Black Noise

by Hiltunen, Pekka

  ‘You haven’t been rude at all, just demanding,’ Martha said. ‘There just isn’t anyone answering over there right now. Unfortunately.’

  ‘It is unfortunate,’ Paddy said. ‘You probably aren’t even in the London office. The phone centre isn’t here, is it?’

  ‘No, we’re in Newbury these days.’

  ‘What would you do, Martha, if there were an emergency and you had to make contact with someone in the legal department but no one was answering their phones?’

  The line went silent. Finally a second laugh came.

  ‘I’d make an announcement over the PA system,’ Martha said. ‘We have a connection to that too.’

  Paddy closed his eyes and waited.

  ‘I can’t do that now though,’ Martha said.

  ‘Why not?’ Paddy asked.

  ‘Well because we’re only allowed to do that in special circumstances.

  We’ve only ever really used it during fire drills,’ Martha explained. ‘And once they played music over it and read greetings from all the companies at the anniversary of the building’s opening. But it’s really only there for emergencies. It broadcasts everywhere in the building, to the conference rooms and loos and everywhere.’

  ‘Martha, this is an emergency,’ Paddy said. ‘No one is dying, but believe me, this is about big things. We’re going to spend weeks cleaning up the mess if I can’t talk to that police officer right now.’

  A long silence.

  ‘If we do make an announcement over the loudspeakers, what would you want it to say?’ Martha asked.

  Maggie sipped the coffee Kenneth Laing had brought and looked at the man and his computer screen.

  ‘Listen, you probably don’t have any reason to worry,’ Maggie said. ‘That table contains your monthly mobile traffic figures, a comparison to the other major operators in Britain and the number of service disruptions for each of you. I’m here to find out how your own figures match up with the information that has come to us.’

  She cast a friendly glance at Laing.

  ‘This hard approach is intended to test how you handle information transparency requests,’ Maggie pointed out.

  Laing visibly relaxed and mimed wiping sweat from his brow.

  ‘Whew,’ he said. ‘I was thinking we had a problem.’

  ‘That depends on how your numbers compare to ours.’

  She knew her role. During the night she and Lia and Paddy had determined what she needed to know about the Vodafone legal department’s work.

  Maggie was just about to continue when an announcement rang through the office.

  ‘Mr Fordham,’ a female voice said from a small loudspeaker situated above the door. ‘Mr Jon Fordham, this announcement is for you. Please ring the switchboard immediately.’

  Laing stared at the loudspeaker in surprise. They heard as the same message was repeated, also echoing in the corridor.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Laing said. ‘That request is for one of my colleagues. Highly irregular.’

  He stood up, stepping into the corridor and glancing around. When he apologised for the interruption and left for a moment, Maggie leaned back in her chair in satisfaction and watched Rico’s memory stick. The light had started flashing faster again.

  Rico’s fingers flew over the tablet’s virtual keyboard at a speed Lia and Paddy found unreal.

  Most people can’t type that fast on a real keyboard, Lia thought.

  On the Topo’s display, commands, lines of code and long streams of data flashed past.

  Rico had gained access to Berg’s phone records and was currently removing any information about calls and messages that would connect Berg to the Studio. At the same time he was adding new entries for conversations and texts that never really happened.

  Lia and Paddy didn’t breathe a word. This was Rico’s job; they couldn’t help with this.

  ‘Time?’ Rico called out, making the others jump.

  ‘Two thirty-four,’ Paddy said.

  Rico was into his third minute working with the phone data. They had guessed they would have three, maybe four minutes in the metadata archives. Maggie would do her best to delay the person at Vodafone and keep the memory stick in his machine as long as necessary, but the police were also in the legal department.

  Thanks to the office building’s public address system and the helpfulness of Martha at the switchboard, Paddy had managed to contact the inspector who had come to the legal department to review Berg’s customer data. But now the police officer was calling his station. He had received a message that someone urgently needed to speak with him, but it would only take a few more seconds before he realised the alert was wrong. Before long he would return to his task and be given the phone records to look over.

  ‘Tell me when we hit three minutes!’ Rico yelled to Paddy and continued his furious work.

  Lia saw Gro in the corridor. The door to Rico’s large office was open, but Gro didn’t presume to enter. She was lonely and needed them, but no one had time right now.

  I’ll take you out in just a minute. In just a minute when this is over.

  ‘Two fifty-five,’ Paddy announced.

  Rico stopped. His fingers came up from the keyboard, but his eyes continued sifting through the data visible on the screen. Lia saw the effort on his face – Rico was frozen in place staring: had he done everything?

  Rico’s breath caught.

  ‘I still haven’t changed the log,’ he said in agony. ‘They might notice that someone was just in the file. Changing that will take time. At least half a minute. Maybe a minute. Should I do it?’

  Paddy cast Lia a quick look. They didn’t have a clue.

  Rico’s fingers attacked the keyboard again. Lia and Paddy watched as he barrelled forward not knowing whether they had succeeded, whether they still had time – whether changing the archive log information was the one thing everything else hinged on.

  The time was three minutes and forty-nine seconds when Rico cut the connection between the Topo and the Vodafone server. Bouncing out of his chair, he marched to the door, startling Gro in the corridor.

  ‘Get Maggie out of there,’ Rico said to Lia and Paddy.

  He knelt down to pet Gro. His hands were shaking.

  When Kenneth Laing returned to his office, Maggie had already received the text message from the Studio: All done. Get out.

  ‘Something irregular is going on out there,’ Laing said apologetically. ‘The police are visiting with some of my other colleagues. And that address system is never used for summoning people like that.’

  ‘The announcement did feel a bit odd,’ Maggie said.

  ‘The police are probably here about those video killings,’ Laing said, lowering his voice.

  He waited for this confidence to make an impression, but Maggie remained silent.

  Laing looked at his computer screen. Maggie had removed the blue memory stick, and the spreadsheet was gone.

  ‘We’re going to have to return to this at a later date,’ Maggie said.

  She explained that she had just received a message on her phone about an urgent question regarding a legal matter going before the court that morning.

  ‘And you seem to be busy here too,’ Maggie said. ‘We’ll get back to this later. And we may end up handling it in Newbury after all. People from our office do travel out there quite frequently.’

  The man nodded absentmindedly.

  ‘A very irregular morning indeed,’ he said. ‘Ofcom and the police here in our department at the same time. You would think we’d done something… well… illegal.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Maggie said with a sigh.

  Thanking him for the coffee, she picked up her briefcase and strode to the door. ‘Two official visits on the same morning,’ she said. ‘One really might get the idea you had done something.’

  23.

  The fourth video showed up online on Monday night.

  Sitting at home on Kidderpore Avenue, Lia saw excerpts from it on the morning n
ews. Again the video had been uploaded by hacking another YouTube account. The account owner never even saw the video herself since it attracted so much attention and was ordered removed by the police almost immediately.

  The video showed Brian Fowler being kicked to death.

  It was like the killer wanted to send a personal message to the whole world, Lia thought. In terms of its imagery, the new video was similar to the previous ones, but the effect was different. Now the police had begun their search to catch the killer, and someone had tried to stop him on a street in Kensington.

  He wants to show that he’s invincible. He plucks one victim after another off the street, does to them what he wants and then leaves the bodies in the streets. And spreads sick pictures of it around.

  Anything could be coming. And he wants people to know it.

  Gro sensed Lia’s mood and huddled at her feet as if preventing her from disappearing too.

  Leaving the dog in her small flat during the day was difficult, but she couldn’t think of any alternative. She didn’t have time to go to the Studio, and because she had spent part of the previous morning there, she would have to concentrate hard all day at Level.

  She comforted herself with the knowledge that she had been able to devote at least some time to Gro the previous evening. When Maggie had returned from her visit to Vodafone, Lia had hurried to work dead tired and then dropped by Mari’s flat in Hoxton in the early evening. She had seen Mari sleeping, and there were dirty plates in the kitchen – at least Mari had been on her feet and eaten something. From Hoxton Lia returned to the Studio to pick up Gro and managed to get home to collapse in her bed before dark.

  The amount of work and shuttling from place to place was starting to tax her, especially since the knowledge that somewhere a man who had killed five people was probably walking free was lurking in the back of her mind the whole time.

  When she returned home after work, Gro was overjoyed.

  ‘I don’t know how I can keep you,’ she said to the dog as she took her out.

  Just saying that thought out loud felt bad. Gro was a stray saved from difficult conditions. It wasn’t fair for her to have to get used to another new home and new people again.

  Caring for Gro meant something else to Lia too. The dog was a living, breathing bond to Berg.

  ‘Min snälla, underbara hund,’ she said to Gro in Swedish.

  Did Berg ever talk to her in Swedish? A dog couldn’t recognise languages, but maybe something she knew would get through.

  Lia didn’t know whether she could keep a dog in the King’s College residence hall. What she knew was that giving up Gro wasn’t an option. The name Berg had given the dog was a clear sign of his respect for her, and caring for Gro was a matter of honour for Lia.

  The fourth video unleashed a tidal wave of criticism in the media. The Metropolitan Police Service commissioner was condemned for the fruitlessness of the investigation, and the video-sharing websites were censured for their irresponsibility. Criticism came from politicians, interest groups and members of the public alike, and the tabloids practically excoriated the authorities.

  Hey, guys, this killer is taking the mick out of you, blared the Sun.

  They also poked fun at the name Operation Rhea. The police had a habit of choosing names for their big operations from a list compiled of more or less random, sometimes rare words. This made it unlikely that the name would clash with anything concrete referred to in the case at hand. A rhea was a flightless bird from South America reminiscent of an ostrich.

  ‘This rhea can’t seem to get off the ground either,’ the Sun wrote maliciously in their lead article.

  Some of the staff at Level seemed more interested in the police investigation’s lack of results than in the murders themselves. Although the Sun’s headlines were a detestable attempt to garner newspaper sales from a tragedy, the paper did manage to channel people’s feeling of helplessness in the face of these crimes, editor-in-chief Timothy Phelps suggested in a meeting.

  The police leadership responded to the criticism by holding two press conferences during the day. In the first they released two stills from the video they had received from Rich Lane. They showed the killer dragging Brian Fowler out of a van.

  Did anyone recognise this man, the police asked the public. Or the vehicle the man was using?

  At the same time, the police claimed that the general public in the city were not in danger. Additional police resources had been called in from other areas for Operation Rhea, and street patrols were increased. But the public was asked to support the investigation in any way they could, and anyone out in the city at night was encouraged to stay aware of their environment.

  Although the pictures of the killer were blurry, their publication caused an enormous stir. The pictures spread quickly online, which also made new copies of the previous videos crop up.

  See the Monster of the Decade, proclaimed the Mirror.

  Lia and the rest of the Level team shook their heads at the sensationalism.

  ‘First, the pictures don’t show how he looks,’ said Sam. ‘And second, the monster of the decade almost sounds like a title of distinction.’

  In the second news conference of the day, the police began to shift blame to the video sharing services and their users. YouTube, MySpace and the other companies were helping the police in their investigation, but the heart of the problem was that the police or the government didn’t have any way to stop the spread of content online.

  ‘This killer gets part of his gratification from making these shocking videos,’ the police inspector said. ‘And some of the public are humouring him by sharing the videos.’

  The law did give the authorities the option of intervening when materials threatened general safety, even to the point of exercising extraordinary measures.

  ‘But we have no way of completely deleting the videos if people keep copying them,’ he said. ‘And if we can’t capture the perpetrator, we can only punish the people who disseminate these materials.’

  Those methods of punishment were slow and too lenient to help in this situation, the inspector pointed out.

  ‘Today in the press we saw claims that this killer is making a mockery of the police. What he is doing is making a mockery of absolutely everything, of all of society, and that is why everyone is responsible for stopping him.’

  That evening on the way to Hoxton, Lia was messaging Paddy. He was at the Studio, he had spent the whole day there with Maggie and Rico. They were considering what to do next. Rico had reviewed the fourth video frame by frame but hadn’t found anything new.

  Arriving in Hoxton, Lia again noticed small changes in Mari’s flat. The handbag had disappeared from the hall. Perhaps that was a good sign, that Mari had grabbed her bag. The dirty plates in the kitchen had been loaded into the dishwasher, but Mari hadn’t started it yet because there were so few.

  Of course it was possible that a cleaner had come, but Lia didn’t believe that. In this state Mari wasn’t going to let anyone in here, this close.

  The bedroom door was open a crack. Lia listened at the door for a long time without opening it. Not a sound. She could just about make out Mari’s shape on the bed. Either Mari was sleeping or just wanted to rest.

  Lia believed Mari knew that she was visiting, and that this knowledge helped Mari.

  She went to sit in the study. The laptop was in sleep mode. Lia hesitated for a moment and then woke it up. She saw from the browser history the websites last visited on the machine. Mari had been online during the day, reading the news. She had also watched the fourth kicking video.

  She knows where this is going. That the killer is still free.

  She knows that the Studio can’t operate fully without her.

  Suddenly the room filled with a familiar ringtone. Lia guessed whose name would pop up on the screen.

  Mamia’s concerned face flashed onto the big wall display.

  This time Mamia waited silently for Lia to find the
headphones and microphone. Once Lia had them on, the talking-to began.

  ‘It’s been a week!’ Mamia said. ‘Do you understand what kinds of things an old person can start dreaming up in that much time?’

  Lia had to smile despite Mamia’s indignation.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But we did speak the night before last.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s been a week since I’ve been able to catch Mari. Yes, I know that isn’t your fault. But you could ask Mari to answer every once in a while. I’ve been standing guard at my computer waiting for one of you to condescend to logging on so I could ring.’

  ‘Is something the matter there?’ Lia asked.

  ‘No. But there is where you are.’

  This time avoiding telling how things really were was harder for Lia. Mamia wanted to know what condition Mari was in.

  ‘Since you know Mari, you must know that she always wants to keep some things to herself,’ Lia said.

  Mamia suddenly turned deadly serious. Lia was surprised by the reaction, as if she had just insulted her.

  ‘I have known Mari since the day she was born,’ Mamia said slowly. Her voice held a new, harder edge. ‘I have known Mari her entire life,’ Mamia continued. ‘I think I know her better than any of her friends in London. Including you.’

  Lia felt simultaneously sheepish and obstinate. Mari’s grandmother wanted the best for her and concealing from her that her granddaughter was in some sort of grief-induced depression was absurd. But Lia knew that Mari had left her home country in her early twenties, founding the Studio years later after moving to London – it was unlikely Mamia knew everything she had done or that Mari wanted her grandmother knowing.

  Mamia realised the situation. Her expression softened.

  ‘Listen,’ Mamia said. ‘I have perhaps five years left to live. I’m about to turn eighty-three, I’m half blind, I have sciatica and my mobility is starting to be so-so even on my good days. I certainly don’t have more than ten years ahead of me. At this point I only have one thing I really care about any more. Mari and her siblings.’