Ben Elton - Dead Famous

“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 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?”

“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.”

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