I Know What You Did Last Wednesday

I Know What You Did Last Wednesday (2003) is a short story in the Diamond Brothers series of comedy thrillers by Anthony Horowitz (author of the Alex Rider series). It was included in the omnibus Three of Diamonds in 2004.

The plot bears a close resemblance to Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, in which visitors are invited to an isolated island and are murdered one by one in odd but appropriate ways. The title is a parody of I Know What You Did Last Summer. Horowitz keeps the reader's attention with gruesome jokes and spine tingling drama.

The main characters are Tim Diamond, an incompetent private detective, and his smarter younger brother Nick, the narrator, who usually solves all of Tim's cases.

Plot summary

Tim Diamond receives a letter from his old school friend, the millionaire Rory McDougal. It invites him to the remote Crocodile Island, of the coast of Scotland, for a high school reunion, promising him £1000 if he attends. Nick invites himself along.

There they meet Sylvie Binns, Janet Rhodes, Libby Goldman, Brenda Blake, Mark Tyler and Eric Draper, all of Tim's old classmates except for the popular Johnny Nadler. They are taken over to Crocodile Island by Captain Horatio Randle, on his small boat named the Silver Medal.

Upon arriving on the island, they find Rory dead, cut to pieces with a sword. With the boat not returning for three days, the phones in the house gone, and all mobile phones signal less, the horrified group is trapped in the middle of a murder mystery. Later in the same day Sylvie is poisoned by a cyanide-laced chocolate bar in her room, and during the night Janet Rhodes is stabbed by a model Eiffel Tower. During the night Nick sees a Skull mask outside his room, but a few moments later it is gone. Brenda also claims to have seen it.

The remaining guests proceed to search the island, but discover no one. Paranoid, they begin to distrust each other. Before long Libby Goldman is crushed by a heavy globe.

Nick finds out that the people in the school disliked each other. Tim once broke three of Mark's fingers with a conker, and on the last day of term Eric Draper was thrown into the canel by the other students and had to spend six months in hospital due to the pollution. With just five of the group left, they agree to stay in the hall and watch each other. Nick points out that everybody came first in a subject at school and all the people who have been killed have been killed in a way that shows that person's subject. The lights go out suddenly, and when they come back on, Brenda Blake is dead, hit on the head by an organ pipe, and Eric Draper has been shot by an old-fashioned pistol, which lies smoking on the floor. Mark Tyler is missing, but the brothers find him outside, impaled by a javelin.

Tim becomes paranoid and accuses Nick as the murderer and runs for his life towards the cliffs. As an explosion causes the cliff edge to collapse beneath him, he falls down towards a bed of sharply pointed rock "needles", but Nick manages to pull him back just in time.

Captain Randle arrives, and Nick accuses him of being the missing classmate Johnny Nadler and the perpetrator of the murders. He admits the crimes, explaining his motive: he was always in second place, originally at school, where he came second in all subjects, and then in life, second place with patents, in job interviews and so on. He traces it back to his time at school, and set up cunning traps to kill all his classmates appropriately.

Rory, 1st in Maths, was "divided"; Sylvie, 1st in Chemistry was poisoned; Janet, 1st in French was stabbed with the French icon, the Eiffel Tower; Libby, 1st in Geography was killed by a model globe; Brenda, 1st in Music was killed by an organ pipe; Eric, 1st in History, was shot by an old pistol. Mark, 1st in Sport, was impaled by a javelin; and Tim, 1st in Needlework, should die on the rock needles.

Johnny is about to kill them both, but then in the nick of time Eric Draper, who survived the shot, hits him with a blunderbuss. The Diamond brothers, Eric and a well tied up Johnny sail the ship back to the mainland, having radioed the police to pick up Johnny. Tim apologizes for suspecting Nick, who forgives him.

×==External links==×

• I Know What You Did Last Wednesday at Walker Books