flaps of the sweat-box, and, with her bile still rising in her throat, she rushed out of the boys’ room and headed for the toilet.
A few minutes later Geraldine and her editing team watching the monitoring screens saw somebody appear at the front of the sweatbox, swathe themself in a sheet and follow Kelly to the toilet, pausing only to pick up a knife. And kill her.
DAY TWENTY-SEVEN. 11.46 p.m.
“Oh my God! Oh, please God, no!”
It was unlike Geraldine to ask assistance from anybody, least of all the Almighty, but these were, of course, very special circumstances. The puddle on the floor around Kelly had suddenly appeared and was spreading rapidly.
“Fogarty, you and Pru come with me. You too!” Geraldine barked at one of the runners. “The rest of you stay here.”
Geraldine and her colleagues rushed out of the monitoring bunker and down the stairs into the tunnel which ran under the moat, connecting the production complex to the house. From the tunnel they were able to gain access to the camera runs and from these runs there were entrances to every room in the house.
Larry Carlisle, the duty cameraman, heard a noise behind him. Later he was to explain to the police that he had been expecting to see his relief clocking on early, and had been about to turn and tell the next man not to run and make such a clatter when Geraldine and half the editing team had rushed past.
“Through the store room!” Geraldine barked, and in a moment she and her colleagues found themselves blinking in the striplit glare of the house interior. Later they were all to recall how strange it felt, even in that moment of panic, to be there inside the house. None of them had entered the house since the inmates had taken it over and now they felt like scientists who had suddenly found themselves on a petri dish along with the bugs they had been studying.
Geraldine took a deep breath and opened the toilet door.
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
DAY TWENTY-SEVEN. 11.47 p.m.
“Give me your mobile!” Geraldine barked at Fogarty, her voice shrill but steady.
“What… What?” Bob Fogarty’s eyes were fixed on the horrifying crimson vision before him, the knife. The knife in the
“Give me your mobile phone, you dozy cunt!” Geraldine snatched Fogarty’s little Nokia from the pouch at his belt.
But she could not turn it on; her hand was shaking too much. She looked up at the live hot-head that was still impassively recording the scene. “Somebody in the edit suite call the fucking police!… Somebody watching on the Internet! Do something useful for once in your crap lives! Call the fucking police!”
And so it was that the world was alerted to one of the most puzzling and spectacular murders in anybody’s memory or experience: by thousands of Internet users jamming the emergency services switchboards and, failing to get through, calling the press.
At the same time, at the scene of the crime, Geraldine seemed unsure what to do next.
“Is she… dead?” said Pru, who was peering over Fogarty’s shoulder, trying to keep the bile from rising in her throat.
“Prudence,” said Geraldine, “she’s got a kitchen knife stuck through her fucking brain.”
“Yes, but we should check all the same,” stammered Pru.
“You fucking check,” said Geraldine.
But at this point Kelly saved them from further speculation about her state of health by keeling off the toilet seat and falling to the floor. She went head first, pulled forward over her knees by the weight of her own head. This resulted in her butting the floor with the handle of the knife, which buried the blade another inch or two into her head, as if it had been hit by a hammer. It made a sort of creaking sound which caused both Pru and Fogarty to be sick.
“Oh, great. Fucking brilliant,” Geraldine said. “So let’s just throw up all over the scene of the crime, shall we? The police are going to fucking love us.”
Perhaps it was the idea of what people might think of them that led Geraldine to turn once more to the watching cameras. “You lot in the box. Switch off the Internet link. This isn’t a freak show.”
But it was a freak show, of course, a freak show that had only just begun.
“What the fuck’s going on?” It was Jazz, emerging from the boys’ bedroom, a sheet stuck to his honed, toned and sweaty body. What with his sheet and his muscley physique, Jazz looked like Dervla’s fantasy of him, a Greek God startled on Mount Olympus. He could not have looked more ridiculously out of place if he had tried.
Jazz stood on the threshold of the room staring, stunned by the bright lights and the extraordinary and unexpected presence of intruders in a house that he and his fellow inmates had had exclusive use of for weeks.
Dervla appeared behind him. She too had taken up a sheet and looked equally out of place staring at the casually dressed intruders, behind whom was the corpse. It was beginning to look as if a toga party had crashed into a road accident.
Geraldine realized that the situation was about to spiral out of control. She did not like situations that were out of control; she was a classic example of that tired old phrase, “the control freak”. “Jason! Dervla!” she shouted. “Both of you get back in the boys’ bedroom!”
“What’s happening?” Dervla said. Fortunately for them neither she nor Jazz could see into the lavatory. The gruesome sight was blocked from them by the cluster of people at its doorway.
“This is Peeping Tom!” Geraldine shouted. “There has been an accident. All house inmates are to remain in the boys’ bedroom until told otherwise. Get inside! NOW!”
