Dead Famous

DAY THIRTY-THREE. 5.10 p.m.

It had been six days since the murder, and Sergeant Hooper and his team continued with the huge task of trawling through the vast archive of unseen Peeping Tom footage. Searching diligently for any hint of an incident that might have turned somebody’s mind to murder. It was gruelling work even for Hooper, who was a big House Arrest fan, fitting their audience profile and advertiser expectations perfectly. Hooper was the opposite of Coleridge, a very modern copper, a hip, mad-for-it, bigged-up, twenty-first-century boy with baggy trousers, trainers, an earstud and a titanium Apple Mac Powerbook. Hooper and his mates never missed any of the various reality TV shows, but even he was being ground down by the task he now faced. Fortunately not all seven hundred and twenty hours a day of camera activity were available to the police, the vast bulk of it having been discarded on a daily basis by the Peeping Tom editors. But there were still hundreds of hours left, and watching it was like watching paint dry. Worse, at least paint did eventually dry. This lot seemed to stay wet for ever.

Hamish picking his nose again… Jazz scratching his bum.

The girls doing their yoga, again.

Garry doing more press-ups.

Garry doing chin-ups on the doorframes.

Garry running on the spot…

Hooper was beginning to despise the people in the house, and he did not want to. Quite apart from the fact that he did not think it would help him in his detection work, in a way these were his people. They had similar interests and ambitions, a similar honest conviction that they had a right to be happy. Hooper did not want to start thinking like Coleridge. What was that man like? Always banging on about the housemates having no sense of “duty” or “service” or “community”. As if wanting to have it large made you an enemy of society.

Nonetheless, they were seriously beginning to wear him down. It was just that they never did anything, and, more irritatingly, they never thought anything. That most defining of all human characteristics, the capacity for abstract thought, was pressed solely into the service of… of… Nothing.

Hooper cursed inwardly. He was even beginning to think like Coleridge.

And of clues to a murder there were none.

Until Trisha spotted something.

Not much, but something.

“Have a look at this, sergeant,” she said. “Arsey little moment between Kelly the slapper and David the ponce.”

“Arsey, constable? Slapper? Ponce?” Hooper replied, in Coleridge’s schoolmasterly tone, and they both smiled grimly at the thought of the linguistic strictures under which they were obliged to work.

It was only a minor incident, just a whisper of a possibility, but then the police had long since given up any hope of happening upon the obvious.

“We are looking for a catalyst,” Hooper explained to the assembled officers. “In chemistry, sometimes the tiniest element, if added to other compounds, can cause the most explosive results. That’s what we’re looking for: a tiny psychological catalyst.”

It had sounded good when Coleridge had said it to Hooper, and it sounded even better when Hooper showed off with it to his constables. Coleridge might have the lines, but Hooper felt that he knew how to deliver them.

The potential catalyst that Trisha had found was tiny indeed. It had not even been interesting enough for Peeping Tom to broadcast it, but Trisha found it interesting, and so did Hooper.