Although we were wondering why an adult had been killed this time and not a student, we put aside our investigation until the weekend, so as soon as the weekend came, Pam decided to get back to the scene in the forest. No matter how much we were trying to get into the mind of the murderer, we couldn’t understand the reasoning behind such an act. Everyone except Scarlett understood the concept of killing – human beings had an infinite number of reasons behind killing – but the message the pentagram was sending was difficult to understand.
A few days later, the death of the local woman, named as Mrs Williams, had obviously become the sole topic in class and outside class for what seemed an eternity. Some of the students even claimed to have seen her ghost walking down the corridors, as if she would really bother with them instead of haunting her husband.
After much speculation about who was responsible for her death, it was announced in the newspapers that the husband had been arrested on suspicion of murder, then released on bail. Apparently, he had got tired of being abused and had retaliated. It sounded a bit far-fetched to me because if he really had had enough of being mistreated, he could have just left. Why stay and then kill his wife? It did not make any sense to me at all. Later on, it was revealed that he had an alibi and was cleared of all charges.
The story could have ended there – well, for us anyway – if we hadn’t found chunks and chunks of hair at the KGB.
The KGB was an old and almost abandoned shed on school grounds. It was so well hidden that I had named it KGB after the Soviet Union security agency. The older J.C. students were known to hide in it for multiple reasons, but Pam, Scarlett, Delphine and I used it to practise our song for the Surrey’s Got Talent, or SGT, competition. Every school in Surrey was allowed to send their five best talents to the competition, and the winners got not only great prizes but also a trophy for their school, but before getting to SGT, we needed to be among the five best in the J.C.’s Got Talent competition. I had not told the boys of our decision to compete. Pam, Delphine and Scarlett were fine with the boys finding out what we were up to, but I wasn’t. Having grown up with Hassan and Hogan, I couldn’t bear the thought of them making fun of me during rehearsals. They had done so when we were in primary school, and I was not prepared to relive that.
We had seen pictures of Mrs Williams, and the chunks of hair in the KGB were the same colour as hers. We all looked at each other. I knew what I was thinking was gruesome, and I was hoping that the others were thinking the same, but no one was talking. I could feel fear growing inside of them. It was obvious they were all reaching the same conclusion, and then Scarlett asked me whether I was going to say it or she should. I guess fear gave strength to Scarlett, because she was usually a lot more reserved than this. She was right, of course; someone had to say something, so I gave them my theory.
To me it was clear that Mrs Williams had either been held in the KGB or, even worse, been killed there. The thought of her murder happening where we were standing started to make its way through our minds. If we were scared before, now we were starting to get terrified. The reality was that if she was killed or attacked in the KGB, then had her body carried to the woods to mask the original crime scene, that could only bring forth one question no one wanted to ask: how did she end up on school property, and why? Was it linked to the missing pupils?
We left the KGB in a hurry and went to our beloved tree hang-out spot, which was J.C.’s very own yew tree. As soon as we were out of the shed, I felt a lightness inside me. I hadn’t realised how heavy the air had become in the shed. The strange feeling of having someone other than my fellow students and friends in the KGB gave me the chills.
When we arrived at the yew tree, the boys were sitting around chatting with Abadi and Brown. Pam and I had decided to give Brown a chance. It was just too bad that he came with Abadi. Luckily, Abadi had to leave, and it gave us the opportunity to tell the others what had happened in the KGB. Their reaction was very unexpected for some of them; Alex and Brown wanted to go and see it for themselves.
William ran towards me and hugged me. He wanted to make sure that I was okay, just as Hogan did with Scarlett. Pollard, Morgan and Walker looked shocked and terrified, but the best reaction came from Hassan.
First he looked stunned. Then he burst out laughing, and slowly but surely, the thought of the school being the crime scene travelled to his brain, and terror was all that was left on his face. It was so good that I had to take a picture for future use.
After examining the KGB, William and Hogan, against Alex’s and my strong objections, decided to inform the headmaster.
William and Hogan’s position was that by remaining silent, we would make the tiny Gateway Hill police force’s job even more difficult than it already was. Banking on the girls backing me up, I presented the issue to the group and lost because Scarlett gave her vote to Hogan.
There was no longer any question about Scarlett’s feelings towards him. She had fallen for him, just as he had fallen for her too, and I was paying the price for their mutual attraction. In the end, Delphine decided that the only way to go about it was to send an anonymous letter to the headmaster, and we agreed.
Being the murder mystery buff that I was, I was prepared for the mission. I wore gloves while buying a new ream of printing paper and envelopes, I typed the letter so that no one would match my handwriting or the ink from my printer, and I was still wearing my gloves when I mailed it in the village. I guess watching Columbo had taught me a lot.
And then came the hard part: waiting for a reaction. The wait felt like an eternity; every day we would spy on the headmaster’s office, and every day we were disappointed. One week passed, and we saw no constables in the school. Then a second week passed, and there was still no sign of a constable.
We could only deduce that the headmaster had not passed on the information we had given him. He had probably assumed that it was a joke. I then took it upon myself to send two new anonymous letters, one to Constable Anderson and the second one to the J.C. paper. It worked. Two days later, Officer Smith and Constable Anderson were in the school, and my letter was on the front page of the J.C. paper a few days after that. It said:
Dear sir,
Mrs Williams was murdered in a shed located inside the J. C. Maxwell school. I strongly advise you to have a look inside before the responsible parties clear it and wipe away all clues you might have found interesting.
A friend.
Very quickly the KGB was deemed a no-go zone for all, and police tape was everywhere, as well as groundkeepers, who were standing guard to ensure that no students were allowed in. Clearly, I was right about the identity of the hair’s owner. They wouldn’t have made that much fuss if the hair did not belong to Mrs Williams.
I expected them to fingerprint every student to separate our prints from the murderer, but Tristan reminded us that not only were our prints in the school archives, so they already had them, but also it did not seem like Gateway Hill police were even interested in solving this crime.
The school grounds were buzzing again; questions were flying from everybody’s mouth. What had she been doing in the school? Had she been meeting someone? How had she got in? Why would the murderer have brought her into the school? Was the killer a member of the school board? Was it Arnold? Was that the reason he was missing? Was it one of the teachers? To be fair, I would have given anything for the killer to have been my art teacher.
And then came the sceptics. We should have expected it. They were speculating that we were just making up stories because we were bored of our lives and wanted to live the life of superheroes on TV and in our favourite comics, which was not far from the truth, except that we had found real evidence.
The next day, when we got up, besides the tape marking the scene of the crime still being visible, everything pretty much got back to normal. Exams were close by, so we spent most of our time studying, but not all of us.
To everyone’s great surprise, a few days later the news announced that the victim’s husband had passed away. He apparently committed suicide and had left a note admitting to the crime. That did not make any sense. Not only had his alibi been verified by the police, but he clearly did not care much for his wife, so why kill himself when he was finally going to start enjoying life? Or was he killed and his death disguised as a suicide? That last part would have made a world of sense.
In the end, including Arnold’s disappearance, which we were now considering as a murder without a body, we were looking at three dead and no suspect. We were more than ever convinced that J.C. was ground zero for bad luck, or even worse, the headquarters of the gate between our world and hell. I had expected tension to be high in the school, and it was, but it was not because of the dead body.
It was almost time for JCGT, and everybody’s nerves were shattered. Scarlett and Eugenie (Pollard had now become a friend, and we had started to call her Eugenie or Genie) had, with their parents’ permission, moved in with one of Eugenie’s mother’s friends in the village, which gave Pam, Scarlett, Delphine and me a place to rehearse our song. I felt bad that Eugenie was not part of our singing group, but when we created the group, she had not been a friend yet.
She had created a group dance, however, with Walker and Morgan, and after watching them perform, I was pretty sure that they should have left Morgan out. She was a terrible dancer, and although Eugenie and Walker were not great, they could have made it to the top ten without two-left-feet Morgan.
The boys were also entering the competition, and since we had abandoned the KGB as a rehearsal location, they had taken it over. I was due to study, but curiosity got the better of me, and I went to spy on them. William, Hogan and Tristan were doing a song and a choreography to go with it.
The singing was average, but the dancing was amazing. It made me wish we had some choreography to go with our song as well, but when I watched Alex and Hassan perform after the other boys had gone, that was the highlight of the year.
They had also decided to sing and dance, and it was so bad it was good. Alex was a very pretty boy with long hair, so he kept playing with it while singing. Maybe he thought it would add some panache to his performance, but it just made it worse. Alex also had that deep, manly voice that made him sound so sexy, but it was not a singing voice. When he sang, it sounded like someone was strangling him.
Hassan’s voice, however, was pretty good. He was originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and they were great singers and great dancers. My grandfather was Cameroonian, and in Cameroon they said there wasn’t anyone from the DRC that did not know how to sing. There was also another thing they said in Cameroon, which was that the people from DRC, although quite vain, had the worst sense of style in Africa.
Proving that some stereotypes were true, Hassan was a great singer, but his fashion sense had been borrowed from Jerry Lewis. He also had the bad habit of copying Alex in many things, including mannerisms, which meant that he was running his hand through his non-existent long hair, and the effect was hilarious. I was laughing so hard I fell on the floor and had to run and hide before they saw me.
Unfortunately, I did not see the time, and I was late to start my paper, which meant that when I called Eugenie to send the car over to pick me up, because I was spending the night in the village, it was already pretty late. I stayed and waited for the car at the library while writing my paper, but after we were asked to leave the library, the car was still not there.
I had to wait at the school gate, but there was no car coming for me. I was the only child left outside the south gate, besides a girl called Natalie whose car was always late. When my car finally came, I offered to have Natalie dropped at her house, but she declined. She said that she would rather wait; she was convinced that her car would be around shortly.
I advised her to wait inside the school instead of outside. It was windy and getting cold; I did not want her to be alone when it got dark, and she agreed. I watched her going in, and when the driver and I were reassured that she was inside the school, we left.
The next day, when I got to school, Natalie was waiting for me. She dragged me to a corner and told me the most important piece of information needed for my mother’s investigation. She said that after getting inside the school, she had got a call from her father, asking her to meet him by the north entrance.
While she was on her way up, the place looked entirely deserted, but it wasn’t. The headmaster was there, and she saw him going inside the yew tree. The tree was the biggest in the school, but still, the story was pretty out there.I believed her, though. I knew it sounded impossible, but I believed her. Now it was confirmed: J.C. was definitely ground zero for the anomaly. The tree was the portal we had been looking for, and the headmaster.
It worried me that the headmaster was so careless with his secret. Anyone could have seen him go inside that tree, and then I realised that Nathalie’s father had been late, and instead of picking her up from the south entrance, which students used, she had been picked up by the north entrance, an entrance almost solely used by the school staff. To top it all, it had been late. The Headmaster would have expected all students to be in their dormitories, so he would have had no reason to fear being seen by anyone.
I went straight to Pam and told her what I had uncovered. We called my mother, but I was told that Mother had gone to join my father, so we had no choice but to continue watching the tree until we figured out how the portal worked.
We were also more convinced than ever that the deaths of the students had a connection to the portal.
The next day, I called in a meeting at the KGB and told the others what had happened but kept my mother’s investigation out of it. Something must have been in the water that day, because they believed me. It was now clear to us that the murderer was the headmaster, which explained why Mrs Williams was killed in the school.
We also had a theory as to why. We assumed that Mrs Williams had been drunk, managed somehow to get into the school, had seen the headmaster go inside the tree, and he had killed her to keep her silent. Chopping her body into pieces and placing her on a pentagram had been to confuse the police.
We were also certain that Arnold had suffered the same fate as Mrs Williams, and for the same reasons. Mr Williams must have figured out what had happened to his wife, threatened to go to the police – maybe he demanded money from the headmaster – and he lost his life as a result.
A man as evil as the headmaster was perfectly capable of disguising a murder as a suicide. Summer half-term holiday was coming up, so we pushed it forward till after we were back. Since Scarlett and Hogan had started dating, we thought that it would only be fair that we all stayed together in London during the last holiday.