B004M5HK0M EBOK Read Online Free PDF

both had blonde hair, red lipstick, matching costumes – superficial dressing-up details that made them look the same. Emily found it harder to see the difference between them than she had when she saw them off duty upstairs in the boudoir. Perhaps it was because their features were obscured by the blindfolds. Perhaps it was the way they threw their knives with precision, at exactly the same time.
    Emily was just thinking, You know, there’s got to be more than skill involved in this; there’s got to be some trick, there must be some safeguard, to ensure they don’t hurt each other... And then something terrible happened – one of the knives hit Zsa-Zsa in the chest. She gurgled and slumped. Her blindfold slipped. She looked towards Emily beseechingly, it seemed – although it must have been Emily’s imagination because Zsa-Zsa couldn’t have known Emily was there. And then she died.
    Some part of Emily’s brain was saying to her, Look, don’t be so unsophisticated. Just wait a few moments, this is all part of the act. This girl is going to get up and bow, and everything’s going to be alright. But people in the audience were screaming, some had started running towards the girls. The people who were furthest away who couldn’t see what had happened, and who could only hear the confusion and the screaming, they reacted as though everyone in that hall must be in danger from some as yet unnamed thing – a fire, a flood, a terrorist cabal - and they started running away.
    While all this was going on, the guests who were still enjoying the party in the garden outside, who either didn’t want to see the knife throwing act or who couldn’t get in because it was too crowded, they were carrying on as normal; they were laughing, singing. The sound outside seemed to come in waves, as if someone was throwing it in dollops at the walls and trying to make it stick. It provided a rather sinister soundscape.
    Joe had run forward towards Zsa-Zsa. Emily ran forward too, reaching for her phone. Others had got their phones out before her; others were calling the police, dialling 999. Joe was kneeling next to Zsa-Zsa, motioning at the crowd to keep back. Other performers had linked arms in front of the crowd – she saw Elise there in her belted raincoat, and the Vie en Rose people – and they were doing their best to keep order and keep everyone back, including Emily’s neighbour Victoria, the mother of the skateboarding children, who was standing there with a very non-plussed expression, arms folded, head slightly tilted to one side.
    And then Emily saw something – a clue! The knife that had stuck in Zsa-Zsa’s chest was not one of the ornate daggers Emily had seen upstairs in the boudoir. It was an ordinary long-handled kitchen knife. Emily looked around and above her. There were people hanging from the balconies above to look at what was going on. There were two staircases leading down into this grand hall. Anyone could have thrown that knife.
    The police arrived, their radios yapping – in Brixton, you’re never more than two minutes away from a squad car full of Her Majesty’s finest. The place was in chaos. Behind her, Emily saw Joe dragging Zsa-Zsa away, out into the corridor where he and Emily had come in, leaving a trail of blood on the floor. Emily would have liked to intervene to tell him they didn’t do it like that on TV. Shouldn’t he respect the crime scene? But she felt she should get to the police and offer herself as a witness. She had been close enough to see every detail, and sober enough to remember what she had seen. Even as she approached the police officers, she tried to think about what she had noticed and press it down hard into her brain, in case some little nugget of information that she laid bare turned out to be important in their enquiry. She went over it and over it like a teenager cramming for her exams: the knife was an ordinary long-handled knife, the blindfold slipped, I saw the light