Dead famous by Ben Elton Read Free Book Online

work.’

DAY THIRTY-ONE. 8.30 a.m.
    A fter reading Trisha’s report of her interview with Fogarty, Coleridge called a meeting of all his officers.
    ‘Currently,’ he said firmly, ‘I am of a mind that we are pursuing the wrong seven suspects and the wrong victim.’ This comment, like so many that Coleridge made, was met with blank stares. He could almost hear the whoosh as it swept over their heads.
    ‘How’s that, then, boss?’ Said Hooper.
    ‘Boss?’
    ‘Inspector.’
    ‘Thank you, sergeant.’
    ‘How’s that, then, inspector?’ Hooper persevered wearily.
    ‘How is it that we’re pursuing the wrong suspects and the wrong victim?’
    ‘Because we are looking at these people in the way that the producers and editors of Peeping Tom Productions want us to look at them, not as they are.’ Coleridge paused for a moment, his attention drawn to an officer at the back of the room who was chewing gum, a female officer. He longed to tell her to find a scrap of paper and dispose of it, but he knew that the days when an inspector could treat his constables in that manner had long gone. He would not be at all surprised if there was a court in Brussels that could be cajoled into maintaining that the freedom to chew gum was a human right. He confined his reaction to a withering stare, which caused the girl’s jaw to stop moving for all of three seconds.
    ‘We must therefore be extremely cautious in our views, for apart from a brief interview with each of the surviving housemates after the murder, we know these people only through the deceiving eye of the television camera, that false friend, so convincing, so plausible, so real and yet, as we have already seen, so fickle and so false. We must therefore begin at the beginning with all of them and presume nothing. Nothing at all.’ And so the grim task of reviewing the House Arrest tape archive continued.
    ‘It’s day three under House Arrest and Layla has gone to the refrigerator to get some cheese.’ This was the voice of Andy, House Arrest’s narrator.
    ‘Layla’s vegan cheese is an important part of her diet, being her principal source of protein.’

DAY THIRTY. 9.45 a.m.
    Y ou know that even though the weather was warm and sunny Geraldine insisted that the central heating be on at all times, don’t you?’ Fogarty said. Trisha was astonished.
    ‘You made it hot in order to get people to take their clothes off?’
    ‘Of course we did. What do you think? Peeping Tom wanted bodies! Not baggy jumpers! Twenty-four degrees Centigrade is the optimum good telly temperature, warm but not sweaty. Geraldine always says that if she could make it twenty-five degrees in the room and minus five in the vicinity of the girls’ nipples she’d have the perfect temperature.’ Trisha looked at Fogarty thoughtfully. He certainly was going out of his way to make his employer look bad. Why was that? She wondered.
    ‘Anyway,’ the man concluded, ‘Miss High and Mighty, oh so brilliant. Machiavellian genius Geraldine Hennessy got it totally wrong with Kelly, although she has never admitted it. She thought that just because she didn’t like Kelly nobody else would, but the public did like her and apart from Woggle she was the most popular one on the show. We had to change tack and from day two we edited in Kelly’s favour.’
    ‘So sometimes the subject does lead the programme?’
    ‘Well, with a little help from me, I must admit. I gave Kelly plenty of cute angles. I was buggered if I was going to do Geraldine’s dirty work.’

DAY THIRTY-ONE. 8.30 a.m.
    A fter reading Trisha’s report of her interview with Fogarty, Coleridge called a meeting of all his officers.
    ‘Currently,’ he said firmly, ‘I am of a mind that we are pursuing the wrong seven suspects and the wrong victim.’ This comment, like so many that Coleridge made, was met with blank stares. He could almost hear the whoosh as it swept over their heads.
    ‘How’s that, then, inspector?’ Hooper