Take Your Final Bow

Chapter 4 - Noah Rackwood

Thursday 8th June, 3:00pm

Today has been such a nightmare! We were supposed to keep quiet about what happened last night, but somehow the whole school knows. I guess it is hard to keep it a secret when there is blood all over the auditorium stage and police officers swarming the place. Still, they expect the cast and the stagehands to clear up the mess from last night. By mess, I mean the props, sets, costumes, and everything else that isn't obviously involved in Jack's death. This is a perfect opportunity for me and Emily to have a little look at the backstage and changing room areas for clues.
We still have to endure a whole day of lessons 'as normal', but it is awkward in every silence because everyone is always trying to put down the weight of what was going on in our school. Many people seem to think that Jack was the one who switched the guns, that he committed suicide on purpose, but I know that the switch had happened while Jack had been making a fuss in the dressing room, so he could not have been the person to have made the swap.
At the end of the final lesson, a tense hour of trying not to think about death while studying Macbeth in English (ironic, I know), I text Emily:

Meet me outside the auditorium in 5. We need to discuss where we are going to look for clues.

Then I pack up my things and head for the auditorium corridor to wait for her.
She arrives, as is so often her way, exactly five minutes after I texted her, and she looks so excited that even her neat French braids look ecstatic. It looks like she loves Jack's death even more than she loved being in the play to begin with! Knowing the way she thinks, she probably sees this as more of a game or a puzzle than an actual investigation into someone's death. All that, and she tells me I am the one not taking it seriously.
'So. We know that someone made the switch from a fake gun to a real one. Now we need to search the crime scene for clues or hints that may lead to breakthroughs!' She whispers excitedly. I roll my eyes. Here we go again...
'You go and look round the changing rooms and the lockers, and where you saw the commotion and I will have a little listen around where the police are interviewing the people they think might be involved. Stupid policemen! They are investigating the wrong crime scene: it didn't happen out there, it happened in here! And they think -'
I can tell she is about to go into a rant so I hold out my hand to stop her there.
'Let's go and join the others before anyone thinks we are up to something. Which we are... But I don't want anyone getting the wrong idea.'
We sneak back and join the rest of the cast and the play crew. Fortunately, nobody had noticed we were gone, except Kaitlin, who just assumed we were let out late from class. What a sweet, naive little friend she is. Pity she is a suspect.
The group of adolescents gradually thins, and we then take the opportunity to split up. I head off in the direction of the changing rooms, and Emily saunters casually towards the office by the auditorium, where the interviews are taking place. The first things I find are a number of rather smelly costumes. How do they smell like this when they have only been worn twice? Some people in this school really don't know how to wear deodorant. Among the pile of freshly-scented garments was Nick's costume, which Jack allegedly hid before the play. Nick has a solid alibi for the actual swap, but he is likely to be an accomplice arranging a distraction to draw everyone's attention while someone else was switching the guns. Anyway, Nick would have been relatively able to get hold of a gun, because he is in one of Longcaster's famous gangs.
The stinky clothes appear to have no more use in the case, so I chuck them in a basket to bring back to Mrs McHamish. I move on to the lockers. I have a little peak in all the lockers that are left unlocked, which, to be fair, owners do at their own risk, but find nothing alluding to anything to do with murder. My search seems to be hopeless, and I am just leaving the locker area to go and find Emily and tell her about my distraction hypothesis when something catches my eye. Something is skittering over the floor in the breeze that flows through this area. A tiny scrap of paper. I pick it up in interest, and turn it over. On one side, the paper is blank. On the other side, it says is big, scrawled letters,

Gay Scum

I blinked in shock, aghast. Why would anyone write this? It looks like one of the notes people put in other people's lockers, but I have never seen anything like this written on one before. I shove it into my pocket and march purposefully towards the office.

* * *

Emily seems to have a knack for being able to fit into small places. It is one of the things that she has a talent for that I just can't do, no matter how hard I try. Perhaps it is just because I am tall. Anyway, she appears to have jammed herself into the tiny little wardrobe in the office. Admittedly, it is the perfect place to listen from, but what if her foot falls asleep? What will she do then? Hilarious jokes aside, she has left that hideous place now and we are back in the corridor. I have given Mrs McHamish my basket of smellies to show for my work and Emily has brought some from another changing room. How she got them I will never know. Now that the teacher is satisfied, we can go and discuss our findings. I explain in as much detail as I can what I found in the changing room, and what I came up with, and then I show her the note I found by the lockers. 'It was floating around by the lockers, and that looks like Jack's handwriting, doesn't it?' I ask timidly, unsure how she will respond.
'Sounds like Jack, or whoever wrote this if it wasn't him, really didn't like someone. Could this hate for them have got him killed?' She asks in response. Answering a question with a question. Tedious.
'Anyway, I have slightly worrying motives for both Mrs McHamish and for Isabel. Turns out Mrs McHamish failed her drug test. She was high! That means she has no reliable proof to say she did or did not swap the guns.'
I give an exasperated sigh. More motives. Brilliant.
'That isn't even the worst of it! It also turns out Isabel and Jack broke up last week! I don't know why, but that also gives Isabel a reason to kill Jack - she didn't want him to rat about why they broke up!'
'That's a bit of an overreaction. She could have just asked him not to say anything.'
 'True, but knowing Jack, would he keep to his word?'
Probably not, we both think. So now we have more motives, more details, and more to find out. Looks like the next few weeks are going to be very interesting. At that moment, Kaitlin skips past and spots us. Her face lights up with pure delight, as it does every time she sees Emily, and she bounds over to us like Emily's excitable puppy Barney. Kaitlin wraps Emily up in a hug. Emily looks at me, and I know the meeting is over, and that we will talk again tomorrow.