Paul Magrs - Mystery Lady

But witnesses to what? No one saw anything.

Dodie has managed to get herself closer to the corpse. ‘Poor thing was strangled with her own feather boa,’ she says musingly. ‘Very quickly. By an expert, I’d say. Someone with very dexterous fingers.’

I’m hanging back a little bit, and that’s when I feel someone tugging at my elbow and going, ‘Psssst,’ in my ear.

‘Yes..?’ I turn to see a very grand old lady in furs and a tiara. Her eyes are watery and the pointed tip of her nose is bright blue.

‘Excuse me, my dear. You are Cassandra, aren’t you?’

‘Why, yes,’ I gasp. I can’t believe that anyone here besides my friends would ever have heard of me.

The pale old lady smiles gently. ‘Good evening, my dear. I’m so sorry to interrupt in the middle of all this excitement. My name is Lucrezia Noggins.’

I boggle at her for a moment. I know that name, don’t I? I’ve heard it before. Quite recently…

‘As I say, beg pardon for the intrusion, my dear, but there’s someone over here who would like to speak to you as a matter of some urgency…’

I let myself be led along by this well-mannered old lady, towards the back of the set, away from the milling crowd.

There, sitting on a chair alone, and looking rather worried, is the victim herself. Doris Hobbs, in her bright green bikini. Lucrezia pats her hand. ‘There, there, my dear. These things come as an awful shock, I know.’

Doris Hobbs coughs and clears her throat. ‘Why is this happening to me..?’ she asks, in a wondering tone.

Lucrezia chuckles lightly and her watery eyes are shining. ‘Ah, if only we knew the answer to that one, my dear! But please. Don’t be scared. Have no fear. Things are in hand.’

The magician’s assistant looks straight at me. ‘And who’s she?’

Lucrezia tells her, ‘She’s a good friend to Timothy Bold.

Remember? You wanted me to fetch her. You wanted to tell her something .’

‘Oh, yes!’ says Doris, sitting up straighter. ‘You’re right. Why are my thoughts so muddled up?’

Lucrezia shrugs. ‘Who can blame them, my dear? You’ve just this minute been strangled to death with your feather boa. You’re bound to feel a little dizzy. But, quickly, tell lovely Cassandra here what she needs to know, and then I can show you the way to go next.’

The Magician’s assistant nods and idly strokes the feathers of the boa that throttled her. ‘It wasn’t him. You mustn’t for a second think this was because of your friend.’

Lucrezia prompts her. ‘Now come along, my dear Doris…’

‘Wait!’ says Doris, a little wildly. ‘Don’t let that nice boy be blamed for my murder! Tell Dodie! Make sure she finds the right one! Tell her she has to expose the right one..! Check the box! It isn’t empty! And watch out for ginger hairs…!’

I stare after them as old Lucrezia leads the girl in the bikini away, into the off-stage area. They are swallowed up in a bank of dry ice.

But… how can this be happening?

That woman was dead. She was strangled here, on this very stage, several minutes ago.

I freeze, there on the spot.

So how was I talking to her?

And she looked straight at me, didn’t she? Both she and the old lady.

Why… I wonder, breathlessly… could it be possible that I have a very special gift..?

Maybe it’s tasteless to feel excited so soon after a poor girl was throttled, but I can’t help myself.

I am gifted…!

I must act at once, though, and pass my message on to Dodie. We must both make sure that Timothy doesn’t get blamed for this…

Timothy had been taken off by the security guards to wait for the police, and we were being shepherded out of the studios into the main foyer, where we were given mugs of strong, sweet tea to fortify our nerves.

I lost track of Cassandra. It was only as I was sipping my tea and scowling at the lollygagging hordes that she drifted up to me again.

‘It wasn’t Timothy,’ she whispered.

‘Well, of course it wasn’t,’ I snapped.

‘What I mean is, I’ve had word from the horse’s mouth.’

‘Whatever are you talking about, Cassie?’ said I, impatiently.

‘I don’t know how or why it happened, but I have talked with the dead girl just now. I think… I think I must have a very special gift.’

Right at that moment I didn’t quite feel like discussing Cassandra’s special gift. ‘We’ve got to get Timothy out of here. We can’t have him getting embroiled as a murder suspect. We’ve got work to do. This is too inconvenient.’

We took advantage of the milling crowd and the chaotic scenes around us, and we crept back into the deserted studio complex. It was astonishing that nobody stopped us. I’ve always believed that if you walk about confidently, as if you actually belong in a place, then no one will bother you, and so it was that we found our way to Timothy’s dressing room. A burly guard called Derek was guarding the door. He was a bit dim and bought my story that I was Tim’s solicitor.

‘And I’m her assistant,’ put in Cassie.

We found Tim with his head in his hands, still wearing his stage costume. ‘Oh, Dodie it was terrible. That poor girl. I witnessed her final few seconds. And now… now they think I’m responsible!’

‘We’re going to get to the bottom of this,’ I told him firmly. ‘We know you didn’t do it, of course. But what happened in there, inside that cabinet?’

‘Well, it was all a bit of a blur, what with the music and dry ice and everything going round and round. There was a false door inside the box, and she was hiding behind that…’

I was listening intently and staring at him as he spoke. Cassie said, ‘What’s that long hair on his jacket collar?’

I stared. She was right. There was a long auburn hair. Clearly not one of his. The dead girl’s hair was black. I carefully picked it off him and held it to the light.

‘Synthetic,’ I mused. ‘Nylon. Now, who do you know wears a long ginger wig?’

Timothy had no idea.

But my clever assistant did. ‘Carswell Hobbs has hideous, fake orange hair,’ she burst out.

‘The dead girl’s husband!’ I gasped.

‘What?’ frowned Tim. ‘But he wasn’t here tonight. He’s ill at home. That’s why I ended up having to do the stupid trick in the first place.’

‘I think you’ve been framed, on live TV,’ I told him.

‘What can we do?’ asked Cassie. Then she said: ‘Check the box. That’s what Doris said.’

‘We need to get a look inside that magic box,’ I decided.

Next thing, we were back on the studio floor where the stage hands had left the magic box exactly where it was. It was a murder scene and nothing had been altered since the terrible moment that door had flown open.

A detective inspector in a grubby raincoat had arrived to grill my friend.

‘I have a strange suspicion,’ I announced, holding aloft the ginger filament I had found on Timothy’s collar.

‘Bit of an amateur sleuth as well as a lawyer are we?’ sneered the Detective Inspector.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, and stepped inside the magic box.

‘You can’t do that,’ cried the detective. ‘We haven’t looked at it yet…’

‘Then come and look at it now,’ I said. He followed reluctantly, and found me fiddling with the catch of the false door.

‘So this is how they do the disappearing act, is it?’ the detective said. ‘A concealed door.’

‘This is where poor dead Doris was supposed to hide herself away,’ I said. ‘But she found rather more than she bargained for. I believe that she found something – or rather, someone – that she truly didn’t expect to be lurking back here.’