Dead Famous

DAY TWENTY-EIGHT. 6.00 p.m.

Coleridge pushed the record button on his audio tape-machine.

“Witness statement. Geraldine Hennessy,” he said before sliding the little microphone across the desk and setting it down in front of Geraldine.

“Bit of a reversal for you, eh, Miss Hennessy?”

“Ms.”

“I’m sorry, Ms Hennessy. Bit of a reversal, you being the one getting recorded, I mean.”

Geraldine merely smiled.

“So tell me about the night it happened.”

“You know as much as I do. The whole thing was recorded from start to finish. You’ve seen the tapes.”

“I want to hear it from you. From Peeping Tom herself. Let’s start with the sweatbox. Why on earth did you ask them to do it?”

“It was a task,” Geraldine replied. “Each week we set the inmates challenges to perform to keep them busy and see how they react when working together. They get to pledge a part of their weekly booze and food budgets against their chances of success. We gave them wood and tools and polythene, a couple of heating units and all the instructions, and as it happens they did a bloody good job.”

“You told them how to make it?”

“Of course we did, or how else would they have done it? If I gave you some wood and plastic and told you to construct a Native American sweatbox to seat eight, could you do it?”

“Probably not, I suppose.”

“Well, nor could this lot either. We gave them the designs and the materials and told them exactly where to put it to suit our hot-head camera. This they did and it took them three days. Then on the Saturday evening, as the sun went down, we gave them a shitload of booze and told them to get on with it.”

“Why did you let them get drunk?”

“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? To try to get them to have sex. The show had been going for three weeks and apart from a near miss with Kelly and Hamish in Bonkham Towers we’d had scarcely a hint of any nooky at all. I wanted to get them going a bit.”

“Well,” said Coleridge pointedly, “you certainly did that.”

“It wasn’t my fucking fault somebody got killed, inspector.”

“Wasn’t it?”

“No, it fucking wasn’t.”

Coleridge absolutely hated to hear a woman swear, but he knew he could not say anything about it.

“Look, I’m not a social worker, inspector. I make telly!” Geraldine continued. “And I’m sorry if it offends you, but telly has to be sexy!”

She said it as if she was talking to a senile octogenarian. Coleridge was in fact only two years older than she was, but the gap between them was chasmic. She had embraced and joined each new generation as it rose up to greet her, remaining, in her own eyes at least, forever young. He, on the other hand, had been born old.

“Why did it have to be so dark?”

“I thought it would loosen up their inhibitions if they couldn’t see each other. I wanted them all completely anonymous.”

“Well, you certainly succeeded in that, Ms Hennessy, which is the principal factor inhibiting my investigation.”

“Look! I didn’t know anybody was going to fuck off and murder someone, did I? Forgive me, but in my many years of making television it has never crossed my mind to arrange my work on the offchance that you coppers might want to look at it later in the light of a homicide investigation.”

It was a fair point. Coleridge shrugged and gestured Geraldine to continue.