“Wow!” shouted Chloe. “Amped up! All right! You OK, Dave?”
“Yes, Chloe, I’m fine.”
“Wicked!”
“Absolutely. Wicked indeed.”
“Look, fair play to you, David,” Chloe gushed. “Respect and all that big-time. You’ve been through it, and we all haven’t, and it must have been an incredibly weird experience and all that, but I’ve got ask you this, you know that, don’t you? Of course you do, you know what I’m going to ask, I can see it in your face, you do know, don’t you? What I’m going to ask? Of course you do, so let’s get it over with. The big question everybody wants to know is, ‘Did you kill Kelly?’”
“No, absolutely not. I loved Kelly.” David gave it his best shot – the short pause before answering to focus fully and assume the appropriate look of pained sincerity, the tiny catch in the voice, but it did him no good. The crowd wanted a result; they booed, they jeered; a chant developed: “Killer. Killer. Killer.”
David was stunned. He hadn’t expected this.
“Sorry, babe. They think you did it, babe,” said Chloe. “Sorry and all that, but at the end of the day there it is, babe.”
“But I didn’t do it, I promise.”
“All right, then,” said Chloe, perking up. “Let’s see if anybody thinks somebody else did it.”
There were substantial cheers for this proposition, some without doubt coming from the same people who had only moments before condemned David. The situation, like the police investigation, was confused.
“Well, fair play to you, Dave,” said Chloe. “There are lot of young ladies on your side, I can see that, and can you blame them? Wicked!”
And, of course, at this the cheering redoubled.
“So come on, then, David. If you didn’t do it, who do you think did?”
“Well, I don’t know. I’d have to say Garry, but it’s just a guess. I really don’t know.”
“Well, we’ll just have to wait to the end of the series to find out, won’t we?” said Chloe, which was an outrageous and entirely unfounded statement, but it sounded convincing enough, such is the seductive power of television.
“In the meantime,” Chloe shouted, “let’s take a look at some of Dave’s finest moments in the house!”
DAY THIRTY-FIVE. 10 p.m.
Coleridge’s team had to deal with thousands of calls from cranks. Every second ring of the phone heralded yet another clairvoyant who had seen the culprit in a dream.
Hooper kept a little tally. “Dervla appears in most of the male clairvoyants’ dreams, and Jazz in the birds’. Funny that, isn’t it?”
This call was different, though. It came just as the closing credits of the House Arrest Eviction Special were rolling on the TV in the police incident room. When Hooper picked up the phone there was something about the caller’s calm and steady tone that made him decide to listen.
“I am a Catholic priest,” said the rather formal, foreign-sounding voice. “I recently heard a confession from a very distressed young woman. I cannot of course tell you any details, but I believe you should be looking not only at the people who remain in the house, but also those who have left it.”
“Have you been speaking to Layla, sir?” Hooper replied. “Because we have so far been unable to locate her.”
“I can’t say anything more, except that I believe that you should continue trying to find her.” At that the priest clearly felt that he had already said enough, because he abruptly concluded the conversation and rang off.
DAY THIRTY-SIX. 11.00 a.m.
The results of the house DNA tests took three days to arrive, which Coleridge thought was outrageous.
As expected, the individuals represented on the sheet were the male housemates. Jazz, most prominently, Gazzer, David and Hamish equally clearly, and Woggle the least. Woggle, of course, had not been available to supply a sample, having famously skipped bail and disappeared. However, when he left the house he had accidentally left his second pair of socks behind, which despite having since been buried in the garden by the other boys, yielded copious quantities of anarchist DNA.
“So the sheet points towards Jazz, then,” said Hooper.
“Well, perhaps, but we’d expect his presence to be detected more strongly, since he wore the sheet after Geraldine and her team had arrived.”
“Yes, convenient, that, wasn’t it?” Hooper observed drily. “Covers his tracks very nicely, except that if one of the others had worn it too we would expect their presence to show more strongly also. After all, the killer would have been sweating like a pig when he put it on.”
“But all the other three have come up equally.”
“Exactly, sir.”
“Which is a bit weird in itself, isn’t it?” said Trish. “Sort of supports the idea that they were all in it, and they had a pact, to divide suspicion.”
“Well, anyway, at least it rules the girls out,” said Hooper.
“You think so?” Coleridge enquired.
“Well, doesn’t it?”
“Only if the sheet under discussion was the one the killer used to hide under, which it probably is, but we can’t be certain. We know that it’s the sheet Jazz grabbed after the Peeping Tom people had entered the house, but can we be sure it was the one that the killer dropped onto the pile when he returned to the sweatbox?”
“Well, it was on top.”
“Yes, but the pile was fairly jumbled, and all the sheets were the same dark colour. More than one sheet may have been on top, so to speak. The tape is not entirely clear.”
“So it doesn’t help us at all, then?” said Trish.
“Well, I think it could strengthen a case; it just couldn’t make one. If there was further evidence against Jazz, this sheet would help, that’s all.”
DAY THIRTY-SEVEN. 9.30 p.m.
For six hours the house had been completely empty, the thirty cameras and forty microphones recording nothing but empty rooms and silence. Six hours of nothing, which had been diligently watched by millions of computer-owners all over the world.
It had begun at three o’clock that afternoon when the police arrived and collected all of the housemates, taking them away without explanation. Naturally this caused a sensation. The lunchtime news bulletins were filled with breathless stories of group conspiracies, and halfway round the world, down in the southern hemisphere, newspaper editors preparing their morning editions considered risking pre-emptive headlines announcing “THEYALLDUNNIT!”
The reality made everybody look stupid, particularly the police.
“A tape measure!” said Gazzer as he and the others re-entered the house. “A fahkin’ tape measure! That’s what Constable Plod’s using to catch a killer!”
It had been Trisha’s idea to take all of the housemates down to the Peeping Tom rehearsal house at Shepperton and ask them to walk the journey taken by the killer, thereby enabling a comparison to be made with the number of strides taken on the video. Coleridge had thought it was worth a try, but the results had been disappointing and inconclusive. A tall person might have scuttled, a short one might have stretched. The sheet made it impossible to work out clearly the nature of the killer’s gait, and so the inmates were released without further comment.
Gazzer’s frustration was echoed across the nation. “The fahkin’ FBI have got spy satellites and billion-dollar databases, and what have our lot got? A fahkin’ tape measure!”
DAY THIRTY-EIGHT. 7.00 p.m.
Hooper had to ring David’s doorbell for a long time before he could get him to answer it. While he waited on the steps of his apartment building the three or four reporters who were hanging about fired questions at him.