Just as the music started to play to open the show, the door swung open one last time. Bree walked in managing to trip over her own feet, sending her mobile phone flying across the room. Any other day the lateness and the clumsiness of Bree would have infuriated Nathan but today he barely noticed the entrance of his wife as his eyes were fixed upon the stranger sitting at the bar. He was completely certain that he knew the stranger from somewhere but he just could not work out where he knew him from.
Backstage at the show, Lilly was preparing for her big performance. She wasn’t a particularly brilliant singer but everyone knew that she had only got the job because of the relationship that she had with Nathan, a relationship she regretted starting. Nathan was a violent man but the power that he had in town meant that people chose to put up with his violence. Bree only stayed with him because of the children and Lilly knew she would never get another job in town if she were to leave him.
That night however, there was more than one stranger in town. Having been told by their friend that Nathan and Bree were distracted watching the show and knowing that their children attended boarding school, three shadowy figures crept across the front lawn of the largest house in town. They managed to disable the alarm system and enter the house through a rear window.
Lilly made her way to her dressing room as the lights in the theatre came back on. As the audience began to leave, Nathan realised that the stranger was absolutely nowhere to be seen. He pushed Bree to one side and made his way towards the backstage area. Lilly opened the dressing room door and noticed the reflection of the stranger in the opposite mirror. She closed the door and flung her arms around him. He wiped the make-up from around her eyes and revealed a number of dark bruises. He began to speak. “What are you doing here Lilly? You need to get away from him.” She replied “I can’t, I have nowhere else to go.” Suddenly there was a loud bang as the door flew open slamming against the wall. Nathan burst in to the dressing room and was absolutely furious. However, before he had a chance to open his mouth to talk, he saw a spark fly from Lilly’s hand. A loud gunshot rang through the theatre and Nathan slumped to the ground.
At the same time, on the other side of town, Nathan’s house had been cleared of all the small valuable items that the three men could find. The money and the jewellery from the safe, the laptops and iPods from the children’s rooms and Nathan’s prize trophy from the study had all gone. The three men made their way around the block to their van and patiently waited for the final member of their gang to arrive.
Sirens rang all through the night sky, but when the police arrived at the theatre, the stranger had vanished, the barman was clueless, Lilly’s hands were empty and Bree was crouched next to her husband’s lifeless body. The CSIs arrived but before the body was removed from the scene, the CSI pulled a long, sharp knife from Nathan’s back, cutting he skin further.
Back at the lab, the only fingerprints that the CSI had found were Bree’s. She had had enough of Nathan’s constant abuse and had followed him backstage after he noticed that the stranger had disappeared at the final cabaret night. As he flung Lilly’s dressing room door open, she plunged the cold, sharp edge in to his back slicing through his skin and piercing deeply into his heart. Blood poured out in vast amounts and death followed for Nathan almost instantly. As Lilly pulled the trigger, Nathan was already falling to the floor and her shot hit the wall across the corridor. Bree yelled at the stranger to leave and to take Lilly’s gun with him. Bree was to take the blame for everything that had happened that night. As the police to both of the girls to the station, four men left town in the opposite direction, one of them carrying a gun in his left hand.
The trial that followed a couple of weeks later left Bree convicted of man slaughter. Bree tried to escape from her prison sentence by crying out stories of the abuse she had received from her husband. Bree’s tales of Nathan’s violence had been backed up by Lilly ensuring her a lower sentence and Lilly was sent home from the court room. The only person missing from this scene was the stranger.