After another half-hour or so of searching, during which nothing of interest was discovered, Coleridge decided to leave the lab people to their work. “Let’s go and meet the suspects, shall we?”

DAY TWENTY-EIGHT. 3.40 a.m.

The housemates were being held in the Peeping Tom boardroom, situated on the upper floor of the production complex across the moat from the house. The seven tired, scared young people had been taken there after being questioned briefly at the scene and then allowed to shower and dress. Now they had all been sitting together for over an hour, and the truth of the night’s terrible event had well and truly sunk in.

Kelly was dead. The girl with whom they had all lived and breathed for the previous four weeks, and with whom they had all been groping and laughing only a few hours before, was dead.

That was the second most shocking thing any of them had ever in their lives been forced to try to come to terms with.

The most shocking thing of all was the self-evident fact that one of them had killed her.

The penny had dropped slowly. At first there had been much weeping and hugging, expressions of astonishment, confusion, sadness and solidarity. They had felt as if they were the only seven people in the world, bonded by a glue that no outsider would ever understand. It was all so strange and confusing: the four weeks of isolation and game-playing, then the mad, drunken excess of the sweatbox, the sudden onrush of raw sexual energy that had taken them all by surprise… and then the death of their comrade and the house suddenly full of police. That had almost been the strangest thing of all. To find their house, the place where nobody could enter and none could leave save by a formal and complex voting procedure, full of police officers! Of course, they had been intruded on before, when Woggle was arrested, but that had been different. The housemates had remained in the majority, in some way in control. This time they had been reduced to a huddled little ghetto in the boys’ bedroom, pleading to be allowed to wash themselves.

All this common and unique experience had at first served to create a gang mentality for the seven surviving housemates… Jazz, Gazzer, Dervla, Moon, David, Hamish and Sally.

But as they sat together around the big table in the Peeping Tom boardroom, rapidly sobering up, that solidarity had begun to evaporate like the alcohol in their systems. To be replaced by fear, fear and suspicion. Suspicion of each other. Fear that they themselves might be suspected.

One by one Coleridge saw them, these people who were shortly to become so familiar to him. And with each brief interview the depressing truth became clearer. Either six of them genuinely knew nothing, or they were each protecting all the others, because none of them had anything to say to him that shed any light upon who had left the sweatbox in order to kill Kelly.

“To be honest, officer,” Jazz told Coleridge, “I could not have told you what was up and what was down inside that box, let alone where the exit was. It was totally dark, man. I mean totally. That was the point of it. We’d been in there two hours, and we were just so pissed, I mean, completely -”

“How did you know it was two hours?” Coleridge interrupted.

“I didn’t know, I heard since. Man, I would not have known if it was two hours, two minutes or two years. We was out of it, floating, zombied, brain-fucked to the double-max degree, and we was getting it on! I was getting it on! Do you understand? Four weeks without so much as a touch of a woman, and suddenly I was getting it on. Believe me, man, I wasn’t thinking about where no exit was. I was happy where I was.”

This was the common theme of the majority of the interviews. Each of them had been utterly disoriented inside that box, losing all concept of space and time, and contentedly so, for they had been enjoying themselves.

“It was so fookin’ hot in there, inspector,” Moon assured him, “and dark, and we were drunk. It was like floating in space or summat.”

“Did you notice anybody leave?”

“Maybe Kelly?”

“Maybe?”

“Well, I didn’t even know where the entrance was by then. At the end of the day, I don’t think anybody knew fook all about anything, to be quite honest. But I did feel a girl suddenly moving, like, amongst us all… and quite quickly, which was a bit of a surprise because we were all so chilled.”

“You were chilled?” Coleridge thought he must have misheard. He wanted things to be clear for the tape.

“The witness means relaxed, sir,” Hooper interjected.

“Whatever the witness means, sergeant,” Coleridge snapped, “she can mean it without your leading her to it. What did you mean, miss?”

“I meant relaxed.”

“Thank you. Please continue.”

“Well, I think that maybe after I felt the girl move there was like a little waft of cooler air. I think maybe I realized that somebody was going for a piss or whatever, but quite frankly, at the end of the day, I weren’t that bothered. I mean I were giving somebody – I think it were Gazzer – a blow-job at the time.”

Interview after interview told the same story: varying degrees of sexual activity plus the idea that someone, probably a girl, had scrambled over them shortly before the game was brought to an abrupt halt. They each remembered this moment because it had rather jarred the “chilled” atmosphere that had developed.

“And this movement happened quite suddenly?” Coleridge asked each of them. They all agreed that it had, that there had been a sudden flurry of limbs and soft warm skin, followed by the faintest waft of cooler air. With hindsight it was clear that this must have been Kelly rushing off to the lavatory.

“Could anybody have sneaked off after her?” Coleridge asked them. Yes, was the reply, they all felt strongly that in the cramped, crowded darkness and confusion of it all, it would have been possible for a second person to follow Kelly out of the sweatbox unnoticed.

“But you yourself were unaware of it.”

“Inspector,” said Gazzer, and he might have been speaking for them all, “I wasn’t aware of anything.”

Sally’s were the only recollections that differed substantially from the norm. When she appeared Coleridge had been taken aback. He had never seen a woman whose arms were completely covered in tattoos before and he knew that he would have to try not to let it prejudice his view of her.

“So you were not involved in the sexual activity?” Coleridge asked.

“No. I decided to try and use the exercise to improve my understanding of other cultures,” Sally replied. “I found a corner of the box, ignored what the others were doing and concentrated on recreating the consciousness of a Native American fighting woman.”

Coleridge could not stop himself from reflecting that to the best of his knowledge all the Native American fighting had been done by men, but he decided to let it go. “You didn’t want to join in the, um, fun?” he asked.

“No, I’m a dyke, and all the other women who were in that box are straight, or at least they think they are. Besides, I had to concentrate on something other than them, you see. I had to concentrate.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like dark, confined spaces. I don’t like getting into black boxes.”

“Really? Is this something you have much experience of?”

“Not for real, no. But in my head I imagine it all the time.”

Coleridge noted that the cigarette Sally held in her hand was shaking. The column of smoke rising above it was jagged. Like the edge of a rough saw. “Why do you imagine dark boxes?”

“To test myself. To see what happens to me when I go there.”

“So on being confronted by a real physical black box, you decided to use it as a test of your mental strength.”