Woggle stank. Digging tunnels is hard physical work and every drop of sweat that he had sweated remained in the fabric of his filthy garments, a motley collection of old bits of combat gear and denim. If Woggle had worn a leather jacket (which, being an animal liberationist, of course he would never do) he would have looked like one of those disgusting old-style hell’s angels who never washed their Levi’s no matter how often they urinated on them.
“Guy, you are rank!” Jazz continued. “You are high! Here, man, have a blow on my deodorant before we all get killed of asphyxiation and suffocate to death here!”
Woggle demurred. “I consider all cosmetics to be humanoid affectations, yet one more example of our sad species’ inability to accept its place as simply another animal on the planet.”
“Are you on drugs or what?”
“People think that they are superior to animals, and preening and scenting themselves is evidence of that,” Woggle droned with the moral self-assurance of a Buddha, “but look at a cat’s silky coat or a robin’s joyful wings. Did any haughty supermodel ever look that good?”
“Too fucking right she did, guy,” said Jazz, who personally used two separate deodorants and anointed his skin daily with scented oils. “I ain’t never gone to sleep dreaming about shagging no cat, but Naomi and Kate are welcome any time.”
Layla spoke up from the kitchen area where she was preparing herbal tea. “I have some cruelty-free organic cleansing lotions, Woggle, if you’d like to borrow them.”
Layla. Real job: fashion designer and retail supervisor. Star sign: Scorpio.
“They won’t be cruelty-free after the plastic bottles end up in a landfill and a seagull gets its beak stuck in one,” Woggle replied.
“Don’t be fooled by that fashion designer thing, sir,” said Hooper. “She’s another shop girl. It comes out later in the second week. Layla cannot believe it when Garry points out that she and Kelly do basically the same job. Layla thinks she’s about a million miles above Kelly. There was quite a row.”
“Garry likes annoying them all, doesn’t he?”
“Oh yes, anything for a reaction, that’s Garry.”
“And this young lady Layla takes herself very seriously?”
“She does that, all right. Some of the biggest clashes in the first week are between her and David the actor, over who’s the most sensitive.”
“They both reckon themselves poets,” Trisha chipped in.
“Yes, I can see that there’s a lot of concealed anger there,” Coleridge remarked thoughtfully. “A lot of failed ambition for both of them. It could be relevant.”
“Not for Layla, sir, surely? She got chucked out before the murder happened.”
“I am aware of that, sergeant, but seeing as how we don’t know anything at all it behoves us to investigate everything.”
Hooper hated the fact that he worked under a man who used words like “behoves”.
“This girl Layla’s resentment and feelings of inadequacy could have found some resonance in the group. She may have been the catalyst for somebody else’s self-doubt. Who knows, sometimes with murder it’s entirely the wrong person that gets killed.”
“Eh?” said Hooper.
“Well, think about it,” Coleridge explained. “Suppose a man is being taunted by his girlfriend about his powers in bed. Finally he storms out into the dark night and on his way home a stranger steps on his heel. The man spins round and kills the stranger, whereas really he wanted to kill his girlfriend.”
“Well, yes, sir, I can see that happening with a random act of anger, but the murder happened long after Layla left…”
“All right. Suppose you have a group of friends, and A has a dark, dark secret which B discovers. B then begins to spread the secret about and this gets back to A, but when A confronts B, B convincingly claims that the blabbermouth is in fact C. A then kills C, who actually knew nothing about it. The wrong person gets killed. In my experience there are usually a lot more people involved in a murder than the culprit and the victim.”
“So we keep Layla in the frame?”
“Well, not as an actual murder suspect, obviously. But before she left that house it is entirely possible that she sowed the seed that led to murder. Let’s move on.”
Trisha pressed play and the camera panned across from Woggle to settle on the tenth and final housemate.
Dervla. Real job: trauma therapist. Star sign: Taurus.
She was the most beautiful, everybody agreed that, and the most mysterious. Quiet and extremely calm, it was never easy to work out what was going on behind those smiling green Irish eyes. Eyes that always seemed to be laughing at a different joke from the rest of the group. By the time of the murder Dervla had been the bookies’ number-two favourite to win the game, and she would have been number one had Geraldine Hennessy not occasionally and jealously edited against her, making her look stuck-up when in fact she was merely abstracted.
“So what’s a trauma therapist when it’s at home, then?” Garry asked. He and Dervla were stretched out beside the pool in the pleasant aftermath of the morning’s champagne.
“Well, I suppose my job is to understand how people react to stress, so that I can help them to deal with it.” Dervla replied in her gentle Dublin brogue. “That’s why I wanted to come on this show. I mean, the whole experience is really just a series of small traumas, isn’t it? I think it’ll be very interesting to be close to the people experiencing those traumas and also to experience them myself.”
“So it’s got nothing to do with winning half a million big ones, then?”
Dervla was far too clever to deny the charge completely. She knew that the nation would almost certainly be scrutinizing her reply that very evening.
“Well, that would be nice, of course. But I’m sure I’ll be evicted long before that. No, basically I’m here to learn. About myself and about stress.”
Coleridge was so exasperated that he had to make himself another mug of tea. Here was this beautiful, intelligent woman, to whom he was embarrassed to discover he found himself rather attracted, with eyes like emeralds and a voice like milk and honey, and yet she was talking utter and complete rubbish.
“Stress! Stress!” Coleridge said, in what for him was almost a shout. “Not much more than two generations ago the entire population of this country stood in the shadow of imminent brutal occupation by a crowd of murdering Nazis! A generation before that we lost a million boys in the trenches. A million innocent lads. Now we have ‘therapists’ studying the ‘trauma’ of getting thrown off a television game show. Sometimes I despair, I really do, you know. I despair.”
“Yes, but, sir,” Trisha said, “in the war and stuff people had something to stand up for, something to believe in. These days there isn’t anything for us to believe in very much. Does that make our anxieties and pain any less relevant?”
“Yes, it does!” Coleridge stopped himself before he could say any more. Even he could occasionally tell when he was sounding like a bigoted, reactionary old idiot. He took a deep breath and returned to the subject of the young woman on the screen.
“So, this Dervla girl went into the house with the purely cerebral intention of observing case studies in stress?”
“Yes,” said Trisha, referring to her file on Dervla, “she felt that the nomination process with its necessary winners and losers offered a perfect chance to study people’s reactions to isolation and rejection.”
“Very laudable I must say.”
“And she also added that ‘she hopes one day to be a television presenter’.”
“Now why does that not surprise me?” Coleridge sipped his tea and studied the screen. “One house, ten contestants,” he said almost to himself. “One victim.”