I Know What You Did Last Wednesday (3 page)

“Is she…?” he began.

“Yes,” Tim said. “She’s asleep.”

“I don’t think so, Tim,” I said.

Eric went over to her and took her wrist between a podgy finger and thumb. “She has no pulse,” he said. He leant over her. “She’s not breathing.”

Tim’s mouth fell open. “Do you think she’s ill?” he asked.

“She’s dead, Tim,” I said. Two murders in one day. And it wasn’t even Tim’s bedtime.

Libby burst into tears. It was getting to be a habit with her. At least Brenda didn’t scream again. At this close range, I’m not sure my eardrums could have taken it.

“What are we going to do?” someone asked. I wasn’t sure who it was and it didn’t matter anyway. Because right then I didn’t have any idea.

“It might have been a heart attack,” Tim said. “Maybe the shock of what happened to Rory…”

Darkness had fallen on Crocodile Island. It had slithered across the surface of the sea and thrown itself over the house. Now and then a full moon came out from behind the clouds and for a moment the waves would ripple silver before disappearing into inky blackness. Tim and I were sitting on our four-poster bed. It looked like we were going to have to share it. Two posters each.

Maybe it had been a heart attack. Maybe she had died of fright. Maybe she’d caught a very bad case of flu. Everyone had their own ideas … but I knew better. I remembered the twist of silver I had seen on the carpet.

“Tim, what can you tell me about Sylvie Binns?” I asked.

“Not a lot.” Tim fell silent. “She was good at chemistry.”

“I know that.”

“She used to go out with Mark. We always thought the two of them would get married, but in the end she met someone else. Mark ran all the way round England. That was his way of forgetting her.”

Mark Tyler had been the last person to see Sylvie alive. I wondered if he really had forgotten her. Or forgiven her.

“Maybe she was ill before she came to the island,” Tim muttered.

“Tim, I think she was poisoned,” I said.

“Poisoned?”

I remembered my first sight of Sylvie, on the quay. She had been eating a chocolate flake. “Sylvie liked sweets and chocolate,” I said.

“You’re right, Nick! Yes. She loved chocolate. She could never resist it. When Mark was going out with her, he took her on a tour of a chocolate factory. She even ate the tickets.” Tim frowned. “But what’s that got to do with anything?”

“There was a piece of silver paper on the floor in her room. I think it was the wrapper off a sweet or a chocolate. Don’t you see? Someone knew she couldn’t resist chocolate – so they left one in her room. Maybe on her pillow.”

“And it wasn’t almond crunch,” Tim muttered darkly.

“More likely cyanide surprise,” I said.

We got into bed. Tim didn’t want to turn off the lights, but a few minutes later, after he had dozed off, I reached for the switch and lay back in the darkness. I needed to think. Sylvie had eaten a poisoned chocolate. I was sure of it. But had she been given it or had she found it in her room? If it was already in the room, it could have been left there before we arrived. But if she had been given it, then the killer must still be on the island. He or she might even be in the house.

There was a movement at the window.

At first I thought I’d imagined it, but propping myself up in the bed, I saw it again. There was somebody there! No – that was impossible. We were on the first floor. Then I remembered. There was a terrace running round the outside of the house, connecting all the bedrooms.

There it was again. I stared in horror. There was a face staring at me from the other side of the glass, a hideous skull with hollow eyes and grinning, tombstone teeth. The bones glowed in the moonlight. Now I’ll be honest with you. I don’t scare easily. But right then I was frozen. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t cry out. I’m almost surprised I didn’t wet the bed.

The skull hovered in front of me. I couldn’t see a body. It had to be draped in black. It’s a mask, I told myself. Someone is trying to frighten you with a joke-shop mask. Somehow, I managed to force back the fear. I jerked up in bed and threw back the covers. Next to me, Tim woke up.

“Is it breakfast already?” he asked.

I ignored him. I was already darting towards the window. But at that moment, the moon vanished behind another cloud and the darkness fell. By the time I had found the lock and opened the window, the man – or woman, whoever it was – had gone.

“What is it, Nick?” Tim demanded.

I didn’t answer. But it seemed that whoever had killed Rory McDougal and Sylvie Binns was still on the island.

Which left me wondering – who was going to be next?

Janet Rhodes didn’t make it to breakfast.

There were just the five of us, sitting in the kitchen with five bowls of Frosties and a steaming plate of scrambled eggs that Brenda had insisted on cooking but which nobody felt like eating. Libby had another cigarette in her mouth but everyone had complained so much that she wasn’t smoking it. She was sucking it. Eric was still in his dressing-gown, a thick red thing with his initials – ED – embroidered on the pocket. Mark was wearing a track suit. A security camera winked at us from one corner of the room. There were a lot of security cameras on the island. But none of us felt even slightly secure.

“What are we going to do?” Brenda asked. I got the feeling that she hadn’t slept very much the night before. There were dark rings under her eyes and although she’d put on lipstick, most of it had missed her lips. “This island is haunted!” she went on.

“What do you mean?” Eric asked.

“Last night … my window … it was horrible.”

“I’ve got quite a nice window,” Tim said.

“I mean … I saw something! A human skull. It was dancing in the night air.”

So she’d seen it too! I was about to chip in, but then Eric interrupted. “I don’t think it’s going to help, sharing our bad dreams,” he said.

“I didn’t dream it,” Brenda insisted.

“We’ve got to do something!” Mark cut in. “First Rory, then Sylvie. At this rate, there won’t be any of us left by lunch-time.”

“I don’t want any lunch,” Libby muttered.

“We need to talk about this,” Eric said. “We need to work something out. But there’s no point starting until we’re all here.” He glanced at the clock. “Where the hell is Janet?”

“Maybe she’s in the bath,” Tim suggested.

“In the water or underneath it?” Eric growled.

The minute hand on the kitchen clock ticked forward. It was nine o’clock. Suddenly Mark stood up. “I’m going upstairs,” he announced.

“You’re going back to bed?” Tim asked.

“I’m going to find her.”

He left the room. The rest of us followed him, tiptoeing up the stairs and along the corridor with a sense of dread. Actually, Eric didn’t exactly tiptoe. He was so fat that it must have been quite a few years since his toes
had
tips. Mark Tyler had moved quickly, taking the stairs four at a time as if they were hurdles and he was back at the Olympic games at Atlanta. He was outside the door when we arrived.

“She’s overslept,” Tim said to me. “She’s fine. She’s just overslept.”

Eric knocked on her door. There was no answer. He knocked again, then turned the handle. The door opened.

The hairdresser had overslept all right, but nothing was ever going to wake her up again. She had been stabbed during the night. She was lying on her back on a four-poster bed like the one in our room, only smaller. The bed was old. The paint had peeled off the posts and there was a tear in the canopy above her. In fact the whole room looked shabby, as if it had been missed out by the decorators. Maybe I noticed all this because I didn’t want to look at the body. You may think I’m crazy, but dead people upset me. And when I did finally look at her, I got a shock.

Whoever had killed her hadn’t used a knife. There was something sticking out of her chest and at first I thought it was some sort of rocket. It was silver, in the shape of a sort of long pyramid, with four legs jutting out. Then, slowly, it dawned on me what I was looking at. It was a model, a souvenir of the building that I had climbed up with Tim only the year before.

It was incredible. But true. Janet Rhodes had been stabbed with a model of the Eiffel Tower.

“The Eiffel Tower!” Tim muttered. His face was the colour of sour milk. “It’s an outrage. I mean, it’s meant to be a tourist attraction!”

“Why the Eiffel Tower?” I asked.

“Because it’s famous, Nick. People like to visit it.”

“No – I don’t mean, why is it a tourist attraction. I mean, why use it as a murder weapon? It’s certainly a strange choice. Maybe someone is trying to tell us something.”

“Well, they certainly told Janet something,” Tim said.

We were back at the breakfast table. The scrambled eggs were cold and congealed and looked even less appetizing than before. All the Frosties had gone soggy. But it didn’t matter. There was no way anybody was going to eat anything today. The way things were going, I wondered if any of us would ever eat anything again.

Nobody was talking very much. I knew why. But it was Brenda who put it into words.

“Do you realize…” she began, and for once her voice was hoarse and empty. “Do you realize that the killer could be sitting here, at this table.”

Tim looked around. “But there’s only us here!”

“That’s what she means, Tim,” I said. “She’s saying that the killer could be one of us!”

Brenda nodded. “I know it’s one of us. One of us got up last night and went down the corridor.” She shuddered. “I thought I heard squeaking last night…”

“That was Tim,” I said. “He snores.”

“No. It was a floorboard. Somebody left their room…”

“Did anyone else hear anything last night?” Eric asked.

There was a pause. Then Libby nodded. “I have the room next to Mark,” she said. She turned to look at him. “I heard your door open just after midnight. I heard you go into the corridor.”

“I went to the toilet,” Mark replied. His dark face had suddenly got darker. He didn’t like being accused.

“You went to the toilet in the corridor?” Tim asked.

“I went to the toilet which is across the corridor, opposite my room. I didn’t go anywhere near Janet.”

“What about the skull?” Brenda whispered. Eric scowled. He had forgotten about the dancing skull. “I know you say it’s a dream, Eric,” she went on. “But that’s typical of you. You never believed anything I said, even when we were at school. Well, believe me now…” she took a deep breath. “Maybe it wasn’t a ghost or a monster. Maybe it was someone in a mask. But they were there! I was awake. I jumped out of bed and went over to the window but by the time I got there, seconds later, they’d gone. Vanished into thin air…”

“It wasn’t a dream,” I said. “I saw it too.”

“You?” Eric sneered at me.

I nodded.

“I didn’t see anything,” Tim said.

“You were asleep, Tim. But it was definitely there. It came out of nowhere … like a magic trick. A rabbit out of a hat!”

“You saw a rabbit too?” Tim asked.

We all ignored him. “Any one of us could have climbed out onto the terrace,” Brenda said. “Any one of us could have killed Janet. And Rory. And Sylvie! How do we know that she wasn’t strangled or poisoned or something?”

“I think she
was
poisoned,” I said.

Everyone looked at me so I told them about the sweet wrapper and Sylvie’s love of chocolate. It was strange. Everyone in the room was ten years older than me but suddenly I was in control.

Not for long, though. Eric Draper, the ex-head boy, raised his hands. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced. “I don’t think we should jump to conclusions. Why would any of us sitting at this table want to kill Rory or Sylvie or Janet?”

“Mark used to go out with Sylvie,” Libby said. She was staring at him. “When she broke up with you, you told me you wanted to kill her.”

“That was ten years ago!” Mark protested. He jerked a finger at Libby. “Anyway, what about
you
? You nearly
did
kill Rory with that bicycle pump…”

“Yes. And what about you!” Tim pointed at Eric. “You say your name’s Eric, so why are you wearing a dressing-gown that belongs to Ed?”

It took Eric a few seconds to work out what Tim was getting at. “Those are my initials, you idiot!” he snapped. He took a deep breath and raised his hands. “Look,” he went on. “There’s no point arguing amongst ourselves. We have to stick together. It could be our only hope.”

The others fell silent. I had to admit, Eric was speaking sense. Blaming each other wouldn’t help.

“Both Brenda and … Tim’s little brother saw somebody last night,” he went on. I didn’t know why he couldn’t call me by my name. “Now that could have been one of us, dressing up to frighten the others. But remember, we were all inside the house … and this thing, whatever it was, was outside. So maybe it was someone else. Maybe it was someone we don’t know about.”

“You mean … someone hiding on the island?” Mark said.

“Exactly. We know we can’t call the police. We know we’re stuck here. But it seems to me that the first thing we have to do is find out if there’s anyone else here.”

“We’ve got to organize a search party,” I said.

Tim shook his head. “This is no time for a party, Nick,” he muttered.

“You’re right, Eric,” Libby said. “We’ve got to go over the island from head to tail.”

“But at the same time, I think we should keep an eye on each other,” Brenda said. “I’ll feel safer that way.”

Eric went upstairs to get changed. Mark went with him. From now on, we were going to do everything in pairs. Brenda and Libby cleared the breakfast things. I’d already noticed that most of the food in the house was in tins – which was just as well. Even the cleverest killer couldn’t tamper with a tin, so at least we wouldn’t starve. At half past nine we all met in the hall. Then we put on our coats and went outside.

The search began back at the jetty, right at the head of the crocodile. The idea was that we could cover the entire island, working like the police searching a wood when someone has gone missing. That is, we kept ten metres apart, always in sight of one another, moving across the island in a line. It was a beautiful day. The sun was shining and the sea was blue, but even so I could feel a chill breeze on Crocodile Island. And there was something else. I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was being watched. It was weird. Because it was obvious that there wasn’t anybody in sight … not even so much as a sheep or a cow.