by Howard Marks
That’s not what you signed up for, you’re well aware. Not something he told you when you first met. Nothing to do with the song, the singing, that talent which you still half-believe to be there.
Your choice.
Left or right. Old or new. Either way a death of sorts.
Your fingers move towards his right hand.
15
SHE MADE HER way back to the café, ordered more tea and proceeded to crunch the data she’d already collected. The answer lay here. Discipline, rigour and the odd flash of imagination might just be enough to find it.
She started work. She tabulated her evidence as much as she could, so any overlaps or cross-references would jump out at her.
More tea. Her fourth cup now. She hadn’t yet re-watched Riley’s videos, but she needed to do so. She found them on the memory stick. Each girl had her own video: Nia Hopkins, Delyth Moses, Esyllt, Lisa Marr, Katie Tana, Sara Armitage.
Nia first. Cat only watched the clip for a few seconds, trying to focus on the performance but all she could think of was the broken body in the pithead shaft, the autopsy shots. She shut it down, called up the DeMo clip, saw the waitress standing on the same stage as Nia, or one much like it. Delyth opened her mouth to sing and Cat saw her bloated corpse; Delyth hit an opening note and Cat saw her tortured body, her serrated nipples. She shut the clip down.
It was a bad gig. Would she have got onto tranks if she hadn’t had to cope with stuff like this? There wasn’t an answer.
Still wanting to retch, she tried Esyllt, got as far as the opening seconds of the EasyT clip – Esyllt with uncannily neat hairstyle marooned on an ocean of stage – before she shut that down too. She’d watch them later. See what they told her. She couldn’t face it now. Her limbs and body felt heavy, as though they were subject to some new double gravity.
She closed the video player and, for relief more than anything else, went back to her web browser, clicked through to YouTube and entered ‘Radiohead Street Spirit’ as her search term. Somehow, she’d expected only a few videos to show and Riley’s names to pop out, but there were dozens of versions of the song. She checked the names of some of the YouTube singers against their Facebook accounts and found that, where she was able to correlate one against the other, the singers appeared to be living an ordinary, untroubled life. If this was the Devil’s Song, he had a funny way of picking his victims.
Was this the final collapse of Riley’s theory? For a moment Cat thought so, except that Griff Morgan’s name still flashed over this whole case like a broken light. The drugs tied Morgan into the case, just as the graffiti in the Tregaron cottage had done. Somehow Kyle’s interest did as well. That meant, Cat decided, that there might be some truth to Riley’s conjectures, it’s just that neither she nor Riley himself had yet discerned it.
In some desperation, after rooting around, she found a version of Riley’s campfire tale. It was pasted in a metal music chatroom, apparently from an older chatroom that had closed many years previously. The original poster was anonymous, and all the elements were the same. Morgan’s girlfriend singing the song and dying in a fire shortly afterwards. The hotel worker who had heard the song playing after the girl’s death. His entering the suite and seeing all the girl’s things, as if she had only just walked out of the room. It felt like the sort of story teens circulate to frighten each other. She wondered if Riley might have invented it himself, and posted it to give colour to his story.
Feeling more ready to watch the videos of the dead girls, Cat searched for them on YouTube. The three Welsh girls had their videos online, but there was nothing from Lisa Marr, Katie Tana or Sara Armitage. Weird.
Cat thought there was something off with the YouTube search function, then remembered that she’d first watched those videos from Riley’s memory stick, not from the site itself. All the clips Riley had saved had now been withdrawn from their respective online homes. As far as Cat could tell, via some web-archive libraries and Google caches, the clips had been withdrawn at about the same date, about a week after the Croatian girl’s disappearance.
Had Riley begun contacting the girls at this time with his theory? If so, the girls had apparently decided not to chance it. The performances of the three Welsh girls seemed also to have been withdrawn with the others, but then posted again a month before the mine bodies had been found. That was something, some type of pattern in the chaos. A further hint that Riley might have been onto something. But what did it mean? Maybe they had felt that whatever threat existed had passed and it was safe to go online again.
Cat tightened her grip on the mouse, ignored her feelings, dived in.
She called up the Moses girl, the YouTube original, not Riley’s curt ID version. This time she watched the song properly. The performance began assuredly enough, with barely any hesitation. The girl’s eyes were almost closed throughout. The words were slow and whispered like an incantation, until in the central section, a change of Delyth’s vocal register was partially disguised by a sound that was part sob, part whoop. Cat dragged the cursor back, listened again. It was a curious noise to come from so accomplished a singer; an unholy marriage of grief and celebration.
Cat minimised the DeMo clip, exhaled heavily, called up Nia’s YouTube window, moved the cursor to the mid-section, listened. She heard the same sound from Nia. Delyth and Nia seemed to have the same eccentric singing technique.
Faster now, because that was the only way Cat could face it, she called up Esyllt’s performance, heard the same strange vocal tic in the mid-section of the song, noted the long shift she wore like the others. They looked like novitiates, transported by the power of the song. All held their hands clasped in front of them at waist height, like figures in some Pre-Raphaelite religious scene.
The girls had lived within a tight radius of each other. They hadn’t been known to mix socially, yet there must have been a connection between them, a connection close enough to enable them to develop similar performance styles. Was that possible? She didn’t believe that they were simply imitating each other. Why would they want to? More likely they would want to develop their own individual interpretations, yet the style was undoubtedly similar.
She clicked back to Nia’s video, the earliest to be posted by almost six months. She watched more closely now.
From a close-up of Nia’s face the camera pulled back to reveal the performance space, a proscenium arch partly visible beyond the small circle of light that encased her. Something about the scale of it made Cat stop the video momentarily. She had thought it had merely been mocked up to look like a theatre, but now she could see that it really was a theatre, albeit one that had an unused appearance.
She clicked on the play icon again, let the scene go on a little longer. Towards the end of the song the camera moved, an amateurish pan that momentarily confused Nia. For the briefest of moments the girl lost focus, then found the camera again, followed it round with her eyes. Just before her final notes died away Cat saw a rectangular shape, one corner of it caught by the follow-spot.
Cat pressed pause, moved her head closer to the screen. Squinted. It was a theatrical flat, a wooden frame upon which a sheet of canvas had been stretched. Primed with undercoat then painted, this would have formed part of a scenic backdrop. It wasn’t clear exactly what was depicted, but it was an outdoor scene. The layers of trompe l’œil grey stone made her wonder whether it was supposed to be an old wall of some sort.
She called up the other two girls, found stills that showed as much background detail as possible, then clipped the images, and copied then over into Photoshop. She did what she could to enhance the images and set lighting and contrast settings similarly.
In the DeMo clip, the space had been lit so tightly that she could see nothing behind the circle of the follow-spot, yet in super-zoom mode, where you could see every pixel, you could see a clear similarity between the Nia clip and the DeMo one. The paintwork on the proscenium arch just visible on the right had a deliberately loose quali
ty, so that you could almost see the brushstrokes. In the EasyT clip Cat could just make out, leaning against the back wall, another right-hand section of the theatrical flat. It was unmistakably the same as the Nia one. You could superimpose one image on the other and almost not notice the difference.
But what did this mean?
All the performances looked as though they’d been filmed in a similar place. Maybe even the same place. Some sort of theatre, a large formal stage. Not something that one would find in the heart of the country. A city, maybe. A town, at the very least. There was the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff. But not all theatres in Wales were in cities. There was the Torch Theatre in Milford Haven, the Theatr Hafren in Newtown and Theatr Clwyd. Where was that? Wrexham? Mold? Towns, then, but not right out in the country.
The girls would need to travel there. She seemed to remember something about Nia disappearing now and again. She called Thomas, who sounded busy.
‘Price?’
‘How are things going? Get any more from Riley?’
‘Nada. Lots of details. Nothing new. We could find a charge that would stick, but it’s probably not worth it.’
‘Any drugs in his flat?’
‘Marijuana. Personal use quantities.’
‘His phone records?’
‘Nothing useful.’
‘And the surveillance team? The guys staking out the back garden with the rather valuable compost bin?’
‘Nothing from them either. That’s probably fucked up.’
‘Maybe Morgan monitored all the activity that took place there yesterday and decided to cancel the deal.’
‘A lot of money to lose. Fuck, if no one else wants it …’ said Thomas.
‘Yeah, but I think there are quite a lot of Met officers watching that bin at the moment, Thomas.’
‘Yeah,’ he agreed sadly.
‘Look, quick question: did Nia ever go away? Take weekends away from her family, that sort of thing?’
Thomas checked something by yelling the question out at a colleague and getting an answering yell back again. ‘Yeah, apparently. No big deal, though. Why?’
‘I might have something. Not sure. I’ll give you a call later, OK?’
Thomas put on his I’m-going-to-be-obnoxious voice. ‘Yes, Price, but not too much later, you know what I mean.’
Cat ignored him and rang off.
She turned back to the screen, remembering now the owner of the Owain Glyndwr, how she had mentioned a few occasions when Delyth had asked for days off on the weekend. She knew from Martin that Esyllt used to head off too.
She thought she could see a basic pattern beginning to emerge, not much admittedly but something to work with. First Nia, then the other two girls had posted their clips. Perhaps all the clips had been recorded while the girls were away for the weekend. Of the girls, only Esyllt would have been able to afford a private music tutor – or Nia at a push – so it seemed unlikely that this was the shared link. In an age of talent shows, it wouldn’t have been difficult to tempt girls into recording their big shot at stardom, clandestinely or otherwise.
Yet Cat couldn’t shake off the feeling that whoever had coached all the girls to sing in that strange way, if that’s what had happened, hadn’t been a talent scout or a legit part of the music industry. There was nothing wrong with shooting a video, teenagers did it all the time and there wasn’t anything indecent about the performances she had witnessed. Yet none of the girls had spoken of what they were doing when they went away for the weekend. Something about the process had persuaded them all to keep silent.
Cat leaned back in her chair, her right hand rifling around in the pile of papers until she found a biro. She twirled it between her fingers. Her thoughts led her back through the case.
Nia had already had a presence on YouTube prior to her performance of ‘Street Spirit’, had even attracted a small following. So here was a theory: someone had spotted Nia from her earlier videos, then persuaded her – trained her? – to sing ‘Street Spirit’ in that way and in that theatre. Maybe Nia was the first, the catalyst that had led to the other two girls being targeted.
But perhaps there had been something about Nia’s reading of the song that hadn’t satisfied the shadowy force in some way – so that person had persuaded Nia to recruit the others. The evidence from Tregaron was that the girls barely knew each other, but in a small community people always knew each other enough. She recalled her own youth, and how any upcoming talent was discussed throughout the whole town, and not just in school. This one was a real actor in the making, could be another Anthony Hopkins, even. That one was going to challenge Bonnie Tyler in a few years. So Nia would have known who the talent was, but who was the figure behind the videos? And what had he, or she, been looking for?
She returned to YouTube and entered ‘Street Spirit’ in the search window, waiting as an alarmingly long column of amateur performers assembled. She scrolled down, clicked on one entitled ‘Street Spirit-Sian C’, attracted by the Welsh name. This turned out to be the work of an art student. The music was just a soundtrack to an animation of a bleak landscape where the bare trees sprouted thorns and birds of prey arrived to perch on the branches. It was skilful enough, but Cat worried about Sian C’s state of mind. The scenes quickly became too depressing to tolerate.
She called up a video further down the page uploaded by ‘Sharkskin’, four boys in their late teens or early twenties who were singing in someone’s garage. It was just another lousy YouTube video.
She clicked on to the next page, waited as another list of performers appeared. Cat felt deflated. Her head had started to pound again. Had that Chinese medicine worn off? Or was it just this case? It seemed like half the world had covered the Radiohead song. Which really was strange, because it wasn’t exactly ‘My Way’, was it? Seemed there were a lot of despondent people out there.
She pressed on, peered at the performers, searching for some intuitive connection to the murdered and missing girls. Nothing jumped out. Sighing, she booted over to another music site, scanned the long lists of covers, again found nothing. She went to another site, telling herself it was the last. More wannabe indy kids, an overweight male lounge lizard from Suffolk, some smiling sequinned triplets from Hull who hadn’t got the message. She was giving up, was about to close the window when about halfway down one page a head-and-shoulders shot caught her eye.
A teenage girl, dressed in what appeared to be a type of choirboy’s outfit, white and flowing, though with no ruff at the neck. The still captured from the upload gave little away, but the setting could, just could, have been the same as the one in the other girls’ videos. The performer was named as RhiP. Rhi, short for Rhiannon? It seemed like a reasonable guess. Still, it didn’t necessarily mean she was Welsh. Maybe her parents had been Fleetwood Mac fans.
She clicked on play.
The girl was captured in a tight spotlight, her voice cracking with nerves at first, but once she settled down her talent was obvious. She was a natural alto, a lower register than the other girls, had more trouble reaching the higher notes, hadn’t yet learned how to sing across the break in her voice. The scenery in the background looked vaguely similar to the others. It was less clear, but there was a wash that could have been the same grey stone effect.
The waitress who had been patient with Cat that day came over, clearly wanting her to pay up and get out. Cat dropped money – too much money – on the table. Her mind was elsewhere.
She took a still of the girl, clipped it down to a headshot and loaded it to her phone.
She called Thomas. He was all ready to give her more of his bullshit, but she cut through it.
‘I’ve got an IP address that I need tracing. There’s a girl on YouTube who might fit the profile. I think I should go see her.’
‘Might. Sounds a bit vague. You’ll have a warrant for that request, of course.’
She said nothing.
‘It’s an offence to get that kind of thing without a warrant
.’ He didn’t say he couldn’t do it, Cat noted, just that he wouldn’t.
‘Right, and yesterday you felt that Riley was resisting arrest for really quite a long time. Resisting arrest quite hard and repeatedly.’
‘That’s different. Look, if you can work up an application for the warrant, I’ll see if I can get it. But this is a big case now. It’s like every fucker in Camarthen wants a piece of it. I’ve got to play it by the book.’
‘OK.’
‘Sorry.’
Cat rang off. Sod it.
She was standing on the street outside the café. For a moment, she couldn’t remember where she was. Just stuck out on a big London street, breathing exhaust fumes. A cycle courier drew up to some red traffic lights and, by twisting his front wheel, the courier managed to stay balanced until the lights changed, his foot not once touching the ground.
Cat retreated to a quieter side street and called Kyle. She explained what she needed and why. She didn’t give full details, just said that an internet search had identified another possible woman at risk and she wanted to check on her.
‘You need a warrant for that,’ said Kyle brusquely.
‘I know. But all I’ve got is a hunch, not evidence.’
Kyle paused a moment, long enough that Cat wasn’t sure she was still there. Then: ‘OK. Hold.’
Cat held. She could hear Kyle talking on another line in the background. It was true: you couldn’t source an IP address from the provider via Command and Control without getting a warrant. But a tame SPOC dealt with the same liaison at the service providers every day. Inevitably things got matey. For a highly placed officer to source that kind of information on the quiet wasn’t a big ask. Maybe Thomas just wasn’t senior enough. Maybe Camarthen was too far out of the loop.
Kyle came back. ‘OK, I’ve got it.’ She gave Cat an address in Blackheath, South London. An address and a phone number. A surname too: Rhiannon Powell.
Cat noted the details.
‘Got that?’
