We had breakfast together in the kitchen. Neither of us ate very much. For starters, 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 armor 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 taped 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 one another. 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 in 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 the killer stop with Tim? I wasn’t meant to be part of this. I had never gone to St. Egbert’s. But I was a witness to what had happened and maybe I had seen too much.

I went over what had happened the night before. We had always assumed that there was nobody else on the island, but thinking it through, I knew this couldn’t be true. We had all been sitting down: Brenda in front of the organ, Eric opposite her, Mark nearest the door, and Tim and me on the sofa. But none of us had been anywhere near the light switch, and someone had most certainly turned off the lights—not just in the drawing room but throughout the entire house. Somewhere down in the basement, there would be a main fuse switch. But that led to another question. If the killer had been down in the basement, then how had he or she managed to appear in the room seconds later to shoot Eric and push the organ pipe onto Brenda?