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pointless . It doesn’t make it easy for two detectives to do their jobs.’

7
    It might seem strange that someone as popular as Daisy should have a secret like the Detective Society. Certainly, when I first met her I never suspected the sort of person she really is. The first time I met Daisy would be hard to forget. It was the first time I’d ever stepped onto a games field – and incidentally, also the first time I truly thought I might die.
    I had been at Deepdean for less than a day. My boat from Hong Kong had only docked in England a week before, and I still couldn’t understand how anywhere in the world could be so cold. I watched the English girls happily running out onto the field wearing skimpy games skirts, and decided that I would have nothing to do with such madness. But I found myself ordered outside anyway, my lumpy legs sticking out underneath my itchy grey games skirt and games knickers (according to the English, the only place you can get cold is your behind, so they make you put on extra underwear over your real underwear to keep warm), and my frozen pink hands clutching my shiny new hockey stick.
    Then Miss Hopkins blew her whistle, and suddenly all the other girls began to pound up and down in front of me, screaming and waving their sticks about as though they wanted to murder each other. It began to rain – not at all like the warm rain I was used to at home, but as though someone was shooting flakes of ice into my face and all up my bare, goose-pimply legs.
    That was the moment when I realized that England might not be exactly how it had seemed in my jolly school-story books.
    I had been hearing about England – and the boarding schools real English children went to – all my life. My father had studied at one when he was a little boy, and he never stops talking about it. He made me learn to read and write in English – and not only me but all our servants, even the mui jai – and then he gave me heaps and heaps of English books to read.
    All the same, I never thought I would go to an English school myself. All the boys from families like mine did, of course, but girls generally stayed on Hong Kong Island. I would have too, if two things had not happened: first, my father’s concubine had another daughter. This meant that my father’s dream of sending a son of his to school in England was ruined again. Secondly, a girl my family knows, Victoria Cheng, was sent away to Hampden School for Ladies, in Cairo. Her father showed mine a picture of Victoria standing stiffly next to lots of other pale little girls in pinafores, and my father decided on the spot that if the Chengs could do it, we could do it too, and better.
    The next thing I knew, my father was telling me that even though it was the middle of the year, I was going away to school myself – and not to Cairo, but to the real thing in England. ‘If Cheng thinks that he can get the better of me like that,’ said my father, ‘he’s wrong. Besides, no school in the world could change the fact that his daughter is stupid. My clever Hazel is worth ten Victoria Chengs, and now she’s going to prove it.’
    My mother was furious. She hates my father’s obsession with England. ‘Western school never did any Chinese person good,’ she said.
    ‘Oh, come now, Lin darling,’ said my father, laughing. ‘What about me?’
    ‘Exactly,’ snapped my mother, and for the next week she refused to speak anything but Cantonese in protest.
    Of course, I was wild with excitement. Like my father, I was obsessed with the real, original England. Our big white cake of a house, and the whole compound it sits in, is filled with Western things. We have a tidy green lawn bordered with pink roses (my mother is always complaining about all the watering they need), the Folio Society sends us heavy, beautiful-smelling parcels of books each month to fill up my father’s library, and in every room the patterned wallpaper is nearly hidden by paintings – of