Dead famous

by Ben Elton

  ‘No, sir, that’s right,’ Trish replied.

  ‘The one system he truly does understand is the social security system.’

  ‘So the state can keep him fed and watered while he seeks to overthrow it? Very convenient, I must say.’

  ‘Yes, sir, he thinks so too,’ said Hooper.

  ‘Later on he has a huge row with the rest of them about it because they refuse to celebrate the irony of the fact that the state is funding him, its most bitter enemy.’

  ‘Presumably because they, like the rest of us, have to fund the state.’

  ‘That’s basically their point, yes.’

  ‘Well, I’m delighted to discover that these people and I have at least one opinion in common. This Woggle,any history of fraudulent claims? False addresses? Double-drops, financial skulduggery, that sort of thing? Anything that might make him vulnerable to discovery?’

  ‘No, sir, on that score he’s completely clean.’ There was a brief pause and then, almost uniquely, all three of them laughed. If there was one thing that Woggle wasn’t, it was clean.

  ‘Shit, man,’ Jazz observed, aghast.

  ‘Haven’t you ever heard of soap?’ Woggle had taken up what was to become his habitual position, crouching on the floor in the room’s only corner, his bearded chin resting on bony knees which he hugged close to his chest, his great horned dirty toenails poking out from his sandals. Woggle was dirty in a way that only a person who has just emerged from digging a tunnel can be dirty. He had come straight to join the House Arrest team from his previous home, a 200metre tunnel under the site of the proposed fifth terminal at Heathrow Airport. Woggle had suggested to Geraldine the Gaoler that perhaps he should take a shower before joining the team, but Geraldine, ever watchful for the elements that could be said to make up ‘good telly’, assured him that he was fine as he was.

  ‘Just be yourself,’she had said.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Woggle had replied.

  ‘For I am the sum of all my past lives and those I have yet to live.’ Woggle stank. Digging tunnels is hard physical work and every drop of sweat that he had sweated remained in the fabric of his filthy garments, a motley collection of old bits of combat gear and denim. If Woggle had worn a leather jacket (which, being an animal liberationist, of course he would never do) he would have looked like one of those disgusting old-style hell’s angels who never washed their Levi’s no matter how often they urinated on them.

  ‘Guy, you are rank!’ Jazz continued.

  ‘You are high! Here, man, have a blow on my deodorant before we all get killed of asphyxiation and suffocate to death here!’ Woggle demurred.

  ‘I consider all cosmetics to be humanoid affectations, yet one more example of our sad species’inability to accept its place as simply another animal on the planet.’

  ‘Are you on drugs or what?’

  ‘People think that they are superior to animals, and preening and scenting themselves is evidence of that,’ Woggle droned with the moral self-assurance of a Buddha, ‘but look at a cat’s silky coat or a robin’s joyful wings. Did any haughty supermodel ever look that good?’

  ‘Too fucking right she did, guy,’ said Jazz, who personally used two separate deodorants and anointed his skin daily with scented oils.

  ‘I ain’t never gone to sleep dreaming about shagging no cat, but Naomi and Kate are welcome any time.’ Layla spoke up from the kitchen area where she was preparing herbal tea.

  ‘I have some cruelty-free organic cleansing lotions, Woggle, if you’d like to borrow them.’ Layla. Real fob: fashion designer and retail supervisor. Star sign: Scorpio.

  ‘They won’t be cruelty-free after the plastic bottles end up in a landfill and a seagull gets its beak stuck in one,’Woggle replied.

  ‘Don’t be fooled by that fashion designer thing, sir,’ said Hooper.

  ‘She’s another shop girl. It comes out later in the second week. Layla cannot believe it when Garry points out that she and Kelly do basically the same job. Layla thinks she’s about a million miles above Kelly. There was quite a row.’

  ‘Garry likes annoying them all, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Oh yes, anything for a reaction, that’s Garry.’

  ‘And this young lady Layla takes herself very seriously?’

  ‘She does that, all right. Some of the biggest clashes in the first week are between her and David the actor, over who’s the most sensitive.’

  ‘They both reckon themselves poets,’Trisha chipped in.

  ‘Yes, I can see that there’s a lot of concealed anger there,’ Coleridge remarked thoughtfully.

  ‘A lot of failed ambition for both of them. It could be relevant.’

  ‘Not for Layla, sir, surely? She got chucked out before the murder happened.’

  ‘I am aware of that, sergeant, but seeing as how we don’t know anything at all it behoves us to investigate everything.’ Hooper hated the fact that he worked under a man who used words like ‘behoves’.

  ‘This girl Layla’s resentment and feelings of inadequacy could have found some resonance in the group. She may have been the catalyst for somebody else’s self-doubt. Who knows, sometimes with murder it’s entirely the wrong person that gets killed.’

  ‘Eh?’ Said Hooper.

  ‘Well, think about it,’ Coleridge explained.

  ‘Suppose a man is being taunted by his girlfriend about his powers in bed. Finally he storms out into the dark night and on his way home a stranger steps on his heel. The man spins round and kills the stranger, whereas really he wanted to kill his girlfriend.’

  ‘Well, yes, sir, I can see that happening with a random act of anger, but the murder happened long after Layla left…’

  ‘All right. Suppose you have a group of friends, and A has a dark, dark secret which B discovers. B then begins to spread the secret about and this gets back to A, but when A confronts B, B convincingly claims that the blabbermouth is in fact C. A then kills C, who actually knew nothing about it. The wrong person gets killed. In my experience there are usually a lot more people involved in a murder than the culprit and the victim.’

  ‘So we keep Layla in the frame?’

  ‘Well, not as an actual murder suspect, obviously. But before she left that house it is entirely possible that she sowed the seed that led to murder. Let’s move on.’ Trisha pressed play and the camera panned across from Woggle to settle on the tenth and final housemate.

  Dervla. Real job: trauma therapist. Star sign: Taurus.

  She was the most beautiful, everybody agreed that, and the most mysterious. Quiet and extremely calm, it was never easy to work out what was going on behind those smiling green Irish eyes. Eyes that always seemed to be laughing at a different joke from the rest of the group. By the time of the murder Dervla had been the bookies’ number-two favourite to win the game, and she would have been number one had Geraldine Hennessy not occasionally and jealously edited against her, making her look stuck-up when in fact she was merely abstracted.

  ‘So what’s a trauma therapist when it’s at home, then?’ Garry asked. He and Dervla were stretched out beside the pool in the pleasant aftermath of the morning’s champagne.

  ‘Well, I suppose my job is to understand how people react to stress, so that I can help them to deal with it.’ Dervla replied in her gentle Dublin brogue.

  ‘That’s why I wanted to come on this show. I mean, the whole experience is really just a series of small traumas, isn’t it? I think it’ll be very interesting to be close to the people experiencing those traumas and also to experience them myself.’

  ‘So it’s got nothing to do with winning half a million big ones, then?’ Dervla was far too clever to deny the charge completely. She knew that the nation would almost certainly be scrutinizing her reply that very evening.

  ‘Well, that would be nice, of course. But I’m sure I’ll be evicted long before that. No, basically I’m here to learn. About myself and about stress.’ Coleridge was so exasperated that he had to make himself anot
her mug of tea. Here was this beautiful, intelligent woman, to whom he was embarrassed to discover he found himself rather attracted, with eyes like emeralds and a voice like milk and honey, and yet she was talking utter and complete rubbish.

  ‘Stress! Stress!’ Coleridge said, in what for him was almost a shout.

  ‘Not much more than two generations ago the entire population of this country stood in the shadow of imminent brutal occupation by a crowd of murdering Nazis! A generation before that we lost a million boys in the trenches. A million innocent lads. Now we have ‘therapists’ studying the ‘trauma’ of getting thrown off a television game show. Sometimes I despair, I really do, you know. I despair.’

  ‘Yes, but, sir,’ Trisha said, ‘in the war and stuff people had something to stand up for, something to believe in. These days there isn’t anything for us to believe in very much. Does that make our anxieties and pain any less relevant?’

  ‘Yes, it does!’ Coleridge stopped himself before he could say any more. Even he could occasionally tell when he was sounding like a bigoted, reactionary old idiot. He took a deep breath and returned to the subject of the young woman on the screen.

  ‘So, this Dervla girl went into the house with the purely cerebral intention of observing case studies in stress?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Trisha, referring to her file on Dervla, ‘she felt that the nomination process with its necessary winners and losers offered a perfect chance to study people’s reactions to isolation and rejection.’

  ‘Very laudable I must say.’

  ‘And she also added that ‘she hopes one day to be a television presenter’.’

  ‘Now why does that not surprise me?’ Coleridge sipped his tea and studied the screen.

  ‘One house, ten contestants,’ he said almost to himself.

  ‘One victim.’

  DAY THIRTY. 7.00 a.m.

  It was now three days since the murder, and Coleridge felt as if his investigation had scarcely begun. No forensic evidence of any value had emerged from the search of the house, the suspect interviews had revealed nothing but apparent shock and confusion, the observers at Peeping Tom could not suggest even a hint of a motive, and Coleridge and his excellent team had been reduced to sitting about in front of a television making wild guesses. Coleridge closed his eyes and breathed slowly. Focus, he had to focus, forget the storm that was raging around him and focus. He tried to free his mind, rid it of all thoughts and preconceptions, make of it a blank page upon which some invisible hand might write an answer. The murderer is…But no answer came. It just didn’t seem credible that there had even been a murderer, and yet there had most definitely been a murder. How could it be possible to get away with murder in an entirely sealed environment, every inch of which was covered by television cameras and microphones? Eight people had been watching the screens in the monitoring bunker. Another had been even closer, standing behind the two- way mirrors in the camera runs that surrounded the house. Six others had been present in the room left by the killer to pursue his victim. They were still there when he or she returned shortly thereafter, having committed the murder. An estimated 47,000 more had been watching via the live Internet link, which Peeping Tom provided for its more obsessive viewers. All these people saw the murder happen and yet somehow the killer had outwitted them all. Coleridge felt fear rising in his stomach. Fear that his long and moderately distinguished career was about to end in a spectacular failure. A world-famous failure, for this was now the most notorious case on the planet. Everybody had a theory — every pub, office, and school, every noodle bar in downtown Tokyo, every Turkish bath in Istanbul. Hour by hour Coleridge’s office was bombarded with thousands of emails explaining who the killer was and why he or she had done it. Criminologists and Crackers were popping up all over the place — on the news, in the papers, on-line and in every language. The bookies were taking bets, the spiritualists were chatting to the victim and the Internet was about to collapse under the weight of traffic of webheads exchanging theories. Indeed, the only person who seemed to have absolutely no idea whatsoever of the killer’s identity was Inspector Stanley Spencer Coleridge, the police officer in charge of the investigation. He walked through the house, trying to gain some sense of its secrets. Asking it to give him some clue. Not the real house, of course. The police forensics team had completed their business there in a day and had then been obliged to return it to its owners. This was a replica house that Peeping Tom Productions had been happy to lend to the police. The plasterboard and glue version that the producers had used during the months of camera rehearsal, during which they had ensured that every single angle was covered and that there truly was no place to hide. This replica house had no roof or plumbing and did not include the garden, but internally its colours and dimensions were precise. It gave Coleridge the feel. He cursed himself. Standing in the imitation space, he felt that he had become like one of the actual housemates: he had no useful thoughts in his head whatsoever, only feelings.

  ‘Feelings,’ Coleridge thought.

  ‘The modus operandi of an entire generation. You don’t have to think anything, or even to believe anything. You only have to feel.’

  Like the real house, the replica house, which stood on an empty sound stage at Shepperton Film Studios, consisted of two bedrooms, a shower room, a bathroom in which laundry could be done in a big steel trough, a toilet, an open-plan living, kitchen and dining area, a store room, and the room known as the confession box, where the inmates went to speak to Peeping Tom. Three dark corridors ran along the edges of the house that did not open out onto the garden, and it was along these corridors that the manned cameras travelled, spying on the inmates through the huge two-way mirrors that took up most of the walls. These cameras, combined with the remote-controlled ‘hot-head’ ones situated inside the house, ensured that there was not a single square centimetre of space in which a person might avoid being observed. The only room that was not covered by the manual camera runs was the toilet. Even Peeping Tom’s obsessive voyeurism had drawn a line at having cameramen standing eighteen inches from the inmates while they evacuated their bowels. The duty editors had to watch, however, as the toilet contained a hot-head, which missed absolutely nothing. They had to listen, too, as the cubicle was also wired for sound. Coleridge was reminded of the catchphrase that had adorned so many roadside posters in the run-up to broadcast.

  ‘there is NO escape’ they had read. For one of the inmates that statement had proved horribly prophetic. The house and garden complex was surrounded by a moat and twin lines of razorwire fencing patrolled by security guards. The monitoring bunker in which the production team worked was situated fifty metres beyond the fence and was connected to the camera runs via a tunnel under the moat. It was along this tunnel that Geraldine and the horrified Peeping Tom night crew had run on that dreadful night after they had witnessed a murder on their television monitors. The murder. It was eating Coleridge up. For the umpteenth time he walked across the replica of the floor that the victim had crossed, to be followed moments later by the killer. Then he went and stood in the camera run, looking in on the room, just as the operator had done on the fatal night. He re-entered the living space and opened a drawer in the kitchen unit, the top one, the one the killer had opened. There were no knives in the drawer Coleridge opened; it was only a rehearsal space. Coleridge spent almost three hours wandering around the strange, depressing replica, but it told him nothing more about what had happened during the few, brief moments of dreadful violence than he already knew. He asked himself how he would have carried out the murder had he been the killer. The answer was, in exactly the same way as the killer. It was the only way it could have been done with any chance of getting away with it. The killer had seen his or her one opportunity to kill with anonymity and had seized it. Well, that was something, Coleridge told himself. The speed with which the killer had grasped his or her chance surely proved that he had been waiting and watching. He or she had wanted to kill. What could possibly h
ave happened to engender such hatred? Without any evidence to the contrary, Coleridge had to presume that these people had all been complete strangers to each other less than a month before. He and his team had been studying the background of all the housemates but had so far found not one shred of a suggestion that any of them had known each other prior to entering the house. So why would a stranger plan to kill a stranger? Because they were strangers no more. Something must have happened or been said in those three weeks that had made murder inevitable. But what? There had certainly been some dreadful goings-on in the house, but nothing had been observed that looked remotely like a motive for the crime. It could not be ruled out that two of the inmates had not been strangers. That some ancient enmity had been unwittingly introduced into the house? That some bleak and terrible coincidence in the selection process had led to murder? Whatever the answer, Coleridge knew that he wouldn’t find it there in that gloomy old hangar at Shepperton. It was inside the real house, it was inside the people inside the real house. Wearily, he returned to his car, to which Hooper had retreated half an hour earlier, and together they began their drive back to Sussex, where the real Peeping Tom house was located, a journey of about twenty miles which if they were lucky would only take them the rest of the morning.

  DAY THIRTY. 9.15 p.m.

  While Coleridge and Hooper nosed their way along the M25, Trisha was interviewing Bob Fogarty, the editor-in-chief of House Arrest. After Geri the Gaoler, Fogarty was the most senior figure in the Peeping Tom hierarchy. Trisha wanted to know more about how the people she had been watching came to be presented in the way they were.

  ‘House Arrest is basically fiction,’ said Fogarty, handing her a styrofoam cup of watery froth and nearly missing her hand in the darkness of the monitoring bunker.

  ‘Like all TV and film. It’s built in the edit.’

  ‘You manipulate the housemates’ images?’

  ‘Well, obviously. We’re not scientists, we make television programmes. People are basically dull. We have to make them interesting, turn them into heroes and villains.’