Dead Famous

DAY TWENTY-NINE. 8.00 p.m.

Having spent the day reviewing the footage from the very first day in the house, Coleridge and Hooper turned once more to the tape of the night of the murder. The same images that Geraldine, the Peeping Tom production team and 47,000 Internet subscribers had watched live less than forty-eight hours before. Those same strange, fuzzy, bluish-grey pictures that the night-sight cameras had transmitted from the boys’ bedroom. A bedroom that seemed innocent and empty, entirely normal, save for the weird-looking plastic box in the middle of the room, a box which they knew contained eight drunk, naked people, the only evidence of whom were the strange bulges that seemed to undulate against the polythene walls from time to time. It was an eerie and depressing sight for the two policemen, knowing as they did that one of those living bulges was shortly to die.

“He could have done it inside the box,” said Hooper thoughtfully. “Why didn’t he do it in the box?”

“Or she,” Coleridge reminded Hooper, “or she. We refer to the murderer as a he for convenience’s sake but we must never ever forget that it could be a woman.”

“Yes, all right, sir, I know. But what I’m saying is that nobody would have known, if he or she had done it inside the box, if a hand had reached out in the darkness holding a small knife, which the murderer could easily have sneaked in with him. It would have been relatively simple to just slit a throat in the dark and wait until people smelt blood, or felt it. By the time anybody realized that the warm stuff flowing all over them wasn’t sweat they’d all have been drenched in it. Maybe that’s what he planned.”

“There was no small knife in the box when we searched it, or in the room.”

“Well, sir, if he’d suddenly decided to follow the victim to the toilet instead, he could have put it back in the kitchen drawer when he got the bigger one.”

“I don’t think so, sergeant. How could he have been sure of his kill in that darkness? Whether he’d stabbed the right person and whether he’d finished the job properly? Chances are it would have been a terrible mess. He would have just cut off a nose or something, or somebody else’s nose, or his own fingers.”

“Well, he had to do it some time. How would he have known that a better chance was going to emerge?”

“He didn’t know, but he was waiting. If the chance hadn’t come, my guess is that he would have carried on waiting.”

“For how long? Until his prey got voted out and escaped him altogether?”

“Ah, but he or she knew that the prey hadn’t been nominated that week, giving at least eight days’ grace.”

“All I’m saying,” the sergeant insisted, “is that if I was desperate to kill somebody in that house, I would have reckoned a crowded, darkened sweatbox, inside which everybody was drunk, to be about the best shot I was going to get.”

“Well, the drinking is a factor, surely. I suppose he knew that people would have to start going to the lavatory at some point.”

“He couldn’t be certain.”

“No, he couldn’t be certain of anything. However and whenever he chose to do it, this was always going to be a risky sort of murder.”

Coleridge looked at the time code on the video. They had pressed pause at 11.38. He knew that when he pressed play the code would tick over to 11.39 and Kelly Simpson would emerge from the sweatbox to take what would be the final brief walk of her life.

Kelly Simpson, so young, so excited, so certain of her splendid fun-filled destiny, gone into that stupid, pointless house to die. In Coleridge’s mind there appeared the image of how she had been on that very first day in the house, jumping into the pool with excitement, shrieking about how “wicked” it all was. And wicked was without doubt the word, because the time was now 11.38 on Kelly’s last day in the house, and in a few more minutes she would be in a pool once more. A pool of her own blood.

“The point I’m making, sir,” Hooper pressed on, “is that if he was planning to kill her, which we have presumed he was, then he must have been considering the possibility of doing her inside the sweatbox. He could not have known for certain that she would go to the loo, or that he would be able to conceal his identity when he followed her into it.”

Coleridge stared at the screen for a long time. Difficult to believe that there were eight people in that foolish little plastic construction. “Unless the catalyst for the murder did not occur until after they had entered the box,” he mused. “Unless whatever it was that made the killer want Kelly dead did not occur until moments before she ran to the toilet, and in fact he ran after her in an act of spontaneous fury.”

“Or fear,” Hooper added.

“Yes, that’s right. Or fear. After all, since none of these people knew each other before they entered the house…”

“Or so we have been told, sir.” This remark came from Trisha, who had just returned with a round of teas.

“Yes, that’s right, constable, so we have been told,” said Coleridge. “We have been working on the theory that the catalyst that provoked the murder must have taken place at some point between the housemates entering the house and their entering the box. But of course something terrible might have happened once they were inside the box.”

“Well, it would certainly explain why the people at Peeping Tom have no idea about a motive,” Trisha conceded, sugaring Coleridge’s tea for him.

“It would indeed. And this situation was after all developing into an orgy.”

Coleridge pronounced the word “orgy” with a hard “g”. Hooper wondered whether he did it deliberately and rather thought he must.

“Quite a volatile environment, I should imagine. An orgy,” Coleridge continued.

“Are you suggesting a rape, sir?” said Trisha. “That someone forced themselves upon Kelly and then killed her in order to avoid the consequences?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time a rape turned into a murder.”

“But the others? We’ve talked to them all. They didn’t notice anything. I mean, you simply could not keep a thing like that quiet.”

“Couldn’t you? In that environment? Besides, consider the possibility that they were all conspirators. That they were all covering up for the one who actually did the dirty work.”

“You mean perhaps they all wanted Kelly dead?”

“Perhaps,” said Coleridge. “It would certainly explain the startling lack of evidence in any of their statements.”

“You think that perhaps she had something on them, that she knew something about them all?”

Coleridge accepted his mug of tea from Trisha without looking at her. Instead he continued to stare at the box on the screen. He was imagining something very ugly. “Or because they’d all done something to her,” he said finally.

“Some kind of group abuse?” Hooper said. “A gangbang?”

Coleridge wanted to tell Hooper to use some other more suitable term, but he knew that there wasn’t one. For the umpteenth time he pressed play and 11.38 ticked over to 11.39. Kelly emerged from the sweatbox.