Dead Famous

Astonishingly, such was the hostage mentality that had developed amongst the housemates that Jazz and Dervla did as they were told, returning to the darkness of the boys’ bedroom, where the others were emerging from the sweatbox, hot, naked and confused.

“What’s going on?” David asked.

“I don’t know,” Dervla replied. “We’re to stay in here.”

Then somebody in the edit suite took it upon themselves to turn on all the lights in the house. The seven inmates were caught almost literally in the headlights. They stood around the redundant sweatbox blinking at each other, naked, reaching for sheets, blankets, towels, anything to cover their red-skinned, sweaty embarrassment, memories of the previous two wild hours turning their hot red faces still redder. It was as if they were all fourteen years old and had been caught in the process of a mass snog by their parents.

“Oh my God, we look so stupid,” said Dervla.

Outside, Geraldine was taking charge. Later on it was generally agreed that, having got over her shock, she had acted with remarkable cool-headedness.

Having confined the seven remaining inmates to one room, she ordered everybody to retrace their steps and do everything possible to avoid further altering the scene of the crime.

“We’ll stand in the camera run,” she said, “and wait for the cops.”

DAY TWENTY-EIGHT. 6.00 a.m.

Six hours later, as Coleridge left the scene of the crime, the light was beginning to break on an unseasonably grim and drizzly morning.

“Murder weather,” he thought. All of his homicide investigations seemed to have taken place in the rain. They hadn’t, of course, just as his boyhood summer holidays had not all been bathed in endless cleansing sunshine. None the less, Coleridge did have a vague theory that atmospheric pressure played a tiny role in igniting a killer’s spark. Premeditated murder was, in his experience, an indoor sport.

From beyond the police barriers hundreds of flashbulbs exploded into life. For a moment Coleridge wondered who it might be that had caused such a flurry of interest. Then he realized that the photographs were being taken of him. Trying hard not to look like a man who knew he was being photographed, Coleridge walked through the silver mist of half-hearted rain and flickering strobe light towards his car.

Hooper was waiting for him with a bundle of morning papers. “They’re all basically the same,” he said.

Coleridge glanced at the eight faces splashed across every front page, one face set apart from the others. He had just met the owners of those faces. All but Kelly, of course. He had not met her, unless one could be said to have met a corpse. Looking at that poor young woman curled up on the toilet floor, actually stuck to it with her own congealed and blackened blood, a kitchen knife sticking out of the top of her head, Coleridge knew how much he wanted to catch this killer. He could not abide savagery. He had never got used to it; it scared him and made him question his faith. After all, why would any sane God possibly want to engineer such a thing? Because he moved in mysterious ways, of course; that was the whole point. Because he surpasseth all understanding. You weren’t meant to understand. Still, in his job it was hard sometimes to find reasons to believe.

Sergeant Hooper hadn’t enjoyed the scene much either, but it was not in his nature to ponder what purpose such horror might have in God’s almighty plan. Instead he took refuge in silly bravado. He was thinking that later he would tell the women constables that Kelly had looked like a Teletubby with that knife coming out of the top of her head. It was the same thought that Geraldine had had. Fortunately for Hooper he never ventured such a remark within Coleridge’s hearing. Had he done so he would not have lasted long on the old boy’s team.

DAY TWENTY-EIGHT. 2.35 a.m.

They had received the call at one fifteen, and had arrived at the scene of the crime to take over the investigation by two thirty. By that time, probably the biggest mistake of the case had already been made.

“You let them wash?” Coleridge said, in what was for him nearly a shout.

“They’d been sweating in that box for over two hours, sir,” the officer who had been in charge thus far pleaded. “I had a good look at them first and had one of my girls look at the ladies.”

“You looked at them?”

“Well, blood’s blood, sir. I mean, it’s red. I would have spotted it. There wasn’t any. I assure you we had a very good look. Even under their fingernails and stuff. We’ve still got the sheet, of course. There’s a few drops on that.”

“Yes, I’m sure there is, the blood of the victim. Sadly, though, we do not have a problem identifying the victim. She’s glued to the lavatory floor! It’s the killer we’re looking for, and you let a group of naked suspects in a knife- attack wash!”

There was no point pursuing the matter further. The damage was done. In fact, at that point in the investigation Coleridge was not particularly worried. The murder had been taped, the suspects were being held, all of the evidence was entirely contained within a single environment. Coleridge did not imagine that it would be long before the truth emerged.

“This one’s got to be a bit of a no-brainer,” Hooper had remarked as they drove towards the house.

“A what?” Coleridge enquired.

“A no-brainer, sir. It means easy.”

“Then why don’t you say so?”

“Well, because… Well, because it’s less colourful, sir.”

“I prefer clarity to colour in language, sergeant.”

Hooper wasn’t having this. Coleridge wasn’t the only one who had been woken up at one in the morning. “What about Shakespeare, then?” Hooper reached back in his mind to his English Literature GCSE for a quote. He retrieved a sonnet:

“What about ‘Shall I compare you to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.’ Perhaps he should have just said, ‘I fancy you’?”

“Shakespeare was not a policeman embarking on a murder inquiry. He was poet employing language in celebration of a beautiful woman.”

“Actually, sir, I read that it was a bloke he was talking about.”

Coleridge did not answer. Hooper smiled to himself. He knew that one would annoy the old bastard.

And Coleridge was annoyed once more, for, once they had arrived at the house, it became very quickly clear to him that this investigation was by no means straightforward at all.

The pathologist had no light to shed on the subject. “What you see is what you get, chief inspector,” she said. “At eleven forty-four last night somebody stabbed this girl in the neck with a kitchen knife and immediately thereafter plunged the same knife through her skull, where it remained. The exact time of the attack was recorded on the video cameras, which makes a large part of my job rather redundant.”

“But you concur with the evidence of the cameras?”

“Certainly. I would probably have told you between eleven thirty and eleven forty, but of course I could never be as accurate as a time code. Bit of luck for you, that.”

“The girl died instantly?” Coleridge asked.

“On the second blow, yes. The first would not have killed her had she gone on to receive treatment.”

“You’ve watched the tape.”

“Yes, I have.”

“Do you have any observations to offer?”

“Not really, I’m afraid. I suppose I was a little surprised at the speed with which the blood puddle formed. A corpse’s blood doesn’t flow from a wound, you see, because the heart is no longer pumping it. It merely leaks, and an awful lot leaked in two minutes.”