Dead Famous

DAY TWENTY-NINE. 8.30 p.m.

“I think he had been planning on making only one blow,” said Coleridge. “After all, he couldn’t afford to get any blood on him.”

“Tough call, that, if you happen to be knifing somebody.”

“Just one huge blow, straight into the brain. Instant death.”

“And no geyser of blood.”

“Exactly, but the girl must have moved her head and he hit the neck.”

“Fortunately for him not the jugular.”

“No, not the jugular. He got away without getting marked, just.”

“One lucky bastard.”

Coleridge was forced to agree: the killer had indeed been one lucky bastard.

“I still say it would take a man to deliver a blow like that, and a strong one,” Hooper continued.

“It doesn’t. We proved that,” said Trisha with a touch of impatience. She herself had spent an unpleasant afternoon at a local butcher’s shop plunging knives into pigs’ skulls.

“I know that a woman could have done it, but at what risk?” Hooper insisted. “If the knife had got stuck in the bone of the skull, for instance – that happened with the pigs, Trish, half the times you tried it. What’s more, the force required is huge, and there’s no guard on a kitchen knife. You were wearing gloves, but your hand slipped occasionally. What if hers had done? She’d have cut off her own fingers. Kelly would have grabbed the sheet. It would have been all up. The chances of a woman pulling off a blow like that are quite small.”

“Except for Sally,” Coleridge said. Big, beefy Sally. The Internet’s murderer of choice.

“Why on earth would Sally murder Kelly?” said Trish, a little too quickly.

“Why would any of them?” Coleridge answered. “The only thing we can say for sure is that any one of them could have done it. The killer was right-handed and so are all of the remaining housemates. However, I concede that it is more probable that one of the stronger ones did it. Probably a man.”

They all turned back to the screen. The figure had thrown open the door at 11.44 and twenty-nine seconds. The first blow had fallen two and a half seconds later, the next and final one two seconds after that. The killer had been inside the lavatory for considerably less than ten seconds in all.

“If it wasn’t all so damned clinical,” Coleridge observed, “I would have said that the attack was frenzied.”

The tape played on. The killer had clearly taken two sheets from the pile when he left the sweatbox, for now as he raised himself up from making the second blow he threw one over his victim. The other one continued to cover him as he left the toilet.

“And you talked to the cameraman on duty, constable?” Coleridge enquired.

“Yes, I did, sir,” Trish replied, “at length. His name is Larry Carlisle. He saw the figure in the sheet enter the lavatory and moments later he saw the figure emerge.” Trisha gathered up her case notes and quoted from the transcript of her interview with the cameraman…

“‘I saw the figure follow the victim into the toilet at approximately twenty to midnight. He re-emerged shortly thereafter and headed back across the living area towards the boys’ bedroom. I did not cover him with my camera as I had been instructed to continue to watch the toilet for Kelly in order to obtain more good nude footage. I remained there, watching the door, until the alarm was raised. I recall thinking that she was having a long time in the loo. I had only twenty minutes to go until my shift finished and I was beginning to think I’d have to leave her for the next bloke. Anyway, about four or five minutes after the figure in the sheet emerged, they all rushed down from the monitoring bunker, and you know the rest.’”

“Four or five minutes?” said Coleridge when Trisha had finished reading.

“That’s what he said.”

“According to the people in the box and the time codes it was no more than two.”

“I suppose if you’re just standing staring at a door it would be easy to misjudge a period of time.”

“How long did he say elapsed between Kelly emerging from the bedroom and the killer following her?”

“He said two, but gets that wrong as well, because it was around five.”

Coleridge got out the big red ledger in which he kept his notes for the case and wrote down Carlisle’s name and the discrepancies the man had made in his timings. Coleridge wrote in longhand, and it always seemed to take him about a week to complete a sentence.