‘I think that’s exactly what he wants,’ Mari said seriously.
‘Even though he loves the band?’
‘Even so. This man wants to take things away from people. He wants to change them, pervert them.’
They had to ring the police, Lia said. They had to pass on this information.
‘Gerrish said they have to get any information immediately. Whenever anyone conceals information, someone suffers,’ she explained.
‘Oh, Gerrish said that, did he?’ Mari said, looked at Lia long and hard before continuing, ‘OK.’
She looked for her mobile and dialled a number.
‘Rico? Send them to the police. Right now.’
Then she immediately rang off. She and Rico had already been considering sending the videos to the police, Lia realised.
‘When the police release them, good won’t be the only thing that comes of it by any means,’ Mari said.
‘What do you mean?’
The celebrity connection to the slayings would turn the media’s interest white hot.
‘The front pages of the papers won’t have room for anything else after this,’ Mari said.
They both had the same thought: Berg’s death was going to become even more public. Beyond a source of trauma and grief for the entire nation, the killings would become an even larger media event, which meant that some in the media would have scant concern for the suffering of the bereaved and would start focusing only on the sensational aspects of the crimes.
‘Still,’ Lia said. ‘Maybe the videos will move the police investigation forward. Maybe the fact they were made to Queen songs will fit with one of their profiles. That might help them catch him.’
Mari nodded.
‘Let’s hope so.’
They had gone through a bottle of wine. Mari fixed them a bite to eat, cheese and bread and fruit.
Sitting by the tall window with her best friend, Lia felt as though she knew too much about things it wasn’t good to know anything about, and she thought that the only thing in this situation that might help was for Mari’s strength to return.
We need her.
Mari looked at her, a warm memory in her eyes.
‘When you came to the Studio the first time, you were so confused,’ Mari said. ‘I felt like saying, calm down, girl, I’m about to show you things you’ve never even dreamed of before. But I couldn’t say anything like that. You were so panicked.’
‘Well, you did show me things I’d never dreamed of,’ Lia said.
‘Yes, I did.’
Mari’s eyes began to water, and she choked up.
Lia knew what Mari was crying for, for what they had had at the Studio. And Berg.
When she had cried that out, she poured them more wine and said one of their Finnish words, the words that English couldn’t quite match.
‘Perkele.’ Yes, it was the name of the Devil, yes it was an expletive, but it was also so much more.
Mari was coming back.
By eleven o’clock they were seriously tipsy. Mari had turned off the music, which was too fraught for them now.
Lia could feel it was time for a small confession.
‘I’ve been talking to your grandmother,’ she said. ‘Online.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Mari said. ‘I saw on the computer that she had called.’
‘She told me… about your childhood,’ Lia said.
‘Ah.’
Upon hearing this, Mari looked aside.
‘She told me about the Laboratory,’ Lia said.
Mari sipped her wine. Her expression revealed absolutely nothing.
‘That means you’re the only one outside my family who knows,’ Mari said.
That was enough. A desire to protect the woman in front of her filled Lia, a need to show she was worthy of trust.
‘Mamia just asked me to tell you that I know,’ Lia explained.
‘Mamia is a dear old lady who always thinks she knows what’s right for other people,’ Mari said. ‘In that sense I take after my family perfectly.’
An awkward silence fell. In order to fill it, Lia started talking about Level, little things that were happening at work. Mari wasn’t listening.
‘We were like caged animals,’ she suddenly said.
Mari and her three siblings had believed that life was supposed to be as limited and regulated as it was in their childhood home. Their mother convinced them they were different from other children because they got to have school at home and they had their own special way of learning. When they saw pictures of big school classes, it felt strange: did everyone else really have to sit and read in such big groups?
Mari’s big sister was the only one of them who sensed that something was wrong with the way the family lived. But even her sister didn’t know how many things in their severe upbringing were so unusual. Over the years of visiting their grandparents they began to understand.
‘We could see it in their expressions. When our own grandmother looked at us that way. Shocked at how we were. Caged animals.’
The neighbours thought the family must belong to a strange religious sect, Mari later learned. Intense religiosity was typical of families who home schooled.
‘There was also something very Finnish about the way our neighbours let us isolate ourselves,’ Mari said.
Lia understood. In Finland people didn’t assume everyone had to be social all the time. Keeping at a distance a family who had chosen an idiosyncratic way of life was just as well.
Over time the four siblings developed a strong sense of community. Even though they didn’t keep in touch as adults, trust was always their bedrock. Their relationships had already been tried so thoroughly in their childhood. It was as if they owed each other something – what, Mari wasn’t sure.
‘All we had was each other. And Mom, in the beginning. Mom, who wanted us to be quiet and sit still and concentrate on our studies all the time every day. We tried to be the best at knowing things.’
The days of home school melted together. The schedule was always the same. Up at seven, morning chores and then studying by eight. Breaks only for eating and once a day for time outside. On outings they avoided meeting other people. Instead, while they walked their mother quizzed them on what they had been reading.
‘Sometimes when people stared at us outside, I thought it was because they were jealous. That other people knew we were special.’
There was always the feeling that they were supposed to be. A feeling of constant, absolute necessity to be better than others.
They studied enormous amounts of material. Speed reading was one of the first things their parents trained them in. And constant testing: their mother was always assessing how well they were learning what they were reading.
‘Information was our escape. If we knew things, we felt safe.’
Afterwards, as an adult, Mari thought that her mother had really been incapable of treating children like children. Perhaps Auni Nurmi had started her research project partially so her children would grow up to be like her as quickly as possible.
Lia could hear from Mari’s voice how hard this was on her. Lia felt like interrupting the story, but she didn’t have the nerve. She had always sensed something almost manic in Mari’s appetite for information. Now she knew why.
Mari’s parents ended up having a series of serious rows with the children’s grandparents, who at one point threatened to go to the authorities, to report the family to the district child protection officers. Mari’s mother threatened to move the family out of the county and cut off all contact with the grandparents. She also pointed to the children’s exceptional test results.
Twice a year the headmaster from the local secondary school visited them. They didn’t tell him exactly what kind of pedagogical experiment the family was running, but the headmaster was very impressed with the children’s knowledge and their mother’s focus on discipline.
‘I always made up these complicated imaginary stories about that old ma
n,’ Mari said. ‘About him and everyone else we met.’
Of course the children wanted their mother’s approval. They did everything, and sometimes their mother was satisfied.
‘Whenever one of us got good marks in a test, she always said the goal wasn’t here in this moment and place. The goal was always somewhere ahead of us.’
The most important thing was always the research, Nurmi and Gerber’s experiment, and the whole family was responsible for making it a success. They were the Nurmi and Gerber experiment.
In a way they never terminated the experiment, it just sputtered out as the family broke up. Mari’s parents were fighting more and more, and the children began to realise how odd their lifestyle was and became ashamed of it. When their parents split, their mother moved to Germany to continue her research. None of the children went with her.
‘Then Mamia let it all out at once, years later. She said our family was a laboratory. That was the moment I started hating my childhood. And Doctor Auni Nurmi.’
Lia swallowed her discomfort at the words Mari used to describe her mother.
‘I don’t want anyone knowing anything about this,’ Mari added.
Lia nodded.
They talked for a while longer. Mari asked about Lia’s meeting with Detective Chief Inspector Gerrish, but Lia noticed Mari wasn’t concentrating on their conversation.
In the end they just sat quietly, sipping their wine and looking out. Only a few lights were on in the neighbouring windows. The street stayed mostly deserted, with only the occasional pedestrian this late at night. Really there was nothing to look at. It was peaceful. It felt sufficient.
When Lia left for home in the small hours of the morning, she looked out of the taxi window at London, Islington, Chalk Farm, and Belsize Park. She thought of the killer who somehow had become even stranger now. She thought of the stacks of books and papers in Mari’s flat and the moment during the evening when Mari had sworn.
Mari was still living in the Laboratory. But she was coming out.
29.
The police didn’t announce the connection between the snuff videos and Queen.
Lia waited for it to appear in the news at any moment, and all day at Level she kept an eye on the wires. Not a word.
She texted Mari about it. Why were the police concealing it?
The police were probably researching their violent crime databases for anything related to Queen, Mari guessed. The investigators were combing the Queen forums online, sifting through Queen fan videos, interviewing people who knew the subject.
‘The police don’t want to let it out because as long as only they have it, the murderer might make a mistake and do something on one of these forums,’ Mari wrote.
During the day it occurred to Lia that maybe Level should write about it. The strange connection between the killings and the band would be an amazing scoop for any news outlet. The print run would sell out, and the website would probably crash under the traffic. They would be the envy of everyone in the media.
But the thought of leaking something to her own magazine was too difficult. Lia would have a hard time doing it without revealing she knew something about it, and, above all, the news could hurt the police investigation. The whole idea made her more and more ashamed as the day wore on. How could she even have considered something like that, treating it like news to sell?
She spent the last two hours of the day plugging away harder than usual, assuaging her conscience by agreeing to some extra work for the next week and making a couple of calls to arrange something for the evening.
Before her appointment in Hoxton, she stopped in Harrow at the shooting range. Paddy had arranged for Bob Pell to take over supervising Lia so that she could come and practise if Pell had space on the range. Pell tried to offer additional instruction, but Lia declined.
She shot for an hour. She was getting better all the time. Her Heckler & Koch P7 did get hot quite quickly, but that forced her to take breaks and focus more on her performance.
At the end of the hour, she rang Mari to announce she was coming soon. This time she didn’t use her key to Mari’s flat, she rang the bell. Mari came to open immediately.
‘Let’s go out,’ Lia said.
Mari’s guard went up instantly.
‘I don’t want to go to the Studio right now,’ she said.
‘Who said anything about the Studio?’ Lia asked and made Mari grab her coat.
Lia had found an appropriate place within walking distance of Mari’s home. Not right in the neighbourhood, because she guessed Mari wouldn’t want that.
When Mari saw the name on the door, Anga Yoga, she stopped.
‘I don’t want to do yoga,’ she said.
‘Of course you don’t,’ Lia said and dragged her in.
She had reserved them their own small room where an instructor was waiting, a woman with strong Caribbean features.
Although the serenity of the yoga studio was in complete contrast to the noise of the half illegal shooting range Lia had just left, the places also had an absurd similarity. Both demanded perfect focus. Both had strong effects on the mind and body.
The instructor looked at Mari’s reluctant stance for a moment and then pulled Lia aside.
‘Your friend doesn’t want to do yoga, and she isn’t really in the right shape for it now anyway,’ the woman said.
‘She’s in fine shape. And she needs something like this,’ Lia said.
‘I don’t mean physical shape,’ the woman said quietly. ‘If a person is spiritually weak, yoga can be too much effort. It can trigger too strong emotions.’
‘Let’s take it easy then,’ Lia said. ‘And stop immediately if she starts feeling bad.’
Mari agreed to come into the dressing room, where they changed into the loose clothing Lia had brought. She agreed to sit on the floor in the small practice room.
When the instructor asked them to slowly lower themselves into a supine position, tears began running down Mari’s face.
The hour was an intense experience for all of them. The instructor and Lia guided Mari through a gentle series of movements, watching as she cried and feeling their own eyes water as well. It was as if they were watching someone close to them lying down on a hospital bed for a frightening test no one could know the results of.
But at the end of the hour, Mari stood up and, after hopping in the shower and some cold water, she could talk again without getting emotional.
‘That was good,’ she said to Lia. ‘That was really good.’
They grabbed food on the way back to Mari’s flat.
Lia noted that apparently Mari wasn’t in the habit of chatting with the staff at the Co-op down the street.
She wondered to herself why Mari lived here in particular. Hoxton had long been one of the more threadbare areas of East London, but it was changing rapidly. Especially at the southern end, more creative people and IT professionals had moved in, and some blocks were already among the most stylish in the city. But Mari lived in the part of Hoxton bordering on Islington still dominated by old housing estates populated by families of humble means. Tiny grocery shops gave the streets their colour, and languages other than English were common. Mari’s building was on the edge of Shoreditch Park and a few other similarly handsome buildings stood around, but otherwise the area was rather shabby. Although restaurants that looked insignificant from the outside might have the praises of big-time food critics pasted in their windows, Lia noticed: maybe looks were deceiving.
Mari sensed Lia’s meditations.
‘I like these streets,’ she said.
If you looked closely you could see signs of wealth and need, like nests of different cultures living side-by-side. The Hoxton Square area a little further south was already quite smart, but here a person could still be themselves.
Upstairs in the flat, Mari locked the door behind them and sighed.
‘Alcohol.’
Lia opened a bottle of wine, and, while Mari sorted ou
t the food in the kitchen, made two quick calls. First she checked with Rico that all was well at the Studio and nothing new had come out in the news about the police investigation. Then she talked to Mr Vong to make sure he wouldn’t mind Gro staying with him again.
‘Not at all,’ Mr Vong said.
They got along very well, he assured her. They had even seen a hare on their walk on Hampstead Heath that day. That had been very exciting for Gro, Mr Vong related enthusiastically.
Lia and Mari didn’t talk about difficult things. Not a word about the video murders or Berg. Lia could see from the stacks of books spread around the flat that Mari was continuing her investigation, but they didn’t talk about that.
Mari did ask whether the Studio had heard anything from Craig Cole, but so far as Lia knew, Cole hadn’t been in contact.
They ate the supper Mari had made and then sat in the same place as the previous night. Lia talked about Level. She had the feeling that the others at work had started evaluating her more closely, as a possible future Art Director. Mari talked about things she wanted to change about her flat some day. She had been thinking about building a sauna, but that would require quite a battle of papers and planning permission, not to mention the renovation itself.
Mari had her computer next to her, which gave Lia an idea.
‘Have you been in touch with your grandmother?’
Mari shook her head.
‘Not yet. All in good time.’
‘Let’s ring her now,’ Lia suggested.
She could see from Mari’s face that at first she meant to refuse but then changed her mind.
‘I’ve never rung her with anyone else,’ Mari said.
They moved to sit side-by-side. They were a little crowded on the windowsill. Lia had to lean on the windowpane, and Mari set the computer on a bench in front of them. But once they got the VoIP program open and saw themselves in the picture onscreen, the situation amused them both.
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