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discover their alibis.’
    I wrote them down.

    ‘All right, excellent work,’ said Daisy. ‘Now we must consider the matter of the body.’
    I did not like the sound of that at all. In fact, it gave me the shudders. There we were, back again to the horrible idea that the murderer might still have been in the Gym when I arrived.
    ‘Where did it go?’ asked Daisy, not noticing the look on my face. ‘How did the murderer move it? They wouldn’t have had long, after all. If you left the Gym at five forty-five and came back with me and Virginia at, well, let’s say five fifty-two – that seems about right – then they wouldn’t have been able to get far. Bodies are extraordinarily heavy, my uncle says.’
    I wished Daisy hadn’t said that. It might have been a joke, but it made my chills worse than ever.
    ‘I’d say that it was more than possible that your suggestion about the murderer hiding in the Cupboard is correct,’ said Daisy excitedly, sounding more and more like something from one of her detective novels. ‘And he or she could have dragged the body in there too! Imagine – you, me and Virginia, just a few steps away from the killer and the victim. But if it was there at that moment, where was it moved to afterwards? Since no one using the Gym today noticed a body, it must have been moved somewhere else after we left yesterday evening. Perhaps the murderer used the trolley that Jones stores in the Cupboard, to move it more easily. Anyway, that’s another of our tasks, to discover the current location of Miss Bell’s body.’
    ‘Ugh,’ I said, shivering. I didn’t want to see Miss Bell’s corpse ever again, and I couldn’t bear the thought that both it and the murderer might have been nearby when I returned to the Gym with Virginia and Daisy. Daisy, however, rolled her eyes at me. Things like that do not bother her at all. I don’t think she sees them in her imagination in quite the same way I do.
    ‘I think investigating the body’s whereabouts will involve more careful planning than we can manage right now. We can’t just go nosing about the school looking for a corpse, after all. I’ll have to think about that. But – Hazel, write this down – the plan for tomorrow is as follows: we must establish alibis for the masters and mistresses on our suspect list. We can try asking them directly, of course, but it may be easier simply to ask other girls. However, remember that this mission requires constant vigilance! Any answer may lead to the truth.’
    ‘Yes,’ I said, fighting down my nerves. ‘I know. But – I still can’t believe that one of our masters or mistresses could have committed a murder .’
    ‘Oh, don’t be silly, Hazel. My uncle says anyone’s capable of murder, deep down. Only remember—’
    But at that moment, the door to the airing cupboard was wrenched open and Virginia Overton appeared before us, looking grim. As quickly as I could, I dropped my casebook onto the floor and sat on it. Luckily, Virginia is sometimes less than observant.
    ‘Whatever are you doing?’ she asked us furiously. ‘Come out of there at once.’
    Daisy was unperturbed. ‘The button just popped off my pyjama jacket. Hazel was helping me find a new one.’
    ‘I don’t think so,’ said Virginia. ‘It’s nearly ten o’clock – you ought to have been in bed half an hour ago. Get back to your dorm immediately, and I shall be telling Matron about this later.’
    Under her baleful eye we scurried out of the cupboard towards our dorm, Daisy clutching a new pyjama jacket. ‘Beast,’ she said, as soon as we were round the corner. ‘She only wants us out of it so she and Belinda Vance can canoodle in there. Betsy North says she caught them at it last week.’
    ‘Oh,’ I said.
    ‘The problem with this place,’ said Daisy, pausing in the stairwell to wriggle out of her old pyjama jacket and into her new one, ‘is that there are far too many secrets wherever you turn. And most of them are so