Dead Famous

toilet. Carlisle captures this moment beautifully and gets complimented from the monitoring box for his efforts. Now Kelly disappears into the toilet and Carlisle is instructed to cover the door in the expectation of getting more good nude material when she emerges.”

“But she doesn’t emerge.”

“No, because he kills her, sir. It could so easily have been him. Put yourself in his shoes, the shoes of a besotted man, a man who from the very beginning has been risking his job, his future in the industry, his marriage – don’t forget, sir, Carlisle is married with children. He’s been risking everything for the love of Dervla -”

“A love that’s mirrored by his hatred of Kelly,” Trisha chipped in. “Look at this, sir.” She had brought a large folder into the room with her, the sort of folder that an artist or graphic designer might use to keep their portfolio of work in. Inside it were a series of photographs that the people at Forensic had taken of their work on the tunnel side of the two-way mirror.

In the first photo it was impossible to make anything out. All that could be seen was a streaky, dusted surface where a finger had clearly traced numerous letters on top of one another. Then Trish produced a second copy of the photograph, and then a third, on which the relevant experts had struggled to make sense of the mess; here in different-coloured translucent pastel shades they had followed different sentences, sometimes getting a clear reading, sometimes making informed guesses.

“Look at that one, sir,” said Kelly, pointing to a sentence that was traced out in red. “Not very nice, is it?”

DAY TWENTY-SIX. 8.00 a.m.

“The bitch Kelly still number one. Don’t worry my darling. I will protect you from the cocksucking whore.”

Dervla reached forward to the mirror and angrily rubbed out the words. She had come to dread brushing her teeth in the morning. The messages had been getting steadily angrier and uglier, but she could say nothing about it for fear of revealing her own complicity in the communication. Of course, she no longer encouraged him, she no longer spoke to the mirror, and had wracked her brains to think of a way of telling the man on the other side to stop. The only idea that she had had was singing songs with vaguely relevant lyrics.

“I don’t wanna to talk about it.” “Return to sender.” “Please release me, let me go.”

But the messages kept coming. Each one uglier than the last. “I swear to you my precious, I’d kill her for you if I could.”

DAY FORTY-FIVE. 3.10 p.m.

“‘I’d kill her for you if I could,’” Coleridge read out. “Well, that’s pretty damning, isn’t it?”

“So there he is,” Hooper pressed on eagerly. “The man who wrote that message, standing with his camera pointing at the toilet door, knowing that the object of his hatred is inside. What does he do? He locks his camera in the position he has been told to maintain, creeps back along Soapy corridor, up Dry, through the wall hatch into the boys’ bedroom, picks up a sheet from outside the sweatbox, emerges from the bedroom covered in it, and the rest we know. It’s Carlisle we see cross the living area to pick up the knife from the kitchen drawer, Carlisle who bursts in on Kelly, and Carlisle who murders her.”

“Well…” said Coleridge warily.

“I know what you’re going to say, sir. I know, I know. What about the bedroom? It’s covered by cameras too…”

“It had occurred to me, yes,” Coleridge answered.

“If he’d entered the room from Dry and gone and picked up a sheet at the sweatbox we would have seen it and we didn’t.”

“Yes, and not only did we not see it, but what we did see was a person emerge from the sweatbox and pick up the sheet.”

“Yes, sir, but only on video. No one who was in the sweatbox recalls a second person leaving it. Therefore either one, some or all of them are lying.”

“I agree.”

“Unless the video is lying. Carlisle is a trained camera operator. We know from his extraneous activities that his interest in the tools of television is not merely professional. Is there some way that he could have corrupted the evidence of the hot-head camera in the bedroom? The imaging of the figure emerging into the sheet is pretty unclear. Trisha and I have been wondering if he could have somehow frozen the picture being broadcast for a few moments -”

“After all, the image had remained unchanged for hours already,” Trisha interrupted. “Is it possible that he somehow looped a few seconds or simply paused it for long enough to cross the room to the sweatbox?”

“After which it would all happen in real time as we saw it,” Hooper concluded.

“He would have had to pull the same trick on the way back,” said Coleridge. “We saw the murderer return to the sweatbox, don’t forget.”

“I know. There are a lot of problems with the theory,” pressed Hooper, “but don’t forget, sir, that Carlisle was very hazy about the timings of when the events happened. Do you remember that he claimed that only two minutes had passed from when Kelly went to the toilet to when the killer emerged from the bedroom, while everybody in the monitoring bunker said it was five, which was proved on the time code. And he claimed that as much as five minutes passed after the killer had re-emerged until the murder was discovered, whereas in fact it was only two. Again the people in the box and the actual time code all concurred. Those are big discrepancies, sir, but understandable ones, of course, if it was actually Carlisle who committed the murder. Anybody might imagine that two minutes was five and that five was two if they had spent those minutes killing someone with a kitchen knife.”

“Yes,” conceded Coleridge. “I think they might. I suggest you speak to the relevant boffins in order to see how these remote cameras might be interfered with. And of course we’d better have another word with Miss Nolan.”

DAY FORTY-SIX. 2.30 p.m.

The sight of Dervla being escorted from the house by the police for the second time in one day caused a sensation both outside and in. Surely this must mean that she was now the number-one suspect?

Geraldine could scarcely contain her delight. “The fucking cops are flogging our show for us,” she crowed. “Just when everybody thought Loopy Sal’ done it, they nick the virgin princess twice! Fuck me sideways, it’s brilliant. But we have to make plans. A lot of moolah’s riding on this. If they don’t give us Dervla back we’ll cancel this week’s eviction, all right? Can’t lose two of the cunts in one week, just can’t afford it. A week of this show is worth more money than I can count!”

Hamish and Moon were up for eviction this week, but if Dervla went it seemed that they would get a reprieve. The nominations had been the most relaxed since the relatively calmer days of Woggle and Layla. With Sally gone there had been a general lifting of the gloom, besides which Sally was a prime suspect for having committed the murder, so her absence had made the house feel safer.

It felt safer no longer, of course. There had been shock and fear at Dervla’s second removal by the police.

“Fookin’ ’ell, I thought I were all right with her,” said Moon. “We’ve been sharing a fookin’ bedroom! I lent her a jumper.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Jazz. “The cops are fishing, that’s all.”