I Know What You Did Last Wednesday by Anthony Horowitz Read Free Book Online Page A

A hypodermic syringe?
    Tim must have had the same thought. He was looking everywhere, afraid to touch anything, afraid even to take another step. We went out into the hall. The fire had died down and was glowing red. The front door was open.
    “Maybe he went outside,” Tim said.
    “What would be the point?” I asked.
    Tim shuddered. “Don’t talk about points,” he said.
    We went outside. And that was where we found Mark. He had come first in sport but now he had reached the finishing line. Somebody had been throwing the javelin and they’d thrown it at him. It had hit him in the chest. He was lying on the grass, doing a good impersonation of a sausage on a stick.
    “It’s … it’s … it’s…” Tim couldn’t finish the sentence.
    “Yeah,” I said. “It’s Mark.” There were a few leaves scattered around his body. That puzzled me. The nearest trees were ten metres away. But this wasn’t the time to play the detective. There were no more suspects. And only one more victim.
    I looked at Tim.
    Tim looked at me.
    We were the only two left.

NEEDLES
    Tim didn’t sleep well that night. Although I hadn’t said anything, not wanting to upset him, even he had managed to work out that he had to be the next on the killer’s list. He also knew that his own murder would have something to do with needlework. So he was looking for needles everywhere.
    By one o’clock in the morning we knew that there were no sewing needles in the room, no knitting needles and no pine needles. Even so, it took him an hour to get into bed and several more hours to get to sleep. Mind you, nobody would have found it easy getting to sleep dressed in a full suit of medieval armour, but that still hadn’t stopped Tim putting it on.
    “There could be a poisoned needle in the mattress,” he said. “Or someone could try and inject me with a syringe.”
    Tim didn’t snore that night; he clanked. Every time he rolled over he sounded like twenty cans of beans in a washing machine. I just hoped he wasn’t planning to take a bath in the suit of armour the following morning. That way he could end up rusting to death.
    At four-thirty, he woke up screaming.
    “What is it, Tim?” I asked.
    “I had a bad dream, Nick,” he said.
    “Don’t tell me. You saw a needle.”
    “No. I saw a haystack.”
    I didn’t sleep well either. I got cramp and woke up in the morning with pins and needles. I didn’t tell Tim, though. He’d have had a fit.
    We had breakfast together in the kitchen. Neither of us ate very much. For a start, we were surrounded by dead bodies, which didn’t make us feel exactly cheerful. But Tim was also terrified. I’d managed to persuade him to change out of the armour but now he was worrying about the food. Were there going to be needles in the cereal? A needle in the tea? In the end, I gave him a straw with a tissue sellotaped over the end. The tissue worked as a filter and he was able to suck up a little orange juice and a very softly-boiled egg.
    I have to say that for once I was baffled. It was still like being in an Agatha Christie novel – only this time I couldn’t flick through to the last page and see who did it without bothering to read the rest. Personally, I had always thought Eric had been the killer. He seemed to have the strongest motive – being half-drowned on the last day of school. It was funny really. All eight of the old boys and girls of St Egbert’s had disliked each other. But someone, somewhere, had disliked them all even more. The whole thing had been planned right down to the last detail. And the last detail, unfortunately, was Tim.
    But who? And why?
    Tim sat miserably at his end of the table, hardly daring to move. Why had he had to come first in
needlework
of all things? How was I supposed to find the needle that was going to kill him? I knew now that the only hope for me was to solve this thing before the killer struck one last time. And a nasty thought had already occurred to me. Would