Black Noise

by Hiltunen, Pekka

  ‘Have there ever been cases like this before?’ Lia asked.

  Maggie had just looked into that.

  ‘Several murders occur in London every week. Sometimes we even have brutal beatings with a whole group involved in the killing. But usually those are gang fights or drunken brawls. This is different. This has the hallmarks of a serial killer,’ Maggie said.

  ‘These killings were planned to be caught on video,’ Mari said.

  ‘How can you tell? Lia asked.

  ‘From the amount and quality of work that went into it,’ Mari said.

  Shooting the videos probably hadn’t taken long, but editing each of them to create the taut rhythm of the final product would have taken even an experienced professional hours to complete.

  ‘They also finished the job somehow,’ Paddy said. ‘Kicking a person to death is more difficult than you would think.’

  In theory it was possible to kill someone with one or two kicks if they landed right, Paddy explained, listing the dangerous places. The temples were a dicey spot, as was the rest of the head, and a rupture of the spleen or liver could lead to death even after a short beating. But usually it was hard to kill someone that way. Even striking someone with an edged weapon could leave them with hours to live.

  The killers wanted all of the bodies to be found at the same time, Mari pointed out. People who acted that systematically could have disposed of the bodies without anyone noticing, but instead, they dumped them near busy streets, intending that they be found. The awful violence and then leaving bodies in the street – the killers must have either truly hated these victims or been looking for shock value.

  Lia didn’t say out loud what she was thinking.

  Paddy knows about these things from his old police experience, but Mari can only draw conclusions from what she sees. Mari would have made an unbelievable detective.

  ‘I don’t want to think about this any more,’ Mari said.

  Lia blanched. Had Mari guessed what she was thinking? But Mari didn’t even glance at her.

  ‘I don’t want to investigate this or get involved in any way,’ Mari continued. ‘The police have their work to do. Three bodies and three videos. And all the black videos uploaded before this. We still have Craig Cole – that isn’t over yet. And I have some other plans as well.’ Lia sat for a long time in the Den rolling a ball for Gro. That was their game – she rolled the ball and Gro took off after it when she gave the signal, a small nod of her head.

  The dog loved balls, but Lia was really playing with her because she wanted something to do. Anything. Berg was pottering around on the other side of the Den – after a day like that, neither of them really knew how to react, but they had to have something to keep them busy.

  Hearing the sounds of the Den was calming, and Lia realised something she had never thought before: Berg was the only one whose work started with such clear, concrete sounds. Hammers, drills, sewing machines. With Rico an entire virtual world surrounded you, invisible and inscrutable, but spending time with Berg gave you the feeling that anything could be built or mended. With Mari… Around Mari it felt like force of will was enough to change the world.

  ‘Shall I brew up some Bettys?’

  Berg’s suggestion snapped Lia out of her reverie. ‘Yes, thanks,’ Lia said.

  Bettys and Taylors was Berg’s favourite tea, and offering it was his way of telling you to calm down and take it easy. Plenty of coffee and tea were brewed at the Studio – coffee for Lia and Mari because of their Finnish roots and for Rico since he was from Brazil, and tea for the others. Berg knew the moment when offering Lia a teacup was more appropriate than a coffee mug.

  When Berg left for home with Gro, Lia thought about going for a run. A beep from her mobile phone interrupted the thought though.

  It was an instant message from the Studio’s internal communication system. Rico had sent just two words: ‘BBC News’ and a link to a news item. Lia found the nearest computer and opened the BBC News homepage.

  The Operation Rhea investigators had discovered the identities of the victims and published their names. Evelyn Morris, Michael Cottle and David Wynn. All three previously reported missing in London. According to initial information, the victims did not know one another, but one thing did connect them: they had all disappeared within the past week after nights out in clubs or bars in London. Their bodies had also been left on streets close to the sites of their disappearances. In the cases of Wynn and Cottle, the bodies were within sight of the bars, and Morris was found a few hundred metres from the pub where she was last seen.

  After reading the article, Lia walked straight to Rico’s office and found him at his desk. The expression on Rico’s face was difficult to interpret.

  He pointed to the names of the clubs in the BBC story on his tablet display. RVT, Heaven, Black Cap. Lia only recognised one of them.

  ‘Heaven is an old gay club,’ she said. ‘I went there once for a work friend’s farewell party.’

  ‘I go there,’ Rico said quietly. ‘Not often, but sometimes. I’ve been to all these places. At one time or another. They’re all gay places.’

  Lia stared at Rico. Their brilliant, nerdy hero. With his boyish Brazilian features, Lia had always found Rico attractive and sweet, and now that he was implying he was gay, Lia found him attractive, sweet and suddenly a little vulnerable.

  ‘I’ve been with men and women. Usually men these days,’ Rico clarified.

  ‘OK,’ Lia said, slightly flushed.

  Rico didn’t need to explain his sexuality to her. Still, Rico wanted to say it out loud.

  ‘They’ll find who did it,’ Lia said. ‘They have the videos and everything. No one can pull something like that off without leaving any evidence behind. Maybe someone saw them throwing the bodies on the street, or maybe the kidnappings got caught on CCTV.’

  Rico nodded.

  ‘Of course they’ll get caught,’ he said. ‘It isn’t that.’

  After seeing the victims’ names, Rico had looked to see what he could find out about them online – as countless other people around the country were no doubt doing right then too. He had seen pictures of all three.

  ‘I think I know one of the men. Michael Cottle. I think he’s a Mike I talked with sometimes.’

  Rico hadn’t known Cottle well, they weren’t friends, but the man’s murder still hit close to home.

  ‘There isn’t any big, like… feeling of community at those bars, nothing that deep anyway,’ Rico said. ‘But still it feels like even though this didn’t hit me, it hit us. It could have been me. They killed my people.’

  11.

  Mari changed her mind about standing aside once the police spokespeople announced that the kickings weren’t necessarily hate crimes.

  The determination and speed with which she took up the case showed how angry she was.

  Immediately after the updated police press conference, Mari called them all to the Studio, and as she walked to Bankside, Lia already knew what was up.

  ‘Idiots,’ Mari said, meaning the police.

  All six of them were sitting in her office. Rico had the victims’ names up on the television, broadcasting from the Topo. Evelyn Morris, Michael Cottle, David Wynn.

  All disappeared after spending an evening at a gay bar, including Evelyn Morris. The men were known to be homosexual, but because police information indicated that Evelyn Morris had only had boyfriends over the years, they didn’t want to classify the cases as anti-gay crimes.

  ‘It is possible these are hate crimes, but the victims may also have been chosen at random,’ the police spokesperson said.

  ‘They were all grabbed coming out of gay bars,’ Mari said. ‘And their bodies were brought back to the bars. How stupid do you have to be to think that this woman’s sexual orientation is the deciding factor here?’

  Maybe the police wanted to avoid fanning fear among the gay club clientele and spreading hysteria in the media, Rico suggested.

  Mari alr
eady had tasks outlined for them.

  ‘We don’t have time to spend weeks planning this. We have to act quickly,’ she said.

  Rico would inspect the videos again, sifting through them frame by frame with his software so nothing would go unnoticed. Were there technical details in the videos that could be used to track down whoever produced them? Did the images contain anything recognisable?

  ‘We need enlargements of anything even remotely identifiable,’ Mari said. ‘It might be something on the floor or ground or in the background on the wall or on the kicker’s clothing or shoes. Or on the victim.’

  ‘The police have already done that work, or are doing it,’ Rico said. ‘And sifting through the CCTV footage from around those bars. If I could get into the police database, that would be helpful.’

  ‘Can you get in?’ Mari asked.

  Rico rolled his eyes.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said.

  One of his hacker contacts might know how to break the police systems’ protection.

  ‘That will take time, and we can’t know whether it will lead anywhere,’ Mari said. ‘But at least we can examine the videos now.’

  Maggie would get to interview the staff in the bars where the victims were last seen, and Paddy would reach out to his contacts in the police to see if any theories were circulating about the murders. Berg would help Rico with the videos.

  ‘Lia, I have a meeting set up for you in two hours, so you’ll have time to prepare a little.’

  Lia looked at Mari inquisitively.

  ‘It’s with a woman who knows everything there is to know about anti-gay crime in Britain.’

  ‘Why are we in such a rush? We can’t know for certain that more of these murders are going to take place,’ Lia said.

  ‘I’m afraid we can,’ Mari said, nodding to Rico, who pulled up some sort of number list on the display.

  ‘Here are the durations of all of the black videos,’ Rico said.

  The shortest of them was a little over two minutes, the longest almost six. The three snuff films perfectly matched the lengths of three of the black videos.

  ‘They’re going to make ten of them,’ Mari said.

  The offices of Gallant stood on King’s Cross Road, an area Lia didn’t know particularly well due to its old reputation as a home to drug dealers, prostitutes and heavy traffic.

  She didn’t exactly have to look for the organisation’s building since the entrance was pasted with rainbow flags and posters of people with serious, accusing faces. The woman Lia had come to meet looked hard too. Annie Bayhurst-Davies’ face was full of piercings, and her ample body was more covered by tattoos than her thin tank top. It was as though she wanted to say as much as possible about herself at once using her appearance.

  Lia had assumed that she would have to explain her visit to the executive director of Gallant, but Bayhurst-Davies didn’t ask. Instead, she was more interested in the way Lia had arranged the meeting.

  ‘This morning I received a call from the one person in the world who never has to ask anything of me. All she has to do is tell me what she wants,’ Bayhurst-Davies said once they had shaken hands and taken their seats in her office. ‘My teacher at Lancaster University in the gender studies department. My dear, dread guru.’

  Lia concealed a smile. Mari had gained them access to the head of Gallant in a way she couldn’t refuse.

  ‘I really appreciate you taking the time to meet me,’ Lia said.

  ‘My old teacher is the worst shrew in all of Lancashire, a real shrew. She doesn’t do favours,’ Bayhurst-Davies continued. ‘How did you know to contact her, and why was she willing to vouch for you?’

  ‘I know a person who knows people,’ Lia said.

  Gallant was a London organisation that opposed violence against gay and lesbian people. Like many other gay organisations, it also reacted against any attacks on other sexual and gender minorities. That was why the clumsy acronym LGBTI often appeared in the organisation’s press releases: lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals and intersexuals, i.e. people who had physical characteristics of both sexes. Towards the acronym and Annie Bayhurst-Davies, Lia felt both great empathy and some degree of hesitation.

  Rights for everyone regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, yes. But there were times, Lia had to admit to herself, that the ways people exposed their bodies, aggressively asserting their queer identity, made her ever so slightly uncomfortable. She wanted to understand though.

  ‘This morning I’ve had three TV interviews and one big press conference. Tonight I have another event and a slew of interviews, and I’m supposed to be issuing statements for the foreign press,’ Bayhurst-Davies rattled off.

  The message was clear: Don’t waste my time.

  ‘I may be able to help you,’ Lia said.

  The woman looked Lia over.

  ‘Good,’ she finally said. ‘What do you want to know?’

  Lia began with the most important thing: why would anyone want so desperately to attack gay people that they would kick them to death and then stream videos of the murders? Who would do something like that?

  ‘I don’t know,’ Bayhurst-Davies replied quickly. ‘These killings are in a category of their own. We’ve never seen anything this methodical.’

  Not necessarily in their brutality though, she went on to point out. Most of the crimes against sexual minorities in London and the UK in general were small and undramatic. But savage murders happened every year too.

  ‘How many?’ Lia asked, making some quick notes.

  The number was difficult to pin down precisely, Bayhurst-Davies said. Greater London police recorded some 1,200–1,500 crimes as homophobic each year, but researchers estimated that a much larger number never came to light or the connection to homophobia was unclear. Every year two or three murders occurred in the area with apparent anti-gay or anti-gender minority sentiment.

  ‘But usually it’s impossible to know how much the victim’s sexuality had to do with the case,’ Bayhurst-Davies said. ‘Like what they did to Stuart Walker in Scotland.’

  Lia remembered the news reports well. The brutal murder of a thirty-year-old gay man in a small village had shocked the whole country. A barman by trade, Walker’s family became worried when he failed to show up at his grandmother’s birthday party. His body was found in an industrial estate on the outskirts of town. During the night he had been tortured, killed and his body set alight. Walker had been well-liked, and his homosexuality was public knowledge, but the police avoided talking about the case as a possible hate crime for as long as they could.

  Suddenly Bayhurst-Davies stood up behind her desk.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, and then began riffling through a filing cabinet in the corner until she found the paper she was looking for and handed it to Lia.

  ‘This is how it looked at first,’ she said.

  Lia stared at the enormous headlines. GAY MAN KILLED IN SCOTLAND – TIED TO LAMPPOST AND TORTURED.

  ‘Fortunately that wasn’t true – that they found Stuart tied to a lamppost,’ Bayhurst-Davies said. ‘That detail was wrong. But the rest was right. He had been tortured. He had been violated. Just think – a grandmother was waiting for her grandson to come to her eightieth birthday party, the boy who had always been the family comedian. Walker was like that, always talking. Making people laugh, bringing joy.’

  Walker’s murder had sent the whole village into mourning, and nearly a thousand people attended the funeral.

  ‘That’s how it always is,’ Bayhurst-Davies said. ‘There’s always something not quite right in the initial information, but the general picture almost always is. And there is always a village worth of people left suffering. The funerals aren’t usually that big, but every one of these cases affects dozens if not hundreds of people.’

  Big murder cases where the motive was homophobia were rare. But Gallant had always known they happened regularly. And nothing indicated they were on the decline. If anything, the opposite wa
s true. Violent attacks on gay people were a serious problem all around the world. Although the most brutal acts usually occurred in developing countries where homosexuality was completely banned, the West didn’t have any room to flatter itself that it didn’t have a problem too. Violence against women and ethnic minorities had diminished in many countries, but in some areas gays and lesbians were in greater danger than ever before.

  Statistics on hate crimes in general in Britain seemed to show a decline. But it was hard to trust statistics because a large percentage of cases were never recorded.

  ‘Who is behind the attacks?’ Lia asked.

  Usually relatively young adult men, Bayhurst-Davies said. For a long time skinheads were the major culprits, but nowadays the skins were telling the police that Muslim extremist youths were doing it more.

  ‘We don’t have any evidence of a change like that, but there have been cases. It’s hard to classify these current attackers since they’re all so different.’

  Before Stuart Walker and the videotaped killings, the gay murder that had received the most publicity was Ian Baynham in 2009. It happened in the centre of London, near the place where David Wynn’s body had been found now. Baynham’s killing attracted the most attention because the main perpetrator was such a surprise: a nineteen-year-old girl, Ruby Thomas. Thomas, a drinker with violent tendencies, had been flirting with men on the street. Encountering Baynham, a sixty-year old out with his male friend, the girl started a row. Baynham became indignant when Thomas began using homophobic slurs. Shouting and arm waving ensued, and the girl attacked Baynham. Thomas’s former boyfriend, who was also on the scene, struck Baynham to the ground, at which point the girl and her friends began assaulting him. Sneering all the while, she continued beating him even though he was already lying on the ground unconscious, with blood dripping from his head. Later the group joked about the incident on Facebook.

  Thomas, who grew up in a violent family, received a sentence of seven years, which included an extra year for committing a hate crime. The boyfriend who knocked Baynham to the ground received six years. Many criticised the light sentences, especially since everyone knew they would only serve part of them.