Black Noise (33 page)

The beach was a little more than two kilometres away, Lia estimated. That kind of distance didn’t usually take her long, but now she was running on sand and in the dark.

And she constantly had to keep an eye on her environment, searching for signs that might indicate danger.

Right now the darkness also felt like a companion. Lia couldn’t see very far ahead, but it would also be hard for anyone to see her.

She held her pistol lightly, constantly at the ready.

Philip Dillon was somewhere ahead of her. He had Rico. Maybe he had already killed Rico.

Mari would have said that this was a job for Paddy and Ron. Mari wouldn’t have let her if she had stayed to ask, but Lia knew that this job was made for her. She might be able to get to the place Dillon was going in time.

When a person has run her whole life, her body develops a runner’s memory. She knows how long different distances require, and at what points to sprint without really feeling it. Now Lia was going fast. Maybe it helped that she was getting away from the sombre concrete building. Just going inside had shocked Mari out of her senses. Or maybe since she had arrived in Zanzibar, Lia had known that the moment would come when she would have to be stronger than she had ever been.

The night was warm, but the air along the seashore was moving. Running was easy.

Lia sped up. If she didn’t think of anything, it was almost like jogging at home. Lia breathed herself forward through the darkness.

Achatina Beach was deserted.

Lia easily picked out their van on the other side of the beach. It was near the treeline, its silhouette visible against the white sand.

The vehicle was creeping slowly through the sand. Without lights, since Dillon didn’t want to attract attention.

Lia had never done anything like this. She had confronted armed men, she had tailed a criminal with Paddy, but she had never been in a situation like this.

Especially not alone. Paddy and Ron were coming, somewhere behind her, but she couldn’t wait for them.

She moved further up away from the waterline. Her feet sank more easily into the sand, but once she arrived on level ground it carried her weight again.

She slowed to a light jog.

How many minutes had passed? Had Dillon killed someone in that time?

She couldn’t think of such things. She couldn’t think of anything.

A couple of hundred metres in front of her, the van stopped. Lia slowed as well, glancing back and to the sides, searching for any movement or signs of people.

No one.

She walked slowly through the trees, closer to the van.

Tree roots, fallen branches and foliage protruded from the sand. She had to walk carefully to avoid tripping or making a noise. And she also had to keep her eyes glued to the van and stay aware of her surroundings.

Having a weapon in her hand gave her a strange feeling of omnipotence. As if she could march straight over to the van and use the gun to set everything right.

That wasn’t possible though. She stopped.

What was Dillon doing right now? What would Dillon want at this moment?

He wanted two things, Lia thought: to get away and probably to kill Rico because Rico was part of the group that had humiliated him.

Dillon was here because Achatina Beach had once been a favourite place for the boys of Stone Town. Little Farrokh Bulsara swam here. This was not a place Dillon would think of for getting away from his trackers, not so close to Stone Town. He had stopped here to kill Rico.

The vehicle remained where it was. The driver’s door opened. Out stepped Philip Dillon.

He was too far away. Lia knew she wouldn’t be able to hit him from this distance in the dark. He was favouring one of his feet, the one Ron had shot.

Dillon circled around behind the vehicle, grabbing the rear doors and swinging them open. Lia saw a slender figure sprawled behind Dillon in the van. Rico. Rico was alive. Rico moved, instinctively trying to get away from the killer.

Lia was fast as she ran to the van. She ran faster than she ever had.

Dillon had to hear her coming. Releasing his grip on the struggling Rico, he turned to look.

Lia loped the final metres towards him in a fog. She moved precisely, placing her feet as deliberately as she could. That was the only way to move forward and face this killer.

She saw Dillon’s eyes in the dark. There was something in those eyes Lia didn’t recognise. He extended his left hand towards her and for a second Lia stared at the outstretched, empty hand. Suddenly she realised he wanted her to look at it, that it was a feint.

The small knife only hit Lia obliquely. Her reflexive dodge saved her, and the dagger only grazed her upper arm.

When Dillon saw that the knife he had thrown hadn’t stopped Lia, he grabbed Rico.

Lia was only a few metres from them. She saw the fear on Rico’s face as Dillon dragged him out of the van.

Lia fired. She fired again.

She hit him on the outside of his thigh. She hit him in exactly the place you were supposed to hit to stop a man.

Dillon faltered. He didn’t even make a sound, but he jerked backwards. Rico pulled himself away. Lia knew her shot had been accurate, and still she saw one of his hands reaching for his trouser pocket.

He still didn’t fall.

Lia had to stop that hand. She shot again. And again.

It didn’t feel bad. It didn’t feel wrong. Firing the weapon was the only way to stop that hand and bring an end to a situation that was impossible to endure.

Once they had Philip Dillon bound unconscious in the back of the van, Rico rang Mari. Now Mari answered instantly.

Rico was still half in shock from Dillon’s beating, but he could talk, and Lia wanted to guard the killer. Lia heard Rico briefly telling Mari what had happened. Still she was having a hard time getting used to the idea that the incident was over.

They didn’t want to take any risks with Dillon. Rico had gone through his pockets and found two more knives. Dillon had retrieved three in all from his cache behind the concrete building.

As Rico started the van and slowly drove back to the road, Lia kept her gun trained on Dillon.

He was alive. Lia had hit him in the thigh, arm and shoulder. They weren’t instantly fatal wounds, but they stopped Philip Dillon. They had to get him to hospital even though Lia struggled against the idea within herself.

A desperate scene awaited them along the road near the Temple.

Mari sat on the sand with a man in her arms Lia could only just recognise as Aldo Zambrano. Mari had found a piece of fabric to cover his upper body with, but his legs showed what had been done to him. They were covered in burns, horribly painful looking ulcers. Here and there intact skin was visible, but it was also swollen. Zambrano was in such weak condition that he couldn’t even keep his eyes open.

Paddy sat with Theo Durand right next to them, holding his arm protectively around the man. Durand was conscious but looked at everything with wide, frightened eyes. He stared at the van as it drove up. He couldn’t grasp that his ordeal was over.

They couldn’t put these men in the same space where Philip Dillon lay bleeding.

Soon Ron showed up, breathing hard. He had run after Lia and then turned back when he saw the van returning.

They didn’t talk much. There wasn’t much to say.

Lia saw that Mari had taken control again. Holding Zambrano in her arms, she gave Ron his instructions. They would take Dillon to the concrete building and tie him up there to wait.

‘Show him to us,’ Mari said.

Ron lifted the unconscious man out of the rear of the van and carried him for all to see. Lia understood why. Mari wanted Aldo Zambrano and Theo Durand to see their torturer subdued. Mari wanted to give them an assurance that Dillon and their nightmare would never return.

Durand stared at the bullet-riddled killer. Zambrano could barely open his eyes but looked for a moment at the man sprawled in Ron’s arms. Then he quickly turned his head away.

Ron took Dillon to the concrete building, and while he was securing him, the others helped the former prisoners into the van.

Before leaving, Mari took one more trip to the building. She wanted to see how Dillon looked now.

When she returned, she also brought one of his shoes, the one with the micro transmitter. Ron stayed to guard Dillon.

‘Will he live?’ Paddy asked.

Mari nodded. Starting the car, Paddy set off driving towards Stone Town.

They took Durand and Zambrano to the city’s small hospital. Two night nurses were on duty, both older men who during their careers had seen everything from scuba diving accidents to house fire victims. But both were shaken when they saw the condition Durand and Zambrano were in. One of them instantly ran off to ring a doctor.

‘The police will come in the morning,’ Mari told Durand.

She held a hushed conversation with him before the nurses wheeled him off on a stretcher for examination.

Durand had agreed not to reveal them to the police, Mari told the others. Mari had told him that Dillon killed one of their friends. That was enough of an explanation. Zambrano had been so detached from the world through the events of the night that he wouldn’t be able to say anything to the police that could harm them.

The night nurse asked them into the reception area to collect their contact information.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ Mari told the nurse. ‘You go and ease their pain. The one with the burns could die of them.’

They returned to pick up Ron.

On the way, Mari and Paddy made their decision about Philip Dillon. They would leave him in the concrete building under lock and key. It was possible he would die of blood loss before the police arrived, but that was a risk they decided to take.

They didn’t go into the building. Paddy went to call Ron out, and they closed the door carefully.

‘He isn’t going to escape again,’ Ron said when he climbed in the van.

Ron had bound Dillon’s wounds. He had lost a lot of blood and seemed in critical condition.

‘If he ever walks again, it’s going to be slowly and with a limp,’ Ron said.

The receptionist at the Cinnamon Hotel was piqued when they appeared in the middle of the night, but Mari silenced him with a glance.

Mari announced they would be leaving first thing in the morning on the first flight out. The manager could start arranging them some food and writing up the bill.

Ron collected his things from his own hotel, which was close by, and joined them back at the Cinnamon. They were all worried about Rico.

‘I might have concussion,’ Rico admitted.

His head ached badly and his brain wasn’t quite working right. When Philip Dillon had suddenly appeared at the van, he hit Rico hard, several times. They could also see the shock from the events of the night in him, but that was true of all of them, Lia thought.

Only Mari was strangely calm. At the Zoroastrian temple, she had staggered out of the concrete building, barely able to stand, utterly beaten down. Now Mari’s strength had returned, and Lia thought she seemed to have regained the mental balance she had lost over the previous weeks.

Even a night with no sleep didn’t seem to drain Mari’s ability to concentrate any more. She simply handled things one at a time.

The first morning flight to the mainland departed a little before eight o’clock. It was already light.

As they were waiting for their flight at Kisauni Airport, Paddy made an anonymous call to the local police and told them where to find Philip Dillon near the temple and Audax Mkapinga waiting tied up in the House of Wonders.

‘We wouldn’t leave like this if this were just going to remain a matter for the Zanzibari police,’ Mari told Lia.

And it didn’t. A few minutes later, an airport official came and announced to all the passengers that their departure would be slightly delayed. No explanation was given, but it soon became apparent.

Without any prior announcement, a private jet arrived. They watched from the departure terminal windows as the passengers of the mysterious flight disembarked onto the tarmac.

‘Interpol,’ Paddy said quietly.

There were four police officers, easy to identify from their bearing despite their civilian clothes. The plane contained no other passengers. The police were quickly ushered through the border formalities, and Mari, Lia and the others watched from a distance as the detectives exited the terminal to cars waiting outside.

When the announcement came for their departure, Mari sighed with relief. Despite the arrival of Interpol, Durand and Zambrano’s fate still weighed on them. But staying on the island was too big a risk for the Studio team.

On the return flight, they mostly slept. Afterwards, Lia remembered three things from the trip.

First was the relief when Rico visited the clinic at Nairobi airport while they were waiting for their flight to London and was given a clean bill of health. He had concussion, but it wasn’t dangerous, and the other marks were just bruises.

The second was the feeling that came over Lia when she saw Mari and Paddy sitting side by side in the plane. Quietly they took adjacent
seats, Lia, Rico and Ron noting it silently and letting them have their space. When Lia stood up to pace the aisles and stretch her limbs during the flight, she saw Mari and Paddy holding hands. Lia wasn’t sure exactly what feeling it gave her, but it was a good one.

The third was a startling moment just before arriving home. They were waiting at Heathrow Airport in the long, winding immigration queue, numb from exhaustion and from everything they had experienced. In the queue, Rico handed Lia the Topo, which was displaying new information that had just come from Maggie. Maggie had found one more detail about Dillon’s previous life.

His full name was Alexander Philip Dillon. Once she had found his original first name, which he had dropped, that opened up new avenues. Dillon had lived as a ward of court in his childhood, moving from one orphanage to another. He had good marks in school, but his records also reported constant discipline problems. Before taking odd jobs in the film industry and trying to become a paramedic, he had applied to the police force and the army. Both turned him away.

Years ago some of Dillon’s amateur videos had won two small prizes. In one of them, he had cut together pieces of Queen videos to create a completely new work.

Maggie had found out that Dillon was an avid participant on several Queen fan forums. Time after time the forum administrators had tried to ban him because before long he always ended up belligerently slandering other forum members.

Dillon had a rented flat in Kensington, only a kilometre from Rich Lane where he had dumped Brian Fowler’s body and shot Berg. Dillon’s flat was near Logan Place, where Freddie Mercury had lived for years and also where he died. The general belief was that Mercury’s ashes had been spread in the garden of his home – after his death, the star had been blessed in London in a Zoroastrian ceremony and cremated.

‘That could explain the fire, Dillon’s fire,’ Mari said after seeing the information. ‘Or part of it.’

But no one from the Studio would be going to Dillon’s flat in Kensington. That task belonged to the police.

Reading simple, concrete information instantly cleared Lia’s woozy head. The killer who had caused all of this, and whom they
had left barely alive in Zanzibar waiting for the police to arrive, was really just a person.

‘But only just,’ Mari said. ‘There is probably still a great deal about his background that has never been recorded.’

Someone like Dillon could spend years causing trouble and intimidating people without it ever leaving any specific evidence.

‘That’s all still ahead of us,’ Mari said. ‘He is still going to become a celebrity, in a way.’

That was why Mari had gone back to see how Dillon looked as he lay bound, shot and unconscious on the floor of that concrete bunker in Zanzibar.

‘I was proving to myself that we got him.’