Black Noise (27 page)

The text message came sometime after five in the morning. Lia woke up to the alert sound. She had been having a hard time sleeping.

The text was from Peter Gerrish.

‘Ring me. I heard from your work that you’re travelling. Ring me now.’

The time difference from London was three hours. Gerrish had sent the message in the middle of the night. The police in London were working the case around the clock.

Lia didn’t ring. She stood up, quickly showered and went to knock on Mari’s and Rico’s doors. She didn’t bother with Paddy’s door – she imagined he had spent the night in Mari’s room.

‘It’s good you haven’t rung Gerrish,’ Mari said when they met in the breakfast room. ‘There isn’t any reason to let the police know you’re in Zanzibar,’ she carried on, keeping her voice low enough that the waiter wouldn’t hear.

He was a little surly at having them wake up so early, but he still made coffee and tea and then went to get fresh bread.

Lia looked at Mari.

‘Did you sleep at all?’ she asked.

‘A little,’ Mari said.

During the night she had had an idea. Several, actually, she said. The most important one was that they might have a way to find out where the killer was staying.

‘If he came here to be close to his idol, he might be staying somewhere near where Mercury used to live,’ Mari said.

‘In the Camlur’s Restaurant building?’ Lia asked.

The previous evening the building had looked rundown and rambling. But maybe there were flats there – the restaurant and bar only made up part of the space.

Lia, Mari and Paddy set out early. Rico stayed at the hotel: he was having problems with battery charging. The charger from the mainland seemed to be working, but the Topo and a couple of other machines’ batteries still didn’t seem to be charging.

‘I don’t know what’s wrong,’ Rico said.

It was almost as if the refined machines didn’t want to work, in protest at being brought to the hot, damp island, he mused. Batteries were often the weak link in machines. Maybe the problem was in the uneven current. As his last resort, Rico had a power inverter they could plug into the cigarette lighter of a car.

‘They aren’t very efficient, but nearly every car in the world has a lighter plug. It’s the only universal power outlet.’

As they were touring the city, Mari had seen a street-level office advertising flats. The office hadn’t opened yet when they returned to it, but in the window, next to the letting photographs, was a phone number.

Omar Ngowi arrived ten minutes later, very quickly considering they were in Zanzibar. Ngowi was a slender man approaching sixty whose face always bore a fascinating, odd expression, a combination of a forbearing smile and a dreamy distance from the here and now.

Ngowi opened his office door, asking them in and encouraging them to sit around a small table. He didn’t have many brochures or the like. His was a small company.

‘If I wanted to buy a flat here, what should I do?’ Mari asked immediately after the introductions.

Curiosity flitted across Ngowi’s eyes.

‘You want to buy a flat here at eight in the morning?’

‘Possibly,’ Mari said. ‘How would I go about it?’

‘Do you have a specific place in mind? A specific flat?’ he asked.

Not yet, Mari replied. First she wanted to know how to buy or rent a flat on the island.

‘Your agency is the only one I’ve seen here,’ Mari noted. ‘Where are all the others?’

Ngowi shrugged.

‘There aren’t many. Only two really, foreign owned, big ones.’

Selling properties and buildings in Tanzania was a veritable jungle of red tape that cut foreigners off from some rights. In Zanzibar the markets were regulated with even more care because the authorities realised how attractive the sandy beaches of the archipelago were to foreign investors.

Foreigners couldn’t buy any land or homes in Zanzibar without a local go-between. Frequently people had to found entire corporations with Zanzibari owners to do it. These would serve as a front for the foreign owner and handle all the bureaucracy. Renting had its rules too, but getting around them didn’t require as much creativity.

‘This is a place where almost anything is possible,’ Omar Ngowi said.

‘Are foreign owners’ names recorded somewhere though?’

‘Names?’ Ngowi said, leaning back in his chair in amusement. ‘Sometimes the names are known, sometimes they aren’t. Names are relative. If necessary they become commodities as well.’

Mari smiled back.

‘Your real name isn’t Omar,’ she said.

‘No,’ he admitted openly.

‘You use it because it’s easier for foreign business partners to remember and say,’ Mari continued.

Ngowi nodded. ‘Because they don’t care what my parents thought when they were naming me a lifetime ago. Here in Zanzibar we have many cultures: African and Zanzibari. Then Islamic culture brings its own dimension. And then the strange, rich world of the tourists. Endless excitement. Like a nature programme you can watch hour after hour.’

Mari laughed.

‘Where are you from?’ Ngowi asked.

When they introduced themselves they had only told him their names and hadn’t mentioned their nationalities.

‘Britain,’ Paddy said.

‘You are,’ Ngowi said to Paddy. ‘But these ladies, them I would have placed somewhere else. In Europe, yes. Germany? No, not Germany. Scandinavia.’

‘We are all from London,’ Mari said, settling the matter. ‘Omar,’ she continued, leaning forward. ‘What would you say if I wanted to buy a flat on Kenyatta Road, in the building with Camlur’s Restaurant?’

Ngowi did not bat an eyelash.

‘I would say you aren’t the first person to ask. People ask occasionally. Maybe once a year. A person will come in who wants to buy Freddie Mercury’s boyhood home and make money on it.’

Who owns the building, Mari asked.

Ngowi did not know for certain. He had never found out because there were no flats for sale in the building. Everyone who lived there was local, most of them renting. They weren’t much interested in who used to live there a long time ago. Ngowi only investigated the ownership arrangements of the buildings where flats came on sale. Otherwise doing so was just extra work.

‘But on this island no property is sold to a foreigner without me hearing about it. Me and the two big agencies. We hear about almost all of the bigger lettings to outsiders as well,’ he added.

Despite its hundreds of thousands of residents, in practice Zanzibar was just a small village spread out across a big island, Ngowi said.

‘So you would know if a foreigner had bought a flat in Freddie Mercury’s building, even if it happened through a local intermediary,’ Mari said.

It had become apparent to Ngowi that Mari was looking for information, not a flat.

‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘But there aren’t any foreigners living in the Camlur’s building.’

Mari nodded. They had probably found all the information they would get from this office. She stood up, thanking Omar Ngowi and walking to the door with Lia and Paddy following after.

‘Where are you off to in such a hurry?’ Ngowi asked.

‘We have a lot of things we need to look into,’ Paddy said congenially.

‘You tourists,’ Ngowi sighed. ‘It is like watching a nature programme. Always rushing from one thing to the next.’

They were already on their way out the door when they heard Ngowi speak again.

‘The Camlur’s building doesn’t have any foreign owners,’ Ngowi said. ‘But that isn’t Freddie Mercury’s family’s real home. They only lived there some of the time, and Freddie almost not at all. You probably don’t have time to hear about where the Bulsara family’s real house is located though.’

Freddie Mercury’s extended family had lived in several buildings in Stone Town. It was no wonder the information about them was confused and that it was misused to lure tourists in.

Once they were all sitting around his small table again, Omar Ngowi told them about all of the places. Taking out a well-worn map, he showed the location of each building as he described it.

There were a couple of places where Freddie Mercury had lived with his parents, when he was still little Farrokh Bulsara. There were several buildings where other family members had lived. At least one aunt had lived in the Zanzibar Gallery building, and right next to the square near the old post office was another similar building.

Further out of town, on Nyerere Road, was the Zoroastrian temple the family had attended. The Bulsara family was from India and were adherents of the teachings of the Prophet Zarathustra. The temple had deteriorated to the point of uselessness, but in its day it had been beautiful.

‘They say Freddie went there too,’ Ngowi said. ‘But there aren’t many who would really know, and their memories are beginning to be frail.’

The island was full of places with connections to the Bulsara family. Ngowi pointed out a place in Stone Town along the shore: the Shangani Street swimming beach where Freddie swam as a child with his friends. Outside the city was another similar place at a small cove.

‘Achatina Beach,’ Ngowi said.

That was a new name. Before it had never really had a name. For a long time it had been a popular swimming spot, and Freddie was known to have gone there often. The boys roamed the island, and of course only men and boys could swim freely with others watching, Ngowi pointed out. Nowadays swimming was not allowed on Achatina Beach because the whole area was protected. Nearby there were some caves where a rare mollusc named
Achatina reticulata
lived.

‘There aren’t any of the snails on the beach,’ Ngowi said. ‘But they still call it Achatina Beach. People think it is good that at least some of the beaches can’t have expensive hotels built on them even if it is for the sake of a snail that no one ever sees.’

The Bulsara family had been upstanding members of the community, and many older people remembered them well. But what little
Farrokh had turned into was a more difficult matter to swallow. For Muslims, Freddie Mercury’s homosexuality was a complicated issue, and although the island no longer boasted a strong Zoroastrian religious community, Mercury’s entire public persona was at stark variance with that tradition as well.

People had tried running Freddie Mercury tours of Stone Town to give visiting foreigners a chance to walk in the singer’s footsteps. There were plenty of interested tourists, but the efforts tended to sputter because the more conservative locals frowned upon the idea. Once there had even been talk of a Freddie Mercury statue, just for the tourists, but the idea disappeared with a whimper rather than a bang.

‘I don’t understand what the big problem is,’ Ngowi said. ‘You wouldn’t believe the tourists we see around here all the time. Women wearing almost nothing and men holding hands. But we also have our Tanzanian traditions. And Muslim traditions.’

Freddie Mercury’s actual childhood home was located in the more rambling part of Stone Town, Shangani. The area was made up of tumbledown buildings, some of them more than a hundred years old, and the alleys that snaked between them. Mercury’s home was simple, a white, two-storey building with dark front doors made of thick timbers. The beautiful old doors were the only thing that differentiated it from all the others.

‘The building is not for sale,’ Ngowi rushed to point out. ‘I’ve checked many times.’

But the neighbouring building had been sold recently. Two years previously a foreign-owned company had purchased it.

‘Does the owner live in the building?’ Paddy asked.

Ngowi didn’t know. He didn’t know anything about the owner, but at the time of purchase he had heard rumours that the sale happened because it was next to the Bulsara family’s old house.

Zanzibar was like a small village, the agent repeated, but one could do almost anything to the buildings of Stone Town, any kind of renovation you wanted, without attracting any attention. If the owner stayed on the right side of the authorities, no one came snooping behind the thick walls of the houses to see what was going on inside.

‘Can you find out who owns the building?’ Mari asked.

Ngowi glanced to the side and thought. Even before he had his mouth open, Mari had the banknotes ready in her hand.

‘Of course we will compensate you for your trouble,’ Mari said.

‘That isn’t necessary,’ Ngowi said.

With his eyes he counted the total Mari was holding.

‘But it is true that I will need a little help to get this information,’ he said. ‘A little more help.’

Mari added a couple more notes from her wallet. The agent gave no indication he had seen any of this.

‘I need to make a few phone calls,’ he said. ‘It will take time. Here you can’t always get people on the phone instantly, unlike me.’

An hour later they had one address and two telephone numbers.

Lia stared at the piece of paper in Mari’s hand. When Omar Ngowi had rung his contacts, none of them had understood the Swahili conversations or even realised he had found the numbers until he started writing them on the paper before their eyes.

One of the phone numbers belonged to a man who had killed five people and maybe more. The other belonged to the local man who served as the intermediary for the purchase of the building.

‘Why are these numbers important to you?’ Ngowi asked.

There was no suspicion in his eyes. He was not looking for more money, Lia realised. He was interested because three foreigners had appeared in his office asking strange questions. A temporary bond of secrecy had developed between them and Ngowi, and he wanted to help them achieve their goal, whatever it was.

Paddy looked at Mari without answering Ngowi’s question. Lia didn’t know what to say.

‘You know that most people in the world are good and decent,’ Mari said to Ngowi. ‘And then there are those who aren’t. And a small number of them are truly sick.’

Ngowi froze. He looked at Mari silently and then nodded almost imperceptibly.

‘This address,’ Mari said, looking at the piece of paper. ‘Next to Tippu Tib’s house in Shangani?’