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 then?” 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.