Read Online Mr Campion's Fault by Mike Ripley - Free Book Online Page A

want to come round mine and wait for the next one?’ said Roderick, throwing his friend a lifeline, which Andrew grasped with mercenary speed.
    ‘What’ve you got?’
    ‘Mum’s always baking, so there’ll be sweetcake of some sort and we’ve got Black Beer and lemonade.’
    ‘Any Coca-Cola?’
    ‘No, Mum always gets Vimto. You could stay for tea if you wanted to.’
    Andrew’s head, after a short struggle, got the better of his stomach. ‘Better not. My Mum’ll kill me if I spoil my dinner.’
    His friend did not miss the opportunity and said with fake surprise: ‘Oh, I forgot you snobs have
dinner
whereas us poor folk have
tea
.’
    ‘I’m not a snob.’ Andrew straightened to his full height (a single, but crucial, inch taller than his companion) and hitched up his haversack by the shoulder straps. ‘I can’t be, can I, if I talk to you?’
    ‘Don’t force yourself. You don’t have to come back to mine if you don’t want.’
    ‘Can’t resist it, really; I’ve never been in a haunted house before.’
    Rupert, when he and Perdita were alone later, reflected that their introduction to the inhabitants of the Dragons’ Den had been akin to stumbling into an officers’ mess in Poona – or somewhere in the Raj – during the monsoon season, the two main differences being that gin-slings had been replaced by tea in mismatched cups and cracked saucers, and that the temperature was anything but sub-tropical. It had not taken Rupert long to deduce that the school’s heating went off precisely as the final bell of the afternoon sounded.
    Even though those staff present had only had a few minutes to get themselves settled before Brigham Armitage arrived with his guests, they had already insulated themselves against the falling temperature by boiling kettles and creating an acrid, floating layer of tobacco smoke.
    The dragons were in the majority male and seated. The only two females were standing at a small butler’s sink in one corner guarding a dreadnought of a kettle balanced precariously on a hissing gas ring. The only face familiar to the Campions was one of the female ones, that of Celia Armitage who had shown them to her husband’s study on arrival.
    After her offer of tea had been politely declined, Mrs Armitage suggested she ‘do the honours’, to which the headmaster agreed with a cheerful grunt and a shrug as if to indicate he had little say in the matter. Rupert had heard that an officer’s rank cut no ice at all in a sergeants’ mess and presumed that the same applied to headmasters in a staff room.
    Ladies went first, of course, and the female who was not Celia Armitage was introduced by her as Miss Daphne Cawthorne, who taught mathematics and music, though presumably at different times.
    ‘Actually, it’s
Mrs
Cawthorne,’ the woman said with a thin smile as she shook Perdita’s hand, ‘but the tradition of the school is that all females are “Misses”. I’m not sure why.’
    Daphne Cawthorne was a fair-haired, middle-aged woman wearing a deep pink woollen suit which clung not unfavourably to her not-un-shapely figure. The skirt hung to an inch above the knee – Perdita guessed it would be exactly an inch – displaying legs clad in sheer brown stockings and square-toed shoes with good heels which would give stability whilst bustling up and down a classroom and just a little additional height so that she would not be dominated by the taller boys.
    She had, thought Perdita, a stern face though not an unkind one, and the expression of one who had forgotten how to smile, but did not miss the experience much.
    ‘And this is my husband, Stuart,’ as a dark-complexioned man whose black, close-cropped curls sat on his head like a knitted swim cap materialized at her side. ‘He teaches music and maths in that order, whereas I teach maths and cover for him in music. You might say we’re a double act.’
    To Rupert, the Cawthornes were the only double act in the den, for all the other