Dead Famous

Now a girl came running out to join Jazz. A pretty girl with a happy laughing face and a small jewel stud through one nostril.

Kelly. Real job: sales consultant. Star sign: Libra.

“Wicked!” shouted Kelly.

“Chh chh boom!” Jazz replied.

Kelly began to jump up and down, clapping her hands together with excitement. “Wicked! Unreal! Amped up!” She shouted, and, kicking off her baggy hipsters, she jumped into the pool.

“Sales consultant?” Coleridge enquired. “What does that mean?”

“Shop girl,” said Hooper. “Miss Selfridge.”

Coleridge stared at Kelly’s flickering image on the screen. “Did you see those trousers she was wearing? They showed half her bottom.”

“I’ve got a pair exactly the same,” Trisha remarked.

“Well, frankly, Patricia, I’m surprised. You could see her knickers poking out of the top.”

“That’s the point, sir.”

“It is?”

“Yes, sir, no sense paying for a CK G-string if people can’t see it, is there?”

Coleridge did not ask what CK stood for. He wasn’t falling into obvious traps like that. “What sense of her own worth does that girl have if she chooses to boast about her underwear?”

Coleridge wondered if he was the only person in the world who felt so completely culturally disenfranchised. Or were there others like him? Living secret lives, skulking in the shadows, scared to open their mouths for fear of exposure. People who no longer understood the adverts, let alone the programmes.

On the TV screen Kelly burst back out of the water, and as she did so one of her breasts popped momentarily over the top of her sodden vest. By the time she surfaced for a second time she had got it covered up. “Oh my God!” shouted Kelly. “I’m wearing my microphone. Peeping Tom’ll kill me.”

“She was wrong about that,” Hooper remarked. “Kelly’s famous boob. I remember it well. Definitely worth the cost of a mike. They used it in the trailers, all hazy in slow-motion, very cheeky, very nice. It was in the papers, too – ‘It’s House A-BREAST!’ Most amusing, I thought.”

“Could we get on, please?” Coleridge snapped testily.

Hooper bit his lip. He pressed play and a young woman with tattoos and a Mohican haircut strutted out of the house to look at the swimming pool.

Sally. Real job: female bouncer. Star sign: Aries.

“They should say ‘Real job: token lesbian’,” said Trisha. “She’s the gay one. They have to have a gay or a dyke, I think it’s part of the Broadcasting Standards Commission guidelines.”

Coleridge wanted to object to the word “dyke” but he wondered whether perhaps it had become the officially accepted term without his noticing. Language changed so quickly these days. “Do you think those tattoos mean anything?” he asked instead.

“Yeah, they mean keep clear ’cos I’m one scary hard bitch,” Hooper replied.

“I think they’re Maori,” Trisha said. “They certainly look Maori.”

Sally’s arms were entirely covered in tattoos; there was not a single square inch of flesh left showing from her wrists to her shoulders. Great thick stripes of blue-black snaked and coiled across her skin.

“You know she’s the number-one Internet choice for having done it,” Hooper noted, adding, “She’d be strong enough. Look at the muscles on it.”

“That knife was very sharp,” Coleridge snapped. “Any one of the people in that house would have been strong enough to pierce a skull with it if they felt strongly enough about the skull they were piercing. And would you kindly keep comments about the Internet to yourself? The fact that there are millions of bored idiots out there with nothing better to do than tap rubbish down telephone lines has absolutely nothing to do with this investigation.”

Silence reigned briefly in the incident room. Coleridge was so unabashed in the way he treated them all like schoolchildren; it was difficult to know how to react.

“This bouncer business,” Coleridge said, returning to the subject of Sally. “Known to us?”

“Soho nick have talked to her occasionally,” said Tricia, leafing through Sally’s file. “She’s cracked a few heads, but only in self-defence.”

“Her mother must be very proud.”

“She also got into a bit of a fight at last year’s Gay Pride march. Took on a couple of yobs who were jeering.”

“Why do these people feel the need to define themselves by their preferences in bed?”

“Well, if they didn’t talk about it, sir, you wouldn’t know, would you?”

“But why do I need to know?”

“Because otherwise you would presume they were straight.”

“If by that you mean heterosexual, I would not presume any such thing, constable. I would not think about it at all.”

But Trisha knew that Coleridge was deceiving himself. Trisha was quite certain that Coleridge presumed she was a heterosexual. It simply would not occur to him to think otherwise. How she longed to shock him to his foundations and prove her point by announcing that she was as entirely and absolutely a lesbian as the tattooed girl on the screen. Actually, sir, all my lovers are women and what I particularly enjoy is when they bang me with a strap-on dildo.

He would be astonished. He thought she was such a nice girl.

But Trisha didn’t say anything. She kept quiet. That was why she secretly admired women like Sally, irritating and graceless though they might be. They did not keep quiet. They made people like Coleridge think.

“Let’s move on,” said Coleridge.

“Nice knockers, girl!” Sally shouted at Kelly, who was just emerging from the pool.

Garry, all muscles and shaved head, was the next to emerge from the house. On seeing Kelly, soaking wet with her skimpy singlet clinging to her fit young body, he dropped to his knees in mock worship. “Thank you, God!” he shouted to the skies. “Something for the lads! We like that!”

Garry. Real job: van driver. Star sign: Cancer.

“Or the girls!” Sally shouted back. “You never know, she might play for my team.”

“You a dyke, then?” Garry enquired, turning to her with interest.

“Derr!” said Sally, pointing to the front of her vest on which were written the words “I eat pussy”.

“Oh, is that what it means? I thought it meant you’d just been to a Chinese restaurant!” Garry laughed hugely at his joke, which was to provoke a minor scandal when it was broadcast later that evening, being considered highly bold, provocative and controversial.

Inside the house a bald woman in a leopardskin-print mini-skirt was exploring the living area. “Check it out, guys! There’s a welcome basket! Wicked!”

Moon. Real job: circus trapeze artiste and occasional lap-dancer. Star sign: Capricorn.

“Fags, chocolate, champagne! Wicked!”

“Get stuck in!” shouted Garry from the patio doors.

The others quickly assembled around the basket and the four bottles of Sainsbury’s own-brand champagne were immediately opened. They all collapsed onto the orange, green and purple couches on which they would lounge for so much of the long days to come.

“Right, since we’re chilling out and kicking back, I might as well tell you now,” Moon shouted in her exaggerated Mancunian accent, “because at the end of the day you’re all going to find out anyways. First of all, I’m going to win this fookin’ game, all fookin’ right? So the rest of you bastards can just forget it! All right?” This