DAY THIRTY-TWO. 9.20 p.m.
One wall of the incident room had become known as “the Map”. On it Trisha had affixed photographs of the ten housemates, which she had then connected by a great mass of criss-crossing lines of tape stuck to the plaster with Blu-Tack. On the strips of tape Trisha and her colleagues had written short descriptive sentences such as “attracted to”, “loathes”, “had row about cheese”, and “spends too long in the toilet”.
Hooper had attempted to recreate Trisha’s map on his computer, using his photo scanner and untold gigabytes of three-dimensional graphic-arts software programming. Sadly the project defeated him and a little bomb kept appearing and telling him to restart the computer. Soon Hooper was forced to slink back to the drawing pins and Blu-Tack along with everybody else.
Now Coleridge was standing in front of the map solemnly contemplating the ten housemates and the ever-growing web of interconnecting relationships. “Somewhere,” he said, “somewhere in this dense mass of human intercourse must lie our motive, our catalyst for a murder.” He spoke as if he were addressing a room full of people, but in fact only Hooper and Trisha were there, everybody else having long since gone home. They had decided that the evening’s subjects for discussion would be Layla the beautiful “hippie” and David the dedicated actor.
On one of the tapes that connected their two photographs Trisha had written: “Friends for first day or two. Turned sour.”
“So what was this early friendship based on?” Coleridge asked. “It can’t have been much if it went sour so quickly.”
“Well, they have lot in common,” Trisha replied. “They’re both vegans and obsessed with diets and dieting, which seems to have formed a bond between them. On the very first evening they had a long and rather exclusive conversation about food-combining and stomach acids. I’ve lined up the tape.”
Sure enough, when Trisha pressed play there on the screen were David and Layla, set slightly apart from the rest of the group, having the most terrific meeting of minds.
“That is so right,” said Layla.
“Isn’t it?” David agreed.
“But it’s amazing how many people still think that dairy is healthy.”
“Which it so isn’t.”
“Did you know that eggs killed more people in the last century than Hitler?”
“Yes, I think I did know that, and wheat.”
“Ugh, wheat! Don’t get me started on wheat!”
Now the sombre tones of Andy the narrator intruded briefly. “David and Layla have discovered that they have a lot in common: they both miss their cats dreadfully.”
“Pandora is the most beautiful and intelligent creature I have ever met,” David explained, “and sadly I include human beings in that statement.”
“I so know what you mean,” Layla replied.
Trisha stopped the tape. “Fogarty the editor told me they got very excited about David and Layla that night. They thought that they might even troll off to the nookie hut and have it off there and then, but all that happened was a shoulder massage.”
“But they were definitely friends?” Coleridge asked.
“I think it’s more that they hated everybody else. Looking at the tapes, it’s pretty obvious that they thought themselves a cut above the others. On the first day or two the cameras often caught them exchanging wry, superior little glances. Peeping Tom broadcast them, too. The public hated it. David and Layla were the absolute least popular people in the house.”
“But of course they didn’t know this.”
“Well, there’s no way they could have done. They were sealed off. In fact, watching them you get the impression that they think people will love them as much as they love themselves. Particularly him.”
“Yes, David certainly is a cocky one,” Coleridge mused. “Arrogant almost beyond belief, in fact, in his quiet, passive-aggressive sort of way.”
Hooper was surprised to hear Coleridge using a term as current and overused as passive-aggressive, but there was no doubt that the phrase summed up David exactly.
They looked at David on the screen and stared into his soft, puppy-dog eyes. All three were thinking the same thing.
“It would certainly take a very confident person to believe that they could get away with what our murderer got away with,” said Coleridge. “No one with the slightest self-doubt would ever have attempted it.” He returned to the theme of friendship. “So familiarity quickly took its toll on David and Layla’s closeness. Like many a friendship too eagerly begun, it had no staying power.”
“That’s right,” said Trisha. “It started going wrong with the cheese and went downhill from there.”
“They were too alike, I reckon,” said Hooper. “They got in each other’s way. They wanted the same role in the house, to be the beautiful and sensitive one. It all fell irrevocably to pieces over Layla’s poem.”
DAY FIVE. 9.00 p.m.
The row began with the best intentions. David had suggested, in an attempt to engineer a rapprochement between himself and Layla (and hence avoid her nominating him), that since he was trained and practised in the art of recitation perhaps he should learn one of Layla’s poems and recite it for her. Layla had been touched and flattered and because there were no papers or pens allowed in the house David had set to learning the poem orally directly from the author.
“Lactation,” said Layla.
“That’s very, very beautiful,” said David.
“It’s the title,” Layla explained.
“I understand,” said David, nodding gently, as if the fact that “Lactation” was the title required a heightened level of perception to come to terms with.
“Shall we take it two lines at a time?” Layla asked.
By way of an answer David closed his eyes and put his hands together at the fingertips, his lips gently touching his index fingers.
Layla began. “‘Woman. Womb-an. Fat, full, belly, rich with girl child. Vagina, two-way street to miracles.’”
David breathed deeply and repeated the first two lines of Layla’s poem. It was clear from his manner that he thought Layla would be amazed and thrilled to have her words lent wings by such a richly liquid and subtle voice.
If she was, she hid it well. “Actually, that first line is meant to be very upbeat, joyful,” Layla said. “You’re being too sombre. I always say it with a huge smile, particularly the words ‘girl child’. I mean, think about it, David, doesn’t the thought of a strong, spiritual woman’s belly engorged with a beautiful girl child just make you want to smile?”
David was clearly aghast. “Are you giving me direction, Layla?” he asked.
“No, I just want you to know how to say it, that’s all.”
“The whole point about getting an actor to work on a piece of writing, Layla, is in order to get another artist’s interpretation of it. An actor will find things in a poem that the author did not even know were there.”
“But I don’t want the things that aren’t there, I want the things that are.”
David seemed to snap. “Then you’d better recite it yourself,” he said, jumping angrily to his feet. “Because quite frankly it stinks. Apart from the repulsive imagery of fat, engorged female stomachs, from, I might add, a woman with less flesh on her than a Chupa Chups stick, I am a professional actor and I simply will not take direction from an amateur poet! Particularly after I have paid her the enormous compliment of actually taking an interest in her pisspoor work!” And with that David headed outside for a dip in the hot spa.