Certain Death

by Tanya Landman

“Peepo didn’t kill himself!” I said urgently. “We were right. Here’s the proof!”

  Graham looked slightly baffled by my excitement. “But it’s nonsense,” he protested. “Jibberish. It doesn’t prove anything except that he defaced the posters. And the fact that he was possibly unbalanced.”

  “Don’t you remember the suicide note? It was just a torn scrap of paper like this one.”

  “So?”

  “So this is the other half! The original note must have been ripped down the middle.” I knew exactly what the first one had said. The words were tattooed on my memory. “If you put the bits together,” I explained to Graham, “it would read: My only love, Irena, my wife, now and for ever, I am to blame. I marked the posters. A foolish act. But now I have killed my rage. I am calm. I am Misha again. I am myself. Forgive me. Let us love again as we once did.”

  “Oh!” said Graham, flushing slightly. “Not a suicide note, then.”

  “No… And not a confession, either. Not to attempted murder, anyway. Someone must have planted it to make the police think Peepo had killed himself.”

  “Yuri?” asked Graham.

  “The fact that he had this half in his caravan looks dead dodgy.”

  “Do you think Peepo was blackmailing him?”

  “He could have been,” I said. “I mean, I know Yuri’s caravan isn’t exactly luxurious, but maybe he’s happy like that. If he was in the army he probably likes things fairly basic. It doesn’t mean he hasn’t got pots of money stashed away somewhere. And he was first on the scene, wasn’t he? You said yourself that the person who discovers the body is often the one who killed them. Suppose Yuri was already in the caravan when Peepo went in? When we saw him on the steps we thought he was opening the door – that he’d just got there. But he could have easily been coming out. Yuri must have killed Peepo!”

  “But why?” Graham’s forehead was creased.

  “Maybe Peepo saw him taking a shot at Irena,” I suggested. “But hang on…” I sighed, contradicting myself. “He can’t have fired at Irena. What did he say to the police?” I attempted to copy his accent. “I am an excellent shot, Inspector. If I had meant to kill Irena, believe me, I would not have missed.”

  Graham rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Of course, we only have his word for that. We haven’t witnessed his performance. If his aim is as poor as the Dashing Blade’s, he couldn’t possibly have struck a target with any degree of accuracy. And I seem to recall his hands shaking when we bought our tickets.”

  “They did, didn’t they. I’d forgotten that,” I replied. “So could he have fired at her and missed? But why? What’s his motive? Do you think he’s in love with Irena, too?”

  Graham shrugged but said nothing. It didn’t seem at all likely. Yuri didn’t show any emotion at all when Irena was about – as far as he was concerned she could be a plank of wood or a park railing. We sat in silence, trying to come up with a single reason why Yuri might have tried to kill Irena, but neither of us could find one.

  I thought about what we’d seen in Yuri’s caravan. There had to be a clue there. The photograph. The model church. Those amazing little carvings. The sweet-wrapper stained glass. Something was nagging at me. Something I’d missed. Overlooked. It tickled away at the back of my mind, tantalizingly out of reach. What was it? The photograph? The church? The windows? The gargoyles?

  The gargoyles!

  “Graham,” I said, shattering the silence. “That church he was making…”

  “Impressive, wasn’t it.”

  “You’d need a really steady hand to do something like that. If his hands shook all the time… Well, he wouldn’t be able to do it, would he?”

  Graham frowned. “No, probably not. How very strange.”

  “Why might a person’s hands shake?” I asked.

  “There are all kinds of illnesses that can cause it. I believe Parkinson’s disease is one. Chronic alcoholism gives people the shakes. My uncle once had a thyroid problem that made him a bit jerky—”

  “Fear!” I interrupted him. “Fear, Graham. Yuri’s not ill – his hands don’t tremble all the time, that model proves it. Something scared him!”

  “But he was only selling tickets.” Graham looked puzzled. “Why would that give him cause for anxiety?”

  I shut my eyes, trying to remember what had happened the day we bought the tickets. We’d been standing in the queue. “That old lady was ahead of us. The one who died. She kept talking, didn’t she? Did you hear what she said?”

  “No,” said Graham. “Sorry.”

  “Me neither.” I fished through my mind, trying to pluck out a word, a phrase, a sentence that she’d uttered. For a frustrating few seconds I couldn’t get hold of anything. Then one surfaced. I love the circus. And there had been something funny about the way she pronounced the word “circus”. She’d rolled the “R”. In a blinding flash I realized why Yuri’s accent had struck me as vaguely familiar. The old lady had spoken that way too. “I think they might have come from the same place,” I said slowly.

  “Yuri and Ana Kotromanik? Really?” Graham looked incredulous. “What makes you think that?”

  “She had the same accent… Rolled her Rs like he does.” I frowned. “She had a loud voice, didn’t she? The kind that carries. Maybe she said something that frightened him.” It sounded unlikely even to me. But some gut instinct told me I was finally on the right track. “We need to find out where she was from.”

  There was an Internet cafe round the corner. It didn’t take Graham long to access the files of the local newspaper, and there in the obituaries were a few lines about the woman who’d died. It turned out that Ana Kotromanik had fled from her home in what used to be called Yugoslavia. She’d come to England as a refugee from the Bosnian War in 1995. Graham scrolled down until he found the name of the town she’d been born in. It was the same as the one on the back of Yuri’s photograph.

  Stolijna.

  stolijna

  Graham typed the word “Stolijna” into the search engine.

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” I said.

  “Me too.” Graham’s mouth had gone into a tight line, as if he was bracing himself. “We’re going to find out something horrible, I can tell.”

  We did. And it was more terrible than either of us could have imagined. The news site had a bit of background about the Bosnian War but I didn’t really understand much of it. As far as I could see, Yugoslavia had suddenly fallen apart. People – neighbours – had divided into ethnic groups and turned on each other. It had been awful. Worst of all, we read that there had been a massacre at Stolijna. The men had been rounded up by the army. Marched out. Lined up. Shot. Every single one of them had been killed.

  “Everyone but Yuri…” I croaked.

  “…who was in the army.” Graham finished my sentence for me. We looked at each other in horror, unspoken questions hanging in the air. Had he watched his fellow soldiers kill those people? Had he been part of it?

  I felt sick. Faint. Dizzy. And then I felt angry.

  “He told Inspector Humphries the truth,” I said bitterly. “If I had meant to kill Irena, I would not have missed. He wasn’t aiming at her, was he? It was the old woman. Ana Kotromanik was the one he wanted dead.”

  “But why?” asked Graham miserably.

  “He was scared when he heard her voice in the ticket queue. He must have recognized her. Maybe Ana knew something bad about him. Bad enough for him to kill her before she could tell anyone. He must have aimed at Irena so everyone would think she was the target. He fired so the bullet would bounce off and hit Ana.”

  “Stop a minute.” Graham was shaking his head. “Even if he’s the most expert marksman in the world he couldn’t guarantee killing Ana like that. No one could judge the trajectory of a ricocheted bullet that accurately.”

  “OK, so how did he do it? Because he did do it, Graham. I know he did.”

  Graham didn’t speak for a good five minutes. His face showed signs
of Deep Thought, so I didn’t interrupt him. Instead I remembered Ana Kotromanik in her headscarf and neck brace talking about how much she loved circuses. She’d gripped my arm so hard when she was watching Irena. At least she’d been enjoying herself when she died.

  Eventually Graham said, “Yuri possesses two pistols.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s possible that he fired two shots simultaneously. If he’s as good a marksman as he claims, he could have fired at Irena – intending to miss – at the same time as he killed Ana.” Before I could even reply, Graham frowned. “No… That theory doesn’t work.” He sighed with irritation. “The angle would have been all wrong.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everyone in the audience was looking up at Irena. That’s why Ana got hit between the eyes when the bullet ricocheted off. If Yuri had fired straight across at her, it would have hit her in the neck.”

  “The neck…” I echoed. Suddenly my heart gave a lurch. “She couldn’t look up! Ana had that neck brace, remember? No wonder she gripped my arm like that. It had nothing to do with Irena’s act – she must have looked across the ring and seen Yuri. She recognized him and gasped. The poor woman must have been trying to tell me!”

  Graham’s voice came out in a small, scared whisper. “So are we assuming that Yuri the sharpshooter is, in fact, a war criminal?”

  “I’m not absolutely certain,” I said grimly. “But I can tell you one thing for sure. If he is, we’re not going to let him get away with it.”

  the missing

  bullet

  When I told Graham what I thought we should do next, the colour drained from his face. “Are you sure we can’t just go straight to the police?” he asked faintly.

  “Evidence,” I said. “We need evidence.”

  “We’ve got the note,” he protested. “That proves Peepo didn’t kill himself.”

  “It’s not enough. Inspector Humphries thinks the case is closed. He won’t listen to a pair of kids rambling on about something that happened years and years ago in another country unless we can prove we’re right.”

  “OK,” he conceded. “Although I don’t like it.”

  “I’m not particularly keen myself,” I replied, “but we’re not letting that man get away with killing Ana and Peepo and all those other people!”

  My plan was to sneak into the big top as soon as the show was over. The bullet that had been fired at Irena must have gone somewhere. I was hoping we could find it – or, failing that, locate a hole in the tent fabric or a mark on the frame that would prove that two pistols had been fired. If we were lucky, we’d find the evidence we needed, make a quick call to the police and then be back in our separate homes, lying in bed and looking ill, by the time our mums got back from work. If we didn’t at least get that bit right we’d be in Very Big Trouble.

  We didn’t have long to wait until the end of the show, and twenty minutes after the last audience member had left the big top the performers trooped out and shut themselves in their caravans, presumably to eat and rest before they had to do the whole thing again in the evening. We watched Yuri shut his door behind him.

  “Right,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Our routine for breaking into the circus was now as well oiled as the Bouncing Bellinis’ act. We slithered under the fence with the practised ease of commandos and wriggled under the caravans until we reached the box office. Then it was just a matter of a short sprint across open ground to the big top and another crawl under the canvas.

  We accomplished our mission without being spotted, but fear made us both breathless. By the time we were standing in the empty ring we were wheezing and it took us a few minutes to calm down.

  As soon as we’d got our breath back, we started our search – but it was harder than I’d thought. Without the performers falling over themselves to sell us stuff or the audience jostling to get the best seats, it all looked different. We couldn’t work out exactly where we’d been sitting.

  “There, I think,” I said, but Graham contradicted me.

  “We were further round. Next to that pillar, don’t you remember?”

  I trusted Graham’s memory for that sort of detail more than mine, so I didn’t argue.

  “OK. If I was here,” I said, sitting down, “and Ana was next to me here, Yuri must have been over there, directly opposite. So if he fired at Irena, where do you think the bullet ended up?”

  “It could be almost anywhere,” said Graham. “But if our theory is correct, we know it didn’t hit anyone – and no one found it. So it can’t have come down into the audience.”

  “Might it have landed in the ring?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “In which case Yuri would have pocketed it by now.” I looked up at the roof. “Do you think it could have gone through the canvas?”

  “It might have done,” said Graham. “In which case there should be a hole.”

  We scoured the big top until we’d both given ourselves neck ache but we couldn’t see a single hole that shouldn’t have been there.

  “There’s only one option left,” considered Graham. “It might have hit one of the timber poles. I suggest we check those.”

  We began with the one closest to where we’d been sitting and worked our way around the ring. We were almost back where we’d started when we spotted it – high above our heads, the paint was nicked and the wood splintered.

  “There!” Graham crooned, his face glowing with satisfaction. “It must be embedded in the wood.”

  “Brilliant!” I exclaimed. “Let’s give Inspector Humphries a call once we get out of here. Then we’d better run home quick.”

  But before we could escape, we heard a voice. We both froze. We were dead.

  “Run?” said the voice, rolling the R around as if it was edible. “There is nowhere to run. You will say goodbye to each other. Then – how you say? – it is curtains for the pair of you.”

  “Yuri,” I said faintly to Graham. “Help!”

  We turned to face our killer. But when he stepped out of the shadows, we both gawped in amazed silence. Because the man pointing two lethal-looking weapons in our direction wasn’t Yuri.

  It was the Dashing Blade.

  brothers in arms

  The Dashing Blade had a very long, very sharp, very shiny knife in each hand – and they were both pointing at me and Graham. For a second I was tempted to laugh, because I remembered how bad his aim had been during his act. He’d had to practically push the knives in around Ruby like drawing-pins. I thought that if we made a run for it, he’d miss us both and we’d escape. Then I noticed that despite the absence of his thick glasses, he wasn’t having any problems fixing us with a cold, murderous glare. He looked like he’d lost loads of weight, too. Either that, or he’d removed the pillow he kept stuffed up his shirt.

  “You were acting,” I said, my heart sinking. “You’ve been acting the whole time. You’re not short-sighted at all, are you? And you’re certainly not overweight.”

  He laughed. A hard, barking sound that could have chipped flint. “You have seen through my disguise,” he smiled. “So now you must die.”

  “Are you from Stolijna too?” I asked desperately, playing for time.

  The mention of the town caused a whiff of sentiment to soften the Dashing Blade’s features. “Yes,” he replied. “Stolijna is my home.”

  “So.” I tried to piece things together. “You and Yuri are friends, are you?”

  “Yuri is my brother.”

  “Your brother? Were you in the army together? Did you take part in the massacre too?” A wave of cold fury washed over me. “How could you? Those people were your neighbours!”

  “They were Bosniaks,” he spat, his lip curled in disgust. “Muslims. They did not belong there. Our homeland needed to be cleansed. To be made pure. They had to die.”

  “So we were right,” said Graham. “Yuri did kill all those people.”

  The Dashing Blade laughed again and
spat into the sawdust. “Not Yuri. He is weak! He had not the stomach for the task. When he saw Ana Kotromanik weeping and pleading for the lives of her sons, he fled like a baby. Deserted. He should have been shot for his cowardice, but when the war ended it was I who was called a criminal. I had to flee my country, so I came to find my little brother. I knew he would help me. What better place to hide than a circus? Who would look for me here?”

  “Then Ana Kotromanik turned up.”

  “Yes. Many years have passed, yet Yuri knew her at once. He told me to give myself up. He said he would cover for me no longer. But I cannot. I will not! Stand trial for doing my duty to my country? It is inconceivable! I borrowed his weapons to dispose of my enemies. He is not the only man here who is an excellent shot.”

  “So you killed Ana the way we thought,” I said. “And Peepo? Did you shoot him, too?”

  “Ah! Poor, foolish Peepo! He was obsessed with Irena. When he meddled with the posters and the adverts he was hot with anger. I knew that he was the perfect – how you say? – fall guy. If she was shot at, everyone would think he was to blame. A broken heart, a jealous rage – the same old story that has been told through the centuries. Yet Peepo saw what I had done. He tried to blackmail me. So he, too, had to die. I went to Irena’s caravan. I found the note he had written and saw at once how I could use it to my advantage. I tore it in half. I waited. I knew he would come. It was a habit of his to go there when she was absent. I killed him and climbed out of the window.”

  “And you hid the other half of the note in Yuri’s photo? What was the point of that?”

  The Dashing Blade shrugged. “A contingency plan. A second fall guy. If the police did not believe Peepo had killed himself, I needed a different direction to point them in.”

  “But you couldn’t have got away with that. If they’d arrested Yuri, he’d have told the police what you did in Stolijna. They’d have worked it out.”

  “Not if I silenced him first. Overcome with remorse, he shoots himself. Another suicide. Easy.”

  I was stunned by the man’s ruthlessness. “You’d be prepared to kill your own brother to save your skin?”