Dead famous (4 page)

‘Yes, but, sir,’ Trisha said, ‘in the war and stuff people had something to stand up for, something to believe in. These days there isn’t anything for us to believe in very much. Does that make our anxieties and pain any less relevant?’

‘Yes, it does!’ Coleridge stopped himself before he could say any more. Even he could occasionally tell when he was sounding like a bigoted, reactionary old idiot. He took a deep breath and returned to the subject of the young woman on the screen.

‘So, this Dervla girl went into the house with the purely cerebral intention of observing case studies in stress?’

‘Yes,’ said Trisha, referring to her file on Dervla, ‘she felt that the nomination process with its necessary winners and losers offered a perfect chance to study people’s reactions to isolation and rejection.’

‘Very laudable I must say.’

‘And she also added that ‘she hopes one day to be a television presenter’.’

‘Now why does that not surprise me?’ Coleridge sipped his tea and studied the screen.

‘One house, ten contestants,’ he said almost to himself.

‘One victim.’

DAY THIRTY. 7.00 a.m.

I
t was now three days since the murder, and Coleridge felt as if his investigation had scarcely begun. No forensic evidence of any value had emerged from the search of the house, the suspect interviews had revealed nothing but apparent shock and confusion, the observers at Peeping Tom could not suggest even a hint of a motive, and Coleridge and his excellent team had been reduced to sitting about in front of a television making wild guesses. Coleridge closed his eyes and breathed slowly. Focus, he had to focus, forget the storm that was raging around him and focus. He tried to free his mind, rid it of all thoughts and preconceptions, make of it a blank page upon which some invisible hand might write an answer. The murderer is…But no answer came. It just didn’t seem credible that there had even been a murderer, and yet there had most definitely been a murder. How could it be possible to get away with murder in an entirely sealed environment, every inch of which was covered by television cameras and microphones? Eight people had been watching the screens in the monitoring bunker. Another had been even closer, standing behind the two- way mirrors in the camera runs that surrounded the house. Six others had been present in the room left by the killer to pursue his victim. They were still there when he or she returned shortly thereafter, having committed the murder. An estimated 47,000 more had been watching via the live Internet link, which Peeping Tom provided for its more obsessive viewers. All these people saw the murder happen and yet somehow the killer had outwitted them all. Coleridge felt fear rising in his stomach. Fear that his long and moderately distinguished career was about to end in a spectacular failure. A world-famous failure, for this was now the most notorious case on the planet. Everybody had a theory — every pub, office, and school, every noodle bar in downtown Tokyo, every Turkish bath in Istanbul. Hour by hour Coleridge’s office was bombarded with thousands of emails explaining who the killer was and why he or she had done it. Criminologists and Crackers were popping up all over the place — on the news, in the papers, on-line and in every language. The bookies were taking bets, the spiritualists were chatting to the victim and the Internet was about to collapse under the weight of traffic of webheads exchanging theories. Indeed, the only person who seemed to have absolutely no idea whatsoever of the killer’s identity was Inspector Stanley Spencer Coleridge, the police officer in charge of the investigation. He walked through the house, trying to gain some sense of its secrets. Asking it to give him some clue. Not the real house, of course. The police forensics team had completed their business there in a day and had then been obliged to return it to its owners. This was a replica house that Peeping Tom Productions had been happy to lend to the police. The plasterboard and glue version that the producers had used during the months of camera rehearsal, during which they had ensured that every single angle was covered and that there truly was no place to hide. This replica house had no roof or plumbing and did not include the garden, but internally its colours and dimensions were precise. It gave Coleridge the feel. He cursed himself. Standing in the imitation space, he felt that he had become like one of the actual housemates: he had no useful thoughts in his head whatsoever, only feelings.

‘Feelings,’ Coleridge thought.

‘The modus operandi of an entire generation. You don’t have to think anything, or even to believe anything. You only have to feel.’

Like the real house, the replica house, which stood on an empty sound stage at Shepperton Film Studios, consisted of two bedrooms, a shower room, a bathroom in which laundry could be done in a big steel trough, a toilet, an open-plan living, kitchen and dining area, a store room, and the room known as the confession box, where the inmates went to speak to Peeping Tom. Three dark corridors ran along the edges of the house that did not open out onto the garden, and it was along these corridors that the manned cameras travelled, spying on the inmates through the huge two-way mirrors that took up most of the walls. These cameras, combined with the remote-controlled ‘hot-head’ ones situated inside the house, ensured that there was not a single square centimetre of space in which a person might avoid being observed. The only room that was not covered by the manual camera runs was the toilet. Even Peeping Tom’s obsessive voyeurism had drawn a line at having cameramen standing eighteen inches from the inmates while they evacuated their bowels. The duty editors had to watch, however, as the toilet contained a hot-head, which missed absolutely nothing. They had to listen, too, as the cubicle was also wired for sound. Coleridge was reminded of the catchphrase that had adorned so many roadside posters in the run-up to broadcast.

‘there is NO escape’ they had read. For one of the inmates that statement had proved horribly prophetic. The house and garden complex was surrounded by a moat and twin lines of razorwire fencing patrolled by security guards. The monitoring bunker in which the production team worked was situated fifty metres beyond the fence and was connected to the camera runs via a tunnel under the moat. It was along this tunnel that Geraldine and the horrified Peeping Tom night crew had run on that dreadful night after they had witnessed a murder on their television monitors. The murder. It was eating Coleridge up. For the umpteenth time he walked across the replica of the floor that the victim had crossed, to be followed moments later by the killer. Then he went and stood in the camera run, looking in on the room, just as the operator had done on the fatal night. He re-entered the living space and opened a drawer in the kitchen unit, the top one, the one the killer had opened. There were no knives in the drawer Coleridge opened; it was only a rehearsal space. Coleridge spent almost three hours wandering around the strange, depressing replica, but it told him nothing more about what had happened during the few, brief moments of dreadful violence than he already knew. He asked himself how he would have carried out the murder had he been the killer. The answer was, in exactly the same way as the killer. It was the only way it could have been done with any chance of getting away with it. The killer had seen his or her one opportunity to kill with anonymity and had seized it. Well, that was something, Coleridge told himself. The speed with which the killer had grasped his or her chance surely proved that he had been waiting and watching. He or she had wanted to kill. What could possibly have happened to engender such hatred? Without any evidence to the contrary, Coleridge had to presume that these people had all been complete strangers to each other less than a month before. He and his team had been studying the background of all the housemates but had so far found not one shred of a suggestion that any of them had known each other prior to entering the house. So why would a stranger plan to kill a stranger? Because they were strangers no more. Something must have happened or been said in those three weeks that had made murder inevitable. But what? There had certainly been some dreadful goings-on in the house, but nothing had been observed that looked remotely like a motive for the crime. It could not be ruled out that two of the inmates had not been strangers. That some ancient enmity had been unwittingly introduced into the house? That some bleak and terrible coincidence in the selection process had led to murder? Whatever the answer, Coleridge knew that he wouldn’t find it there in that gloomy old hangar at Shepperton. It was inside the real house, it was inside the people inside the real house. Wearily, he returned to his car, to which Hooper had retreated half an hour earlier, and together they began their drive back to Sussex, where the real Peeping Tom house was located, a journey of about twenty miles which if they were lucky would only take them the rest of the morning.

DAY THIRTY. 9.15 p.m.

W
hile Coleridge and Hooper nosed their way along the M25, Trisha was interviewing Bob Fogarty, the editor-in-chief of House Arrest. After Geri the Gaoler, Fogarty was the most senior figure in the Peeping Tom hierarchy. Trisha wanted to know more about how the people she had been watching came to be presented in the way they were.

‘House Arrest is basically fiction,’ said Fogarty, handing her a styrofoam cup of watery froth and nearly missing her hand in the darkness of the monitoring bunker.

‘Like all TV and film. It’s built in the edit.’

‘You manipulate the housemates’ images?’

‘Well, obviously. We’re not scientists, we make television programmes. People are basically dull. We have to make them interesting, turn them into heroes and villains.’

‘I thought you were supposed to be observers, that the whole thing was an experiment in social interaction?’

‘Look, constable,’ Fogarty explained patiently, ‘in order to create a nightly half-hour of broadcasting we have at our disposal the accumulated images of thirty television cameras running for twenty-four hours. That’s seven hundred and twenty hours of footage to make one half-hour of television. We couldn’t avoid making subjective decisions even if we wanted to. The thing that amazes us is that the nation believes what we show them. They actually accept that what they are watching is real.’

‘I don’t suppose they think about it much. I mean, why should they?’

‘That’s true enough. As long as it’s good telly they don’t care, which is why as far as possible we try to shoot the script.’

‘Shoot the script?’

‘It’s a term they use in news and features.’

‘And it means?’

‘Well, say you’re making a short insert for the news, investigating heroin addiction on housing estates. If you simply went out to some urban hellhole with a camera and started nosing around, you could be looking for the story you want till Christmas. So you script your investigation before you leave your office. You say…All right, we need a couple of kids to say they can get smack at school, we need a girl to say she’d whore for a hit, we need a youth worker to say it’s the government’s fault…You write the whole thing. Then you send out a researcher to round up a few show-offs and basically tell them what to say.’

‘But how could you do that on House Arrest? I mean, you can’t tell the housemates what to say, can you?’

‘No, but you can be pretty sure of the story you want to tell and then look for the shots that support it. It’s the only way to avoid getting into a complete mess. Look at this, for instance…This is Kelly’s first trip to the confession box on the afternoon of day one.’

DAY ONE. 4.15 p.m.

I
t’s brilliant, wicked, outrageous. I feel just totally bigged-up and out there,’ Kelly gushed breathlessly from the main monitor. She had come to the confession box to talk about how thrilling and exciting it all was.

‘I mean, today has just been the wickedest day ever because I really, really love all these people and I just know we’re all going to get along just brilliantly. I expect there’ll be tension and I’ll end up hating all of them for, like, just a moment at some point. But you could say that about any mates, couldn’t you? Basically I love these guys. They’re my posse. My crew.’ Deep in the darkness of the editing suite Geraldine glared at Fogarty.

‘And that’s what you want her to say, is it?’ Bob cowered behind his styrofoam cup.

‘Well, it’s what she did say, Geraldine.’ Geraldine’s eyes flashed, her nostrils flared and she bared her colossal overbite. It was as if the Alien had just burst out of John Hurt’s stomach.

‘You stupid cunt! You stupid lazy cunt! I could get a monkey to broadcast what she actually said! I could get a work-experience school-leaver pain-in-the-arse spotty fucking waste-of-space teenager to broadcast what she actually said! What I pay you to do is to look at what she actually said and find what we want her to say, you cunt!’ Fogarty threw a commiserating glance at the younger, more impressionable members of staff.

‘Who is Kelly, Bob?’ Geraldine continued, throwing an arm towards the frozen image of the pretty young brunette on the screen.

‘Who is that girl?’ Fogarty stared at the television. A sweet smile beamed back at him, an open, honest, naive countenance.

‘Well…’

‘She’s our bitch, Bob, she’s our manipulator. She’s one of our designated hate figures! Remember the audition interviews? All that pert ambition? All that artless knicker-flashing. All that girl power bollocks. Remember what I said, Bob?’ Fogarty did remember, but Geraldine told him anyway.

‘I said, ‘Right, you arrogant little slapper, we’ll see how far you get towards presenting your own pop, style and fashion show once the whole nation has decided you’re a back-biting, knob- teasing fucking dog,’ didn’t I?’

‘Yes, Geraldine, but on the evidence of today she’s turned out to be really quite nice. I mean, she’s a bit of an airhead, and vain, certainly, but she’s not really a bitch. I think we’ll find it quite hard to make her look that nasty.’

‘She’ll look however we want her to look and be whatever we want her to be,’ Geraldine sneered.