The Killing Joke by Anthony Horowitz

Author:Anthony Horowitz [Horowitz, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Thriller, Humour
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

SEVENTEEN

It was a story with all the ingredients to make a tabloid editor happy to be alive. A bizarre murder in a North London suburb. Police incompetence. A sensational escape. And—the icing on the cake—a well-known actor at the centre of it all.

It didn’t matter that nobody had ever heard of Guy Fletcher. He had been in E for Emergency, Policemen’s Wives and the Manchester Murders, and they were all very well known indeed. He had even starred in a Nescafé commercial. Suddenly Nescafé found themselves receiving the sort of publicity they could have done without. COLD BLEND ran one of the punning headlines in the press, a slightly forced reference to the deep freeze. This led to a po-faced press release from the coffee company, and, three weeks later, the sacking of their advertising agency.

And at the same time there was the character and the background of the murdered man. Johnny Peters, it now turned out, had worked for the NSPCC and various other charities, visiting sick children in hospitals up and down the country. He would dress up in a bright orange and green three-piece suit with dyed hair and a bowler hat and enter the wards, cartwheeling down the corridors with a cry of: “Here’s Little Johnny!” He would juggle with the fruit brought by the visiting parents—three apples and a banana. He was a comedian, a ventriloquist, a magician and—according to many of the doctors and nurses who had encountered him—he had been personally responsible for the recovery of many children who might otherwise have perished.

“He was wonderful,” Marsha Brown, of the Whittington Hospital in Archway, told the Daily Mail. “The children all adored him—even the ones who weren’t fully conscious. The moment he arrived, everyone cheered up. I can’t believe there’s anyone on the planet who would want to do him harm. Little Johnny was a saint.”

She caught the national mood. Suddenly everyone was talking about Little Johnny. He effortlessly stole all the front pages, even that of the Financial Times. Even the imminent publication of the Sanderson report—an enquiry into government corruption—was, for the time being, forgotten. Then Oxfam stepped in. Little Johnny had worked for them too, entertaining children in the third world. He had been in New York after 9/11. It was no wonder that Guy had rarely seen him in Mapletree Close. He had been tireless.

At first nobody knew why Guy Fletcher had murdered his upstairs neighbour. Mrs Atwood, of course, appeared in every single newspaper. This was to be the crowning achievement of her life: gossipmongering on a national scale. But despite what she said, a “domestic” seemed unlikely. Neighbours argued in Muswell Hill but, by and large, they didn’t kill each other—not unless they were Dennis Nilsen (who, by coincidence, had lived just round the corner). And there was something strangely at odds between the leafy surroundings of Mapletree Close and the grotesque nature of the killing: the belt round the neck, the body in the deep freeze. But

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