Black Noise

by Hiltunen, Pekka

  Lia remembered reading about the case in the news. Then, it had felt like an isolated act. Listening to Bayhurst-Davies talk was starting to give her a more coherent picture.

  ‘People always want to explain away hate crimes,’ she said. ‘It’s easy to say that Ruby Thomas was drunk and came from a horrible family so that’s what really matters. Or that everyone in Stuart Walker’s home town liked him and that no one wished any harm on him. But in all of these cases the sexual orientation of the victim was a key factor. The circumstances surrounding a crime blur people’s vision, but they don’t reduce the destructive effects of homophobia. If we always find some other explanation, it’s never going to go away.’

  Bayhurst-Davies praised the London police for their actions in recent years. Each police division had at least one officer assigned specifically to LGBTI issues. But they were also seeing a backlash: as these groups’ rights received more attention, the opposition to them only hardened.

  ‘And the fanatics are getting better and better at it,’ Bayhurst-Davies said. ‘They usually know not to reveal their attitudes publicly. A local councillor can advance his ideology by soliciting funding for far-right Christian groups. The police can fail to list crimes as homophobic.’

  Investigating homophobia was usually quite complicated. Sometimes the police justified not handling cases as hate crimes as an attempt to protect the victims. There were times when covering things up did protect them, Bayhurst-Davies said, but at the same time it prevented the overall problem from being addressed.

  They had been talking for nearly an hour now, and Lia could see that the woman wanted to move on to other work.

  ‘That’s how it is,’ Bayhurst-Davies said. ‘Whenever someone attacks gay people, we get flooded with work.’

  Usually the victims didn’t have lawyers, and Gallant would try to find them one. They helped arrange medical care and found the victims and their families safe places to stay. Often the victims needed shelter just so they could testify against their attackers. Sometimes the organisation had to put pressure on the police, and representatives were constantly waging a public opinion battle in the media.

  ‘People only want to see happy gay and lesbian people. After all, think how much they’ve already given us by legalising homosexuality and making gay marriage possible in some countries. And TV shows are full of cute, cuddly gays, so what do we have to complain about any more? But we aren’t just a harmless little minority. Every day I meet people whose lives are being made intolerable by homophobia.’

  Did Bayhurst-Davies believe homophobia was behind the video murders, Lia asked.

  ‘Do I believe that personally? You bet your sweet tiny arse I do,’ she snapped. ‘Three people snatched outside of gay bars end up dead. How could the connection be any clearer? Publicly what I would say is that I expect the police to investigate the incidents with utmost speed and care.’

  Did Gallant have any idea who could be behind something like this?

  ‘No. Only guesses.’

  Watching the kicking videos for the first time, Bayhurst-Davies had automatically thought it must be skinheads.

  ‘Skins are still a real threat to a lot of us,’ she said. ‘In London gay and lesbian people don’t have to be constantly afraid for their safety, but there are still groups of people it’s best to keep your distance from. Like skinheads.’

  But over time Bayhurst-Davies had started to get the feeling that the videos were too much to be the work of the skinheads.

  ‘Violent skins like simple things. Slogans. Petrol bombs. They wouldn’t have the patience to make videos like these. The people behind this are… stranger,’ she said.

  There had been a few serial killers who had targeted gay people in Britain in recent decades. Allegedly, the worst of them had managed to kill fifteen men before his arrest.

  If this was a serial killer or some new homophobic group, that would be a serious setback for organisations like Gallant and the whole country’s sexual minorities, Bayhurst-Davies observed solemnly.

  ‘When things this big happen, people start to get afraid. And living in fear limits your life. Whatever position we’ve managed to achieve in the past, now we slowly have to rebuild it all over again.’

  12.

  ‘I don’t know if there’s any point in doing this,’ Paddy said, staring at a series of enlarged frames from the kicking videos hung on the Studio conference room wall. Lia knew what Paddy meant.

  This is like a police incident room. Their investigators must have exactly these same pictures posted on their walls.

  ‘What do you recommend?’ Mari calmly asked Paddy.

  Paddy shook his head.

  ‘I don’t have any recommendation. I just don’t know if this is a good idea.’

  Mari looked at them each in turn, Paddy, Lia, Rico, Maggie and Berg.

  ‘We’ve never really done anything like this,’ Mari said. ‘We usually keep our distance from violent crimes. And last year we got our fill of that side of things when Lia came to us.’

  Lia recognised Mari’s familiar, cool analytic gaze, the one that always came out in moments of crisis – and, unfortunately, occasionally also at times Lia would prefer not to see it.

  ‘I haven’t been thinking in terms of doing the police’s work for them,’ Mari said. ‘But if they aren’t getting anywhere with this, I want to know. If one of you thinks this is too dark for us to look into, it would be best to say so now.’

  None of them had anything to say to that.

  Only one day had passed since they had received their assignments. Lia reported on her meeting with Annie Bayhurst-Davies at Gallant. Rico went through what he had found in the videos.

  The videos had all been shot in dimly lit interior rooms. In the images they could make out a dark, stained floor and a lighter wall, but no clear details were visible. It could be the same place in all three videos.

  ‘Whenever something new or identifiable may be coming into the background, there’s a cut,’ Rico said. ‘The editor really knew what he was doing.’

  Determining the number of kickers was difficult, but their movements most likely suggested a slender adult man or men.

  ‘And strong,’ Rico added. ‘They kick their victims like they know how and where to kick. Like they’ve practised and know how to channel their anger with precision.’

  Lia stared at Rico in surprise, and he clarified.

  ‘Street brawlers. This isn’t their first time doing something like this.’

  Paddy had heard from his contacts in the police that their thinking was in line with what Lia had heard from Annie Bayhurst-Davies.

  ‘They could be skinheads.’

  It was impossible to make out anything specific about the kickers’ clothing other than narrow-cut trousers and heavy shoes. Skinheads often dressed like that.

  ‘If it is skinheads, they wouldn’t be stupid enough to let their gang insignia show,’ Paddy said.

  Rico listened to Paddy, looking serious.

  ‘Skinheads do seem like the most likely culprits right now,’ he admitted. ‘I wonder about the production values though. The editing seems a bit too slick for them.’

  And it wasn’t just the video. All kinds of people belonged to those gangs. There had been gay skinheads, Rico said, and in some gangs they were even out and open about it. The skins vs. gays setup wasn’t as black and white as it used to be.

  Paddy hadn’t heard much else from his police contacts, only that the authorities believed the deaths had occurred in London. The victims were taken from London clubs, and they were brought back to the same locations – nothing indicated that the murders had happened very far away.

  During the day, Maggie had visited the owners of the three gay bars where the victims were last seen. She had presented herself as the director of a PR firm scouting locations for new product launch events. The bar staff had just been through their police interviews, so Maggie had an easy time getting them to pour out their troubles t
o her. One hate crime victim close to home was bad enough, but suspicions about three had them completely unhinged worrying that their customers would be too afraid to come out at night.

  ‘And there’s more,’ Maggie said, glancing at Rico.

  The shift managers at the bars were genuinely devastated about the violent deaths. Maggie had got the feeling that they mourned the victims almost like family.

  ‘One of them said that when the police came the feeling in their place changed,’ Maggie said. ‘Like they had released sniffer dogs there. All the anger they knew existed somewhere against them had been let in when the police came and started asking their questions.’

  The bartenders hadn’t known the victims well and mostly just had second-hand information. According to them, the victims had been normal customers: regular partygoers out meeting friends.

  All of these people had come back with them to the Studio, Lia thought. Annie Bayhurst-Davies from Gallant, Paddy’s world of policemen and skinheads, and Maggie’s bartenders living the nightmare that had suddenly taken over their lives.

  And then there are the others in Mari’s head. The ones who did the killing and made the videos.

  Maggie thought they should go back to the gay bars at night and ask about the victims. That would make it more likely they would find people who knew them better.

  ‘That’s too much work for one person to handle,’ Mari said.

  Rico and Lia volunteered to help, and Paddy said he was ready to go too. Berg looked unsure.

  ‘I don’t know how well an old guy like me would fit in there,’ he admitted.

  A quick smile flitted across Rico’s face.

  ‘You’d make a great gay bear,’ he suggested. ‘One of the ones with a beard and black leather and some belly to go with it.’

  The thought bewildered and amused Berg. But Mari thought four people would be enough and that they could go as themselves without any cover identities.

  ‘I think it’s safe,’ she said. ‘Three victims, three different bars in different parts of London. The perpetrators changed locations so they can’t be traced.’

  ‘When are we going?’ Lia asked.

  Mari’s glance at Rico contained a question.

  ‘Now,’ Rico said. ‘Early in the evening people are in better shape to talk.’

  13.

  The thumping of the music was audible on the street as Lia, Maggie, Rico and Paddy approached the Heaven nightclub.

  Lia recognised the music. It immediately brought two things to mind.

  Ages had passed since she had been out dancing or looking for companionship. The pounding rhythm caused a physical reaction, an almost painful longing to get out on the dance floor. Music was the best thing for tying together memories of nights out partying, she thought. Years later you could hear a song and know the time a specific memory belonged to. The nights and the people and the events at the clubs all ran together, but the songs served as temporal landmarks.

  The song playing now was a new club mix of Adele’s hit ‘Rolling in the Deep’. As they entered Heaven, it washed over them, seeming to go on forever. Ten seconds into the middle of the thundering and Lia was wondering where she had lost the intense high bars and dancing used to bring her.

  That nostalgia disappeared with a single thought.

  David Wynn had been here just a few days before. ‘Rolling in the Deep’ had probably been playing that night too.

  Before scattering into the clamorous, swaying mass of hundreds of people, they divided up jobs. Gay men for Rico, women for Lia. Maggie and Paddy would take the bartenders and bouncers, after which they would help Lia and Rico.

  Getting people talking about David Wynn was no problem, but only a small number of the club’s patrons and staff seemed to know him.

  ‘He was still just a boy,’ a large bouncer told Paddy. The rugged-looking man fought back tears for a moment talking about Wynn. ‘I just can’t imagine how he could have given anyone a reason to do anything like that.’

  The club staff were worried about the murders, but the customers didn’t believe they were in any danger. Only some of the revellers were regulars at Heaven, and there were a lot of foreign tourists and occasional drop-ins. At such a famous club, a good part of the crowd was straight too, and the central location meant the surrounding streets were crowded every night. One macabre murder touching a mass of humanity this size seemed strangely distant, almost random. Some people might even find the video killings exciting.

  Lia watched Maggie’s progress through a group of carousing young men out of the corner of her eye. Vociferously admiring Maggie’s self-confident style, they surrounded her to get better acquainted, but Lia heard her giving two of the young men a thorough dressing down for treating David Wynn and the other two murders too lightly.

  ‘None of us is invincible, boyo,’ Maggie said to the mouthiest of the men. ‘You may be able to squeeze into those Dolce & Gabbana jeans and even dance a little in them, but that isn’t going to protect you from bad people.’

  ‘Will you protect me, Mummy,’ the man threw back.

  ‘No. Your only protection is very small, and it isn’t located in your trousers, although I’m sure that’s small too. The thing that might keep you safe is seventy centimetres higher up, and you seem to be doing your best to put it out of commission with illegal stimulants.’

  The man’s drivel drowned in the cheering of the rest of the crowd.

  In Camden a completely different place awaited them, a world away from the cosmopolitan Heaven. The Black Cap pub was more relaxed and the concentration of gay people was higher. Here they quickly learned all sorts of details about Evelyn Morris, who had been a regular visitor. In addition to her own boyfriends, she was known to have had a large circle of gay acquaintances.

  ‘Fag hag,’ Rico said to Lia.

  To those who knew her, Evelyn Morris had been the perfect queen bee: her best friends had been gay men and she loved partying with them. Morris was even known to have cut short a couple of her own dating relationships when her boyfriends couldn’t get along with her gay coterie.

  Lia listened to these accounts of a woman she had never known. Evelyn Morris had been younger, more animated and more rakish than her.

  Evelyn had enjoyed a much larger circle of friends than her. But Lia could also imagine herself in Evelyn’s place at the club.

  The Black Cap played the same songs as Heaven. What did Evelyn do that night?

  ‘Rolling in the Deep’ is playing in the background. Evelyn goes out to get some air and cool off.

  Lia slowly made her way to the door and slipped out. The night was chilly. Outside on Camden High Street a group of a few men were smoking, and further off stood other solitary figures.

  Inside, Adele’s raspy, passionate voice ached for a relationship gone bad.

  Lia thought of her lonely life.

  Was Evelyn thinking about the same sorts of things? Did she leave here alone that night or with friends?

  Lia felt someone walk up next to her.

  ‘We must have been thinking the same thing,’ Rico said. ‘Shall we walk?’

  Strolling along the street, they looked all around. Mostly small shops, hairdressers, offices.

  Maggie had attracted a group of admirers in the Black Cap, Rico reported. Paddy was getting his share of flattering looks too, but no one had approached him directly yet: the regulars could recognise a hetero man who wasn’t just there to have a good time, and asking about Evelyn Morris didn’t increase the other customers’ enthusiasm to make his acquaintance.

  When they reached Ferdinand Street, where Morris’s corpse was found, a dreary sight awaited them. No doubt it was a bleak stretch of road at any time, but with the crime scene cordoned off by the police, it was startlingly harsh.

  Entrance to the cul-de-sac of Ferdinand Place was cut off by plastic tape stretched between traffic cones, and a uniformed officer stood guard to prevent passers-by from getting too close. Lia and Rico could
n’t see exactly where the body had been found, but its location was easy to tell: even at this time of night several police investigators were still hard at work under large floodlights.

  Their brilliance created an unreal, separate space in the dark night.

  Lia glanced at the shabby buildings bordering the street. Miscalculating distances was easy in the dark, but her internal sense of direction told her they were about six hundred metres as the crow flies from the pub.

  They watched the police work for a few seconds, the policeman on guard eyeing them warily. It was possible another officer was lurking somewhere nearby taking pictures of anyone who seemed interested in the crime scene.

  Lia nodded to Rico, and they continued their walk. Turning at the next corner, they started making their way back to the pub by another route.

  ‘That place was a good choice,’ Rico said. ‘I doubt that cul-de-sac gets much traffic at night. There is probably CCTV somewhere nearby, but otherwise you could do almost anything you wanted there.’

  When they arrived back at the pub, Rico stopped. For a moment he watched the stream of cars and pedestrians flowing along Camden High Street and then noticed a small alley between two buildings.

  The alley was so small it didn’t even have a name.

  ‘Look,’ he said, motioning towards the pub.

  From the corner of the alley one could see the door of the Black Cap and observe anyone coming or going. But from the pub you wouldn’t be able to see someone watching you from around the corner.

  The only doors visible in the alley looked like emergency exits, and it seemed unlikely anyone ever used them under normal circumstances. Rico looked for security cameras on the walls. There were none.

  ‘If they chose their victim specifically, they could have waited for her here,’ Rico said.