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instruction.”<br />
“I’m sure he’s gone,” Emma said, hoping that this was true as she walked through the door. For<br />
some reason she was not eager for Tom and Konstantin to meet. “He said I was his last lesson of the<br />
day. Here’s the ballroom,” she added, with a half-hearted sort of gesture.<br />
“I never would have deduced as much.”<br />
“But it is huge, is it not?”<br />
“Everything in this country is huge.” Tom walked to the middle of the dance floor and made a<br />
slow circle, taking in the series of balconies, the imperial boxes, the half-finished sets in the corners<br />
of the performance level, the orchestra pit, the marble staircase leading from the wardrobe rooms to<br />
the ballroom floor. “There are so many points from which people can enter and exit.”<br />
“My guess would be that the two victims came down the stairs,” Emma said. “The performers<br />
are perhaps accustomed to entering from the second level, where the costume and props and dressing<br />
rooms are located. Konstantin both arrived and departed by that level today. They most likely do not<br />
use these lower doors, on the audience level, at all.”<br />
“I agree,” said Tom. “Although Trevor would be in despair if he could hear you use so many<br />
words like ‘guess’ and ‘perhaps’ and ‘most likely’ all in sequence. Let us look upstairs.”<br />
“And what is our explanation if we’re caught snooping around the performers’ area?”<br />
“That you forgot something after your lesson, you silly girl.”<br />
“I wouldn’t have left it up here,” she muttered, as they climbed the broad staircase which led to<br />
a changing room for the dancers. Adjacent to it was a prop room, larger in itself than many theaters,<br />
and then a small sitting room with any number of settees and even a small daybed.<br />
“Not a bad situation,” Tom said. “A little home away from home for the performers.”<br />
“Given what most of them have come from,” Emma mused, “it’s hard to imagine they’d be<br />
inclined to risk losing their position within the tsar’s troupe.”<br />
“What makes you say that?”<br />
“I don’t know,” she confessed. Even though they had left the ballroom, they were still<br />
whispering. “But the young ballet dancers who were killed, they were meeting here at night, were<br />
they not? Which implies a forbidden sort of liaison.”
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