Dead famous (3 page)

‘They have to play their fellow housemates one way and the public another. Be unobtrusive enough not to get nominated but interesting enough not to get evicted if they do get nominated. I think that’s why people find the programme so fascinating. It’s a genuine psychological study. Like a human zoo.’

‘Is it?’ Coleridge snapped caustically.

‘In that case I wonder why the producers never seem to miss a single opportunity to broadcast sex talk or to display breasts.’

‘Well, breasts are fascinating too, aren’t they, sir? People like looking at them. I know I do. Besides which, when people go to the real zoo, what do they like looking at most? Monkeys’ burns and rumpo, that’s what.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘I’m not being ridiculous at all, sir. If you had the choice of watching two elephants either having their tea or having it off, which would you choose? People are interested in sex. You might as well face it.’

‘I think we’re straying from the point.’

‘Do you, sir?’ Said Trisha, who was looking at Hamish’s face on the screen.

‘I don’t. This house was riddled with sexual tension and that’s got to be relevant, hasn’t it? For instance, just look who Hamish is staring at.’

‘It’s impossible to say.’

‘You’ll see in the wide shot, it’s coming up next.’ Trisha touched the play button on the ancient VCR and, sure enough, the picture cut to a wide shot of the laughing, slightly drunken group lolling about on the couches.

‘He’s looking at Kelly now, sir, and then he starts staring at Layla. He’s checking them out. The psychologist on the show says that during the first hours in the house the group will be thinking principally about who they’re attracted to.’

‘Now that is a surprise, constable! And there was me imagining that they were thinking about the value of their immortal souls and the definition of God.’ Coleridge regretted his outburst. He did not approve of sarcasm and he liked Trisha and valued her as an officer. He knew that she did not speculate idly.

‘I’m sorry. I’m afraid I’m still having some difficulty getting over my exasperation with these people.’

‘That’s all right, sir. They certainly are a bunch of pains. But I do think it’s important that we find out who fancies whom. I mean, in this unique murder environment jealousy has to be a fairly likely motive.’

‘Who do you think fancies Woggle, then?’ Hooper asked, laughing at the figure who had just appeared on the screen.

Woggle
. Real job: anarchist. Star sign: claims to be all twelve.

‘I mean, let’s face it,’ Hooper continued.

‘If you were looking for a potential murder victim out of this lot, it would have to be Woggle, wouldn’t it? I mean, that bloke is just asking for it.’

‘Any white bloke with dreadlocks is asking for it in my opinion,’ Trisha remarked, adding, ‘Woggle was Geraldine the Gaoler’s private little project, sir.’

‘What do you mean by that, constable?’ Trisha was referring to one of the confidential internal policy briefings that she had secured from the Peeping Tom offices on the day of the murder.

‘He was the only inmate of the house that Peeping Tom actually approached, rather than the other way round. In Geraldine Hennessy’s opinion he was, and I quote, ‘guaranteed good telly. A natural irritant, like the grain of sand in the oyster shell around which a pearl will grow’.’

‘Very poetic,’ Coleridge remarked.

‘I must say, it’s a stretch of the imagination to think of Mr Woggle as a pearl, but it takes all sorts, I suppose.’

‘She saw him on the lunchtime news on the day of the annual May Day riots, sir.’

‘Ah. So he was arrested? Now that is interesting.’

‘He wasn’t arrested, sir, he was being interviewed by the BBC. It was Woggle’s claim to fame.’

‘I saw that interview you did ‘bout anarchy and all that malarkey,’ Moon was saying to Woggle, sensing a kindred alternative spirit.

‘You were fookin’ magic, babe. Double wicked.’

‘Thank you, sweet lady,’ Woggle replied.

‘But what was the story with the medieval jester’s hat? Was it, like, making a point or what?’

‘It was indeed making a point, 0 bald woman. When the so-called wise men have run out of answers it is time to talk to the fools.’

‘So they talked to you, then,’ said Jazz drily.

‘Correctomundo, soul brother.’ Woggle flashed what he believed was a smile of devilish subtlety but which, owing to his beard and the state of his teeth, looked like a few broken Polo mints buried in a hair-filled bathroom plug-hole.

‘I couldn’t get to work that day,’ Kelly complained.

‘They closed Oxford Street. How’s stopping people doing their shopping going to help anybody?’ Woggle did his best to explain, but his politics were not overburdened with detail or analysis. He seemed to recognize something he called ‘the system’, and he disapproved of this system in its entirety.

‘That’s it, really,’ he said.

‘So what is the system, then?’ Kelly asked.

‘Well, it’s all that capitalist, global, police, money, hamburger, American, foxhunting, animal-testing, fascist-groove-thing, isn’t it?’ Woggle explained in his dull, nasal monotone.

‘Oh, right. I see.’ Kelly sounded unconvinced.

‘What we need is macrobiotic organic communities interacting with their environments in an atmosphere of mutual respect,’ Woggle added.

‘What the fahk are you talking about?’ Garry enquired.

‘Basically it would be nice if things were nicer.’ Once more Inspector Coleridge pressed pause.

‘I presume Woggle’s antagonism to ‘the system’ does not prevent him from living off it?’

‘No, sir, that’s right,’ Trish replied.

‘The one system he truly does understand is the social security system.’

‘So the state can keep him fed and watered while he seeks to overthrow it? Very convenient, I must say.’

‘Yes, sir, he thinks so too,’ said Hooper.

‘Later on he has a huge row with the rest of them about it because they refuse to celebrate the irony of the fact that the state is funding him, its most bitter enemy.’

‘Presumably because they, like the rest of us, have to fund the state.’

‘That’s basically their point, yes.’

‘Well, I’m delighted to discover that these people and I have at least one opinion in common. This Woggle,any history of fraudulent claims? False addresses? Double-drops, financial skulduggery, that sort of thing? Anything that might make him vulnerable to discovery?’

‘No, sir, on that score he’s completely clean.’ There was a brief pause and then, almost uniquely, all three of them laughed. If there was one thing that Woggle wasn’t, it was clean.

‘Shit, man,’ Jazz observed, aghast.

‘Haven’t you ever heard of soap?’ Woggle had taken up what was to become his habitual position, crouching on the floor in the room’s only corner, his bearded chin resting on bony knees which he hugged close to his chest, his great horned dirty toenails poking out from his sandals. Woggle was dirty in a way that only a person who has just emerged from digging a tunnel can be dirty. He had come straight to join the House Arrest team from his previous home, a 200metre tunnel under the site of the proposed fifth terminal at Heathrow Airport. Woggle had suggested to Geraldine the Gaoler that perhaps he should take a shower before joining the team, but Geraldine, ever watchful for the elements that could be said to make up ‘good telly’, assured him that he was fine as he was.

‘Just be yourself,’she had said.

‘Who’s that?’ Woggle had replied.

‘For I am the sum of all my past lives and those I have yet to live.’ Woggle stank. Digging tunnels is hard physical work and every drop of sweat that he had sweated remained in the fabric of his filthy garments, a motley collection of old bits of combat gear and denim. If Woggle had worn a leather jacket (which, being an animal liberationist, of course he would never do) he would have looked like one of those disgusting old-style hell’s angels who never washed their Levi’s no matter how often they urinated on them.

‘Guy, you are rank!’ Jazz continued.

‘You are high! Here, man, have a blow on my deodorant before we all get killed of asphyxiation and suffocate to death here!’ Woggle demurred.

‘I consider all cosmetics to be humanoid affectations, yet one more example of our sad species’inability to accept its place as simply another animal on the planet.’

‘Are you on drugs or what?’

‘People think that they are superior to animals, and preening and scenting themselves is evidence of that,’ Woggle droned with the moral self-assurance of a Buddha, ‘but look at a cat’s silky coat or a robin’s joyful wings. Did any haughty supermodel ever look that good?’

‘Too fucking right she did, guy,’ said Jazz, who personally used two separate deodorants and anointed his skin daily with scented oils.

‘I ain’t never gone to sleep dreaming about shagging no cat, but Naomi and Kate are welcome any time.’ Layla spoke up from the kitchen area where she was preparing herbal tea.

‘I have some cruelty-free organic cleansing lotions, Woggle, if you’d like to borrow them.’ Layla. Real fob: fashion designer and retail supervisor. Star sign: Scorpio.

‘They won’t be cruelty-free after the plastic bottles end up in a landfill and a seagull gets its beak stuck in one,’Woggle replied.

‘Don’t be fooled by that fashion designer thing, sir,’ said Hooper.

‘She’s another shop girl. It comes out later in the second week. Layla cannot believe it when Garry points out that she and Kelly do basically the same job. Layla thinks she’s about a million miles above Kelly. There was quite a row.’

‘Garry likes annoying them all, doesn’t he?’

‘Oh yes, anything for a reaction, that’s Garry.’

‘And this young lady Layla takes herself very seriously?’

‘She does that, all right. Some of the biggest clashes in the first week are between her and David the actor, over who’s the most sensitive.’

‘They both reckon themselves poets,’Trisha chipped in.

‘Yes, I can see that there’s a lot of concealed anger there,’ Coleridge remarked thoughtfully.

‘A lot of failed ambition for both of them. It could be relevant.’

‘Not for Layla, sir, surely? She got chucked out before the murder happened.’

‘I am aware of that, sergeant, but seeing as how we don’t know anything at all it behoves us to investigate everything.’ Hooper hated the fact that he worked under a man who used words like ‘behoves’.

‘This girl Layla’s resentment and feelings of inadequacy could have found some resonance in the group. She may have been the catalyst for somebody else’s self-doubt. Who knows, sometimes with murder it’s entirely the wrong person that gets killed.’

‘Eh?’ Said Hooper.

‘Well, think about it,’ Coleridge explained.

‘Suppose a man is being taunted by his girlfriend about his powers in bed. Finally he storms out into the dark night and on his way home a stranger steps on his heel. The man spins round and kills the stranger, whereas really he wanted to kill his girlfriend.’

‘Well, yes, sir, I can see that happening with a random act of anger, but the murder happened long after Layla left…’

‘All right. Suppose you have a group of friends, and A has a dark, dark secret which B discovers. B then begins to spread the secret about and this gets back to A, but when A confronts B, B convincingly claims that the blabbermouth is in fact C. A then kills C, who actually knew nothing about it. The wrong person gets killed. In my experience there are usually a lot more people involved in a murder than the culprit and the victim.’

‘So we keep Layla in the frame?’

‘Well, not as an actual murder suspect, obviously. But before she left that house it is entirely possible that she sowed the seed that led to murder. Let’s move on.’ Trisha pressed play and the camera panned across from Woggle to settle on the tenth and final housemate.

Dervla
. Real job: trauma therapist. Star sign: Taurus.

She was the most beautiful, everybody agreed that, and the most mysterious. Quiet and extremely calm, it was never easy to work out what was going on behind those smiling green Irish eyes. Eyes that always seemed to be laughing at a different joke from the rest of the group. By the time of the murder Dervla had been the bookies’ number-two favourite to win the game, and she would have been number one had Geraldine Hennessy not occasionally and jealously edited against her, making her look stuck-up when in fact she was merely abstracted.

‘So what’s a trauma therapist when it’s at home, then?’ Garry asked. He and Dervla were stretched out beside the pool in the pleasant aftermath of the morning’s champagne.

‘Well, I suppose my job is to understand how people react to stress, so that I can help them to deal with it.’ Dervla replied in her gentle Dublin brogue.

‘That’s why I wanted to come on this show. I mean, the whole experience is really just a series of small traumas, isn’t it? I think it’ll be very interesting to be close to the people experiencing those traumas and also to experience them myself.’

‘So it’s got nothing to do with winning half a million big ones, then?’ Dervla was far too clever to deny the charge completely. She knew that the nation would almost certainly be scrutinizing her reply that very evening.

‘Well, that would be nice, of course. But I’m sure I’ll be evicted long before that. No, basically I’m here to learn. About myself and about stress.’ Coleridge was so exasperated that he had to make himself another mug of tea. Here was this beautiful, intelligent woman, to whom he was embarrassed to discover he found himself rather attracted, with eyes like emeralds and a voice like milk and honey, and yet she was talking utter and complete rubbish.

‘Stress! Stress!’ Coleridge said, in what for him was almost a shout.

‘Not much more than two generations ago the entire population of this country stood in the shadow of imminent brutal occupation by a crowd of murdering Nazis! A generation before that we lost a million boys in the trenches. A million innocent lads. Now we have ‘therapists’ studying the ‘trauma’ of getting thrown off a television game show. Sometimes I despair, I really do, you know. I despair.’