Black Noise

by Hiltunen, Pekka

  But half an hour later while Lia was still contemplating how to overcome the lead investigator’s reluctance, he suddenly rang back.

  ‘I’m not sure this is a good idea,’ Brewster said. ‘But Holywell wants to meet you.’

  ‘Really?’

  Before Lia had brought them the Studio’s projections of future crime scenes. Brewster’s second-in-command in the investigation, criminal psychologist and profiler Christopher Holywell, was interested to hear what else Lia might have to report. And Lia seemed to sense that Brewster was privately pleased that DCI Gerrish didn’t have anything to do with it this time.

  ‘Peter Gerrish doesn’t know you’re coming?’ Brewster had asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’ll notify him of your visit, of course,’ Brewster said. ‘Sooner or later.’

  ‘As you wish,’ Lia had replied. ‘But I understood you were in charge of the investigation, not him.’

  They had planned out her meeting with the police the previous night at the Studio. Over and over Mari and Paddy ran her through what she was supposed to do.

  ‘At first don’t say anything,’ Mari said. ‘If they try to talk to you in the lobby, say that this is the kind of thing that needs to be discussed elsewhere. If they try to take you to an interrogation room, say you want to talk about it with other investigators present. Don’t give them any other option. Don’t mention the incident room. Wait for Brewster to decide that for himself.’

  Lia didn’t need to lead Brewster along though. He took her straight to the incident room.

  It was early evening, and only a few police detectives were around besides Brewster and Christopher Holywell. A handful of investigators manned the telephones in the adjacent room.

  ‘Most of them are sleeping,’ Brewster said. ‘People have been pulling sixteen-hour days. Pretty soon they’re going to start dropping like flies from exhaustion. These people never stop unless someone orders them to rest.’

  The pictures on the walls of the large room were still the same. The sunlight revealed their every detail, but Lia wasn’t shocked to see them any more. They were just tragic and depressing. Gloomy fragments of reality.

  Christopher Holywell came to introduce himself as soon as he saw Lia. A rather small man, he was dressed less formally than his police comrades, in jeans and polo shirt.

  ‘Why are you involved with this case?’ Holywell asked, managing to make the question sound friendly despite its directness. ‘Gerrish and Brewster say you’re a complete outsider. Gerrish also urged you to stay out of it.’

  ‘I have my reasons,’ Lia said. ‘Just like Gerrish and you have your own ways of leading investigations. So do you want to talk about that or the information I have?’

  Any other policeman would have moved on to Lia’s information, but not Holywell. The forensic psychologist looked at Lia very closely.

  ‘I was a psychologist, years ago,’ Holywell said. ‘Then I got roped into assisting in a police investigation.’

  He recounted being at turns shocked and intensely interested by everything he saw and experienced.

  ‘For some of us, understanding crime changes us. We’re still afraid of it, but at the same time the experience wakes us up. It makes you feel more capable,’ he said.

  He had started studying forensic psychology and, within a few years, had risen to teaching at Portsmouth University and joined the ranks of Scotland Yard’s Murder/Major Investigation Teams as a profiler. He trained SCAS crime analysts in Hampshire and represented Britain at international events in the field.

  ‘As an investigator I always get the really repellent, weird cases,’ Holywell said.

  ‘And you’re still satisfied with your choice of profession?’ Lia asked.

  Holywell laughed.

  ‘I specialise in crimes against sexual and gender minorities,’ he added.

  Lia nodded. At least someone on the investigation knew what was going on.

  ‘Well, what do you have?’ asked Brewster, who had been waiting impatiently.

  Lia hadn’t said over the phone when she proposed their meeting. They had planned that at the Studio too: Lia had to get into the incident room.

  ‘These,’ Lia said, pulling a stack of papers out of her bag.

  They were printouts of online conversations from the people whose accounts the killer hacked to upload his videos. These were the ones who had each mocked Queen or Freddie Mercury in some way.

  Clearly Brewster and Holywell weren’t expecting anything like this.

  Lia explained the progress of the discussion threads. As she talked, she glanced around, trying not to let on what she was searching for.

  Overhearing the conversation, the other investigators came to listen in. Lia realised she was stuck in the wrong part of the room. She was too far away from the table that interested her.

  ‘Let me show you something,’ she said, walking over to a table next to her target.

  She spread the papers out on the empty table so they were all visible at once.

  ‘Look at the dates and times,’ Lia said.

  The men bent over to examine the printouts.

  ‘What’s significant about them?’ Holywell asked.

  The killer had chosen users out of the long discussion threads who poked fun at Queen, but the discussions were all from different times. The oldest was from more than a year before.

  ‘Couldn’t the different times indicate that he’s been planning this for at least that long?’ Lia asked. ‘Maybe the killer participates in these discussions himself.’

  At the Studio Rico had been trying to track down contact information for everyone in the threads, but that was slow. It would be easier for the police because they could get information directly from the service providers.

  The investigators read the sheets of paper one by one and then pondered.

  Lia stood behind them, calmly looking at the next table, which was full of unfamiliar machines and small glass bottles. On the whiteboard above the table were words and abbreviations written in marker.

  Two syringes also lay on the table. Lia hadn’t noticed them on her first visit when she had been further away from the table. The syringes were small and thin. They had long needles.

  Drug syringes?

  She quickly tried to memorise the words on the whiteboard. At first remembering them felt easy as she focused all of her powers of concentration. But when she turned away for a second, she realised she couldn’t even remember half of it. There was too much.

  ‘Is this all?’ Brewster asked.

  Lia shrugged.

  ‘Isn’t this enough?’

  Brewster cast a stern glance at Holywell.

  ‘How did you get these?’ Holywell asked Lia.

  ‘The same way as the information about Rich Lane,’ Lia said. ‘Using computer programs to sift through a lot of different things.’

  ‘What things?’ Holywell asked calmly.

  ‘What had been done online from their IP addresses, what websites they hung out on.’

  ‘Where did you get the IP addresses?’

  ‘The same place you did,’ Lia said.

  ‘The ISPs?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lia said. ‘You just did it by the book. If our killer did visit those pages, he probably masked his connection. But there’s still something there to investigate.’

  Brewster interrupted their conversation.

  ‘If this is everything, then we don’t have any reason to detain you here any further.’

  ‘Sure there is,’ Lia said. ‘I want something in exchange.’

  Holywell shrugged lightly. ‘We knew all these kids were Internet trolls to one degree or another. And that at least one of them had mocked Queen,’ he said.

  But the police hadn’t realised that all of them had done so, Holywell admitted. Lia’s information would help their investigation.

  Lia saw how Holywell’s gaze quickly paused on Brewster, and when the lead investigator immediately moved away to shuffl
e through some papers on his desk, she realised the police had planned the meeting out ahead of time too. Holywell wanted to talk to her alone.

  He wants to figure me out, and I want to remember that list of words on the wall.

  ‘Do you think you know why this man is committing these crimes?’ Holywell asked.

  ‘No,’ Lia admitted. ‘I understand it has something to do with celebrity obsession syndrome. That’s what you call it, right?’

  Holywell nodded.

  ‘It isn’t an officially recognised diagnosis,’ he said. ‘And it doesn’t completely explain what’s going on here. But it’s an apt name for how some people’s imbalance presents. This man follows serial killer logic. They all have fetishes, details they worship. Usually they’re sexual or violent. This man’s fetishes relate to obsessive admiration and violence.’

  Freddie Mercury died in 1991, before the rise of the Internet, so he escaped much of the hate speech and aggression so common online. But a figure like Mercury, who lived with such flourish, was in a class of his own when it came to engendering abnormally strong feelings in his admirers even after his death, Holywell said.

  ‘It’s as if the star’s death creates a space for his admirers that they fill with their fantasies,’ he said. ‘And this sort of idolisation can be much more powerful for people than you might believe. Because of the Internet more and more people have the ability to create their own reality and only associate with people like themselves.’

  Lia had a hard time concentrating on what the profiler was saying and simultaneously trying to commit to memory the list on the wall behind him without being noticed.

  Henssge. Anect. Subdural haematoma. Nearly twenty words and abbreviations, some with numbers following. The words didn’t describe anything Lia was familiar with. She guessed it was a list of drugs and chemical compounds, but also realised that impression was influenced by the flasks and syringes and strange devices on the table.

  What was in the flasks? Why were they here – the police had to have separate laboratories, right?

  Some of the flasks were empty. Two had liquid, one clear, one yellowish.

  Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. They could just be sampling tools.

  As Holywell continued his analysis of Freddie Mercury fans, Lia grasped just how much he had researched the topic.

  Anything related to the star they admired could become a fetish for some fans. Just recently a woman in the United States had been issued a restraining order. She was a Queen fan who had become obsessed with an actor who resembled Freddie Mercury. He played Mercury in a musical tribute to the band, and this fan began sending him and his wife strange messages.

  A major homicide had been blamed on Mercury worship before in Britain, Holywell pointed out.

  ‘What was it?’ Lia asked.

  The murder happened in 1999, Holywell explained. A television presenter named Jill Dando was shot down in cold blood on her doorstep in Fulham. The man convicted of her murder was Barry George.

  Lia knew the name from the year of appeals following the conviction.

  ‘George was also a fan, in his own way,’ Holywell said.

  Over the years Barry George had been convicted of various sex crimes, and he suffered from personality disorders. He worshipped a wide range of celebrities, especially Princess Diana. He collected thousands of pictures of women, both celebrities and people he met himself. For some of them he had contact information. George had an interest in guns, dressed in uniforms and sometimes impersonated a police officer, a soldier or sports stars. He even managed to wiggle his way into newspaper articles using celebrities’ names as his own. Once troops guarding the royal family detained George for hiding near Kensington Palace with a rope, a large hunting knife and a poem dedicated to Prince Charles.

  At the time of Dando’s murder, George had been using the name Barry Bulsara. Bulsara was Freddie Mercury’s real surname.

  Lia nodded at Holywell’s account while feverishly repeating the names of the drugs on the board behind him.

  George had represented himself as Mercury’s cousin and tried to get into the singer’s former Kensington flat so often and disruptively that the police were forced to remove him physically. George had even tried to have surgery to make himself look as much like Freddie Mercury as possible.

  ‘Some fans do things like that,’ Holywell said. ‘Or rather, they aren’t really fans, they’re a sort of über-fan who think they can get closer to their idols by becoming more like them. Or that they’re special people so that should show in their appearance.’

  George’s only stint of employment had been a short gig as a runner for the BBC, but the network hadn’t kept him on. Apparently George had taken exception to the way the BBC dealt with Mercury’s death. No one knew why George would have wanted to kill Jill Dando, but there were different theories. Dando resembled Princess Diana. Dando had worked in a prominent position at the BBC, with which George had a conflicted relationship. And his whole life Barry George had behaved aggressively towards women and wanted to be famous.

  ‘Barry Bulsara,’ Lia repeated.

  Of course she recognised what the criminal psychologist was doing, trying to create a connection with her without revealing too much. All of Britain knew the Dando case, and everyone had followed the continuing saga of Barry George. After seven years in prison, George was freed. No one else was ever accused of Dando’s murder, but serious doubts had arisen about the evidence used to convict him. In part because of his troubled upbringing, numerous experts had supported George’s release, and a popular campaign ensued.

  But many in the police still believed in George’s guilt, Holywell added.

  ‘Do you believe this man is like Barry George… or Bulsara?’ Lia asked.

  ‘No,’ Holywell said. ‘This man and George have the same obsessive admiration in common, but otherwise this one is a much more dangerous case. Our killer is exceptionally strong and intelligent.’

  Lia read the names, words and figures on the board behind Holywell.

  Henssge. Anect. 4.512. Alphabet – why did it say ‘alphabet’?

  ‘Our perpetrator would kill anyway,’ Holywell said. ‘You could compare it to building a house. For this man killing is like building. He’s good at it, and he wants to do it. He’s been waiting a long time for the chance to build what he’s been planning. The way he videotapes his killings and makes them into Queen fetish objects is the macabre exterior of the house.’

  Lia’s heart pounded. She stared at the list of words and abbreviations on the whiteboard. She thought she could remember them, at least most of them. She thought she could describe the things on the table.

  ‘It would be best for you to give this up,’ Holywell said quietly. ‘It would be best for you to tell us what you know and let us take it from there.’

  ‘Is that the stuff used to drug the victims?’ Lia asked, pointing to the glass bottle behind Holywell.

  This question took Holywell completely by surprise. Quickly he glanced at DCI Brewster, who had also heard the question. Lia could see from Brewster’s expression that she had gone too far.

  ‘We’re done now,’ Brewster said curtly.

  He wasn’t speaking to Lia but rather to Holywell.

  ‘I came to bring you information that could help you,’ Lia said to them both. ‘And to ask why you aren’t publicly treating these as anti-gay hate crimes.’

  Brewster stepped towards Lia angrily, but she stayed calm. Mari had made her instructions clear: When you ask it, don’t get angry. Don’t yell. Don’t give them any reason to react. Just pay attention to what they say.

  ‘I’m leading this investigation with the full support of my superiors,’ Brewster said. ‘Which, by the way, is none of your business.’

  Holywell lowered his eyes, which revealed everything to Lia.

  Brewster. Brewster is responsible.

  ‘I think she could help us,’ Holywell quickly said to his superior.

  ‘Rolf
e,’ Brewster said to one of the detectives following the situation from the sidelines. ‘Please show Ms Pajala out.’

  33.

  That night new videos showed up online.

  Lia, Mari and the others watched them together at the Studio as they went through the information gathered from the police incident room.

  The videos used Queen music timed to fit with clips from violent films, reportage from war zones and anything else that showed people dying or being abused.

  When the videos started appearing, it was unclear who was making them for a while. But from the usernames used to upload them it soon became obvious that their creators were just troublemakers who wanted to get a rise out of people by showing them unpleasant images. Some of the videos were just clumsy excerpts from B-movies, but some of them had required a good deal of effort to make the shootings, stabbings or explosions match the rhythm of the music.

  Many of the creators wanted credit for their work. Seeing the reactions the videos elicited, they started advertising them on social media with links to more of the same kind of content.

  Queen’s most popular song, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, inspired the most knock-offs. It was so long that some of the film makers didn’t have the patience to edit imagery for the whole song, but they had no inhibitions when it came to the brutality of the pictures.

  ‘I detest people,’ Lia said.

  She would come to repeat that more than once during the day.

  The videos attracted a lot of views. Within two days of the tabloids starting to call the murderer the Queen Killer, several dozen of these videos had been uploaded. They made the news on several channels, which quickly multiplied their viewership.

  ‘Just when you think you’ve seen humanity sink as low as possible, something new comes along,’ Mari said.

  The Times pointed to the frightening social aspect of the videos. On its website it reminded its readers that this was no different from happy slapping, the random acts of violence young people committed to catch on camera and post online. Usually it was an assault on another youth.