Dead Famous

or straight, men like to put it about a bit, full stop. But when it comes to football, you only ever support one team, don’t you? You’re faithful, Moon, it’s true love.”

Watching from the depths of the monitoring bunker, Geraldine Hennessy could see that without Woggle life in the house was beginning to look dull. She needed to do something quickly to pep things up. Her solution was to give the housemates more to drink. “What is the number-one interest people have in watching these programmes?” she asked her production team at their morning meeting the next day. There was silence. Geraldine’s minions all learned quickly that most of her questions were rhetorical.

“To see if any of the inmates shag, am I right? Of course I’m right. When you get down to it, that’s what it’s all about. But basically it never fucking happens, does it? Nobody ever actually does it! We all keep up the pretence that it’s going to happen, us and the newspapers and the bleeding Broadcasting Standards Commission, we all pretend that it’s all so bleeding titillating when it patently isn’t. But nobody ever actually does the business. And why is that, I ask myself?”

She was indeed asking herself, for her cowed minions remained silent.

“Because nobody is ever pissed enough, that’s why! Which, in a nutshell, is the problem with reality TV! Not enough booze! Oh, we can give them hot spas and massage rooms and nookie huts and all that bollocks, but in the long run no one is going to do the nasty, insert the portion, prise open the clam, heat up the sausage or cleave the bearded monster with the one-eyed lovesnake unless they are completely arseholed!”

Everybody shuffled their papers and looked embarrassed. They all knew that they were involved in a fairly tawdry exercise, but they fervently wished that Geraldine would not revel in it quite so much.

Then Geraldine announced that she was changing the rules. She was going to separate the food and alcohol budgets in order to remove the usual constraint of having to sacrifice a meal for a drink.

There were protests, of course, once it was announced, from the watchdogs and the bishops. Geraldine took the moral high ground, her usual defence for descending into the gutter. “We believe that people should be treated as adults,” she sniffed. “If you set up a valid experiment such as ours and then police it from the outside as if it was some fifth-form trip, you learn nothing about the people involved. Our intention is to facilitate and encourage genuine social interaction.”

Nobody was fooled, of course. The tabloids put it most succinctly with their leader comment: “It’s House A’pissed! Lets get ’em drunk and watch ’em shag.”

Of course even Geraldine had to draw a line somewhere. These people were locked in a house with no TV, no writing equipment, no sense of time and almost nothing to do except a few foolish tasks, for weeks on end. Given the chance, most people would start drinking the moment they got up in the morning and carry on until collapsing into unconsciousness at night. Peeping Tom could not allow that. There were, after all, strict broadcasting standards to observe. Therefore, Peeping Tom banned daytime drinking and also rationed it during weekday evenings. At weekends, however, it was party time, and the housemates could have as much to drink as they liked.

“And my rule in life has always been,” Geraldine told a press conference, “that the weekend starts on Thursday.”

That afternoon, the Thursday following the drama of Layla’s eviction and Woggle’s arrest, found the store room where Peeping Tom left the house supplies filled with booze.

Under normal circumstances Thursday should have meant another round of eviction nominations, but because of Woggle’s unexpected departure it was announced that the evictions for that week would be cancelled and that things would be picked up as normal on the following Thursday. If ever there was an excuse for a party, this surely had to be it.

DAY THIRTY-SIX. 1.00 p.m.

Coleridge had spent another fruitless morning out at Shepperton Studios wandering around the replica Peeping Tom house, foraging in his imagination for some stroke of insight that might lead on to a theory.

Something was forming in his mind, the beginnings of an idea, but it was just a theory. There was nothing much so far to back it up. Still, better to be chewing on something rather than nothing, even if it did prove to be a red herring in the end. He returned to the station to find a faxed letter from the Irish Garda waiting for him. It was in response to an inquiry he had made to them about Ballymagoon, the village which Coleridge had heard mentioned on the radio and which was at the centre of an economic slump in rural Ireland. Dervla’s home village.

Suspect family still resident in village, the letter read. Both parents and two younger sisters continue to live at family home. Family do not appear to have escaped effects of slump. Considerable financial hardship, car sold, negative equity on house and farm, mounting debts. Recent request for loans denied.

Well, thought Coleridge, if ever a girl had a pressing reason for wanting to win half a million pounds it was Dervla. On the other hand, he knew from many years of experience that when it came to money most people did not need a pressing reason to covet half a million pounds.

Nonetheless, her parents were in danger of losing their farm. And volunteering to be on House Arrest was quite a strange choice for a girl like Dervla to make. Of all of the housemates, she was undoubtedly the most… Coleridge struggled for the word… “beautiful” sprang into his mind, but he fought it out again. Finally he settled upon “different.” Dervla was the most different.

There was no doubt about it that, as motives went, money was always a good one. Coupled with imminent family shame it was terrific… Except killing one housemate was scarcely going to guarantee her victory. It was only week four, there were seven other competitors, and it seemed unlikely that she had been planning to kill them all.

She could not even have known that she was a popular housemate. None of them knew anything about what the world was thinking.

Something to save for later was about all Coleridge could construe from his fax from the Irish police. He put it in the Dervla file and asked a constable to add a “motive” note to her photograph on the wall map. Then he joined Trisha and Hooper at their habitual position in front of the video screen.

They were looking at day eighteen.

“Look at all that booze. Must be over a hundred quid’s worth,” said Trisha.

“It was the only way to get things going,” Hooper replied. “Geraldine Hennessy said as much to the press at the time.”

“Surely these people must have realized that they were being manipulated?” Coleridge observed. “Getting them drunk is such a transparent ploy.”

“Of course they realized it, sir, but you have to try and understand that they’re not like you. They don’t mind. And frankly if I was stuck in a sealed house with David and his guitar for weeks on end and somebody stuck five crates of booze on the table, I’d get stuck in myself.”

“But have they no sense of personal privacy? Dignity?”

Hooper could disguise his exasperation no longer. “Well, sir, being as how they’ve all volunteered to be on the programme and they’ve been wandering around in their knickers ever since, I would say that the answer to that would probably have to be no.”

“Don’t take that tone with me, sergeant.”

“What tone, sir?”

“You know damn well what tone.”

“I do not know what tone.”

“Well, don’t take it anyway.”

On the screen, while the other housemates began their evening’s drinking, Moon got up and made her way to the confession box. “I just wanted to say… that I’ve been thinking about the trick I played on Sally and the girls the other night, you know, when I said all that stuff about being abused and institutionalized…”