Black Noise (9 page)

Afterwards, when everything is over, Mari has one thing she can cling to. How fast it all was. This is Mari’s consolation and defence: the pace of events, how they propelled each other into motion.

They have everything recorded. Their own snuff film where they can see it all second by second.

Berg is in Kensington placing the sixth camera. Paddy is driving towards Clapham.

The Studio has a direct connection to both. In his large office, his hands full of cables, Rico directs the images from the cameras to different displays. Eight displays in a row with six showing real-time feeds, two waiting blankly for the final cameras to be in place.

The streets are peaceful. The cameras show that there are few people out tonight – the cold is keeping them indoors.

Berg is ahead of schedule. He is that good. A loudspeaker in Rico’s office crackles into life.

‘Is six working?’ Berg asks.

‘Perfectly,’ Rico replies.

On Rich Lane, Berg moves back to the Studio’s van. He still has one camera to install, in Stoke Newington.

Mari watches Paddy and Berg’s progress on the Topo’s display. They are two dots on a map on the computer screen. Her thoughts are entirely on them, on Paddy, who is so reliable, and Berg, who always does everything with such care.

Paddy’s car is creeping forward, but Berg’s van is still a static point on Rich Lane, and Mari knows why: before Berg starts driving away from camera number six, he has to put his toolbox in its place in the back of the vehicle. He always does that. He isn’t the kind of man to have things rattling around in the back of his van.

Something moves on the screen representing camera two, placed on the outskirts of Soho. Mari, Rico, Lia and Maggie watch as a dark car glides into the picture and stops. They wait to see what might happen. No, it’s just a car that pauses for a while and then continues on.

And in that moment while their focus is on camera two, something happens on display number six. They don’t notice it immediately. They lose the first seconds.

Afterwards, when everything is over, Mari knows that if they had been watching the situation from the beginning, everything might have gone differently. They had the security teams Paddy had enlisted waiting in the city. Maybe they would have had time to ring and stop everything, maybe call in the police. This didn’t need to happen.

She will never forgive herself for this.

Camera number six shows a white van park on Rich Lane. A male figure steps out. The man opens the back doors of the van and stretches in to pull something out.

A large, black rubbish sack.

They see from the shape and weight of the sack what is in it, and when the man dumps the sack on the ground and cuts it open with a knife, they see the victim’s black trousers and garish shirt. Despite the growing darkness, they can see that one half of the shirt is red.

The camera eye shows the heavy shoes and slim trousers of the man dragging the body. They have seen these legs before, on videos where people are killed.

The victim sprawls as the man drags him away. Then they can only see one leg.

Their camera angle isn’t wide enough to see everything that happens. They hear voices, their own voices, startled cries as they try to catch up with the situation.

A moment passes. The victim’s leg swings, and they know what the man is doing – he is arranging the body in the alley.

Berg also sees this in his van through the camera he just installed.

And then a sight assaults them that rips their lives apart.

Mari, Lia, Rico and Maggie stand in the Studio surrounded by Rico’s computers and stare at the picture transmitted by camera six from a lane in Kensington. Berg has appeared in the picture. Their Berg. It shouldn’t be like this. Berg should not be in the picture.

Mari realises why Berg is there. There is only one murderer. The man dragging that body. One man is doing all of this, killing and taping his killing and throwing his victims on the street.

That is why their valiant Berg does not hesitate to intervene. Berg is out of the van to stop the killer. Berg is raising his pistol. He aims his weapon and shouts.

Everything stops. All they can see of the victim lying on the ground is a lifeless leg.

At the Studio they can’t hear what Berg yells, but they see how he falls.

Their Berg, their valiant friend, falls like a felled tree.

They can’t see the shooter, but they see the bullet hit Berg in the temple. The shooter must be an expert marksman. Otherwise this would not happen. Otherwise all of this would not be taking place right before their eyes.

Mari looks at the camera image, her mind unable to understand everything she is seeing and what she should do. Complete silence. No one can speak.

Berg lies on the street. Then the camera shows his body twitch. They understand what just happened: the killer shot him again. Making sure of his kill.

A sound from the loudspeaker on Rico’s desk breaks the silence in the Studio. It’s Paddy, asking what is happening and why no one is answering him.

Afterwards, when everything is over, Mari watches their personal snuff film over and over at the Studio. She watches as the body of the victim in the black and red shirt lolls as he is dragged along the alley. Mari watches as Berg arrives in the picture. The assurance in Berg’s hands as he aims his pistol at the killer. Then he’s hit, and he falls. Their Berg.

A man falls like a tree, and everything crumbles, everything Mari has built her life upon.

She watches the images in the video again and again until she knows every fraction of every second by heart. She repeats them in her mind, and from them comes a word she repeats in her mind. Forgiveness.

There will be none. She will never give forgiveness for this, not to herself, not to the shooter, not to the world.

The time for forgiveness is past.

Some things they could do on autopilot.

Paddy started towards Kensington and Rich Lane. He controlled his shock and sorrow so he could continue to function. There was no time to lose. The killer had disappeared from their camera image immediately, getting away, but someone might find the bodies in the alley any second.

‘Get Berg’s gun, keys and mobile,’ Mari said to Paddy over the phone. ‘Remove the camera, and drive the van a little way away.’

Mari’s voice sounded mechanical, Lia thought. Herself, she could scarcely speak or even really think.

One thing at a time. Think one thing at a time.

The familiar people around her she saw in slow motion. One thought at a time, she tried to move forward from this moment.

Berg is dead. He’s lying there with that other body.

The killer came today hours before he did the last three times.

The victim in the red and black shirt had to be the missing man, Evelyn Morris’ friend, Brian Fowler. Probably the killer had a video somewhere of killing him too.

Why did he come so early? Why did he dump the body on Rich Lane?

They were each thinking the same questions. Fowler was kidnapped in Camden, somewhere else entirely.

‘The killer knew the police are still combing the area around the Black Cap,’ Rico pointed out.

The man had chosen another gay meeting place in Kensington but not to snatch a new victim, to get rid of a previous one. They were on the right track – they could predict where the killer might go – but knowing what he would do there was impossible.

In the feed for camera six they saw Paddy arrive in the alley. He knelt over both bodies, and they could see in his frame the moment the final knowledge came to him: nothing could be done; Berg and Fowler were dead.

Paddy quickly went through Berg’s pockets, taking out a set of keys and a phone. From the street he retrieved Berg’s gun. His wallet
with driving licence, credit cards and money could stay in his trouser pocket.

‘The police need to be able to identify him,’ Mari instructed Paddy. ‘The very second they find him.’

Not only mechanical but almost cold,
Lia thought. For some reason, Mari’s voice scared her almost more than what she had just seen on the video screen.

Of course she understood why Mari and Paddy were doing this. They were trying to protect the Studio, to minimise their losses.

Lia wouldn’t have been able to do that. She knew that if she even tried to do something like that she would start screaming. They had already experienced an irrecoverable loss. They had seen Berg murdered, and after that everything else was stupid and pointless.

Someday I’ll probably be thankful that Mari and Paddy are able to do this right now.

Thinking about that was sad but also calming. The thought of things to come, that there would be some kind of future.

For Maggie it wasn’t. She just sat sobbing quietly.

When Paddy removed camera number six from the wall on Rich Lane and the picture it was broadcasting to the Studio disappeared from the screen, Rico started crying too.

One of them had to go to Berg’s home.

Lia only understood the significance of that when she heard Mari talking about it quietly on the phone with Paddy. When the police found Berg’s body, they would search his flat in Barnet soon afterwards, either tonight or tomorrow morning at the latest. They had to remove all evidence that Berg had worked for the Studio.

‘He doesn’t have anything on his home computer,’ Mari told Paddy. ‘We talked about that once. He said he kept all of his messages to here online instead of on his hard drive, and it’s all encrypted.’

The goal wasn’t to remove any indication that Berg had known them. Just everything that might hint at the work the Studio did. ‘There won’t be much,’ Maggie said suddenly. They were startled to hear her speak.

‘I’ve spent some time there,’ Maggie continued. ‘He told me about his business.’

Looking at his flat, you would just think Berg was an old carpenter doing the sorts of jobs any independent tradesman in that industry might, Maggie said.

‘He has some tools and a workbench.’

Lia remembered the workbench concealed behind a curtain. She had been in Berg’s flat that very morning before their outing in Woodside Park. Berg had confided in her about how he met Mari. They had shared their silly little jokes.

‘We still need to make a visit,’ Mari said. ‘Just to be sure.’

Paddy headed towards Barnet. He already had Berg’s keys. He ended his call to the Studio to ring the security guards he had hired for possible emergencies. They wouldn’t be any help now.

Lia sat down next to Maggie, taking her hand and squeezing.

‘Are we going to leave him there on the street?’ Maggie asked Mari.

Mari took a few moments to answer.

‘We have to,’ she said. ‘As soon as Paddy is far enough away, we’ll ring the police.’

Rico made the call. Using a computer program that rerouted the connection and altered his voice, so that there would be no way to trace the call.

At Mari’s instruction, Rico also sent the police what their camera had recorded of what happened on Rich Lane. He cut out the beginning with Berg flashing in and out of the picture while he installed the camera, as well as stripping all the metadata that might lead back to the Studio.

‘I’m using AnonFiles,’ Rico told the others. ‘And Tor.’

Talking about practical matters helped him. AnonFiles was an anonymous file sharing site, and sending a link to the file to the police through the Tor network would obfuscate the path the message took.

They all listened to his hacker jargon without hearing it. When Rico left to look for an unprotected WiFi network somewhere else in the city to send the materials, Lia had to hold herself back from stopping him. Her instincts told her that going outside was bad.

Paddy searched Berg’s apartment quickly. He didn’t dig to the back of every cupboard, he just gave everything a quick once-over. Berg
had been as meticulous at home as at the Studio. A place for everything and everything in its place.

The most important thing was to look for any papers. Paddy checked the desk drawers and other places there might be stacks of papers or files. There wasn’t much that could connect Berg to the Studio’s address, mostly just a few taxi receipts, which Paddy collected. None of the documents showed the others’ names. A couple of postcards Maggie had sent on holiday could stay mixed in with notes and letters from Berg’s relations.

Nothing in the flat indicated that Berg had been in a relationship with anyone. Which they already knew.

By the time Paddy arrived at the Studio, it was past midnight.

They didn’t talk much. No one hurried home. Now it was important to be together for a while. But none of them had the strength to work any more. They had any number of things to investigate – they knew that – but just the thought of it felt overwhelming. Before long they couldn’t put off going home any longer, though.

‘We have to concentrate on surviving,’ Mari said.

Paddy offered the others a lift, and Maggie and Rico accepted with relief. Lia intended to go with them, but then she suddenly remembered something. She walked from Rico’s office to the Den.

Gro. The dog was awake and greeted her with tail wagging. She had been waiting for someone to come.

Lia looked at the dog. There was no way to explain that Berg didn’t exist any more. It felt important not to cry.

If I cry, Gro will feel bad. If I don’t cry, Gro will be fine.

The thought felt simultaneously ever so logical and ever so childish.

‘Will you two be all right?’ Mari asked Lia in the corridor.

Lia nodded as she clipped the leash to Gro’s collar.

‘I’m going to take a taxi,’ she said.

‘Can you have a dog in your flat?’ Mari asked.

Lia could hear from Mari’s voice that the mechanicalness was fading. Shock was taking over, even for Mari.

‘For now, yes,’ Lia said.

Mari handed her something.

Lia looked at the bunch of unmarked keys. She recognised the keys to the front door of the building and the Studio – she already had those – but the ring held several other keys as well.

‘For emergencies,’ Mari said, turning and walking back to her office.

Lia looked at Gro and knew that she had to leave. She had to move forward, one thing at a time.