Dead famous (28 page)

DAY FORTY-TWO. 7.00 a.m.

M
rs Copple was awoken by the ringing of the telephone. Almost at the same time her doorbell began to sound. By seven thirty there were forty reporters in her front garden and her life was ruined.

‘sally’s the one. Just ask her mum’ was the most pithy of the headlines.

‘The press always find out everything,’Coleridge said sadly when Trisha told him what had happened.

‘They’re much better than us. Nothing can ever be kept from them. They don’t always publish, but they always know. They’re prepared to pay, you see, and if you’re prepared to pay for information, somebody will always be found to give it to you in the end.’

DAY FORTY-TWO. 7.30 p.m.

H
ousemates, this is Chloe, can you hear me?’ Yes, they could hear her.

‘The fifth person to leave the Peeping Tom house will be…’ The traditional pause…

‘Sally!’ In that moment Sally made a little bit of TV history by becoming the first evictee from a programme of the House Arrest type not to shout ‘Yes!’ And punch the air in triumph as if delighted to be going. Instead she said, ‘So everybody out there thinks I did it too.’

‘Sally,’ Chloe continued, ‘you have ninety minutes to say your goodbyes and pack your bags and then we’ll be back to take you to your appointment with live TV!’ Sally went over to the kitchen area and made herself a cup of tea.

‘I don’t think you did it. Sally,’ said Dervla, but Sally only smiled. Then she went into the confession box.

‘Hallo, Peeping Tom,’ she said.

‘Hallo, Sally,’ said Sam, the soothing voice of Peeping Tom.

In the monitoring bunker Geraldine crouched close to the, monitor, pen and pad in hand, ready to give Sam her lines. She knew she must play this one very carefully. Dangling before her was the prospect of some very good telly indeed. The result turned out to be even better than she had hoped.

‘I expect by now the press have found out about my mum,’ said Sally.

‘How she’s been held at Ringford Hospital for the last twenty years.’

‘Horrible place,’ whispered Geraldine, ‘the worst loony bin of the lot.’

‘Ever since Kelly died I’ve been wondering,’ said Sally.

‘Could I have done it? Is there some way I could have gone into a sort of trance? Got into the sweatbox and turned into my mother? I know that my mum told me she couldn’t remember a thing about when she did it, and when the police talked to me I couldn’t really remember even being in the sweatbox. So perhaps I did it and can’t remember that either? Was I in a box inside a box? My own black box? To be honest, I don’t know. I don’t think it was me. Paranoid schizophrenics don’t cover their tracks, wear sheets and avoid getting even one drop of blood on themselves. I think it was too good to have been me. I don’t think I could commit the perfect murder. I know my mother didn’t when she killed my father…But it could have been me. I have to accept that. I just can’t remember.’

‘Fu-u-u-ucking hell,’ Geraldine breathed.

‘This is fa-a-a-aabulous.’

‘One thing I do know,’ said Sally, ‘is that everybody will think it was me and that I’ll never escape that as long as I live. It’s obvious that the police haven’t got a clue. They’ll probably never arrest anyone, so for the rest of my life I’ll be seen as the black dyke nutter who murdered Kelly. Therefore, I’ve decided to make the rest of my life as short as possible.’ And with that Sally produced a kitchen knife from within the sleeve of her shirt. She had palmed it when she had made herself a cup of tea.

DAY FORTY-TWO. 9.00 p.m.

W
hen Chloe went back on air she was able to announce yet another dramatic exit from the house. Not live as planned, because Sally had departed an hour earlier in an ambulance, her attempted suicide having been watched live on the Internet all over the world. She had managed to stab herself twice in the chest before Jazz burst into the confession box, having been alerted to do so by Peeping Tom. Nobody yet knew whether she would survive her wounds or not. Chloe explained all of this to the viewers, and promised a regular update throughout the show.

‘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.

T
he 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.

D
ervla’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 one.’

‘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.