Black Noise

by Hiltunen, Pekka

  Craig Cole’s feeble attempts at self-defence were strange too, Mari said to Lia one night. He hadn’t even filed a police complaint about her accusations, instead just waiting apathetically for the truth to come out.

  ‘This whole thing has gone too far,’ Mari said. ‘No innocent person should have to endure something like this.’

  She also wanted to get involved because she detested the exaggerated fuss some newspapers made about sexual harassment. For decades the issue had been virtually taboo in the UK, as elsewhere, but in recent years more and more cases had come to light where someone accused a famous person of sexual abuse. Entertainers, artists, long-established politicians. The revelations had shocked the nation time and time again. When the incidents kept coming, people had started learning to approach the issue in a new way, breaking the systematic silence. Brushing it aside was a thing of the past.

  But these accusations were a dangerous temptation for the media. Witch hunt was often an understatement, and sometimes innocents were harmed. Serious, aggravated sexual harassment occurred every day, and sensational stories only made it harder to do anything about the real problem.

  Lia agreed completely, but she still had a theory about why the Craig Cole case touched Mari so deeply. Perhaps Mari was partially trying to make up for the Arthur Fried incident. A year earlier the Studio had taken on two jobs, the ones that had drawn Lia into the team. While investigating the activities of far-right politician Arthur Fried, they had also begun looking into the death of a woman brutally slain in London.

  Participating in those jobs changed Lia’s life. She had never believed she could do anything like that or even thought about grim crimes in detail. But after meeting Mari, her ideas of what was possible for a normal person had broadened considerably.

  However, they had come to loggerheads about what Mari had done to Fried. It had taken time for Lia to get over their disagreement.

  But now here she was, at the Studio. Their little band had become very dear to her, as had their office building’s expansive views of the Thames and the old industrial blocks of Bankside.

  Mari and she rarely talked about the events of a year ago and especially avoided talking about the Arthur Fried incident. Lia knew it was better to let things lie.

  Maybe Cole is Mari’s way of balancing something out. Help one man regain his reputation because she made the wrong decision about another.

  But what do I know? Mari probably doesn’t regret her decisions one little bit. Maybe that’s only my wishful thinking.

  5.

  The first phone call the Studio arranged in Cole’s defence went through to a live broadcast on Radio 2 at 8.52 a.m.

  ‘And who do we have on the line now?’ asked the woman hosting the morning talk show, her voice so soft and friendly you could have packaged and sold it to spread on toast.

  ‘Dave here,’ the caller replied.

  ‘Dave, you’re calling from Ipswich?’

  ‘You got it!’

  ‘Goodness gracious, we certainly are perky out in Ipswich this morning, aren’t we? So what’s your take on the question of the day? Should the licence be changed to reflect how many TV broadcasts a person really watches?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. I’m perfectly satisfied with the current system. But what I’m not satisfied with is that last night when we met, you started groping me.’

  The presenter’s silence only lasted about ten seconds.

  ‘OK, Dave…’

  ‘It’s not OK,’ Dave interrupted. ‘People need to hear this. It’s the easiest thing in the world to ring a radio show and throw out any old bollocks.’

  ‘OK, you’ve had your fun.’

  ‘Don’t OK me. I’m twenty-eight years old. You’re forty-seven, and I’m twenty-eight.’

  From the presenter’s voice, it was obvious she was losing her temper.

  ‘Repeating ages like that isn’t funny. You’re just trying to allude to Bryony Wade,’ the woman said.

  ‘The purpose isn’t to be funny. The purpose is to prove something.’

  ‘Great, you’ve proved something.’

  ‘Thank you!’

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, that was Dave from Ipswich who wanted to talk about something other than the question of the day and who –’

  ‘And who is twenty-eight years old,’ Dave interrupted.

  ‘Very funny,’ the presenter said, disconnecting the call and continuing her programme.

  The Studio staff made four similar calls during the day, each to a different radio programme. In addition to Dave, age twenty-eight, there were Lisa, thirty-two, Terry, sixty-seven, and Shane, forty-four. Adult callers who repeated their own age several times, claimed the host of the programme had harassed them and talked about how easy it was to get on a phone-in show and say absolutely anything.

  In each case the presenter stumbled for a moment at first before recognising the connection to the Bryony Wade case and ending the conversation as quickly as possible. The calls attracted a lot of attention anyway. Subsequent callers wanted to comment too, and soon Craig Cole had become the main topic of discussions on other programmes as well.

  That afternoon a news editor for the BBC rang Cole and asked whether he knew about these surprising phone calls. ‘Yes, I’ve heard,’ Cole replied. ‘I don’t know the people calling, but it is awfully nice that people want to get involved. It gives you the feeling that people really care.’

  That was the answer Cole and Mari had agreed upon.

  The Studio’s letters to the editor about Craig Cole did their job, quickly spawning online chatter, and Lia noticed it was getting the reporters at Level talking too. The topic of Cole even came up in their editorial meeting, although they decided not to do a story because they already had other crime pieces in the pipeline. That was a small disappointment for Lia, but, on the other hand, she was pleased that Level didn’t grasp at scandals just because the headlines would sell magazines.

  The fake Cole scrapbooks had an even more profound effect. The intent was to create a specific impression: a collection of clippings collected lovingly over the course of years, a book an admirer might piece together about a revered, trusted person. All three of the media outlets which received them took notice. So unusual were they that they were treated to a thorough review. Yes, people smiled at them, but they also started thinking.

  The first media outlet that took action was Sky News. Calling the number that accompanied the package, one of their background reporters said that the host of their Sunrise programme, Eamonn Holmes, wanted to do an hour-long special broadcast about the life and career of Craig Cole. Maggie answered at the Studio playing the part of the book’s sender, someone who maintained a Cole fan site.

  Mari was over the moon.

  ‘I knew the scrapbook would work!’

  Lia watched her enthusiasm with amusement.

  She thinks she’s always right. Which she is, nearly always.

  What she didn’t understand was why Mari had wanted to meet Craig Cole herself, face to face. As a general rule, Mari avoided direct contact with the targets of the Studio’s work, and Cole was a national radio personality, so being seen with him could arouse unwanted curiosity.

  ‘He needs me,’ Mari explained.

  Cole had fallen from so high that his emotional reserves were almost exhausted. All of his energy was going into getting through each day, keeping himself together. In order to accept someone’s help, Cole would have to trust them completely.

  An acquaintance with a person like Cole also had its good points, Lia thought. The network of important people he knew had to be large even if it hadn’t held up when he had needed it.

  Mari chose her friends and associates at the Studio carefully. Thanks to all the relationships she had developed over the years, Mari had so much money she never had to skimp on expenses in their work. And Lia could never stop admiring the talents of the people Mari assembled around her.

  Berg made a particular impression
on Lia while they were searching for articles about Cole for the scrapbooks. When their haul from the specialist shops that sell old newspapers had proved too small, Berg had the idea of looking for real Cole admirers and convincing them to sell parts of their collections. Lia went along when Berg went to meet one woman.

  A twenty-six-year-old paraplegic, she spent her days lying in a nursing home. Thinking the woman might feel uncomfortable with a strange man visiting, Berg asked Lia to accompany him. But Lia didn’t have to do anything during the visit, just watch as Berg deftly handled everything. He didn’t offer the woman pity for her condition or talk to her with exaggerated warmth. He was just disarmingly sincere.

  Sitting at her bedside, they talked about Craig Cole for quite some time. The woman had taken a shine to Cole years earlier, initially because of the sound of his voice. Now after the Gropegate scandal, she didn’t know what to think of Cole but hesitated to throw away the magazine stories she had collected.

  ‘I don’t want all of them, just a part,’ Berg said.

  The woman went silent and stared at Berg in confusion.

  ‘I’ve always liked all sorts of TV and radio people,’ Berg said. ‘Like some of the news anchors or Stephen Fry – it doesn’t matter what he’s talking about or what show he’s on. When a person does something like that well, it just brings people joy, you know? And it’s totally different from liking a singer. They can give you opinions, life experience. It’s a little like having a friend who knows loads about all sorts of things and is always trying something new. They just make the world a little more fun and open.’

  Lia saw on the woman’s face that those words had earned Berg a stack of clippings about Craig Cole.

  On the way back from the nursing home, Berg drove Lia back to Hampstead. Once he had turned the Studio’s grey van around and driven off with Gro staring out the window wagging her tail, Lia couldn’t help thinking that Berg had just as much warmth and natural wisdom as any of the famous people they had just been talking about.

  Berg is one of those people who always makes everyone feel better.

  But unlike some famous performer, Berg’s wisdom wasn’t to be shared with everyone. It belonged to the Studio, and to Gro.

  That thought led to another, more melancholy idea. Had Berg adopted the dog because he felt lonely? Lia knew a little bit about everyone at the studio. Maggie had one marriage behind her and was currently seeing someone. Rico kept personal things private but was active on the London night scene. Between Mari and Paddy there was a clear, mutual interest, but so far neither of them had made a move – and both of them engaged in other occasional relationships. During her years in London, Lia had felt a gnawing loneliness that led her to seek variety by picking up men in bars, but now she was living a sort of intermediate phase in which the most important things to her were work and the people at the Studio.

  But, as far as she knew, Berg had never been married or had children and didn’t seem to be looking for that. Besides Mari, Berg was the only person at the Studio who had ever talked to her much about relationships – actually he had asked her about the subject very directly once.

  ‘What’s a young woman like you waiting around for?’ Berg asked her one night in the Den kitchen when no one else was around.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Lia asked evasively, guessing what he was getting at.

  ‘Why don’t you have a man?’ Berg continued.

  Coming out of anyone else’s mouth it would have sounded rude. But Berg lived alone himself, and his attitude was so open and accepting that Lia knew he was only interested in a straightforward answer to the question.

  ‘I guess I’m just going through a phase. Like I’m between two places in my life,’ Lia said. ‘I’ll find someone who’s right for me. Someday.’

  ‘Good,’ Berg said.

  He hadn’t laboured the topic by making jokes or offering advice. That made Lia like him even more. They could talk about complicated, even painful things. Berg might be lonely sometimes, but even in his solitude there was an unusual peace.

  We are all a little like Gro, lucky that a person like that happened to cross our paths. We were all lucky to end up at the Studio.

  You need one or two really good strokes of luck to protect you from the bad things that always come.

  6.

  Lia’s day at Level was busy. After putting off her work to go to a series of meetings, she had to get her layouts done quickly. The hour hand was already creeping up on three o’clock, and in situations like this Lia usually shut everything else out of her mind, but something in one of her colleague’s voices made her turn and look.

  ‘Dear God,’ said Sam, the reporter who sat at the desk next to her.

  Staring at his computer screen, Sam was as white as a sheet, with his fists pressed to his mouth.

  Lia rolled her chair over next to him. On the display was a video. There was no sound because Sam had headphones plugged in.

  The images in the video changed at a breathtaking pace. Something was happening, so confused and violent that it was hard to comprehend.

  A person lying on the ground was being kicked. Lia wasn’t sure whether the victim was a man or a woman, the images shifted too quickly. The feet doing the kicking looked like a man’s, but being sure of the number of kickers was impossible.

  Kicking legs surrounded the person on the ground.

  Dear God indeed.

  Occasionally the kicker would take a step back to get more force. Flying into the victim, the kicks sent the poor person sprawling into unnatural positions.

  The video was shot and edited in such a way that the kicks became the main focus, sometimes also moving into slow motion. It was the world’s most disgusting work of videography, starring a pair of feet mutilating a helpless person.

  ‘That’s the sickest thing I’ve ever seen,’ Lia managed to say.

  Sam shoved his chair back, pulling his headphones out. When their cord came out of the computer too, Lia realised that the video didn’t have any sound.

  Sam was speechless. He was so shocked that he had to stand up and walk around a bit.

  ‘How did they make it?’ Lia asked. ‘Why would anyone do something like that?’

  She looked at the video and hated it. As the kicks flew home again and again, watching became too repulsive.

  Reaching over to the keyboard, Sam stopped the video. On screen froze an image of the feet mid-motion and the victim, a dark, lifeless mass against a grey background.

  Lia stared at the frozen frame on the computer and then turned to look at Sam. Seeing his expression, she realised what he was thinking.

  What if those images aren’t staged?

  Listening to Sam and the others in the office following the story as it progressed made it difficult for Lia to concentrate on her design work.

  The editorial staff at Level was a male-dominated group that was hard to faze, but the video made them all shake their heads. Most of them couldn’t watch it all the way through, even when it was still online. According to the news broadcasts, the aggressive kicking video had been uploaded by an unknown hacker to a woman’s YouTube account. By the time YouTube removed the video, it had been copied to countless other servers and continued spreading.

  ‘Rather gruesome for a viral stunt,’ said the editor-in-chief of Level, Timothy Phelps.

  What was the purpose of the kicking video? That was the question that began to crop up on the Internet discussion boards. And did it have anything to do with the earlier, black videos?

  It would take a really sick person to want to spread these images around, Lia thought. There was nothing artistic about the video. It was all too ugly, too frighteningly real.

  If it was meant as a protest against violence in films or video games, it completely overshot its mark. All it did was make viewers sick.

  By the time Lia arrived at the Studio, it was almost seven. This time both Gro and Rico greeted her in the hall.

  ‘You’ve seen the vi
deo, right?’ Rico asked. ‘Did you hear the news though?’

  ‘What news?’

  ‘The police think it really happened,’ Rico said.

  Not waiting around for Lia’s response, he walked back to his office carrying his custom-built tablet. Lia quickly patted Gro and then followed Rico with the dog obediently backing off at the door to Rico’s kingdom.

  Rico’s office in the Studio was a large space mainly dominated by the dim flashing lights of workstations and server racks. Rico always wanted the light set optimally for his machines and the work he was doing. There were dozens of custom-modified computers in the room and shelves of supplies he used to assemble other devices.

  Rico showed Lia the ITV news broadcast. It had just been released, and while Lia watched it, Rico set his tablet in its cradle. He called it the ‘Topo’, a Portuguese word that meant ‘top’ but also ‘done!’ when used as an interjection. The little machine was Rico’s pride and joy, the subject of constant upgrading and tweaks. Somehow he had managed to pack more processing power into it than a normal desktop computer. He never went anywhere without it.

  Video Violence, read the headline over the picture. The image was familiar to Lia – this was the thing she and countless other people around Britain had been staring at in shock for the past few hours.

  Cruel kicks at a person lying helpless on the ground.

  Lia watched the news report in silence. The newsreader spoke about the outrage the video had sparked, its removal from YouTube and the statement from the police. The authorities suspected that the video might depict an actual assault. The images had been cut so little was visible of the people doing the kicking or the location where it occurred, but, according to experts, the footage seemed real.

  The video had been uploaded by the username Dina81. That account belonged to a woman in her thirties of Algerian descent living in Bristol. Her only other videos were four clips from rock festivals recorded on her phone. The woman was devastated that the video had showed up online under her name and, according to the police, she didn’t know how it had happened.