by Unknown
She stood still and listened for a moment. The sound was coming from a cellar door a little way off to her left. She put her hand on the latch and heard it click open, and she pulled at the door. The sound of a dog in distress got louder. Emily peered in. The cellar space was vast. Clearly it was currently being used as a storage space for all the gaudy accoutrements of the performers at the house because she could see, stacked in the shadows, eight giant painted heads, and other objects whose form and function was less discernible. Half a dozen fireworks exploded in the sky above her, and a little of the light reached down into the darkness and showed Emily a few bars of what seemed like a cage, and she heard the animal whimper again. What sort of brute would do something like this?
‘Don’t open it!’ A man’s voice. She turned. It was Chris.
‘There’s a dog down there – I can hear it whimpering.’
‘So you thought you’d interfere? You didn’t think it might have been put down there on purpose?’
‘Yes but, seriously, why would anyone shut a dog down there in a cage in the darkness on a night like tonight?’
‘You’re a clever girl, Emily,’ he said. ‘You’ll figure it out.’
He went past her – he didn’t push, exactly, but he moved with intention, so that she had to step out of his way – and opened the door and went down into the cellar. Emily stood there for a moment, wondering what to do next. Then she saw Joe walking towards her out of the darkness. There seemed to be a rule tonight, that when she saw one of these two men, she’d shortly afterwards see the other – as if one always needed to be at hand to cancel the other’s actions out.
‘He’s got a dog in there,’ Emily said.
‘Who? Chris?’
‘You knew about it?’
‘What can I do? He’s the chief.’
‘Oh my God!’
‘It’s one night only, Emily. It’s OK.’
‘It’s really not.’
‘Come. We can go into the house this way. Maybe you can have a drink.’
Joe walked further up the side of the house and Emily followed him. It was very dark there, there was no path and the only light was from the stars, the occasional firework, and whatever faint illumination reached them from the windows of the house higher up on the first and second floor. Emily stumbled and scratched her leg on some holly leaves and cursed, and Joe took her hand, matter-of-factly, so she wouldn’t fall into the next bush.
She strained her eyes looking into the darkness. Was there someone else here? Up ahead of them, she heard the rustling sound of movement in the bushes. Or maybe it was the wind, or water in a stream. She thought she saw the glint of something silver – a knife? Or a bit of tinsel on a tree? She wanted to say to Joe that being in the dark was like being deep underwater, not being able to hear or turn round quickly enough to see the predator behind you. But then she scratched her leg again and she hissed because it hurt, and then Joe stopped so she stopped right behind him and listened to him breathing, and she didn’t say anything about being underwater or what she thought she had seen.
He opened a door at the side of the house and led her into a corridor that smelled of damp stone. It was completely dark. The blackness in here trumped the blackness outside, which at least had layers and shapes in it. Joe edged forward, and Emily could tell from the way his left arm was moving that he was feeling for something in front of him – a doorway or a light. She put her hand lightly on his back and edged forward with him. ‘Shh,’ he said, though she hadn’t said a word.
He must have reached what he’d been looking for because he stopped. A little bit of light appeared in front of them and she could see that he had pulled at the edge of a very thick, heavy curtain until there was enough of a gap for him to peep round.
‘Ach,’ he said, very quietly. ‘No, we’re too late.’
‘What is it?’
‘The knife throwing.’
‘We’ve missed it?’
‘No, they’re just about to start.’
‘Well, can I see?’
‘I suppose so. OK.’
She crouched, and he stood next to her, and they peeped through the gap in the velvet curtain like Victorian children on Christmas Eve. The sensation of standing next to him, spying on events in the grand hall, was both illicit and innocent. But just standing next to him in the darkness would have been very pleasant anyway.
The two sisters came in, to the sound of applause. ‘Ah,’ said Joe. And when Emily asked him, he bent down and whispered to tell her that this one was Zizi, this one was Zsa-Zsa. Apparently they were very well-known, apparently they were from a famous knife-throwing family in Hungary, so Joe said, though Emily had never heard of them.
They were in their blue-grey spangly costumes and finally Emily realised what the colour reminded her of – sharks. They were blindfolded with big, silky pale green scarves tied around their eyes. They looked vulnerable, bringing to mind the painting of Hope by George Frederick Watts that had hung in Emily’s Nana’s living room until she died, and they stood facing each other with their backs against opposite walls, in a slightly recessed area of the hall that provided a natural stage. They were very close to where Emily and Joe were standing – a little too close, perhaps, if one didn’t have faith in their aim – but they were a decent way away from their audience. Emily wondered if she should be worried that Joe had sounded so disappointed that he wouldn’t be able to get them into the grand hall and over to the other side, and safety, before the act began.
The two sisters began to throw their ornate-handled knives simultaneously. The knives crossed mid-flight and stuck into the walls behind them, no more than two hands’ width from where each sister stood. There was a pause, and then they threw again. And again, delineating an unflattering larger version of their own shapes around themselves. It was really rather exciting, and there were gasps from the audience.
The two sisters looked identical. They 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 cro
wd – 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 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 to Joe about it. He had been standing next to her; he had dragged the ‘dead’ girl out of the grand hall and seen her come to life again. If it was only a trick, he’d be able to explain how it was done. Before she could talk to either of them, she had to deal with Chris. As she made her way across the grand hall, he intercepted her.
‘Some trick, huh?’ Chris said. ‘Had me going.’
‘You didn’t know they were going to do it?’
‘They like to keep me on my toes, those Hungarians.’
‘They’re Hungarian? Like Joe.’
‘The name kind of gives it away: Zsa-Zsa.’
‘It could be a stage name, like Midori choosing “Hana-bi”.’
Chris made his funny face again. ‘Midori’s the name of a bright green melon liqueur. Did you know that? “DJ Melon”. It’s got quite a ring to it. It’s half the reason I booked her for this evening, and then she told me she was going to go by “Hana-bi”.’
‘Chris, where’s Zsa-Zsa? I need to talk to her.’
‘She’s around here somewhere.’
‘Or Zizi – where could I find Zizi?’
‘They’re off duty now, Emily. I don’t know. Maybe they’re in one of the private rooms upstairs. Maybe they’ve gone to the pub.’
‘Private rooms?’
‘Even performers need privacy.’
Emily was going to ask him – she was going to interrogate him, to find out whether Midori had been poisoned for stumbling unwittingly on some secret – but Victoria came up and intervened. Victoria said, ‘I heard the DJ got shot. She went down mid-set. That’s what the boys said. Was she really hurt or was it part of the act?’
Chris said, ‘She got food poisoning. Apparently.’
‘What we saw just now, though,’ Emily said. ‘The knife throwing. Was that really just an act?’
‘What do you mean?’ said Chris. He looked tired.
‘Well I looked at Zsa-Zsa,’ said Emily, ‘and her blindfold slipped after the knife went into her chest, and she looked at me and the light went out of her eyes.’
‘Really?’ said Chris.
‘Really!’ said Victoria.
‘Yes,’ said Emily. ‘It reminded me of when my dog died.’
Chris looked at her for a moment or two. Emily thought that perhaps he was thinking of their altercation by the cellar door, and was quaking a little, taking her seriously now as a dog owner who wouldn’t stand for the ill-treatment of a dog in his care. Or perhaps he was wondering if it was too late to call the police back to investigate now that Emily had come forward as a witness to tell him what she had seen. She waited to see what he would say – it would be interesting to see if he could say anything without a note of exasperation in his voice. But no... he was about to
speak, and unfortunately it seemed the words were to be accompanied by a sneer.
‘Does the light really go out of a creature’s eyes when it dies?’ Chris said. ‘Really? A fish that’s been out of the river for a while, yes, it gets a milky look in the eyes and a slightly fishy smell. But it’s not like the soul leaving the body and curling upwards like a wisp of smoke. The light is not “in” someone’s eyes in the first place. Look, I’m sorry, Emily, because you’re obviously overwrought because your dog has died. But the light going out of Zsa-Zsa’s eyes – it’s like something in a story.’
‘Where is she then?’ said Emily. ‘Zsa-Zsa?’
Chris looked irritated. He said, ‘She’s not here.’
‘She can’t have just disappeared!’
‘There’s no mystery about it, Emily. If she wanted a break from this place, all she had to do was walk to main road and hop on a bus.’
‘Alright. But I’d like to talk to Zizi.’
Chris smiled politely enough. He walked off towards the staircase without answering. Emily wondered, was he heading to the first floor boudoir to warn Zizi that Emily was on to her?
Emily stood in the middle of the grand hall and came to a decision. Yes, OK, maybe the light didn’t go out of Jessie’s eyes. Another way of putting it would be to say that she had ceased to be. But Zsa-Zsa had ceased to be, too – right in front of her. And dead people don’t come back to life, so Emily was going to find out what was going on. Her first potential witness scurried past: Elise. She’d been standing at the front of the crowd while the knives were being thrown, and what’s more she’d be able to give Emily an insider’s perspective on the relationship between Zsa-Zsa and Zizi.
