Dead famous

by Ben Elton

  ‘A what?’ Coleridge enquired.

  ‘A no-brainer, sir. It means easy.’

  ‘Then why don’t you say so?’

  ‘Well, because.. Well, because it’s less colourful, sir.’

  ‘I prefer clarity to colour in language, sergeant.’ Hooper wasn’t having this. Coleridge wasn’t the only one who had been woken up at one in the morning.

  ‘What about Shakespeare, then?’ Hooper reached back in his mind to his English Literature GCSE for a quote. He retrieved a sonnet: ‘What about ‘Shall I compare you to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.’ Perhaps he should have just said,’I fancy you’?’

  ‘Shakespeare was not a policeman embarking on a murder inquiry. He was poet employing language in celebration of a beautiful woman.’

  ‘Actually, sir, I read that it was a bloke he was talking about.’ Coleridge did not answer. Hooper smiled to himself. He knew that one would annoy the old bastard. And Coleridge was annoyed once more, for, once they had arrived at the house, it became very quickly clear to him that this investigation was by no means straightforward at all. The pathologist had no light to shed on the subject.

  ‘What you see is what you get, chief inspector,’ she said.

  ‘At eleven forty-four last night somebody stabbed this girl in the neck with a kitchen knife and immediately thereafter plunged the same knife through her skull, where it remained. The exact time of the attack was recorded on the video cameras, which makes a large part of my job rather redundant.’

  ‘But you concur with the evidence of the cameras?’

  ‘Certainly. I would probably have told you between eleven thirty and eleven forty, but of course I could never be as accurate as a time code. Bit of luck for you, that.’

  ‘The girl died instantly?’ Coleridge asked.

  ‘On the second blow, yes. The first would not have killed her had she gone on to receive treatment.’

  ‘You’ve watched the tape.’

  ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘Do you have any observations to offer?’

  ‘Not really, I’m afraid. I suppose I was a little surprised at the speed with which the blood puddle formed. A corpse’s blood doesn’t flow from a wound, you see, because the heart is no longer pumping it. It merely leaks, and an awful lot leaked in two minutes.’

  ‘Significant?’

  ‘Not really,’ the pathologist replied.

  ‘Interesting to me, that’s all. We’re all different physiologically. The girl was leaning forward, so gravity will have increased the speed of blood loss. I suppose that accounts for it.’ Coleridge looked down at the dead girl kneeling on the floor in front of the toilet. A curious position to end up in, for all the world like a Muslim at prayer. Except that she was naked. And, of course, there was the knife.

  ‘Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him,’ Coleridge murmured to himself.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Macbeth,’ said Coleridge.

  ‘Duncan’s death. There was also a lot of blood on that occasion.’ Coleridge had gone to bed with the Complete Works the night before, preparing for the amateur dramatics audition that he knew he would fail.

  ‘Well, there normally is a lot of blood when people get stabbed,’ stated the pathologist matter of factly.

  ‘So that’s your lot for the moment,’ she continued.

  ‘We might find something on the knife handle. The killer wrapped the sheet round it for grip and also, one presumes, in order to avoid leaving prints. They’d all been in a sweatbox, secreting copiously, so some cellular matter might have soaked through. Could possibly get an ID from that.’

  ‘Nobody’s touched the knife, then?’ After the washing incident Coleridge was ready to believe anything.

  ‘No, but we’ll obviously have to touch it to get it out of her head. We’ll almost certainly have to cut the skull as well. Grim work, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Yes.’ Coleridge leaned over the body, trying to see as far as he could into the toilet cubicle without stepping in the pool of congealed blood. He put his hands against the walls to support himself.

  ‘Hold my waist, please, sergeant. I don’t want to fall onto the poor girl.’ Hooper did as he was told and Coleridge, thus suspended, took in the scene. Kelly’s naked bottom stared up at him and, beyond that, the toilet bowl.

  ‘Very clean,’ he remarked.

  ‘What, sir?’ Hooper asked, surprised.

  ‘The lavatory bowl, it’s very clean.’

  ‘Oh, I see, I thought you meant…’

  ‘Be quiet, sergeant.’

  ‘That was Kelly.’ Geraldine spoke from behind him.

  ‘Scrubbed the toilet twice a day. She can’t stand dirty bogs…’ Her voice trailed away as she reminded herself that Kelly was past caring about anything now.

  ‘I mean, she couldn’t stand it…She was a very neat and tidy girl.’ Coleridge continued his investigation.

  ‘Hmmm, not a particularly thorough girl, though, I fear. She missed a few small splashes of what I think is vomit on the seat. Thank you, you can pull me back now.’ With Hooper’s help and by walking his hands backwards along the walls, Coleridge rejoined the pathologist.

  ‘What about the sheet worn by the killer?’ He asked.

  ‘The one he took back into the boys’ bedroom?’

  ‘You might be luckier with that. I mean, all that sweating must have loosened some skin. Some of it would certainly have stuck to the sheet.’ The original officer on the scene chipped in at this point.’We think that the sheet the killer used was the same one as the black lad, Jason, put on when he emerged from the room after the event, sir.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Coleridge thoughtfully.

  ‘So if by any chance Jason were our man, then he would have a convenient alibi for any residue of his DNA on the sheet.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose he would.’

  ‘It’ll take a day or two at the lab,’ said the pathologist.

  ‘Shall I send it off?’

  ‘Yes,of course. Not a lot of point in my looking at it,’Coleridge replied.

  ‘I see that the lavatory door has a lock.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Geraldine.

  ‘It’s the only one in the house. It’s electronic and they can open it from either side, in case one of them faints or decides to top themselves or whatever. We can also spring it from the control room.’

  ‘But Kelly didn’t use the lock?’

  ‘No. None of them did.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, I suppose if you’ve got a camera staring at you while you do your thing privacy becomes sort of irrelevant. Besides, there’s a light that says when the loo’s occupied.’

  ‘So the killer would not have expected to encounter a lock?’

  ‘No, not since about the second day.’ Coleridge inspected the door and the lock mechanism for some moments.

  ‘I only had it fitted as an afterthought,’ said Geraldine.

  ‘I thought we ought to give them at least the impression of privacy. If only she’d used it.’

  ‘I’m not sure it would have helped,’ said Coleridge.

  ‘The killer was obviously very determined, and the restraining bar on this lock is only plywood. It would have taken very little force to kick it open.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Geraldine. Coleridge summoned the police photographer to ensure that photographs of the door and its catch were taken, and then he and Sergeant Hooper retraced the killer’s steps from the lavatory back to the boys’ bedroom.

  ‘Nothing to be got from the floor, I suppose.’

  ‘Hardly, sir,’ said Hooper.

  ‘The same eight people have been back and forth over these tiles twenty-four seven for the last four weeks.’

  ‘Twenty-four seven?’ Hooper gritted his teeth before replying.

  ‘It’s an expression, sir. It means twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.’

  ‘I see…Quite useful.
Economic, to the point.’

  ‘I think so, sir.’

  ‘American, I presume?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I wonder if any item of colloquial English will ever again emanate from this country.’

  ‘I wonder if anybody apart from you remotely cares, sir.’ Hooper knew that he was safe to be as cheeky as he liked. Coleridge was no longer listening to him, nor was he really thinking about the changing nature of English slang. That was just his way of concentrating. Coleridge always turned into an even bigger bore than usual when his mind began to gnaw at a problem. Hooper knew that he was in for weeks of grim pedantry. After another half-hour or so of searching, during which nothing of interest was discovered, Coleridge decided to leave the lab people to their work.

  ‘Let’s go and meet the suspects, shall we?’

  DAY TWENTY-EIGHT. 3.40 a.m.

  The housemates were being held in the Peeping Tom boardroom, situated on the upper floor of the production complex across the moat from the house. The seven tired, scared young people had been taken there after being questioned briefly at the scene and then allowed to shower and dress. Now they had all been sitting together for over an hour, and the truth of the night’s terrible event had well and truly sunk in. Kelly was dead. The girl with whom they had all lived and breathed for the previous four weeks, and with whom they had all been groping and laughing only a few hours before, was dead. That was the second most shocking thing any of them had ever in their lives been forced to try to come to terms with. The most shocking thing of all was the self-evident fact that one of them had killed her. The penny had dropped slowly. At first there had been much weeping and hugging, expressions of astonishment, confusion, sadness and solidarity. They had felt as if they were the only seven people in the world, bonded by a glue that no outsider would ever understand. It was all so strange and confusing: the four weeks of isolation and gameplaying, then the mad, drunken excess of the sweatbox, the sudden onrush of raw sexual energy that had taken them all by surprise…And then the death of their comrade and the house suddenly full of police. That had almost been the strangest thing of all. To find their house, the place where nobody could enter and none could leave save by a formal and complex voting procedure, full of police officers! Of course, they had been intruded on before, when Woggle was arrested, but that had been different. The housemates had remained in the majority, in some way in control. This time they had been reduced to a huddled little ghetto in the boys’ bedroom, pleading to be allowed to wash themselves. All this common and unique experience had at first served to create a gang mentality for the seven surviving housemates…Jazz, Gazzer, Dervla, Moon, David, Hamish and Sally. But as they sat together around the big table in the Peeping Tom boardroom, rapidly sobering up, that solidarity had begun to evaporate like the alcohol in their systems. To be replaced by fear, fear and suspicion. Suspicion of each other. Fear that they themselves might be suspected. One by one Coleridge saw them, these people who were shortly to become so familiar to him. And with each brief interview the depressing truth became clearer. Either six of them genuinely knew nothing, or they were each protecting all the others, because none of them had anything to say to him that shed any light upon who had left the sweatbox in order to kill Kelly. To be honest, officer,’ Jazz told Coleridge, ‘I could not have told you what was up and what was down inside that box, let alone where the exit was. It was totally dark, man. I mean totally. That was the point of it. We’d been in there two hours, and we were just so pissed, I mean, completely—’

  ‘How did you know it was two hours?’ Coleridge interrupted.

  ‘I didn’t know, I heard since. Man, I would not have known if it was two hours, two minutes or two years. We was out to it, floating, zombied, brain-fucked to the double-max degree, and we was getting it on! I was getting it on! Do you understand? Four weeks without so much as a touch of a woman, and suddenly I was getting it on. Believe me, man, I wasn’t thinking about where no exit was. I was happy where I was.’ This was the common theme of the majority of the interviews. Each of them had been utterly disoriented inside that box, losing all concept of space and time, and contentedly so, for they had been enjoying themselves.

  ‘It was so fookin’ hot in there, inspector,’ Moon assured him, ‘and dark, and we were drunk. It was like floating in space or summat.’

  ‘Did you notice anybody leave?’

  ‘Maybe Kelly?’

  ‘Maybe?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t even know where the entrance was by then. At the end of the day, I don’t think anybody knew fook all about anything, to be quite honest. But I did feel a girl suddenly moving, like, amongst us all…and quite quickly, which was a bit of a surprise because we were all so chilled.’

  ‘You were chilled?’ Coleridge thought he must have misheard. He wanted things to be clear for the tape.

  ‘The witness means relaxed, sir,’ Hooper interjected.

  ‘Whatever the witness means, sergeant,’ Coleridge snapped, ‘she can mean it without your leading her to it. What did you mean, miss?’

  ‘I meant relaxed.’

  ‘Thank you. Please continue.’

  ‘Well, I think that maybe after I felt the girl move there was like a little waft of cooler air. I think maybe I realized that somebody was going for a piss or whatever, but quite frankly, at the end of the day, I weren’t that bothered. I mean I were giving somebody — I think it were Gazzer — a blow-job at the time.’ Interview after interview told the same story: varying degrees of sexual activity plus the idea that someone, probably a girl, had scrambled over them shortly before the game was brought to an abrupt halt. They each remembered this moment because it had rather jarred the ‘chilled’ atmosphere that had developed, ‘And this movement happened quite suddenly?’ Coleridge asked each of them. They all agreed that it had, that there had been a sudden flurry of limbs and soft warm skin, followed by the faintest waft of cooler air. With hindsight it was clear that this must have been Kelly rushing off to the lavatory.

  ‘Could anybody have sneaked off after her?’ Coleridge asked them. Yes, was the reply, they all felt strongly that in the cramped, crowded darkness and confusion of it all, it would have been possible for a second person to follow Kelly out of the sweatbox unnoticed.

  ‘But you yourself were unaware of it.’

  ‘Inspector,’ said Gazzer, and he might have been speaking for them all, ‘I wasn’t aware of anything.’ Sally’s were the only recollections that differed substantially from the norm. When she appeared Coleridge had been taken aback. He had never seen a woman whose arms were completely covered in tattoos before and he knew that he would have to try not to let it prejudice his view of her.

  ‘So you were not involved in the sexual activity?’ Coleridge asked.

  ‘No. I decided to try and use the exercise to improve my understanding of other cultures,’ Sally replied.

  ‘I found a corner of the box, ignored what the others were doing and concentrated on recreating the consciousness of a Native American fighting woman.’ Coleridge could not stop himself from reflecting that to the best of his knowledge all the Native American fighting had been done by men, but he decided to let it go.

  ‘You didn’t want to join in the, um, fun?’ He asked.

  ‘No, I’m a dyke, and all the other women who were in that box are straight, or at least they think they are. Besides, I had to concentrate on something other than them, you see. I had to concentrated ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t like dark, confined spaces. I don’t like getting into black boxes.’

  ‘Really? Is this something you have much experience of?’

  ‘Not for real, no. But in my head I imagine it all the time.’ Coleridge noted that the cigarette Sally held in her hand was shaking. The column of smoke rising above it was jagged. Like the edge of a rough saw.

  ‘Why do you imagine dark boxes?’

  ‘To test myself. To see what happens to me when I go there.’

  ‘So
on being confronted by a real physical black box, you decided to use it as a test of your mental strength.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘And did you pass the test?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t remember anything about what happened in that box. It just totally weirded me out and so I went somewhere else in my head.’ And press her though he might, Coleridge could get nothing more out of Sally.

  ‘I’m not holding out on you,’ she protested, ‘I swear. I liked Kelly. I’d tell you if I knew something, but I don’t remember anything at all. I don’t even remember being there.’

  ‘Thank you, that’ll be all for now,’ Coleridge said. As Sally was leaving she turned at the door.

  ‘One thing, though. Anything Moon tells you is a lie, all right? That woman wouldn’t know the truth if it stuck a knife in her head.’ Then she left the room.

  ‘Do you think she was trying to tell us Moon did it?’ Hooper said.

  ‘I have no idea,’ Coleridge replied. Both David and Hamish struck Coleridge as evasive. Their statements were much the same as Carry’s, Jason’s and Moon’s had been, but they seemed less frank, more guarded.

  ‘I couldn’t tell you where Kelly was in the box,’ said Hamish.

  ‘I know I was feeling up one of the girls, but to be honest I couldn’t tell you which.’ Something about his manner struck Coleridge as jarring. Later on, when discussing it with Hooper, the sergeant admitted that he had felt the same way. They had both interviewed enough liars to be able to spot the signs. The defensive body language, the folded arms and squared shoulders, the body pushed right back in the seat as if preparing for attack from any side. Hamish was probably lying, they thought, but whether it was a big lie or a little one they could not tell.

  ‘You’re a doctor, it says here,’ Coleridge observed.

  ‘I am,’ said Hamish.

  ‘I would have thought that a doctor might have been a little more aware. After all, there were only four women in that darkness. You’d known them all for a month. Are you seriously telling me that you were groping one of them and had no idea which?’

  ‘I was very drunk.’