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other performers appearing, coming out of their caravans as if this was the morning and they’d just woken up. Only it was the middle of the night and these people weren’t dressed for bed! There was a clown in striped pants with a bowler hat and (inevitably) a red nose. There was a man on stilts. A fat man with a crash helmet. Two more sisters on unicycles. The strong man had come back with his steel girder. A pair of identical twins stood like mirror images, identical expressions on their faces. And what they were all looking at was my big brother Tim, holding a knife and hovering in the doorway of a man who had just been murdered.
    The little girl who had started it screamed once more and shouted something out. The strong man spoke. Then the clown. It all came out as jibberish to me but it didn’t take a lot of imagination to work out what they were saying.
    “
Boris the balloon man has been murdered!
”
    “
Dear old Boris! Who did it?
”
    “
It must have been the idiotic-looking Englishman holding the knife
.”
    I don’t know at what precise moment the mood turned nasty, but suddenly I realized that the people all around me no longer wanted to entertain us. The clown stepped forward and his face was twisted and ugly … as well as being painted white with green diamonds over his eyes. He asked Tim something, his voice cracking with emotion and his make-up doing much the same.
    “I don’t speak Russian,” Tim said.
    “You kill Boris!”
    So the balloon man really was called Boris. The clown was speaking English with an incredibly thick accent, struggling to make himself understood.
    “Me?” Tim smiled and innocently raised a hand. Unfortunately it was the hand that was still holding the knife.
    “Why you kill Boris?”
    “Actually, I think you mean ‘why
did
you kill Boris,’” Tim corrected him. “You’ve forgotten the verb…”
    “I don’t think they want an English lesson, Tim,” I said.
    Tim ignored me. “I kill Boris, you kill Boris, he killed Boris!” he explained to the increasingly puzzled clown.
    “I didn’t kill Boris!” I exclaimed.
    “They killed Boris!” the clown said.
    “That’s right!” Tim smiled encouragingly.
    “No, we didn’t!” I yelled.
    It was too late. The circus performers were getting closer by the second. I didn’t like the way they were looking at us. And there were more of them now. Four muscle-bound brothers in white leotards had stepped out of the shadows. The ringmaster was staring at us from the edge of the tent. I wondered who was entertaining the audience. The entire circus seemed to have congregated outside.
    The ringmaster snapped out a brief command in Russian.
    “Let’s go, Tim!” I said.
    Tim dropped the knife and we turned and fled just as the performers started towards us. As far as they were concerned, Tim had just murdered one of their number, and this was a case of an eye for an eye – or a knife wound for a knife wound. These were travelling performers. They had their own rules and to hell with the country in which they found themselves.
    Tim and I took off across the park, trying to lose ourselves in the shadows. Not easy with a full moon that night. Something huge and solid sailed across the sky, then buried itself in the soft earth. The strong man had thrown his girder in our direction. We were lucky – he was strong, but he obviously had lousy aim. The girder would be found the next day sticking out of the grass like a bizarre, iron tree. Half a metre to the right and we’d have been found underneath it.
    But I quickly realized that this was only the start of our troubles. The entire circus troupe had abandoned the performance in order to come after us. Word had quickly got round. We had killed old Boris and now they were going to kill us. There was a dull
whoomph!
and a figure shot through the air. It was the man in the crash helmet. This had to be Karl “On Your” Marx, the human cannon-ball. They had fired him in our