Black Noise (21 page)

Mari sits in her office at the Studio.

The others have left, including Paddy and Rico once night fell. She gave them assignments, deciding to try to bring an end of this evil.

The others at the Studio know she isn’t strong yet, but she is almost there.

And sitting here makes her stronger. The rooms Mari has worked for so long, the space and the machines, the strength of the place. She has been building the Studio for too long – no one is going to take it away from her.

They took Berg. They aren’t going to take anything else.

Mari is now focusing all her resolve on one thought: the man who did all of this will not walk around free much longer.

Whoever you are, I’m going to bring you down. I’m going to throw you like a tiny pebble into a ravine,
Mari thinks.

She smiles at this feeling, how good it feels to think of catching him.

Is it revenge? Or executing justice? Her feeling contains both, noble and base. Sometimes the two intertwine.

But that doesn’t matter. Those are moral distinctions; their time will come when the goal has been reached. First they have to figure this man out. They have to know why he acts the way he acts.

They have to understand their adversary. And they must know and understand this man better than anyone else can know him.

‘You are one sick fuck,’ Mari says.

Swearing at him out loud heightens her senses. She listens to her voice. She hears the power of her resolve.

It is no coincidence this man is killing gay people. Nor that he makes videos of his killings using songs from a band led by a gay man.

Mari closes her eyes and thinks of Queen and Freddie Mercury.

She has spent hours over the past days watching videos of concert recordings and interviews with the band, almost through the night. She knows their history by heart. She knows how all the members of Queen talk and move; she knows their facial expressions. She knows by heart the light, shrugging serenity with which the
emaciated Freddie Mercury said his farewells to the world in his final days.

This Mari knows: how to take control. She learned it as a child, in a way that warped her entire life, and everything that has happened since then has pointed towards setting straight that twisting in one sense or another.

Mari cannot endure the feeling of powerlessness. After a childhood like hers she is unable to accept submission, not after realising she was living in the Laboratory.

She knows how to collect information and assimilate its essence, with a speed others find astonishing. She understands people with a sensitivity without compare, and right now she is trying to understand a man who wants to kill gay people and turn their murders into a tribute to the band he worships.

Really he doesn’t worship only the band. He worships the gift, the ability to touch others deeply, an ability no one else can duplicate. Queen touched this man. Maybe that has been the most powerful experience in his life.

A brief reading of this killer would be: sociopath. Loner, manic, attention-seeking. A homophobe moved by simple instincts.

The police profiler, Holywell, probably looks at him this way.

And the killer probably is all that but much, much more.

Mari listens to Queen. She looks the songs up online, clicking one after another. Many of them are familiar, some new. She isn’t trying to think of what they do for this man. She wants to experience them powerfully herself.

The man seeks out his victims, lures them within reach, pumps them full of paralytics and puts them in front of a camera for execution. He kills, because for him, killing is art.

He kills, because he is the next logical step from happy slapping and celebrity worship, an unholy union of the two, a nightmare no one wants to contemplate.

Who is he making his art for? Everyone who clicks on his videos. His audience is the whole world. He worships power and fame.

This killer wants clicks. He wants a million clicks online. He is going to reach his goal.

And suddenly Mari realises that simply waiting for this man to make a mistake will not lead to his capture. He is ahead of the police and ahead of the Studio. He has done all of this so precisely, patiently revealing each grotesque detail to the world.

There will be more victims if the police or they at the Studio don’t dare to think further ahead. They have to find the courage to make assumptions and move towards their fears.

Mari sits in her office at the Studio and tries to understand a man who cannot be understood.

Sorrow fills Mari to her core. Not just for her own loss or for the loss of the victims’ loved ones. What she mourns is that she has lived a life that has made it possible to understand such a sick person.

His throat hurt.

Theo Durand lay on the floor of his cell, trying to control the twitching of his arms and hold himself together.

More symptoms kept appearing. He had never experienced anything similar before, as if his whole body was surrendering to pain and compulsion.

Something in his throat was swollen, badly. How was that possible, when his whole body cried out for water? Theo didn’t know.

He hadn’t had anything to drink in hours, possibly days. The passage of time was a mystery – the light visible in the cell was always the same strange yellow one.

The crazy man who brought him here hadn’t shown his face. Theo didn’t know whether the man’s absence was good or bad.

Sometimes his throat hurt so badly that his eyes watered. Whatever was so swollen felt like it was blocking his whole throat. He had cautiously tried to touch it, first with his tongue, then with his fingers. The pain was so intense he had to give up.

Did the throat pain come from the spice?

Theo had eaten the contents of the bag the man left. The lunatic’s dirty paper bag was the only thing he had. The powder in the bag was so disgustingly strong that just a few pinches of it made him gag, but if he hadn’t eaten anything he would have lost consciousness. The lumpy powder’s burning bite preserved his grip on this world.

The powder must be some sort of spice, Theo decided, but eating it frightened him. He didn’t really know what was in it, and every time Theo took a little helping of it from the bag with his fingers and painfully swallowed it, he felt the thirst in him surge.

And what a thirst it was.

Crazy man.

Steps outside the cell. He was coming.

This time Theo had to get the man to talk. He had locked Theo in here, and he was the only one who could let him out.

Eyes stared at Theo through the bars.

‘Tell me what you want,’ Theo said. ‘Do you want something? We can talk about it.’

He heard the hoarseness of his voice, and every word hurt like a slash at his throat.

The man didn’t say anything.

‘Maybe I can give you something you want,’ Theo suggested.

If he wanted sex, let him have sex. Anything so Theo could get out of this place.

‘Eat,’ the man said, pointing at the paper bag on the floor.

He talked, Theo thought. At last he talked.

‘I have been,’ he said. ‘It’s too strong. It makes me so thirsty.’

‘If you eat, I’ll give you water later,’ the man said. ‘Eat.’

‘Why?’

‘It will prepare you.’

Theo didn’t understand. What did the lunatic mean?

‘Prepare me for what?’ he repeated.

His voice was higher. They both heard it.

‘It’s preparing you to burn,’ the man said.

Theo felt the nausea in him grow.

‘Fucking lunatic,’ he said.

It was a knee-jerk reaction, and it was wrong. But it was out now. He couldn’t take it back.

The lunatic went quiet. He stood motionless, nothing in his face moving at all.

Suddenly Theo understood why the man was standing right where he was. He was staying out of the camera picture. The camera was sending images somewhere, and he didn’t want to be seen. Maybe someone else could see the picture. As soon as the man left, Theo would try to talk to the camera, try to call for help.

Before that he had to get this lunatic to talk more.

‘What is it?’ Theo asked, pointing to the bag.

‘Coriander,’ the man said.

Theo stared at him, speechless. This was all going over his head.

‘It will prepare you,’ the man said.

Theo squeezed his eyes tight shut. Feeling his arms twitching, he pulled them around him. The blood pounded in his head. He was
trying to understand what the man said. Was there anything he could say to this…
creature?

There wasn’t.

When Theo opened his eyes, the man was gone again.

The fifth video differed from the earlier ones.

In it there was no kicking, and no one lying on the ground. It was mysterious and slow. The images were so dark and grainy it was difficult to tell what they showed.

When Lia, Mari and the rest of the Studio saw it, their first reaction was a strange relief. If they could conclude anything from the video, it was that another mangled body wasn’t lying somewhere waiting to be found. Although the images were unpleasant, there was still the feeling that they had to watch them. They were evidence that the killer was free and continuing his work.

That the video was the work of the same man, of this they were sure.

‘It’s him,’ Mari said. ‘That’s as sure as sure can be.’

The killer had just changed his mode of operation.

Perhaps he was frightened, Paddy guessed. Having Berg show up on Rich Lane in Kensington had disturbed his plan. He had executed Berg, brushing him out of the way, but maybe the possibility of getting caught had made him re-evaluate the sense in his brutal attacks.

‘Or maybe this was the plan all along,’ Mari said. ‘This video isn’t the work of an afternoon.’

The song was Queen’s ‘Somebody to Love’, one of the ones that matched exactly the length of the black videos. That was why they were among the first to detect it. Rico had written a program that crawled the Internet’s most popular music services and sent alerts whenever one of the six possible remaining Queen songs appeared in a new video.

Rico was also convinced this one was from the killer after inspecting it more closely. Although the images were cut to match a slower rhythm than before, he believed he could tell the maker from his work.

‘You can just tell,’ he said.

He could see it in the change of focus, the camera angles, the great skill with which the killer used footage that otherwise looked like the product of an amateur.

The clearest evidence was what the images showed. The camera, which remained still the entire time, showed a dark room with a man locked in.

‘There is light there,’ Rico said. ‘There’s just so little that it looks dark.’

On the bottom half of the screen now and then they could see the man trudge back and forth slowly. He paced like a prisoner in a cell.

Two scenes showed him screaming. He stared straight at the camera and screamed at it. Not out of pain but distress.

‘He sees the camera. He knows he’s being filmed,’ Paddy said.

The prisoner in the video was begging the camera for help. Watching it was horrific. There was no doubt the situation was genuine.

‘That isn’t acting,’ Maggie said.

Near the end they could see him more clearly in the centre of the darkness. When his half-naked body hit the light, it glistened. He was sweating, profusely.

‘It’s hot in there,’ Paddy said.

In some of the pictures it looked as though the man had something in his mouth.

‘Is he eating sand?’ Lia asked.

Deducing anything from the pictures was impossible. Rico ran still after still through his image processing programs, ultimately deciding that the substance was lighter than sand.

The final images were the most shocking. The man stood up straight in the middle of the room, looked at the camera and drew something on his bare chest with his forefinger. He did it with the same light brown substance he was eating. When his hand moved out of the way, the picture showed that on his chest in block capitals he had written the word HELP.

‘He’s pitting his hopes on someone else seeing the camera image other than whoever locked him in there,’ Paddy said.

His hope was not in vain. When word of the video started circulating, it was viewed more than one hundred thousand times on YouTube alone before the site admins took it down. There was plenty of time for it to be copied to other sites and continue spreading.

The police kept schtum. The media asked DCI Brewster and the other leaders of the investigation, but they weren’t willing to comment on the video or even say whether they were looking into it.

The police wanted to keep open the possibility that the fifth video didn’t belong to the same series as the previous four, Paddy guessed. And they wanted to prevent the phenomenon from growing even larger.

‘That’s possibly true,’ Mari said. ‘It’s still a stupid attitude to take though.’

The police might be preventing serious study of the video elsewhere. The Studio certainly weren’t the only people besides the police who could look into it. This was precisely the sort of problem crowdsourcing could help with, which was exactly what Rico used in his research of the videos. If the video was being analysed all over the world, by every means possible, someone would see something new in it, Mari was sure.

But for the police the homosexual aspect of the case was just a little too much.

How do we know the man in the fifth video is gay? Lia asked.

‘We don’t, but we do,’ Mari answered.

The man was slim and in his thirties. He didn’t look particularly fit. In the pictures he didn’t appear to have any tattoos, and there were no recognisable details on his underpants. Nothing pointed to his background.

But there was something special in his features Lia recognised. It was hard to define. Maybe it was mostly about the expression of emotion, a sort of sensitivity. Sensitive didn’t completely describe his face, but it was close.

‘Gay men show their feelings,’ Rico said. ‘Often that’s the only identifiable difference.’

Seeing the emotions of the man on the video wasn’t hard. He was filled with an immense dread.

‘He doesn’t know what’s happening to him,’ Mari said.

Lia could hear from Mari’s voice that she had just about had enough of the situation and waiting for the police to act.

In the middle of all this, work at
Level
had become stressful. Most of Lia’s time was spent thinking about everything but design layouts, and she was always just killing time, waiting for the moment she could get to the Studio and then home in the evening.

On the night the fifth video appeared, she found Gro and Mr Vong in Hampstead outside the residence hall. They were headed out for a stroll.

How were they getting along? Lia asked when she saw the dog.

Very well, Mr Vong said. Gro was a good assistant. When Mr Vong was out doing his caretaker work, Gro always came with him and was never afraid of noises or strange places.

Of course not, Lia thought. Gro was used to Berg’s equipment in the Den, occasional loud noises and all sorts of different projects. It was probably all very comforting and homely for her.

‘Hopefully Gro can still stay with me,’ Mr Vong said. ‘For a while longer?’

Lia nodded. The dog and the elderly gentleman had quickly adopted one another. Mr Vong had plenty of time for her, and perhaps she recognised that Mr Vong was the closest thing to Berg the world had to offer now.

Lia wasn’t needed here.

When man and dog had disappeared on their walk, Lia went and dropped through Mr Vong’s letterbox a small present she had bought for him. It was a book with interviews from some of the world’s greatest political leaders about their life experiences and visions for the future. The only woman in the group was Gro Harlem Brundtland. Lia didn’t send a card with it. Mr Vong would know who was thanking him.

She rang Bob Pell to see if he had space on the range in Harrow.

‘For Paddy Moore’s students, always,’ Pell said.

Paddy paid him so well for the use of the firing range that it was in his best interests to cancel any other appointments that clashed, he told her. Lia spent the rest of the evening practising shooting stationary targets.

Just before heading off to bed, she rang Mari at home in Hampstead.

‘How did it go at the shooting range?’ Mari asked.

Well, Lia reported. She wasn’t sure how long she wanted to practise shooting, but she thought she wanted to learn to do it well.

‘Is there any point in it?’ she asked.

‘Of course there is,’ Mari said. ‘Maybe it’s just what you need right now.’

‘How’s yoga?’ Lia asked.

She liked that they asked after each other as if nothing out of the ordinary were going on. They had known each other for fewer than two years but had gone through so much in that time. Here they were as friends – the things they talked about were anything but casual, but between them was a special warmth. They watched over each other like an old married couple.

They needed that. They needed normal life.

Yoga was going well and doing her good, Mari said. Before going to any more classes she had checked whether Anga was the sort of studio she wanted. Lia had done excellent work choosing it. The instructor was among the best in the city, and the studio was genuinely dedicated to yoga, not a place you came to show off expensive outfits. Mari had also looked into the different styles of yoga and what kinds of effects they had on people. Lia grinned hearing that Mari had read about hot yoga, Christian yoga, Ashtanga, and all the others and still found that the one Lia had chosen for her was just right. Regular, straightforward yoga, effective but simple.

Ending the telephone call was difficult. Their chat was so close to what they’d had before all this, before Berg’s death.

‘Our life is never going to go back to the way it was,’ Lia said.

‘No,’ Mari said. ‘But it can go back to being good.’

‘I feel sort of…
kaiho
, you know,’ Lia said. ‘Sort of nostalgic but more in a sad way.’

‘I know,’ Mari said.