Dead Famous

unenlightened comrades, but for Peeping Tom Productions.

He skulked away from the pub, dressed his wounds as best he could in a nearby public toilet and then went underground. Literally. He returned to the tunnels whence he had come. There better to nurse his colossal sense of grievance. To dig it deeper into his angry heart with every stone and ounce of earth that he moved.

They had brought him low. All of them. The people on the inside of the house and the ones across the moat in the bunker.

Dig, dig, dig.

Geraldine Hennessy. That witch. He had thought that he could trust her, but he had been mad.

Dig, dig, dig.

You could not trust anyone. Not straights, not muggles, not fascist television people, and certainly not those bastards in the house. Particularly the ones who had pretended to be his friend. He hated them most. Not Dervla, of course, not the Celtic Queen of the Runes and Rhymes. Dervla was all right, she was a beautiful summer pixie. Woggle had seen the tapes and she had not nominated him. But the other one, the one who had made the tofu and molasses comfort cake! What a hypocritical slag that bitch had been! He’d eaten it, too. Late at night when she wasn’t looking. Well, he’d show her.

Dig, dig, dig.

He hadn’t wanted to kick that girl. She’d come at him with her dogs and now the whole country loathed him and he was facing a prison sentence. Woggle was scared of prison. He knew that the people in prisons were even straighter than the ones on the outside. They didn’t like people like Woggle. Especially people like Woggle who kicked fifteen-year-old girls.

That was why he had gone back underground. To hide and to plan. Woggle decided as he scraped away at the earth that if he was going down, he was not going down alone. He would have his revenge on them all.

Dig, dig, dig.

DAY FORTY-FIVE. 3.00 p.m.

Trisha and Hooper checked the lab report for the final time, took deep breaths, and walked into Coleridge’s office.

The police had had the two-way mirror glass through which Carlisle had been sending his messages to Dervla removed and sent to the forensic lab for analysis. The conclusions had come back within a few hours, and it seemed to Trisha and Hooper that they rather changed everything.

“We think this builds a pretty strong case against the cameraman, Larry Carlisle, sir.”

Coleridge looked up from the notes he had been reading.

“Look at this.” Hooper produced the summary of the evidence found by the forensic technicians. “Carlisle wrote his messages with his instant heat pack, but he also traced them with his finger. The heat from the pack warmed the condensation on the other side.”

“I know that, sergeant. I told you.”

“Well, because Dervla wiped away the steam on her side it looked as if the messages were gone for ever. But the residue his finger left on the glass on his side remained. There are stains, sir. Stains and smears.”

“Stains and smears?”

“Semen, I’m afraid.”

“Ye gods.”

“I’ve spoken to Carlisle. He admits that he regularly masturbated during his duty shifts. He claims they all did.”

“Oh no, surely not!” Coleridge protested.

“Carlisle seemed to think it was hardly surprising, sir. As he said, once Geraldine cut the shifts down to one man, the operator was all alone in a darkened corridor for eight hours, covered in a big blanket. They’re all men and they’re staring at beautiful young women undressing and taking showers.”

Hooper almost added, “What would you do?” but he valued his job and restrained himself.

“Carlisle says they sometimes called the corridors the peep booths,” Trisha added.

Coleridge stared out of the window for a moment. Three years. That was all he had left, then he could retire and go away for ever and listen to music and reread Dickens and tend the garden with his wife, give more time to amateur dramatics and never have to consider a world of secretly masturbating cameramen ever again. “You’re saying he wrote his messages in semen?”

“Well, there weren’t puddles of it. I think it was more a case of traces of the stuff being left on his fingers.”

Trisha noticed that during this part of the conversation Coleridge addressed himself exclusively to Hooper. He absolutely did not look at her. Coleridge was a man who still believed that there were some things which were better off not discussed in mixed company. Not for the first time Trisha found herself wondering how it was that Coleridge ever came to be a police officer at all. But on the other hand, he was incorruptible, believed passionately in the rule of law and was acknowledged as a superb detective, so perhaps it was not necessary that he also live in the same century as everybody else.

“All right,” Coleridge said angrily. “What did the lab say?”

“Well, sir, it’s all pretty jumbled up and overlaid, but when dusted, four messages can be made out and some of others are partly there. They all give Dervla the current popularity score. Two of the clear ones are pre Woggle’s eviction and put Dervla in third place behind him and Kelly, then with Woggle gone the two girls both move up one. Dervla knew the score from the start. Carlisle told her.”

“But she denied it when we asked her. What a foolish young woman.”

“Well, she could obviously see that her knowing her position relative to Kelly would give her a motive for murder. Half a million pounds is a lot of money, particularly if your mum and dad are broke.”

“And she was closest to the exit in the sweatbox,” Trisha added.

“The least that she’s been guilty of is withholding evidence, and I intend to make sure that she regrets it,” said Coleridge.

“Well, of course, sir, but we think Carlisle is the issue,” said Trisha. “Dervla was his motive. He wanted desperately to be the one who helped her to win, and he was convinced that Kelly stood in the way.”

“You think his desire for her to win could be a strong enough motive for murder?”

“Well, he’s pathologically obsessed with her, sir, we know that. And you only have to look at the tapes he made to see how weird and warped that love is. Surely it’s possible that this aching, gnawing proximity to the object of his affections totally unbalanced him.”

“Love is usually the principal motive in crimes of passion,” Hooper chipped in, quoting Coleridge himself, “and this was clearly a crime of passion.”

“Do you remember what happened to Monica Seles, sir, the tennis player?” said Trisha eagerly. “Exactly what we’re suggesting happened here. A sad, besotted psycho fan of her rival Steffi Graf stabbed Seles in the insane belief that such an action would advance Graf’s career, and that Graf would thank him for it.”

“Yes,” conceded Coleridge. “I think the example is relevant.”

“But consider this, sir,” Hooper jumped in. “Not only did Larry Carlisle have the motive, he had the opportunity.”

“You think so?” said Coleridge.

“Well… almost the opportunity.”

“In my experience opportunities for murder are never ‘almost’.”

“Well, there’s one bit we can’t work out, sir.”

“I look forward to hearing you admit that to a defence lawyer,” Coleridge observed drily, “but carry on.”

“Until now we’ve all been working on the assumption that the murderer was one of the people in the sweatbox.”

“For understandable reasons, I think.”

“Yes, sir, but consider the case against Carlisle, who was even closer to the victim. First of all he sees Kelly emerging from the boys’ bedroom and sweeping naked across the living area towards the