Black Noise (32 page)

A large garden surrounded the ramshackle temple. A fence with iron gates surrounded the garden.

They stopped the van a generous hundred metres away, just in sight of the fence and the old, white edifice behind it.

In the dark, discerning what condition the temple was in was difficult, but the estate agent, Ngowi, had called it a ruin, and everything in the area indicated that it hadn’t been used in decades.

‘Hard to believe,’ Mari said quietly, shaking her head.

She didn’t think it was likely Philip Dillon could have been able to use the temple without anyone noticing. Although the temple was large enough, a lot of people walked through the area each day. Using a famous building would be a huge risk.

But Dillon had come here, straight away. They saw his red dot on the Topo, number one, moving only slightly.

‘He’s listening,’ Paddy said quietly. ‘And watching to see if anyone is following him.’

Dillon’s dot slowly circled the temple grounds, staying outside the fence. Ron followed behind, at precisely the same speed as his quarry.

Mari whispered instructions to the others. Rico and Lia would stay in the car. Mari would go out with Paddy to follow Ron. When Dillon approached the temple itself, they had to be right behind. They couldn’t let him reach his prisoners.

Paddy and Mari were extremely careful as they exited the van. They left the doors slightly ajar so closing them wouldn’t cause any noise.

Rico held the Topo so the light from the display wouldn’t show outside. He and Lia didn’t speak. Just watching the dots on the screen moving after each other was oppressive enough.

Dillon was going to the back of the temple grounds, Lia thought. He had to be almost behind the temple now, in a place that wouldn’t be visible from the street even during the day. Maybe there was another entrance to the fenced area there.

Then the red dot stopped. It stayed motionless for second after second.

Lia stared at the computer screen.

What if he takes his shoes off for some reason?

The thought gave her chills. She glanced at Rico, who was clearly thinking the same thing.

‘Without shoes on that terrain?’ Rico whispered. ‘No way. He isn’t going to take them off.’

The little they could see of the temple garden looked littered and uneven, ground where anything could end up under foot. Why would Dillon go there barefoot?

Ron, Paddy and Mari had noticed Dillon’s pause. Lia and Rico saw on the screen how their dots waited for what would happen next.

Suddenly a light flashed on the screen of Lia’s phone. Mari was ringing.

‘He’s just standing still,’ Mari said quietly.

‘Yes,’ Lia confirmed from the satellite locations.

‘We can see him,’ Mari said. ‘He’s waiting for something. Maybe he’s watching to see if someone is following him. Hard to say where he’s going. Somewhere here is an old cemetery, but I don’t know what he would want there. I’m getting off the phone.’

‘Keep the line open though,’ Lia asked.

‘OK.’

When Philip Dillon started out again, things happened quickly.

He didn’t go to the Zoroastrian temple, he headed off somewhere behind the temple grounds. Lia heard Mari cursing quietly.

‘What now?’ Lia asked.

‘There’s another building. A new one that isn’t on the map!’

Lia and Rico watched on the Topo as Mari, Paddy and Ron started moving after Dillon at the same time.

‘Concrete,’ Mari narrated to the team in the car as she moved slowly, almost at a crawling pace. ‘It looks like a bunker. The window openings are covered.’

Lia glanced at the darkness surrounding the van. Maybe she could just make out the building behind the temple when she really squinted. Her eyes had to adjust to the darkness first since she had been staring at the Topo for so long.

‘Do you see him?’ Mari asked.

‘Yes,’ Lia reported immediately.

Dillon’s red number one blinked on the computer screen but he had made good progress now and his tails were falling behind.

‘It’s like he’s going somewhere behind the concrete building,’ Rico said.

Then the screen flashed and the satellite tracking program disappeared.

‘Shit,’ Rico said.

‘Bad news,’ Lia breathed into the phone.

‘The Topo?’ Mari guessed.

‘Yeah.’

Rico pressed on the machine lightly trying to get more power out of the battery, but the computer was almost done for.

‘We can get along without it,’ Mari said. ‘We can see him again.’

Rico quickly shut down everything else running on the Topo, trying to save the battery. It didn’t help.

‘What do we do?’ Lia asked.

Rico was already getting the car charger out of his bag. Lia started explaining the situation to Mari, but she clearly wasn’t listening.

‘We keep catching glimpses of him,’ Mari repeated. ‘He’s going somewhere behind the building.’

Lia heard Mari conversing quietly with Paddy.

‘We think he’s going to get something,’ Mari said into the phone. ‘Maybe a weapon.’

Rico got the inverter set up and connected to the Topo. When he started the van, wavy lines flashed on the tablet screen and then the display brightened. Gradually the applications came back to life as the power started flowing smoothly.

After a painful wait, the map of the satellite program returned to the screen. Then the blinking dots reappeared.

Lia and Rico stared in surprise at Philip Dillon’s red number one.

‘He’s getting away from you!’ Lia hissed into the phone.

Dillon had progressed past the bunker, several hundred metres away.

‘He keeps getting further away,’ Lia reported.

Mari and Paddy held a hushed consultation.

‘I don’t think there are any buildings there,’ Mari said.

Rico and Lia could see the same thing on the map, which was marked as empty in that area.

‘I think the prisoners could be in that bunker,’ Mari said.

Lia stared at the dots on the screen. Dillon’s dot was far away, hundreds of metres on.

Then Mari and the others were at the door of the concrete building.

‘Locked,’ Mari said into the phone. ‘We have to go in there now. I’m ringing off. Tell me if Dillon comes.’

Lia stared in growing terror at the few small dots blinking on the computer screen. As it stood Philip Dillon was still moving away from them.

When the door opens, heat flares out at them.

Mari follows Ron and Paddy, whose picks have made short work of the concrete bunker’s lock. The men go into the building first, securing the entrance.

They have to go in no matter what is there. They know it will be bad, but their time is running out.

And Mari wants to go in because this killer isn’t going to finish what he intends to do, not if it depends on her.

Her body is throbbing. She has met evil people in her life but never anything like this.

Before them is a stained plastered wall. The building is strange. Inside it is something odd. It’s as if a second building has been built inside it, walls that almost reach the ceiling. And bars.

A weak light flickers over everything. Somewhere there must be a generator. From the ceiling hangs a single darkened lamp. But there is a different shade to the light in the building, and suddenly Mari realises what it is. Fire. Somewhere in here a fire is burning. That is where the stifling heat and smell of smoke are coming from.

They didn’t see smoke outside the building. It must be piped somewhere further off or perhaps they just couldn’t see it in the dark.

Philip Dillon and darkness. Philip Dillon and fire.

Mari’s heart is pounding. Pounding so hard her head is thumping, but she doesn’t stop. Somewhere here are two men on the verge of death.

They move further in, and it becomes almost hard to breathe, but they go deeper into the building anyway. Paddy goes left, Ron goes right. Mari follows Paddy, moving along a large, dirty wall. The men have their weapons ready. Mari has hers in her hand but has not yet removed the safety.

Mari looks at the strange, darkened walls, the bars, the small rooms built inside the building. Why would someone build a building with small windowless rooms inside? Then she understands. Cells. Dillon has built cells here, several of them.

How many prisoners does Dillon have? How many people are here dying?

Paddy motions for Mari to stop and moves forward himself. He peeks around a corner. Then he disappears. Ron is out of sight.

Mari waits. Seconds pass, dozens of seconds. A minute. No sign of the men.

Mari waits longer. Her heart pounds, but she does not move. No sign of the men.

Mari removes the safety on her pistol. She steps up to the corner and cautiously looks around it.

First she sees the fire. The flickering flame and the trail of smoke rising from the back of the large room. In the stinging darkness her eyes gravitate towards the light, hard to look at for its brightness, but in the dark, human eyes always move towards the light.

Fire. The painful sight reminds her of something, one detail among the countless Mari has learned about Freddie Mercury. The Bulsara family were Zoroastrians. Zoroastrians keep an eternal fire in their temples, a symbol of divinity and purification.

And then Mari sees Paddy next to the flame. Paddy has fallen to his knees. He is staring at something, staring through the bars of one of the cells. Dear Paddy is just frozen, looking, his hand pressed to his mouth so he doesn’t scream.

The sound inside Mari swells. Her ears begin to hum. She moves closer to Paddy and sees Ron to her right. Ron has stopped to stare at the same sight as Paddy. He is leaning against the wall, not out of exhaustion, not taking cover, but just in shock.

Mari can hear the coursing of her own blood, her heart struggling to keep up with what is happening.

When men like this are paralysed, when they are so terrified their legs fail them, it is as though the world has lost its foundation. Everything starts to fall.

Mari goes closer and sees what they see. The sound inside Mari stops. Time stops.

Dear God.

Behind the bars, on the floor of the cell lies a person – the tortured, brutalised remains of a man. A man looking at them.

Aldo Zambrano cannot speak. He is alive but unable to move or make any sound. His whole body is full of burn marks, weeping wounds of scorched flesh.

Mari walks towards Aldo Zambrano. He sees her. They look at each other.

Everything is too much. Man was not made to endure sights the likes of this. Mari makes a sound, not even speech. She sees too much in his eyes. Mari turns away, tries to get away, and then she sees into the other cell. There lies another man. Theo Durand.

His chest is heaving. Durand is breathing painfully, not looking at them. He hears their footsteps but does not dare look at them. He is only waiting to die.

The cells are constructed so the men cannot see each other, but they have heard each other’s agony. These men have been kept prisoner, helplessly hearing each other, knowing that the only thing they can expect is death.

A voice inside Mari screams. Someone in her head is screaming. She turns away, from Paddy fallen to his knees and Ron frozen in terror and two men who no longer have anything.

Theo Durand and Aldo Zambrano will never recover from this. There is no treatment, no therapy, no community of family and loved ones that could heal them completely.

They might survive. But Mari knows that no one will be able to remove how they have screamed here and listened to each other’s screams.

Mari knows what it is to be subjugated so thoroughly that recovery is impossible.

Mari feels the weapon in her hand. What if she saw Philip Dillon now?

Forgiveness. There will be none. Its time has passed.

She has to get out, if only for a moment. She walks past the cells, turning at the corner of the final cell, without waiting or looking at what might be there.

A table. On the table a mess of papers and pens and filth. Cables. Near the table is a small stool. Philip Dillon sits here sometimes. Here he sits listening to the sounds his victims make.

Mari steps over to the table. On the floor on the other side of the table she sees a pile of clothes, someone’s clothing. Zambrano’s or Durand’s.

Her eyes pick out a drawing in the chaos of the table. Dillon has sat here drawing pictures. And then Mari sees a large book in amongst the papers.

She opens the heavy book with dark covers. A sketchbook. Dillon sketched his videos in advance, making storyboards for them. Mari sees pictures of kicking legs, familiar images from the videos the whole world has seen. She turns the large, thick pages of the book. Close-ups of men who have been burned. Dillon planned it. He planned how to burn Zambrano. He planned everything for filming, plotting out his acts in advance.

Even before she reaches the final pages, Mari knows what is there. The future videos.

Men tortured with fire. And then burned alive. Dillon intends to put them in the fire one by one. Philip Dillon and fire.

The men in the final videos will see what is ahead of them. The victims will see as they are forced into the flames one by one. How they are burned in the dark of the night.

Mari’s grip on the book fails.

She reels. She has to get out of here.

The red dot stood motionless.

Lia and Rico saw on the screen as Philip Dillon stopped perhaps five hundred metres from the concrete building. They saw Mari, Paddy and Ron’s dots, almost motionless in the building.

How long have they been in there?

Telling time was difficult. From the clock on the display they could see that Mari and the others had only been in the building a few minutes, but even that felt like forever.

What is Dillon looking for? And what have they found in the building?

Lia was holding her mobile ready the whole time. Phone in one hand, pistol in the other.

When the red dot suddenly started moving again, Lia and Rico jumped. Dillon had turned back towards the concrete building and the temple.

Suddenly the wavy lines oscillated on the screen again. The map and dots disappeared for a second.

‘No!’ Lia shouted. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘It’s the charger,’ Rico said. ‘We must have had a surge when we started the engine.’

The map on the screen wavered again, and the dots trembled. Then the image focused.

Dillon’s red dot number one was still moving towards the concrete building. Slowly but steadily.

Lia dialled Mari’s number on the phone and then noticed on the screen that green dot number four was moving. Mari was coming out of the building. Paddy and Ron’s dots were still motionless.

The phone rang. Mari didn’t answer.

Lia and Rico stared in growing panic as Dillon’s dot approached inexorably.

When Mari’s number four was still moving and Lia saw on the screen that Dillon was going straight towards her, she opened the van door.

‘Call Paddy,’ Rico suggested. ‘Or Ron.’

Rico’s face was completely pale. He stared at Lia as she got out of the van.

Then the map on the Topo’s display disappeared completely. Lia didn’t hang around to listen to the cursing that came from the vehicle as Rico tried to get the program running again.

Lia set off around the temple grounds, towards the concrete building, pistol ready in her hand. She let her mobile ring. Mari didn’t answer.

In the thick darkness, the outlines of things disappeared. After staring at the Topo, Lia was having a hard time making out what she was seeing in the night.

If she hadn’t been able to slowly start recognising the shapes of buildings and trees, the sandy clearing stretching in front of her would have been like a strange planet shrouded in darkness.

Silently she walked across the sand, glancing at her phone and selecting Mari’s number again. Nothing.

When the cloud cover thinned for a moment and the misty light of the moon shone through, Lia noticed a strange spectacle whirling in the air. A moving black swirl was visible against the sky. It fluttered restlessly like an enormous version of the black hood Lia had seen sweep over the heads of two men today.

A flock of birds was whirling in the sky. Or were they bats? Lia wondered. Or maybe they were birds returning from feeding out at sea. She was in a place where she didn’t recognise or control anything.

Reaching the back of the temple she immediately saw Mari’s dark figure against the light flickering from the door of the concrete building. Mari stepped out of the building slowly, struggling to stay standing.

She had to make a decision, Lia knew. Dillon would come around the building at any moment and see Mari. Mari had a gun, but there was a chance she might not notice him.

Who knew what the killer had gone to get. Maybe he had a weapon again.

Lia couldn’t yell to Mari. Dillon was too close. Would Lia have time to get Mari back in the building? Paddy and Ron would be
there, and they would be four against Dillon’s one. But it was already a matter of seconds. Lia took off running.

Mari barely reacted to her arrival.

Lia grabbed her by the shoulder, trying to get her moving, but Mari just stood there holding her pistol pointed at the ground.

‘Don’t go in there,’ Mari said.

‘Dillon is coming!’ Lia yelped.

She saw the message get through, but Mari was too numb to react.

Lia dragged her to the ground. Together they pressed themselves into the sand.

They both had guns. Mari wasn’t at full capacity, but maybe they would be able to surprise Dillon, Lia thought.

Mari lay next to her. Lia saw the light glimmering from the open door.

The light will tell Dillon that people have gone inside.

They waited for any sound.

Lia didn’t dare look up any higher, but she tried to watch the sides of the building. Could she see motion there? Was that where Dillon would appear?

A voice echoed from the building. Someone screamed. It might have been Paddy, Lia thought. It sounded like Paddy. Was he shouting in warning, or just saying something to Ron?

Time passed. Lia was sure that Dillon had arrived at the building and was evaluating the situation. But was he able to see them? It was so dark he wouldn’t be able to see them without getting close. They were lying so close to the ground that they could feel a hint of the warmth of the day in the sand.

A sound from the road surprised them completely. Someone was shouting from the van. It was Rico. Lia heard naked fear in his voice.

Rico had been attacked.

The scream stopped. The door of the van slammed shut.

Lia rose up on her elbows. She had to take the risk of looking. Far away on the road their van drove away.

Philip Dillon didn’t turn on the lights, he just drove off into the darkness.

Lia didn’t go into the concrete building.

She made her decision there, lying next to Mari. Mari, who was completely paralysed by something she had seen in the building and the desperation they had heard in Rico’s voice.

What had the estate agent, Omar Ngowi, said? He had showed them the places on the island with connections to Freddie Mercury’s family. Most of them were in Stone Town. But a few were a little further from the city. Like the ruins of the Zoroastrian temple here next to her.

Lia always remembered maps. She could always tell directions and distances.

‘Achatina Beach,’ she said.

Mari heard and understood. Philip Dillon was going in the direction of Achatina Beach.

‘Send Paddy or Ron after me. Or both of them,’ Lia said.

Before Mari could try to stop her, Lia started running.