“Good of you, miss,” the theater manager said. “It was a most distressing sight. Awful. I’ve never seen a thing like it happen in my theaters and I’ve had fire-eaters, lion tamers, you name it.”

Daniel cleared his throat, obviously wanting to get down to business. “Now, Mr. Scarpelli—is that your correct name?”

“My stage name,” the man said. “In real life I’m Alfred Rosen.”

“And the girl’s name?”

“Lily Kaufman.”

“A relative of yours?”

Scarpelli looked almost coy. “No, just a professional associate.”

“I see.” Daniel nodded. “I’ll need the name and address of her next of kin. They’ll have to be notified.”

“If you don’t mind, I’d rather do it myself,” Scarpelli said. “I feel responsible. It’s only right that I should go and see them. Lily thought the world of her parents. Sent money home to them every month regular.”

“Very well, but I’ll still need their names and address for our records.”

“I can come down to your police station and bring you all that in the morning, if you don’t mind,” Scarpelli said. “I don’t know the address off the top of my head and I’m all at sixes and sevens at the moment. My heart still hasn’t stopped thumping. I still can’t believe it, if you want to know the truth. I keep thinking it’s a horrible nightmare and I’ll wake up any second.”

“You stated that someone must have tampered with your equipment,” Daniel said, showing no sign of sympathy. “Why are you so sure of that? Why couldn’t it simply be a malfunction of your trick?”

“Because the trick should have been foolproof,” Scarpelli said.

“Explain it to me.”

Scarpelli raised his hands in horror. “My dear sir. An illusionist never reveals his secrets to anybody.”

“As you wish,” Daniel said, “but you have to realize that the only evidence I have so far of a crime being committed is yourself wielding a saw and almost certainly killing a young woman. A most convenient way of dispatching someone you might have wanted dead.”

Scarpelli’s face flushed. “You think that I—Captain, I assure you that I was exceedingly fond of Lily. I would never have done anything to harm her.”

“So what makes you think anyone else would have wanted to harm her?”

Scarpelli paused, looked around, then lowered his voice. “There have been little things,” he said. “Small glitches in the act. Locks that wouldn’t open, props that mysteriously disappeared right before show-time. I put them down to Lily’s lack of organization. She was something of a scatterbrain, you know. But now I’m wondering if someone was trying to disrupt my act all along. It wasn’t someone who wished harm to Lily, it was someone who wished to destroy my reputation as an illusionist.”