I saw the balloons first and knew at once whose trailer this was. There were more than fifty of them, every color imaginable, clinging together as if they were somehow alive, and suddenly I knew what had just happened. The strange thing was that they did almost seem to be cowering in the corner. They weren’t touching the ground. But the balloon seller was. He was stretched out on the carpet with something silver lying next to his outstretched hand.

“Don’t touch it, Tim!” I warned.

Too late. Tim had already leaned over and picked it up.

It was a knife. The blade was about four inches long. It matched, perfectly, the four-inch-deep wound in the back of the balloon seller’s head. There wasn’t a lot of blood. The balloon seller had been an old man. Killing him had been like attacking a scarecrow.

And then somebody screamed.

I spun around. There was a little girl there in a gold dress with sequins. She was sitting on a bicycle that had only one wheel, pedaling back and forth to stop herself falling over. She was pointing at Tim, her finger trembling, her eyes filled with horror, and suddenly I was aware of the other performers appearing, coming out of their trailers 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 barbell. 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 gibberish 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 these people 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 makeup 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.