Dead Famous

when an inspector could treat his constables in that manner had long gone. He would not be at all surprised if there was a court in Brussels that could be cajoled into maintaining that the freedom to chew gum was a human right. He confined his reaction to a withering stare, which caused the girl’s jaw to stop moving for all of three seconds.

“We must therefore be extremely cautious in our views, for apart from a brief interview with each of the surviving housemates after the murder, we know these people only through the deceiving eye of the television camera, that false friend, so convincing, so plausible, so real and yet, as we have already seen, so fickle and so false. We must therefore begin at the beginning with all of them and presume nothing. Nothing at all.”

And so the grim task of reviewing the House Arrest tape archive continued.

“It’s day three under House Arrest and Layla has gone to the refrigerator to get some cheese.” This was the voice of Andy, House Arrest’s narrator. “Layla’s vegan cheese is an important part of her diet, being her principal source of protein.”

“You see how television pulls the wool over our eyes!” Coleridge exclaimed in exasperation. “If we weren’t concentrating, we might actually have formed the impression that something of interest had occurred! This man’s talent for imbuing the most gut-wrenchingly boring observations with an air of significance normally reserved for matters of life and death is awe-inspiring.”

“I think it’s the Scottish accent,” said Hooper. “It sounds more sincere.”

“The man could have covered the Cuban Missile Crisis without altering his manner at all… It’s midnight in the Oval Office and President Kennedy has yet to hear from Secretary Khrushchev.”

“Who was Khrushchev?” Hooper asked.

“Oh, for God’s sake! He was General Secretary of the Soviet Union!”

“Never heard of it, sir. Is it affiliated to the TUC?”

Coleridge hoped that Hooper was joking but decided not to ask. Instead he pressed play again.

“Layla has just discovered that some of her cheese has gone missing,” said Andy.

“He says it as if she’s just discovered penicillin,” Coleridge moaned.

DAY THREE. 3.25 p.m.

Layla slammed the fridge door angrily. “Hey right, I mean, yeah, I mean, come on, OK? Who’s been eating my cheese?”

“Oh yeah, right. That was me,” said David. “Isn’t that cool?” David always spoke to people in the sort of soft, faintly superior tone of a man who knows the meaning of life but thinks that it’s probably above everybody else’s head. Normally he talked to people from behind because he tended to be massaging their shoulders, but when he addressed them directly he liked to stare right into their eyes, fancying his own eyes to be hypnotic, limpid pools into which people would instinctively wish to dive.

“I mean, I thought it would be cool to have a little of your cheese,” he said.

“Oh, yeah,” Layla replied. “Half of it, actually… But that’s totally cool. I mean totally, except you will replace it, right?”

“Sure, yeah, absolutely, whatever,” said David, as if he was above such matters as worrying about whose cheese was whose.

“Later,” said Andy the narrator, “in the girls’ room, Layla confides in Dervla about how she feels about the incident involving the cheese.”

Layla and Dervla lay on their beds.

“It’s not about the cheese,” Layla whispered. “It’s so not about the cheese. It’s just, you know, it was my cheese.”

DAY THIRTY-ONE. 8.40 a.m.

“I’m honestly not sure if I can continue with this investigation,” said Coleridge.

DAY THIRTY-ONE. 2.00 p.m.

“Actually it was Layla’s cheese that gave Geraldine her first crisis.”

Trisha had returned to the monitoring bunker to speak once more with Bob Fogarty. She and Coleridge had agreed that Fogarty was the person who knew most about the housemates and also about the workings of Peeping Tom. “Why was there a crisis over the cheese?” she asked Fogarty.

“Well, because the duty editor resigned and took both his assistants with him. I had to come in myself and cover. Don’t you call that a crisis? I call it a crisis.”

“Why did he resign?”

“Because unlike me he still had some vestige of professional pride,” Fogarty reflected bitterly, dropping a square of milk chocolate into his cup of watery foam, something Trisha had never seen anyone do before. “As a highly trained, grown-up adult, he simply could not continue to go home to his wife and children each evening and explain that he’d spent his entire working day minutely documenting a quarrel between two complete idiots about a piece of cheese.”

“And so he resigned?”

“Yes. He sent Geraldine an email saying that House Arrest was a disgrace to the British television industry, which, incidentally, it is.”

“And what did Geraldine do?”

“What do you think she did? She leaned out of her window and shouted, ‘Good riddance, you pompous cunt!’ at him as he got into his car.”

“She didn’t mind, then?”

“Well, it was very inconvenient certainly, particularly for me, but we soon got a replacement. People want to come to us. We make ‘cutting-edge television’, you see.” Fogarty’s voice was bitter with sarcasm. “We’re at the sharp end of the industry, we’re hip, challenging and innovative. This is, of course, an industry where they thought it was challenging and innovative when the newsreaders started perching on the fronts of their desks instead of sitting behind them… Damn!”

Fogarty fished about in his cup with a teaspoon, searching for the square of chocolate. Trisha concluded that he had been intending only to soften the outside rather than melt it completely. People develop strange habits when they spend their working lives in dark rooms.

“God, I was jealous of that bloke who left,” Fogarty continued. “I came into television to edit cup finals and Grand Nationals! Drama and comedy and science and music. What do I end up doing? I sit in the dark and stare at ten deluded fools sitting on couches. All day.”

Trisha was discovering one of the great secrets of House Arrest. The people who worked on it loathed the people they were charged with watching.

“It’s all just so boring! No one is interesting enough to be looked at the way we look at these people, and particularly not the sort of person who would wish to be looked at. It’s catch twenty-two, you see. Anyone who would want to be in that damn stupid house is by definition not an interesting enough person to be there.” Fogarty stared at his bank of television monitors. A long, sad, hollow silence ensued.

“It’s the hugging I hate most, you know,” he said finally, “and the