Roll up, roll up! Just sixpence to see The Astonishing Hollow Girl . . . the girl with a hole right in the middle of her body! Stand in front of her and see all the way through to the red velvet curtain behind her! Or push your hand right through! You’ll think it’s a trick of the light . . . you’ll think it’s smoke and mirrors . . . you’ll think it’s impossible . . . but you’ll be wrong. You’ve never seen anything like it, and you never will again. Roll up, roll up. Just sixpence to see The Astonishing Hollow Girl.

Prologue

The Last Murder

1977

He has the impertinence to laugh, as if they’re old friends, not murderer and victim.

‘I think I’d know if you’d poisoned me.’ But even so, he wipes the corners of his mouth with the napkin and runs his tongue around his inner cheeks, then over his lips. Oh God, yes, there is something. Bitter, acrid, sharp. Burning? Why didn’t he notice before? His heart rate quickens. Why did he even agree to this dinner? Spits out what’s left in his mouth, pushes the plate away. Frowns, blinks. Why is everything blurry?

Instinctively, he reaches for the wine to wash the poison from his mouth, from his throat, lungs, veins, nerves, bones, cells, atoms, but his hand stops midway as he realises the exquisite dilemma – the poison could be in the wine.

‘Do you want money? Is that it? I have money. Loads of it. Could set you up for life.’

‘No, I don’t want money.’

He tries to make sense of those absurd words – who doesn’t want money? – but his brain feels like it’s made of strips of dark blue velvet rubbing up against one another like the front legs of blowflies. Must concentrate. Use his brain. Like he did that other time.

There’s a gasp, as pain knifes his stomach, but he forces himself to ask the next logical question. ‘What do you want, then?’

No response. He tries again. ‘This is insane. You won’t get away with it.’

‘Oh, that’s rich – coming from you. Besides, I’m pretty sure I will.’ A gloved hand points an index finger into the air. ‘Actually, there is something I want.’

He clutches his stomach. The pain is beyond excruciating. ‘What? What is it?’

‘But first, you should know I have this.’

Alarm is spreading through his veins like cold tentacles unfurling, but he watches, transfixed, as a small brown bottle is placed at the far end of the table.

‘An antidote.’

He thrusts out a hand to grab it, but his arm is like rubber and lands uselessly beside his plate. And now the table, the room, the gloved hands are all moving strangely, like they’re high in a cable car being rocked by a slow wind.

‘I’ll give you what you want . . . this bottle . . . if you give me what I want. Do we have a deal?’

He tries to stand, but another burst of pain has him clutching his stomach. He sucks in air as if he’s just surfaced from under water, lets out a groan of agony, holds his head to keep his brain from falling apart.

From the other end of the table: ‘Do . . . we . . . have . . . a . . .deal?’

He nods. What choice does he have?

‘Excellent. Now, according to Fowler’s Guide to Household Poisons, the hallucinations and the pain will all be over in’ – they both swivel their heads to look at the clock on the wall, tick, tick, ticking louder and faster, louder and faster, its hands looming and retreating, looming and retreating – ‘approximately half an hour, at which point, your life will cease. Unless, of course, you swallow this.’ The bottle is swung back and forth, just out of reach. ‘So don’t try anything, alright?’

The pain and his fear are now so intense, anyone would feel sorry for him.

Anyone who didn’t know what he’d done.

‘Alright, alright. I won’t try anything. Just hurry up.’

The reply is sluggish and thick. The green-yellow wax inside his ears melts, flows in and out like a tide, pulling the words explaining his side of the deal into his brain like ants stuck in honey.

The incorrect details, minor though they are, still annoy him –they certainly don’t account for his brilliance. Anyway, it’s not as if anyone’s ever going to actually read it. It’s really quite ludicrous how easy it will be – once he has swallowed the antidote – to destroy the document and then his would-be killer. Correction: the other way around…