“But what about you two?” Mum fixed me with an anxious frown. “I’m not sure you should carry on with this production. I’ll bet your mum feels the same, Graham. Maybe I should give her a ring and see what she says.”
Graham and I exchanged swift, horrified glances.
“We can’t possibly let the rest of the cast down,” Graham told her earnestly, surprising me with his streak of low cunning. “Not now. Our roles are pivotal – they couldn’t train anyone else up in time. It’s less than two weeks until opening night.”
“We’ll be fine,” I said, backing him up for all I was worth. “The stalker’s after Tiffany, not a pair of kids. We’re not in any danger.”
Mum looked from me to Graham, examining our faces. “OK,” she conceded reluctantly. “I suppose you can’t really leave everyone in the lurch.”
She turned back to the television. The reporter was saying that the police were trawling through Tiffany’s fan mail to see if they could match anyone’s handwriting to the card on the chocolates.
Mum shook her head and sighed. “That will take them forever. And meanwhile that stalker’s out there planning his next move. I just hope no one gets in his way. You can never tell how far a lunatic like that will go. Someone could get hurt.”
“There are police all over the theatre, Mum. He’s not going to get within a millimetre of any of us,” I said cheerily. “Nothing bad’s going to happen, I promise.”
But sadly my optimism was totally and utterly misplaced. The very next day my mum’s gloomy prophecy proved one hundred per cent accurate.
the tin man’s axe
Graham and I arrived early for our next rehearsal. My mum was putting the finishing touches to a winter wonderland she’d created in the town centre and, as she was still fretting about the stalker, she insisted on giving us a lift. It was nice to be chauffeur-driven for a change, but it meant we got to the theatre ages before anyone else turned up. Everyone except Cynthia, and Maggie of course, who – as far as I could tell – never left the building.
Maggie greeted us with a broad smile. “You’re keen,” she said. “Nice to see such enthusiasm in a pair of youngsters.”
She buzzed us through the security lock but before we could disappear into the dark corridors she said, “Oh – could you find Cynthia and tell her that her son just phoned? He wants her to call him back.”
“Yeah, OK.”
“She’ll be up in Tiffany’s dressing room I should think. A dozen red roses just arrived so Cynthia took them up.”
Suspicion gripped me and I turned to stare at Maggie. “More flowers?” I said sharply. “Who from?”
Maggie gave a throaty chuckle. “Peregrine. That man’s gone completely daft over Tiffany if you ask me. Really, you’d think a chap of his age would know better. Still, you know what they say – there’s no fool like an old fool.”
“Are you quite certain they’re from him?” Graham asked.
“Absolutely,” said Maggie. “I called him to check. Nothing dodgy’s getting past me, I assure you. Not after those chocolates.”
Reassured, Graham and I went off to find Cynthia. But we’d barely set foot on the first set of stairs when I had the sensation that something was terribly wrong. The theatre was pretty much empty and I knew from experience that it was spooky when it was deserted, but this was worse than that. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why the atmosphere was so unnerving. My ears strained for the sounds of an intruder but I couldn’t hear a thing. It wasn’t until we neared the corridor where Tiffany’s dressing room was that I realized it was the silence itself that was scaring me.
The slight squeaking of our trainers on the lino was the only noise in the building. Yet we knew that Cynthia was around somewhere: Maggie had said so.
So why couldn’t we hear her?
In a blinding flash I remembered that Cynthia never did anything without singing to herself. You always knew exactly where she was and what kind of mood she was in. Cynthia’s heart thumped along to a never-ending musical accompaniment: it came as naturally to her as breathing.
There had to be a reason for her silence. But it wasn’t going to be a nice one.
As we rounded the corner we saw that Tiffany’s door was wide open. Something bulky had wedged it firmly back against the wall. No. Not something. Someone.
My heart lurched horribly and Graham clutched my arm so hard that he left finger-shaped bruises all down it.
Cynthia’s feet were sticking out across the corridor. She was face down and completely still. A smudge of blood in her hair showed where she’d been hit. Beside her the Tin Man’s axe lay where her assailant had dropped it. She was still holding the dozen red roses Peregrine had sent to Tiffany.
Across the mirror – scrawled in red lipstick – were the words TIFFANY WILL DIE!
The window was wide open. The stalker must have climbed up the fire escape and lain in wait for Tiffany. Cynthia had surprised him when she opened the door. She must have seen his face. Perhaps she even recognized him. Or her. And so Cynthia had been killed. She’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time and paid the ultimate price for it.
Graham and I were about to go for help when there was a commotion behind us. Tiffany had arrived, along with her bodyguards. The burly pair of guardian angels swung into action at once, calling the police and cordoning off the area.
It was a narrow corridor and Graham and I were totally in the way. We backed off and headed towards the stage feeling shaken and upset. But before we left I had a good look at Tiffany. An expression of horror was on her face; her mouth was open, her eyebrows were raised, her hand was flat against her cheek, fingers outstretched. But she didn’t look genuinely scared. Not like when Peregrine had told her to skip ahead to the last verse of her song.
“Are you sure?” asked Graham when I told him.
“Absolutely.”
“That does seem like a most inexplicable reaction.”
“You said it.”
“I wonder what was going through her mind?” We looked at each other and fell as silent as Cynthia.
We didn’t do any rehearsing that day. For a start, everyone was far too upset. Cynthia had been really popular, especially among the kids. She’d been kind to all of us so there were a fair few Munchkins who were crying inconsolably when we left the theatre. Once Cynthia’s body had been taken away the police wanted to do a fingertip search of the entire building. We all got sent home. We weren’t allowed back in for three days.
During our unscheduled break a big article about Tiffany appeared in a celebrity magazine. We were at my house having tea when Mum came in with it, and Graham and I fell on it as though we might find some clues to Tiffany’s state of mind in there.
It wasn’t very informative. All right, so we got to know what colour her duvet cover was (pink with her initials picked out in gold embroidery) and how her house was decorated (mostly pink and white) and what the garden looked like (mainly roses – pink ones, surprise, surprise), but it didn’t say much about what made her tick.
The only remotely interesting thing was a photograph taken about five years ago before she was famous. When I looked at it closely my pulse began to race.
It was a picture of a group of teenagers dressed in The Wizard of Oz costumes. The caption said it was Tiffany’s school production. The girl playing Dorothy was right in the middle, her face turned to the side as she grinned at one of the other actors. She was very pretty with thick black hair and high cheekbones. Cynthia would have said she had good bone structure.
It took me a while to find Tiffany. She was squeezed in to the far right-hand corner of the frame looking a lot younger and a little plumper. She was wearing a Munchkin outfit.
In a paragraph next to the photo Tiffany was quoted as saying, “We did a production of The Wizard of Oz at school when I was sixteen and I’ve loved it ever since. Getting the part of Dorothy now is like a dream come true.”
“I wonder why she didn’t get it back the
n?” I said.
“Who knows?” replied Graham. “Does it matter?”
I considered. “I think it does, yes. She’s got a fabulous voice. How could they give the part to anyone else?”
“There’s only one way to find out,” said Graham. “Let’s see what’s on the Internet.”
We switched on the computer. The name of the newspaper the photo had first appeared in was printed next to the image. By typing it into the search engine Graham found its site and then went through to the archives. It wasn’t long before he’d printed out the article that originally went with the photo.
It was the kind of thing you get in local newspapers – listing all the kids who’d taken part and saying a few nice things about the show. A girl called Katie had been Dorothy and they’d written a few lines about her “shining performance” and how a “new star was born” and how she was “someone that would undoubtedly be gracing the West End stage in the future”.
“Well they got that wrong,” I said to Graham. “I don’t recognize her. She obviously didn’t make it as an actress.”
Tiffany was mentioned too. “She made an excellent Munchkin, showing a flair for comedy that had us rolling in the aisles.”
“That’s odd,” I said. “You don’t think of Tiffany as being funny, do you?”
Graham didn’t answer. He’d skipped to the bottom of the page and his eyes had grown wide with excitement. “Look!” he said.
I looked.
He was pointing at the last line. I read it out loud.
“After the curtain call the headteacher made a speech giving special thanks to the technical crew without whom, he said, none of this would have been possible: Ed Sawyer, Martin Smith, Gillian Riley and Jason Cotton.”
“Jason Cotton?” I exclaimed. “Do you reckon that’s our Jason?”
“Could be,” Graham replied cautiously. “If it is, then that means he and Tiffany were at school together.”
“So they might have known each other for years. But they never let on, did they? Tiffany never gave the slightest sign that she knew him when he first arrived. She looked right through him as if he wasn’t there.”
“Perhaps she didn’t remember him,” suggested Graham. “They might not have been friends.”
“Maybe not. But surely in a school production like that you get to know everyone, don’t you? They spend ages putting those things together. So she must be pretending not to. I wonder why?”
“I believe that the possibility of them ending up together in another version of The Wizard of Oz purely by chance is very unlikely,” Graham said.
“So it must mean something?”
“It must,” Graham decided.
The only problem was that neither of us could work out what it was.
ruby slippers
It took an awful lot of persuading before our parents would let us carry on with the show. In the end what swung it was the fact that the police had put the building under 24-hour surveillance. The stalker had slipped past them twice – they were determined he wasn’t going to do it again. Graham recited a seemingly endless stream of statistics about muggings and street crime, and finally managed to convince both our mums that we were safer in the theatre than anywhere else in the country.
Not everyone shared Graham’s powers of persuasion. When we were allowed back to work the population of Munchkinland had been decimated.
Graham and I didn’t have a clue what Tiffany and Jason were up to but we were pretty sure that something was going on. We were careful – two people had died already and we didn’t want to add ourselves to the grand total. But when we started rehearsing again – under the protective gaze of Daphne, Cynthia’s replacement – we watched both of them like hawks.
By now everyone was feeling the pressure – we’d lost three days and opening night was just a week away. Peregrine solemnly informed his reduced cast that we would have to “work like demons” if we were going to be ready in time.
It was a major challenge, particularly with the number of policemen crammed into the building. They were guarding every window and every door. It was hard to move without falling over one.
“Which isn’t much good if the stalker is one of us,” I said to Graham. “I know Maggie said Peregrine is obsessed with Tiffany. But suppose he isn’t?”
“What do you mean?”
“He could be pretending he’s smitten to cover up how he really feels. Suppose he’s trying to do away with her so he can claim on the theatre insurance?”
“As we know, money is frequently a motive in murder cases,” opined Graham. “But Peregrine wasn’t here in the building when Cynthia was killed. We were the first to arrive after she did.”
“So Maggie said. But someone must have already been here to bash Cynthia. I know it looked like he’d climbed the fire escape. Yet it would be easy enough to hide in here overnight, wouldn’t it?”
“Any one of us could have done that,” said Graham.
“True,” I conceded. I turned it over in my mind. “You don’t reckon Jason might have something to do with it, do you?”
“If he knew Tiffany at school it’s possible that he’s been obsessed with her since then. But why would he choose to act on it now?”
“Cynthia said he’d been trying to get a job with the company for ages. Maybe he didn’t have the chance before. Although he wasn’t here when Geoff died,” I pointed out.
“No. But he could have come up the fire escape and sneaked in to poison her tea.”
“Good point. And I suppose he could have written that first note and stuck it on the theatre door,” I mused.
“That wizard was too tall for Jason,” objected Graham.
“He could have been wearing platform shoes or something,” I suggested. “I didn’t look at his feet, did you?”
“No,” said Graham. “But if he did do all that he could have easily arranged the chocolates and flowers too.”
“And bashed Cynthia.”
“Yes,” said Graham finally. “It’s certainly a plausible theory. Jason could be our man.”
Which wasn’t a very reassuring thought considering our lives were literally in his hands. I mean, it was Jason who strapped us into our harnesses for the flying sequence. Jason who pushed the buttons that made our wings flap up and down. Jason who programmed the computer that controlled our trajectory. If the mood took him, Jason could send us crashing to the floor. We’d end up just like the Wicked Witch of the East. As flat as cowpats.
Graham and I were both tense and nervous but for almost a week nothing bad happened. Everyone was working their socks off, desperate to be ready for opening night.
On the morning of the dress rehearsal Mum needed to be at work extra early so once again she dropped us off at the end of the alley before any of the other kids had arrived at the theatre.
As usual, Maggie was at the stage door flanked by a couple of police officers. She waved to us as we approached.
I waved back but Graham didn’t. He was frowning and I recognized it as a sign of Deep Thought.
“What is it?” I asked.
He pointed to the building. “There’s the fire escape. If the stalker climbed that to poison Tiffany’s tea, how did he get up there without Maggie noticing?”
“Someone must have distracted her. Delivered flowers or something. He could have sneaked past then.”
“So he must have an accomplice,” said Graham.
“But Maggie’s not stupid. She’d have put two and two together. If she’d seen a stranger she’d have reported it to the police,” I said thoughtfully. “So she must have been distracted by someone she already knew.”
“Which means that one of the cast must have given him a hand…”
We reached the stage door and Maggie let us in, saying, “Hi you two! My, aren’t you keen? You’re the first in again. Peregrine should give you a prize for your enthusiasm!”
Graham and I headed towards the kids’ dressing room. We were planning to just
sit and wait for everyone else to arrive but over the intercom we could hear Tiffany up on stage, singing the opening bars of “Over the Rainbow”.
“I thought Maggie said we were the first ones here,” said Graham.
“Maybe she just meant we’re the first kids to arrive,” I replied, shrugging. I was more interested in the sweetness of Tiffany’s song. “She’s got an amazing voice. Magical.” I suddenly remembered Cynthia’s remark. “It’s very consistent.”
“Which is odd, when you think about it,” said Graham.
“What do you mean?”
“Well in theory it ought to be impossible to reproduce exactly the same effect each time. The vocal chords change, you see, with variations in temperature and humidity. Strong emotion, diet, hot drinks – all sorts of things can affect the human voice.”
Graham and I exchanged looks.
“Shall we go up and watch?” I said.
“Yes,” said Graham slowly. “But we ought to be very careful.”
So we were. We crept like mice through the corridors. By the time we tiptoed into the wings Tiffany’s song had just finished. The last note was still hanging in the air but there was no one on stage but Jason.
Tiffany Webb had vanished. It was as if she’d clicked her ruby slippers and been magically transported home to Kansas.
the dress rehearsal
Graham and I reversed without a word and crept back to the dressing room before Jason could see us. Once there, we shut the door firmly behind us and checked there was no one else around before we started discussing the possibilities.
“Maggie said we were the only ones here. Do you think she didn’t know Jason had arrived?” I asked.
“But how could he have got past her?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He could have stayed here last night, couldn’t he? Perhaps he pretended to be working late. He might have told Maggie he’d lock up when he left. He’s the technician – could he have his own set of keys?”
“That would explain an awful lot,” replied Graham.
Dying to be Famous Page 5