Dead famous (29 page)

DAY FORTY-FOUR. 12.00 p.m.

C
oleridge picked up the phone. It was Hooper, calling from the Peeping Tom production office. He sounded pleased.

‘I’ve got the duty log here, sir. You remember Larry Carlisle?’

‘Yes, the operator who was working in the camera runs on the night of the murder?’

‘That’s the one. Well, he’s been a busy boy, seems to have taken advantage of the fact that a number of people stopped working on the show out of boredom. He’s done twice as many shifts as anyone else, often eight hours on, eight hours off. Loves the show, can’t seem to get enough of it. And, what’s more, he’s covered the bathroom on almost every morning so far. If Dervla’s chatting through the mirror to anyone, she’s chatting to Larry Carlisle.’

‘The operator who was working on the night of the murder,’ Coleridge repeated.

DAY FORTY-FIVE. 7.58 a.m.

C
oleridge had been in the dark hot corridor for only a few minutes and already he loathed it. He felt like a pervert, it was disgusting. The east-west camera run of the Peeping Tom house was known as ‘Soapy’ to the teams who serviced it, on account of the fact that part of the run covered the mirrored shower wall and the mirrors above the basins, which often became splashed with suds and foam. The north-south run was known as ‘Dry’. Soapy and Dry had smooth, highly polished black floors, and were entirely cloaked in thick black blankets. Any light came from inside the house and shone through the long line of two-way mirrors that ran along the inside wall of the corridor. The camera operators were covered completely in black blankets and slid about silently like great coal-dark ghosts. Coleridge had already seen Jazz walk out of the boys’ bedroom and across the living space to use the toilet. That same toilet that had been Kelly’s last port of call upon this earth. The only part of the house that was not visible through the two-way mirrors. Coleridge gritted his teeth as he was forced to listen to what seemed to him to be the longest urination in history. Coleridge could find no words to describe the horror and contempt he felt for the whole tawdry business. Was there ever a better example of humankind’s utter lack of nobility and grace? Here, where with such care, such immense ingenuity, such untold resources, the comings and goings of a communal bathroom were recorded for posterity. It was eight o’clock and time for a change of shift in Soapy corridor. Coleridge heard the faintest swish as a heavily padded door was opened and Larry Carlisle crept in, dressed from head to foot in black. He even wore a ski mask, which further increased the grim and chilling atmosphere of the corridor. Without a word Carlisle disappeared under the blanket that covered the camera and its dolly while the previous operator emerged from the other side and crept away. Coleridge slunk back into the darkness, drawing his black cowled cassock close about him. Carlisle had not been informed of Coleridge’s presence, and imagined himself alone in the corridor as usual. At the other end of the house Dervla emerged from the girls’ bedroom and wandered into the living area. She entered the bathroom and approached the shower, where she took off her shirt to reveal her usual shower attire of cropped vest and knickers. Coleridge turned away, a natural instinct for him in the circumstances. There was a lady in a state of undress and he had no business looking at her. Carlisle also followed his natural instincts, those of a reality TV cameraman, in that he slid along the darkened corridor to get as close as he could to the flesh. Dervla stepped into the shower and began to wash herself, her hands running all over her body with soap. Coleridge forced himself to look again. It was not that he found the sight of Dervla soaping her near-naked body unattractive; quite the opposite. Coleridge bowed to no man in his appreciation of the female form, and Dervla’s in particular with its youthful, athletic grace was just his type. It was because he was attracted that Coleridge wanted to look away. He was a deeply Christian man; he believed in God and he knew that God would be extremely unimpressed if Coleridge started getting hot and bothered while looking at unsuspecting young women in their underwear. Particularly when he was on duty. Coleridge, that is, not God. God, in Coleridge’s opinion, was always on duty. Making absolutely certain in his own mind that his mind was on the job and nothing else, Coleridge turned back from the darkened wall and looked once more on the girl showering herself and the black-cloaked cameraman recording it. Then he saw something that almost made him cry out. It was as much as he could do to stop himself from leaping forward and arresting the dirty little swine there and then. Carlisle had a second camera. The man had emerged from beneath the thick black cape, having left his professional camera locked in position on its dolly, covering the young woman in the shower in a wide shot. Now he was using a small, palm-held digital camcorder, and was clearly making his own private video. Coleridge watched in furious disgust as Carlisle placed his little lens within millimetres of the soapy glass, clearly desperate to get as close to the unsuspecting woman as possible. Shamelessly he explored Dervla’s body, zooming in on her navel, her cleavage, the faint darkened outline of her nipples showing through the material of her top. Then Carlisle crouched down to the level of Dervla’s groin and began recording a long continuous close-up of her crutch area. Dervla’s legs were slightly apart, the knickers thin and lacy. There was the faintest hint of soft wet hair escaping onto the uppermost part of her thighs. Water cascaded from her gusset in a sparking stream. When Dervla had finished showering she turned off the taps, knotted a towel across her breasts, removed her sodden undergarments from beneath it and crossed to the basin to brush her teeth. Carlisle quickly turned off his personal camera and disappeared back under the black cape in order to push his professional camera over to cover the two-way mirror above the basin. Beyond the mirror Dervla looked briefly at her own reflection and shook her head. Coleridge had never been behind a two-way mirror before, and ; it was almost possible to believe that the girl was shaking her head not at herself but at the camera lens that hovered immediately in front of her nose. She did not speak, but she sang a snatch of an old Rod Stewart song, her voice faint beyond the glass but audible.

‘I don’t wanna talk about it,’ she sang. And then: ‘Hey, boy, don’t bother me.’ After that she was silent and avoided engaging directly with her reflection. Now Coleridge saw Carlisle’s hand reach out beyond the front of his camera. He was holding something — a small white pouch I; which he took by a corner and shook. There was a tiny rattling sound in the deathly silence of the dark tunnel, and Coleridge ; realized with surprise what the pouch was: he had shaken one like it himself only a few weeks before during a hill walk in Snowdonia. It was a walker’s instant heat pack, an envelope full of chemicals and iron filings designed to produce a great heat in moments of need. He watched, amazed, as Carlisle crunched the pouch in his fist to form a blunt point, and began to trace letters on the glass. Clearly the heat was intended to warm the condensation on the other side. Carlisle wrote slowly, partly no doubt in order to give the heat time to conduct through the glass, but also, it seemed to Coleridge, because Carlisle was enjoying himself. His forefinger was gently stroking the glass, following the line traced by the heat pack, almost as if, by touching the two-way mirror, Carlisle felt he was in some way touching Dervla. Coleridge strained to see what Carlisle was writing. The letters were inscribed backwards, of course, but they were not difficult to follow. On the other side of the glass Dervla was watching too, her eyes darting downwards as the message appeared.

‘Don’t worry. People still care about you,’ emerged though the condensation. Dervla’s expression did not change. She kept her eyes fixed on the letters. Behind the glass in the dark corridor, unaware that he was being observed by a police inspector, Carlisle stretched out his arm and wrote a few more words.

‘Nobody out here thinks you did it.’ Three separate pairs of eyes watched as the words were slowly spelled out: ‘But you’re number one now. The people love you…And so do I.’ Coleridge was an accomplished watcher of faces, and he knew Dervla’s well from many hours of study. As he looked he saw clearly the distaste that flickered across her face.

‘La de da,’ she said, with a shrug of indifference, and began to brush her teeth. Coleridge could sense Carlisle’s tension as the cameraman fumbled to lock focus on his machine and get sight of Dervla through his own little camcorder. Clearly Carlisle coveted every image of his secret love, and once more he pushed his little lens as close to the glass as he dared without tapping it. First he stole himself a close-up of the dark tuft of hair in Dervla’s armpit, revealed to him because her arm was raised to brush her teeth. Then he panned across a little in order to capture the faint jiggling of her breasts beneath the towel caused by the movement of her arm. Finally, with the practised timing brought by experience, he swung his sights upwards just in time to capture the unwitting girl spitting the toothpaste from between her lips. Coleridge could hear the tiny motor of the camcorder hum as Carlisle zoomed into extreme close-up on Dervla’s wet, white, foaming mouth. When she had finished, Dervla went out of the bathroom and back to the girls’ bedroom. The house was silent once more. All of the inmates were in the two bedrooms on the opposite side of the house from Soapy corridor. Coleridge pressed the button on the little communicator that the Peeping Tom sound department had given him, which alerted Geraldine in the control room to the fact that he had seen enough. A moment or two later Carlisle left his camera, having been recalled by Geraldine under some professional pretext, as she had promised to do. Coleridge followed Carlisle out as he left the corridor. Once outside, blinking in the striplight of the communication tunnel that linked the house with the control complex, Coleridge laid his hand on Carlisle’s collar in time-honoured fashion, and asked him to accompany him to the station.

DAY FORTY-FIVE. 12.00 noon

O
h my God, I think I’m going to be sick. I really do think I’m going to be sick.’ Coleridge was showing Dervla some of the contents of the camcorder that he had taken from Larry Carlisle. Stacked up beside the VCR were seventeen similar mini-cassettes, retrieved by the police from Carlisle’s home.

‘You seem to have become something of an addiction for this man,’ Coleridge said.

‘Viewing his tape collection, it looks like he simply could not get enough of you.’

‘Please don’t. It’s horrible, horrible.’ There was so much of it. Hours and hours of tape. Close-ups of Dervla’s lips when she talked, when she ate, her eyes, her ears, her fingers, but most of all, of course, her body. Carlisle had recorded virtually every single moment that she had spent in the bathroom from day three onwards, becoming ever more practised at gaining close-ups of any intimate area that had been carelessly revealed to him. Often in the shower the weight of the water had pulled at Dervla’s sodden knickers, revealing the top of her pubic hair and, when she turned round, an inch or so of the cleft of her bottom. Carlisle had clearly lived for these moments, and he zoomed in to extreme close-up whenever the opportunity arose.

‘I can’t believe I’ve been so stupid,’ Dervla said, her voice choking with disgust and embarrassment.

‘Of course, I should have guessed why he was being so encouraging towards me, but I had no idea…I…’ Dervla, normally so strong, so self-assured, contemplated the creepily silent dislocated images of her own body on the screen, a body rarely viewed whole but broken up into intrusive, intimate close-ups, and she wept. The tears ran down her face as the soapy water on the screen ran down her stomach and her thighs.

‘Did you get messages in the mirror every day?’

‘Not every day, but most days.’

‘What did they say?’

‘Oh, nothing very startling. ‘How are you?’ That kind of thing. ‘You’re doing great’.’

‘So he talked about the game.’

‘Well, not in any great detail. He was writing backwards in condensed steam, after all.’

‘Did he ever mention Kelly?’

‘No.’ It was a fool’s lie.

‘Actually, yes, I think he did mention her,’ Dervla said quickly.

‘Yes or no. Miss Nolan?’

‘I just said yes, didn’t I? Sometimes…a little…he mentioned them all.’ Half a lie. Was that any better? Or worse? ‘I don’t know why he sent me messages,’ she added.

‘I never asked him to.’

‘He’s in love with you. Miss Nolan.’

‘Please don’t say that.’

‘He loves you, Dervla, and that is something that you are going to have to deal with, because I doubt that what he has done is going to get him any kind of prison sentence. When you come out of the house he’ll be waiting for you.’

‘You really think so?’

‘That’s my experience of obsessives. They can’t just turn it off. You see, he thinks you love him back. After all, you’ve been flirting with him for weeks.’

‘I haven’t…’ But even as she said it Dervla knew that denial was pointless.

‘I…just sort of fell into it,’ she continued.

‘It was a laugh, a game. It’s so boring in that house. The same dull stupid people that you can’t even really get to like because you’re in competition with them. You’ve no idea…And then there was this jokey thing going on, just for me. I had a secret friend on the outside who wished me luck and told me I was doing all right. You can’t imagine how weird and insecure it is in that house, how vulnerable you feel. It was nice to have a secret friend.’ Dervla looked at the screen on which Larry Carlisle’s tape was still playing. She was in the shower again, her hand inside the cups of her sodden bra, soaping her breasts, the shape of her nipples clearly visible.

‘Can we turn that off, please?’

‘I want you to see this next bit.’ The image on the screen flickered and changed to the girls’ bedroom. It was night and all the girls appeared to be asleep.

‘My God, he had a nightsight on his camcorder!’ Dervla gasped.

‘I’m afraid to say, my dear, that this man did not miss anything.’ On the screen Dervla was lying in bed. It had clearly been a hot night, as she was covered by only a single sheet. She was asleep, or so it seemed until her eyes opened for a moment and flickered about the room. Now the camera panned down from her face to her body. It was possible to make out Dervla’s hand gently moving beneath the sheet, moving downwards to below her waist, the outline of her knuckles standing out against the cotton as her fingers moved gently beneath it. The camera returned to focus once more on Dervla’s face: her eyes were closed but her mouth was open. She was sighing with pleasure. Sitting in Coleridge’s office, Dervla turned deep crimson with angry embarrassment.

‘Please!’ She snapped.

‘This isn’t fair.’ Coleridge switched off the tape.

‘I wanted you to see and to know just how little respect this man has had for you. You and he have been partners of sorts. You are partners no longer.’ Dervla felt scared.

‘Surely, inspector, you can’t really be thinking that there’s any connection between this silly lark and…And…Kelly’s death?’ Coleridge waited for a moment before replying.

‘You said his messages mentioned Kelly?’

‘Well, yes, they did but…’

‘What did they say?’

‘They said…They said that people liked her and that they liked me. They liked us both.’

‘I see. And did he ever tell you who they liked more? Your ranking, so to speak.’ Dervla looked the chief inspector in the eye.

‘No. Not specifically.’

‘So you did not know that prior to Kelly’s death you were in second place after her.’

‘No, I did not.’

‘Just remind me once more. Miss Nolan. How much is the prize worth for the winner of this game?’

‘Well, it’s gone up since, but at the time of the murder it was half a million pounds, chief inspector.’

‘How are things at your parents’ farm in Ballymagoon?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I believe your parents are in danger of losing their farm and family home. I was wondering how all that was going. How they were taking it, so to speak.’ Dervla’s face turned cold and hard.

‘I don’t know of late, inspector. I’ve been inside the house. But I imagine they’ll survive. We’re tough people in our family.’

‘Thank you. That will be all, Miss Nolan,’ Coleridge said.

‘For the moment.’