Dead Famous

DAY TWENTY-EIGHT. 7.20 p.m.

“Why did you pull the sheet off?” Coleridge asked. “You must know that it’s wrong to disturb the scene of a crime.”

“It’s also wrong to ignore an injured person in distress. I didn’t know she was dead, did I? I didn’t even know there’d been a crime, as a matter of fact. I didn’t know anything. Except that there was blood everywhere, or something that looked like blood. If I really try to remember what I was thinking at the time, inspector, I honestly still think that I half hoped it was a joke, that somehow the inmates had managed to turn the tables on me for letting them down over Woggle.”

Coleridge pressed play. The cameras had recorded everything: the little group of editors standing outside the toilet, Geraldine reaching in and pulling at the sheet. Kelly being revealed still sitting on the toilet, slumped forward, her shoulders resting on her knees. A large dark pool, flowing from the wounds in her neck and skull, growing on the floor. Kelly’s feet in the middle of the pool, a flesh-coloured island growing out of a lake of red.

And, worst of all, the handle of the Sabatier kitchen knife sticking directly out of the top of Kelly’s head, the blade buried deep in her skull.

“It was all so weird, like a cartoon murder or something,” Geraldine said. “I swear with that knife hilt sticking out of her head she looked like a fucking Teletubby. For a quarter of a second I still wondered whether we were being had.”