Dead famous (30 page)

DAY FORTY-FIVE. 1.30 p.m.

A
t first Geraldine had not wanted Dervla back in the house.

‘Fuck her, the cheating little cow. I’ll teach her for cock-teasing my cameramen and giving the show a bad name.’ Geraldine was angry and embarrassed that such a thing could have been going on under her nose without her having any idea about it. Her professional pride was deeply wounded, and she wanted to have her revenge on Dervla, of whom she was jealous anyway. Soon, however, wiser counsel prevailed. To eject Dervla would almost certainly mean admitting the reason for it, which would only compound Geraldine’s embarrassment. Dervla was now the most popular and most fancied housemate, added to which was the fact that she had been removed by the police for further questioning, which massively increased her fascination. Her photograph was all over the morning’s papers, looking pale and beautiful as she was led from the house. The press had been forced to rethink their conviction that Sally was the killer, ^K(^ and their banner headlines read ‘police detain Dervla’, ‘Dervla arrested’. Soon she would be all over the evening news with reporters standing outside the house breathlessly announcing that the police had failed to lay charges against her. This was exactly the kind of incident that Geraldine needed to keep the whole story at the top of the nation’s, and indeed the world’s, agenda. All in all, Dervla was too important to the show to let go.

‘It’ll mean keeping that disgusting pervert Carlisle,’ Geraldine complained.

‘If we sack him but leave her alone the cunt will blackmail us. At least I know I would.’

DAY TWENTY. 12.40 p.m.

W
illiam Wooster, or Woggle as he was more generally known, was released on bail of £5000, which was stood by his parents. The police had appealed against bail being granted on the grounds that Woggle, being a member of the itinerant, alternative community and a known tunneller, might easily abscond. The judge took one look at Dr and Mrs Wooster, him in tweeds, her in pearls, and decided that it would be an insult to two such obvious pillars of the community to deny them the company of their wayward son. Woggle absconded within two hundred metres of the court. After his brief appearance before the majesty of the law he and his parents had fought their way through the crowd of reporters who were waiting outside the courtroom, got into the waiting minicab and had driven off together. That, however, was as far as Woggle was prepared to go in this return to family life. Woggle waited for the first red traffic light and, when the cab pulled up to stop, simply got out and ran. His parents let him go. They had been through this so many times before and were just too old for the chase. They sat together in the car, contemplating the fact that the company of their son had this time cost them over £1000 a minute.

‘Next time we won’t do this,’ said Woggle’s dad. Woggle ran for about a mile or so, dodging this way and that, fondly imagining that his dear old father was tearing after him waving his umbrella. When he finally believed himself safe, he decided to stop in a pub for a pint and a pickled egg. It was here that he was forced for the first time to come to terms with the extent of the blow that Peeping Tom had dealt him. For it was not just the police and the press who knew him now. Everybody knew him, and they did not like him, not one little bit. A group of men surrounded him at the bar as he waited to be served.

‘You’re that cunt, aren’t you?’ Said the nastiest looking of the gang.

‘If you mean am I beautiful, warm, welcoming and hairy, yes, then you could say I was a cunt.’ It was a piece of bravado that Woggle had cause to regret as the man instantly decked him.

‘I offer up the hand of peace,’ Woggle said from the floor. The man took it and dragged him outside by it, where the. Whole gang comprehensively beat Woggle up.

‘Not so easy when you ain’t kicking little girls, is it?’ Said the thugs, as if by attacking him with odds at six to one they were ; doing something brave. They left him lying in the proverbial pool of blood with broken teeth filling his mouth and hatred filling his soul. Hatred not for the thugs, who as an anarchist he considered merely unenlightened comrades, but for Peeping Tom Productions.

He skulked away from the pub, dressed his wounds as best he could in a nearby public toilet and then went underground.! Literally. He returned to the tunnels whence he had come. There better to nurse his colossal sense of grievance. To dig it deeper into his angry heart with every stone and ounce of earth that he moved. They had brought him low. All of them. The people on the inside of the house and the ones across the moat in the bunker. Dig, dig, dig. Geraldine Hennessy. That witch. He had thought that he could I trust her, but he had been mad. Dig, dig, dig. You could not trust anyone. Not straights, not muggles, not fascist television people, and certainly not those bastards in the house. Particularly the ones who had pretended to be his friend. He hated them most. Not Dervla, of course, not the Celtic Queen of the Runes and Rhymes. Dervla was all right, she was a beautiful summer pixie. Woggle had seen the tapes and she had not nominated him. But the other one, the one who had made the tofu and molasses comfort cake! What a hypocritical slag that bitch had been! He’d eaten it, too. Late at night when she wasn’t looking. Well, he’d show her. Dig, dig, dig. He hadn’t wanted to kick that girl. She’d come at him with her dogs and now the whole country loathed him and he was facing a prison sentence. Woggle was scared of prison. He knew that the people in prisons were even straighter than the ones on the outside. They didn’t like people like Woggle. Especially people like Woggle who kicked fifteen-year-old girls. That was why he had gone back underground. To hide and to plan. Woggle decided as he scraped away at the earth that if he was going down, he was not going down alone. He would have his revenge on them all. Dig, dig, dig.

DAY FORTY-FIVE. 3.00 p.m.

T
risha and Hooper checked the lab report for the final time, took deep breaths, and walked into Coleridge’s office. The police had had the two-way mirror glass through which Carlisle had been sending his messages to Dervla removed and sent to the forensic lab for analysis. The conclusions had come back within a few hours, and it seemed to Trisha and Hooper that they rather changed everything.

‘We think this builds a pretty strong case against the cameraman, Larry Carlisle, sir.’ Coleridge looked up from the notes he had been reading.

‘Look at this.’ Hooper produced the summary of the evidence found by the forensic technicians.

‘Carlisle wrote his messages with his instant heat pack, but he also traced them with his finger. The heat from the pack warmed the condensation on the other side.’

‘I know that, sergeant. I told you.’

‘Well, because Dervla wiped away the steam on her side it looked as if the messages were gone for ever. But the residue his finger left on the glass on his side remained. There are stains, sir. Stains and smears.’

‘Stains and smears?’

‘Semen, I’m afraid.’

‘Ye gods.’

‘I’ve spoken to Carlisle. He admits that he regularly masturbated during his duty shifts. He claims they all did.’

‘Oh no, surely not!’ Coleridge protested.

‘Carlisle seemed to think it was hardly surprising, sir. As he said, once Geraldine cut the shifts down to one man, the operator was all alone in a darkened corridor for eight hours, covered in a big blanket. They’re all men and they’re staring at beautiful young women undressing and taking showers.’ Hooper almost added, ‘What would you do?’ But he valued his job and restrained himself.

‘Carlisle says they sometimes called the corridors the peep booths,’ Trisha added. Coleridge stared out of the window for a moment. Three years. That was all he had left, then he could retire and go away for ever and listen to music and reread Dickens and tend the garden with his wife, give more time to amateur dramatics and never have to consider a world of secretly masturbating cameramen ever again.

‘You’re saying he wrote his messages in semen?’

‘Well, there weren’t puddles of it. I think it was more a case of traces of the stuff being left on his fingers.’ Trisha noticed that during this part of the conversation Coleridge addressed himself exclusively to Hooper. He absolutely did not look at her. Coleridge was a man who still believed that there were some things which were better off not discussed in mixed company. Not for the first time Trisha found herself wondering how it was that Coleridge ever came to be a police officer at all. But on the other hand, he was incorruptible, believed passionately in the rule of law and was acknowledged as a superb detective, so perhaps it was not necessary that he also live in the same century as everybody else.

‘All right,’ Coleridge said angrily.

‘What did the lab say?’

‘Well, sir, it’s all pretty jumbled up and overlaid, but when dusted, four messages can be made out and some of others are partly there. They all give Dervla the current popularity score. Two of the clear ones are pre Woggle’s eviction and put Dervla in third place behind him and Kelly, then with Woggle gone the two girls both move up one. Dervla knew the score from the start. Carlisle told her.’

‘But she denied it when we asked her. What a foolish young woman.’

‘Well, she could obviously see that her knowing her position relative to Kelly would give her a motive for murder. Half a million pounds is a lot of money, particularly if your mum and dad are broke.’

‘And she was closest to the exit in the sweatbox,’ Trisha added.

‘The least that she’s been guilty of is withholding evidence, and I intend to make sure that she regrets it,’ said Coleridge.

‘Well, of course, sir, but we think Carlisle is the issue,’ said Trisha.

‘Dervla was his motive. He wanted desperately to be the one who helped her to win, and he was convinced that Kelly stood in the way.’

‘You think his desire for her to win could be a strong enough motive for murder?’

‘Well, he’s pathologically obsessed with her, sir, we know that. And you only have to look at the tapes he made to see how weird and warped that love is. Surely it’s possible that this aching, gnawing proximity to the object of his affections totally unbalanced him.’

‘Love is usually the principal motive in crimes of passion,’ Hooper chipped in, quoting Coleridge himself, ‘and this was clearly a crime of passion.’

‘Do you remember what happened to Monica Seles, sir, the tennis player?’ Said Trisha eagerly.

‘Exactly what we’re suggesting happened here. A sad, besotted psycho fan of her rival Steffi Graf stabbed Seles in the insane belief that such an action would advance Graf ‘s career, and that Graf would thank him for it.’

‘Yes,’ conceded Coleridge.

‘I think the example is relevant.’

‘But consider this, sir,’ Hooper jumped in.

‘Not only did Larry Carlisle have the motive, he had the opportunity.

‘You think so?’ Said Coleridge.

‘Well…Almost the opportunity.’

‘In my experience opportunities for murder are never ‘almost’.’

‘Well, there’s one bit we can’t work out, sir.’

‘I look forward to hearing you admit that to a defence lawyer,’ Coleridge observed drily, ‘but carry on.’

‘Until now we’ve all been working on the assumption that the murderer was one of the people in the sweatbox.’

‘For understandable reasons, I think.’

‘Yes, sir, but consider the case against Carlisle, who was even closer to the victim. First of all he sees Kelly emerging from the boys’ bedroom and sweeping naked across the living area towards the toilet. Carlisle captures this moment beautifully and gets complimented from the monitoring box for his efforts. Now Kelly disappears into the toilet and Carlisle is instructed to cover the door in the expectation of getting more good nude material when she emerges.’

‘But she doesn’t emerge.’

‘No, because he kills her, sir. It could so easily have been him. Put yourself in his shoes, the shoes of a besotted man, a man who from the very beginning has been risking his job, his future in the industry, his marriage — don’t forget, sir, Carlisle is married with children. He’s been risking everything for the love of Dervla—’

‘A love that’s mirrored by his hatred of Kelly,’ Trisha chipped in.

‘Look at this, sir.’ She had brought a large folder into the room with her, the sort of folder that an artist or graphic designer might use to keep their portfolio of work in. Inside it were a series of photographs that the people at Forensic had taken of their work on the tunnel side of the two-way mirror. In the first photo it was impossible to make anything out. All that could be seen was a streaky, dusted surface where a finger had clearly traced numerous letters on top of one another. Then Trish produced a second copy of the photograph, and then a third, on which the relevant experts had struggled to make sense of the mess; here in different-coloured translucent pastel shades they had followed different sentences, sometimes getting a clear reading, sometimes making informed guesses.

‘Look at that one, sir,’ said Kelly, pointing to a sentence that was traced out in red.

‘Not very nice, is it?’

DAY TWENTY-SIX. 8.00 a.m.

T
he bitch Kelly still number one. Don’t worry my darling. I will protect you from the cocksucking whore.’ Dervla reached forward to the mirror and angrily rubbed out the words. She had come to dread brushing her teeth in the morning. The messages had been getting steadily angrier and uglier, but she could say nothing about it for fear of revealing her own complicity in the communication. Of course, she no longer encouraged him, she no longer spoke to the mirror, and had wracked her brains to think of a way of telling the man on the other side to stop. The only idea that she had had was singing songs with vaguely relevant lyrics.

‘I don’t wanna to talk about it’.

‘Return to sender.’

‘Please release me, let me go.’ But the messages kept coming. Each one uglier than the last.

‘J swear to you my precious, I’d kill her for you if I could.’