Murder on the Dance Floor by Shirley Ballas

Author:Shirley Ballas [Ballas, Shirley and McClure, Sheila]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Two bottles of water, seventy ‘counter push-ups’ and ten squats later, Jack was growing antsy. The gist of the meeting could be summed up like this: Susie’s boss hadn’t uncovered any significant evidence. So if Oxana’s ‘digital forensics’ – whatever the hell they were – were a dead zone, why weren’t they back in the studio dancing?

‘And there was nothing in her diary?’ Susie asked, reaching for one of the almond flour keto muffins Jack had brought from a local bakery. Lily deftly shifted a snack pack of carrot sticks and hummus in front of her.

Brave.

And a little mean. Susie’s curves suited her. She looked good. Even if she was shooting daggers at him half the time.

‘You’ve got to look after your knees, darling,’ Lily quipped when Susie arched an eyebrow.

‘These are keto,’ Jack said, grabbing a muffin and taking a bite.

Susie shot him a thanks for trying look. It wasn’t a full smile, but it was something.

‘The phone was a burner, so nothing beyond a few phone numbers,’ Madhav confirmed.

After taking a melodramatic crunch of one of the carrot batons, Susie turned her attention back to her boss. ‘Oxana probably had the burner because it was cheaper. Maybe she integrated it with a digital calendar she might’ve been using back home? Something that could be held in a cloud?’

Madhav shook his head. ‘We thought that as well, but couldn’t find anything.’

He began to detail how they’d triangulated something and beamed something else up to a satellite so his tech team could try to find out what murdered ballroom dancers from Belarus got up to when they weren’t rehearsing.

Jack could’ve told them if they’d bothered asking.

When they started going through her Facebook history for the third time, he finally lost it.

‘Don’t you get it? All she did was dance!’ Jack shot a pointed look at Susie. ‘She didn’t go out, she didn’t have a secret life as a pole dancer. She didn’t hang out with the girls at bottomless brunch. We had four weeks to get ready for Whitby, so we did what people who want to be champions do. We danced.’

Susie registered the comment with another pronounced chomp on her carrot. ‘What about her bank account?’ she asked Madhav, her eyes still on Jack.

‘Ah, well, now we did find something interesting there, beyond the monthly stipend from Marmaduke.’

Lily examined the sheet Madhav had just produced then shared a look with Susie. ‘A cash withdrawal for five hundred pounds two days before the competition.’ It was a lot of money for someone on a tight budget.

‘What would she have spent five hundred pounds on?’ Susie asked.

‘She didn’t,’ Lily said, pointing at Oxana’s purse which was lined up on the counter amongst some other items from her tote bag. ‘Not all of it, anyway. There’s two hundred pounds in there. And some change.’

‘Well.’ Madhav pulled out a flyer and tapped it. ‘We think she might have been planning on spending it here.’

They all leant in to look: Shaz ’n Baz’s Beauty.

There was a long list of treatments – facials, manis, pedis, fillers, threading, and on it went.

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