The Twist of a Knife

Sky Palmer sucked on her vaping device and for a brief moment the end glowed an angry red. She hadn’t been happy from the moment I’d introduced her to Hawthorne, as if a murder investigation was nothing more than an inconvenience added to her busy diary. She threw down the vape and picked up her hairbrush, scratching at hair, which had gone from pink to her natural colour … a very light blonde.

‘I’m going on stage any minute,’ she went on. ‘I’m still doing my make-up. And I don’t really like to talk to anyone before I start. It messes with my head. I have to think about my character.’

From the first time I’d met her, I’d found Sky difficult to pin down: that mixture of youth and self-assurance, shyness and arrogance. It was even harder now, seeing her sitting there dressed as Nurse Plimpton. Her costume had been designed to turn her into a caricature. It was deliberately tight-fitting around her breasts and hips, with a tear in her black tights … one of the critics had even mentioned it. Tucked under her blouse, there was a plastic bag of fake blood – Kensington Gore – which would burst when she was stabbed (with a scalpel) at the end of Act I. It was all very Rocky Horror Picture Show and she carried it off perfectly on the stage. In the dressing room, though, it was disconcerting. She was trapped between the two characters and I wasn’t sure which was which.

I had to remind myself that Sky was very young, no more than twenty-five. Strolling into rehearsals in her leggings and boas, knee-high boots, gloves with the fingers cut off and every day a different piece of antique jewellery that she might have inherited from a wealthy aunt, she seemed to be modelling herself on Sally Bowles in Cabaret. Maybe that was how she saw herself, skating along the surface of life, admired by all. Hawthorne was looking at her dubiously. He wasn’t impressed.

Her rose-gold telephone rang and without a glance in our direction, she picked it up and answered it.

‘Yeah … Yeah … No, I can’t talk to you right now. I’m about to go on and I’ve got someone with me. No …’

But although she didn’t talk, she listened, holding the phone with her little finger pointing in the air.

I took in the rest of the dressing room while I waited for her, wondering what Hawthorne would make of it all. Somehow, I didn’t think he would find it too difficult to work out Sky Palmer’s background, her family history and everything she’d done in the last ten years, given the multiple clues scattered around.

There was barely a surface that wasn’t crowded out. She had been sent so many flowers she could have opened a shop – or perhaps a funeral parlour – including a huge bunch of roses that had been shoved into a single vase and were struggling to survive. Most of her good luck cards were expensive: handmade rather than mass-market. I’d already noticed Sky’s Gucci umbrella and Cartier watch. The luxury brand names continued with crystal flasks of perfume, hand cream in porcelain tubs, Fortnum & Mason biscuits and loose-leaf tea in fancy tins, liqueur chocolates, soap and scent diffusers, those weird stick things that poke out of a jar of oil, dispensing, to my mind, no scent at all. Three bottles of champagne and a bottle of gin had been lined up on one shelf and there were a dozen glasses that didn’t appear to have been washed.

None of this connected with what I knew of her. She had spent three years appearing as a barmaid in EastEnders, and during rehearsals she’d always spoken with an Estuary English accent, although dismissing us just now, she had been much more Cheltenham Ladies’ College. I thought I’d had a good understanding of everyone I’d met so far – Tirian, Jordan, Arthur and Olivia Throsby. But Sky was something else. A mystery within a mystery.

‘This is a fifteen-minute call for members of the Mindgame company. You have fifteen minutes to curtain up. Thank you.’

It was a disembodied voice that I presumed belonged to Pranav, the stage manager. It came over the intercom system and for the first time I noticed the speaker set high up in a corner of the room. Sky heard it. ‘I’ve gotta go! Bye!’ She disconnected the telephone and set it down, then turned to us. ‘I’m really sorry. I have to get ready.’

‘Come on, darling. I’ve seen the play. You’re not on for the first fifteen pages.’ When Hawthorne was annoyed, he often slipped into language that I would not have used myself. Perhaps he did it deliberately, to show he didn’t care. ‘We need to ask you a few questions about Harriet Throsby,’ he added.

‘I told you. I’ve got nothing to say. I hardly knew her.’

‘Did you know where she lived?’

‘Why are you even asking me that? Are you accusing me of something? Yes, I knew where she lived. We all did.’ She looked directly at me. ‘You showed me that article in the magazine.’

‘What?’