Black Noise

by Hiltunen, Pekka

  Lia listened, abashed.

  ‘I am the only person in Mari’s family she keeps in regular contact with,’ Mamia said. ‘She only rings her siblings very infrequently. Have you ever heard Mari talk about her parents?’

  No, Lia had never heard that.

  ‘Tell me how Mari is doing,’ Mamia said. ‘Maybe I can help.’

  Lia nodded. Mamia had a lot in common with Mari. You couldn’t argue with people like this for long. It was futile.

  Lia didn’t tell the whole truth. Not how Berg died, not anything about the snuff videos or the Studio.

  When Mamia heard that Mari had been keeping to her flat for several days now, she was visibly concerned.

  ‘She isn’t talking to you?’ Mamia asked.

  ‘Not much. This is very unusual, but we’re all feeling horrible.’

  ‘But the rest of you aren’t feeling as horrible as Mari? Why?’

  ‘It could be she blames herself for what happened. That she should have been able to stop his death somehow.’

  ‘Could she have?’

  Lia hesitated. It was an appalling question. You couldn’t answer something like that.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ she managed to say.

  ‘This is very bad,’ Mamia said. ‘It sounds worse than ever.’

  ‘Has this happened before?’ Lia asked.

  She could read the answer on Mamia’s face.

  ‘Has Mari talked about her childhood?’ Mamia asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought not.’

  Mamia was mulling something over. Her hesitation lasted a long time.

  ‘Will you promise me one thing?’ she finally asked.

  The woman’s face was warm but melancholy. During this very moment Mamia was deciding to confide in her, to trust her.

  ‘Promise me that sometime later when Mari is better you’ll tell her that you know. That you know what I’m going to tell you.’

  Mamia moved closer to her computer’s camera, as if trying to get closer to her. Lia nodded.

  When Mari was small, her family lived a very unusual life.

  Her father, Mamia’s son, was a biologist named Mikael Rautee, his parents’ only child and the head of his class as a teenager. From the beginning it had been clear that Mikael would excel as a researcher and achieve a good position. On a conference trip to Helsinki, Mikael met Auni Nurmi, a teacher and educational psychologist. They fell in love, and things progressed quickly. Ultimately they would have four children.

  ‘And they came rather quickly,’ Mamia said, and Lia understood the emphasis.

  ‘At first I wondered why they were running a baby factory. But Auni wanted it that way.’

  At first everything went well. The family kept in contact with the children’s grandparents. Auni didn’t like it when Mikael’s parents asked about how childcare was going. Looking after everything herself was important for her.

  ‘Auni was never a gentle or warm person,’ Mamia said. ‘She still isn’t.’

  Mari and her siblings never went to school. Their mother taught them at home. That was possible in Finland as long as the parents notified the county school board and the children completed the proficiency tests required for compulsory education.

  Auni was an educator who wanted to develop her own teaching model. She started designing it with Johann Gerber, a German, in the late seventies and early eighties. Gerber had been Auni’s teacher at a German university, and they became research partners.

  ‘At the time everyone seemed to be talking about education and childrearing.’

  There were Summerhillism and Waldorf Schools and all sorts of other philosophies of education, Mamia recalled. The waves of ‘free’ educational movements in the sixties and seventies had caused a backlash, demands for a return to discipline. The large schools and classes that before had represented equality began to be seen as harmful to students. Everyone was searching for new directions in education, and most believed the best results would come through small groups and special programmes.

  Auni Nurmi and Johann Gerber were especially interested in the education of exceptionally gifted children. In particular in the findings that gifted children often became bored in large classes when forced to adapt to the pace of slower students, which could lead to the brightest turning into underperformers who hid their talent to avoid arousing jealousy in their peers.

  ‘Auni and Johann believed in home schooling. They thought it allowed them to train children as elite individuals from the beginning. Their intent was good, in a way, although the idea that almost anyone could be groomed into a top performer was somewhat… foolish. It set such demanding goals for the children.’

  Mari’s mother tried the method at home, on her own children. There were two main principles: perfect focus on continuous education and the elimination of all activities that were too emotional or distracted from learning.

  The experiment got out of hand, Mamia said.

  ‘It wasn’t a family. It was a laboratory test.’

  Lia listened in shock to the events Mamia described.

  Mari was the family’s third child. When she was born the experiment was already well underway and family life had adapted to it. Her father went to work, supporting the family financially and participating in teaching at home in the evenings. The mother was responsible for the children’s education during the day and kept precise diaries of her research.

  ‘At first they called it Dedication,’ Mamia said. ‘Dedicated education.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it,’ Lia said.

  ‘Neither has anyone else. My husband and I only heard the term years later when everything came out. They had different names for it and were always coming up with new ones. I guess the idea was that if it had the right name somehow it would gain more respect.’

  The children weren’t allowed to stay in contact with people outside the family. All their energy was focused on acquiring knowledge. They didn’t watch television because it was too entertaining. Sometimes they listened to radio programmes if they related to topics they were learning about. At that time, in the 1980s, they didn’t have the Internet, Mamia reminded Lia.

  Every day they studied for ten hours, although Sunday was shorter. Schedules and subjects were planned based on pedagogical research: Finnish, foreign languages, lots of maths, science. Not much art, mostly just listening to music and sometimes a little drawing. They memorised information at a tremendous pace from books and encyclopaedic summaries their parents went to libraries to write up.

  Lia devoured every strange detail of Mamia’s tale as it shed new light on sides of Mari she had never known and explained the ones she did. Mari’s loneliness. Her desire for control, her overwhelming need to master her environment. Her constant assimilation of information. And her ability to recognise other people’s thoughts.

  At the same time in Germany, Johann Gerber’s family’s three children were going through the same thing. The experiment was meant to demonstrate that children raised exactly the same way in two different countries would all become geniuses. Mari’s mother and Gerber had agreed that if she had better educational outcomes in Finland, they would publish their findings under the names Nurmi and Gerber. If Germany did better, it would be Gerber and Nurmi.

  ‘There was something attractive in the idea that anyone could become exceptional. In a way it was splendid. Very democratic,’ Mamia said.

  Their family had always been for equality, she said. Lia nodded, remembering what Mari had said about her extended family. She had been tight-lipped, only speaking about her father’s side, never about her mother or childhood.

  ‘We called it the Laboratory,’ Mamia said. ‘What they had to endure.’

  The children were unequalled in the masses of facts they could recite, but socially they were very reserved.

  ‘And serious. So much so it was hard to understand,’ Mamia said.

  ‘They were physically healthy, but it was like something was mis
sing from them.’

  The children always attended to their basic daily chores, as if they had grown up in a young offender institution.

  ‘But even in reform schools the children are always surrounded by other children,’ Mamia pointed out. ‘Mari’s family lived in their own little world. The children were so hungry for the companionship of other people.’

  In order to maintain even the weak connection they had with their grandchildren, Mamia and her husband never reported them to the authorities. At her workplace in the magistrate’s court, Mamia did investigate the legality of this sort of childrearing: the country’s constitution and primary education laws at the time gave parents the right to decide how their children would be educated.

  Whenever Mamia saw the children, she tried to give them a glimpse of a more normal life. At their grandparents’ house the children could try things that were forbidden at home: using the telephone, reading picture books, watching television.

  ‘Mari suffered the most,’ Mamia said. ‘She was the quietest and most withdrawn. She was also the best in her studies and always had the best exam scores. Auni expected Mari to be her shining piece of evidence that would bring notoriety to her research.’

  Their mother frequently told the family that the results of the study would reward all their hard work. They just had to work hard enough.

  ‘Sometimes when Auni and Mikael weren’t around to hear, I would tell Mari that one day she would get out of it. That someday it would end and they could live like other people.’

  Mari never replied to that. She didn’t dare, Mamia said.

  Lia felt so sick she could barely speak.

  Mari spent her childhood thinking of escape.

  Nurmi and Gerber’s experiment failed horribly.

  The children in both families started showing maladaptive symptoms. Mamia had heard that one of the Gerber boys in particular rebelled aggressively. Gerber had treated his children much more harshly than the Rautees and sometimes disciplined them physically. Mari and her siblings became fearful and hypersensitive. They were always watching other people’s reactions, Mamia said.

  And Mari started focusing on interpreting other people. As a child she had to struggle to know what her parents and siblings and other people were thinking and feeling, and that became her means of survival.

  But that didn’t completely explain her ability. There had to be something else to it.

  Auni Nurmi and Johann Gerber wrote one report on their study. In it they included the children’s learning outcomes but didn’t deal with their development in other areas. When Gerber presented the report to experts in his faculty in Germany, the reception was one of dismay. Germany looked with suspicion on any educational programme that trained elite groups. The burden of National Socialist education was still too close, and after the war any theories that stressed discipline and leadership tended to be rebuffed.

  In Finland the whole experiment was never addressed in any university or by the educational authorities. Officially it didn’t even exist.

  ‘Mikael also suffered from it,’ Mamia said. ‘He still hasn’t recovered, just like the children.’

  Mari’s parents divorced when she was a teenager. Up until that point the family had soldiered on together. It was no coincidence what professions the children ended up in, Mamia said.

  ‘I think they’ve always been trying to fix what happened to them.’

  Mari left Finland immediately after graduating in record time with a degree in psychology. Her big sister became a teacher whose philosophy was completely the opposite of her parents’. Mari’s little brother had cut off all contact with his parents.

  Mamia had lost contact with Mari for years. She didn’t even know precisely where she had been living. After settling in London, Mari had started calling Mamia now and then, but she only heard from the other siblings occasionally.

  ‘They meet sometimes,’ Mamia said. ‘No one talks about the past. Theirs is a family without memories. The children grew up very fragile in a way. Which is why I’ve always feared something would happen to one of them. Especially to Mari.’

  Mamia fell silent. Everything had been said.

  Lia weighed what she had heard. Inside her, pity and indignation roiled. How could anyone have done this in 1980s Finland, which was so proud of its democratic education system, one of the best in the world? What trials and tribulations had Mari endured as she grew up?

  Dedication. The Laboratory.

  In a way her mother’s goal had been realised, Lia thought: Mari was exceptionally gifted. But not just at the things her mother had intended, also in her strange, sometimes painful tendency to observe others and see what they were thinking. How could she ever talk about all this with Mari?

  ‘You said Mari is lying at home alone now barely able to speak,’ Mamia said.

  This had happened before. At the time of her parents’ divorce and when Mamia’s husband, Mari’s grandfather, died.

  ‘I suppose Mari thought she should have been able to prevent what happened.’

  The children had been raised to think that they were chosen to live an exceptional life where they were personally responsible not only for their own success but for how everything played out in the world.

  Once Mari went mute at a Rautee family reunion, Mamia said.

  ‘It was one of the rare times when Mari and her sister were allowed to see that many people at one time when they were children.’

  Lia was surprised.

  ‘At Vanajanlinna Estate? Near Hämeenlinna?’ she asked.

  ‘Has Mari talked about it?’ Mamia asked in amazement. ‘It’s been so long. It was a rather unpleasant situation. After the party she had to stay in bed for several days.’

  Once Mari had confided in Lia how at the age of eight, at this very party, she had first understood her ability to read people. But in Mari’s version of events, the reunion had sounded different, not at all dark.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Lia said.

  Mamia looked away.

  ‘It’s a long story,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to talk about it another time.’ Fatigue shadowed the old woman’s face.

  ‘We’ve been talking a long time. It’s almost night here,’ she said. ‘Are the nights very different in England than in Finland? It’s been ever so long since I’ve visited.’

  Lia thought.

  ‘They are a little different.’

  The night felt different since there were more people around, she said.

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ Mamia said. ‘You’re right. The world always feels different depending on how many people you think you’re sharing it with. Goodnight. Please ask Mari to ring.’

  24.

  They had to go to the police.

  Lia was the first to say so out loud, in a meeting at the Studio. Rico, Maggie and Paddy’s expressions showed that the same thought had been running through their minds.

  It was afternoon. After doing a short work day at Level, Lia had rushed to the Studio. The previous night she had heard Mamia’s bewildering tale of Mari’s childhood. The rest of the evening she had spent at home pondering how to lure Mari back to the land of the living. And the whole time her grief over Berg flickered in the background.

  Everything that had happened since had clouded the fact that the man who killed Berg and four other people was still free. The police certainly would have announced if the man had been captured – even the tiniest details about the video killings were being endlessly rehashed in the news media. More and more politicians had taken up the issue too. The actions of the police were still under harsh scrutiny, and some were calling for them to be given more resources and leeway.

  Apparently, the pictures of the killer dragging Brian Fowler’s body hadn’t led to any detentions or arrests. But at the Studio they still had Rico’s calculations of the places the man might strike next.

  ‘I can’t give my program to the police,’ Rico said.

  In it he had used so muc
h information acquired illegally from official and private databases that the police would realise immediately that the programmer was a hacker. And Rico couldn’t risk police interviews: he broke British and international law every day. But he agreed with the rest of them about the goal in general. They had to use every expedient, and they had already tried all of their resources.

  Receiving the results of Rico’s program wouldn’t help the police much if they couldn’t also know how the calculations were made, Paddy pointed out. ‘They might have information they could add to improve the results.’

  ‘We could maybe give them the variables. In theory they could dig that up themselves. And the results of the calculation,’ Rico said. ‘But not the program or any information about who made it or how.’

  ‘I could ring Gerrish,’ Lia said.

  She had been thinking about this all morning, delaying the obvious solution. Lia never wanted to see Detective Chief Inspector Peter Gerrish of the City of London Police ever again given the doubts he must harbour about her based on their previous meetings. But she had once supplied Gerrish with information and he had done the same in return. The DCI would probably at least answer her call.

  Rico, Paddy and Maggie considered the idea possible. If any of them wondered at the least experienced member of the Studio taking the initiative, it didn’t show.

  ‘It could work,’ Rico said. ‘But how are you going to get the police to believe that you did the calculations yourself?’

  ‘Maybe I don’t have to,’ Lia said.

  The previous time Detective Chief Inspector Gerrish had grudgingly accepted that Lia wasn’t going to reveal all of her sources. He had tried to look into Lia’s background, but when nothing suspicious came up, he concentrated on the main issue, solving the crime.

  ‘Five dead, the killer free and the media waging open war on the police,’ Paddy said. ‘I’m thinking that in this situation the police are going to appreciate any kind of help they can get.’