Black Noise (19 page)

Sam looked online for ads that might spawn more ideas. As Lia watched one more startlingly expensive-looking commercial, she

suddenly sat up. She had just seen something she didn’t understand. ‘Show me that again,’ she said.

Sam clicked back to the beginning of the video. In the picture a man walked along a pavement drinking a smoothie through a straw. The man then saw a lorry on the road bearing down on a woman crossing the street. The woman was pushing a pram and didn’t notice the lorry. Lia knew the advertisement; she’d seen it before on TV. Next the man would rush to the woman, snatch her and the pram up and catapult into the air. The idea was that the smoothie could make anyone a do-gooding superman.

Lia watched the part where the woman stood in the middle of the street not glancing to either side. What a stupid woman. Why was she just gawping and not acting like normal people did. Why was she being portrayed as stupid?

‘Why do they always need a man saving a woman?’ Lia asked Sam.

Sam grinned.

‘No man could give a right answer to that question.’

Something in the advert bothered Lia. And she knew that was what the people who made it wanted. The simplicity of characters in commercials could irritate you as much as you wanted just as long as you remembered the product.

Then the images moving on the screen gave rise to another idea, a serious, real one. It was so frightening Lia couldn’t continue working.

She apologised to Sam for the interruption and made up an excuse about a meeting she had forgotten. Then she fled the building.

Luckily Mari picked up instantly.

Lia didn’t have time to explain her idea before Mari asked, ‘Can you come to the Studio right now?’

Something jumped inside Lia.

‘Are you coming too?’

‘Yes.’

When Mari arrived at the Studio, everyone else was already there. She hugged Maggie, and smiled at Paddy and Rico and Lia. Mari sat down at her desk as if she had never been gone.

They all made a silent promise not to think that one of the group was missing. They had to investigate the video killings. They had to concentrate.

‘On Craig Cole too,’ Mari said.

The others were surprised.

‘You want to return to the Cole case?’ Rico asked in surprise.

They had been able to put Cole’s issue on the backburner, but Mari didn’t think they could leave it unfinished.

‘He isn’t in the clear yet, and we can’t leave him on his own.’

Lia believed she knew why Mari wanted them to stay on Craig Cole. Mari wanted to give them all something good. A feeling that they could accomplish something, help someone.

Maybe Mari also felt some sort of connection to Cole. Craig Cole had fallen from a position that looked unassailable from the outside. Cole’s popularity was based on genuine warmth and talent. Losing that had been unfair.

The same thing had happened to them – the Studio’s wings had been clipped mid-flight, sending them crashing to the ground. A cold, brutal act had shattered their world. Perhaps after falling from so high, Mari wanted to do what she had always done, setting herself aside and focusing on the needs of others.

Mari had received information that Cole’s agent would no longer even meet with his former star client.

‘They haven’t seen each other for weeks,’ Mari said.

That was bad news. Just a little while ago a radio personality like Cole would have been an important client for any PR agency. Now the agent wanted surreptitiously to dump him.

‘I can’t believe no one wants to hire Craig Cole,’ Mari said.

Popularity like that didn’t disappear that fast. One radio station had offered him a short-term hosting job, although he turned it down.

But Cole needed something new. ‘Maggie, could you look into it?’ Mari asked.

‘My pleasure,’ Maggie said.

Cole needed the right-sized opportunity, Mari suggested. Not a return to the past, not to the centre of attention. But something where he could feel needed and liked.

‘I have a few ideas of where to start,’ Maggie said.

They talked about the video murders for the next hour. As they conversed, strange aspects of the killings that had come out over the past few days started to click into place for Lia.

From his previous work in the police and the private security industry, Paddy knew the magnitude of the celebrity stalking problem. The police kept files on the biggest stars, with records of criminal complaints, reports of threats and any other details. Companies that offered security services made constant risk assessments for their star clients about events at which they were to appear. These firms also investigated fan forums and hate sites where people discussed celebrities, looking for signs of threats.

Paddy had been turning the Queen and Freddie Mercury fansites inside out. Of course most of them were innocent, full of normal, harmless chatter.

‘But it sometimes goes beyond that.’

The elapsed time since Mercury’s death had done nothing to dampen the fervour of his cult following. Some sites offered extensive analyses of each and every picture and morsel of information ever made public about his life. And some tributes an outsider would hardly consider flattering.

‘Some of them are really strange,’ Paddy said.

For example, someone had written a veritable tome trying to prove that Mercury wasn’t gay and hadn’t died of AIDS. The singer’s homosexuality was still such a difficult thing for some fans that they fought against it tooth and nail. As a young man, Mercury had had one long relationship with a woman, who had become his closest friend, but he also had plenty of male partners over the years.

Lia shared with the others the idea that had just startled her so much at
Level
.

‘Maybe this is nothing,’ she said. ‘I don’t know much about these things. But I started wondering why the victims don’t move. Why do they lie on the ground ready to be kicked?’

The question surprised the others.

‘Why don’t they try to get away?’ Lia asked. ‘Wouldn’t a person who knows they’re in mortal danger try to get out of there?’

Mari looked at Lia silently for a long time.

‘That’s true,’ she finally said. ‘You’re right.’

A person being kicked to death would use all their strength to try to escape. Or at least avoid the kicks. But the victims on the videos mostly just lay there. They raised their arms to shield their heads and rolled a bit. But none of them tried to resist or even grab their attacker’s legs. None of them tried to get up. It was unnatural.

‘Why didn’t we think about this?’ Mari asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Paddy said. ‘Maybe because we’ve only been looking at what everyone else is. We haven’t been thinking about the situation from the victims’ perspective.’

In distress like that, a person would do anything to get away, Mari said. The killer had to have done something to them before killing them.

Maybe he slipped something in their drinks at the bars, Maggie suggested. Ruffies.

‘That’s a possibility,’ Mari said. ‘Or maybe he did something to them outside the bars. There are so many eyes in these clubs.’

Whatever he did to them, this discovery was important.

‘In any case,’ Mari said, ‘we’ve just found one more way to narrow down possible suspects.’

The man probably knew a little about drugs or medications and knew where to get them. That would give the police one more lead to chase down.

‘Do the police know about this?’ Lia wondered.

‘Of course,’ Paddy said. ‘It’s their job to think about attacks from the victims’ perspective.’

And they had the bodies, Paddy added. In crimes like these they always did thorough autopsies and ran toxicology screenings.

‘The police know that he’s killing gay people. The police know
he drugs them with something. They know all of this but they’re keeping schtum,’ Rico said.

They could all hear the suppressed anger in his voice.

‘Often they have to hold back details like this,’ Paddy said. ‘Sometimes for weeks or months to protect the investigation.’

Mari turned to Lia.

‘Didn’t you say you saw a table with bottles and machines in the police incident room?’

Lia said she had. She was embarrassed to realise that she remembered almost nothing about the table and its contents. It hadn’t felt important then. The gruesome images of the victims posted on the walls had dominated her attention. For a fleeting moment she had wondered whether the devices and bottles were for collecting some kind of evidence but had shut the thought out of her mind.

Did it matter that much? Maggie asked.

‘Isn’t the most important thing that the police know? That the police can investigate whether the victims were drugged?’

‘That’s critical,’ Mari said. ‘But so far nothing indicates the police are really investigating anything about these crimes the way they should.’

Mari looked them all in the eye, one by one.

‘I don’t think the police are going to catch him,’ she said. ‘But we can.’

Detective Chief Inspector Keith Brewster was waiting for Lia in the large building on Francis Street – the one that looked lifeless on the outside but which housed within it an Operation Rhea in full swing.

He let Lia write her name in the visitor log and take her pass from the guard. Brewster eyed Lia closely, but Lia didn’t say anything. She had a clear goal for her visit: to get back into the incident room.

When she rang and asked Brewster for a meeting, at first he declined.

‘You’re a bystander,’ was Brewster’s curt reply. ‘We’ll get in touch if we find it necessary.’

But half an hour later while Lia was still contemplating how to overcome the lead investigator’s reluctance, he suddenly rang back.

‘I’m not sure this is a good idea,’ Brewster said. ‘But Holywell wants to meet you.’

‘Really?’

Before Lia had brought them the Studio’s projections of future crime scenes. Brewster’s second-in-command in the investigation, criminal psychologist and profiler Christopher Holywell, was interested to hear what else Lia might have to report. And Lia seemed to sense that Brewster was privately pleased that DCI Gerrish didn’t have anything to do with it this time.

‘Peter Gerrish doesn’t know you’re coming?’ Brewster had asked.

‘No.’

‘We’ll notify him of your visit, of course,’ Brewster said. ‘Sooner or later.’

‘As you wish,’ Lia had replied. ‘But I understood you were in charge of the investigation, not him.’

They had planned out her meeting with the police the previous night at the Studio. Over and over Mari and Paddy ran her through what she was supposed to do.

‘At first don’t say anything,’ Mari said. ‘If they try to talk to you in the lobby, say that this is the kind of thing that needs to be discussed elsewhere. If they try to take you to an interrogation room, say you
want to talk about it with other investigators present. Don’t give them any other option. Don’t mention the incident room. Wait for Brewster to decide that for himself.’

Lia didn’t need to lead Brewster along though. He took her straight to the incident room.

It was early evening, and only a few police detectives were around besides Brewster and Christopher Holywell. A handful of investigators manned the telephones in the adjacent room.

‘Most of them are sleeping,’ Brewster said. ‘People have been pulling sixteen-hour days. Pretty soon they’re going to start dropping like flies from exhaustion. These people never stop unless someone orders them to rest.’

The pictures on the walls of the large room were still the same. The sunlight revealed their every detail, but Lia wasn’t shocked to see them any more. They were just tragic and depressing. Gloomy fragments of reality.

Christopher Holywell came to introduce himself as soon as he saw Lia. A rather small man, he was dressed less formally than his police comrades, in jeans and polo shirt.

‘Why are you involved with this case?’ Holywell asked, managing to make the question sound friendly despite its directness. ‘Gerrish and Brewster say you’re a complete outsider. Gerrish also urged you to stay out of it.’

‘I have my reasons,’ Lia said. ‘Just like Gerrish and you have your own ways of leading investigations. So do you want to talk about that or the information I have?’

Any other policeman would have moved on to Lia’s information, but not Holywell. The forensic psychologist looked at Lia very closely.

‘I was a psychologist, years ago,’ Holywell said. ‘Then I got roped into assisting in a police investigation.’

He recounted being at turns shocked and intensely interested by everything he saw and experienced.

‘For some of us, understanding crime changes us. We’re still afraid of it, but at the same time the experience wakes us up. It makes you feel more capable,’ he said.

He had started studying forensic psychology and, within a few years, had risen to teaching at Portsmouth University and joined the ranks of Scotland Yard’s Murder/Major Investigation Teams as a profiler. He trained SCAS crime analysts in Hampshire and represented Britain at international events in the field.

‘As an investigator I always get the really repellent, weird cases,’ Holywell said.

‘And you’re still satisfied with your choice of profession?’ Lia asked.

Holywell laughed.

‘I specialise in crimes against sexual and gender minorities,’ he added.

Lia nodded. At least someone on the investigation knew what was going on.

‘Well, what do you have?’ asked Brewster, who had been waiting impatiently.

Lia hadn’t said over the phone when she proposed their meeting. They had planned that at the Studio too: Lia had to get into the incident room.

‘These,’ Lia said, pulling a stack of papers out of her bag.

They were printouts of online conversations from the people whose accounts the killer hacked to upload his videos. These were the ones who had each mocked Queen or Freddie Mercury in some way.

Clearly Brewster and Holywell weren’t expecting anything like this.

Lia explained the progress of the discussion threads. As she talked, she glanced around, trying not to let on what she was searching for.

Overhearing the conversation, the other investigators came to listen in. Lia realised she was stuck in the wrong part of the room. She was too far away from the table that interested her.

‘Let me show you something,’ she said, walking over to a table next to her target.

She spread the papers out on the empty table so they were all visible at once.

‘Look at the dates and times,’ Lia said.

The men bent over to examine the printouts.

‘What’s significant about them?’ Holywell asked.

The killer had chosen users out of the long discussion threads who poked fun at Queen, but the discussions were all from different times. The oldest was from more than a year before.

‘Couldn’t the different times indicate that he’s been planning this for at least that long?’ Lia asked. ‘Maybe the killer participates in these discussions himself.’

At the Studio Rico had been trying to track down contact information for everyone in the threads, but that was slow. It would be easier for the police because they could get information directly from the service providers.

The investigators read the sheets of paper one by one and then pondered.

Lia stood behind them, calmly looking at the next table, which was full of unfamiliar machines and small glass bottles. On the whiteboard above the table were words and abbreviations written in marker.

Two syringes also lay on the table. Lia hadn’t noticed them on her first visit when she had been further away from the table. The syringes were small and thin. They had long needles.

Drug syringes?

She quickly tried to memorise the words on the whiteboard. At first remembering them felt easy as she focused all of her powers of concentration. But when she turned away for a second, she realised she couldn’t even remember half of it. There was too much.

‘Is this all?’ Brewster asked.

Lia shrugged.

‘Isn’t this enough?’

Brewster cast a stern glance at Holywell.

‘How did you get these?’ Holywell asked Lia.

‘The same way as the information about Rich Lane,’ Lia said. ‘Using computer programs to sift through a lot of different things.’

‘What things?’ Holywell asked calmly.

‘What had been done online from their IP addresses, what websites they hung out on.’

‘Where did you get the IP addresses?’

‘The same place you did,’ Lia said.

‘The ISPs?’

‘Yes,’ Lia said. ‘You just did it by the book. If our killer did visit those pages, he probably masked his connection. But there’s still something there to investigate.’

Brewster interrupted their conversation.

‘If this is everything, then we don’t have any reason to detain you here any further.’

‘Sure there is,’ Lia said. ‘I want something in exchange.’

Holywell shrugged lightly. ‘We knew all these kids were Internet trolls to one degree or another. And that at least one of them had mocked Queen,’ he said.

But the police hadn’t realised that all of them had done so, Holywell admitted. Lia’s information would help their investigation.

Lia saw how Holywell’s gaze quickly paused on Brewster, and when the lead investigator immediately moved away to shuffle through some papers on his desk, she realised the police had planned the meeting out ahead of time too. Holywell wanted to talk to her alone.

He wants to figure me out, and I want to remember that list of words on the wall.

‘Do you think you know why this man is committing these crimes?’ Holywell asked.

‘No,’ Lia admitted. ‘I understand it has something to do with
celebrity obsession syndrome.
That’s what you call it, right?’

Holywell nodded.

‘It isn’t an officially recognised diagnosis,’ he said. ‘And it doesn’t completely explain what’s going on here. But it’s an apt name for how some people’s imbalance presents. This man follows serial killer logic. They all have fetishes, details they worship. Usually they’re sexual or violent. This man’s fetishes relate to obsessive admiration and violence.’

Freddie Mercury died in 1991, before the rise of the Internet, so he escaped much of the hate speech and aggression so common online. But a figure like Mercury, who lived with such flourish, was in a class of his own when it came to engendering abnormally strong feelings in his admirers even after his death, Holywell said.

‘It’s as if the star’s death creates a space for his admirers that they fill with their fantasies,’ he said. ‘And this sort of idolisation can be
much more powerful for people than you might believe. Because of the Internet more and more people have the ability to create their own reality and only associate with people like themselves.’

Lia had a hard time concentrating on what the profiler was saying and simultaneously trying to commit to memory the list on the wall behind him without being noticed.

Henssge. Anect. Subdural haematoma.
Nearly twenty words and abbreviations, some with numbers following. The words didn’t describe anything Lia was familiar with. She guessed it was a list of drugs and chemical compounds, but also realised that impression was influenced by the flasks and syringes and strange devices on the table.

What was in the flasks? Why were they here – the police had to have separate laboratories, right?

Some of the flasks were empty. Two had liquid, one clear, one yellowish.

Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. They could just be sampling tools.

As Holywell continued his analysis of Freddie Mercury fans, Lia grasped just how much he had researched the topic.

Anything related to the star they admired could become a fetish for some fans. Just recently a woman in the United States had been issued a restraining order. She was a Queen fan who had become obsessed with an actor who resembled Freddie Mercury. He played Mercury in a musical tribute to the band, and this fan began sending him and his wife strange messages.

A major homicide had been blamed on Mercury worship before in Britain, Holywell pointed out.

‘What was it?’ Lia asked.

The murder happened in 1999, Holywell explained. A television presenter named Jill Dando was shot down in cold blood on her doorstep in Fulham. The man convicted of her murder was Barry George.

Lia knew the name from the year of appeals following the conviction.

‘George was also a fan, in his own way,’ Holywell said.

Over the years Barry George had been convicted of various sex crimes, and he suffered from personality disorders. He worshipped a wide range of celebrities, especially Princess Diana. He collected thousands of pictures of women, both celebrities and people he met himself. For some of them he had contact information. George had an interest in guns, dressed in uniforms and sometimes impersonated a police officer, a soldier or sports stars. He even managed to wiggle his way into newspaper articles using celebrities’ names as his own. Once troops guarding the royal family detained George for hiding near Kensington Palace with a rope, a large hunting knife and a poem dedicated to Prince Charles.

At the time of Dando’s murder, George had been using the name Barry Bulsara. Bulsara was Freddie Mercury’s real surname.

Lia nodded at Holywell’s account while feverishly repeating the names of the drugs on the board behind him.

George had represented himself as Mercury’s cousin and tried to get into the singer’s former Kensington flat so often and disruptively that the police were forced to remove him physically. George had even tried to have surgery to make himself look as much like Freddie Mercury as possible.

‘Some fans do things like that,’ Holywell said. ‘Or rather, they aren’t really fans, they’re a sort of über-fan who think they can get closer to their idols by becoming more like them. Or that they’re special people so that should show in their appearance.’

George’s only stint of employment had been a short gig as a runner for the BBC, but the network hadn’t kept him on. Apparently George had taken exception to the way the BBC dealt with Mercury’s death. No one knew why George would have wanted to kill Jill Dando, but there were different theories. Dando resembled Princess Diana. Dando had worked in a prominent position at the BBC, with which George had a conflicted relationship. And his whole life Barry George had behaved aggressively towards women and wanted to be famous.

‘Barry Bulsara,’ Lia repeated.

Of course she recognised what the criminal psychologist was doing, trying to create a connection with her without revealing too much. All of Britain knew the Dando case, and everyone had followed the continuing saga of Barry George. After seven years in prison,
George was freed. No one else was ever accused of Dando’s murder, but serious doubts had arisen about the evidence used to convict him. In part because of his troubled upbringing, numerous experts had supported George’s release, and a popular campaign ensued.

But many in the police still believed in George’s guilt, Holywell added.