Shadow Play Read Online Free Page A

anticipation, then suspended in uncertainty, wondering why I wasn’t reacting. After that they probably screwed themselves into expressions of disbelief and terror, but I can’t really be sure, because by then I had lost myself.
    My first words were silly: ‘But that means you have killed him!’ I exclaimed, to which she didn’t reply. The tears had stopped forming and she had run out of justifications. What more could she have said, after all: she had meant it to be a huge surprise, she expected me to understand instantly. I had been with her from two years before her father died. She took a few steps towards me and was possibly going to say something when she realized I was shrinking away, moving back around the bed on which I’d been sitting. Neither of us knew then that we had already touched each other for the last time.
    Anyone would have reasonably expected me to be startled, even shocked, and afraid immediately, like any law-abiding middle-minded type, of the crime not being perfect after all and somehow being traced back to us. Perhaps even an instinctive recoil, a lightning reconsideration of the person before me, seeing what she’d proved herself capable of. But I have never understood myself what next overcame me, what extremely powerful feelings of revulsion, what absolutely blind terror. With my back to the wall and my hands guiding me against it,I crept as far away from her as possible and, in a voice that kept rising, commanded her to stop approaching. She continued ahead with outstretched arms, asking me what had happened, asking me to let her come near, eventually begging me merely to recognize her. But by then hysteria had transformed me and wiped away every faculty until it was I who had become an animal.
    Holding a vase in my left hand I started screaming for help, and that there had been a murder. I screamed continually; then to make some extra noise I hurled the vase at the mirror. She was living at the time in a single room along a corridor that went around an inner courtyard, and I knew the neighbours on either side would have heard me. She was still trying to comfort and stop me – ‘Darling, what are you doing? What are you afraid of? It’s only me, don’t you see? Everything is done already. Just let me come close to you, let me come and hold you, let me explain how I did it’ – even though she must have started to realize something utterly unforeseen had occurred, that I had snapped out of shock and fear.
    But until the minute I sprang to the door to answer the knocking, she could never have understood that we were no longer in this together – that not only was she alone, but from now on I was actively against her. ‘There’s been a killing and she’s the one that did it. I know, because she just confessed to me,’ I announced to the three men who were outside, one of whom was her neighbour, ‘so shut the door and spread out if you want to get her.’
    Finally she reacted, in the only way left to her. It must have been a moment’s decision, because no one even had time to shut the door before she’d turned into a cat again. Or perhapseveryone was so transfixed from not quite knowing what was expected that it bought her a precious few seconds. After all, there was no one else in the room, just me shouting, until they noticed a cat. Only, and I realized this later – at the time I thought it further evidence of her cunning – she was so transformed by terror at the prospect of being cornered that she went straight to being a kitten, less than a fifth of her usual size.
    It was I who broke the silence as she dashed into a corner. ‘Don’t stand there like that, don’t be fooled. It’s a trick of hers, I know it well. That’s how she committed the murder. Grab the cat and you’ve got her.’ I pushed the man nearest to me towards her. He knelt forward uncertainly and she seized