I can’t do that. I can’t love anyone. Not now. My grief is too much.
I grieve so much for him.
Someday I may be able to think differently, but now I think: a human being is a falling tree. We have only the time it takes a tree to fall to the ground. We hold each other up, but in the end all trees fall.
Miracle man. I don’t know if I was strong enough to hold you up.
I remember you.
Mari watches Lia fold the piece of paper and place it in her pocket. Lia looks away and Mari turns as well to avoid intruding on her grief.
Leaving on an aeroplane, high in the sky, there is a feeling of disconnection from everything. For a moment, nothing can break.
III
Killer Queen
41.
Immediately upon arrival, in the taxi on the way from the small Kisauni Airport towards Stone Town, two things became clear.
First, it was hot. A heat that washed over them and came closer and penetrated deeper than any heatwave in England. In the early evening air was a promise of the cooling breeze that would rise from the ocean, but it hadn’t started yet. Their clothing stuck to their skin.
And, secondly, there was no electricity.
Rico laughed out loud when he realised. The entire Zanzibari main island of Unguja had no mains power.
Kisauni Airport had lights, which was why they didn’t notice immediately, but when the taxi driver started talking about how hard life was without electric lights and they saw in the waning daylight that no lamps glimmered within the houses, the situation was clear.
‘How did we not know this?’ Rico said, grinning at Mari.
The power outage made Mari solemn.
‘This could be a problem,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why we didn’t know about it.’
She and Paddy had spent hours reading the Zanzibari news. Rico had found out everything he could about the level of technical equipment available on the island. None of them had grasped that the island wouldn’t have power.
Once they arrived in Stone Town, they discovered why they hadn’t easily discerned the problem from London. No electricity was already everyday life here. Because it had been going on for months and the telephone network still worked, the problem was no longer news, or at least no one was going to talk about it on the travel websites.
The issue lay with the cable coming from the mainland, along the floor of the ocean, the desk clerk at the Cinnamon Hotel told them. The cable was broken, probably snapped by a ship carrying out maintenance work. No one knew who the guilty party was because apparently no one was investigating. Or repairing it.
‘Maybe they’ll do it on the mainland,’ the receptionist said. ‘Yes, they should do it.’
The receptionist at the Cinnamon was an older man used to foreign travellers. The hotel was beautiful, an old renovated white building. It took its name from the local spice tradition: Zanzibar had once been a notable centre of the spice trade.
They had chosen their accommodation carefully so they would have space for all of Rico’s equipment and adequate privacy. The whole hotel had only six rooms, of which they occupied four.
‘We heard that a tourist disappeared on the island recently,’ Mari said to the receptionist. ‘A Frenchman.’
‘No,’ the receptionist replied. ‘That is not possible.’
‘Why not?’
Zanzibar – or the main island of Unguja, which is generally just called by the name of the whole island group – was generally a very safe place. There were around 600,000 residents, but other than the capital, the other population centres were mostly villages. Between those buzzed mopeds and dala dala – beaten-up vans that operated as minibuses. A few passenger aeroplanes came to the island each day, and a ferry ran to the mainland, but mostly people just lived day-to-day lives.
‘This is a very peaceful place,’ the man assured them.
Mari did not believe him. For Lia these suspicions and a power outage affecting the entire island were downright bewildering. If they hadn’t realised it at the Studio, how could they prepare for what was ahead of them? But Mari and Rico’s way of handling the issue quieted any concerns.
Everyone on Unguja used generators, the man at the desk had said. They always turned them on at dusk. The hotel guests could charge their phones and use other electrical devices for several hours each night, and the generator could be available at other times as necessary.
‘Not good enough,’ Rico said.
Several of his devices had such sensitive batteries that the potential voltage spikes coming from a generator could damage them. And under no circumstances was Rico going to allow the Topo anywhere near a dirty power source like that. Immediately he rang a company in Nairobi and ordered a charger that would store power from the generator and then charge their batteries with a more even current. It would arrive on the next plane.
Rico had arranged Internet access in advance. The Topo had its own satellite connection, and they also had a separate satphone. The case that contained the small base station was a bother to carry, but it ensured them uninterrupted, secure access any time they wanted.
The power outage might also benefit them, Mari said.
‘How?’ Lia asked.
The island’s phone network was unlikely to function without issues, and they were almost certainly the only ones with twenty-four hour access to an IT arsenal and good network connections, Mari explained.
‘Not even he could have all this. At least not as protected from disturbances like ours are.’
He, Lia thought.
He was also here somewhere. Maybe close.
It was already dark by the time they had moved into their rooms. Thick candles illuminated the rooms – despite the receptionist’s promises, the hotel was saving the generator. They were lodging right in the heart of Stone Town, in the centre of a rambling collection of narrow lanes. When they gathered in the lobby to go out, Rico handed each a small torch. They were so light that you could hang one from a buttonhole but bright enough to be useful.
The colour of Stone Town was the bleached white of sand. The buildings were whitewashed, and those that were painted properly were still white. Here and there they noticed that familiar dirty yellow ochre – the colour they had used Rico’s hacker friends to identify just a short time previously. Between the old buildings were some smaller structures, some made of concrete. By looking closely, in places one could see that stones and even coral were sometimes mixed with the cement. Mari had worked out why: to save on construction costs.
As they walked the streets, they listened as one generator after another growled into life. Still light only flickered from within the buildings and outside a few small shops. Mostly it was dark.
In this labyrinth they would have easily lost their way, but Lia and Paddy quickly pieced together their route. The important thing was to know the main thoroughfares and your own position relative to them. In the darkness of the evening and in amongst the buildings, landmarks were difficult to see, but they committed the street corners to memory as they went.
Stone Town was an entirely new kind of experience for Lia, a mixture of African and Middle Eastern characteristics, Islamic culture and the ever-intrusive commercial brands of the West. Barefoot children roamed the streets, with the sound of a bicycle bell ringing here and there. In front of the buildings sat men in colourful tunics and small hats. The women were less visible – they had to be in the kitchens of the city watching boiling pots.
White-skinned foreign travellers were easy to pick out here, but, on the other hand, there were a lot of them in Stone Town. Lia thought she could also see a few foreigners in the mass of people who had taken up more permanent residence. These navigated the winding, bumpy streets more comfortably, and their clothing was a combination of western and Zanzibari.
Was one of them him?
Paddy had set the rules for moving about in the city. They always had to go in pairs if possible. Never without weapons, but o
nly Paddy and Rico carried them constantly. Lia still didn’t feel completely confident with a weapon, and Mari didn’t want one.
They also had other tools, Mari said. Lia wasn’t sure she wanted to know what that meant, but Mari’s confidence was reassuring.
They ate dinner at a small Indian restaurant located in the centre on the first floor of an old building. The place filled quickly. The reason was the tandoor: the restaurant was not dependent upon the generators because it had an old-fashioned wood-fired oven out of which poured dark, sweet, slightly smoky aromas.
By day the restaurant must offer a good view of Stone Town’s busy main street, Kenyatta Road. Now, in the darkness, they could only see dim lamps and flickering candle flames.
They had to be like any other tourists, Mari said. They had to behave like tourists while they investigated where Theo Durand had disappeared. First thing in the morning they would have to meet with the local police and look into any leads.
Wanting to show off his language skills, the waiter at the restaurant churned out English and French as he presented the food, along with a brief lesson in the local Swahili. When he had taken their orders, Mari asked whether he had heard about the disappearance of a French tourist on the island.
No, the waiter assured them, no one had disappeared in years.
‘He’s lying,’ Mari said quickly after the man had left.
According to the news, there had been numerous hold-ups in Zanzibar over the years, and travellers had got in other trouble as well in the archipelago. Because someone didn’t always investigate what happened to tourists, and many of them might just have left the area on their own, disappearances weren’t necessarily reported to anyone.
Lia was exhausted from the journey, the heat and the whole situation. The conversation was scanty. They were all just waiting to get to bed and start work in the morning.
After dinner, Paddy and Lia led them back to the hotel through the warrens of Stone Town without a moment’s hesitation. Minus the constant feeling of danger, strolling here might be nice some day, Lia thought.
She sneaked a glance at Mari. She seemed calm, as if arriving on the island had removed all uncertainty and set a clear goal in front of her.
As if she knows what’s ahead.
42.
The sixth video was the most savage of all.
Watching it made them ill, and its appearance online was an upsetting omen. How could this killer be stopped when all they could do was watch as a person was tortured?
Rico woke the others early after logging on to the Topo and seeing what the night had brought. They gathered to watch the video in Mari’s room.
In the picture was a young man, western, light skinned. His age was difficult to determine precisely because he was in such bad shape. All he was wearing was a pair of shorts.
Mostly the video showed him sitting slumped against a wall. He shook, his body jerking. He was emaciated, but the worst thing was that his skin was covered in grotesque sores. Blackened, swollen, bloody wounds. He looked like a person who had been tortured so long he had given up any hope of staying alive.
‘The only way to put a person in that state is time,’ Paddy said.
He guessed that most of the marks were burns. The man had been burned with something. He had been starved, probably for many days.
‘If that’s true, he was grabbed a while ago,’ Rico said.
The video clearly combined images from several days. Occasionally the man was seen agonisingly scratching the dark wall with his fingers. In a few close-ups his face was distorted in a scream. He screamed, but the video had no sound.
The Queen song the video was made to was called ‘You Take My Breath Away’.
At the end of the video, the man tried to stand. His legs wouldn’t support him, but he forced himself up. He stared past the camera, his eyes fixed on something beyond. His eyes shone with untold dread.
Maybe that was what made the video so awful, Lia thought. The first videos had been full of intensity and aggression, and the fifth a strange, chilling expectation. Here a man, who knew he was going to die, was being held prisoner and tortured brutally.
Rico asked out loud the question that weighed on them all. Could the killer know about their arrival in Zanzibar? Had the video been uploaded during the night because of that?
‘I don’t think so,’ Mari said.
Hundreds of thousands of tourists visited the main island of Unguja alone every year. They included people from dozens of different countries, and Stone Town was abuzz with visitors. How could the killer have detected them in that mass of humanity?
‘I don’t think he knows anything about us,’ Mari said.
The only thing that connected them to the killer was Berg. The police hadn’t been able to trace Berg’s connection to the Studio, so how would a man who was doing all this at the same time have been able to do it?
But they were running out of time.
The man in the fifth video had appeared to be wasting away slowly. This new one would die from his injuries at any moment, if he hadn’t already.
Of course it was possible that the killer had filmed these two men some time ago. Maybe they were already dead. But the kicking videos had always come fresh, with the bodies dumped in public places relatively soon after the killings – Mari believed that this was how the killer wanted to work. He wanted them all watching these victims as they suffered.
New copies of the previous video were still spreading online. Rico estimated that within the space of a few days it had been watched around the world hundreds of thousands of times, maybe over a million. The newest video had only garnered several thousand views so far because it had only been online a few hours.
‘Can we see whether it’s being watched in Zanzibar?’ Paddy asked.
Rico shook his head.
‘That won’t help. Even if we could tell, we wouldn’t be able to see the IP address it was being watched from. He’s sure to have anonymised his computer and network connection.’
They divvied up tasks. Rico stayed at the hotel to go through the images from the sixth video frame by frame. He guessed that the shots had been processed more than the previous videos – the space behind the man had been obscured from view.
Lia and Paddy would talk to the local police. Mari wanted to tour the city, to get a feel for the area. In daylight and with other people around, she felt confident enough to go out for a while on her own.
As she left Mari’s room, Lia noticed that both pillows of the wide bed had been used. In this heat there was no need for a duvet. Apparently Mari hadn’t spent the night alone – perhaps Paddy had been with her. Lia didn’t ask.
43.
The first thing you notice in the Darajani Market are the smells. The smell of frying food, raw meat kept in the open air, exhaust fumes. And the sweet enticingness of incense.
Mari walks among the booths and tables, making her way through the press. She has not been this vulnerable in years.
She is ready to abandon her complex security measures for a moment and expose herself to come-what-may because in this job they are going deep into the most painful and important things in her life. The whole endeavour is reckless, perhaps megalomaniacal. But Mari has taken it upon herself, and the others at the Studio have decided to come along.
Or perhaps the killer made the decision for them by firing the shot that felled Berg and then by walking up to him and executing him where he lay. After something like that they had only two choices: hide and lick their wounds for the rest of their lives or make this man pay for his crimes.
The Darajani Market is full of sounds. It is a clamorous maelstrom covering a large square and a squat, dirty market hall in the middle of the old town. Here they sell everything with bright colours or tentacles or spines, alive, fried or dried. This is a place where the multitude of people and merchandise might conceal anything. This kind of place Mari would normally avoid or at least take someone along to as backup, but now
she wanted to come alone.
The man comes here too sometimes. Everyone in Zanzibar does. Tourists, locals, small children – every single person on the island has been right here at some point in time.
Mari looks at the crowd and senses the intentions of those walking around her.
A woman buying ingredients for dinner. She doesn’t really know how to cook, not the way that would make her husband praise her food, and every night when she sets the evening meal before the family she feels inferior. She selects herbs, feels the aubergines with her hand, but really she doesn’t want to be here. She wants to be somewhere else entirely, living a different life.
That man in the dark glasses is looking for customers. He sells everything, from tiny to enormous, legal to illegal, but mostly he stocks the illegal because those give him the greatest profits. In the Darajani Market on the island of Unguja in Zanzibar the lines between legal and illegal still exist – they are monitored, but in nearby lanes they disappear, and goods and services and drugs and perhaps even people become only objects of trade. Everything is on offer; with this man in the dark glasses anything can be bought or sold.
Mari walks between the stands. The space is confined; she can feel the throng on her skin. And Mari comes ever closer to this man who kills. He is here somewhere, maybe not in the market right now but here on the island.
Mari feels as if every moment is bringing her closer. She knows that if the killer passes by, she will recognise him. Maybe not from his clothing – he won’t necessarily be wearing the trousers and shoes people around the world have seen in the kicking videos. But Mari will recognise him from his eyes, from what lies behind them.
Black Noise Page 26
