Cold Courage

by Pekka Hiltunen

  ‘Do you feel bad somehow that I helped Thomas leave?’ Mari asked.

  ‘No. But it doesn’t feel like it should. And I have the feeling that I owe you a debt of gratitude. Even though I didn’t ask for this.’

  ‘No, you don’t owe me anything.’

  Matt Thomas was happy because he was getting to move forward in his career, Mari said. Thomas’ ideas and attitude would fit in better at a member of the tabloid press whose main goal was sales and circulation than Level did. And Lia would have the opportunity to consider whether to continue in a job she liked. All of her options remained open.

  ‘You could still leave, if you want.’

  ‘That’s all true,’ Lia said, trying to control herself. ‘But can you understand how this makes me feel? That you’re playing around with my life. Opening up new opportunities for me. Not letting me do it myself.’

  ‘I guess you could see it that way,’ Mari said. ‘But that’s how I am. I organise things the way I want them to be. In a way, everyone does it, but I take it further than most.’

  ‘And of course I appreciate what you did. But if you’d asked me whether I wanted you to…’

  ‘You probably would have said that you didn’t,’ Mari said. ‘You wouldn’t have wanted it because you think that life isn’t supposed to work that way. Thomas should have found a new job just by chance, with no one else having a hand in it. It’s a question of free will. Did Thomas change jobs out of his own free will and choice? Yes, he did. Only the circumstances were changed; I changed them. Lia, you and I probably have different views on how life works. I think that hardly anything in the world ever really happens out of free will. Someone or something is always guiding everyone’s choices. There are times when I want to be the one doing the choosing.’

  ‘But when it’s a question of my life, I want to be that person, not you.’

  Mari admitted that it was a perfectly justifiable hope.

  ‘But I have to say that there are always going to be things that I don’t ask your opinion about. And nowadays I already ask you about an awful lot. And that’s important to me. But I don’t always intend to ask.’

  They ended the call. The discussion was going nowhere. They each had their work to do, and arguing depressed them both.

  An uncomfortable feeling hung over Lia for the next few days. Matt Thomas’ departure was a good thing, but Mari’s part in it was troubling.

  As interim editor-in-chief, Timothy Phelps immediately moved to make changes, surprising and inspiring the staff. He delegated some editor-in-chief responsibilities to other members of the team, but no one’s load grew too much. For example, he encouraged them to work in pairs on developing content for their regular columns. Lia enjoyed sitting with Sam for half the day bouncing around ideas for subjects and visual themes for the magazine’s small feature stories.

  Tim’s natural transition into the routine of being editor-in-chief was a joy to see. Lia did find it a little embarrassing that she had once gone to bed with the man who was now her boss. But Tim had always treated her well, and he did so now as well. He also did more work than anyone else in the office. His face burned with the intensity of someone whose career had just taken off, but instead of trying to get ahead by trampling on other people, as Thomas had, Phelps valued others’ contributions.

  At times Lia felt thankful to Mari for what she had done. At times she was infuriated that Mari could arrange things the way she wanted them to be.

  She did not ring Mari, on principle, in order to protest. And not a text or email came from Mari. Sad to say, Lia knew the silence was not the result of Mari feeling she had done something wrong.

  She’s just concentrating on something else.

  48

  The news broke on the 2nd January. The first versions were already spreading through the media by 6 a.m.

  It was a conundrum for all of them. The subject matter was so unbelievable that they each had to publish their own piece as soon as possible, but the accuracy of the report was difficult to evaluate. One after another the online media, TV news and printed papers moved it to the top of their stacks.

  The most arresting headline came from the Daily Mirror. They had just barely squeaked through a reprinting of their front page. Filling it were the words: ‘Fried beat the Woman Without a Face.’ Above was a clarification: ‘Prostitute says.’ Beside this stood a picture of a smiling Arthur Fried.

  Millions of people saw the front page of the Daily Mirror that day because many of the TV broadcasts also used it to illustrate the story. However, the Mirror’s piece was the bluntest version of the same information everyone had received.

  It dawned on Lia quickly that the stories were all based on a bulletin she had also received from a very familiar source: the battered women’s advocacy and domestic abuse prevention organisation The Wall. The bulletin had been sent overnight to hundreds of news outlets, including Level.

  In the communiqué, the chairperson of the organisation, Karen Llewes, reported that she had in her possession a video that had shocked her and the other staff deeply. They had decided to hand over the video to the police immediately.

  ‘But in order to prevent this serious matter from getting lost in the bureaucratic shuffle of police investigations, as so many incidents of violence against women do, our organisation also decided to release the video to the press,’ Llewes wrote.

  The video was available for viewing on their website. Because public interest in the story would be so large, The Wall had moved their site to a new server that could better handle the load.

  By mid-morning, no one needed to go online to watch it though, since it was running in a near continuous loop on every TV channel that covered the news.

  However, some people wanted to see the original as well. In the afternoon, The Wall issued a new statement that the video had received over 900,000 views so far. Financial donations were flooding in. In order to prevent publication of the video seeming like a fundraising operation, The Wall had also posted links to six other anti-domestic violence organisations on its site with an admonition to support them as well.

  Lia watched the video again and again.

  The hardest thing to get used to was seeing Elza speaking in it. The press release gave her first name, and she introduced herself at the beginning of the video.

  Lia stared at the familiar face, which filled almost the entire screen. The video was short and simply produced. Elza sat before a white background and talked.

  Her words left the viewer stupefied.

  ‘My name is Elza. I’m from Latvia. I’m a prostitute and I’ve been working in London for many years. When I came here it was my own choice. I wanted to work as a prostitute. But from the beginning the conditions I was forced into were very difficult, and I want to stop working like this now.

  ‘Before I finish, I want to talk publicly about a man who was my client, Arthur Fried. Arthur Fried is a very bad man. He’s well-known in Britain and portrays himself as a good, religious man, but I know that he is evil.

  ‘He beats women. He’s done it to a lot of girls, and I know two prostitutes he left black and blue.

  ‘One of them was my best friend, Daiga Vītola. Daiga was the woman who was killed and left in the boot of a white car in the middle of the City last year. In the newspapers they called her the Woman Without a Face.

  ‘Once when Arthur Fried hired Daiga, he hit her several times. Daiga asked him to stop, but he said he would pay extra and kept on doing it. He said he liked Daiga’s cries. They helped him hit her harder. He only stopped torturing her when other people came into the room because of her screams.

  ‘We didn’t know that Arthur Fried was a famous politician then. After that I heard from a lot of prostitutes that he had hit them. I’ve heard that he’s hit other women in his life as well.

  ‘I wanted to say this publicly because men like Arthur Fried don’t deserve to walk free. When this video comes out, I’ll already be out of the country.

/>   ‘How do you know what I say is true?

  ‘Ask Arthur Fried. And look at this picture.’

  The video switched from Elza’s face to a photograph showing a side view of a naked male figure on his knees straddling a naked woman. Looking closely at the picture, one could easily recognise both Arthur Fried and Elza. Fried’s penis had been removed from the image with a blur. The photograph stayed up for twenty seconds, after which the video cut back to Elza again.

  ‘I don’t want to blackmail Arthur Fried. I’m not asking for money. I’m giving this picture to him completely free of charge, through the media.

  ‘My friend Daiga Vītola died in a horrible way. Before that her life was horrible too. She was a wonderful person and she deserved to have a decent life.

  ‘I’m going to go looking for a life like that somewhere else now too. My first step is this video.’

  At the end of the video, the telephone numbers and URLs of three victim support groups appeared on the screen.

  It was amazing work. But watching it was troubling. It troubled Lia that the story was so appalling and visceral. And it troubled her that she knew it was not true.

  Most people did not doubt the veracity of the video for a moment. Elza’s narration was so stark and felt so sincere that disputing it felt impossible. The photograph increased the feeling of reality.

  Even the experienced staff at Level believed it instantly.

  ‘Good God Almighty,’ said Timothy Phelps. ‘Fried is finished now. The good minister is going to a special circle of Hell now from which no one in politics ever returns. All the angels in Heaven couldn’t redeem him now.’

  Cries of protest over publication of the video also arose quickly.

  Online comments and phone calls came in to The Wall criticising the organisation as ethically irresponsible.

  According to the news, the police were considering whether to ban The Wall from keeping the video on their site. It might be a case of gross criminal defamation, and simply displaying the video could be construed as a crime. But the threshold for such censorship was high, and the ban had to be handed down by a court.

  And besides, stopping the video would have been impossible. Within a matter of hours it had been copied to countless other sites. Declarations of opposition to Fried and his class of criminal attracted hundreds of thousands of sympathisers. Television crews interviewed men and women on the street about how their attitudes towards Arthur Fried, domestic violence and prostitution had changed. The entire country was talking about it.

  The comic John Blatt tried to use it in a joke.

  ‘Is hitting a prostitute domestic abuse? Don’t ask me. I just wish my domestic circle was as wide and sexy as Arthur Fried’s,’ Blatt joked on a live broadcast on Channel Four.

  Blatt became the day’s second, lesser bête noire. Most of the live audience sitting in the studio exited in the middle of the broadcast in protest over the joke, and dismayed feedback flooded in.

  Arthur Fried did not appear in public. Dozens of reporters and cameramen camped outside his house, but no one had any solid information about whether he was even home. He had visited five cities over the previous week in an attempt to shore up voter support for Fair Rule. Now no one could get in touch with him.

  That evening at six o’clock, a press release left the party office. It contained just two sentences: ‘Party Leader Arthur Fried is deeply shocked by the slanderous attack recently made on his character. He condemns all violence of any sort and believes that the truth will emerge in the police investigation.’

  Everywhere these statements were interpreted as containing no direct denial from Fried that he had hit women and the prostitutes mentioned in the video.

  During the 9 p.m. BBC News broadcast, the political correspondent observed that unless some miracle occurred, Fair Rule’s election hopes and Arthur Fried’s career were finished.

  ‘We call memoirs containing revelations of this sort kiss-and-tell books. Now we’ve entered a new era. This was a kiss-and-kill video. I can’t see any way Fried could return to politics after this,’ the reporter said.

  Lia watched the evening news at home. The case had also made the international channels. CNN seemed to relish showing clips of it with accompanying expert commentary.

  Although no one anywhere suggested that Fried had anything to do with the death of Daiga Vītola, many people found the abuse alone incomprehensibly cruel.

  This has to be Mari’s best work ever. She’s got Fried after all.

  Lia did not ring Mari. She did not ring anyone at the Studio. She guessed that at least Rico, Berg and Maggie had been involved in making the video. But she was not sure whether she wanted to know.

  Lia did not know how to regard the video. It was both beautiful and grotesque.

  Truth and lie perfectly entwined. So tangled together they become indistinguishable.

  After watching her face tell this shocking story all day, Lia wanted to talk to Elza herself. Taking out her phone, she looked up Elza’s brand new number.

  To her surprise, Elza answered immediately.

  ‘Lia? Is that you?’

  ‘Yes, it’s me. Where are you?’

  ‘In London. I haven’t left yet. How are you? How do you feel?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to think of this video.’

  ‘It’s great, isn’t it? It’s everywhere. I just saw it on al-Jazeera and a Polish news show. I have cable TV here with at least two hundred channels.’

  ‘Elza, why did you do it?’

  Lia heard her laugh.

  ‘Why? Come on, you should know. Because of your friend, Mari. She showed me Arthur Fried’s ex-wife’s video. The one you couldn’t publish.’

  Of course.

  ‘But Arthur Fried never hit Daiga. He probably never even met her.’

  ‘No. But he hit so many other women that it doesn’t matter. Daiga won’t mind. Daiga would want us to make him suffer as he should.’

  Elza was clearly thrilled. She explained about the filming: they had done it in the same place as Sarah Hawkins’ video, and Elza had collaborated with Mari on the script.

  ‘I would have wanted more make-up for the shooting, but everyone else didn’t think it was a good idea. They wanted me to look normal.’

  How had they made the image of Arthur Fried with Elza? Lia asked. Was it genuine?

  ‘Of course it is!’

  Elza sounded almost insulted.

  ‘Mari found out where Fried was. He was on a speaking tour in Yorkshire, and we found him in Leeds.’

  Everything had happened in a matter of days. Elza flew to Leeds with Rico and Berg in tow. Once in the city, they took a room in the same hotel where Fried was staying the night.

  In the evening Fried was sitting in the hotel bar, keeping his distance from the other customers. He was drinking a lot. Elza approached him.

  ‘At first he was surprised and then his guard went up. He guessed I was a reporter. I said I was just a lonely girl. He asked whether I was in the business, and I said I was. He asked my price and whether I knew who he was. I said I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I was damn good, Lia. He really thought I didn’t know who he was.’

  Fried gradually forgot his suspicions and his interest in Elza’s offer grew.

  ‘The best was when I gave him the key to my room. He stared at it and said that usually the deal was to go the man’s room. I said that if he thought I was too forward, maybe what I needed was the right man to teach me my place.’

  A fleeting flash had lit up Fried’s eyes. Elza had dangled just the right piece of bait: a woman who needed a tough, hard man.

  They went to Elza’s room. Elza made sure that Fried was drinking the whole time. By the time they had their clothing off, Fried was so drunk he was staggering.

  ‘He came and sat on me. What a big oaf. We were taking pictures the whole time.’

  The room had been so full of hidden cameras they could have captured Fried from any angl
e they wanted. Rico and Berg had spent the whole day installing and testing them.

  ‘It wasn’t even actual sex. He couldn’t do anything,’ Elza said. Fried had groped and slobbered on her, and she had let him long enough to get the shots they needed. When Elza said she had had enough, Fried tried to hit her, but he was no danger by that point. Fried collapsed on the floor, and Elza called Berg and Rico to drag him to his own room.

  ‘Fried thought they were hotel staff. He pushed money at them to try to shut them up.’

  Elza had an abnormal amount of experience of what men were capable of – and what to expect of them. But Arthur Fried was in a different class.

  ‘He’s just like Kazis and Olafs. Not the same kind of criminal, but still empty inside the same way. He’s not human and he never will be. Something important is missing inside. He’s like an animal. Bestija.’

  And Elza herself? Lia asked.

  ‘You can’t stay in Britain any more, since the whole country’s just spent the day staring at that video. The media and police will be hunting you down to get more information.’

  Elza said she had no intention of staying. She was moving to Canada. Mari had procured her a new counterfeit passport in another name.

  ‘I’ll get to make a new start in Canada. Ausma is coming with me, and she already has a new passport too. She’s just coming for a trip, to think about what she wants to do. We have the means for that now.’

  Where had Elza received her money from? Lia asked.

  ‘Your friend doesn’t mess about. I would have done it for free, but Mari wanted to pay. I need the money, and she needed the video. Everybody wins.’

  My friend. Everybody wins.

  Elza said she would not be reachable on that number after that day.

  ‘It isn’t a good idea for me to keep this one, and I’ll be getting another number in Canada anyway. Actually, your friend has already arranged it all.’

  My friend has already arranged it all.