Dead Famous

DAY FORTY-FIVE. 3.10 p.m.

“‘I’d kill her for you if I could,’” Coleridge read out. “Well, that’s pretty damning, isn’t it?”

“So there he is,” Hooper pressed on eagerly. “The man who wrote that message, standing with his camera pointing at the toilet door, knowing that the object of his hatred is inside. What does he do? He locks his camera in the position he has been told to maintain, creeps back along Soapy corridor, up Dry, through the wall hatch into the boys’ bedroom, picks up a sheet from outside the sweatbox, emerges from the bedroom covered in it, and the rest we know. It’s Carlisle we see cross the living area to pick up the knife from the kitchen drawer, Carlisle who bursts in on Kelly, and Carlisle who murders her.”

“Well…” said Coleridge warily.

“I know what you’re going to say, sir. I know, I know. What about the bedroom? It’s covered by cameras too…”

“It had occurred to me, yes,” Coleridge answered.

“If he’d entered the room from Dry and gone and picked up a sheet at the sweatbox we would have seen it and we didn’t.”

“Yes, and not only did we not see it, but what we did see was a person emerge from the sweatbox and pick up the sheet.”

“Yes, sir, but only on video. No one who was in the sweatbox recalls a second person leaving it. Therefore either one, some or all of them are lying.”

“I agree.”

“Unless the video is lying. Carlisle is a trained camera operator. We know from his extraneous activities that his interest in the tools of television is not merely professional. Is there some way that he could have corrupted the evidence of the hot-head camera in the bedroom? The imaging of the figure emerging into the sheet is pretty unclear. Trisha and I have been wondering if he could have somehow frozen the picture being broadcast for a few moments -”

“After all, the image had remained unchanged for hours already,” Trisha interrupted. “Is it possible that he somehow looped a few seconds or simply paused it for long enough to cross the room to the sweatbox?”

“After which it would all happen in real time as we saw it,” Hooper concluded.

“He would have had to pull the same trick on the way back,” said Coleridge. “We saw the murderer return to the sweatbox, don’t forget.”

“I know. There are a lot of problems with the theory,” pressed Hooper, “but don’t forget, sir, that Carlisle was very hazy about the timings of when the events happened. Do you remember that he claimed that only two minutes had passed from when Kelly went to the toilet to when the killer emerged from the bedroom, while everybody in the monitoring bunker said it was five, which was proved on the time code. And he claimed that as much as five minutes passed after the killer had re-emerged until the murder was discovered, whereas in fact it was only two. Again the people in the box and the actual time code all concurred. Those are big discrepancies, sir, but understandable ones, of course, if it was actually Carlisle who committed the murder. Anybody might imagine that two minutes was five and that five was two if they had spent those minutes killing someone with a kitchen knife.”

“Yes,” conceded Coleridge. “I think they might. I suggest you speak to the relevant boffins in order to see how these remote cameras might be interfered with. And of course we’d better have another word with Miss Nolan.”