Dead famous

by Ben Elton

  ‘I’m afraid that we cannot show you the footage of Sally’s final, brilliant, heartfelt, totally honest and spiritual visit to the confession box, because apparently suicide is a crime and our legal people are worried that some authoritarian government office or other might attack us for showing you the truth. Right! I mean how fascist is that? Apparently you’re not grown up enough to see what’s actually going on in this world, which is so all about mind control and Brave New 1984-type stuff, which is not what Sally wanted at all!’ It was not a vintage performance, but Chloe’s autocue had been hastily assembled. The message was clear enough. Any attempt to stop Peeping Tom from exploiting the anguish of a deeply dis turbed young woman was an outrageous infringement of the civil liberties of the viewer. Chloe was able to show the public the footage of Jazz’s heroic and dramatic entrance into the confession box, when he managed to grab Sally’s hand and wrest the knife from her grasp. After that she introduced a compilation of footage of Sally’s brilliant weeks in the house. Peeping Tom would of course have liked to cut live to the house to show the reactions of the other housemates to Sally’s horrify- I ing act, but sadly they couldn’t, because Geraldine was currently $ in the house conducting a crisis negotiation with the remaining J inmates. Trying to persuade them to carry on with the show. ] ‘We can’t, we just can’t,’ Dervla was saying.

  ‘Not now. People will think we’re absolute ghouls.’

  Even as the Peeping Tom nurse had been rushing along the corridor under the moat in order to help Sally, the other inmates had been clamouring to leave. This would be financially y disastrous for Peeping Tom, of course, particularly after such a I dramatic crowd-pleaser as Sally’s attempted suicide. They stood ; to lose tens, possibly hundreds of millions of pounds.

  ‘You’re wrong, Dervla, you’re wrong,’ Geraldine said.

  ‘They love you out there, they admire your courage, they respect you, and if you have the guts to see this through they’ll respect you even more. Nobody thinks any of you five killed Kelly, they all think it was Sally, and it probably was. She just about confessed to it before she stabbed herself. In a way that’s kind of an end to the whole murder thing, isn’t it? Now all you lot have to do is sit out the rest of the game.’

  ‘No way,’ said Dervla.

  ‘I want out.’ The too,’said Jazz, still shaking violently from his encounter with Sally. The others agreed. They had had enough. In the end Geraldine offered the inducement that she had been expecting to have to use much earlier.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’m doing pretty well out of all this, I won’t deny it. There’s no reason why you lot shouldn’t profit too. How about this? The prize is currently half a million. What if we double it and guarantee the other four a lump too…Let’s say a hundred grand for the next one out, two hundred for the one after that, three hundred for whoever comes third, and four hund…No, half a mill for the runner-up? How about that? Not bad moolah for sitting on your arses for another few weeks, eh? If you agree now, the minimum all of you will make is a hundred grand.’ This offer pretty much clinched it, the prospect of being rich and famous being enough inducement for anyone.

  ‘Just one extra thing,’ said Dervla.

  ‘If the police make an arrest on the outside — you know, David or whoever — you have to tell us, OK? We can’t be the only people in the country who don’t know.’

  ‘Fine, whatever, I promise, absolutely,’ said Geraldine, thinking to herself that she would have to give that one some thought.

  DAY FORTY-THREE. 9.00 a.m.

  The morning after Sally’s attempted suicide Coleridge was forced for the first time to allow a public statement to be issued, something which he believed to be no part of the police’s responsibilities. But Sally was out of danger, and the world press wanted to know whether the police intended to arrest her.

  ‘No,’ Coleridge said, reading laboriously from prepared notes, ‘there are no plans to arrest Miss Sally Copple for the murder of Miss Kelly Simpson, for the obvious reason that there is absolutely no evidence against her. Her own statements regarding a hereditary disposition towards murder and the fear that she might have done it while in a trance do not constitute grounds for an arrest. The investigation continues. Thank you and good day.’ After he had retreated into the building. Hooper and Trisha joined him.

  ‘So what do you think, then, sir?’ Hooper asked.

  ‘I mean, I know we have no proof, but do you think Sally did it?’

  ‘I don’t,’ Trisha said quickly, causing both Hooper and Coleridge to look at her curiously.

  ‘I don’t think she did it either, Patricia,’ said Coleridge.

  ‘And I don’t think she did not do it either.’ Coleridge was of course a show-off in his small way, and he enjoyed the confused looks that this little paradox engendered.

  ‘I know she did not do it,’ he said.

  ‘The killer is without doubt still in place.’

  DAY FORTY-THREE. 4.40 p.m.

  Dervla’s little secret finally began to unravel when Coleridge started to view Geraldine’s ‘bathroom tapes’, the hoarded compilation of flesh-revealing shots that she was saving for an X-rated Christmas video.

  ‘She just seems to love brushing her teeth,’ Coleridge observed. Geraldine had retained quite a lot of footage of Dervla’s dental hygiene routine, because this was the point of the day when quiet and reserved Dervla was at her most sexy and coquettish. Not just because she was either in her underwear or a wet T-shirt or a towel, having just had her shower, but also because standing at the mirror, particularly in the early weeks, she seemed so jolly and full of fun, smiling and winking at her reflection in the glass. It was almost as if she was flirting with herself.

  ‘She’s not like that when she does her teeth in the evening,’ Coleridge remarked.

  ‘Well, maybe she’s a morning type of person,’ said Hooper.

  ‘So what? She’s not the first girl to smile at her reflection.’ Coleridge flipped the switch on a second VCR machine, a rather complicated new one that he had only partly mastered. He had been able to convince the bureaucrats who administered his budget that the nature of the evidence he had at his disposal justified the hiring of a great deal of video and TV equipment. His only problem now was that it was so very complicated. Hooper could work it all, of course, and made no secret of displaying his superiority.

  ‘What I could to for you, sir, is upload the tapes from the VCR onto digital format in my camcorder, bung it across a flywire into the new iBook they gave us, chop up the relevant bits and crunch it down via the movie-making software, export it to a Jpeg file and email it straight to you. You could watch it on your mobile phone when you’re stuck at traffic lights if we get you a WAR’ Coleridge had only just learned how to use the text message service on his phone.

  ‘I do not have my phone on when I am in my car, sergeant. And I hope that you don’t either. You’ll be aware, of course, that using one when driving is illegal.’

  ‘Yes, sir, absolutely.’ They returned to the job in hand. Coleridge had lined up a moment of tape from a discussion that the group had had on day three about nominations.

  ‘I’m at my most vulnerable to nomination in the mornings,’ Dervla was saying, ‘because that’s when I’m going to snap at people and hurt their feelings. I’m crap at mornings, I just don’t want to talk to anyone.’ Coleridge turned off his second machine and returned to the tape showing Dervla brushing her teeth.

  ‘She may not like talking to anyone,’ Coleridge observed, ‘but she certainly likes talking to herself.’ On screen Dervla winked again into the mirror and said, ‘Hallo, mirror, top of the morning to you.’

  ‘Now watch her eyes,’ Coleridge said, still staring intently at the scene. Sure enough, on the screen Dervla’s sparkling green eyes flicked downwards and remained on what must have been the reflection of her belly button for perhaps thirty seconds.

  ‘Maybe she’s contemplating her navel, sir. It’s a very cute o
ne.’

  ‘I’m not interested in observations of that kind, sergeant.’ Now Dervla’s eyes came up again, smiling, happy eyes.

  ‘Oh, I love these people!’ She laughed.

  ‘This tape is from day twelve, the morning after the first round of nominations,’ Coleridge said.

  ‘You’ll recall that nobody nominated Dervla, although, of course, she’s not supposed to have any idea about that.’ Hooper wondered whether Coleridge was onto something. Everybody knew that Dervla was in the habit of laughing and talking to herself before the bathroom mirror. It had always been seen as rather an attractive, fun habit. Could there be more to it than that? ‘Look, I’ve had some of the technical boffins make up a tooth- brushing compilation,’ said Coleridge. Hooper smiled. Only Coleridge thought you needed ‘boffins’ to edit a video compilation. He himself made little home movies on his PowerBook all the time. Coleridge put in his compilation tape and together they watched as time and again Dervla dropped cryptic little comments at her reflection in the mirror before brushing her teeth.

  ‘Oh God, I wonder how they see me out there,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t kid yourself, Dervla girl, they’ll all love Kelly, she’s a lovely girl.’ Coleridge switched off the video.

  ‘What were Dervla’s chances of winning the game at the point when Kelly was killed?’

  ‘The running popularity poll on the Internet had her at number two,’ Hooper replied, ‘as did the bookies, but it was pretty irrelevant, because Kelly was number one by miles.’

  ‘So Kelly was Dervla’s principal rival in terms of public popularity?’

  ‘Yes, but of course she couldn’t have known that. Or at least she’s certainly not supposed to.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ Once more Coleridge pressed play on the video machine that held his toothbrushing compilation.

  ‘I wonder who the public loves most?’ Dervla mused archly to herself. Moments later her eyes flicked downwards.

  DAY FORTY-FOUR. 12.00 p.m.

  Coleridge picked up the phone. It was Hooper, calling from the Peeping Tom production office. He sounded pleased.

  ‘I’ve got the duty log here, sir. You remember Larry Carlisle?’

  ‘Yes, the operator who was working in the camera runs on the night of the murder?’

  ‘That’s the one. Well, he’s been a busy boy, seems to have taken advantage of the fact that a number of people stopped working on the show out of boredom. He’s done twice as many shifts as anyone else, often eight hours on, eight hours off. Loves the show, can’t seem to get enough of it. And, what’s more, he’s covered the bathroom on almost every morning so far. If Dervla’s chatting through the mirror to anyone, she’s chatting to Larry Carlisle.’

  ‘The operator who was working on the night of the murder,’ Coleridge repeated.

  DAY FORTY-FIVE. 7.58 a.m.

  Coleridge had been in the dark hot corridor for only a few minutes and already he loathed it. He felt like a pervert, it was disgusting. The east-west camera run of the Peeping Tom house was known as ‘Soapy’ to the teams who serviced it, on account of the fact that part of the run covered the mirrored shower wall and the mirrors above the basins, which often became splashed with suds and foam. The north-south run was known as ‘Dry’. Soapy and Dry had smooth, highly polished black floors, and were entirely cloaked in thick black blankets. Any light came from inside the house and shone through the long line of two-way mirrors that ran along the inside wall of the corridor. The camera operators were covered completely in black blankets and slid about silently like great coal-dark ghosts. Coleridge had already seen Jazz walk out of the boys’ bedroom and across the living space to use the toilet. That same toilet that had been Kelly’s last port of call upon this earth. The only part of the house that was not visible through the two-way mirrors. Coleridge gritted his teeth as he was forced to listen to what seemed to him to be the longest urination in history. Coleridge could find no words to describe the horror and contempt he felt for the whole tawdry business. Was there ever a better example of humankind’s utter lack of nobility and grace? Here, where with such care, such immense ingenuity, such untold resources, the comings and goings of a communal bathroom were recorded for posterity. It was eight o’clock and time for a change of shift in Soapy corridor. Coleridge heard the faintest swish as a heavily padded door was opened and Larry Carlisle crept in, dressed from head to foot in black. He even wore a ski mask, which further increased the grim and chilling atmosphere of the corridor. Without a word Carlisle disappeared under the blanket that covered the camera and its dolly while the previous operator emerged from the other side and crept away. Coleridge slunk back into the darkness, drawing his black cowled cassock close about him. Carlisle had not been informed of Coleridge’s presence, and imagined himself alone in the corridor as usual. At the other end of the house Dervla emerged from the girls’ bedroom and wandered into the living area. She entered the bathroom and approached the shower, where she took off her shirt to reveal her usual shower attire of cropped vest and knickers. Coleridge turned away, a natural instinct for him in the circumstances. There was a lady in a state of undress and he had no business looking at her. Carlisle also followed his natural instincts, those of a reality TV cameraman, in that he slid along the darkened corridor to get as close as he could to the flesh. Dervla stepped into the shower and began to wash herself, her hands running all over her body with soap. Coleridge forced himself to look again. It was not that he found the sight of Dervla soaping her near-naked body unattractive; quite the opposite. Coleridge bowed to no man in his appreciation of the female form, and Dervla’s in particular with its youthful, athletic grace was just his type. It was because he was attracted that Coleridge wanted to look away. He was a deeply Christian man; he believed in God and he knew that God would be extremely unimpressed if Coleridge started getting hot and bothered while looking at unsuspecting young women in their underwear. Particularly when he was on duty. Coleridge, that is, not God. God, in Coleridge’s opinion, was always on duty. Making absolutely certain in his own mind that his mind was on the job and nothing else, Coleridge turned back from the darkened wall and looked once more on the girl showering herself and the black-cloaked cameraman recording it. Then he saw something that almost made him cry out. It was as much as he could do to stop himself from leaping forward and arresting the dirty little swine there and then. Carlisle had a second camera. The man had emerged from beneath the thick black cape, having left his professional camera locked in position on its dolly, covering the young woman in the shower in a wide shot. Now he was using a small, palm-held digital camcorder, and was clearly making his own private video. Coleridge watched in furious disgust as Carlisle placed his little lens within millimetres of the soapy glass, clearly desperate to get as close to the unsuspecting woman as possible. Shamelessly he explored Dervla’s body, zooming in on her navel, her cleavage, the faint darkened outline of her nipples showing through the material of her top. Then Carlisle crouched down to the level of Dervla’s groin and began recording a long continuous close-up of her crutch area. Dervla’s legs were slightly apart, the knickers thin and lacy. There was the faintest hint of soft wet hair escaping onto the uppermost part of her thighs. Water cascaded from her gusset in a sparking stream. When Dervla had finished showering she turned off the taps, knotted a towel across her breasts, removed her sodden undergarments from beneath it and crossed to the basin to brush her teeth. Carlisle quickly turned off his personal camera and disappeared back under the black cape in order to push his professional camera over to cover the two-way mirror above the basin. Beyond the mirror Dervla looked briefly at her own reflection and shook her head. Coleridge had never been behind a two-way mirror before, and ; it was almost possible to believe that the girl was shaking her head not at herself but at the camera lens that hovered immediately in front of her nose. She did not speak, but she sang a snatch of an old Rod Stewart song, her voice faint beyond the glass but audible.

  ‘I d
on’t wanna talk about it,’ she sang. And then: ‘Hey, boy, don’t bother me.’ After that she was silent and avoided engaging directly with her reflection. Now Coleridge saw Carlisle’s hand reach out beyond the front of his camera. He was holding something — a small white pouch I; which he took by a corner and shook. There was a tiny rattling sound in the deathly silence of the dark tunnel, and Coleridge ; realized with surprise what the pouch was: he had shaken one like it himself only a few weeks before during a hill walk in Snowdonia. It was a walker’s instant heat pack, an envelope full of chemicals and iron filings designed to produce a great heat in moments of need. He watched, amazed, as Carlisle crunched the pouch in his fist to form a blunt point, and began to trace letters on the glass. Clearly the heat was intended to warm the condensation on the other side. Carlisle wrote slowly, partly no doubt in order to give the heat time to conduct through the glass, but also, it seemed to Coleridge, because Carlisle was enjoying himself. His forefinger was gently stroking the glass, following the line traced by the heat pack, almost as if, by touching the two-way mirror, Carlisle felt he was in some way touching Dervla. Coleridge strained to see what Carlisle was writing. The letters were inscribed backwards, of course, but they were not difficult to follow. On the other side of the glass Dervla was watching too, her eyes darting downwards as the message appeared.

  ‘Don’t worry. People still care about you,’ emerged though the condensation. Dervla’s expression did not change. She kept her eyes fixed on the letters. Behind the glass in the dark corridor, unaware that he was being observed by a police inspector, Carlisle stretched out his arm and wrote a few more words.