Ben Elton - Dead Famous

“So you did not know that prior to Kelly’s death you were in second place after her.”

“No, I did not.”

“Just remind me once more, Miss Nolan. How much is the prize worth for the winner of this game?”

“Well, it’s gone up since, but at the time of the murder it was half a million pounds, chief inspector.”

“How are things at your parents’ farm in Ballymagoon?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I believe your parents are in danger of losing their farm and family home. I was wondering how all that was going. How they were taking it, so to speak.”

Dervla’s face turned cold and hard. “I don’t know of late, inspector. I’ve been inside the house. But I imagine they’ll survive. We’re tough people in our family.”

“Thank you. That will be all, Miss Nolan,” Coleridge said. “For the moment.”

At first Geraldine had not wanted Dervla back in the house. “Fuck her, the cheating little cow. I’ll teach her for cock-teasing my cameramen and giving the show a bad name.”

Geraldine was angry and embarrassed that such a thing could have been going on under her nose without her having any idea about it. Her professional pride was deeply wounded, and she wanted to have her revenge on Dervla, of whom she was jealous anyway. Soon, however, wiser counsel prevailed. To eject Dervla would almost certainly mean admitting the reason for it, which would only compound Geraldine’s embarrassment. Dervla was now the most popular and most fancied housemate, added to which was the fact that she had been removed by the police for further questioning, which massively increased her fascination.

Her photograph was all over the morning’s papers, looking pale and beautiful as she was led from the house. The press had been forced to rethink their conviction that Sally was the killer, and their banner headlines read “POLICE DETAIN DERVLA”, “DERVLA ARRESTED”. Soon she would be all over the evening news with reporters standing outside the house breathlessly announcing that the police had failed to lay charges against her. This was exactly the kind of incident that Geraldine needed to keep the whole story at the top of the nation’s, and indeed the world’s, agenda.

All in all, Dervla was too important to the show to let go.

“It’ll mean keeping that disgusting pervert Carlisle,” Geraldine complained. “If we sack him but leave her alone the cunt will blackmail us. At least I know I would.”

William Wooster, or Woggle as he was more generally known, was released on bail of £5000, which was stood by his parents. The police had appealed against bail being granted on the grounds that Woggle, being a member of the itinerant, alternative community and a known tunneller, might easily abscond. The judge took one look at Dr and Mrs Wooster, him in tweeds, her in pearls, and decided that it would be an insult to two such obvious pillars of the community to deny them the company of their wayward son.

Woggle absconded within two hundred metres of the court.

After his brief appearance before the majesty of the law he and his parents had fought their way through the crowd of reporters who were waiting outside the courtroom, got into the waiting minicab and had driven off together. That, however, was as far as Woggle was prepared to go in this return to family life. Woggle waited for the first red traffic light and, when the cab pulled up to stop, simply got out and ran. His parents let him go. They had been through this so many times before and were just too old for the chase. They sat together in the car, contemplating the fact that the company of their son had this time cost them over £1000 a minute.

“Next time we won’t do this,” said Woggle’s dad.

Woggle ran for about a mile or so, dodging this way and that, fondly imagining that his dear old father was tearing after him waving his umbrella. When he finally believed himself safe, he decided to stop in a pub for a pint and a pickled egg. It was here that he was forced for the first time to come to terms with the extent of the blow that Peeping Tom had dealt him. For it was not just the police and the press who knew him now. Everybody knew him, and they did not like him, not one little bit.

A group of men surrounded him at the bar as he waited to be served. “You’re that cunt, aren’t you?” said the nastiest looking of the gang.

“If you mean am I beautiful, warm, welcoming and hairy, yes, then you could say I was a cunt.”

It was a piece of bravado that Woggle had cause to regret as the man instantly decked him.

“I offer up the hand of peace,” Woggle said from the floor.

The man took it and dragged him outside by it, where the whole gang comprehensively beat Woggle up.

“Not so easy when you ain’t kicking little girls, is it?” said the thugs, as if by attacking him with odds at six to one they were doing something brave. They left him lying in the proverbial pool of blood with broken teeth filling his mouth and hatred filling his soul. Hatred not for the thugs, who as an anarchist he considered merely 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.

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.”