Ben Elton - Dead Famous

“Who? Who was the accomplice?” gasped Chloe.

“Why, Bob Fogarty, of course. It could only be Bob Fogarty, the man who made such a heavy-handed point of hating Ms Hennessy, a man with video-editing skills equal to your own, Ms Hennessy. Because I put it to you, Geraldine Hennessy, that the world never saw Kelly murdered! That dark event remains unrecorded. It is the tape that you and Fogarty made at Shepperton that was played that night and which has so absorbed the interest of the public ever since! Your construction of a murder that had yet to happen and which you and he dropped into edit mix at the point at which the real Kelly entered the lavatory. I have taken some advice on this matter and have been told that the opening of the door would be a good point at which to switch the tapes. From that moment on, you and all the people in the monitoring bunker were watching the tape you had made and not the actual feed from the cameras . You yourself have boasted that computer time codes can easily be falsified, and with you and Fogarty working together it was a simple matter to switch your television monitors over to playing the tape.”

Geraldine tried to speak, but no sound came. The floor manager did what all floor managers do and brought her a plastic cup of water.

“Now that Kelly was in the lavatory, although you of course could no longer see her, you used the remote-controlled lock that you yourself had insisted on having installed and sealed the lavatory door, trapping poor Kelly and thus insuring yourself against the possibility of her completing her lavatorial functions before you could get to her. You then excused yourself from the monitoring bunker, saying that like the girl on the screen you too needed to spend a penny, and you rushed off to do your terrible deed!”

There was sensation in the studio and, of course, across the globe. Seldom can any television performer have had so attentive an audience. All over the world pans boiled dry, dinners burned and babies’ cries went unheeded. There was no talk of cutting to an ad break now.

“Go on,” sneered Geraldine. “What am I supposed to have done then?”

“You ran under the moat, along the connecting tunnel, I imagine having first grabbed for yourself a strategically placed smock. I feel certain that somewhere there is an incinerator in London that could tell a tale of a blood-stained coverall. You ran into the corridor and from there you made your way into the boys’ bedroom. Once inside the house you grabbed a sheet from the top of the pile that you had instructed the housemates to place outside the sweatbox. That polythene construction in which the people you see standing here tonight were sweating with drunken lust -”

“Not me, I’d been evicted,” Layla piped up, but Coleridge swept on.

“You covered yourself with the sheet, emerged into the living area and went to get the knife, pausing briefly at the kitchen cupboard to take out the predictions envelope, tear it open and put its contents inside a new but identical envelope. It was then, of course, that you added your extra note, predicting a second murder. No one saw any of this, of course, because the editors were watching the video that you and Fogarty had made a month before, a video on which Kelly Simpson was sitting peacefully on the lavatory, and for the time being no other figures were to be seen. There was the live cameraman to consider, of course, but Larry Carlisle had been instructed to cover the lavatory door and wait for Kelly. This is why Carlisle claimed a much shorter time had elapsed after Kelly went to the lavatory before the killer emerged, because the figure he saw rush past him in a sheet was you, the real killer . Meanwhile, in the monitoring bunker, your accomplice Fogarty and the editing team were still watching a peaceful house in which a lone girl was sitting on the lavatory. You, Ms Hennessy, would be back in the monitoring bunker before your tape revealed a besheeted figure entering the lavatory.”

There were gasps and applause from the audience.

“Unreal,” said Chloe. “Mental. Absolutely mental. Just totally wicked.”

Geraldine remained aloof and silent, seemingly held at bay by the three cameras pointing at her.

“But I’m getting ahead of myself,” said Coleridge. “Poor Kelly Simpson is still alive… Although only for a few more moments. The door to the lavatory springs open, unlocked at the appointed time by your colleague in the bunker, you burst in on the unsuspecting girl, but you do not find her as you had hoped, sitting on the lavatory as per your impersonation on the video you had made. No, she is kneeling in front of the lavatory, being sick. This is no good – everything must be as it is on the tape: the girl must die sitting and, most importantly, she cannot have been sick because she is not seen being sick on your tape. You grab her, you spin her round, she no doubt thinks that someone has come to help her, but no, you’ve come to kill her. With admirable coolness you stab her first in the neck and then, deploying the full force of your passion, your strength and your greed , you bury the blade in her skull, working quickly, knowing that seconds count. You flush the toilet and clean the vomit from the bowl. You do a good job, Ms Hennessy, but not quite good enough. A few tiny flecks are left on the seat. Then, and at this point I can only gasp at your icy cool, you clean out the dead girl’s mouth . Did you have a cloth? Toilet paper would have stuck to her teeth. Your shirt cuff, perhaps? I don’t know, but crucially I do know that in doing what you did you marked the dead girl’s tongue! Kelly was only seconds dead and so could still bruise, unfortunately for you, Ms Hennessy. You could not, of course, clear the vomit from the back of her mouth and her throat, but you had done your best, a best which was very nearly good enough. But time is short, Kelly is bleeding. If she bleeds too much on you, you’re done for. Quickly you place the corpse in the same sitting position that you yourself took on your tape. You put a second sheet on top of the dead girl and, covering yourself once more in your own sheet, you leave the lavatory. Again, Larry Carlisle sees the besheeted figure exit the lavatory minutes before the editors do, because on their screens still nothing has happened yet ; on their screens Kelly Simpson is still alive! I applaud you, Ms Hennessy, you designed the process so that Larry Carlisle’s story concurred exactly with what was seen in the monitoring bunker. It was only the timings that you could not fix.”

Once more there were murmurs of appreciation in the studio.

“Now you run, back through the living area and into the boys’ bedroom,” Coleridge said, his voice rising, “pausing only to take the sheet you have been using to cover yourself and quickly wipe it round all of the boys’ beds in order that a confusion of skin cells and other DNA matter will be present on it. Perhaps you wore gloves and a hair scarf? I don’t know, since at the time I was too stupid to consider the possibility of testing for anyone other than the people who had been in the sweatbox.”

There were cries of “No!” at this. Coleridge was the hero of the hour and the audience would not hear a word said against him, even by himself.

“You go back into the corridor,” Coleridge continued, “you run through the tunnel, hide your coverall and arrive back in the monitoring bunker just in time to see your identical version of the murder take place on screen. You have created the perfect alibi: you’re sitting safely and prominently with your editors when the murder takes place, so nobody could suspect you. The murder, like everything that happens on these so-called ‘reality’ programmes, was built in the edit, it was nothing more than television ‘reality’.” Coleridge paused momentarily for breath. He knew that shortly he must bring on his ghost.