Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders Read Online Free PDF Page B

bleedin’ thing? It might be covered in all them pretty ribbons and twinkling jewels, but I’ll tell you what it is, it’s a death trap without so much as a net or a rope to save you when . . . if . . .’
    Peggy faltered and her grip on the ribbons slackened. ‘Sorry, Kitty, I didn’t mean . . .’
    The room was silent for a moment except for the sound of the little fire crackling away in the grate. It was most important that I was kept warm before a performance – Madame Celeste had said so.
    *
    For the last week or so, even over Christmas, which didn’t mean much to me anyway, I’d spent every waking hour in Madame Celeste’s cavernous attic learning how to use the trapeze that had made her a star way back when Fitzy started out as a circus hand in Ireland. The old girl drank like a navvy and to look at her now you wouldn’t think that someone of such prodigious corpulence could ever have hauled her body up the steps of a tavern, let alone to the platform of a flying trapeze a hundred foot up in the air. But she didn’t half know her stuff.
    Fitzy said she’d been the most dazzling aerial artiste Dublin had ever clapped eyes on, and the faded, curling circus bills that decorated the shabby stairwell leading up to her attic showed a lithe and beautiful young woman soaring through the air like a painted angel.
    Now she was a mound of flesh, draped in what looked like the shredded remnants of some tasselled parlour curtains. Only her glittering jet eyes and the unlikely confection of thick black hair piled up on top of her head hinted at the likelihood of some long-ago connection to the flying girl on the stairwell.
    The first thing to say is that Madame Celeste’s attic was vast. It must have run across five houses. When I pushed open the little door at the top of the stairs I wasn’t expecting there to be so much space in front of me of a sudden – and above me too. It was like one of them optical illusions of Swami Jonah’s.  He had a magic box that was bigger on the inside than it had any right to be if you looked at it from the outside. He told me it was done with mirrors. Madame Celeste had a mirror, twelve foot high it was, propped up against the wall on the left. There should have been at least one more floor above us, but that had been removed so that I could see the network of timbers stretching out high overhead beneath the underside of the roof.
    It reeked of sweat and cat piss in there. It was hardly surprising – when I stepped into the echoing room, a dozen pairs of yellow eyes turned to stare at me. The old girl swayed to her feet, clapped her hands and started to make shooing sounds. As the cats bolted for the stairs, Madame Celeste nodded to herself and patted the leather flask at her hip absent-mindedly – she didn’t seem entirely able to focus her eyes on me.
    ‘You’ll be Kitty then? Take off your shoes, now, and on you get.’
    She gestured vaguely to the centre of the room. As she waved her hand I got a powerful whiff of armpit that hadn’t seen a soap bar since the death of Prince Albert.
    I knew where she wanted me to go. The attic was a big bare space. A fire crackled in a corner hearth, a pile of empty gin bottles teetered against the far wall and a heap of dusty cushions littered the floor beneath a long rope swing that dangled from the rafters high above. I say swing, but it didn’t have a seat – just a narrow wooden bar that swayed gently about five foot in the air.
    We started off low, but I still had to use a stool to climb up. At first Madame Celeste told me, ‘Lean back, kick out and go as high as you like, just for the hang of it.’
    I won’t deny it was a lovely feeling as the ropes creaked and the swing rose higher and higher into the spaces between the beams. The old girl just watched me, occasionally taking a swig from the flask. After a few minutes she called out, ‘Enough of that. Bring it to a stand, Kitty.’
    When the swing was still again, she told me