Black Noise (20 page)

‘Do you believe this man is like Barry George… or Bulsara?’ Lia asked.

‘No,’ Holywell said. ‘This man and George have the same obsessive admiration in common, but otherwise this one is a much more dangerous case. Our killer is exceptionally strong and intelligent.’

Lia read the names, words and figures on the board behind Holywell.

Henssge. Anect. 4.512. Alphabet – why did it say ‘alphabet’?

‘Our perpetrator would kill anyway,’ Holywell said. ‘You could compare it to building a house. For this man killing is like building. He’s good at it, and he wants to do it. He’s been waiting a long time for the chance to build what he’s been planning. The way he videotapes his killings and makes them into Queen fetish objects is the macabre exterior of the house.’

Lia’s heart pounded. She stared at the list of words and abbreviations on the whiteboard. She thought she could remember them, at least most of them. She thought she could describe the things on the table.

‘It would be best for you to give this up,’ Holywell said quietly. ‘It would be best for you to tell us what you know and let us take it from there.’

‘Is that the stuff used to drug the victims?’ Lia asked, pointing to the glass bottle behind Holywell.

This question took Holywell completely by surprise. Quickly he glanced at DCI Brewster, who had also heard the question. Lia could see from Brewster’s expression that she had gone too far.

‘We’re done now,’ Brewster said curtly.

He wasn’t speaking to Lia but rather to Holywell.

‘I came to bring you information that could help you,’ Lia said to them both. ‘And to ask why you aren’t publicly treating these as anti-gay hate crimes.’

Brewster stepped towards Lia angrily, but she stayed calm. Mari had made her instructions clear: When you ask it, don’t get angry. Don’t yell. Don’t give them any reason to react. Just pay attention to what they say.

‘I’m leading this investigation with the full support of my superiors,’ Brewster said. ‘Which, by the way, is none of your business.’

Holywell lowered his eyes, which revealed everything to Lia.

Brewster. Brewster is responsible.

‘I think she could help us,’ Holywell quickly said to his superior.

‘Rolfe,’ Brewster said to one of the detectives following the situation from the sidelines. ‘Please show Ms Pajala out.’

That night new videos showed up online.

Lia, Mari and the others watched them together at the Studio as they went through the information gathered from the police incident room.

The videos used Queen music timed to fit with clips from violent films, reportage from war zones and anything else that showed people dying or being abused.

When the videos started appearing, it was unclear who was making them for a while. But from the usernames used to upload them it soon became obvious that their creators were just troublemakers who wanted to get a rise out of people by showing them unpleasant images. Some of the videos were just clumsy excerpts from B-movies, but some of them had required a good deal of effort to make the shootings, stabbings or explosions match the rhythm of the music.

Many of the creators wanted credit for their work. Seeing the reactions the videos elicited, they started advertising them on social media with links to more of the same kind of content.

Queen’s most popular song, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, inspired the most knock-offs. It was so long that some of the film makers didn’t have the patience to edit imagery for the whole song, but they had no inhibitions when it came to the brutality of the pictures.

‘I detest people,’ Lia said.

She would come to repeat that more than once during the day.

The videos attracted a lot of views. Within two days of the tabloids starting to call the murderer the Queen Killer, several dozen of these videos had been uploaded. They made the news on several channels, which quickly multiplied their viewership.

‘Just when you think you’ve seen humanity sink as low as possible, something new comes along,’ Mari said.

The Times
pointed to the frightening social aspect of the videos. On its website it reminded its readers that this was no different from happy slapping, the random acts of violence young people committed to catch on camera and post online. Usually it was an assault on another youth.

Happy slapping and these new videos were a difficult subject for the media,
The Times
observed. They had to tell people about the phenomenon even though the publicity was precisely what fed it.

‘The police don’t have time to respond,’ wrote one commentator. ‘Videos can be restricted but not completely deleted. The real question is about the wellbeing of families, support and training for teachers and the limits we each set on acceptable behaviour in our interactions each and every day. This is not a problem we can erase or ignore, but we can prevent it. If you know that your children are watching these videos, intervene. All freedoms have limits. Despite our commitment to democracy, as a society we do not sanction demonstrations that devolve into riots and hooliganism. Likewise, we can ill afford to allow happy slapping to spread, and these videos are beyond the pale.’

When a video entitled
Bohemian Whipsody
started circulating online, a line had been crossed. The video, uploaded by a user named ‘dethcalls’, became a hot topic because the author claimed to have assembled it from video clips of actual deaths, mostly brutal beatings that ended up being fatal. In the longest one a man whipped a motionless, naked woman.

‘A snuff film made into a music video,’ Paddy said. ‘And the person who created it could easily be a minor.’

Most of dethcalls’ previous uploads had been removed due to complaints. The music he used was extreme heavy metal, and the images usually depicted the subjugation of women.

‘Can you find out who dethcalls is?’ Mari asked Rico.

The job took Rico a couple of hours.

The boy was seventeen years old and lived in Nottingham. His name was Ian, and he had a long record of involvement with social services and the Youth Crime Unit.

‘Poor kid,’ Paddy said.

Mari shook her head.

‘That video isn’t the work of any “poor kid”,’ she said. ‘That boy is going to grow up to be a big problem.’

But the Studio wasn’t going to get involved, Mari said.
Bohemian Whipsody
was deleted before long, but it would live on in the darker
corners of the Internet and become a hit in its own little gruesome subgenre. But it wasn’t a pressing problem for them.

Henssge. Anect. Subdural haematoma. Alphabet.

Lia remembered almost all of the words, abbreviations and numbers she had seen in the incident room. She tried to duplicate the list as well as she could by writing the words on the whiteboard in Mari’s office at the Studio in the same order she had seen them.

She wasn’t sure of two of the numbers, but everything else was etched in her mind.

‘This is part of a forensic pathology investigation,’ Paddy said immediately upon seeing the list.

The forensic analysis was happening elsewhere than in the Operation Rhea offices, and the police would only be receiving specific information about the results of the analysis. But it was possible that the detectives had wanted to see with their own eyes something that had been found in the bodies.

Paddy recognised a few of the terms in the list. Subdural haematoma meant intracranial bleeding. Henssge had to do with Henssge nomograms, a method for calculating time of death based on body temperature.

‘The Alphabet is MPDV and other drugs like that,’ Paddy said.

Murder victims were tested for possible drugs in their systems, and many of the modern designer drugs were known by abbreviations, the ‘alphabet’ in common police parlance.

One of the abbreviations had been circled: Anect.

‘I’ve never heard of that,’ Paddy said.

Rico only took a few seconds tracking it down on the Topo. The drug in question was Anectine. In hospitals its active ingredient was known as SUCCS. Succinylcholine.

‘What does it do?’ Paddy asked.

‘Paralyses muscles. It paralyses a person’s muscles but keeps them conscious.’

Anectine was used especially in emergency situations, for example when victims of an accident were being transported in an ambulance. If there was an urgent need to intubate, succinylcholine relaxed the patient’s muscles instantly so the tube could be inserted.

The drug’s advantages in medical treatment were almost immediate effectiveness and short duration, ten minutes at most. The downside was that the patient couldn’t communicate after receiving it.

‘If the killer is injecting his victims with Anectine, they wouldn’t be able to scream or fight back at all. But they would stay conscious; they would know what was happening to them and stumble along as he forced them to wherever he was going to kill them,’ Mari said.

Lia couldn’t say anything. She was nauseated by the thought that the killer could do something like this. Paddy stared at Mari in shock.

‘Do the victims know what’s being done to them?’ Mari asked. ‘Do they feel pain?’

Rico scanned the web pages he had open on the Topo.

‘It seems like it,’ he said quietly.

The instructions for administering Anectine warned health professionals specifically that it did not render the patient unconscious or remove feeling. That was why its use was so specific.

‘It’s really strong,’ Rico said, still reading online. ‘The muscles start relaxing almost instantly. The first ones are the throat muscles, which is why you can’t talk.’

He did a cross-search with Anectine and the other words Lia had memorised at the incident room. One of them came back with results: furosemide.

‘It’s a drug they usually use for something else completely,’ Rico said. ‘But it can also be used to prolong the effect of Anectine.’

Mari stood up from her desk and walked to the windows.

‘He injects them with drugs so they can’t call for help or fight for their lives. Then he keeps them like that as long as he wants,’ Mari said.

For a moment there was perfect silence. Rico’s low voice was the first to break it.

‘If you give a large enough dose of Anectine, it can also kill,’ he said.

‘I don’t think this man would make a mistake like that,’ Mari said. ‘I don’t think he would let them die before he’s finished doing what he wants.’

In the middle of an evening that felt as if it would go on forever, Mari suddenly suggested that Maggie and Lia go home.

‘No, I can stick it out for a while longer,’ Maggie protested. ‘If nothing else, I can think about Craig Cole.’

But Maggie did leave, and a little later Lia gave in too.

‘Go and take Gro for a walk,’ Mari said. ‘Try not to think about anything.’

It didn’t work. When Lia arrived in Hampstead, Mr Vong had apparently already left for Gro’s evening walk because he didn’t answer his doorbell.

For a fleeting moment Lia considered the bars where she used to go looking for male companionship. Right now that felt impossible though, if only because all she would be able to think about would be people getting snatched from gay bars.

She couldn’t go online. The news sites and discussion boards would just be full of talk about the Queen Killer.

She couldn’t drink alone. Too depressing.

Lia still had her copy of the old travel guide Mr Vong had given her once,
Good for You, London!
Thumbing through it often helped her in lonely moments. For all its frivolity, it portrayed the city around her with an unreal beauty. She couldn’t go there though, not now.

She went out, walking to the small sculpture garden next to the hall of residence and waiting for the silent peace of the statues in the light of the street lamps to do its work.

What was Mari doing right now? What did she want to talk to Rico and Paddy about? What could be the reason for keeping Lia and Maggie out of a discussion?

Right now hundreds of police officers were trying to investigate this terrifying series of murders. At the same time, dozens, perhaps hundreds of people around Britain were sitting at their computers making perverse videos to Queen songs for other people to watch.

And somewhere there was a man who had killed five people and meant to kill more.

Hampstead, Lia’s timeless, placid village was not what she needed now. It was late, but she decided to ring Bob Pell and see whether the shooting range was still open.

‘Are we at that point in our relationship already? Late-night calls and all?’ he said.

‘Can I still come in?’

‘Of course.’

No one but Pell was at the range. Lia knew she might be giving him ideas with her late arrival, and Pell did try to initiate some mild flirtation. But after seeing that Lia really did want to concentrate on shooting, he left her in peace.

In half an hour Lia’s nervous exhaustion disappeared. Pell noticed the break in the gunfire and came to look at her results.

‘Not bad,’ Pell said.

‘I think working as a graphic designer helps,’ Lia said.

She was used to seeing things as precise lines and measurements. She felt like she could instinctively estimate where to aim.

Pell snorted. ‘I didn’t know they taught shooting at art school.’

Lia was actually so promising that trying shooting at a moving target would be worth her time too, he said.

Lia seized the opportunity instantly. Pell turned on the range’s machinery and large, round targets hanging from tracks began moving at the rear of the hall. Lia spent nearly an hour shooting at the moving targets, and as one after another went swinging, she knew her aim was progressively getting better.

‘More tomorrow?’ she finally asked Pell.

‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Fancy a drink to celebrate your progress? I have a bottle of good red wine out in the office.’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Suit yourself,’ Pell replied quickly. ‘Come tomorrow before nine if you want. You’re one of the fastest learners I’ve ever seen.’

Lia thought she knew at least one person who learned faster than her.