Dead famous

by Ben Elton

  ‘Nobody out here thinks you did it.’ Three separate pairs of eyes watched as the words were slowly spelled out: ‘But you’re number one now. The people love you…And so do I.’ Coleridge was an accomplished watcher of faces, and he knew Dervla’s well from many hours of study. As he looked he saw clearly the distaste that flickered across her face.

  ‘La de da,’ she said, with a shrug of indifference, and began to brush her teeth. Coleridge could sense Carlisle’s tension as the cameraman fumbled to lock focus on his machine and get sight of Dervla through his own little camcorder. Clearly Carlisle coveted every image of his secret love, and once more he pushed his little lens as close to the glass as he dared without tapping it. First he stole himself a close-up of the dark tuft of hair in Dervla’s armpit, revealed to him because her arm was raised to brush her teeth. Then he panned across a little in order to capture the faint jiggling of her breasts beneath the towel caused by the movement of her arm. Finally, with the practised timing brought by experience, he swung his sights upwards just in time to capture the unwitting girl spitting the toothpaste from between her lips. Coleridge could hear the tiny motor of the camcorder hum as Carlisle zoomed into extreme close-up on Dervla’s wet, white, foaming mouth. When she had finished, Dervla went out of the bathroom and back to the girls’ bedroom. The house was silent once more. All of the inmates were in the two bedrooms on the opposite side of the house from Soapy corridor. Coleridge pressed the button on the little communicator that the Peeping Tom sound department had given him, which alerted Geraldine in the control room to the fact that he had seen enough. A moment or two later Carlisle left his camera, having been recalled by Geraldine under some professional pretext, as she had promised to do. Coleridge followed Carlisle out as he left the corridor. Once outside, blinking in the striplight of the communication tunnel that linked the house with the control complex, Coleridge laid his hand on Carlisle’s collar in time-honoured fashion, and asked him to accompany him to the station.

  DAY FORTY-FIVE. 12.00 noon

  Oh my God, I think I’m going to be sick. I really do think I’m going to be sick.’ Coleridge was showing Dervla some of the contents of the camcorder that he had taken from Larry Carlisle. Stacked up beside the VCR were seventeen similar mini-cassettes, retrieved by the police from Carlisle’s home.

  ‘You seem to have become something of an addiction for this man,’ Coleridge said.

  ‘Viewing his tape collection, it looks like he simply could not get enough of you.’

  ‘Please don’t. It’s horrible, horrible.’ There was so much of it. Hours and hours of tape. Close-ups of Dervla’s lips when she talked, when she ate, her eyes, her ears, her fingers, but most of all, of course, her body. Carlisle had recorded virtually every single moment that she had spent in the bathroom from day three onwards, becoming ever more practised at gaining close-ups of any intimate area that had been carelessly revealed to him. Often in the shower the weight of the water had pulled at Dervla’s sodden knickers, revealing the top of her pubic hair and, when she turned round, an inch or so of the cleft of her bottom. Carlisle had clearly lived for these moments, and he zoomed in to extreme close-up whenever the opportunity arose.

  ‘I can’t believe I’ve been so stupid,’ Dervla said, her voice choking with disgust and embarrassment.

  ‘Of course, I should have guessed why he was being so encouraging towards me, but I had no idea…I…’ Dervla, normally so strong, so self-assured, contemplated the creepily silent dislocated images of her own body on the screen, a body rarely viewed whole but broken up into intrusive, intimate close-ups, and she wept. The tears ran down her face as the soapy water on the screen ran down her stomach and her thighs.

  ‘Did you get messages in the mirror every day?’

  ‘Not every day, but most days.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘Oh, nothing very startling. ‘How are you?’ That kind of thing. ‘You’re doing great’.’

  ‘So he talked about the game.’

  ‘Well, not in any great detail. He was writing backwards in condensed steam, after all.’

  ‘Did he ever mention Kelly?’

  ‘No.’ It was a fool’s lie.

  ‘Actually, yes, I think he did mention her,’ Dervla said quickly.

  ‘Yes or no. Miss Nolan?’

  ‘I just said yes, didn’t I? Sometimes…a little…he mentioned them all.’ Half a lie. Was that any better? Or worse? ‘I don’t know why he sent me messages,’ she added.

  ‘I never asked him to.’

  ‘He’s in love with you. Miss Nolan.’

  ‘Please don’t say that.’

  ‘He loves you, Dervla, and that is something that you are going to have to deal with, because I doubt that what he has done is going to get him any kind of prison sentence. When you come out of the house he’ll be waiting for you.’

  ‘You really think so?’

  ‘That’s my experience of obsessives. They can’t just turn it off. You see, he thinks you love him back. After all, you’ve been flirting with him for weeks.’

  ‘I haven’t…’ But even as she said it Dervla knew that denial was pointless.

  ‘I…just sort of fell into it,’ she continued.

  ‘It was a laugh, a game. It’s so boring in that house. The same dull stupid people that you can’t even really get to like because you’re in competition with them. You’ve no idea…And then there was this jokey thing going on, just for me. I had a secret friend on the outside who wished me luck and told me I was doing all right. You can’t imagine how weird and insecure it is in that house, how vulnerable you feel. It was nice to have a secret friend.’ Dervla looked at the screen on which Larry Carlisle’s tape was still playing. She was in the shower again, her hand inside the cups of her sodden bra, soaping her breasts, the shape of her nipples clearly visible.

  ‘Can we turn that off, please?’

  ‘I want you to see this next bit.’ The image on the screen flickered and changed to the girls’ bedroom. It was night and all the girls appeared to be asleep.

  ‘My God, he had a nightsight on his camcorder!’ Dervla gasped.

  ‘I’m afraid to say, my dear, that this man did not miss anything.’ On the screen Dervla was lying in bed. It had clearly been a hot night, as she was covered by only a single sheet. She was asleep, or so it seemed until her eyes opened for a moment and flickered about the room. Now the camera panned down from her face to her body. It was possible to make out Dervla’s hand gently moving beneath the sheet, moving downwards to below her waist, the outline of her knuckles standing out against the cotton as her fingers moved gently beneath it. The camera returned to focus once more on Dervla’s face: her eyes were closed but her mouth was open. She was sighing with pleasure. Sitting in Coleridge’s office, Dervla turned deep crimson with angry embarrassment.

  ‘Please!’ She snapped.

  ‘This isn’t fair.’ Coleridge switched off the tape.

  ‘I wanted you to see and to know just how little respect this man has had for you. You and he have been partners of sorts. You are partners no longer.’ Dervla felt scared.

  ‘Surely, inspector, you can’t really be thinking that there’s any connection between this silly lark and…And…Kelly’s death?’ Coleridge waited for a moment before replying.

  ‘You said his messages mentioned Kelly?’

  ‘Well, yes, they did but…’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘They said…They said that people liked her and that they liked me. They liked us both.’

  ‘I see. And did he ever tell you who they liked more? Your ranking, so to speak.’ Dervla looked the chief inspector in the eye.

  ‘No. Not specifically.’

  ‘So you did not know that prior to Kelly’s death you were in second place after her.’

  ‘No, I did not.’

  ‘Just remind me once more. Miss Nolan. How much is the prize worth for the winner of this game?’

  ‘Wel
l, it’s gone up since, but at the time of the murder it was half a million pounds, chief inspector.’

  ‘How are things at your parents’ farm in Ballymagoon?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I believe your parents are in danger of losing their farm and family home. I was wondering how all that was going. How they were taking it, so to speak.’ Dervla’s face turned cold and hard.

  ‘I don’t know of late, inspector. I’ve been inside the house. But I imagine they’ll survive. We’re tough people in our family.’

  ‘Thank you. That will be all, Miss Nolan,’ Coleridge said.

  ‘For the moment.’

  DAY FORTY-FIVE. 1.30 p.m.

  At first Geraldine had not wanted Dervla back in the house.

  ‘Fuck her, the cheating little cow. I’ll teach her for cock-teasing my cameramen and giving the show a bad name.’ Geraldine was angry and embarrassed that such a thing could have been going on under her nose without her having any idea about it. Her professional pride was deeply wounded, and she wanted to have her revenge on Dervla, of whom she was jealous anyway. Soon, however, wiser counsel prevailed. To eject Dervla would almost certainly mean admitting the reason for it, which would only compound Geraldine’s embarrassment. Dervla was now the most popular and most fancied housemate, added to which was the fact that she had been removed by the police for further questioning, which massively increased her fascination. Her photograph was all over the morning’s papers, looking pale and beautiful as she was led from the house. The press had been forced to rethink their conviction that Sally was the killer, ^K(^ and their banner headlines read ‘police detain Dervla’, ‘Dervla arrested’. Soon she would be all over the evening news with reporters standing outside the house breathlessly announcing that the police had failed to lay charges against her. This was exactly the kind of incident that Geraldine needed to keep the whole story at the top of the nation’s, and indeed the world’s, agenda. All in all, Dervla was too important to the show to let go.

  ‘It’ll mean keeping that disgusting pervert Carlisle,’ Geraldine complained.

  ‘If we sack him but leave her alone the cunt will blackmail us. At least I know I would.’

  DAY TWENTY. 12.40 p.m.

  William Wooster, or Woggle as he was more generally known, was released on bail of £5000, which was stood by his parents. The police had appealed against bail being granted on the grounds that Woggle, being a member of the itinerant, alternative community and a known tunneller, might easily abscond. The judge took one look at Dr and Mrs Wooster, him in tweeds, her in pearls, and decided that it would be an insult to two such obvious pillars of the community to deny them the company of their wayward son. Woggle absconded within two hundred metres of the court. After his brief appearance before the majesty of the law he and his parents had fought their way through the crowd of reporters who were waiting outside the courtroom, got into the waiting minicab and had driven off together. That, however, was as far as Woggle was prepared to go in this return to family life. Woggle waited for the first red traffic light and, when the cab pulled up to stop, simply got out and ran. His parents let him go. They had been through this so many times before and were just too old for the chase. They sat together in the car, contemplating the fact that the company of their son had this time cost them over £1000 a minute.

  ‘Next time we won’t do this,’ said Woggle’s dad. Woggle ran for about a mile or so, dodging this way and that, fondly imagining that his dear old father was tearing after him waving his umbrella. When he finally believed himself safe, he decided to stop in a pub for a pint and a pickled egg. It was here that he was forced for the first time to come to terms with the extent of the blow that Peeping Tom had dealt him. For it was not just the police and the press who knew him now. Everybody knew him, and they did not like him, not one little bit. A group of men surrounded him at the bar as he waited to be served.

  ‘You’re that cunt, aren’t you?’ Said the nastiest looking of the gang.

  ‘If you mean am I beautiful, warm, welcoming and hairy, yes, then you could say I was a cunt.’ It was a piece of bravado that Woggle had cause to regret as the man instantly decked him.

  ‘I offer up the hand of peace,’ Woggle said from the floor. The man took it and dragged him outside by it, where the. Whole gang comprehensively beat Woggle up.

  ‘Not so easy when you ain’t kicking little girls, is it?’ Said the thugs, as if by attacking him with odds at six to one they were ; doing something brave. They left him lying in the proverbial pool of blood with broken teeth filling his mouth and hatred filling his soul. Hatred not for the thugs, who as an anarchist he considered merely unenlightened comrades, but for Peeping Tom Productions.

  He skulked away from the pub, dressed his wounds as best he could in a nearby public toilet and then went underground.! Literally. He returned to the tunnels whence he had come. There better to nurse his colossal sense of grievance. To dig it deeper into his angry heart with every stone and ounce of earth that he moved. They had brought him low. All of them. The people on the inside of the house and the ones across the moat in the bunker. Dig, dig, dig. Geraldine Hennessy. That witch. He had thought that he could I trust her, but he had been mad. Dig, dig, dig. You could not trust anyone. Not straights, not muggles, not fascist television people, and certainly not those bastards in the house. Particularly the ones who had pretended to be his friend. He hated them most. Not Dervla, of course, not the Celtic Queen of the Runes and Rhymes. Dervla was all right, she was a beautiful summer pixie. Woggle had seen the tapes and she had not nominated him. But the other one, the one who had made the tofu and molasses comfort cake! What a hypocritical slag that bitch had been! He’d eaten it, too. Late at night when she wasn’t looking. Well, he’d show her. Dig, dig, dig. He hadn’t wanted to kick that girl. She’d come at him with her dogs and now the whole country loathed him and he was facing a prison sentence. Woggle was scared of prison. He knew that the people in prisons were even straighter than the ones on the outside. They didn’t like people like Woggle. Especially people like Woggle who kicked fifteen-year-old girls. That was why he had gone back underground. To hide and to plan. Woggle decided as he scraped away at the earth that if he was going down, he was not going down alone. He would have his revenge on them all. Dig, dig, dig.

  DAY FORTY-FIVE. 3.00 p.m.

  Trisha and Hooper checked the lab report for the final time, took deep breaths, and walked into Coleridge’s office. The police had had the two-way mirror glass through which Carlisle had been sending his messages to Dervla removed and sent to the forensic lab for analysis. The conclusions had come back within a few hours, and it seemed to Trisha and Hooper that they rather changed everything.

  ‘We think this builds a pretty strong case against the cameraman, Larry Carlisle, sir.’ Coleridge looked up from the notes he had been reading.

  ‘Look at this.’ Hooper produced the summary of the evidence found by the forensic technicians.

  ‘Carlisle wrote his messages with his instant heat pack, but he also traced them with his finger. The heat from the pack warmed the condensation on the other side.’

  ‘I know that, sergeant. I told you.’

  ‘Well, because Dervla wiped away the steam on her side it looked as if the messages were gone for ever. But the residue his finger left on the glass on his side remained. There are stains, sir. Stains and smears.’

  ‘Stains and smears?’

  ‘Semen, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Ye gods.’

  ‘I’ve spoken to Carlisle. He admits that he regularly masturbated during his duty shifts. He claims they all did.’

  ‘Oh no, surely not!’ Coleridge protested.

  ‘Carlisle seemed to think it was hardly surprising, sir. As he said, once Geraldine cut the shifts down to one man, the operator was all alone in a darkened corridor for eight hours, covered in a big blanket. They’re all men and they’re staring at beautiful young women undressing and taking showers.’ Ho
oper almost added, ‘What would you do?’ But he valued his job and restrained himself.

  ‘Carlisle says they sometimes called the corridors the peep booths,’ Trisha added. Coleridge stared out of the window for a moment. Three years. That was all he had left, then he could retire and go away for ever and listen to music and reread Dickens and tend the garden with his wife, give more time to amateur dramatics and never have to consider a world of secretly masturbating cameramen ever again.

  ‘You’re saying he wrote his messages in semen?’

  ‘Well, there weren’t puddles of it. I think it was more a case of traces of the stuff being left on his fingers.’ Trisha noticed that during this part of the conversation Coleridge addressed himself exclusively to Hooper. He absolutely did not look at her. Coleridge was a man who still believed that there were some things which were better off not discussed in mixed company. Not for the first time Trisha found herself wondering how it was that Coleridge ever came to be a police officer at all. But on the other hand, he was incorruptible, believed passionately in the rule of law and was acknowledged as a superb detective, so perhaps it was not necessary that he also live in the same century as everybody else.

  ‘All right,’ Coleridge said angrily.

  ‘What did the lab say?’

  ‘Well, sir, it’s all pretty jumbled up and overlaid, but when dusted, four messages can be made out and some of others are partly there. They all give Dervla the current popularity score. Two of the clear ones are pre Woggle’s eviction and put Dervla in third place behind him and Kelly, then with Woggle gone the two girls both move up one. Dervla knew the score from the start. Carlisle told her.’

  ‘But she denied it when we asked her. What a foolish young woman.’

  ‘Well, she could obviously see that her knowing her position relative to Kelly would give her a motive for murder. Half a million pounds is a lot of money, particularly if your mum and dad are broke.’