Circus of Thieves and the Raffle of Doom Read Online Free Page A

cards, wedding rings, and once (his
piece-de-resistance
) a pair of knickers to the embarrassed guest star.

    Please cast your mind back roughly ten minutes or so in book-time. Are you there? Fingers O’Boyle is just stepping up onto the pavement-stage. A tiny line of ants is running away,
screaming minuscule ant screams. Who do you think is his first ‘member of the public’ up on stage? Can you guess?
    I don’t know why I asked you that question, since I can’t hear you. But if your answer was Billy, then you guessed correctly. If you guessed someone else, we can all just pretend
that you like to shout out names randomly while you read books. It might be best to shout out another name now, to make this more convincing to passers-by.
    Only one person notices that Billy isn’t who he’s pretending to be. Hannah. She has also noticed, with some surprise and horror, that while the other performers were gathering the
crowd, Billy was working his way around the circle, slipping his delicate, fast-moving, not-very-clean hands into the pockets of the audience.
    If Hannah hadn’t become his friend earlier that day, she might have leapt out into the middle of the circle, stopped the show, and exposed Billy’s thieving, but she sensed this
wasn’t what you should do to a friend, so she just watched anxiously as he pilfered items from the crowd.
    She wasn’t sure she was doing the right thing, since Billy had admitted the whole circus was on the run, and he certainly did not like the sound of the word ‘police’. There was
definitely something fishy going on. 11
    While everyone else enjoyed the beginnings of the show, Hannah wrestled with her dilemma. Should she trust her instincts and trust Billy, or trust the fact that stealing was stealing was
stealing? Because putting your hands into other people’s pockets and walking away with their stuff – that’s stealing.
    Before she’d decided what to do, Billy was called up on stage as the first volunteer. During part of the act, at the exact moment when Fingers was pointing out that a missing ace of spades
was stuck to a lamp post up above everyone’s heads, Hannah saw in the twinkle of an eye a small, not-very-clean hand slip a large clutch of shiny objects into Fingers’ pocket. These
were the objects which in the course of the next half-hour were returned to their owners. While everyone else laughed and gasped with every new revelation, Hannah just sighed with relief.

    The show ended with more gymnastics and general circus hoopla while Mr Shank sat behind a velvet-covered table, selling tickets for the evening’s one-night-only performance. If he had been
selling hot cakes to a town of cake-starved cake fanatics at the height of their annual Build A House Out Of Cakes Festival, he could hardly have sold tickets any faster.
    Every ticket came with free entry to the Shank Entertainment Empire annual charity raffle, and Armitage was such a charming and debonair salesman that almost everyone happily put down their name
and address, usually without even asking which charity was involved or what the prize might be. 12
    Hannah did as she was told and didn’t approach Billy, but as the crowd began to disperse, he suddenly appeared by her side.
    ‘I saw you,’ said Hannah.
    ‘I know,’ said Billy. ‘I saw you seeing me. Thanks for not spoiling the show.’
    ‘I was worried. I thought you were stealing. Especially after what you said.’
    ‘What did I say?’
    ‘You said you were on the run.’
    ‘I told you that was a joke,’ he said.
    ‘But what if you telling me it was a joke was the joke?’
    Billy narrowed his eyes and peered at Hannah as if he was examining her through a microscope. ‘You’re clever,’ he said, ‘but you think too much.’
    ‘I don’t think it’s possible to think too much. Thinking’s good.’
    ‘Maybe you’re right. Narcissus thinks all the time. But only about food.’
    ‘Are you on the run or not? I want to