DAY ONE. 4.30 p.m.

Kelly left the confession box and went back into the living area of the house. Layla gave her a sympathetic little smile and stroked her arm as she walked by. Kelly turned back, smiled and then they had a little hug together.

“Love you,” said Layla.

“Love you big time,” Kelly replied.

“You stay strong, OK?” said Layla.

Kelly assured Layla that she would certainly attempt to stay strong.

Kelly was so pleased that Layla was hugging her. Earlier in the day they had had a small tiff over Layla’s insistence on including walnut oil on the first group shopping list. Layla pointed out that since she ate mainly salad, dressings were very important to her and that walnut oil was an essential ingredient.

“Also it lubricates my chakras,” she’d said.

Kelly had suggested to Layla that with their limited food budget, walnut oil was surely rather an expensive luxury item.

“Well, I think that’s an entirely subjective observation, babes,” Layla replied, relishing her own eloquence, “and quite frankly depends on how much you value your chakras.”

David then weighed in, supporting Layla. He pointed out that as far as he was concerned the bacon that Kelly had suggested they order, because she cooked a wicked brekkie, was hardly an essential item… “except perhaps to the pig that donated it”, David observed piously from the unimpregnable fortress of his lotus position. “Personally I would far rather order walnut oil than corpse.”

All the other boys leapt in and supported Kelly, but David and Layla’s effortless occupation of the moral high ground had made Kelly feel rotten and for a minute she had thought she would cry. Instead she went into the confession box and told Peeping Tom how much she loved everybody.

Now she had re-emerged and Layla had rewarded her with a hug.

Kelly was wearing only a T-shirt and a tiny pair of shorts and Layla was dressed with similar minimalism in a little silk sarong and matching bikini top. Their tight little tummies touched and their breasts pushed against each other.

Across the room the hot-head camera clamped to the ceiling whizzed and whirred and zoomed towards them with unseemly haste.

DAY THIRTY. 9.45 a.m.

“You 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.

After 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.”

“You see how television pulls the wool over our eyes!” Coleridge exclaimed in exasperation. “If we weren’t concentrating, we might actually have formed the impression that something of interest had occurred! This man’s talent for imbuing the most gut-wrenchingly boring observations with an air of significance normally reserved for matters of life and death is awe-inspiring.”

“I think it’s the Scottish accent,” said Hooper. “It sounds more sincere.”

“The man could have covered the Cuban Missile Crisis without altering his manner at all… It’s midnight in the Oval Office and President Kennedy has yet to hear from Secretary Khrushchev.”

“Who was Khrushchev?” Hooper asked.

“Oh, for God’s sake! He was General Secretary of the Soviet Union!”

“Never heard of it, sir. Is it affiliated to the TUC?”

Coleridge hoped that Hooper was joking but decided not to ask. Instead he pressed play again.

“Layla has just discovered that some of her cheese has gone missing,” said Andy.

“He says it as if she’s just discovered penicillin,” Coleridge moaned.