“I can’t believe I’ve been so stupid,” Dervla said, her voice choking with disgust and embarrassment. “Of course, I should have guessed why he was being so encouraging towards me, but I had no idea… I…”
Dervla, normally so strong, so self-assured, contemplated the creepily silent dislocated images of her own body on the screen, a body rarely viewed whole but broken up into intrusive, intimate close-ups, and she wept. The tears ran down her face as the soapy water on the screen ran down her stomach and her thighs.
“Did you get messages in the mirror every day?”
“Not every day, but most days.”
“What did they say?”
“Oh, nothing very startling. ‘How are you?’ That kind of thing. ‘You’re doing great’.”
“So he talked about the game.”
“Well, not in any great detail. He was writing backwards in condensed steam, after all.”
“Did he ever mention Kelly?”
“No.”
It was a fool’s lie.
“Actually, yes, I think he did mention her,” Dervla said quickly.
“Yes or no, Miss Nolan?”
“I just said yes, didn’t I? Sometimes… a little… he mentioned them all.”
Half a lie. Was that any better? Or worse?
“I don’t know why he sent me messages,” she added. “I never asked him to.”
“He’s in love with you, Miss Nolan.”
“Please don’t say that.”
“He loves you, Dervla, and that is something that you are going to have to deal with, because I doubt that what he has done is going to get him any kind of prison sentence. When you come out of the house he’ll be waiting for you.”
“You really think so?”
“That’s my experience of obsessives. They can’t just turn it off. You see, he thinks you love him back. After all, you’ve been flirting with him for weeks.”
“I haven’t…” But even as she said it Dervla knew that denial was pointless. “I… just sort of fell into it,” she continued. “It was a laugh, a game. It’s so boring in that house. The same dull stupid people that you can’t even really get to like because you’re in competition with them. You’ve no idea… And then there was this jokey thing going on, just for me. I had a secret friend on the outside who wished me luck and told me I was doing all right. You can’t imagine how weird and insecure it is in that house, how vulnerable you feel. It was nice to have a secret friend.”
Dervla looked at the screen on which Larry Carlisle’s tape was still playing. She was in the shower again, her hand inside the cups of her sodden bra, soaping her breasts, the shape of her nipples clearly visible. “Can we turn that off, please?”
“I want you to see this next bit.”
The image on the screen flickered and changed to the girls’ bedroom. It was night and all the girls appeared to be asleep.
“My God, he had a nightsight on his camcorder!” Dervla gasped.
“I’m afraid to say, my dear, that this man did not miss anything.”
On the screen Dervla was lying in bed. It had clearly been a hot night, as she was covered by only a single sheet. She was asleep, or so it seemed until her eyes opened for a moment and flickered about the room. Now the camera panned down from her face to her body. It was possible to make out Dervla’s hand gently moving beneath the sheet, moving downwards to below her waist, the outline of her knuckles standing out against the cotton as her fingers moved gently beneath it. The camera returned to focus once more on Dervla’s face: her eyes were closed but her mouth was open. She was sighing with pleasure.
Sitting in Coleridge’s office, Dervla turned deep crimson with angry embarrassment. “Please!” she snapped. “This isn’t fair.”
Coleridge switched off the tape. “I wanted you to see and to know just how little respect this man has had for you. You and he have been partners of sorts. You are partners no longer.”
Dervla felt scared. “Surely, inspector, you can’t really be thinking that there’s any connection between this silly lark and… and… Kelly’s death?”
Coleridge waited for a moment before replying. “You said his messages mentioned Kelly?”
“Well, yes, they did but…”
“What did they say?”
“They said… they said that people liked her and that they liked me. They liked us both.”
“I see. And did he ever tell you who they liked more? Your ranking, so to speak.”
Dervla looked the chief inspector in the eye. “No. Not specifically.”
“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.”
DAY FORTY-FIVE. 1.30 p.m.
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.”
DAY TWENTY. 12.40 p.m.
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.