Dead famous (22 page)

‘Kelly,’ he said, with a big broad smile. And at that moment, in that very instant, they both knew. Kelly was certain that she had not told a soul about her pierced labia, not even the girls. She had been specifically holding the information back to use as a triumphant, sexy revelation at some strategic moment later in the game, when she felt the need to shine. But the voice in her ear knew. The voice of Hamish. Hamish knew because the moment he had touched that tiny wire he had whispered her name. And now Kelly saw the truth. The bastard had touched her vagina before. The half-formed suspicions that had troubled her aching head the morning that she had woken up in that horrible little sex cabin were suddenly turned to cast-iron facts.

‘My God!’ Kelly breathed, momentarily more surprised than angered.

‘You felt me up when I was passed out. You fingered me. You knew I was pierced.’ Her voice was a whisper; the shock of the revelation was still sinking in. All of the other people in the box were busy with their own affairs. Nobody heard her. Nobody heard. Like Kelly, Hamish had realized the moment that he said it, in the instant that he breathed those two giveaway syllables ‘Kelly’, that he had made a terrible, terrible mistake. But as yet it was still a secret. Only they knew; the others were all too busy with their own giggling, their own fumbling.

‘Please,’ Hamish pleaded into Kelly’s ear.

‘Don’t tell them.’ But in the way her body recoiled from him he knew that she would. How could she not? Why should she not? She would tell the others, she would tell the world, and he would be finished. Of course, he would deny it, it was her word against his, but people liked Kelly, they would believe her. The minimum he could expect was national shame, and the worst…Prosecution for sexual assault. For digital penetration. His career was over, that was for sure. Doctors could not afford that kind of scandal. What woman would trust him with her body now? He almost laughed. Here they all were, pawing at each other like animals in muck, and he was in danger of being prosecuted for sexual assault! Hamish’s blind black vision turned red with fury. The slag! The disgusting fucking slag! She had been happy enough to let him feel her up just then, to let him finger her. And yet now she would ruin him utterly for having done exactly the same thing before. Hamish’s rush of fear and fury were fully matched by what Kelly was feeling. She was outraged, disgusted. She wanted to be sick. This bastard had mauled her while she lay unconscious! Put his hand inside her. Had he raped her? He could have raped her. Probably not, Kelly’s fevered brain was telling her. If he had raped her she would have known, for sure. But would she? Perhaps he was small, perhaps he had been very careful. She remembered the sensation with which she had woken up. That discomfort, the sudden overwhelming urge to dive into the pool. Had he put it in her? How would she ever know? ‘Please, don’t tell,’ Hamish whispered once more, and suddenly his hand was at her mouth. Now Kelly was struggling to get out of the sweatbox, pushing herself through the laughing, groping bodies that surrounded her, trying to find the exit flaps.

‘She’s getting out!’ Thought Hamish.

‘What will the bitch do?’ David was also aware that it was Kelly who was rushing for the exit. Kelly, the woman who with her special knowledge of him held his fate in her hands…The bitch, the one who had been taunting him.

‘What’s on her mind?’ He thought.

‘What will the cow do?’ Kelly passed Dervla in her panting, sweating struggle to get out. Dervla knew it was Kelly, because she could hear her hurried breathing. To Dervla’s mind she sounded excited, almost triumphant. What had she to be so excited about? Dervla thought about the message that she had read in the mirror that morning.

‘The bitch Kelly still number one.’ Did Kelly know that she was number one? That she was winning? Was that why she was so excited? Dervla felt a massive surge of irritation towards the silly young woman who was squirming across her. What was so special about Kelly? She wasn’t particularly bright, her morals were not very impressive, her dress sense was questionable and yet there she was, seemingly unmoveable in the lead. All the confidence that Dervla had felt before about playing a longer game than Kelly evaporated. Kelly was going to win. She was going to grab all the fame and she was going to grab the halfmillion quid, too. The half-million quid, about which Dervla had privately been dreaming since the day her application had been accepted. The half-million quid that would save her family…Her beloved mother and father, her darling little sisters, from disaster. Dervla wondered why Kelly was running out so suddenly and so breathlessly. What was she up to? Sally shrank back into the corner of the sweatbox in which she had been hiding since almost the moment she had entered it, pushing away any hands or limbs that intruded on her space. Sally pushed Kelly away as she passed, and as she did so Sally thought to herself, ‘That girl’s in a hurry to get out of the sweatbox.’ And with that thought, despite the heat. Sally’s blood ran cold. For a memory had come upon her and claimed her for its own. It was the memory of her mother, on the only occasion in her life when Sally had ever spoken to her, sitting behind a glass screen speaking through an intercom.

‘I don’t know why a person like me does the things she does,’ Sally’s mother’s voice had crackled.

‘You just get stuck in the dark box and then it happens.’ Suddenly Sally believed she knew how her mother had felt. She too was stuck in the black box. The black box was real. Gazzer was thinking the same thing that he always felt about Kelly. He kept it well hidden, but one day he intended to get even with that bitch. Inside the house or out he would pay her back for what she had implied about his little lad, his wonderful Ricky. Telling the whole nation that he was a selfish, scrounging, absent father who didn’t give a fuck. That was basically what she had implied. Well, Gazzer would show her. Sooner, or later. Or sooner. Kelly was past them all and out. She gulped down the fresher, cooler air that hit her as she emerged from the flaps of the sweatbox, and, with her bile still rising in her throat, she rushed out of the boys’ room and headed for the toilet. A few minutes later Geraldine and her editing team watching the monitoring screens saw somebody appear at the front of the sweatbox, swathe themself in a sheet and follow Kelly to the toilet, pausing only to pick up a knife. And kill her.

DAY TWENTY-SEVEN. 11.46 p.m.

O
h my God! Oh, please God, no!’ It was unlike Geraldine to ask assistance from anybody, least of all the Almighty, but these were, of course, very special circumstances. The puddle on the floor around Kelly had suddenly appeared and was spreading rapidly.

‘Fogarty, you and Pru come with me. You too!’ Geraldine barked at one of the runners.

‘The rest of you stay here.’ Geraldine and her colleagues rushed out of the monitoring bunker and down the stairs into the tunnel which ran under the moat, connecting the production complex to the house. From the tunnel they were able to gain access to the camera runs and from these runs there were entrances to every room in the house. Larry Carlisle, the duty cameraman, heard a noise behind him. Later he was to explain to the police that he had been expecting to see his relief clocking on early, and had been about to turn and tell the next man not to run and make such a clatter when Geraldine and half the editing team had rushed past.

‘Through the store room!’ Geraldine barked, and in a moment she and her colleagues found themselves blinking in the striplit glare of the house interior. Later they were all to recall how strange it felt, even in that moment of panic, to be there inside the house. None of them had entered the house since the inmates had taken it over and now they felt like scientists who had suddenly found themselves on a petri dish along with the bugs they had been studying. Geraldine took a deep breath and opened the toilet door.

DAY TWENTY-EIGHT. 7.20 p.m.

W
hy did you pull the sheet off?’ Coleridge asked.

‘You must know that it’s wrong to disturb the scene of a crime.’

‘It’s also wrong to ignore an injured person in distress. I didn’t know she was dead, did I? I didn’t even know there’d been a crime, as a matter of fact. I didn’t know anything. Except that there was blood everywhere, or something that looked like blood. If I really try to remember what I was thinking at the time, inspector, I honestly still think that I half hoped it was a joke, that somehow the inmates had managed to turn the tables on me for letting them down over Woggle.’ Coleridge pressed play. The cameras had recorded everything: the little group of editors standing outside the toilet, Geraldine reaching in and pulling at the sheet. Kelly being revealed still sitting on the toilet, slumped forward, her shoulders resting on her knees. A large dark pool, flowing from the wounds in her neck and skull, growing on the floor. Kelly’s feet in the middle of the pool, a fleshcoloured island growing out of a lake of red. And, worst of all, the handle of the Sabatier kitchen knife sticking directly out of the top of Kelly’s head, the blade buried deep in her skull.

‘It was all so weird, like a cartoon murder or something,’ Geraldine said.

‘I swear with that knife hilt sticking out of her head she looked like a fucking Teletubby. For a quarter of a second I still wondered whether we were being had.’

DAY TWENTY-SEVEN. 11.47 p.m.

G
ive me your mobile!’ Geraldine barked at Fogarty, her voice shrill but steady.

‘What…What?’ Bob Fogarty’s eyes were fixed on the horrifying crimson vision before him, the knife. The knife in the skull.

‘Give me your mobile phone, you dozy cunt!’ Geraldine snatched Fogarty’s little Nokia from the pouch at his belt. But she could not turn it on; her hand was shaking too much. She looked up at the live hot-head that was still impassively recording the scene.

‘Somebody in the edit suite call the fucking police!…Somebody watching on the Internet! Do something useful for once in your crap lives! Call the fucking police!’ And so it was that the world was alerted to one of the most puzzling and spectacular murders in anybody’s memory or experience: by thousands of Internet users jamming the emergency services switchboards and, failing to get through, calling the press. At the same time, at the scene of the crime, Geraldine seemed unsure what to do next.

‘Is she…Dead?’ Said Pru, who was peering over Fogarty’s shoulder, trying to keep the bile from rising in her throat.

‘Prudence,’ said Geraldine, ‘she’s got a kitchen knife stuck through her fucking brain.’

‘Yes, but we should check all the same,’ stammered Pru.

‘You fucking check,’ said Geraldine. But at this point Kelly saved them from further speculation about her state of health by keeling off the toilet seat and falling to the floor. She went head first, pulled forward over her knees by the weight of her own head. This resulted in her butting the floor with the handle of the knife, which buried the blade another inch or two into her head, as if it had been hit by a hammer. It made a sort of creaking sound which caused both Pru and Fogarty to be sick.

‘Oh, great. Fucking brilliant,’ Geraldine said.

‘So let’s just throw up all over the scene of the crime, shall we? The police are going to fucking love us.’ Perhaps it was the idea of what people might think of them that led Geraldine to turn once more to the watching cameras.

‘You lot in the box. Switch off the Internet link. This isn’t a freak show.’ But it was a freak show, of course, a freak show that had only just begun.

‘What the tuck’s going on?’ It was Jazz, emerging from the boys’ bedroom, a sheet stuck to his honed, toned and sweaty body. What with his sheet and his muscley physique. Jazz looked like Dervla’s fantasy of him, a Greek God startled on Mount Olympus. He could not have looked more ridiculously out of place if he had tried. Jazz stood on the threshold of the room staring, stunned by the bright lights and the extraordinary and unexpected presence of intruders in a house that he and his fellow inmates had had exclusive use of for weeks. Dervla appeared behind him. She too had taken up a sheet and looked equally out of place staring at the casually dressed intruders, behind whom was the corpse. It was beginning to look as if a toga party had crashed into a road accident. Geraldine realized that the situation was about to spiral out of control. She did not like situations that were out of control; she was a classic example of that tired old phrase, ‘the control freak’.

‘Jason! Dervla!’ She shouted.

‘Both of you get back in the boys’ bedroom!’

‘What’s happening?’ Dervla said. Fortunately for them neither she nor Jazz could see into the lavatory. The gruesome sight was blocked from them by the cluster of people at its doorway.

‘This is Peeping Tom!’ Geraldine shouted.

‘There has been an accident. All house inmates are to remain in the boys’ bedroom until told otherwise. Get inside! NOW!’ Astonishingly, such was the hostage mentality that had developed amongst the housemates that Jazz and Dervla did as they were told, returning to the darkness of the boys’ bedroom, where the others were emerging from the sweatbox, hot, naked and confused.

‘What’s going on?’ David asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Dervla replied.

‘We’re to stay in here.’ Then somebody in the edit suite took it upon themselves to turn on all the lights in the house. The seven inmates were caught almost literally in the headlights. They stood around the redundant sweatbox blinking at each other, naked, reaching for sheets, blankets, towels, anything to cover their red-skinned, sweaty embarrassment, memories of the previous two wild hours turning their hot red faces still redder. It was as if they were all fourteen years old and had been caught in the process of a mass snog by their parents.

‘Oh my God, we look so stupid,’ said Dervla. Outside, Geraldine was taking charge. Later on it was generally agreed that, having got over her shock, she had acted with remarkable cool-headedness. Having confined the seven remaining inmates to one room, she ordered everybody to retrace their steps and do everything possible to avoid further altering the scene of the crime.

‘We’ll stand in the camera run,’ she said, ‘and wait for the cops.’