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Well, that was something, Coleridge told himself. The speed with which the killer had grasped his or her chance surely proved that he had been waiting and watching. He or she had wanted to kill. What could possibly have happened to engender such hatred? Without any evidence to the contrary, Coleridge had to presume that these people had all been complete strangers to each other less than a month before. He and his team had been studying the background of all the housemates but had so far found not one shred of a suggestion that any of them had known each other prior to entering the house. So why would a stranger plan to kill a stranger? Because they were strangers no more. Something must have happened or been said in those three weeks that had made murder inevitable. But what? There had certainly been some dreadful goings-on in the house, but nothing had been observed that looked remotely like a motive for the crime. It could not be ruled out that two of the inmates had not been strangers. That some ancient enmity had been unwittingly introduced into the house? That some bleak and terrible coincidence in the selection process had led to murder? Whatever the answer, Coleridge knew that he wouldn’t find it there in that gloomy old hangar at Shepperton. It was inside the real house, it was inside the people inside the real house. Wearily, he returned to his car, to which Hooper had retreated half an hour earlier, and together they began their drive back to Sussex, where the real Peeping Tom house was located, a journey of about twenty miles which if they were lucky would only take them the rest of the morning.

DAY THIRTY. 9.15 p.m.
    W hile Coleridge and Hooper nosed their way along the M25, Trisha was interviewing Bob Fogarty, the editor-in-chief of House Arrest. After Geri the Gaoler, Fogarty was the most senior figure in the Peeping Tom hierarchy. Trisha wanted to know more about how the people she had been watching came to be presented in the way they were.
    ‘House Arrest is basically fiction,’ said Fogarty, handing her a styrofoam cup of watery froth and nearly missing her hand in the darkness of the monitoring bunker.
    ‘Like all TV and film. It’s built in the edit.’
    ‘You manipulate the housemates’ images?’
    ‘Well, obviously. We’re not scientists, we make television programmes. People are basically dull. We have to make them interesting, turn them into heroes and villains.’
    ‘I thought you were supposed to be observers, that the whole thing was an experiment in social interaction?’
    ‘Look, constable,’ Fogarty explained patiently, ‘in order to create a nightly half-hour of broadcasting we have at our disposal the accumulated images of thirty television cameras running for twenty-four hours. That’s seven hundred and twenty hours of footage to make one half-hour of television. We couldn’t avoid making subjective decisions even if we wanted to. The thing that amazes us is that the nation believes what we show them. They actually accept that what they are watching is real.’
    ‘I don’t suppose they think about it much. I mean, why should they?’
    ‘That’s true enough. As long as it’s good telly they don’t care, which is why as far as possible we try to shoot the script.’
    ‘Shoot the script?’
    ‘It’s a term they use in news and features.’
    ‘And it means?’
    ‘Well, say you’re making a short insert for the news, investigating heroin addiction on housing estates. If you simply went out to some urban hellhole with a camera and started nosing around, you could be looking for the story you want till Christmas. So you script your investigation before you leave your office. You say…All right, we need a couple of kids to say they can get smack at school, we need a girl to say she’d whore for a hit, we need a youth worker to say it’s the government’s fault…You write the whole thing. Then you send out a researcher to round up a few show-offs and basically tell