B004M5HK0M EBOK Read Online Free PDF Page B

go out of her eyes.
    ‘A murder has taken place!’ someone announced, grandly, as if they were playing the butler at a themed dinner party. At least it wouldn’t be difficult to solve: there were so many, many witnesses. Though possibly none was so reliable as Emily. If she could only reach the police... She had almost got there when there was a huge burst of applause. People were grinning, looking back towards the place where Zsa-Zsa had died. Emily looked too, and was astonished at what she saw: Zizi and Zsa-Zsa had turned up again. Zsa-Zsa had apparently died, and yet she was standing there right as rain in her blood-stained costume with the knife still sticking out of her chest. She pulled it from her costume and waved the silly stubby thing at the audience. She smiled, a strange sly smile. It was just a prop. She and her sister held hands and bowed at the audience, and bowed to each other, and everyone gasped and was astonished, and then clapped.
    Emily looked back towards the velvet curtain and Joe was standing there clapping vigorously, smiling away and nodding. Suddenly he didn’t look so attractive, with his head wagging clownishly up and down on his neck. Emily looked towards the police officers and saw Chris talking to them. She couldn’t hear what he was saying but she could read his body language, the apology as his hands went up and he shrugged and told them the audience reaction to a performance had got out of hand.
    The police officers were responding to a call on a night when every firework functions like a trick or treat for them because it sounds like a gunshot. They were busy, modern local police officers in bullet proof vests, not the tweedy Scotland Yard detectives who traditionally turn up in murder mystery stories. Nor were they career detectives in the middle of nowhere, who desperately needed this to be the murder investigation that would make their name. They were in London, soon enough there would be another stabbing. They didn’t look amused, they didn’t look disappointed, they didn’t look as though they were going to arrest everyone for wasting police time. But elsewhere in London there were murders and knife crime and silly children setting off fireworks – all sorts of things that had to be investigated on a very busy weekend – and they were obviously keen to leave.
    So this was just another performance – a special Halloween performance for the party-goers from their new friends at the bottom of the street. It had been a fantastic theatrical trick. And yet... and yet... Emily was not so sure. She’d looked at Zsa-Zsa and she’d watched as the light went out of her eyes. Emily had only just seen her dog die about a week before. That was the first time she’d ever seen a fellow creature die – and now it had happened again. And it was the same: Emily was sure Zsa-Zsa had died. Still, there she was, smiling and bowing.
    Emily had an idea that the trick that had been performed was nastier than the one the audience thought they had seen. There were a few things that had been a little ‘off’ tonight. There was Zizi’s rudeness in the boudoir before the performance, for example, when she had shut the door in Emily’s face. But did it really amount to suspicious behaviour, or was it pre-performance nerves; a knife-thrower’s right to privacy? Emily would have liked to ask Midori’s opinion but her friend was at home, sleeping off the ill effects of that glass of punch. Could Midori have been put out of the way because she had seen something in that boudoir? Had someone slipped poison into Midori’s punch? If so, who? Chris had offered her a glass of punch, but so had Joe. Anyone could have put their hand over Midori’s cup while she sucked on those prawn, and dropped something nasty into it.
    Emily decided to talk to Dr. Muriel and find out what Dr. Muriel made of it; she seemed like a very sensible witness type person who could help to evaluate the facts. She wanted to talk