sometimes it goes away for a few secs, but then it comes back again.”

“It looks pretty swollen up,” I said.

“Don't touch it,” he said.

I wished there was something I could do to make it stop hurting. “Do you think it's broken?”

“I never had a broken leg before. All I know is it bloody well hurts.”

“Maybe I could get you some aspirins or something,” I said.

“Do you think they might help?”

“I don't know,” I said. “It says in the ads that they're pain relievers. I don't know if I believe that. We could try it, though.”

“All right,” he said.

“Maybe it'll be better in the morning. Maybe it's just a bad bruise.”

“I don't think so,” he said. “It hurts more than a bruise. He really bashed me.”

“You could hear it crack,” I said. “Well, the thing is, Leslie and Margaret and I talked it over, and we decided somebody has to tell Miss Grime.”

“She won't care. She hates me because I'm a Pakistani. I'm only here because my father's got the lolly.” David's grandfather was some kind of rich Indian prince before they divided the country into India and Pakistan. David's mother is actually English, which is why he's got the name of David for a first name. His parents live in Paris.

“She doesn't like me, either,” I said. I got tired of standing up. I didn't want to sit down on his bed because I might jiggle his leg, so I looked around to see whose chair had the least amount of junk on it. The dorm where Plainfield and David and I live is the old billiard room, from when the house was a mansion. It's up on the fourth floor—just one room with a little old beat-up bed for each of us, and three bureaus and three kinds of wardrobes where we're supposed to hang our clothes. Actually, we don't hang them up too much. We keep the place
pretty
messy with clothes and books and papers and stuff junked around. Usually there's a soccer football under the bed along with the dust, and a lot of toy soldiers set up someplace. Leslie's got a hobby of toy soldiers, all painted with special colors of the various British regiments.

The room isn't too small, but it's pretty crowded due to the way we've got it junked up. There's a fireplace, with a gas heater in it, but of course you don't get to turn it on except when it snows, which is mostly never. Actually, we're supposed to keep the place spick and span.

Old Shrimpton is supposed to come up and inspect every morning and chew us out if there's the least piece of dust on the floor. At the beginning of the year he did it for about a week, but he's pretty lazy, and now he doesn't come up more than about once a month. He'll say, “Come on, chaps, this is simply impossible. Get a move on. Let's get on with it now, Quincy, this isn't your American pigsty, you know, in England we don't just toss our things about.” Of course, in England they
did
toss their things about—Leslie was worse than me about hanging up his clothes—but we'd slop around hanging things up until Shrimpton went away again, and that was about all the cleaning we did.

Finally I decided that David's chair had less junk on it than anybody's, so I flung it all on Leslie's bed and sat down. “Listen, David, what exactly did Jaggers tell you?”

“You know he came up just before you did?”

“He did?” I was surprised at that.

“He pulled down my sock and looked at my leg. He said, ‘There was no need for all that bloody row, Choudhry, it's just a bruise. Fell down on it the wrong way, I can tell. If you silly sods would pay attention to what I tell you, things like this wouldn't happen.”

“What did you say?” I asked.

“I told him I thought it was broken and I wanted to see the doctor. He began raging at that. He said we couldn't bother the doctor over every little scratch, it was time I learned to bear up. I'd been living too soft and the rest of that rot he's always flogging about us not being able to stand a little punishment.”

Suddenly he stopped talking and sort of shuddered and sucked in a quick breath and closed his eyes. I knew it was hurting badly and he was trying not to moan or cry. It made me feel awful to see him like that. “Listen, David, we're going to
make
Miss Grime get a doctor.”

CHAPTER
3

S
T
. B
ASKET
'
S IS
in an old mansion that got turned into a school about a hundred years ago. It's older than that because of being founded by Henry the Eighth or whoever it was, but they've only been in this building for around a hundred years. It's a four-story brick building. Down in the basement there's the kitchen and dining room, and a couple of classrooms, and more classrooms on the ground floor. On the next floor classrooms too, but mostly the apartment of Mr. and Miss Grime, who run the school. Then on the third floor there are rooms for a few of the masters, which is what they call the teachers. And on the top floor, some dorms for us boarders. There are only four of us. Most of the kids just come during the day.

In front of the school there's a little lawn and some bushes, but out back there's a pretty big field where we can play athletics—games, the English call them. There's a high, red brick wall surrounding everything, with two gates in it. The front gate opens onto Tanza Road, and the back one opens onto Hampstead Heath, which begins right behind the back wall.

Those extensive stables that got my father all excited are part of the back wall. They probably were terrific once, but there aren't any horses in them now. They're just used for storage, so, as you can see, I'm not learning how to ride a horse.

In general, I guess you could say everything about St. Basket's is pretty old and beat up. The math book we have in the third form came out in 1927. Form is what the English have instead of grades. Third form is equal to the eighth grade. I guess it doesn't matter too much about the math book, though arithmetic has changed, but the history book came out in 1936, so as far as St. Basket's is concerned, the world came to an end in that year. Which suits them, I guess, because in 1936 England was still ruler of the seas.

They don't waste any money on heat, either. You see, they have the idea that it never gets cold in London except when it actually goes below freezing, so most of the time the radiators are stone cold, and the kids come to class all huddled up with sweaters on under their blazers, and mufflers—that's scarves—around their necks. Sometimes you can actually see your breath—I'm not kidding, you can.

Another thing they don't waste any money on at St. Basket's is food. For all I know, our fat cook, Mrs. Rabbit, may be terrific, but you can't tell because we get mostly the same slop all
the
time. She says, “Before the war, we ‘ad lovely things to cook—roast venison and cakes with ever so many eggs, but it's all too dear nowadays. Poor Mrs. Rabbit.” But I can understand why she's so fat—mostly what we eat is starches and sweets. You don't see too many vegetables around. We get a lot of things like shepherd's pie. Another one they have is baked beans on toast. A big one is bangers and mash. Bangers are these fat sausages they have, and mash is mashed potatoes. Dessert is usually rice pudding or custard pudding, which is cake with custard sauce dumped over it. For breakfast, it's cold cereal and cold toast with marmalade. The toast must have been hot once, otherwise it wouldn't have got toasted, but to make sure that it's cold and stiff when you eat it they let it stand around in a little rack for a while before they serve it. The only thing they have for it is orange marmalade. Being cold, the toast always smashes up when you spread anything on it, anyway.

But the main thing wrong with St. Basket's is that it's a prison. You're hardly allowed to do anything without asking, and usually they say no, anyway. They don't bother to give you a reason, either. “We don't do things that way at St. Basket's,” is all the reason you ever get. You can't use the telephone unless there's an emergency; in fact, you're not supposed to use a pay phone or anything when you're away from the school, except, of course, on your vacation. But that doesn't matter much, because you're hardly ever away from school. Us boarders are not allowed to leave the grounds without permission. Of course, sometimes we go to another school to play them in football—that's what we call soccer. Then on Sunday we go to church. But the only real time we're allowed off is a couple of hours Sunday afternoon. I'm not kidding when I say it's a prison.

The floors all creak and the doors squeak and the desks have names carved in them with dates like 1872. In the United States, the parents would come charging around and make them get new books and more vitamins, but English parents don't mind. In fact, they like it that way. The idea of an English school is that if it doesn't hurt you it isn't good for you.

What saved it was David Choudhry and Leslie Plainfield. The rest of the kids were day boys and girls, that is, they went home after school. But Choudhry and Plainfield and me and Margaret Fallows were boarders.

After I left David I went down to the dining room for supper. Actually they call it tea—in England anything that comes between five and seven at night is tea, even if it's a banquet—but actually it was plain old supper.

The
dining room being in the basement, the windows are up high. Over on one side there's a little counter across the kitchen door where Mrs. Rabbit serves the meals. At lunchtime, when the day kids are there, the room is pretty full, and Mrs. Rabbit grunts and shouts, “Come along, boy,” and sweats into your food if you're not lucky, but in the evening the four of us just sit at one table and relax.

The masters ate at seven-thirty, and Mr. and Miss Grime ate at eight o'clock all by themselves in their suite on the second floor. Actually the masters were supposed to take turns eating with us and watch over our table manners, but they didn't because they couldn't stand the way we ate. Shrimpton always said, “One would go mad if one had to watch you wallow in the trough every evening. Table manners are not expected of Quincy, of course, one does not look for that kind of thing in Americans, but I am shocked at the rest of you.” Of course, he was wrong about that, too. English kids are great on heaving food around the place. You know, snapping peas on their spoons or scaling buttered bread at somebody. At lunchtime, when the day kids are there, there are always a few buns flying through the air. Leslie figures a meal doesn't really count unless he's flung a couple of buns or catapulted a few peas at somebody.

Margaret and Plainfield were already there, jamming home the evening's delicacy, which was the usual slop, bangers and mash and some peas that had been cooked for a few days and were practically white. Mrs. Rabbit was smart: she always quickly piled on the gravy before you got a look at the food, and if you washed it down with a lot of milk, you usually could ram home seconds.

“How's Choudhry?” Leslie said.

“Pretty bad. If you want to know what I think, Jaggers really broke his leg.”

“Surely Miss Grime will call Dr. Corps-Deadly,” Margaret said.

“Well, she won't if she doesn't think there's anything really wrong with him. She hates to spend the money.”

“Can't she put it on the National Health?” Margaret said. They have this free medical service in England.

“She can't,” Leslie said. “You can only do that with people, not with schools.”

“Oh,” Margaret said.

We sat thinking for a while, and jamming home the food. Finally Leslie said, “It's up to you, Quincy.”

“
It's best to see Miss Grime when she's having her sherry,” Margaret said. “That's what I did when I wanted extra days at Bank Holiday to go to Paris with Mummy, and it worked.”

“That's the best idea,” Leslie said. It was known in school that Mr. and Miss Grime always had a glass of sherry before their dinner, and it was the best time to ask them a favor. I guess the kids had been passing the word down for years and years. So I would have to see them between seven and eight, and it was almost seven already. It gave me a sinking feeling to have it so close.

By the time I got to my seconds Leslie and Margaret were finishing their rice puddings, and then they excused themselves and went off upstairs to play snap, which is an English card game. I went over to the counter to get my pudding from Mrs. Rabbit.

“Where's David Choudhry?” she asked.

“He got hurt,” I said. “He doesn't feel like eating.”

“‘E's supposed to eat whether ‘e feels like it or not. What's ‘e think this is, a ‘otel?”

“Well, actually, he can't walk.”

“‘E should see Corps-Deadly, if ‘e's sick, innit?”

“That's what I think,” I said. “Only Jaggers won't call him.”

She closed one eye to squint at me, and then opened it again. “Well, it isn't none of my business. If I was you, though, I'd get the lad a doctor. Rice pudding?”

“Yes, please,” I said.

“I expect yer'll want to tyke somefing up to ‘im?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Poor Mrs. Rabbit,” she said. “Special dinners now, innit.” She let out a big sigh. “I'll leave ‘im a samwidge an' a pot o' tea.”