St. Mallory's Forever!

48 ABBY: Lemon curd and treacle.

Helen finally burst through my door about fifteen minutes behind schedule, looking like she'd just seen a ghost (or at least, how I imagine someone would look if they had just seen a ghost) so thoughts of Tim Mr. Mystery Morrigan were temporarily pushed aside.

"Helen? Are you okay?"

Helen waved my concerns aside as she slumped onto my bed. "You'll never." Deep breaths. "Guess." More deep breaths. "What happened." She seemed stunned.

"Are you okay?" I repeated.

Helen nodded. Then shook her head.

"You need a drink," I said. "Scotch and soda?"

That's a little St. Mallory's joke, of course. Alcohol is strictly prohibited, but the girls offer a Scotch and soda and then bring out a soft drinks can and say, "Sorry, clean out of Scotch. Next time." Okay, it's not cutting edge comedy, but then this is a boarding school, not the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

But I must say by the time Helen had finished, I could have done with something stronger than a Fanta. A Pepsi, at the very least.

"I was on the way to the music block to see if Mum had seen Xuan and..."

"And?" Call me impatient, but you can't build up suspense like this and then just stop in mid-sentence.

"And I overheard Tim and the Bursar..."

If this was a film, that would be where the scary music cued in to ratchet up the tension. Tim and the Bursar would be a suspicious combination any day of the week, but bearing in mind what I now knew about Tim that Helen didn't yet know about Tim, the movie music was pounding in my ears.

I won't type out the whole conversation (for one thing, I can't remember it, and for another... Well, the main thing is that I can't remember it), but the long and short of it is that it's not the Bursar who is after the Nils music (which will fit into an envelope) but Tim, and the Bursar seems to be after something else entirely (which apparently won't fit into an envelope). Or something like that.

It now seems that not only does Sam — sorry, I mean the Bursar — know Kitty — sorry, I mean Mrs. Stroud — but the Bursar also knows Tim Morrigan, whoever Tim Morrigan really is.

Helen says the Bursar called Tim 'Tim', which could mean the Bursar doesn't know who Tim really is either, or it could just be part of the act. To complicate matters even further, if that were possible, one of them appears to be working for the other, and bizarrely it seems to be the Bursar that is working for Tim!

The whole scenario is so crazy you just couldn't make it up. Which is why, bearing in mind the juicy gossip I'd received from my cousin, I believed Helen one hundred and one percent.

While Helen had been relating the incident I had popped a couple of cans of Pepsi (room temp, of course — why can't we have fridges in our cubies?) and we sat there for a few minutes with just the sound of carbonated water fizzing merrily.

I figured it was my turn to speak next, and said, "I told you Tim wasn't a nice person." Instantly I regretted it. It sounded like I was point-scoring, which honestly I wasn't. It just needed saying. Especially given what I knew that Helen didn't know, and that I had to tell her next.

But how? Fortunately Helen gave me the perfect lead.

She was shaking her head, not at me, but at Tim. "I can't believe it," she said. "Tim was so mean. It was like he was a different person."

I took a deep breath and reached out a comforting hand, like girls do.

"Helen, Tim Morrigan is a different person." I took a deep breath. "That is, he's not Tim Morrigan at all, he's someone else. He's a fake. A fraud. An imposter."