"Dead Famous" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elton Ben)
Nomination DAY TWENTY-NINE. 9.15 a.m.
“Television presenter, television presenter, television presenter, television presenter, train driver.”
Sergeant Hooper looked up. “Train driver?”
“I’m sorry, my mistake. Television presenter.”
Chief Inspector Coleridge dumped the thick file of suspect profiles onto his desk and turned his attention once more to the big video screen that had been erected in the corner of the incident room. For the previous two hours he had been watching tapes at random.
Garry lounged on the green couch. The pause button was down and Garry’s image was frozen. Had the tape been running, the picture would have been much the same, for Garry was in his customary position, legs spread wide, muscles flexed, left hand idly fondling his testicles.
A blurred blue eagle hovered above his right ankle. Coleridge hated that eagle. Just what the hell did this pointless lump of arrogance and ignorance think he had in common with an eagle? He pressed play and Garry spoke.
“Your basic English Premier League team consists of ten idiots and one big gorilla hanging about up at the front, usually a black geezer.”
Coleridge struggled to care. Already his mind was drifting. How much rubbish could these people talk? Everybody talked rubbish, of course, but with most people it just disappeared into the ether; with this lot it was there for ever. What was more, it was evidence. He had to listen to it.
“… What the ten idiots have to do is keep kicking the ball up to the gorilla in the hope that he’ll be unmarked and get a lucky shot in.”
The world had heard these sparkling observations before: they had been chosen for broadcast, the people at Peeping Tom Productions having been thrilled with them. The words “black” and “gorilla” in the same sentence would make a terrific reality TV moment.
“‘Bold, provocative and controversial’,” Coleridge muttered under his breath.
He was quoting from a newspaper article he had found inside the box of the video tape he was watching. All of the House Arrest tapes had arrived with the appropriate press clippings attached. The Peeping Tom media office were nothing if not thorough. When you asked for their archive, you got it.
The article Coleridge had read was a profile of Geraldine Hennessy, the celebrated producer behind House Arrest.
“We’re not BBC TV,” Geraldine, known to the press as Geraldine the Gaoler, was quoted as saying. “We’re BPC TV: Bold, Provocative, Controversial, and allowing the world a window into Garry’s casual, unconscious racism is just that.”
Coleridge sighed. Provocative? Controversial? What sort of ambitions were those for a grown-up woman? He turned his attention to the man sitting opposite Garry, the one on the orange couch: flashy Jasper, known as Jazz, so cool, so hip, such strutting self-confidence, always grinning, except when he was sneering, which he was doing now.
“That’s it, mate,” Garry continued, “no skill, no finesse, no planning. The entire national game based on the strategy of the lucky break.” Once more he rearranged his genitals, the shape of which could clearly be made out beneath the lime-green satin of his sports shorts. The camera moved in closer. Peeping Tom clearly liked genitals; presumably they were BPC.
“Don’t get me wrong about saying the big bloke’s black, Jazz,” Garry added. “Fact is, most League strikers are these days.”
Jazz fixed Garry with a gaze he clearly believed was both enigmatic and intimidating. Jazz’s body was even better than Garry’s and he too kept his muscles in a pretty continuous state of tension. They seemed almost to ripple up and down his arms as he idly fondled the thick gold chain that hung round his neck and lay heavy on his beautiful honed chest. “Gorilla.”
“What?”
“You didn’t say ‘bloke’, you said ‘gorilla’.”
“Did I? Well, what I mean is gorillas are big and strong, ain’t they? Like your lot.”
Over by the kitchen units Layla, the blonde hippie supermodel in her own mind, tossed her fabulous beaded braids in disgust. Inspector Coleridge knew that Layla had tossed her lovely hair in disgust, because the video edit he was watching had cut abruptly to her. There was no way that Peeping Tom was going to miss that snooty little middle-class sneer. Coleridge was quickly coming to realize that Peeping Tom’s editorial position was firmly anti intellectual pretension.
“We consider ourselves to be the People’s Peeping Tom,” Geraldine was quoted as saying in the article. Clearly she also considered Layla to be a stuck-up, humourless, middle-class bitch, for that was how the edit was portraying her.
Coleridge cursed the screen. He had been watching Jazz, he wanted to watch Jazz, but one of the principal handicaps of his investigation was that he could only watch whoever Peeping Tom had wanted to be watched at the time, and Inspector Coleridge had a very different agenda from that of Peeping Tom. Peeping Tom had been trying to make what they called “great telly”. Coleridge was trying to catch a murderer.
Now the camera was back with Garry and his testicles.
Coleridge did not think that Garry was the murderer. He knew Garry, he had banged up twenty Garrys every Saturday night during his long years in uniform. Garry’s type were all the same, so loud, so smug, so cocky. Coleridge thought back to how Garry had looked two nights before, in the aftermath of a murder, when they had faced each other over a police tape recorder. Garry hadn’t looked so cocky then, he had looked scared.
But Coleridge knew Garry. Garrys got in fights, but they didn’t murder people, unless they were very unlucky, or drunk and at the wheel of a car. Coleridge most certainly did not like this strutting, pumped-up, tattooed, cockney geezer, but he did not think that he was evil. He did not think that he was the sort of person to sneak up on a fellow human being, plunge a kitchen knife into their neck, pull it out again and then bury it deep into their skull.
Coleridge did not think that Garry would do something like that. But, then again, Coleridge had been wrong before, lots of times.
The nation didn’t think that Garry was the murderer either. He was one of their favourites. Gazzer the Geezer had been amongst the early tabloid tips to win the game before it had turned into a real-life whodunit, and he rarely topped the poll when the media considered the identity of the killer.
Coleridge smiled to himself, a sad, rather superior smile. The only sort of smile he seemed able to muster these days. The nation did not really know Gazzer. They thought they did, but they didn’t. They had been given only his best bits, his chirpy one-liners, his unnerving ability to spot what he thought to be a snob or a clever dick, the relentless and gleeful way he wound up the snooty, self-important Layla. And the bold chunky penis end that had once been glimpsed peeping out from beneath his running shorts. An image that had immediately found its way onto T-shirts sold at Camden Lock market.
“Cyclops! In your bed!” Garry had shouted as if addressing a dog, before relocating the offending member, “Sorry, girls, it’s just I don’t wear no pants, see. They make my love furniture sweaty.”
That was all the nation saw of Garry, just bite-sized chunks of honest, no-nonsense, common-sense geezer, and on the whole they liked him for it.
On the screen, Garry, like the video editor who had created the tape that Coleridge was watching, had noted Layla’s doubtful response to his homily on racial characteristics and, sensing the reaction of a snob and a clever dick, had decided to press his point.
“It’s true!” he protested, laughing at Layla’s discomfort. “I know you ain’t supposed to say it, but bollocks to fucking political correctness. I’m paying Jazz a compliment. Blacks are faster and stronger and that’s a proven fact. Look at boxing, look at the Olympics. Fuck me, the white blokes ought to get a medal for having the guts to compete at all! It’s even worse with the birds. You seen them black birds run? Half a dozen bleeding ebony amazons charge past the finishing tape in a pack and then about ten minutes later a couple of bony-arsed gingers from Glasgow turn up.”
Bold stuff: bold, provocative and controversial.
“Yes, but that’s because…” Layla stuttered, knowing she must refute these appalling sentiments.
“Because fucking what?”
“Well… because black people have to turn to sport on account of the fact that other opportunities in society are closed off to them. That’s why they’re disproportionately over-represented in physical activities.”
Now Jazz chipped in, but not to support Layla. “So what you’re saying, right, is that in fact a load of white geezers could actually beat us blacks at running and boxing and stuff like that if only they wasn’t so busy becoming doctors and prime ministers? Is that it, Layles?”
“No!”
“You’re the fucking racist, girl, that is disgusting!”
Layla looked as if she was going to cry. Garry and Jazz laughed together. No wonder the nation preferred them to her. A large section of the viewing public saw Gazzer and Jazz as their representatives in the house. Jovial, no bullshit, down-to-earth blokes. Top lads, diamond geezers. But how would the nation feel, Coleridge wondered, if it had to suffer them twenty-four hours a day? Suffer them as the other inmates did? Day after day, week after week, with their unabashed arrogance bouncing off the walls and ceiling. How irritating would that be? How much might someone secretly hate them? Enough to attack either of them in some way? Enough to force one or both of them onto the defensive? Enough to provoke them to murder?
But people didn’t murder each other because they found each other irritating, did they? Yes. As a matter of fact, in Coleridge’s experience, they did. Irritation was the commonest motive of all. Sad, petty, human disputes blown up suddenly and unintentionally into lethal proportions. How many times had Coleridge sat opposite some distraught family member as they struggled to come to terms with what they’d done because of irritation?
“I couldn’t stand him any more. I just snapped.”
“She drove me to it.”
Most murders took place in a domestic situation between people who knew each other. Well, you couldn’t get a much more domestic situation than House Arrest, and by the time of the murder the inmates knew each other very well, or at least knew the bits of each other that were on show, which is all anybody ever knows about anyone. These people did virtually nothing but talk to and about each other every waking moment of the day and night.
Perhaps one of them really had simply become irritating enough to get themselves killed?
But they were all irritating. Or at least they were to Coleridge. Every single one of them, with their toned tummies and their bare buttocks, their biceps and their triceps, their tattoos and their nipple rings, their mutual interest in star signs, their endless hugging and touching, and above all their complete lack of genuine intellectual curiosity about one single thing on this planet that was not directly connected with themselves.
Inspector Coleridge would happily have killed them all.
“Your problem is you’re a snob, sir,” said Sergeant Hooper, who had been watching Coleridge watch the video and had followed his train of thought as surely as if Coleridge had had a glass head. “Why the hell would anybody want to be a train driver these days anyway? There aren’t any train drivers as a matter of fact, just some bloke that pushes the start button and goes on strike every now and then. It’s hardly a noble calling, is it? I’d much rather be a TV presenter. Frankly, I’d rather be a TV presenter than a copper.”
“Get on with your work, Hooper,” said Coleridge.
Coleridge knew that they all laughed at him. They laughed at him because they thought he was old fashioned. Old fashioned because he was interested in things other than astrology and celebrity. Was he the last man on earth interested in anything other than astrology and celebrity? Things like books and trains? He was only fifty-four years old, for heaven’s sake, but as far as most of his officers were concerned he might as well have been two hundred. To them Coleridge was just so weird. He was a member of the Folio Society, a lay minister, he never failed to visit a war memorial on Armistice Day, and he grew plants from seeds rather than buying them ready-made from a garden centre.
The fact that it had fallen to Coleridge to watch the entire available footage of House Arrest. To sit and watch a group of pointless twenty-somethings living in a house together and subjected to constant video surveillance was a cruel joke indeed. It was safe to say that under normal circumstances there was no other show in the history of television that Coleridge would have been less inclined to watch than House Arrest.
Coleridge gripped the handle of the proper china mug he insisted on using despite the fact that it required washing up. “When I want your opinion, Hooper, on train drivers or any other subject for that matter, I shall ask for it.”
“And I will always be happy to oblige, sir.”
Coleridge knew that the sergeant was right. Who could blame today’s youth for its lack of sober ambition? In the days when little boys wanted to grow up to be train drivers they had wanted to grow up to be the master of a vast machine. A fabulous spitting, steaming, snarling, living beast, a monster in metal that required skill and daring to handle, care and understanding to maintain. Nowadays, of course, technology was so complex that nobody knew how anything worked at all except Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking. The human race was out of the loop, to employ a phrase he often heard Hooper using. No wonder all young people wanted was to be on television. What else was there to do? He stared wearily at the huge piles of video tapes and computer disks that seemed to fill most of the room.
“Well, let’s go back to the beginning, shall we? Attack this thing in order.” He picked up a tape marked “First broadcast edit” and put it into the machine.
One house. Ten contestants. Thirty cameras. Forty microphones. One survivor.
The words punched themselves onto the screen like fists slamming into a face.
Frantic, angry rock music accompanied the post-punk graphics and the grainy images supporting them.
A spinning hot-head camera.
A barbed wire fence.
A snarling guard dog.
A girl with her back to the camera removing her bra.
A close-up of a mouth, screaming and contorted with rage.
More big guitar noise. More jagged graphics.
Nobody watching could be in the slightest doubt that this was telly from the hip and for the hip. The message was clear: boring people should seek their entertainment elsewhere, but if you happened to be young, bigged up and mad for it, this was the show for you.
Nine weeks. No excuses. No escape.
House Arrest.
A final blast of swooping, feedback-laden guitar and the credits were over. For one last moment the Peeping Tom house was empty and all was calm. A big, bright friendly space, with a wide tiled living area, pleasant communal bedrooms, stainless steel washrooms and showers and a swimming pool in the garden.
The front door opened and ten young people spilled through it, spreading out into the large open plan living area. Ten people who, the pre-publicity had assured the nation, had never met before in their lives.
They whooped, they shrieked, they hugged, they said “Wicked!” over and over again. Some went into the bedrooms and jumped up and down on the beds, others did chin-ups on the doorframes, one or two stood back a little and watched, but everybody seemed to be of the opinion that the adventure of a lifetime had just begun and they simply could not be starting off on it with a more wicked crew.
Having clearly established the fact that the viewing public were in the company of a party crowd, the camera began to introduce the housemates individually. The first to be picked out was an impossibly handsome young man with soft puppy eyes, boyish features and long shoulder-length hair. He wore a big black coat and carried a guitar. A graphic stamped itself across the man’s face, letters made out of bricks, like prison walls.
David. Real job: actor. Star sign: Aries.
“Pause, please, constable.”
The image froze and the assembled officers studied the handsome face on the screen, a face disfigured by the angry graphic stamped across it.
“Real job: actor,” Coleridge said. “When did he last work?” Trisha, a young detective constable who had just finished pinning up the last of the seven suspect photographs, turned her attention to David’s file. “Panto, Prince Charming. Two Christmases ago.”
“Two years ago? Then it’s hardly a real job, is it?”
“That’s what Gazzer says later on in the show, sir,” Hooper chipped in. “David gets quite arsey about it.”
“Arsey?”
“Annoyed.”
“Thank you, sergeant. It will speed matters up considerably in this incident room if we all speak the same language. Is there any evidence that this boy can actually act?”
“Oh yes, sir,” said Trisha. “He had a very good start. RADA graduate and quite a lot of work at first, but recently it just hasn’t been happening for him.”
Coleridge studied David’s face frozen on the screen. “Bit of a come-down, this, eh? I can’t imagine that appearing on House Arrest was what he had in mind when he left drama college.”
“No, it does look a bit desperate, doesn’t it?”
Coleridge looked once more at David. The face was flickering and jumping about because the police VCR was old and clapped out and did not like pausing. David’s mouth was slightly open in a grin and the effect made him look like he was gnawing at the air.
“What does he live off while he’s doing his real job of not acting?”
“Well, I wondered about that, sir,” said Hooper, “and I have to admit it’s a bit obscure. He doesn’t sign on, but he seems to do pretty well for himself – nice flat, good clothes and all that. He told Peeping Tom that his parents helped him out.”
“Look into it, will you? If he’s in debt or steals or sells drugs and one of the other people in the house had found out… Well, there might be something, the ghost of a motive…” But Coleridge did not sound convinced.
“The telly people would have heard it, wouldn’t they, sir? I mean, if another inmate had found something out about him? Don’t they hear everything?” Trisha asked. “Not absolutely everything,” Hooper, who was a reality TV buff, replied. “They see everything, but they don’t hear everything – most but not all. Sometimes, when the inmates whisper, it’s hard to make out what they’re saying, and every now and then they leave their microphones off and have to be told to put them back on. And they sometimes tap them when they speak. The contestants in the first series worked that one out. Remember Wicked Willy? The bloke who got chucked off for trying to manipulate the votes? That was his little trick.”
“Well, that would be worth watching out for, wouldn’t it?” Trisha said. “Microphone tapping – very conspiratorial.”
“Unfortunately most of the bits where you can’t hear weren’t stored on disk because they were useless for broadcast.”
“Oh, well,” said Coleridge. “As my mother used to say, life wasn’t meant to be easy. Next one, please. Move on.”
“Check it out, guys! A swimming pool!”
Jazz had opened the patio doors and spun round to announce his discovery. The graphic punched bricks into his handsome young face:
Jazz. Real job: trainee chef. Star sign: Leo (cusp of Cancer).
“This is better than Ibiza!” He performed a little acid-style dance on the edge of the pool while doing a convincing vocal impression of a drum and bass track. “Duh! Boom! Chh chh boom! Chh chh boom! Chhh chhh BOOM!”
Now a girl came running out to join Jazz. A pretty girl with a happy laughing face and a small jewel stud through one nostril.
Kelly. Real job: sales consultant. Star sign: Libra.
“Wicked!” shouted Kelly.
“Chh chh boom!” Jazz replied.
Kelly began to jump up and down, clapping her hands together with excitement. “Wicked! Unreal! Amped up!” She shouted, and, kicking off her baggy hipsters, she jumped into the pool.
“Sales consultant?” Coleridge enquired. “What does that mean?”
“Shop girl,” said Hooper. “Miss Selfridge.”
Coleridge stared at Kelly’s flickering image on the screen. “Did you see those trousers she was wearing? They showed half her bottom.”
“I’ve got a pair exactly the same,” Trisha remarked.
“Well, frankly, Patricia, I’m surprised. You could see her knickers poking out of the top.”
“That’s the point, sir.”
“It is?”
“Yes, sir, no sense paying for a CK G-string if people can’t see it, is there?”
Coleridge did not ask what CK stood for. He wasn’t falling into obvious traps like that. “What sense of her own worth does that girl have if she chooses to boast about her underwear?”
Coleridge wondered if he was the only person in the world who felt so completely culturally disenfranchised. Or were there others like him? Living secret lives, skulking in the shadows, scared to open their mouths for fear of exposure. People who no longer understood the adverts, let alone the programmes.
On the TV screen Kelly burst back out of the water, and as she did so one of her breasts popped momentarily over the top of her sodden vest. By the time she surfaced for a second time she had got it covered up. “Oh my God!” shouted Kelly. “I’m wearing my microphone. Peeping Tom’ll kill me.”
“She was wrong about that,” Hooper remarked. “Kelly’s famous boob. I remember it well. Definitely worth the cost of a mike. They used it in the trailers, all hazy in slow-motion, very cheeky, very nice. It was in the papers, too – ‘It’s House A-BREAST!’ Most amusing, I thought.”
“Could we get on, please?” Coleridge snapped testily.
Hooper bit his lip. He pressed play and a young woman with tattoos and a Mohican haircut strutted out of the house to look at the swimming pool.
Sally. Real job: female bouncer. Star sign: Aries.
“They should say ‘Real job: token lesbian’,” said Trisha. “She’s the gay one. They have to have a gay or a dyke, I think it’s part of the Broadcasting Standards Commission guidelines.”
Coleridge wanted to object to the word “dyke” but he wondered whether perhaps it had become the officially accepted term without his noticing. Language changed so quickly these days. “Do you think those tattoos mean anything?” he asked instead.
“Yeah, they mean keep clear ’cos I’m one scary hard bitch,” Hooper replied.
Sally’s arms were entirely covered in tattoos; there was not a single square inch of flesh left showing from her wrists to her shoulders. Great thick stripes of blue-black snaked and coiled across her skin.
“You know she’s the number-one Internet choice for having done it,” Hooper noted, adding, “She’d be strong enough. Look at the muscles on it.”
“That knife was very sharp,” Coleridge snapped. “Any one of the people in that house would have been strong enough to pierce a skull with it if they felt strongly enough about the skull they were piercing. And would you kindly keep comments about the Internet to yourself? The fact that there are millions of bored idiots out there with nothing better to do than tap rubbish down telephone lines has absolutely nothing to do with this investigation.”
Silence reigned briefly in the incident room. Coleridge was so unabashed in the way he treated them all like schoolchildren; it was difficult to know how to react.
“This bouncer business,” Coleridge said, returning to the subject of Sally. “Known to us?”
“Soho nick have talked to her occasionally,” said Tricia, leafing through Sally’s file. “She’s cracked a few heads, but only in self-defence.”
“Her mother must be very proud.”
“She also got into a bit of a fight at last year’s Gay Pride march. Took on a couple of yobs who were jeering.”
“Why do these people feel the need to define themselves by their preferences in bed?”
“Well, if they didn’t talk about it, sir, you wouldn’t know, would you?”
“But why do I need to know?”
“Because otherwise you would presume they were straight.”
“If by that you mean heterosexual, I would not presume any such thing, constable. I would not think about it at all.”
But Trisha knew that Coleridge was deceiving himself. Trisha was quite certain that Coleridge presumed she was a heterosexual. It simply would not occur to him to think otherwise. How she longed to shock him to his foundations and prove her point by announcing that she was as entirely and absolutely a lesbian as the tattooed girl on the screen. Actually, sir, all my lovers are women and what I particularly enjoy is when they bang me with a strap-on dildo.
He would be astonished. He thought she was such a nice girl.
But Trisha didn’t say anything. She kept quiet. That was why she secretly admired women like Sally, irritating and graceless though they might be. They did not keep quiet. They made people like Coleridge think.
“Let’s move on,” said Coleridge.
“Nice knockers, girl!” Sally shouted at Kelly, who was just emerging from the pool.
Garry, all muscles and shaved head, was the next to emerge from the house. On seeing Kelly, soaking wet with her skimpy singlet clinging to her fit young body, he dropped to his knees in mock worship. “Thank you, God!” he shouted to the skies. “Something for the lads! We like that!”
Garry. Real job: van driver. Star sign: Cancer.
“Or the girls!” Sally shouted back. “You never know, she might play for my team.”
“You a dyke, then?” Garry enquired, turning to her with interest.
“Derr!” said Sally, pointing to the front of her vest on which were written the words “I eat pussy”.
“Oh, is that what it means? I thought it meant you’d just been to a Chinese restaurant!” Garry laughed hugely at his joke, which was to provoke a minor scandal when it was broadcast later that evening, being considered highly bold, provocative and controversial.
Inside the house a bald woman in a leopardskin-print mini-skirt was exploring the living area. “Check it out, guys! There’s a welcome basket! Wicked!”
Moon. Real job: circus trapeze artiste and occasional lap-dancer. Star sign: Capricorn.
“Fags, chocolate, champagne! Wicked!”
“Get stuck in!” shouted Garry from the patio doors.
The others quickly assembled around the basket and the four bottles of Sainsbury’s own-brand champagne were immediately opened. They all collapsed onto the orange, green and purple couches on which they would lounge for so much of the long days to come.
“Right, since we’re chilling out and kicking back, I might as well tell you now,” Moon shouted in her exaggerated Mancunian accent, “because at the end of the day you’re all going to find out anyways. First of all, I’m going to win this fookin’ game, all fookin’ right? So the rest of you bastards can just forget it! All right?” This exhibition of bravado was received with friendly cheers.
“Second, I’ve done lap-dancing, right? I took money off sad blokes for letting them see me bits, I’m not proud of it, but at the end of the day I was fookin’ good at it, right?”
This provoked more cheers and shouts of “Good on you!”
“And third, I’ve had a boob job, right? I was dead unhappy with my self-image before, and my new tits have really empowered me as a person in my own right, right? Which at the end of the day is what it’s all about, in’t it? Quite frankly, at the end of the day, I feel that these are the boobs I was supposed to have.”
“Gi’s a look, then, darling, and I’ll tell you if you’re right!” Gazzer shouted.
“Easy, tiger!” Moon shrieked, revelling in the attention. “Take it easy. We’ve got nine fookin’ weeks in here, don’t want to peak too soon. Oh God, though, what have I said? I feel terrible. Me mum never knew ’bout me being a stripper, she thinks I’m dead proper, me. So-rry, Mum!”
“I’ve got nothing against a bit of cosmetic surgery,” Jazz reflected. “I’ve never regretted my nob reduction, at least now it don’t poke out the bottom of me trousers!”
The housemates laughed and shrieked and said “Wicked!” but there were some who laughed more than others. A quiet-looking girl with raven-dark hair and green eyes only smiled. Sitting beside her was a rather straight-looking young man dressed in smart but casual Timberland.
Hamish. Real job: junior doctor. Star sign: Leo.
“He doesn’t look happy,” Coleridge observed, staring at Hamish’s handsome face, which was caught in a rather sullen expression.
“He’s thinking about winning,” said Hooper. “He went in with a strategy. Keep your head down, don’t get noticed, that’s his little motto. ‘Only the noticed get nominated.’ He went into the confession box every night and said that. It’s a very complex game,” Hooper continued. “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’ bums 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, O 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, fox-hunting, 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 200-metre 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 job: 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.”
“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.”