Dying to be Famous (6 page)

Yet Tiffany didn’t seem unpredictable when she was on stage – if anything she was just the opposite. When Cynthia (humming “You’re the Cream in my Coffee”) brought Tiffany her cappuccino, she sighed admiringly.

“Your voice is wonderful,” Cynthia said, handing her the cup. “I’m terribly jealous. You never change, you never stumble, you never falter. You’re so
consistent
. How on earth do you do it?”

Hannah was close by and her eyes narrowed shrewdly as she waited for Tiffany to respond.

For a second Tiffany looked outraged, almost as if Cynthia had insulted her. But then she did one of those gleaming smiles, which hit Cynthia like a thunderbolt.

“Hard work,” Tiffany said. “That’s all it is. I’m a professional. I never stop practising.”

If Tiffany
was
under terrible pressure like Graham thought then it was certainly greater by the end of the day, when the results came back from the lab. All the soft-centred chocolates – the ones she’d said were her favourites – had been injected with a lethal dose of poison. If Graham had eaten the strawberry one he wouldn’t be with us any more, he’d be in hospital. Or the mortuary: dead on a slab in a fridge right next to Geoff. And I’d be there with both of them. It made me feel quite dizzy but Graham seemed a lot less bothered about it than I was.

“The reality is that we avoid death several times a day,” he said with one of his blink-and-you-miss-it grins as we left the theatre. “Every time you cross the road you risk fatal injury. There’s no point fretting about what might have happened.”

The story was all over the evening news. We watched it at my house and Mum’s reaction made me glad we hadn’t told Inspector Humphries about our near-death experience. She tutted and gasped her way through the item, making it hard for me and Graham to hear the details.

The police were trying to find the person who had tampered with the chocolates, but they hadn’t got very far. It seemed that the stalker – dressed in the wizard outfit – had taken both the flowers and chocolates to the office of a local delivery firm. They’d paid in cash so they couldn’t be traced.

“Didn’t you think it was odd to be given items by someone in costume?” demanded the reporter.

“Fancy dress, I thought it was,” the receptionist shrugged. “It’s the party season; it’s not unusual this time of year. We get all sorts in here.”

“Putting poison into chocolates!” my mum exclaimed. “What will that stalker try next?”

“It’s very often the case that killers have their own characteristic way of despatching their victims,” Graham told her. “As long as poisoning remains his favourite method, Tiffany’s relatively safe. She’ll just have to watch what she eats.”

“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.

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 T
IFFANY
W
ILL
D
IE
!

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.

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.