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gave her rather an uncomfortable feeling. What were his motives? Was he attracted to her? Was he perving on her? What other reason could he have for risking his job in such a manner? On the other hand, perhaps he was doing it for a laugh? Perhaps he was just a wild and crazy guy who fancied the crack of manipulating Peeping Tom? Dervla was well aware of how much the media preferred scandals and skulduggery in the house to honest relationships. It was always the bad boys and girls who got the publicity. If this mysterious letter-writer managed to open up a dialogue with her, the story would certainly be worth more than a cameraman’s wage. That was a thought. Perhaps he was already in the pay of a newspaper? The press were always trying to drop leaflets and parachutists and hang-glider pilots into the house; it must have occurred to them to try to bribe a cameraman. Now another thought occurred to her: perhaps this person was no friend at all, but an agent provocateur! Seeking to tempt her into breaking the rules! Was this entrapment? A sting? Were Peeping Tom or the newspapers trying to catch her out? If so, then were they trying the same trick on the others? Dervla imagined her exposure as a cheat, the earnest tones of the voiceover man revealing her shame. Revelling in it.
    ‘We decided to test each of the inmates by offering them an illegal channel of communication with the outside world. Dervla was the only housemate to take the bait, the only willing cheat…’ That would be it, expulsion in disgrace, for ever more to be labelled ‘Devious Dervla,’
    ‘Dastardly Dervla’…Dirty Dervla. Her mind swam. She forced herself to focus her thoughts. It simply couldn’t be Peeping Tom doing this. Entrapment was immoral — she wasn’t at all sure if it wasn’t an actual crime. If a respectable production company did that, then nobody would ever trust them again. No, it couldn’t be Peeping Tom. What if it was the media? Well, so what? So far she had done nothing wrong and she would be careful to keep it that way. Besides, any paper that had bribed a cameraman could not publish anything about it without revealing their source, and they would certainly wait a while to do that. Dervla reckoned that at the very least she had time to sit back and see how the situation developed. And if it really was a friend, somebody who had taken a shine to her and wanted her to win…Who could tell? Perhaps it might give her the edge. It would certainly be nice to get a bit of outside information…And she hadn’t actually asked for any help, so it wasn’t really immoral. Not to look in the mirror, surely?

DAY THIRTY-TWO. 9.20 p.m.
    O ne wall of the incident room had become known as ‘the Map’. On it Trisha had affixed photographs of the ten housemates, which she had then connected by a great mass of crisscrossing lines of tape stuck to the plaster with Blu-Tack. On the strips of tape Trisha and her colleagues had written short descriptive sentences such as ‘attracted to’, ‘loathes’, ‘had row about cheese’, and ‘spends too long in the toilet’. Hooper had attempted to recreate Trisha’s map on his computer, using his photo scanner and untold gigabytes of three- dimensional graphic-arts software programming. Sadly the project defeated him and a little bomb kept appearing and telling him to restart the computer. Soon Hooper was forced to slink back to the drawing pins and Blu-Tack along with everybody else. Now Coleridge was standing in front of the map solemnly contemplating the ten housemates and the ever-growing web of interconnecting relationships.
    ‘Somewhere,’ he said, ‘somewhere in this dense mass of human intercourse must lie our motive, our catalyst for a murder.’ He spoke as if he were addressing a room full of people, but in fact only Hooper and Trisha were there, everybody else having long since gone home. They had decided that the evening’s subjects for discussion would be Layla the beautiful