Black Noise

by Hiltunen, Pekka

In London this man killed five people, four meticulously planned and one as a by-product. He performed those deaths theatrically, ferociously.

  Now he is torturing. This man is here somewhere and has chosen wasting away as his method of killing. As if as he comes closer to what he wants he is slowing things down, biding his time. Perhaps on the island there is something that is making him act this way.

  For this man, killing is a form of self-expression, just as music is for a musician. His creation is death.

  Mari looks at the stall in front of her from which rises a light, yellowish wisp of smoke. A stick of incense burns away the evil as it worships the good, and suddenly everything Mari has read about the objects of the murderer’s devotion falls into place.

  Mari knows why he is here, and she knows why he has decided to wear his victims down.

  Even in the heat of the blazing sun, Mari shivers as if from a cold draught, almost as though the killer is near.

  Almost as if she has got inside him.

  44.

  At the Malindi Police Station, Paddy didn’t waste any time on pleasantries. The two old policemen behind the desks were used to many kinds of customers, but not large western men who marched in displaying irresistible authority.

  ‘Who is the officer in charge of this shift?’ Paddy asked.

  One of the policemen spoke monosyllabic English.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  Paddy pulled out his passport and ID card which said he was a professional private investigator.

  ‘What you want?’ the policeman asked, begrudgingly glancing at the card.

  ‘You have two missing person cases here,’ Paddy said. ‘The people missing are in danger. I need to see your superior.’

  The commanding officer was young. On his belt he carried a heavy pistol, and he spoke more fluent English than his subordinates, but he didn’t look like a man who led large investigations.

  ‘We don’t give out any information unless the families ask,’ the commander said. ‘Or unless the request comes through the official channels.’

  His eyes moved restlessly between Paddy and Lia. Lia hadn’t introduced herself, but apparently that didn’t matter. As the man, Paddy was assumed to be directing the encounter.

  The commander’s office was a small cubby hole hidden at the back of the station. The computer squatting on the table was old and clunky. Criminal investigation here was not at the cutting edge of international policing.

  ‘We know that one of the missing people is a Frenchman named Theo Durand,’ Paddy said. ‘Who is the other one?’

  The commander was reluctant to cooperate, but he didn’t have the nerve not to answer Paddy’s question.

  ‘We have carried out the proper notifications,’ the man said. ‘To the people concerned. If you aren’t a member of the family or a government official, we have nothing we can share with you.’

  ‘Where are these notifications of yours?’ Paddy asked.

  ‘With the appropriate authorities.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘The embassies,’ the commander said.

  He instantly realised he had revealed something: the other missing person was not from the same country as Theo Durand. The commander looked at Paddy in irritation.

  ‘What do you want here?’

  ‘To capture a dangerous person.’

  ‘Who?’

  Paddy froze, looking at the commander.

  ‘You don’t have a clue what’s going on,’ Paddy said tiredly. ‘You don’t have a clue what’s happening on your island right under your nose.’

  The police commander shrugged. This clearly wasn’t the first time some foreigner had criticised the local police, and he wasn’t interested in accepting complaints.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Paddy said to Lia. ‘There’s nothing for us here.’

  Rico quickly found a news story about a missing Italian man once he knew what to look for. The information was on the website of an Italian newspaper.

  His name was Aldo Zambrano. The date of his disappearance was unclear, but the news story had only been published the day before. Online they found a few pictures of Zambrano, who was from Cosenza. He was the same man as in the newest video.

  Mari calculated the dates. Some time must have separated the disappearances of the two newest victims, but both had been at the killer’s mercy for several days. Who knew what had been done to them after shooting the videos. Or whether either of them was even alive any more.

  They roamed the city all day.

  Stone Town was ramshackle but still beautiful. Lia quickly grasped the layout of the small city, but the totality of it was impossible to comprehend in a moment. Despite the heat and the oppressive atmosphere, she found herself here and there staring at street corners bleached with dust behind which nearly anything could be hiding, or the beautiful wooden doors of the old buildings with their thick iron locks.

  No one in the city was talking about the missing men. That they discovered quickly. They asked about Durand and Zambrano around the hotels: even in the backpacker hostels no rumours were circulating, as if the missing men simply did not exist.

  They found the hotels where the men had stayed. The staff at each had clearly been ordered to keep quiet. Small banknotes convinced them to open up a little.

  They didn’t know any details about the disappearances. All over the island, tourists tended to leave their hotels early in the morning, returning to rest during the hottest period of the day and then going out again in the evening. Hotels didn’t keep track of their patrons’ comings and goings, only making sure that intruders didn’t come into the rooms. Tracking foreigners’ movements would have been difficult anyway: sometimes someone suddenly decided to go off on a tour of the island or scuba diving without telling anyone at the hotel.

  The police had collected the missing men’s things. The Frenchman had been travelling alone and had only been missed once his relatives in France started asking after him. The Italian had been with a group of friends, who after waiting a while had started making noise about his disappearance.

  ‘The police silenced them,’ one of the waiters in the hotel told Paddy. ‘The Italians threatened to go to the international press, but the police said that since the man had disappeared under mysterious circumstances, they would do best to be quiet.’

  ‘Mysterious circumstances?’ Paddy asked.

  The man was shoga, the waiter said, using a vulgar Swahili term for gay. Sometimes it meant a close friend, he said, but there was no confusion about the sense in which the police had used it about Aldo Zambrano.

  ‘Most of his friends were probably shoga too,’ the waiter said.

  The friends had left a couple of days before having waited for Zambrano in vain.

  ‘They weren’t close friends,’ the waiter said. ‘Not couples. They were just having fun.’

  Lia and Paddy couldn’t get the Italian man’s travelling companions’ information from the hotel, but Paddy thought they would turn up. At the very latest when the Italian news began reporting the case more widely.

  As day turned to evening, they still hadn’t made much progress in their search. The police station closed and the city began preparing for another night without electricity.

  They all gathered in Mari’s room at the hotel. Lia checked her voicemail. She had kept her phone with her all day, but at some point a message had appeared without her hearing it ring. It was from Detective Chief Inspector Peter Gerrish.

  ‘Ring me,’ Gerrish said tersely.

  The police profiler, Christopher Holywell, wanted to talk to Lia, and so did Gerrish.

  ‘Ring now,’ Gerrish demanded.

  It was only a matter of time until foreign police started showing up in Stone Town to join the investigation for the missing men.

  ‘What investigation?’ Mari asked. ‘My impression is that the police here haven’t done anything about it.’

  But Mari and the others knew they were in the right pla
ce. And although they hadn’t found out much from the locals, they had to press on.

  Mari had also received a message from London. It was from Maggie, who had returned from Berg’s memorial service in Stockholm. Maggie said she was at the Studio ready to help with anything, and she had a question.

  ‘What do we do about Craig Cole?’ Maggie asked in her message.

  Cole had visited Bradford and talked to the director of The Pulse, and the new job and prospective colleagues seemed pleasant. But now he was telling Maggie that he was hesitating.

  ‘Something is weighing on his mind,’ Maggie said.

  This was probably the same problem Mari had seen him struggling with before.

  ‘He doesn’t dare to act. He won’t defend himself,’ Mari said.

  But right now they didn’t have time to concentrate on Cole. Mari suggested that Maggie meet him again on her own.

  Ask why he hadn’t filed a complaint about Bryony Wade with the police, Mari suggested in her own message. ‘Chat with him. Try to find out what is preventing him from getting over this.’

  In Mari’s room, Lia felt an almost palpable pressure. She had never seen her companions so uncompromising, shutting out other matters so they could discover what they had come to Zanzibar to discover. Surrounding them was an old city that would not easily give up its secrets. Interpol and detectives from Tanzania would be coming – perhaps, eventually – but in the meantime anything could happen on the island.

  So many days have passed. Maybe Durand and Zambrano are already dead.

  ‘I want to go out,’ Lia told the others. ‘Anywhere, just so long as I don’t have to sit here.’

  Lia and Paddy jogged through the centre of Stone Town to the sea and Shangani Street, which ran along the shore.

  Only a hint of light remained. They had their small torches, but they didn’t need to turn them on quite yet. By the side of the road, the sand was compacted by foot traffic, making it good for jogging.

  On their run, they circled the whole city, resorting to using their torches once darkness fell in earnest. Children yelled greetings to them. The last fishing vessels were returning to shore, their catches being carried off in baskets.

  If the situation hadn’t been so bad, it would have been beautiful, Lia thought. The scene was nearly as atmospheric as her evening route at home in Hampstead.

  In London, Maggie waited for Craig Cole outside his house.

  ‘You lot like surprising people,’ Cole said when he saw her on the street.

  Maggie smiled thinking how their visits must seem to Cole. Women from a PR firm who appeared without an appointment wanting to talk to him, bearing strange propositions.

  ‘This time I’m not here to suggest anything new,’ Maggie said. ‘I just came to chat, if you have some time.’

  Cole asked Maggie in and sat her in the kitchen, which was familiar from her previous visit.

  Maggie talked about the radio station in Bradford and what was going on with their programmes. Small independent stations like The Pulse had the luxury of doing things the way they wanted, but not everything had to focus on Yorkshire issues.

  ‘It isn’t how small they are that’s the issue,’ Cole said. ‘Going to a small station feels fine.’

  ‘What doesn’t feel good about it then?’ Maggie asked.

  Cole cast her a hesitant glance. Maggie knew she was more approachable for him than Mari and Lia had been. Being more or less his age, he could more easily imagine Maggie having similar life experiences to him.

  ‘I’ve been wondering whether the best thing wouldn’t be to withdraw from public life entirely,’ Cole said.

  Maggie nodded. She understood that impulse well. All famous artists and media personalities considered it as they aged. Once you had experienced the rush and elevated sense of self brought by popularity, at some point wanting to get away from its negative aspects was natural. Everyone always assumed celebrities would be constantly available to the media, willing to open up about their lives and keeping themselves in peak physical condition – before long the whole thing became a burden.

  But Cole also had his own reasons for wanting his privacy.

  ‘I’ve done some things I’m not proud of,’ he told Maggie.

  Maggie understood that this confession was difficult. He wanted to open up because he knew he had a difficult choice ahead of him.

  Craig Cole had been unfaithful. Over the years he had cheated on his wife, Gill, three times.

  ‘They never meant anything to me,’ Cole said, not looking at Maggie. ‘They only mattered afterwards, when the shame hit me.’

  They had always been young women Cole met on business trips. He had had dozens of opportunities for affairs but only slipped these three times.

  ‘Some people in this business wouldn’t think anything of three dalliances,’ he said. ‘But for me they have always been horrible failures. Afterwards. When they were happening, I wasn’t thinking anything, but afterwards that made it even worse.’

  His infidelity and the feelings of shame that came along with it had become such a big issue for Cole that Bryony Wade’s accusations had simply felt like the universe passing judgement on him. Cole had done wrong, not towards a teenage girl, but towards his wife.

  ‘For most people cheating is just hedonism or narcissism. They use it to prove something to themselves, not others,’ Cole said. ‘In my life I’ve had plenty of evidence that people like me. But that wasn’t enough.’

  Cole had strayed three times but thought about his betrayals thousands of times, making them a central part of his identity.

  ‘It probably says something that I’ve never liked remembering those three women, what the sex was like. They were very attractive. In their twenties. But I don’t fantasise about them or dream about doing it again. I’ve learned what a man who does those things is like – despite everything he already has. I fantasise about what life would be like if I hadn’t done it. Or what it would be like if I got caught publicly.’

  Cole realised that he was the one who had made his mistakes so important. As if he wanted to have some flaw, some imperfection to condemn him.

  ‘What kind of person wants that?’ Cole asked Maggie.

  Maggie didn’t have an answer.

  Cole had confessed his affairs to his wife. The first two he had admitted when he was drunk, both at once, and the situation had led them to a crisis in their marriage. Gill had considered divorce, but after seeing Cole’s contrition, she had decided to stay with him.

  ‘When I had to tell her about the third time, something between Gill and me changed,’ Cole said.

  Looking at him, his wife had seemed to understand. He wasn’t just looking for sex, he was looking for the storm of emotion that followed being unfaithful.

  That was why Cole hadn’t filed a complaint about Bryony Wade. He had been afraid that one of those young women with whom he had cheated on his wife would go public. To the point of paranoia he had suspected that one of the three had told Bryony Wade about what had happened and was just waiting to get an opportunity to blackmail him.

  Cole had money, lots of it. His and Gill’s finances were secure and would be for the rest of their lives. He didn’t necessarily need to look for work, but the money also left him open to possible blackmail.

  Maggie could see that this admission had taken a major emotional effort for him. Cole searched Maggie’s expression for disapproval. When he didn’t see any repudiation, talking about it became a liberating experience.

  After their meeting, Maggie sent Mari a brief message about Cole’s admission and the situation. The approval of his audience and his good-guy role were so important for Cole that they had also become an emotional compulsion.

  ‘He isn’t worried about going to Bradford because he’s afraid of failing. What he’s thinking about is whether he wants his old life back at all,’ Maggie wrote.

  ‘Let’s wait,’ Mari replied. ‘Wait and keep in touch with him. And be ready for anythi
ng to happen here. We’re getting closer.’

  When Lia received a text from Rico, she and Paddy immediately turned back towards the centre of Stone Town.

  He was waiting for them on Kenyatta Road near an old building. Some time ago a grey paint had been applied, but the stone walls beneath could have been at least a hundred years old.

  Before them stood the Zanzibar Gallery, a shop selling books, decorations and tourist trinkets. The main streets of Stone Town were home to any number of similar shops. Stepping inside them was not a good idea unless you were willing to listen to fevered sales pitches and haggle over wildly inflated tourist prices. During the course of the day, Lia had gone looking for water in a few of these shops and learned why some customers practically fled after getting a taste of the aggressive sales tactics.

  Lia and Paddy could see from the door that Mari was inside the shop.

  Rico pointed to a small sign on the wall with a glass case below. Mercury House, the sign read, below it in the case two small posters with pictures of Freddie Mercury and a few paragraphs about his life and musical career.

  ‘They don’t know anything,’ Mari announced when she came out of the shop.

  The salespeople weren’t interested in talking to a tourist who wasn’t buying. They didn’t even know the precise history of the building – they just kept repeating that Mercury lived here, Mari said.

  She had been thinking about Freddie Mercury since they arrived on the island. The man they were tracking was in Zanzibar in order to be close to one thing: Freddie Mercury. If you wanted to get close to a person who had died so long ago, where would you go?

  Slowly they walked up the street.

  Maybe investigating the building itself more closely would tell them something, Mari suggested. That would take resourcefulness though, since the shopkeepers were so negative.

  ‘But it may be that the solution is something else entirely,’ Mari said.