The Blurred Man (4 page)

Barry Krishner, the driver of the steamroller, hadn’t been able to tell us anything. After his encounter with Tim, it would probably be years before he talked again. He might babble and jibber, but I guessed talking would be a little beyond him. The police had presumably investigated and found nothing. Maybe there was nothing to find.

And yet…

Part of me still wondered if Lenny Smile really was dead. I remembered the man I had glimpsed in Brompton Cemetery. He had looked remarkably like the man I had seen in the photograph, and had certainly taken off fast enough when I spotted him. But if Lenny wasn’t dead, where was he? And who was it who had disappeared under the steamroller?

“I give up!” Tim exclaimed.

He seemed to be reading my mind. “This isn’t an easy case,” I agreed.

“No!” He pointed. “I’m talking about this crossword in the
Dandy
!”

I ignored him and flicked over the page in my newspaper. And that was when I saw it. It was on the same page as the horoscopes. An advertisement for a circus in Battersea Park.

Direct from Moscow
THE RUSSIAN STATE CIRCUS
Starring
The Flying Karamazov Brothers
Karl “On Your” Marx – The Human Cannon-ball
The Fabulous Tina Trotsky
Three Sisters on Unicycles
And much, much more!

There was a picture showing a big top, but it was what was in front that had caught my eye. It was a figure in silhouette. A man selling balloons.

“Look at this, Tim!” I exclaimed, sliding the newspaper towards him.

Tim quickly read the page. “That’s amazing!” he said. “I’m going to meet an old friend!”

“What are you talking about?”

“My horoscope. That’s what it says…”

“Not the horoscopes, Tim! Look at the advertisement underneath!”

Tim read it. “This is no time to be going to the circus, Nick,” he said. “We’re on a case!”

“But look at the balloon-seller!” I took a deep breath. “Don’t you remember what Mrs Lovely said? There was a witness when Lenny Smile was killed. It was a man selling balloons. I thought that was odd at the time. Why should there have been a balloon-seller in Battersea Park in the middle of the night?”

“He could have been lost…”

“I don’t think so. I think he must have been part of the circus. There’s a picture of him here in the paper. Maybe the balloon-seller was advertising the circus!”

“You mean … on his balloons?”

“Brilliant, Tim! Got it in one.”

Tim ripped the page of the newspaper in half. He must have accidentally caught hold of the tablecloth, because he ripped that in half too. He folded the paper into his top pocket. “It’s your turn to do the washing-up,” he said. “Then let’s go!”

In fact we didn’t go back to Battersea until that evening. According to the advertisement, there was only one performance of the circus that day – at seven thirty – and I didn’t see any point in turning up before. If the balloon-seller really was part of the big top, he’d probably be somewhere around during the performance. We would catch up with him then.

I don’t know what you think about circuses. To be honest, I’ve never been a big fan. When you really think about it, is there anybody in the world less funny than a clown? And what can you say about somebody who has spent half their life learning how to balance thirty spinning plates and an umbrella on their nose? OK. It’s clever. But there simply have to be more useful things to do with your time! And, for that matter, with your nose. There was a time when they used to have animals – lions and elephants – performing in the ring. They were banned and I have to agree that was a good idea. But for my money they could ban the rest of the performers too, and put everyone out of their misery. I’m sorry. I’ve heard of people who have run away to join a circus, but speaking personally I’d run away to avoid seeing one.

But that said, I had to admit that the Russian State Circus looked interesting. It had parked its tent right in the middle of the park and there was something crazy and old-fashioned about the bright colours and the fluttering flags all edged silver by a perfect November moon. Four or five hundred people had turned out to see the show, and there were stilt-walkers and jugglers keeping the lines amused as they queued up to get in. As well as the tent itself there were about a dozen caravans parked on the grass, forming a miniature town. Some of these were modern and ugly. But there were also wooden caravans, painted red, blue and gold, that made me think of Russian gypsies and Russian palm-readers – old crones telling your future by candlelight. Tim had had his palm read once, when we were in Torquay. The palm-reader had laughed so much she’d had to lie down … and that was only the contents of one finger on his left hand.

We bought tickets for the show. Tim wanted to see it, and having come all this way across London, I thought why not? We bought two of the last seats and followed the crowd in. Somehow the tent seemed even bigger inside than out. It was lit by flaming torches on striped, wooden poles. Grey smoke coiled in the air and dark shadows flickered across the ring. The whole place was bathed in a strange, red glow that seemed to transport us back to another century. The top of the tent was a tangle of ropes and wires, of rings and trapezes, all promises of things to come, but right now the ring was empty. There were wooden benches raked up in a steep bank, seven rows deep, forming a circle all round the sawdust. We were in the cheapest seats, one row from the back. As a treat, I’d bought Tim a stick of candyfloss. By the time the show started, he’d managed to get it all over himself as well as about half a dozen people on either side.

A band took its place on the far side of the ring. There were five players, dressed in old, shabby tailcoats. They had faces to match. The conductor looked about a hundred years old. I just hoped the music wouldn’t get too exciting – I doubted his heart would stand it. With a trembling hand, he raised his baton and the band began to play. Unfortunately, the players all began at different times and what followed was a tremendous wailing and screeching as they all raced to get to the end first. But the conductor didn’t seem to notice and the audience loved it. They’d come out for a good time and even when the violinist fell off his chair and the trombonist dropped his trombone they cheered and applauded.

By now I was almost looking forward to seeing the show … but as things turned out, we weren’t going to see anything of the performance that night.

The band came to the end of its first piece and began its second – which could have been either a new piece or the same piece played again. It was hard to be sure. I was glancing at the audience when suddenly I froze. There was a man sitting in the front row, right next to the gap in the tent where the performers would come in. He was wearing a dark coat, a hat and gloves. He was too far away. Or maybe it was the poor light or the smoke. But once again his face was blurred. Even so, I knew him at once.

It was the man from the Brompton Cemetery.

The man in the photograph at the Café Debussy.

Lenny Smile!

I grabbed hold of Tim. “Quick!” I exclaimed.

“What is it?” Tim jerked away, propelling the rest of his candyfloss off the end of his stick and into the lap of the woman behind him.

“There!” I pointed. But even as I searched for Lenny across the crowded circus, I saw him get up and slip out into the night. By the time Tim had followed my finger to the other side of the tent, he had gone.

“Is it a clown?” Tim asked.

“No, Tim! It’s the blurred man!”

“Who?”

“Never mind. We’ve got to go…”

“But the circus hasn’t even begun!”

I dragged Tim to his feet and we made our way to the end of the row and out of the big top. My mind was racing. I still didn’t know who the man in the dark coat really was. But if it was the same person I had seen at the cemetery, what was he doing here? Could he perhaps have followed us? No – that was impossible. I was sure he hadn’t seen us across the crowded auditorium. He was here for another reason, and somehow I knew it had nothing to do with spinning plates and custard pies.

We left the tent just as the ringmaster, a tall man in a bright red jacket and black top hat, arrived to introduce the show. I heard him bark out a few words in Russian, but by then Tim and I were in the open air with the moon high above us, the park eerie and empty and the caravans clustered together about thirty metres away.

“What is it?” Tim demanded. He had forgotten why we had come and was disappointed to be missing the show.

Quickly I told him what I had seen. “We’ve got to look for him!” I said.

“But we don’t know where he is!”

“That’s why we’ve got to look for him.”

There seemed to be only one place he could have gone. We went over to the caravans, suddenly aware how cold and quiet it was out here, away from the crowds. The first caravan was empty. The second contained a dwarf sipping sadly at a bottle of vodka. As we made our way over to the third, a man dressed in a fake leopard skin walked past carrying a steel girder. Inside the tent I heard the ringmaster come to the end of a sentence and there was a round of applause. Either he had cracked a joke or the audience was just grateful he’d stopped talking. There was a drum roll. We approached the fourth caravan.

Lenny Smile – if that’s who it was – had disappeared. But there was another dead man in Battersea Park that night.

I saw the balloons first and knew at once whose caravan this was. There were more than fifty of them, every colour imaginable, clinging together as if they were somehow alive and knew what had just happened. The strange thing was that they did almost seem to be cowering in the corner. They weren’t touching the ground. But the balloon-seller was. He was stretched out on the carpet with something silver lying next to his outstretched hand.

“Don’t touch it, Tim!” I warned.

Too late. Tim had already leaned over and picked it up.

It was a knife. The blade was about ten centimetres long. It matched, perfectly, the ten-centimetre deep wound in the back of the balloon-seller’s head. There wasn’t a lot of blood. The balloon-seller had been an old man. Killing him had been like attacking a scarecrow.

And then somebody screamed.

I spun round. There was a little girl there in a gold dress with sequins. She was sitting on a bicycle which had only one wheel, pedalling back and forth to stop herself falling over. She was pointing at Tim, her finger trembling, her eyes filled with horror, and suddenly I was aware of the other performers appearing, coming out of their caravans as if this was the morning and they’d just woken up. Only it was the middle of the night and these people weren’t dressed for bed! There was a clown in striped pants with a bowler hat and (inevitably) a red nose. There was a man on stilts. A fat man with a crash helmet. Two more sisters on unicycles. The strong man had come back with his steel girder. A pair of identical twins stood like mirror images, identical expressions on their faces. And what they were all looking at was my big brother Tim, holding a knife and hovering in the doorway of a man who had just been murdered.

The little girl who had started it screamed once more and shouted something out. The strong man spoke. Then the clown. It all came out as jibberish to me but it didn’t take a lot of imagination to work out what they were saying.

“
Boris the balloon man has been murdered!
”

“
Dear old Boris! Who did it?
”

“
It must have been the idiotic-looking Englishman holding the knife
.”

I don’t know at what precise moment the mood turned nasty, but suddenly I realized that the people all around me no longer wanted to entertain us. The clown stepped forward and his face was twisted and ugly … as well as being painted white with green diamonds over his eyes. He asked Tim something, his voice cracking with emotion and his make-up doing much the same.

“I don’t speak Russian,” Tim said.

“You kill Boris!”

So the balloon man really was called Boris. The clown was speaking English with an incredibly thick accent, struggling to make himself understood.

“Me?” Tim smiled and innocently raised a hand. Unfortunately it was the hand that was still holding the knife.

“Why you kill Boris?”

“Actually, I think you mean ‘why
did
you kill Boris,’” Tim corrected him. “You’ve forgotten the verb…”

“I don’t think they want an English lesson, Tim,” I said.

Tim ignored me. “I kill Boris, you kill Boris, he killed Boris!” he explained to the increasingly puzzled clown.

“I didn’t kill Boris!” I exclaimed.

“They killed Boris!” the clown said.

“That’s right!” Tim smiled encouragingly.

“No, we didn’t!” I yelled.

It was too late. The circus performers were getting closer by the second. I didn’t like the way they were looking at us. And there were more of them now. Four muscle-bound brothers in white leotards had stepped out of the shadows. The ringmaster was staring at us from the edge of the tent. I wondered who was entertaining the audience. The entire circus seemed to have congregated outside.

The ringmaster snapped out a brief command in Russian.

“Let’s go, Tim!” I said.

Tim dropped the knife and we turned and fled just as the performers started towards us. As far as they were concerned, Tim had just murdered one of their number, and this was a case of an eye for an eye – or a knife wound for a knife wound. These were travelling performers. They had their own rules and to hell with the country in which they found themselves.

Tim and I took off across the park, trying to lose ourselves in the shadows. Not easy with a full moon that night. Something huge and solid sailed across the sky, then buried itself in the soft earth. The strong man had thrown his girder in our direction. We were lucky – he was strong, but he obviously had lousy aim. The girder would be found the next day sticking out of the grass like a bizarre, iron tree. Half a metre to the right and we’d have been found underneath it.

But I quickly realized that this was only the start of our troubles. The entire circus troupe had abandoned the performance in order to come after us. Word had quickly got round. We had killed old Boris and now they were going to kill us. There was a dull
whoomph!
and a figure shot through the air. It was the man in the crash helmet. This had to be Karl “On Your” Marx, the human cannon-ball. They had fired him in our direction, and I just had time to glimpse his outstretched fists as he soared through the night sky before I grabbed hold of Tim and threw him onto the grass. Marx whizzed past. We had been standing in front of an oak tree and there was a dull crunch as he hit the trunk, ending up wedged in a fork in the branches.