Black Noise (11 page)

‘What kind of story?’ Lia asked.

‘Let’s not get into that now,’ Mamia said. ‘Maybe we can talk about it sometime though.’

The same quickness, the same accuracy in every thought as Mari.

‘Now I don’t want to be unfriendly, Lia,’ Mamia said, ‘but since you’re answering when I called Mari, it’s clear that everything isn’t right there. Mari hasn’t answered me in days. At all. You are apparently a new visitor to Mari’s home, or at least you haven’t been there often. You didn’t know to use the headset for the phone, and you have a plate under that sandwich that Mari doesn’t use for sandwiches. It’s too small. You must have taken it out of the cupboard yourself. What’s going on there? Is Mari ill?’

Lia had a difficult time balancing what she could and couldn’t tell Mari’s grandmother. The bluntness of Mamia’s questions didn’t help the situation.

But in her own way Mamia was also leaving her space not to talk about things, Lia noticed. Mamia wanted to know specifically whether Mari was in some sort of distress, but she wasn’t one of those old people who didn’t give others space to live their lives.

Lia said that a good friend of theirs had died tragically, and they were all trying to get over the shock.

‘It wasn’t Paddy, was it?’ Mamia asked immediately.

How much does she know? Lia wondered. Could she know about the Studio?

‘No,’ Lia said. ‘Not Paddy.’

‘Good. I’ve told Mari over and over that in many ways women may be at their best single, but if a man happens to come along you can fall for, you should give the option serious consideration. Mari doesn’t exactly have men lining up outside her door. Men who could keep up with her that is.

‘You don’t want to tell me any more about this death,’ Mamia continued. ‘That’s fine. Not everything needs to be spread around.’

Lia listened, baffled by the woman’s frankness. Mamia relaxed and gave a laugh.

‘You’re obviously hungry. I don’t mind if you eat while we talk.’

Their conversation was strange and stimulating.

Lia didn’t remember ever meeting anyone like her – only her first encounter with Mari had made as deep an impression.

Mamia had to be at least eighty years old, she decided. She didn’t know how old Mari’s parents were, but the wall-sized display revealed the lines in her grandmother’s face. Mamia was very thin. She had on a light frock, almost a summer dress, although early spring was cold in Finland, Lia knew.

Good blood circulation. She must exercise a lot or be health conscious otherwise.

Mari hadn’t told Lia much of anything about her family. Only that they were from Häme and they were social democrats. Her sister was a teacher somewhere, or at least she had been. And there was a brother who secretly married a Chilean woman without telling anyone.

‘You’ve been at
Level
how long now? Six years?’ Mamia asked.

‘Yeah, I guess. Why?’

‘It’s good to get yourself a solid position,’ Mamia observed. ‘But that’s quite a long time to spend at one publication. If you compare it to others your age on the London job market. Don’t most people switch places every few years?’

‘I haven’t needed a change,’ Lia said. ‘It took me a long time to get used to this job. I’m not much of a… career person.’

‘No, you aren’t,’ Mamia said.

Her expression was so warm Lia couldn’t take offence at how direct she was being. Mamia seemed to be well-informed about life in London. Maybe Mari had told her about it.

‘You and Mari, neither of you think about your careers,’ Mamia said. ‘Sometimes I envy you. When I was that age, we had so many more rules. It was rare for someone to go abroad unless they had to in order to make a living. Back then you had to choose what you were going to do and stick with it.’

‘What did you do?’

Mamia had been a secretary in a magistrate’s court. Her diction told of the meticulousness and diligence she applied to discharging her duties. At times she had been frustrated with the hierarchical institution, but now she was mostly proud of her working years. She had seen people’s lives from many different perspectives, she noted, and learned how to manage information.

‘You were a little surprised to have an old lady like me calling you over the Internet,’ Mamia said.

Lia laughed.

‘Yes, it was a bit of a shock,’ she admitted. ‘My grandparents have got used to mobile phones, but email and the Internet and all that is still a struggle.’

‘I can imagine. I do much better than most. On the other hand, one does have plenty of time at this age.’

‘Mari doesn’t talk much about her parents or other family,’ Lia said. ‘Where do you all live?’

The furrowed face on the wall turned serious.

‘Here and there,’ Mamia said. ‘Here and there.’

They talked for a long time. Mamia spoke about Finland, the dramatic twists and turns of the recent elections and what was on at the major art museums and theatres.

Lia deduced from their conversation that at least some of Mari’s family members lived in Finland but that communication between them was not uncomplicated. Still, how dear Mari was to her grandmother was obvious.

Lia recognised a good number of similarities between the two. Mari had surely inherited some of her sense of justice from her grandmother. They had the same quick wit and the same habit of issuing orders.

‘I imagine you’re still hungry,’ Mamia said. ‘You can stop being so polite and picking crumbs off your plate. There’s Finnish crisp bread in the kitchen. I know because I sent it.’

Lia obeyed, fetching more bread. She forgot to take care not to drop crumbs in the study as Mamia told the story of her nickname.

‘It happened near Pori,’ Mamia said. ‘I’m sure you don’t think someone from Pori could come up with something like this on her own. We’re far too serious.’

Mari and her three siblings had been visiting their grandparents.

‘It was a rare joy for us,’ Mamia said. ‘It didn’t happen often at all.’

Mari’s mother didn’t like sleeping in strange houses, she explained, and there were other reasons.

‘They had strong childrearing principles. Children weren’t allowed to speak rudely. Swearing was punished. They were likely the politest, most obedient children in all of Finland.’

Mamia had taken issue with many aspects of parenting in her son’s family. Lia noticed from Mamia’s careful choice of words that she was tiptoeing around the topic.

Once when Mari’s family was visiting, Mamia was watching the children play inside. Mari’s parents were outside, and in the middle of the game Mari’s little brother said, ‘That’s shit.’

‘The boy said it without thinking,’ Mamia said. ‘We had been watching television and there was a comedy show where one of the characters cursed about a Finnish rally racer’s car using that word. And the little boy repeated the word, as children are apt to do. My thought was that these overly obedient children felt so free with me that they could say anything that popped into their heads.’

The little boy was frightened when he realised he had said a swear word. He thought he had offended his grandmother and knew if his parents found out they would punish him.

‘I told him it was a word just like any other word. A strong word, yes, which should be used with care and consideration. But since their parents didn’t want them to use it, they should honour that.’

Then she invented a game for the children. They could choose a nickname for her. The children thought that was ever so exciting, and Mari’s big sister chose the name Mamia because when she was little she used to call Grandmother Mirjami that when she was learning to talk.

‘So I said that from now on, I’m Mamia. And whenever you say Mamia, it can mean anything you want. And it’s also a swear word, but only we know that.’

Lia laughed in surprise.

‘I didn’t see any harm in it,’ Mamia said. ‘It was good for the children to learn that swearing could be perfectly acceptable at times and that no one should make such a fuss about it. It was a harmless way to let the children talk like children.’

The name game had become Mamia and the children’s shared secret. Saying her nickname amused the children to no end. Sometimes they would chant it. ‘Mamia, Mamia, Mamia.’

Mari and her siblings never revealed the game to their parents, Mamia said.

‘What does the name mean now?’

Mamia smiled.

‘It’s simply Mamia. They can swear all they want now. Now they can do as they wish.’

The call had lasted for more than an hour when Lia noticed that night had long since fallen outside. Mamia saw Lia glancing at the clock.

‘We should stop now,’ Mamia said.

‘It would be nice to chat longer,’ Lia said. ‘But I have a dog I need to take out and some other things to do.’

Mamia looked contemplative.

‘You mentioned that Mari doesn’t talk about her family there,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t say much to me about her friends. I’ve heard a little about you. And Paddy, of course.’

‘That’s how she is,’ Lia said.

Neither said anything for a moment.

‘Lia, do you know that I’ve always thought that Mari is one of the last women that life could ever crush. She’s experienced so much.’

Lia swallowed, not knowing what to say.

‘But then if something ever were to knock her down…’ the old woman said, trailing off. ‘If you can, take care of her now. She doesn’t want to be taken care of. She can’t stand anyone watching over her. But no one can survive everything alone.’

Lia thought of Mari lying in her bed nearly incapacitated with grief.

‘If something gets through all of Mari’s defences, things could go very badly for her,’ Mamia said. Lia nodded.

Mamia smiled plaintively.

‘Goodnight.’

The old woman’s face disappeared from the wall. Lia picked up a few breadcrumbs she had dropped and turned off the computer.

She walked to the door of the room and could sense before she entered the corridor that someone was there.

In the hall she found Mari, swaying, leaning on the wall for support.

What had Mari heard of their phone call? At least the end.

Mari looked at her. The agony was visible in her eyes. Lia knew she couldn’t say anything about Berg directly. And this wasn’t a woman anyone could nurse.

‘Gro is waiting,’ Lia said. ‘I have to take her out and then get her home.’

Water welled up in Mari’s eyes. Cautiously Lia approached and hugged her. They stood in the dark hall without saying anything, holding tight to each other and crying.

On her way to the Studio, Lia turned on her smartphone. She had five messages and three calls, all from Rico. Lia’s phone had been on silent as Rico tried to contact her all night. The text messages just said,
Ring
.

Has he found something new about the video killer? Lia wondered as she dialled.

‘No, nothing new,’ Rico answered immediately. ‘But we forgot something very important. Berg’s call history. The phone company has a record of all his calls.’

They had taken Berg’s mobile phone, but the police would be able to investigate his phone traffic by digging into the telephone company’s records. At the Studio they knew the calls wouldn’t be any help capturing the killer, but they would tie Berg to the Studio.

‘I told Mari we should be using crypto-phones with untraceable metadata,’ Rico complained.

‘How fast can the police get the call data?’

‘Paddy thinks they can’t do it during the night. They’ll need a search warrant, and they’ll have to go to the phone company’s premises since they don’t let anyone into their system remotely. But in a criminal investigation this size – they’ll be there first thing in the morning when the phone company opens its doors.’

Lia looked at her phone: almost ten. They had perhaps only eleven hours before the police would be able to connect the Bertil Tore Berg found dead on Rich Lane to the Studio.

‘Paddy and Maggie are here,’ Rico said.

‘I’ll be there in a minute,’ Lia promised.

Determining whether Rico could mess around with the call information by hacking into the telephone company’s system took them nearly an hour. It turned out to be nearly impossible in such a short timeframe.

Rico knew of cases where it had succeeded, things he’d heard from his hacker friends. But Berg’s operator was Vodafone, one of the world’s largest telecom companies, whose systems had notoriously difficult security.

‘Hacking their mobile accounts is pretty easy,’ Rico said.

People were doing that all the time all over the world hoping for free calls, but penetrating the information the company kept about its customers was a different proposition altogether.

‘And we don’t just have to get in to look at it. We have to be able to alter it,’ Rico said.

Mari wouldn’t have taken this long to realise that the phone operator had the call information too. If she was healthy,
Lia thought.
We need Mari.

The entire existence of the Studio was now under threat.

Rico began breaking the matter down into its essential parts: what things in Berg’s calls and messages were dangerous for them? Just that he had kept in such close contact with all of them, for one. Berg had communicated with Mari, Paddy and Rico about Studio business, but most of his messages to Lia and Maggie were more personal.

According to the law, the telecom company was obliged to maintain information about the times of any calls or messages, as well as the numbers of the senders and receivers and the customer’s location when they made the call where the customer was in the network. Retaining the content of messages was a more delicate matter.

‘There are a lot of crazy rumours about that,’ Rico said. ‘Some people claim every message anyone ever sends is secretly stored in some kind of permanent archive somewhere.’

In reality practices for saving the content of messages differed widely around the world, and the laws varied too.

But the police might be able to turn up some of the content of Berg’s messages and would at least contact them at the Studio, and possibly even look into their backgrounds. Paddy’s activities as a private investigator and former cop would be of particular interest. Especially since he had spent some time in prison for his participation in an attempted armoured-car jacking. That was his one and only criminal escapade, but it would arouse suspicion. Rico’s background as a hacker would come out too, and since the killer had uploaded his videos using hacked user accounts, they would definitely haul Rico in for questioning.

Because Lia had been in contact with the police a year earlier, their databases might also contain entries about her. Mari certainly
wouldn’t want to have any sort of contact with the authorities. Maggie was the only one of them that wouldn’t be caught in the net.

‘We have to remove your information,’ Maggie said. ‘If they question me, they won’t get much. I can just say Berg was my friend and we met through the theatre.’

Could they replace the call information they hoped to delete with new data? Lia suggested. The police would have a harder time picking out Berg’s calls to people at the Studio if they were buried in a mass of other data. Rico was an old hand at setting up dummy corporations and creating plausible electronic histories for them. Could he fake phone calls too?

‘I’ve never tried that,’ Rico said.

Despite the rush and the pressure, the idea got him excited.

They worked late into the night. As Rico researched how to meddle with phone connection information, Maggie and Paddy collected names and numbers they could place in Berg’s phone records as a smokescreen. They concentrated on his carpentry work so it would look like Berg had contacts with customers and firms in the industry. The easiest was to use contact information for the big wholesalers and timber suppliers because no one there would remember whether a certain carpenter had rung at a certain time.

Lia helped the others and took Gro out for occasional walks. The poor dog’s schedule was all out of whack, but at least she was used to sleeping in the Den.

When Rico thought he had the process of altering call data under control and they had collected dozens of phone numbers, the biggest question lay ahead: how to get their hands on the Vodafone data.

The company’s main offices were in Berkshire, Newbury, more than fifty miles from London. There was an administrative office building in Paddington, but the technical staff were in Berkshire.

‘I don’t think the police will go all the way to Newbury. And we don’t have to either,’ Rico said.

All they needed was to break into the company’s data system and telecommunications archives. Many employees at the offices in Paddington would also have access to those servers.

‘But going there ourselves doesn’t necessarily make sense,’ Rico said.

Rico showed them a small memory stick. All he needed was to have someone plug this USB drive into a Vodafone computer connected to the internal network.

‘After that I’m as good as there. Once the connection to the Vodafone archives is open, I don’t think it will take me long to change Berg’s metadata. But we have to do it without anyone noticing the memory stick.’

Maggie nodded.

‘That sounds like a job for me,’ she said.