The Case of the Blue Violet: A Murder Most Unladylike Mini Mystery Read Online Free

her was the smile at one side of her mouth. It never went away, and it was not a very nice smile. It looked as though she was remembering something nasty about you, and deciding whether or not to say it aloud. That smile was the truth about her, for Elizabeth was in the business of secrets.
    That makes her sound somewhat like Daisy – but while Daisy likes to know things just for the pleasure of it, to make things fit in her head, Elizabeth
used
the things she knew. Just like a cat snatching little birds out of their nests, she took all the information she could find about each girl at Deepdean, and kept it. And she didn’t simply use the information she gathered – or at least, not immediately. Instead, she would store it up like a present for the day when it would become useful to her. And when it did – well, then you would be ruined.
    There had been one girl, Nina Lamont, generally thought to be the front runner for the Head Girl position – until Elizabeth was seen paying Miss Barnard a visit one morning, looking very grave. Later that day it came out that Nina had stolen from the Benefactors’ Fund. And after that no one could vote for her at all. She did not even come back to Deepdean this year. Apparently, she had been sent to prison – although Daisy said that this was not true, and that it was only to a school in France.
    Elizabeth led a group of five girls, the oddest and angriest and most hateful in their year. They were Elizabeth’s helpers, like a bruising, bullying version of Daisy’s little informants, and they went about prising facts out of all us younger years and feeding them back to Elizabeth. We called them the Five, and we hated them.
    So you can see why everyone at Deepdean was quite terrified of Elizabeth, and why we all got the most horrible thrill when we heard that she had indeed been elected Head Girl – and, as was tradition, had chosen five other Big Girls to be her prefects. Of course, she chose her helpers – and so when we came back to Deepdean this year, Elizabeth and the Five were running the school.

3
    We had been afraid of Elizabeth and the Five, but all the same, I do not think we quite understood how dreadful the new year would be until we were a few weeks into it. At first, the autumn term felt as clean and full of possibility as ever – new timetables, new pencils and inkwells, and exercise books with none of their pages torn out to pass notes. We were fourth formers, closer than ever to being Big Girls, and we undid our top buttons daringly in celebration. Kitty even tried to leave her hair down, although Miss Lappet told her off at once. Clementine had a new contraband bracelet, and Beanie had a dormouse which she hid in her tuck box (it was called Chutney, and all it did was sleep). It seemed as though this term might be better than the last – the shadow of Fallingford had finally lifted, for The Trial was over and the murderer in prison.
    But then the Five began their punishments.
    Elizabeth was absolutely in control of the school’s discipline, and behind everything that happened, but the genius of her was that
she
never carried out any of the punishments. It was only ever the Five who came after us, and they did it quite dreadfully.
    Red-headed, fierce, athletic Florence Hamersley, captain of the hockey team and in training for the hurdles at next summer’s Olympics, was a stickler for laziness. If you were late to breakfast or dinner, or slow at toothbrushes in the evening, her hand would come down on your shoulder and the next thing you knew you were running ten laps around House in the cold and the rain. If you did it slowly, you had to run twenty.
    Dark-haired Lettice Prestwich was even nastier. She ought to have been pretty – she would have been, if she were not so thin. With her, we lived on shifting sand, waiting for the catastrophe. Any flaw in your uniform at all – a missing button, an undone tie – and she would pounce on you, shrieking. She made