Sound

by Catherine Fearns

  ‘But Justine announced at the last minute that she was staying behind, to honour the tradition. She couldn’t have given a shit about tradition before. She ended up staying for three months.’

  ‘With the grandmother. You must have felt as if you were losing her. You brought her up by yourself, and then...’

  ‘I lost her a long time ago,’ interrupted Val.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Things happened. Like I said, I haven’t been the best mother. I won’t talk about it. But everything I did, it was for the family. Anyway, she wasn’t just there with that old woman. The day I was due to leave, I was sitting in a cafe on the side of Lake Geneva, watching that huge water jet and wondering what the hell Justine was doing in that village, when I saw him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Shawn Forrest. He was coming out of one of the posh hotels on the other side of the road, talking on his phone. I had already suspected something was going on between them, and that proved it.’

  My God, he was there, thought Helen. She tried to imagine Justine in that chalet, amongst all those sinister medieval texts and artefacts, wandering the desecrated churchyard, being inculcated into a demonic cult by an old lady. She couldn’t. But she could imagine Shawn Forrest doing it, though. And if he’d been in Geneva, it was no stretch to assume he’d gone to the village too. The fires, the murders, the infinity symbol; now there was a clear link. If, she thought. If Val Killy is telling the truth. She noticed that Val was fiddling incessantly with an infinity-shaped diamond pendant around her neck, the same as the one Justine wore.

  ‘Why didn’t you stop the wedding, Val? If you knew Justine was already having an affair, that Thomas was gay? You knew it was doomed?’

  Val just looked at her; her natural defiance tinged with guilt in the presence of kindness. ‘Money, of course. How many hail Marys would I have to say for that, then?’

  ‘I’m not Catholic. I believe we have to atone in other ways. Maybe you can fix this, Val. Do you think Justine loves Shawn?’

  ‘I don’t think she knows what love is. I think he steered her into it, like she’s been steered her whole life. I told her to go for money, so she drifted towards the richest person in Liverpool. That showed me, didn’t it? What a mess. God, the baby, the fires…’

  ‘Listen,’ said Helen, leaning forward to hold Val’s hand. ‘Shawn Forrest has committed some very serious crimes. And I don’t just mean the old ones. According to Darren, he hasn’t turned over a new leaf at all – if anything, he has got worse. If he goes to prison, Justine will be alone. And if he doesn’t, well… she is in danger. Please try and get her to talk to the police, to testify against him. They can protect her. She will need protection either way.’

  Thirty-Two

  ‘Shawn? The police are after me… I ran off but I don’t know what to do now. You’ve got to help me.’

  Oliver Hecht cowered in a phone box, trying to conceal his conspicuous gym gear behind the wall of flyers for local prostitutes, trying not to look panicked as people walked by, hoping no-one else would want to use the phone.

  ‘I’m gonna stop you there. Are you on a burner?’

  ‘No, I had to run out of the gym with nothing! I’m on a payphone.’

  ‘Jesus, and you call me on this number? Ok, where are you?’

  ‘I’m behind Lime Street Station near the taxi rank. Can you come and get me?’

  ‘I’ll get you out of the city. A car will come and pick you up. Sit tight and someone will call you back in a minute with the details.’

  An hour later, a Ford Escort with fake registration plates pulled into Jewel Street, and a man Oliver vaguely recognised as a caretaker at the Lumina building opened the boot and told him to get in. ‘There’s food and water inside, but you need to keep quiet until we roll off.’

  ‘Roll off where?’

  ‘The Isle of Man ferry.’

  Disappearing a human is easier than disappearing a car. Especially if that human is inside a car. Joey Carrick had owned Everton Scrap Metal for decades. The glory days of the early Eighties, when he would scrap anything and everything, were long gone.

  ‘It’s all above board now, as they say,’ he would inform his customers. But sometimes he would inform them with a wink. Because if the cash offer was right, there was still the elite NQA service. No Questions Asked.

  A new-ish Ford Escort turned in through the gates, and he groaned when he saw the registration plates. They were a giveaway. This was a nearly-new car. He didn’t need any more heat, business was good right now. But he soon relented when he discovered that the price was indeed right. Whoever this was, it was his most discerning customer. This wouldn’t be the first perfectly good car crushed into an unrecognisable one-metre square cube, and it wouldn’t be the last either.

  His heart beating fast, hardly daring to breath, his limbs stiffening, Oliver cowered in the cramped darkness, reflecting on his changing fortunes. This would all be turned around. Shawn would file their joint patent for the Infinity Sound System, and if he could just lie low for a while until this blew over, he would have his shares in the casino complex.

  The roar of the car engine had stopped, the juddering of tyres had stopped, he heard the handbrake, then the driver’s door slammed. Why had they stopped? His heart raced, because he could hear voices. But he could hear the sounds of machinery too, metal clanking – perhaps they were at the port now, and those were the container cranes, a ship anchoring. That was it. Soon he would be on the ferry, and it wasn’t far to the Isle of Man.

  He relaxed slightly and allowed himself to think about the future again, as the engine started and the car rolled forward to, he supposed, the ferry ramp. And then he froze, because the car was suddenly rocked by a massive jolt. He had the sense that something had clamped itself onto the roof. There was a pause, then he felt himself being lifted into the air. By the time he realised what was happening, nobody could hear his screaming and banging above the noise of the JCB and its grabber. Certainly not the driver in his cab, thirty feet below and wearing ear protection.

  As he had crushed others’ organs to death with a silent and invisible force, Oliver Hecht was himself crushed to death, with a force that was anything but silent or invisible.

  The next morning, there was a light frost on the ground in Boundary Park, Everton. As the dawn broke, Bob Shaughnessy took his Labrador Stella for their morning constitutional. The purpose was for her to relieve herself and chase a ball, and for him to pick up the newspaper and some milk the moment the corner shop opened. The sky was lilac, the street lights still on, the piles of waste from Everton Scrap Metal providing an evocative backdrop behind the high park wall. Using the ball-thrower his grandchildren had bought him for Christmas, he lobbed Stella’s beloved old tennis ball into the distance and she raced off. Usually she’d be back within seconds, leaping around for him to throw it again. But today she didn’t come back as quickly as usual, and when she did, her gait was slower, and sheepish. As she got closer, he saw that there was something other than a ball in her mouth.

  ‘What have you got there, girl?’

  She dropped it at his feet and sat obediently behind her treasure. A human hand.

  Thirty-Three

  A text message appeared from Helen. Are you free to talk? Call me ASAP.

  Even the sight of a message from her calmed him, and he called her back straight away.

  ‘Darren, thank goodness. I have something for you. Listen, you were right. There was another message in that recording, and I think I’ve figured it out. I’m at the university, are you close by?’

  They met in a cafe just off Hope Street. Helen started speaking before she even sat down, pausing only to order a coffee from the waitress.

  ‘The recording. You were right. It is a picture. In fact it’s a map. It’s just that we were using the wrong programme – like Anders said, there are so many. I looked up all these programmes you can buy that transform sound into images, and of course they
all produce different images, because the parameters are completely different.’

  Darren looked blank.

  ‘For example, one might decide that a frequency of so-and-so hertz is red, or square, and another would have it blue and round. Et cetera et cetera.’

  ‘Ok, I see what you mean.’

  ‘So which one did Neilson use? Well, I did a bit of research, and it turns out that there’s a programme called Amplitude which was actually developed at Liverpool University. In the Nineties. So it’s rather an old one, but Neilson would have been a graduate student then. Anyway, it’s freeware now, it’s so old, so I got Anders to download it and run the recording again. Look. You were right about the 3D too – without that, I never would have figured it out.’

  Helen fished two sheets of A4 paper out of a clear plastic folder, each a print-out of a different graphic. The first was a 3D diagram, similar to the one they had seen in Anders’ basement studio, with mountains, curve and spikes above the x-axis, or the surface, and a series of connected troughs below. Unlike on Anders’ 3D image, though, this one had more defined curves, some of which looked like buildings. The second was in 2D, a series of interconnected lines, one of which was red, others monochrome.

  Helen placed them on the table in front of Darren, and watched him expectantly. He studied them for a while, and eventually began shaking his head.

  ‘I can’t make head nor tail of this. Except that…’ he pointed to the largest oscillation on the 3D image. ‘That looks a bit like the Lumina building.’

  ‘Yes! Exactly. It is.’

  Darren waited for her to go on.

  ‘Darren, this is a map of the centre of Liverpool. He’s programmed the music in order to identify the main landmarks. Look, this is the Lumina building, as you pointed out. So what else do you recognise?’

  Now a map of the city he knew so intimately began to reveal itself. Not everything; a simplified rendering of the main landmarks, so that someone who knew the city, like him, would be able to identify them. There was the Lumina building, its unique shape now evident. There was the Liver building, clear from its four distinctive roof sculptures; the Radio City tower, the cathedrals with their distinctive shape; and there, at the edge of the river Mersey, was the alien spacecraft shape of the Kingsway Tunnel.

  ‘But everything is the same colour… what is he trying to tell us? And what’s all that underneath?’ He pointed to the mess of troughs and spikes underneath the x-axis.

  ‘Well, I think that’s the key – the underneath. And the clue is that he’s decided to include the Kingsway Tunnel vent, which is not the most obvious landmark. By including this, plus the underneath part, he’s telling us about the second image.’ She pointed to it. ‘This is underground. These are the tunnels beneath Liverpool.’

  ‘Which tunnels? Liverpool is full of tunnels. This can’t be all of them.’ He studied the diagram.

  Helen nodded. ‘These are the disused railway tunnels. I’m sure I’m right – I took out every map I could find and they all fit with this diagram.’ She began pointing them out.

  ‘What’s this one that’s highlighted red?’

  ‘It’s the old Wapping tunnel. Disused for almost a hundred years. If you place this map underneath the 3D map, the entrance to this tunnel is almost directly underneath the Lumina building.’

  ‘The tunnels! That’s where he’s hiding his equipment.’

  ‘And testing it. Think about all the spooky noises. This explains it. It’s a complete maze and rabbit warren of tunnels down there. Who knows how many there are. They say that there are old smugglers’ tunnels leading from every pub in the city down to the docks. So the point is, they’re all connected. In some ways, the perfect place to make a terrible racket unnoticed is underground. But in other ways…’

  ‘The sound has to escape somewhere. I’m going to find out how I can get down there.’

  ‘But Darren, you have to be careful. We don’t know how many other people are involved in this.’

  ‘I suspect not many. Forrest has always kept his cards close to his chest, divided and ruled his employees, made sure nobody knows more than a small part of the complete information. With Springer dead and Hecht missing, it’s possible he may be acting alone on this now.’

  ‘Aren’t you worried about Shawn Forrest coming for you?’

  ‘Yes. No. There’s a part of me that wants him to. But I’m more worried about him going to ground, with all this heat surrounding him. Everything is in place for him, so he doesn’t need to use that sonic weapon anymore.’

  ‘Why do you think this professor made it so complicated? Why didn’t he just tell the police? Or make a recording that was easier to understand?’

  ‘He was paranoid. And perhaps with good reason. He was terrified. His computer had been hacked, he was being followed, he had probably received warnings. Maybe he was worried there was an inside man at the police acoustics department. I mean, Forrest seemed to have made friends with half the acousticians in Liverpool. Neilson was convinced that the USB would be intercepted, and if it was he wanted to make sure that only an expert, someone on his wavelength, could decipher it.’

  They finished their coffees, both deep in thought.

  ‘Thanks, Helen. What would I do without you, eh?’

  ‘With Mikko, we’re turning out to be quite a good team, the three of us. Tell me what else I can do…’

  ‘Tell Mikko we’re on for Monday. Fuck it. It’s worth a shot.’

  Thirty-Four

  ‘So let me get this straight.’

  McGregor paced the floor with the sardonic tone he used when he really wanted to put someone in their place.

  Darren had run out of time. It was Wednesday. Three weeks since Neilson had died, two weeks since Springer had died. On Monday, the Shepherd trial would start and he would be taken off the case and stuck in court, possibly for months. That could mean missing his chance to bring Shawn Forrest to justice, for something, forever. He knew he didn’t have enough evidence, but he had to try it on McGregor.

  He had prepared a presentation of the evidence he did have. What he had was theories and circumstances. He had collected images of sonic weapons, like the ones in the catalogue in the acoustics shop. Evidence of what they could do – scientific papers, military reports. There was an awkward silence after Darren had finished presenting his theory. Even Colette and Dave looked unconvinced. Darren wanted to do everything he could to convince them that this was a thing, that sonic weapons could kill. To get as far away as possible from any supernatural suggestions. There was no need for anyone, even Colette, perhaps especially Colette, to know about the other half of his plan.

  ‘You’re saying…’ McGregor started again, theatrically struggling to understand and speaking in a manner that made Darren wince. ‘That Shawn Forrest wants to build a giant casino complex in Aintree, so he falsified evidence of gas contamination on the Napier housing estate in order to move the residents out. And that the real reason they all got sick was not due to methane but to a sonic weapon sending out an inaudible noise that’s driving them all round the bend. That he’s planning to brainwash people into using the casino by pumping out addictive sounds, and has been practicing them in his club. That he paid Ian Springer to develop his weapon, and then killed him when he wanted out. That he killed Neilson because he’d found out and wanted to expose him. And you’re saying that he’s testing this weapon somewhere in the tunnels underneath the city centre.’

  ‘Pretty much. And I’d be willing to bet that the severed hand found this morning in Everton belonged to Oliver Hecht. Back in the day, that scrap yard was a classic way of getting rid of people. I must admit I’m surprised that Forrest went so old-school. Maybe he panicked.’

  ‘And this Oliver Hecht, you think he’s Forrest’s assistant and our shooter. Have you got evidence for any of this?’

  Darren began to speak, but McGregor put up his hand.

  ‘Other than circumstantial bullshit? Because we’v
e only got your word for it that the mystery measuring man at Napier was Forrest’s boy.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Colette, putting up her hand, ‘I showed his photo to several Napier estate residents and they confirmed he was the council investigator introduced as Jonathan Dunn.’

  ‘And what about Dave?’ added Darren. ‘He shows all the signs of having been addicted to the music in the Lumina club.’

  ‘Dave’s always like that! Dave having a few benders in a row and feeling rough afterwards is not evidence of a murderous conspiracy. He’ll be back at work in no time, with his tail between his legs.’

  Colette put up her hand to speak. ‘Guv, there is evidence of something dodgy going on with that housing estate. This Vanessa Scott woman is head of environmental health for the borough and also on the board of this casino company… that’s not right at all.’

  ‘No, you’re right,’ conceded McGregor, deep in thought for a minute. ‘But it’s a far cry from that to double murder. And you say that Forrest is going to rehouse all the people from the Napier Estate in his own apartments? Including the Lumina Building?’

  ‘Well, not just there. Forrest Group owns a lot of apartments in the city centre, but apparently there are plenty of vacant units in the Lumina.’

  ‘Fuck me.’ McGregor’s eyes glazed over for a moment. Darren smiled to himself. Widowed and with his children grown-up, McGregor had treated himself to a bachelor pad in the Lumina Building. The last thing he would want is the place filling up with young families and elderly pensioners.

  ‘Let me go and question Shawn Forrest, sir. There’s plenty of grounds now.’

  ‘By yourself? No way. We know how you feel about Forrest, DI Swift. I wouldn’t leave you alone with him for a minute. We’d have another murder on our hands.’ Then he relented. ‘I’ll go with you. I’m still not convinced that this is connected to the case. But there are grounds, you’re right. And I must admit, I don’t fancy a load of scallies as my new next-door neighbours. So where would we find the great scouse philanthropist, this time of day?’