B004M5HK0M EBOK (7 page)

‘What’s that, m’dear? SPEAK UP!’ said Dr. Muriel.

The light swung again. This time Emily had a chance to see who was there – it was Chris. He held a powerful torch which he put on the ground in front of him. Now he was standing just in front of her with an axe in his hand. Emily tried to determine whether she should run for her life (and look ridiculous) or stay still, or aim a good kick at him and hope he didn’t chop her legs off.

‘Emily!’ said Chris. ‘Nice head. Is this going to be another performance?’

She said, ‘Don’t do anything stupid, Chris. The police know I’m here.’

‘Of course they do.’ He came up very close, his eye to her peephole.

‘Chris!’ shouted Dr. Muriel from inside her giant head. ‘Is that you?’

Chris turned at the sound of Dr. Muriel’s voice and swung his axe, violently.

‘No!’ screamed Emily. She shut her eyes in spite of herself. She opened them again to see through the nostril peepholes that he was coming for her now. He swung his axe. The fibreglass prison split open. She stepped free, she was unharmed. She looked to her left and Dr. Muriel was there, also unharmed. Their well-being seemed to provide yet another clue to the case, which Emily tried to process.

Chris took Emily’s hand and pulled her towards him. He looked as if he was going to hug her.

‘Where’s the dog that was down here?’ asked Emily.

‘My dog? Sam. He was frightened of the fireworks so I put him down here out of the way. Honestly, Emily, he lives like a prince the rest of the time. It was for one night, and it was for his own good. But, OK, you made me feel guilty, so I put him up in my room.’

‘Where’s that sarcophagus?’ said Dr. Muriel. ‘The painted lady? Zsa-Zsa’s in it.’

‘If you mean the witch that was in here, she’s part of the parade. They’re going to put her on the bonfire and burn her. Seriously, you think Zsa-Zsa’s in it? It’s supposed to be empty.’

Dr. Muriel said, ‘Chris, we know she’s in it. We’ve seen her.’

They scrambled out of the cellar. Out in the garden, the parade had already started. It was an ethereally beautiful sight: A procession of six giant heads lit from inside seemed to float towards the bonfire, flanked by eight Polish stiltwalkers in top hats and coattails, juggling flaming torches. It all looked desperately dangerous – but these people were about to burn (albeit unwittingly) the body of a young woman who had been murdered a few hours before, so it seemed ridiculous to cavil about Health and Safety. At the front of the procession, Emily saw the sarcophagus being carried on the shoulders of a couple of men. The distance between the house and the bonfire wasn’t that great, but the performers were making the most of it by covering the width as well as the length of the garden, winding from one side of it to the other very slowly, weaving around the fruit trees in the orchard. Now they were heading back. The garden was packed with spectators. Some stood on the wooden benches and applauded; others surrounded the performers, pressing in to get a good look. A few – the kids, mostly –joined the back of the parade.

‘Stop!’ yelled Chris. But the music was too loud. Nobody heard him

‘But who knocked us out in the cellar?’ Dr. Muriel asked Chris as they pressed through the crowd towards the bonfire. ‘And why didn’t the performers notice us as they brought the heads out, or at least notice they were only bringing out six giant heads instead of eight of them for the parade?’

‘The props guy was supervising.’

‘Joe?’ asked Emily.

‘Yes, Joe.’

‘Joe set this up?’

Chris said, ‘I don’t know if he set it up or he was covering up. He’s pretty resourceful. I guess if he knew Zsa-Zsa was dead, he presumed the person who killed her was Zizi. He’s in love with Zizi.’

Emily was slightly out of breath from the running and jostling. By now she and Chris were about half way between the front and the back of the parade. They had left Dr. Muriel behind. Emily was panting as she said, ‘Joe was involved with Zizi? But I saw her lipstick in your bedroom.’

‘Did you? Boy, you’re nosey. It must have been Zsa-Zsa’s. The sisters weren’t speaking to each other before the performance. I had to let Zsa-Zsa get ready upstairs in my room. For a while there we thought she wasn’t even going to go on.’

‘So the sister I saw in the boudoir was the third sister? No wonder they didn’t look identical – just similar.’

Chris said, ‘I don’t know, Emily. You’re the detective.’

The parade had reached the bonfire. People had begun chanting: ‘Burn the witch! Burn the witch!’ Chris and Emily had pushed their way to the front – Auntie would have been proud.

‘Stop!’ yelled Chris again. He and Emily leapt on the two men who were carrying Zsa-Zsa in her colourful coffin. As she wrapped her arms and legs around him to tackle him, Emily was sorry – but not surprised – to discover that one of the men was Joe.

As it was knocked to the ground, the lid of the sarcophagus sprang open, and there was Zsa-Zsa: bluish, beautiful, dead, with the knife in her chest.

‘Call the police,’ someone said. It might have been Emily.

Emily disengaged herself from Joe. After she and Chris had toppled him she had lain, briefly, on top of Joe, her knees tucked up (but clasped demurely together) at about the level of his waist, her head tucked under his chin, her ear on his throat – like a very tired or frightened young monkey clinging for comfort to its mother.

‘I’m sorry, Emily,’ said Joe, as he stood up. A Polish stiltwalker grabbed his shoulders and Ravi from Emily’s local shop held on to his elbows. But Joe offered no resistance.

Dr. Muriel caught up with them, ploughing through the crowd with elbows and cane before her, giving a knock to anyone who didn’t get out of the way. Emily turned her friend right round again and walked with her back to the house.

‘So the third sister turned up in London last night and asked one of them or both of them to go back to Hungary with her, to help with the sick mother?’ said Dr. Muriel as they made their way through the scandalised crowd, which by now was buzzing with news of the discovery of Zsa-Zsa’s body.

‘It seems so. But there was an argument, and Zizi refused to leave Joe, so Zsa-Zsa set him up, and got into bed with him so her sister would think they’d been sleeping together and get angry.’

‘Well, certainly she got angry. That was quite a betrayal.’

‘Yes. But the plan backfired and Zizi refused even to let Zsa-Zsa get ready in the same bedroom, and Zsa-Zsa threatened that she wasn’t going to perform. So Zizi put the third sister in one of the shabby spare costumes in case she had to go on.’

‘A bit of a risk - if she was out of practice we might have ended up with a different dead body.’

‘They’re from a famous knife-throwing family, apparently. Very well-known in Hungary. Besides, I expect they could see through the blindfolds. Anyway then... I don’t know. Zsa-Zsa insisted on doing the performance, I suppose. And instead of using the sawn-off prop, Zizi threw a real kitchen knife and killed her.’

Dr. Muriel stopped and rested on her cane, and looked up at the dark passageway that led past Midori’s long-since-absorbed vomit puddle towards the side doors and the cellar. ‘And the third sister was waiting outside in the bushes?’

‘She must have been. You know, I thought I saw someone – or heard them. It was just a glinting and a bit of rustling. You know something else? When Zsa-Zsa died and she looked towards the curtain, she must have seen Joe. I thought she was looking beseechingly at me but it must have been him. Maybe the light didn’t go out of her eyes. But I know a beseeching look when I see one.’

‘So Joe dragged Zsa-Zsa’s body away from the grand hall, and the third sister stepped in to take the bow.’

‘Yes. But whether she was in on it or she was just protecting Zizi, I have no way of knowing.’

‘I suppose it will all come out in court,’ said Dr. Muriel, sagely.

‘One good thing about this evening,’ said Emily. ‘I didn’t learn personally whether roast pig smells like a roast person.’

‘And you let go of Jessie.’

‘Hmm,’ said Emily. ‘Not quite.’

Chris caught up with them just before they reached the front door of the house. He must have been running because he looked flushed. He took Emily’s hand and he got a look on his face that made his nose seem longer and straighter than usual. Emily recognised it finally for what it was: shyness. It twisted his mouth so it looked kind of sexy.

He said, ‘Would you consider joining us, Emily? You’ve got a lovely loud shrieking voice, you were very game with that suitcase. You’re tenacious, you’re good at remembering things. You’d be, you know, an asset.’

Emily looked at him and thought that this might be the offer that would help her, finally, to forget Jessie, to let go and move on from her old life. ‘Thank you,’ said Emily. ‘But no.’

The flashing blue lights and the protesting ‘not ME, not ME, not ME’ sound of the sirens announced that the police had arrived and were parking up on the road outside. Chris left Emily, with a somewhat reluctant final squeeze of her hand, and went off to deal with them.

‘I’ll walk you back to your flat, dear,’ said Dr. Muriel to Emily. ‘If you don’t mind stopping by the kitchen first so I can pick up my trolley.’ As they walked together back to the house, Dr. Muriel said, ‘I don’t suppose we shall ever discover whether Midori was poisoned – but for what it’s worth, I very much doubt it. That girl was over-excited, and wearing very constricting clothing, and she bolted her food from what you told me, and she drank that punch down straight. It sounds like what my mother would have called a giddy spell – she was a classic candidate. Other than that, Emily, is there any aspect of this case left unresolved?’

‘Well, I did wonder,’ said Emily, ‘whether Joe
really
liked my cheesy potato bake that I brought.’

‘I don’t know about that m’dear,’ said Dr. Muriel. ‘But if it’s pertinent to the case, I’m sure it will come out in court.’

o0o0o0o0o

Thank you for reading Three Sisters. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. If you liked Three Sisters, you’re going to love the Emily Castles mysteries. The series can be read in any order, but most people go on to read
Showstoppers
next. There’s blackmail, murder and intrigue when Emily helps out at the end-of-term show at the local stage school.

‘Hello!’ Emily called as she went into her flat on Friday evening, before the front door was fully closed behind her. She lived alone. Calling out was a deterrent strategy in case she had been followed home by an opportunistic thief. The thief was to assume, from hearing her cheery hello, that she lived with a tough, dangerous man or men who wouldn’t stand for Emily being attacked on her doorstep or pushed inside and attacked there. It was a strategy that she no longer thought about or questioned, she just did it. It was one of many little survival tactics she had adopted since coming to live in London – but still, when she called out hello and got no answer, it always seemed, somehow, as if the silence was mocking her for living alone.

She picked up her mail from the doormat: a phone bill, a begging letter from a charity, a voucher for free delivery from a supermarket, and a letter addressed to her neighbour, Victoria. It wasn’t unusual for Emily to get letters delivered to her that were meant for other residents of the street, as though the postmen at the local sorting office were conspiring to bring the community into closer contact with each other. She took the letter across the street to where Victoria lived in a three-storey red brick Edwardian terraced house with her husband and three sons. Emily Castles was a bright, clever young woman with a natural curiosity. When she walked anywhere she walked quickly, usually, and she looked up at her surroundings as if she expected to see something interesting at any minute. But today hadn’t been a good day, and she looked down at the chewing gum-grey pavements without really seeing them, scuttling towards Victoria’s house to avoid being seen as much as to avoid seeing anything. But Victoria opened the door to greet her before Emily could get away. Victoria was very slim, and she had naturally curly brown hair that fell to her shoulders in fat spirals. She was in her early-to-mid forties, Emily thought. Victoria rarely wore make-up unless it was a special occasion because she had lovely skin and even features, and she looked perfectly fine without it. She was bare-faced now, as usual, though Emily couldn’t help noticing she looked paler than usual, even a little drawn.

‘Letter for you,’ said Emily.

‘Oh God, no!’ said Victoria. ‘Oh my God!’ She put one hand to the base of her throat and reached for the door behind her with the other, as if planning on whipping it off its hinges and using it as a shield. Her reaction was unexpected to say the least.

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Showstoppers
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