It could not be ruled out that two of the inmates had not been strangers. That some ancient enmity had been unwittingly introduced into the house? That some bleak and terrible coincidence in the selection process had led to murder?
Whatever the answer, Coleridge knew that he wouldn’t find it there in that gloomy old hangar at Shepperton. It was inside the real house, it was inside the people inside the real house.
Wearily, he returned to his car, to which Hooper had retreated half an hour earlier, and together they began their drive back to Sussex, where the real Peeping Tom house was located, a journey of about twenty miles which if they were lucky would only take them the rest of the morning.
DAY THIRTY. 9.15 a.m.
While Coleridge and Hooper nosed their way along the M25, Trisha was interviewing Bob Fogarty, the editor-in-chief of House Arrest. After Geri the Gaoler, Fogarty was the most senior figure in the Peeping Tom hierarchy. Trisha wanted to know more about how the people she had been watching came to be presented in the way they were.
“House Arrest is basically fiction,” said Fogarty, handing her a styrofoam cup of watery froth and nearly missing her hand in the darkness of the monitoring bunker. “Like all TV and film. It’s built in the edit.”
“You manipulate the housemates’ images?”
“Well, obviously. We’re not scientists, we make television programmes. People are basically dull. We have to make them interesting, turn them into heroes and villains.”
“I thought you were supposed to be observers, that the whole thing was an experiment in social interaction?”
“Look, constable,” Fogarty explained patiently, “in order to create a nightly half-hour of broadcasting we have at our disposal the accumulated images of thirty television cameras running for twenty-four hours. That’s seven hundred and twenty hours of footage to make one half-hour of television. We couldn’t avoid making subjective decisions even if we wanted to. The thing that amazes us is that the nation believes what we show them. They actually accept that what they are watching is real.”
“I don’t suppose they think about it much. I mean, why should they?”
“That’s true enough. As long as it’s good telly they don’t care, which is why as far as possible we try to shoot the script.”
“Shoot the script?”
“It’s a term they use in news and features.”
“And it means?”
“Well, say you’re making a short insert for the news, investigating heroin addiction on housing estates. If you simply went out to some urban hellhole with a camera and started nosing around, you could be looking for the story you want till Christmas. So you script your investigation before you leave your office. You say… all right, we need a couple of kids to say they can get smack at school, we need a girl to say she’d whore for a hit, we need a youth worker to say it’s the government’s fault… You write the whole thing. Then you send out a researcher to round up a few show-offs and basically tell them what to say.”
“But how could you do that on House Arrest? I mean, you can’t tell the housemates what to say, can you?”
“No, but you can be pretty sure of the story you want to tell and then look for the shots that support it. It’s the only way to avoid getting into a complete mess. Look at this, for instance… This is Kelly’s first trip to the confession box on the afternoon of day one.”
DAY ONE. 4.15 p.m.
“It’s brilliant, wicked, outrageous. I feel just totally bigged-up and out there,” Kelly gushed breathlessly from the main monitor. She had come to the confession box to talk about how thrilling and exciting it all was.
“I mean, today has just been the wickedest day ever because I really, really love all these people and I just know we’re all going to get along just brilliantly. I expect there’ll be tension and I’ll end up hating all of them for, like, just a moment at some point. But you could say that about any mates, couldn’t you? Basically I love these guys. They’re my posse. My crew.”
Deep in the darkness of the editing suite Geraldine glared at Fogarty. “And that’s what you want her to say, is it?”
Bob cowered behind his styrofoam cup. “Well, it’s what she did say, Geraldine.”
Geraldine’s eyes flashed, her nostrils flared and she bared her colossal overbite. It was as if the Alien had just burst out of John Hurt’s stomach.
“You stupid cunt! You stupid lazy cunt! I could get a monkey to broadcast what she actually said! I could get a work-experience school-leaver pain-in-the-arse spotty fucking waste-of-space teenager to broadcast what she actually said! What I pay you to do is to look at what she actually said and find what we want her to say, you cunt!”
Fogarty threw a commiserating glance at the younger, more impressionable members of staff.
“Who is Kelly, Bob?” Geraldine continued, throwing an arm towards the frozen image of the pretty young brunette on the screen. “Who is that girl?”
Fogarty stared at the television. A sweet smile beamed back at him, an open, honest, naïve countenance. “Well…”
“She’s our bitch, Bob, she’s our manipulator. She’s one of our designated hate figures! Remember the audition interviews? All that pert ambition? All that artless knicker-flashing. All that girl power bollocks. Remember what I said, Bob?”
Fogarty did remember, but Geraldine told him anyway.
“I said, ‘Right, you arrogant little slapper, we’ll see how far you get towards presenting your own pop, style and fashion show once the whole nation has decided you’re a back-biting, knob-teasing fucking dog,’ didn’t I?”
“Yes, Geraldine, but on the evidence of today she’s turned out to be really quite nice. I mean, she’s a bit of an airhead, and vain, certainly, but she’s not really a bitch. I think we’ll find it quite hard to make her look that nasty.”
“She’ll look however we want her to look and be whatever we want her to be,” Geraldine sneered.
DAY THIRTY. 9.20 a.m.
“Does Geraldine normally talk to you like that?” Trisha asked.
“She talks to everybody like that.”
“So you get used to it, then?”
“It’s not something you get used to, constable. I have an MSc in computing and media. I am not a stupid cunt.”
Trisha nodded. She had heard of Geraldine Hennessy before her House Arrest fame. Most people had. Geraldine was a celebrity in her own right. A famously bold, provocative and controversial broadcaster, Trisha ventured.
“Rubbish!” said Bob Fogarty. “She’s a TV whore masquerading as an innovator and getting away with it because she knows a few popstars and wears Vivienne Westwood. What she does is steal tacky, dumbed-down tabloid telly ideas, usually from Europe or Japan, smear them with a bit of hip, clubby, druggy style, and flog them to the middle class as post-modern irony.”
“So you don’t like her, then?”
“I loathe her, constable. People like Geraldine Hennessy have ruined television. She’s a cultural vandal. She’s a nasty, stupid, dangerous bitch.”
In the gloom Trisha could see that Fogarty’s cup was shaking in his hand. She was taken aback. “Calm down, Mr Fogarty,” she said.