Dead Famous

DAY THIRTY-FOUR. 10.00 a.m.

While various junior officers went off to run the phrase “Far corgi in heaven” around the Internet and through various voice decoders, Coleridge and his inner team put David to one side for a moment and returned to the subject of Woggle.

“It seems to me that, for all that the public knew, there really was only one housemate in week two,” Coleridge said, glancing through the digest of the broadcast edits that Trisha and her team had prepared for him. “Woggle, Woggle, Woggle and once more Woggle.”

“Yes, sir,” Trisha replied. “Briefly he became a sort of mini national phenomenon. Half the country were talking about him and the other half were asking who was this Woggle bloke that everybody was talking about. Don’t you remember it?”

“Very vaguely, constable.”

“The more revolting he got and the more he denied that he was revolting the more people loved him. It was a sort of craze.”

“I’ll never forget when they showed him picking the fleas out of his dreadlocks,” remarked another constable. “We were in the pub and it was on the telly; everybody just sort of gasped. It was soooo gross.”

“Gross if you were watching it. Pretty unbearable if you were living with it,” said Trisha. “Those fleas nearly brought the whole thing to a halt there and then. Shame they didn’t, really, then nobody would have got killed.”

“And we wouldn’t have to watch this torturous drivel,” said Coleridge. “Didn’t those sadists at Peeping Tom offer them any flea powder?”

“Yes, they did, but Woggle refused to use it. He said that his fleas were living creatures, and while he didn’t much like the itching he had no intention of murdering them.”

“Good lord,” Coleridge observed. “An abstract opinion! A moral point of view. I’d given up all hope.”

“Well, it wasn’t abstract to the housemates, sir. And Woggle’s flea debate gripped the nation.”