Dead Funny by Tanya Landman

Author:Tanya Landman [Landman, Tanya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781406339512
Publisher: Walker Books Ltd.
Published: 2012-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

the punch and judy murders

I was the only person who had got more than a passing glimpse of the killer, so it was me who was stuck in front of the police computer trawling the internet for information about the Punch and Judy show. It took ages. There seemed to be hundreds of sites and millions of photographs, and as I examined each one it seemed to get more and more hopeless. The man I’d seen was old. Even if he had once been linked with puppets he’d probably retired long ago. We might never find him.

Luckily Graham was there to help me. We’d been searching for two solid hours with no success when Lieutenant Weinburger came in. “Find anything?” he asked.

“Not yet,” I sighed. “But we’ll keep working on it.”

“This is police work, kid,” he said drily. “It’s one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration. But I think I can give you a break.”

I brightened at once. “Really?”

“Yeah. I’ve been making some calls; digging into Baby Sugarcandy’s past. Biddy Ford, I guess I should call her. It’s midnight in England right now – I had to pull a few people out of bed so it took a while. Seems she was married before she became famous. When she was eighteen years old she got hitched to her childhood sweetheart. As soon as the Sugarcandies began to make it big, the band’s manager made her ditch him. Said it was marriage or a singing career – she had to make a choice. So she divorced the guy, changed her name to Baby Sugarcandy, and came to the States. When she got into the movies she married an actor, and had the two kids. It didn’t last, though. They split a few years later.”

“What was this childhood sweetheart called?”

“He went by the name of Len Radstock.”

“Type it in, Poppy. Go on,” Graham said.

Heart thumping, I entered his name into the search engine. Up came dozens of entries, mostly relating to Radstock, a town near Bath. I scrolled rapidly down through sites about town councillors, schools and shopping facilities. But then – on the fourth page – I found something else. A reference to a newspaper article about the May Fayre in Covent Garden, which seemed to be held every year to celebrate Mr Punch’s birthday. There was a list of participants’ names and it included Len Radstock. Hardly daring to breathe, I opened the page and found a photograph beside the feature. I clicked to enlarge it. Two dozen men stood in a line, each with a Mr Punch on their right hand. And there on the end was a man in a red-and-white striped blazer. He was unmistakeable.

“That’s him,” I breathed. “That’s the murderer.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.