DAY TWENTY-NINE. 6.00 p.m.

Coleridge sat in the larger of the two halls in the village youth centre awaiting his turn among all the other hopefuls. He was very, very tired, having been up for most of the previous two nights investigating a real live “murder most foul”.

Now he was in the realms of fiction, but the words of the great “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech, one of his favourites, seemed to be draining from his mind.

He tried to concentrate, but people kept asking him about the Peeping Tom murder. It was understandable, of course – the whole affair was colossal news, and they all knew that Coleridge was a senior policeman. He would not have dreamt of telling them about his direct association with the crime. “I expect my colleagues will do their best,” he said, trying to fix his mind on being a poor player about to strut and fret his hour upon the stage.

To Coleridge’s great relief his picture had not been shown on any of the news broadcasts during the day, and he did not expect it to be in the morning papers either. He simply did not look enough like a “top cop” to warrant inclusion. When the press did print a photo it was of Patricia, there being nothing they liked more than a comely “police girl”.

Finally, it was Coleridge’s turn to audition, and he was called into the smaller room in order to perform before Glyn and Val’s searching gaze. He gave it everything he had, even managing the ghost of a tear when he got to “out, brief candle”. There was nothing like the murder of a twenty-one-year-old girl to remind a person that life truly was a “walking shadow”.

When he had finished, Coleridge felt that he had acquitted himself well.

Glyn seemed to think so too. “That was lovely. Absolutely lovely and very moving. You clearly have great depth.”

Coleridge’s hopes soared, but only for a moment.

“I always think that Macduff is the key role in the final act,” said Glyn. “It’s a small part, but it needs a big actor. Would you like to play it?”

Trying not to let his disappointment show, Coleridge said that he would be delighted to play Macduff.

“And since you won’t have many lines to learn,” Val chipped in chirpily, “I presume I can put you down for scenery-painting and the car pool?”

DAY TWENTY-NINE. 9.30 p.m.

Episode twenty-eight of House Arrest went out in an extended ninety-minute special edition on the evening following the day after the murder. It should have been episode twenty-nine that night, but there had been no show on the previous evening, partly out of respect and partly because the inmates of the house had spent all day at the police station.

All except one inmate, who was in the morgue.

The special edition show included the lead-up to the murder and the murder itself. There was a tasteful ten-second edit for the actual moment when the sheet rose and fell, a pointless precaution, since it had been aired endlessly on the news anyway. Also included in the show was the return of the housemates into the house in order to bring the chronology up to date. The whole thing was generally considered to have been very good telly indeed. Straight after the broadcast, and by way of absolving themselves from all criticism and responsibility, the network aired a live discussion programme about the morality of their having continued to broadcast the show at all. Geraldine Hennessy appeared on the discussion, along with various representatives of the great and the good.

“I fear that what we have just watched was depressingly inevitable,” said a distinguished poet and broadcaster. Distinguished, as Geraldine would point out to him afterwards in hospitality, principally for appearing on discussion programmes.

“Reality television, as it is called,” drawled the distinguished broadcaster, “is a return to the gladiatorial arenas of ancient Rome. What we are watching is conflict, conflict between trapped and desperate antagonists who compete for the approval of the baying crowd. Like the plebeians of old, we raise and lower our thumbs to applaud the victor and condemn the vanquished. The only difference is that these days we do it via a telephone poll.”

Geraldine shifted in her seat. She hated the way supposed intellectuals leeched off popular culture while loftily condemning it.

“Personally,” the distinguished broadcaster continued, “I am astonished that it has taken so long for murder to become a tactic in these entertainments.”

“Yes, but does that justify its being broadcast?” the shadow minister for home affairs leapt in, angry that the discussion had been underway for over two minutes and that he had yet to speak. “I say most definitely not. We have to ask ourselves what sort of country we wish to live in.”

“And I would agree with you,” said the distinguished poet, “but will you have the courage to deny the mob? The public must have its bread and circuses.”

Geraldine swallowed an overwhelming desire to unleash a four-letter tirade and resolved to be reasonable. That was, after all, why she had come on the show. The last thing she needed at this crucial moment in her career was to be taken off the air. “Look,” she said. “I don’t like what has happened here any more than you do.”

“Really?” sniffed the poet.

“But the truth of the matter is if we don’t put it out one of the low-rent channels will. The moment the inmates decided to carry on with the show, we didn’t have a choice in the matter. If we had refused to go on, some publicist or other would have packaged the lot of them up and sold them to the highest bidder. Cable or satellite, probably. A programme like this could finally bring those carriers into the heart of the mainstream.”

“You could have refused to let them use the house,” the programme’s distinguished host interrupted.

“There are any number of similar houses currently empty overseas,” Geraldine said. “I think I saw that the original Dutch one was being sold on the Internet, cameras and all. That would have been perfect. Besides which, the simple truth of the matter is that you could put these people in a garden shed and the public would watch them.”

“Because one of them is a murderer,” said the shadow minister. “There is blood and gore to be enjoyed here. But let us not forget, Ms Hennessy, a girl has died.”

“Nobody is forgetting that fact, Gavin, but not everybody is attempting to make political capital out of it,” said Geraldine. “There is a genuine public interest here in what is, after all is said and done, a major public event. The audience feel, I think legitimately, that they are a part of this murder. In many ways they feel some responsibility for it. They have been shocked and traumatized. They are grieving and they need to heal. They need to remain connected to what is happening in order to begin that healing process. We cannot suddenly cut them out of the loop. Kelly was much loved, an enormously popular contestant. She truly was the people’s housemate, and in many ways this is the people’s murder.”

It was a brilliant, jaw-droppingly audacious gambit, and totally unexpected. Everybody knew that the real reason Geraldine and the channel wanted to continue broadcasting was money, pure and simple. The stark truth was that Kelly’s murder had turned House Arrest from a moderately successful programme into a television colossus. Episode twenty-six of the show, the last to be shown before the murder, had achieved a 17 per cent audience share. The episode that had just been broadcast, the one that included the murder, had been watched by almost 80 per cent of the viewing public. Almost half of the entire population. Thirty-second advert slots in one of the three commercial breaks had sold at fifteen times their normal price.