Black Noise (23 page)

‘If he’s wearing shorts, Zanzibar would explain that,’ Maggie said. ‘And fans are always gaga over the places stars were born. Just think how many childhood homes have been turned into museums.’

Mari’s eyes flashed.

Determining that the websites of the Tanzanian police and media didn’t have any information that could connect to these crimes took
them under an hour. According to the Tanzanian police, nothing worthy of reporting had happened in Zanzibar recently.

‘What about other countries’ embassies and newspapers?’ Mari asked. ‘The man doesn’t look African. If he’s from a western country and he’s being held prisoner, there should be something about him somewhere. A report of a disappearance or something.’

‘Should we divide up the countries?’ Paddy asked.

Coming up with the right search phrases in all the major languages would be faster, Rico said. That way they could cover multiple countries with the same queries. He and Maggie chose the keywords: man, missing, Zanzibar, Tanzania. They translated the list into dozens of languages and limited the searches so they would only cover the previous year.

The searches immediately returned three results.

‘My God,’ Maggie said as she glanced through them.

One hit was from Germany, the second from Kenya, the third from France. One person from each country had disappeared in Zanzibar within the previous year.

The names of the missing persons required a little extra digging, but they turned up too. When Rico fed them into an image search and the results flashed up on the screen, everyone went silent. In one of the pictures, the man they had been staring at for days as a half-naked prisoner in the fifth video looked back at them.

Only a little information was available about Theo Durand and even less about his disappearance in Zanzibar. He was a Parisian accountant who had been on holiday on the island alone and disappeared without a trace a few days earlier.

His relatives in France had posted a notice about his disappearance on the website of the Manu Association, a support group for the missing and their families. The news hadn’t reached the French media since the disappearance of a single tourist wasn’t going to drive traffic or subscriptions. Even using Durand’s name they couldn’t find anything on the Tanzanian police website.

Maybe Tanzania wasn’t keen on reporting information about lost travellers, Paddy said. It wouldn’t exactly increase tourism.

There was no doubt the man in the video was Theo Durand. The likeness was obvious.

‘We have to tell the police about this immediately,’ Paddy said.

‘Not yet,’ Mari replied. ‘Durand has been a prisoner for days now. If he’s even alive any more. I’ll be ready to give this to the police soon, but first I want to talk it through with all of you.’

‘If he’s a prisoner in Zanzibar, the British police aren’t just going to pop over there to investigate,’ Paddy said. ‘The Tanzanian authorities and Interpol will handle it. And possibly the French authorities.’

‘Do you trust the Tanzanian police to handle the case?’ Mari asked.

Paddy shook his head.

‘We’ll give the police here one day,’ Mari said. ‘If nothing happens in that time, I’m going there myself.’

The others took a second to realise what Mari really meant.

‘To Zanzibar?’ Lia asked.

‘That’s crazy,’ Paddy said sternly.

‘It’s dangerous,’ Mari said. ‘Maybe more dangerous than anything we’ve ever done. But I think it’s going to be our only option.’

Paddy had a hard time keeping his temper.

‘I don’t understand why we’re even talking about this,’ he snapped. ‘The whole idea is completely daft.’

‘I didn’t say I was going alone,’ Mari said. ‘I’ll take other people with me.’

Lia silently watched their debate. She knew Mari’s idea was anything but stupid. Going to Zanzibar would be reckless and maybe dangerous. But if time was short, someone like Mari and the Studio might be able to help.

Suddenly Lia understood that Mari had been emotionally prepared to start chasing this killer for some time now.

She already knew this might be the only way to catch Berg’s killer.

Paddy marched out of the room. They heard him walk straight to the front door and out of the Studio.

Lia looked at Mari and thought she understood her more than ever before.

Mari has decided to face this man herself. She just has to find him.

The pavement outside the Operation Rhea HQ was deserted when Lia arrived on Sunday a little after nine in the morning. Instead of going inside, she glanced down the ramp leading into the car park and at the windows, most of which were covered by Venetian blinds.

The police profiler, Christopher Holywell, quickly appeared from a side door. He had been expecting her.

Holywell rubbed his hands together. Lia understood it had nothing to do with the chilly wind blowing down on the street. Holywell was on guard because Lia had surprised him by requesting an urgent meeting. At the Studio they had decided that the profiler was their best chance, partly because he had treated Lia so warmly. Finding his personal phone number had required Paddy’s contacts in the police force, and fortunately Holywell agreed to the meeting despite knowing that his superiors would frown upon it.

‘What do you have?’ Holywell asked.

Lia took out her phone and showed him the picture on the display.

‘This.’

For a moment Holywell stared at the picture of Theo Durand taken from the French missing persons organisation before realising what was going on.

‘Christ almighty,’ he said. ‘Let’s go inside.’

‘No.’

‘Come on –’ Holywell started to say.

‘No,’ Lia interrupted. ‘We’re talking about this here. On my terms.’

Holywell shut up. His gaze flicked between the small phone display and Lia’s face.

‘Where did you get that?’ he asked.

Lia recounted how much work had gone into finding it and turned over what she knew about Theo Durand. Reeling off the details only took a few seconds: Theo Durand, accountant from Paris, age thirty-two. Disappeared without a trace on vacation in Zanzibar.

‘Zanzibar?’ Holywell repeated.

‘The island in Africa. Fifty kilometres off the coast of Tanzania,’ Lia explained.

‘I know where Zanzibar is,’ Holywell said quickly. ‘Why was he grabbed there?’

‘Because the man you’re looking for is there.’

The profiler took a moment to digest this information.

‘Freddie Mercury was born in Zanzibar,’ he said.

‘You have a good memory,’ Lia said.

Holywell stared at Lia, and Lia realised that the power relationship between them was turning in her favour. The police investigator had to react to the information she was giving.

Lia remembered Mari’s instructions.
Don’t let him take you inside. Don’t let him record your conversation. Stay outside, and be fast.

‘That would fit the killer’s profile,’ Holywell said. ‘Zanzibar. A change of place. This bloke is doing a lot of things differently.’

The change in the videos from kicking to the dimly lit images of a starving prisoner was a clear tactical shift, Holywell said.

‘It’s unusual. Not rare, but unusual.’

Serial killers almost always had their own peculiar MO. These things brought them satisfaction and became a major part of the killings for them. But the Queen Killer was altering things, adding new dimensions. First came the black videos, then the kicking. Now the fifth video was different from the others, and he had shifted from London elsewhere.

‘We have some comparable cases, killers who changed their MO and locations,’ Holywell said.

The police’s Serious Crime Analysis Section had their own database, named ViCSAL. In it they had collected thousands of detailed pieces of information about the perpetrators of serious crimes, especially murderers and rapists. By combining and cross-referencing this information they had often been able to move forward previously unsolved cases.

Serial killers who modified their methods were more common now than before, Holywell said. One thing united them all: they were all seeking fame. All of them became fascinated by famous serial killers and tracked their activities before starting on their own deadly careers.

‘He wants to keep shocking people,’ Lia said.

‘His audience,’ Holywell agreed. ‘He knows that if he had just kept on with the kicking videos, gradually he would have lost his influence. He wants to give them something new to look at, always new details. And now Zanzibar, a completely new place.’

‘He can’t know that we’ve tracked down his location,’ Lia pointed out.

‘No,’ Holywell said. ‘He probably thought that would stay secret for a while longer. That it would only come out when he was finished with what he means to do there.’

‘I want to know two things,’ Lia said quickly.

She could tell from looking at Holywell that he wasn’t comfortable with the position he was in.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘Tell me how you intend to start the investigation in Zanzibar. How long will it take?’ Lia said, pressing him. ‘And I want to know why you’re avoiding admitting publicly that these are gay hate crimes.’

Holywell controlled himself well, Lia had to admit. His voice remained calm.

‘Since this is a French citizen missing in Zanzibar, the operation will fall to the local police,’ Holywell said.

The Metropolitan Police would immediately contact Interpol and the French and Tanzanian authorities. There was a priority classification for things like this that pushed them ahead of everything else. Interpol had teams of experts at its disposal who could get anywhere in the world in under a day, but they were called upon infrequently.

‘Whether Interpol wants to send one of those teams will be up to them,’ Holywell said. ‘We can send investigators to Zanzibar too, but that would be done in cooperation with Interpol as well. And everything would require the blessing of the local authorities. We don’t even know yet whether anything has actually happened in Zanzibar itself other than the disappearance of a tourist. How seriously do you think the Tanzanian police are going to take this when the whole basis for suspecting a crime has occurred is an online video of a man in dark room?’

‘You’ve seen that video,’ Lia said.

‘Yes, I have.’

The way Holywell averted his gaze revealed he knew exactly what the Studio did. The police probably wouldn’t be able to act quickly enough to save Theo Durand.

‘How long will this take?’ Lia asked.

‘To get the investigation going there? Or to open a new investigation if the local police have already searched for him?’ Holywell snorted and took a few nervous steps.

‘A few days,’ he guessed. ‘Maybe even a week. First we’ll have to see how sure we are the man in the video is in Zanzibar.’

‘A week!’ Lia exclaimed in astonishment. ‘You said this would be classified as urgent.’

‘We can’t just up and send someone there. It doesn’t work like that. We don’t even know what’s there.’

Lia had received her answer. Mari wasn’t going to wait around for the police.

‘And my other question.’

Holywell weighed the situation.

‘I’m not in charge of this investigation,’ he said.

‘I know.’

‘I don’t decide what information we release.’

‘I know that.’

‘If I were in charge, it might be handled somewhat differently,’ he said, lowering his voice.

He was trying to win Lia’s confidence. Lia realised he was about to tell her something the police didn’t usually discuss with outsiders.

‘The police have done a lot in the past few years to fight homophobia,’ Holywell began, proceeding to list measures already familiar to Lia. Every police division had officers appointed to handle LGBTI issues. They ran campaigns to encourage the public to intervene in hate crimes.

‘But this time no one wants to talk about gay people out loud,’ Lia said.

‘We talk about it as much as the officer in charge of the investigation sees fit. He doesn’t want to fuel a panic.’

Several years before, the police top brass had decided not to address the sexual orientation or gender of victims of crime in public unless it was absolutely necessary, Holywell said. The media had a tendency
to dig up salacious details about victims’ pasts and frequently spread incorrect information about their sexuality.

‘You don’t understand everything that’s going on here,’ Holywell continued.

For some in the police force, any attention directed at minority issues always felt as if it was being taken from somewhere else, he explained. More manpower had been dedicated to Operation Rhea than to any other case in years. In London alone detectives had interviewed more than a thousand people.

The police knew these looked like gay hate crimes. How much they wanted to treat those crimes like their own special thing was another matter. Some police officers had a hard time digesting the constant recognition of new minority groups.

‘It always means new committees. Organisational restructuring where the latest pet project of the political correctness crowd runs roughshod over everything else.’

Not long ago positions had been created for inspectors to focus on football hooliganism. When the media filled with news of child sexual abuse, special investigators were named for those crimes too. There were units dedicated to human trafficking, to preventing kidnapping and searching for missing people.

‘All of these are necessary,’ Holywell pointed out, making his own position clear to Lia.

When an officer specialised in the latest matter in focus, he received a promotion. When a case involved minority issues, the investigation received more manpower and more money.

‘That’s always what this is about,’ Holywell said. ‘Manpower and money. How much of each there is. What they’re used for.’

‘Manpower and money,’ Lia repeated. ‘And those shouldn’t be focused on gay issues?’

Holywell’s eyes were tired.

‘You don’t know what this is like,’ he said. ‘There are men inside this building who would be ready to go through hell to save someone, no matter who they are. They wouldn’t even hesitate. But some of them also wonder about all the other jobs left undone while the focus is on gay people. They also can’t stand that these issues can mean an easy ascent up the chain of command.’

His tone of voice communicated that this last thought was the central issue.

‘You have some sort of reorganisation coming?’ Lia thought out loud. ‘And it’s going to determine who is in charge and where the manpower and money go.’

Procedures were usually reviewed and updated at three-year intervals, Holywell said.

‘There’s a review report coming up soon,’ he said. ‘And there are a lot of different camps who want more money for their areas of expertise.’

‘You have one of the biggest hate crime cases in the country’s history going on under your nose but you’re thinking about new positions and promotions,’ Lia said.

‘I’m not in charge of this investigation,’ Holywell said again. ‘If I were, things would be handled differently.’

‘It’s hard to believe the police are wasting time on power struggles when people’s lives are at risk,’ Lia said.

‘Lots of things happen in this world that are hard to believe – some are even harder to accept,’ Holywell said.

Lia nodded. A bitter feeling of powerlessness was spreading through her. The options were dwindling.

Grabbing her mobile, she sent Theo Durand’s picture to Holywell’s number.

‘You’ll receive a message in a second with a link to a page about that missing man,’ Lia said. ‘But you can find it yourself by searching his name. It’s spelt T-h-e-o D-u-r-a-n-d. The D at the end is silent.’

‘I’d like you to come with me now to tell the investigators everything you know,’ Holywell said.

‘No deal,’ Lia replied. ‘I’m not coming unless you arrest me. And if you intend to do that, my lawyer will be here before you manage it.’

A text message alert came from Holywell’s pocket. The picture Lia sent had arrived.

‘You’ve been warned to stay away from this,’ he said.

‘Lots of things happen in this world that are hard to believe and even harder to accept,’ Lia said and left.