I Know What You Did Last Wednesday Read Online Free Page A

scrambled eggs that Brenda had insisted on cooking but which nobody felt like eating. Libby had another cigarette in her mouth but everyone had complained so much that she wasn’t smoking it. She was sucking it. Eric was still in his dressing-gown, a thick red thing with his initials – ED – embroidered on the pocket. Mark was wearing a track suit. A security camera winked at us from one corner of the room. There were a lot of security cameras on the island. But none of us felt even slightly secure.
    “What are we going to do?” Brenda asked. I got the feeling that she hadn’t slept very much the night before. There were dark rings under her eyes and although she’d put on lipstick, most of it had missed her lips. “This island is haunted!” she went on.
    “What do you mean?” Eric asked.
    “Last night … my window … it was horrible.”
    “I’ve got quite a nice window,” Tim said.
    “I mean … I saw something! A human skull. It was dancing in the night air.”
    So she’d seen it too! I was about to chip in, but then Eric interrupted. “I don’t think it’s going to help, sharing our bad dreams,” he said.
    “I didn’t dream it,” Brenda insisted.
    “We’ve got to do something!” Mark cut in. “First Rory, then Sylvie. At this rate, there won’t be any of us left by lunch-time.”
    “I don’t want any lunch,” Libby muttered.
    “We need to talk about this,” Eric said. “We need to work something out. But there’s no point starting until we’re all here.” He glanced at the clock. “Where the hell is Janet?”
    “Maybe she’s in the bath,” Tim suggested.
    “In the water or underneath it?” Eric growled.
    The minute hand on the kitchen clock ticked forward. It was nine o’clock. Suddenly Mark stood up. “I’m going upstairs,” he announced.
    “You’re going back to bed?” Tim asked.
    “I’m going to find her.”
    He left the room. The rest of us followed him, tiptoeing up the stairs and along the corridor with a sense of dread. Actually, Eric didn’t exactly tiptoe. He was so fat that it must have been quite a few years since his toes
had
tips. Mark Tyler had moved quickly, taking the stairs four at a time as if they were hurdles and he was back at the Olympic games at Atlanta. He was outside the door when we arrived.
    “She’s overslept,” Tim said to me. “She’s fine. She’s just overslept.”
    Eric knocked on her door. There was no answer. He knocked again, then turned the handle. The door opened.
    The hairdresser had overslept all right, but nothing was ever going to wake her up again. She had been stabbed during the night. She was lying on her back on a four-poster bed like the one in our room, only smaller. The bed was old. The paint had peeled off the posts and there was a tear in the canopy above her. In fact the whole room looked shabby, as if it had been missed out by the decorators. Maybe I noticed all this because I didn’t want to look at the body. You may think I’m crazy, but dead people upset me. And when I did finally look at her, I got a shock.
    Whoever had killed her hadn’t used a knife. There was something sticking out of her chest and at first I thought it was some sort of rocket. It was silver, in the shape of a sort of long pyramid, with four legs jutting out. Then, slowly, it dawned on me what I was looking at. It was a model, a souvenir of the building that I had climbed up with Tim only the year before.
    It was incredible. But true. Janet Rhodes had been stabbed with a model of the Eiffel Tower.
    “The Eiffel Tower!” Tim muttered. His face was the colour of sour milk. “It’s an outrage. I mean, it’s meant to be a tourist attraction!”
    “Why the Eiffel Tower?” I asked.
    “Because it’s famous, Nick. People like to visit it.”
    “No – I don’t mean, why is it a tourist attraction. I mean, why use it as a murder weapon? It’s certainly a strange choice. Maybe someone is trying to tell us something.”
    “Well,