Dead famous

by Ben Elton

  DAY FORTY-NINE. 10.00 a.m.

  It was eviction day, but many long hours would have to pass before the excitement of the evening. As usual the Peeping Tom production team had been racking their brains trying to think of things for the housemates to do. It wasn’t that interest in the show was waning, far from it. House Arrest remained the single most watched show on the planet. Geraldine had just brokered a worldwide distribution deal for the following week’s footage of US$45 million. It was more a matter of professional pride. Peeping Tom knew that it was running a freak show, but, freak show or not, it was still a television programme and they were responsible for it. The general feeling at the production meetings was that some artistic effort was required, if only for form’s sake. The week’s task had been a success. Geraldine had challenged the housemates to create sculptures of each other, and this inspired thought, with all its possibilities for psychological analysis, had provoked an incident of genuine spontaneous drama. An incident that once more confounded the sceptics who thought that House Arrest had run out of shocks. The trouble started when Dervla returned from her second visit to the police station. She was tired and upset after her grilling from Coleridge. Then there had been all the gawpers and reporters outside the house, screaming at her, asking if she had killed Kelly, and if it had been a sex thing. And finally there had been the looks of doubt and suspicion on the faces of her fellow housemates when she re-entered the house. Even Jazz looked worried. All in all, she was in no mood for jokes, so when she noticed that Garry had placed a kitchen knife in the hand of his half- finished representation of her, she flipped.

  ‘You bastard!’ Dervla screamed, white with fury.

  ‘You utter, utter bastard.’

  ‘It was a fahking joke, girl!’ Said Garry, laughing.

  ‘Joke? Remember them? After all, you are the coppers’ favourite, love!’ At which point Dervla slapped him across the face with such force that Garry toppled backwards over the orange couch.

  ‘Fahk that!’ Said Garry, leaping up, tears of pain and anger in his eyes.

  ‘Nobody slaps the Gaz, not even a bird, all right? I intend to give your arse a right proper spanking, you nasty little Paddy bitch!’

  ‘Oi,’ said Jazz, and leaped forward with the intention of intervening, but this act of chivalry turned out to be unnecessary. Dervla did not need any help, for as Garry advanced upon her, fists clenched, intent upon mayhem, she spun round upon one foot and in a single smooth movement planted the other one firmly into Carry’s face. He fell to the ground instantly, blood gushing from his nose.

  ‘Blimey,’ said Geraldine in the monitoring bunker. Dervla had been practising kickboxing since she was eleven and was by now a master at it, but she never told anybody if she could help it. She had discovered early on that once people knew, it was all they ever wanted to talk about. People were always asking for demonstrations and asking earnest questions: ‘OK, say if three, no, four blokes, with baseball bats, jumped you from behind, could you take them out?’ On the whole Dervla had kept her special skill private. Now, however, the world knew and frankly she didn’t care. She realized that she had a score to settle, and that it had nothing to do with Garry. Suddenly weeks of pent-up fear and rage exploded within her. Dervla knew that lurking not ten feet from her was almost certainly the message-writer, Larry Carlisle, the agent of her recent distress. Ignoring Garry, who was crumpled up on the floor howling in pain, Dervla turned to face the mirrors on the wall.

  ‘And if you’re out there, Carlisle, you disgusting little pervert, that’s exactly what you’ll get if you come within a hundred miles of me when I get out of this house. You made the police suspect me, you bastard! So you just leave me alone or I’ll kick your fucking head off and pull your balls out through your neck!’

  ‘Wow,’ said Geraldine in the monitoring bunker.

  ‘Is he going to have some explaining to do when he gets home.’ Thus it was that the affair of the perving cameraman unexpectedly entered the public domain, giving Peeping Tom yet another day of high drama. Carlisle was sacked, of course, but Dervla, who should by rights have also been kicked off the show for conniving with him, was allowed to stay.

  ‘Dervla did not solicit these messages, nor did she welcome them,’ said Geraldine piously, which was complete rubbish, of course, but the press did not care because nobody wanted to remove Dervla from the mix, particularly now that she had suddenly become so interesting. Particularly after Geraldine broadcast a selection of Carlisle’s private footage of Dervla in the shower. All of that excitement, however, had been some days before, and the voracious public appetite for surprises now needed feeding again. The hours until eviction would have to be filled. Geraldine decided to dig out the predictions package.

  ‘Peeping Tom has instructed the housemates to open the ‘predictions’ package, which they had all been a part of preparing at the end of week one,’ said Andy the narrator.

  ‘The package has lain untouched at the back of the kitchen cupboard since the day it was produced.’

  ‘Uh’d fugodden all abah did,’ said Garry, who was still nursing a swollen nose. Garry had decided to accept his surprise beating at Dervla’s hands in good part and let it be known both to her and in the confession box that there were no hard feelings on his side.

  ‘At the end of the day,’ he said through his bloody sinuses, ‘if you get bopped you get bopped. No point crying about it. In fact, getting hit by a bird is good for me and has made me more of a feminist.’ Garry was not stupid. There was a big difference between the hundred grand that the next person out would get and the million that would go to the winner. He wanted to stay in the game while the money grew, and he guessed that sour grapes would not help his cause at all. Therefore, once the doctor had treated his nose, which had been neatly broken, he shook Dervla’s hand and said, ‘Fair play to you, girl,’ and the nation applauded him for it. Inside, of course, Garry was seething. To have been duffed up by a bird, a small bird, on live TV. It was his worst nightmare. He’d never be able to show his face down the pub again. Watching Carry’s efforts to make up with Dervla on the police computer. Hooper did not believe a word of it.

  ‘He hates her. She’s number one on our Carry’s hate list,’ he said.

  ‘The place that Kelly used to occupy,’ Trisha mused.

  ‘And Kelly, of course, got killed.’ They had all forgotten about the predictions envelope, and there was eager anticipation as Jazz solemnly opened it and they all dipped in. The whole thing reminded them of a happier, more innocent time in the house. Peeping Tom had supplied some wine and there was much laughter as all the wrong predictions made six weeks earlier were read out.

  ‘Woggle reckoned he’d be the only one left,’ said Jazz. Took me, Layla picked herself to win the whole thing!’ Laughed Moon.

  ‘Listen to David!’ Shrieked Dervla.

  ‘ ‘I believe that by week seven I will have emerged as a healing force within the group.’’

  ‘In your dreams, Dave!’ Jazz shouted. The laughter died somewhat when they came to Kelly’s prediction. Moon read it out, and it was a moment of pure pathos.

  ‘I think that all the others are great people. I love them all big time and I shall be made up if I am still around by week seven. My guess is I’ll be out on week three or four.’’ There was silence as they all realized how right Kelly had been.

  ‘What’s that one, then?’ Moon asked, pointing at a piece of paper that had not yet been read out. Hamish turned it over. It was written in the same blue pencil that Peeping Tom had provided to everybody but the handwriting was a scrawled mess, as if somebody had been writing without looking and also with their left hand. This, the police handwriting expert was later to confirm, was indeed how the message had been written.

  ‘What does it say?’ Asked Moon. Hamish read it out.

  ‘By the time you read this Kelly will be dead.’’ It took a moment for it to dawn on them just what had been said.

  ‘Oh, my took,’ sai
d Moon. Somebody had known for certain that Kelly would die. Somebody had actually written out the prediction. It was too horrible to imagine.

  ‘There’s more. Shall I read it?’ Hamish asked after a moment. They all nodded silently.

  ‘I shall kill her on the night of the twenty-seventh day.’’

  ‘Oh my God! He knew!’ Dervla gasped. Still Hamish had not finished. There was one final prediction in the note.

  ‘ ‘One of the final three will also die.’’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ Moon gasped.

  ‘No one’s touched that envelope in six fookin’ weeks. It could have been any of us wrote that.’

  DAY FORTY-NINE. 12.05 a.m.

  Woggle had taken to sleeping in his tunnel. He felt safe there. Safe from all the people who did not understand him. Safe to dig away at his hate. Planting it deeper with every blow of his pick. Watering it with his sweat. Occasionally at night he would emerge to get water and to steal food. But more and more he existed entirely underground. In his tunnel. The tunnel that he had dug to take his revenge. Dig, dig, dig. He would show them. He would show them all. One evening, when the time had nearly come for what he had to do, Woggle took his empty sack and crept from his tunnel once more, but this time his mission was not for food. This time he made his way to a squat in London where he had once lived, a squat occupied by anarchists even stranger and more stern in their resolve than he was. These anarchists Woggle knew had the wherewithal to make a bomb. When Woggle crept back to his tunnel just before the morning light the sack he carried was full.

  DAY FORTY-NINE. 7.30 p.m.

  Hamish was evicted in the usual manner, but nobody noticed very much. Try as Chloe might to drum up some interest in his departure, all anybody wanted to talk about was the sensational news that another murder was to take place. The whole world buzzed with the news that one of the final three would die.

  ‘It’s curious, isn’t it?’ Coleridge said, inspecting the ugly scrawled note that lay in Geraldine’s office in a plastic evidence bag.

  ‘It’s fucking chilling, if you ask me,’ said Geraldine.

  ‘I mean, how the hell would he have known he was going to be in a position to do Kelly on day twenty-seven? I hadn’t even had the idea for the sweatbox then. Besides, he might have been evicted by then. I mean, he couldn’t get back into the house, could he? And what about this stuff about killing one of the last three? I mean, nobody knows who the last three will be. It’s up to the public.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Coleridge.

  ‘It is all very strange, isn’t it? Do you think there’ll be another murder, Ms Hennessy?’

  ‘Well, I don’t really see how there can be…On the other hand, he was right about Kelly, wasn’t he? I mean, the predictions envelope was put in the cupboard at the end of week one. There’ve been cameras trained on that cupboard ever since. There is no way it could have been interfered with. Somehow the killer knew.’

  ‘It would certainly seem so.’ At that point Geraldine’s PA entered the office.

  ‘Two things,’ said the PA.

  ‘First, I don’t know how you did it, Geraldine, but you did. The Americans have agreed to your price of two million dollars a minute for the worldwide rights to the final show,the Financial Times are calling you a genius…’

  ‘And the second thing?’ Asked Geraldine.

  ‘Not such good news. Did you see Moon in the confession box? They want a million each, right now, up front, to stay in the house for another moment.’

  ‘Where’s my cheque book?’ Said Geraldine.

  ‘Isn’t that against the rules?’ Coleridge asked.

  ‘Chief inspector, this is a television show. The rules are whatever we want them to be.’

  ‘Oh yes, I was forgetting. I suppose that’s true.’

  ‘And this show,’ Geraldine crowed triumphantly, ‘goes right down to the wire.’

  DAY FIFTY-THREE. 6.00 p.m.

  Over the next few days the police did everything they could to gain some information from the note that had been found in the predictions envelope. They re-entered the house and took samples of everybody’s handwriting, both right and left. They fingerprinted the kitchen cupboard. They pored for hours over the surviving footage from week one when the predictions had been written.

  ‘Nothing. We’ve learnt nothing at all,’ said Hooper.

  ‘I didn’t expect that we would,’ Coleridge replied.

  ‘Oh well, that’s a comfort, sir,’ said Hooper as testily as he dared.

  ‘I just don’t see how it could have happened.’

  ‘And there,’ said Coleridge, ‘is the best clue you’re going to get. For it seems to me that it couldn’t have happened.’ Trisha had been on the phone. Now she put the receiver down with a gloomy face.

  ‘Bad news, I’m afraid, sir. The boss wants you.’

  ‘It is always a pleasure to see the chief constable,’ Coleridge said.

  ‘It makes me feel so much better about retiring.’

  DAY FIFTY-THREE. 8.00 p.m.

  The chief constable of the East Sussex Police was sick to death of the Peeping Tom murder.

  ‘Murder is not what we here in New Sussex are all about, inspector. Here I am, trying to build a modern police service’ — the chief constable did not allow the term police force — ‘a service that is at ease with itself and comfortably achieving its goal targets in the key area of law upholdment, and all anybody wants to talk about is your failure to arrest the Peeping Tom murderer.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, but these investigations take time.’

  ‘New Sussex is a modern, thrusting, dynamic community, inspector. I do not like having our customer service profile marred by young women falling off lavatories with knives in their heads.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think any of us do, sir.’

  ‘It’s an image-tarnisher.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Quite apart, of course, from the human dimensions of the tragedy vis-a-vis that a customer is dead.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And now we have this appalling new development of further threats being made. We are a modern community, a dynamic community and, I had hoped, a community where groups of sexually and ethnically diverse young people could take part in televised social experiments without being threatened with illegal life termination.’

  ‘By which you mean murder, sir.’

  ‘Yes, I do, chief inspector, if you wish to so put it, yes I do! This new threat is making us look like fools! We must be seen to be taking it very seriously indeed.’

  ‘By all means, sir, let us be seen to take it seriously, but I am of the opinion that we do not need to actually take it seriously.’

  ‘Good heavens, chief inspector! A murder has been announced! If the law upholdment service doesn’t take it seriously then who will?’

  ‘Everyone else, no doubt, sir, particularly the media,’ said Coleridge calmly.

  ‘But as I say, I do not think that we need to. I do not think that there will be another murder.’

  ‘Oh yes, and what grounds do you have for this confidence?’

  ‘I don’t think that the killer needs a second death. One was enough, you see.’ The chief constable did not see, and he did not think much of Coleridge’s enigmatic tone.

  ‘One was too bloody many, Coleridge! Do you know that when this story broke I was about to make public my new policy document style initiative entitled Policing The Rainbow?’

  ‘No, sir, I was not aware.’

  ‘Yes, well, you weren’t the only one who was not aware. No one was aware. The damn thing sank without trace. Weeks of work, ignored, absolutely ignored because of this ridiculous murder. It’s not easy catching the eye of the Home Secretary these days, you know.’

  DAY FIFTY-SIX. 7.30 p.m.

  Moon,’ said Chloe ‘you have been evicted from the house.’

  ‘Yes!’ Moon shouted, punching the air, and for once an evictee actually meant what she said. Moon had her m
illion pounds plus the two hundred thousand Geraldine had promised for the next one out, and she was ecstatic to be free. She had no desire to be one of the last three, not now one of them was under sentence of death. The three remaining inmates looked at each other. Gazzer, Jazz and Dervla. One more week. Another million to the winner. Half a million to the runner- up. Three hundred thousand even for the one who came third. If all three survived, of course. Worth the risk, certainly. Gazzer would use it to pursue a life of luxury. Jazz would start his own TV production company. Dervla would save her family from ruin ten times over. Definitely worth the risk. Nobody spoke. They did not speak much at all any more, and they had all taken to sleeping in separate parts of the house. Even Jazz and Dervla, who had become close, could no longer trust each other. After all, it was they who had been closest to the exit on the night Kelly was killed. And now there was this new threat. The whole process was nothing more than a long, grim waiting game. Gazzer, Jazz, Dervla and the whole world, all waiting for the final day.

  DAY SIXTY. 1.30 a.m.

  Woggle was digging for as much as sixteen hours a day now. Not consecutively: he would dig for a few hours then sleep a while and, on waking, begin again immediately. Days did not matter to Woggle. It was hours that counted. Woggle had one hundred and fifteen of them left until the final episode of House Arrest began. He would have to hurry.

  DAY SIXTY-TWO. 9.00 a.m.

  Coleridge decided that it was time to take Hooper and Patricia into his confidence and admit to them that he knew who had killed Kelly. He had had his suspicions from the start. Ever since he had seen the vomit on the seat of that pristine-clean toilet bowl. But it was the note that convinced him he was right, the note predicting the second murder. The murder he did not believe would happen because it did not need to. What Coleridge lacked was proof and the more he thought about it, the more he knew that he never would have proof, because no proof existed, and therefore the killer was going to get away with the crime. Unless…The plan to trap the killer came to Coleridge in the middle of the night. He had been unable to sleep and in order to avoid disturbing his wife with his shifting about and sighing he had gone downstairs to sit and think. He had poured himself a medium- sized Scotch and added the same amount again of water from the little jug shaped like a Scottish terrier. He sat down with his drink in the darkened sitting room of his house, the room he and his wife referred to as the drawing room, and considered for a moment how strange all the familiar objects in the room looked in the darkness of the middle of the night. Then his mind turned to the killer of Kelly Simpson, and how it might be that Coleridge could arrange to bring that foul and bloody individual to justice. Perhaps it was the words ‘foul’ and ‘bloody’ falling into his head that turned his thoughts from Kelly to Macbeth and the rehearsals that would commence a fortnight hence and thereafter take place every Tuesday and Thursday evening throughout the autumn. Coleridge would have to attend these rehearsals because Glyn had asked Coleridge if, given that he was in only the last act, he would be prepared to take on various messenger roles and attendant lords.