The Blurred Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

glancing at the audience when suddenly I froze. There was a man sitting in the front row, right next to the gap in the tent where the performers would come in. He was wearing a dark coat, a hat and gloves. He was too far away. Or maybe it was the poor light or the smoke. But once again his face was blurred. Even so, I knew him at once.
    It was the man from the Brompton Cemetery.
    The man in the photograph at the Café Debussy.
    Lenny Smile!
    I grabbed hold of Tim. “Quick!” I exclaimed.
    “What is it?” Tim jerked away, propelling the rest of his candyfloss off the end of his stick and into the lap of the woman behind him.
    “There!” I pointed. But even as I searched for Lenny across the crowded circus, I saw him get up and slip out into the night. By the time Tim had followed my finger to the other side of the tent, he had gone.
    “Is it a clown?” Tim asked.
    “No, Tim! It’s the blurred man!”
    “Who?”
    “Never mind. We’ve got to go…”
    “But the circus hasn’t even begun!”
    I dragged Tim to his feet and we made our way to the end of the row and out of the big top. My mind was racing. I still didn’t know who the man in the dark coat really was. But if it was the same person I had seen at the cemetery, what was he doing here? Could he perhaps have followed us? No – that was impossible. I was sure he hadn’t seen us across the crowded auditorium. He was here for another reason, and somehow I knew it had nothing to do with spinning plates and custard pies.
    We left the tent just as the ringmaster, a tall man in a bright red jacket and black top hat, arrived to introduce the show. I heard him bark out a few words in Russian, but by then Tim and I were in the open air with the moon high above us, the park eerie and empty and the caravans clustered together about thirty metres away.
    “What is it?” Tim demanded. He had forgotten why we had come and was disappointed to be missing the show.
    Quickly I told him what I had seen. “We’ve got to look for him!” I said.
    “But we don’t know where he is!”
    “That’s why we’ve got to look for him.”
    There seemed to be only one place he could have gone. We went over to the caravans, suddenly aware how cold and quiet it was out here, away from the crowds. The first caravan was empty. The second contained a dwarf sipping sadly at a bottle of vodka. As we made our way over to the third, a man dressed in a fake leopard skin walked past carrying a steel girder. Inside the tent I heard the ringmaster come to the end of a sentence and there was a round of applause. Either he had cracked a joke or the audience was just grateful he’d stopped talking. There was a drum roll. We approached the fourth caravan.
    Lenny Smile – if that’s who it was – had disappeared. But there was another dead man in Battersea Park that night.
    I saw the balloons first and knew at once whose caravan this was. There were more than fifty of them, every colour imaginable, clinging together as if they were somehow alive and knew what had just happened. The strange thing was that they did almost seem to be cowering in the corner. They weren’t touching the ground. But the balloon-seller was. He was stretched out on the carpet with something silver lying next to his outstretched hand.
    “Don’t touch it, Tim!” I warned.
    Too late. Tim had already leaned over and picked it up.
    It was a knife. The blade was about ten centimetres long. It matched, perfectly, the ten-centimetre deep wound in the back of the balloon-seller’s head. There wasn’t a lot of blood. The balloon-seller had been an old man. Killing him had been like attacking a scarecrow.
    And then somebody screamed.
    I spun round. There was a little girl there in a gold dress with sequins. She was sitting on a bicycle which had only one wheel, pedalling back and forth to stop herself falling over. She was pointing at Tim, her finger trembling, her eyes filled with horror, and suddenly I was aware of the