Black Noise

by Hiltunen, Pekka

  Before that he had to get this lunatic to talk more.

  ‘What is it?’ Theo asked, pointing to the bag.

  ‘Coriander,’ the man said.

  Theo stared at him, speechless. This was all going over his head.

  ‘It will prepare you,’ the man said.

  Theo squeezed his eyes tight shut. Feeling his arms twitching, he pulled them around him. The blood pounded in his head. He was trying to understand what the man said. Was there anything he could say to this… creature?

  There wasn’t.

  When Theo opened his eyes, the man was gone again.

  36.

  The fifth video differed from the earlier ones.

  In it there was no kicking, and no one lying on the ground. It was mysterious and slow. The images were so dark and grainy it was difficult to tell what they showed.

  When Lia, Mari and the rest of the Studio saw it, their first reaction was a strange relief. If they could conclude anything from the video, it was that another mangled body wasn’t lying somewhere waiting to be found. Although the images were unpleasant, there was still the feeling that they had to watch them. They were evidence that the killer was free and continuing his work.

  That the video was the work of the same man, of this they were sure.

  ‘It’s him,’ Mari said. ‘That’s as sure as sure can be.’

  The killer had just changed his mode of operation.

  Perhaps he was frightened, Paddy guessed. Having Berg show up on Rich Lane in Kensington had disturbed his plan. He had executed Berg, brushing him out of the way, but maybe the possibility of getting caught had made him re-evaluate the sense in his brutal attacks.

  ‘Or maybe this was the plan all along,’ Mari said. ‘This video isn’t the work of an afternoon.’

  The song was Queen’s ‘Somebody to Love’, one of the ones that matched exactly the length of the black videos. That was why they were among the first to detect it. Rico had written a program that crawled the Internet’s most popular music services and sent alerts whenever one of the six possible remaining Queen songs appeared in a new video.

  Rico was also convinced this one was from the killer after inspecting it more closely. Although the images were cut to match a slower rhythm than before, he believed he could tell the maker from his work.

  ‘You can just tell,’ he said.

  He could see it in the change of focus, the camera angles, the great skill with which the killer used footage that otherwise looked like the product of an amateur.

  The clearest evidence was what the images showed. The camera, which remained still the entire time, showed a dark room with a man locked in.

  ‘There is light there,’ Rico said. ‘There’s just so little that it looks dark.’

  On the bottom half of the screen now and then they could see the man trudge back and forth slowly. He paced like a prisoner in a cell.

  Two scenes showed him screaming. He stared straight at the camera and screamed at it. Not out of pain but distress.

  ‘He sees the camera. He knows he’s being filmed,’ Paddy said.

  The prisoner in the video was begging the camera for help. Watching it was horrific. There was no doubt the situation was genuine.

  ‘That isn’t acting,’ Maggie said.

  Near the end they could see him more clearly in the centre of the darkness. When his half-naked body hit the light, it glistened. He was sweating, profusely.

  ‘It’s hot in there,’ Paddy said.

  In some of the pictures it looked as though the man had something in his mouth.

  ‘Is he eating sand?’ Lia asked.

  Deducing anything from the pictures was impossible. Rico ran still after still through his image processing programs, ultimately deciding that the substance was lighter than sand.

  The final images were the most shocking. The man stood up straight in the middle of the room, looked at the camera and drew something on his bare chest with his forefinger. He did it with the same light brown substance he was eating. When his hand moved out of the way, the picture showed that on his chest in block capitals he had written the word HELP.

  ‘He’s pitting his hopes on someone else seeing the camera image other than whoever locked him in there,’ Paddy said.

  His hope was not in vain. When word of the video started circulating, it was viewed more than one hundred thousand times on YouTube alone before the site admins took it down. There was plenty of time for it to be copied to other sites and continue spreading.

  The police kept schtum. The media asked DCI Brewster and the other leaders of the investigation, but they weren’t willing to comment on the video or even say whether they were looking into it.

  The police wanted to keep open the possibility that the fifth video didn’t belong to the same series as the previous four, Paddy guessed. And they wanted to prevent the phenomenon from growing even larger.

  ‘That’s possibly true,’ Mari said. ‘It’s still a stupid attitude to take though.’

  The police might be preventing serious study of the video elsewhere. The Studio certainly weren’t the only people besides the police who could look into it. This was precisely the sort of problem crowdsourcing could help with, which was exactly what Rico used in his research of the videos. If the video was being analysed all over the world, by every means possible, someone would see something new in it, Mari was sure.

  But for the police the homosexual aspect of the case was just a little too much.

  How do we know the man in the fifth video is gay? Lia asked.

  ‘We don’t, but we do,’ Mari answered.

  The man was slim and in his thirties. He didn’t look particularly fit. In the pictures he didn’t appear to have any tattoos, and there were no recognisable details on his underpants. Nothing pointed to his background.

  But there was something special in his features Lia recognised. It was hard to define. Maybe it was mostly about the expression of emotion, a sort of sensitivity. Sensitive didn’t completely describe his face, but it was close.

  ‘Gay men show their feelings,’ Rico said. ‘Often that’s the only identifiable difference.’

  Seeing the emotions of the man on the video wasn’t hard. He was filled with an immense dread.

  ‘He doesn’t know what’s happening to him,’ Mari said.

  Lia could hear from Mari’s voice that she had just about had enough of the situation and waiting for the police to act.

  In the middle of all this, work at Level had become stressful. Most of Lia’s time was spent thinking about everything but design layouts, and she was always just killing time, waiting for the moment she could get to the Studio and then home in the evening.

  On the night the fifth video appeared, she found Gro and Mr Vong in Hampstead outside the residence hall. They were headed out for a stroll.

  How were they getting along? Lia asked when she saw the dog.

  Very well, Mr Vong said. Gro was a good assistant. When Mr Vong was out doing his caretaker work, Gro always came with him and was never afraid of noises or strange places.

  Of course not, Lia thought. Gro was used to Berg’s equipment in the Den, occasional loud noises and all sorts of different projects. It was probably all very comforting and homely for her.

  ‘Hopefully Gro can still stay with me,’ Mr Vong said. ‘For a while longer?’

  Lia nodded. The dog and the elderly gentleman had quickly adopted one another. Mr Vong had plenty of time for her, and perhaps she recognised that Mr Vong was the closest thing to Berg the world had to offer now.

  Lia wasn’t needed here.

  When man and dog had disappeared on their walk, Lia went and dropped through Mr Vong’s letterbox a small present she had bought for him. It was a book with interviews from some of the world’s greatest political leaders about their life experiences and visions for the future. The only woman in the group was Gro Harlem Brundtland. Lia didn’t send a card with it. Mr Vong would know who was thanking him.
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  She rang Bob Pell to see if he had space on the range in Harrow.

  ‘For Paddy Moore’s students, always,’ Pell said.

  Paddy paid him so well for the use of the firing range that it was in his best interests to cancel any other appointments that clashed, he told her. Lia spent the rest of the evening practising shooting stationary targets.

  Just before heading off to bed, she rang Mari at home in Hampstead.

  ‘How did it go at the shooting range?’ Mari asked.

  Well, Lia reported. She wasn’t sure how long she wanted to practise shooting, but she thought she wanted to learn to do it well.

  ‘Is there any point in it?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course there is,’ Mari said. ‘Maybe it’s just what you need right now.’

  ‘How’s yoga?’ Lia asked.

  She liked that they asked after each other as if nothing out of the ordinary were going on. They had known each other for fewer than two years but had gone through so much in that time. Here they were as friends – the things they talked about were anything but casual, but between them was a special warmth. They watched over each other like an old married couple.

  They needed that. They needed normal life.

  Yoga was going well and doing her good, Mari said. Before going to any more classes she had checked whether Anga was the sort of studio she wanted. Lia had done excellent work choosing it. The instructor was among the best in the city, and the studio was genuinely dedicated to yoga, not a place you came to show off expensive outfits. Mari had also looked into the different styles of yoga and what kinds of effects they had on people. Lia grinned hearing that Mari had read about hot yoga, Christian yoga, Ashtanga, and all the others and still found that the one Lia had chosen for her was just right. Regular, straightforward yoga, effective but simple.

  Ending the telephone call was difficult. Their chat was so close to what they’d had before all this, before Berg’s death.

  ‘Our life is never going to go back to the way it was,’ Lia said.

  ‘No,’ Mari said. ‘But it can go back to being good.’

  ‘I feel sort of… kaiho, you know,’ Lia said. ‘Sort of nostalgic but more in a sad way.’

  ‘I know,’ Mari said.

  37.

  Craig Cole was surprised to meet Lia on his doorstep, accompanied by Maggie, whom he had never met before.

  ‘This is my colleague Margaret,’ Lia said. ‘She knows a lot of people in the media.’

  Cole asked them in, and they sat in the kitchen.

  ‘I thought your work was done,’ he said. ‘The work you did for me. It went beautifully.’

  The nasty stories about Cole had stopped quickly after the programmes and opinion pieces defending him came out. Bryony Wade’s family hadn’t appeared in public again.

  ‘The parents probably realised they didn’t have anything more to gain out of this,’ Cole said.

  Looking at him, they could see he still wasn’t sleeping well.

  ‘We have a proposition,’ Maggie said. ‘A job offer, actually.’

  At the Studio they had decided that Maggie would visit Cole this time because she had found a job opportunity for him, and Mari’s thoughts were elsewhere.

  Cole looked aside upon hearing the word ‘job’.

  ‘I haven’t actually been looking for work.’

  ‘I know,’ Maggie said. ‘But maybe you should be.’

  Maggie kept her eyes locked on Cole as she presented the opportunity she had found. He was sitting diagonally across from them, a little hunched over, as if communicating that he didn’t want to see anyone, ready to fly out of the room. When he heard Maggie’s thoughts, his posture began to straighten.

  In Bradford, there was a radio station named The Pulse. It was very small, not the sort of place he would have ever considered before even for a moment. The station’s programmes mostly dealt with regional issues, but it had established a foothold in the press of national pop stations.

  ‘They’re looking for a host for their music programmes,’ Maggie said.

  A small sort of smile crept onto Cole’s face. He had done music broadcasting when he was young, long before he became a star of talk radio.

  ‘A fifty-year-old man hosting a top-of-the-pops programme?’ Cole said.

  ‘They don’t just want new music,’ Maggie said.

  The majority of their listenership was adults, and now they were looking for a host for their programmes directed at the over-forty crowd.

  ‘That wouldn’t make any sense,’ Cole objected. ‘I’d have to move to Bradford.’

  ‘Yes, you would,’ Maggie admitted.

  She knew Cole was familiar with Bradford. Early in his career Cole had worked as a reporter in the county and he knew what a peaceful place it was.

  It would be a fresh start, Maggie explained. Cole could do work he liked for a reasonably large audience. Hosting a music show would still be sufficiently different from the work he had been doing in recent years though.

  ‘The best thing is you can’t fail at it,’ Maggie said. ‘If it doesn’t work out, not all that many people will hear about it. If it does work, soon you’ll have a faithful audience.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cole said hesitantly.

  He made them tea. Lia remained an observer in the conversation since Maggie had the situation well in hand.

  Maggie talked to Cole about the latest shake-ups at the BBC and ITV. Chatting about this and that, she kept the conversation light and focused on the entertainment industry. Cole poured the tea and offered them their cups.

  ‘They won’t want me in Bradford,’ he said.

  Maggie and Lia exchanged a quick glance.

  ‘Yes they do,’ Maggie said. ‘I’ve already asked.’

  ‘You talked to them about me?’ Cole asked, confused. ‘Before you talked to me?’

  ‘Settle down,’ Maggie said. ‘I didn’t promise you were coming. I simply asked what they would pay if I could get someone like Craig Cole for them.’

  ‘And?’

  Cole’s expression made it clear how much this answer would mean to him.

  ‘The station director said that if I could get them someone like Craig Cole, he would pay them the same amount he’s earning and maybe a little more. Then he asked whether I knew you and what you were doing nowadays. He asked how much he would have to pay me to tell you about their station and find out if you were interested.’

  By the time Maggie and Lia left, Cole had agreed to think about visiting Bradford. He could do that much without any commitment, Maggie assured him.

  ‘If you don’t like the place, just tell me and that will be that. We can look for something else or just drop it if you want.’

  ‘He’ll probably go to Bradford at least to have a look around,’ Maggie told Mari at the Studio.

  ‘We can’t be sure of that,’ Lia said, trying to put a dampener on their expectations.

  But Maggie thought she knew how entertainment stars thought, and she had researched Cole specifically.

  ‘It’s a place Cole can feel safe. He’ll go for a visit at least.’

  Mari thanked Maggie for her effort, but it was easy to tell that her mind was mostly elsewhere.

  That night Lia visited the shooting range again. Holding a weapon was beginning to feel routine. She knew how her Heckler & Koch P7 worked and what it demanded of its handler.

  ‘We usually just say HK, not Heckler & Koch,’ Bob Pell pointed out. ‘You can tell an amateur by the way they talk.’

  ‘I am an amateur,’ Lia said.

  Pell looked at his score record and nodded knowingly.

  ‘You won’t be for long,’ he said. ‘Mr Moore can make a passable shooter out of anyone.’

  Lia frowned at his slightly dismissive tone, but couldn’t help asking what it would take to become better than passable.

  ‘Dinner with me,’ Pell replied.

  ‘I don’t think I want to learn that much about shooting.’

&n
bsp; Pell burst out laughing.

  ‘You’re going to be much better than passable if you keep it up like this,’ he said. ‘You want to shoot, and that determination is what will mean you’ll be good. That can’t be taught.’

  The thought made Lia reflective.

  ‘Why do you want to shoot?’ Pell asked.

  Lia didn’t have an answer to that. She thanked him and left for home.

  Pell’s question wouldn’t leave her in peace though.

  Why do I want to shoot?

  She felt sick when she saw the violent videos spreading online. Just a little while ago the idea of even holding a gun had felt uncomfortable. Her close friend had been shot. By rights Lia should have felt more distrustful of guns now, especially since she was practising in secret.

  But holding a weapon and learning how to use it brought her a feeling of security. The difficult relationship she’d left behind in Finland so many years ago had made her fear for her safety, and in London she had been involved with several crimes. Whether her life held real or imagined dangers, shooting helped her face them.

  I want to learn to shoot because I want to be the kind of person who moves towards the difficult things in this world.

  38.

  The police didn’t release any information about the fifth video. Not even a statement about the possible actions they might take in response.

  The silence of the police affected Mari. Lia noticed that her determination was taking on an increasingly hard edge, as if she knew something unavoidable was coming.

  They were constantly waiting for something that would change everything again. That something didn’t come. Lia always left for the Studio immediately after working as short a day as possible at Level. She walked her familiar route from Fetter Lane, behind her the buzzing streets of the City and the dome of St Paul’s reaching towards the heavens, before her Bankside and its industrial buildings, office blocks and shrine to the arts, Tate Modern, but the transition didn’t work the way it used to: before it had been a journey from the rest of the world to the protection of the Studio, but now the world always travelled with her.