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  ‘Time of death around ten o’clock last night. Suspected heart attack, although he doesn’t look like an obvious heart attack candidate, he seems fit and healthy. Medical records may tell us more. We can do the autopsy as soon as the body has been formally identified.’

  ‘Who found him?’ Darren asked the duty police officer.

  ‘One of his students, guv. Name of Marcel Rees. He’s waiting in the student common room down the corridor.’

  ‘Right, we’ll have a word with him after we’ve looked around here, then we’ll contact the family. But if it doesn’t look suspicious, why were we called in?’

  ‘There’s just this one thing – on his desk.’

  The police officer motioned to Professor Neilson’s workspace, a disorderly spread of documents and textbooks. His in-tray was piled high, and on top lay a brown jiffy envelope, addressed in blue biro to the Major Incident Team, Merseyside Police.

  ‘Look at this, Colette. He was about to send us something.’

  With gloved hands Colette picked up the package. ‘Feels like a USB. Yeah, it’s definitely a USB. I’ll bag that, and we can check it as soon as we get out of here.’

  Darren surveyed the room carefully. Claustrophobic in its windowlessness, it was an eclectic combination of recording studio, study and sitting room. The professor’s chaotic desk was flanked by a raised sound board and an array of audio and technical equipment; stacks of amplifiers, cables, microphones, items that the detectives didn’t recognise. Behind the desk there was a seating area with a sofa and armchair, and a small coffee table which had been upended, the remnants of a takeaway strewn on the floor.

  ‘Something happened here,’ said Darren.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Colvin. ‘I imagine the heart attack happened while he was eating, he stood up and then staggered over here.’ He went through the motions of Shepherd’s potential path.

  ‘But why would he have struggled towards the back of the room, instead of towards the exit? What’s in here?’ Darren was looking at a door in the wall, adjacent to Neilson’s body. With gloved hands, and careful not to touch the corpse, he tried the door. It was locked. ‘Can we get a key for this?’

  While they waited for the police officer to request a key from the departmental office, Dr Colvin packed up his battered leather case and folded his spectacles into the breast pocket of his tweed blazer.

  ‘Well, Detective, I think my work here is done for now. I expect I shall be seeing you at the trial of our illustrious Calvinist friends. Three weeks today, I understand? I must admit I’m intrigued to finally come face to face with our culprits. I believe it’s the most fascinatingly gruesome set of crimes I have encountered in all my time. Although I imagine none of us are looking forward to revisiting the case of young Chelsea.’

  They all nodded at the grim memory of the mutilated body of Chelsea McAllister; the horrific inversion of a baptism that had desecrated the altar of an abandoned church. As Dr Colvin left, the police officer returned with a set of keys from reception. Darren opened the door in the back wall and pushed it open. He and Colette peered inside to avoid stepping over the body.

  ‘I think he was sleeping in here, look.’

  It was a tiny room, probably designed as a store cupboard, but there were no shelves. Instead, the walls and ceiling were lined with dark grey foam shards, hundreds of baleful spikes of them. The floor space was also covered with the same foam shards, and balanced on top, like a bed of soft nails, was an inflated mattress and some neatly-piled blankets and a pillow. In the corner was a stockpile of bottles of water and packets of biscuits.

  ‘All this insulation,’ said Darren, leaning in to look around the enclosed space. ‘It’s a soundproof booth, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s like he was hiding from something. And he was clearly prepared to spend long periods of time in here.’

  They turned around and stepped carefully back into the middle of the office. ‘So you start having a heart attack, alone in the office late at night,’ said Darren. ‘What’s the first thing you do?’

  ‘Try and call for help. Except his mobile phone is still on his desk. And the exit to the corridor is over there.’

  ‘But instead he went the other way,’ said Darren. ‘He tried to get into this cupboard. And found it locked.’

  They looked at each other, both wondering the same thing. Was this just a simple heart attack?

  Marcel Rees perched awkwardly in an armchair, nursing a mug of tea and shaking slightly. He wore extremely thick glasses and his face was framed by a full but neat beard, joined to his hair by sideburns in a sort of helmet.

  ‘Marcel, you found Professor Neilson this morning,’ said Colette gently. ‘I’m sorry you had to go through that. Can you tell us what happened?’

  ‘I just went for my nine o’clock tutorial. Professor Neilson is – was – my PhD supervisor. There was no answer when I knocked, which wasn’t like him. I waited outside for a few minutes, then I decided to see if the door was unlocked, so I could leave my chapter on his desk. The door was open, so I went in and he was lying there. On the floor.’

  ‘Did you touch him at all?’

  ‘No, no, I didn’t. I went over and I could see he was dead. His eyes were open and he was white. So I just went to get help.’

  ‘Did the Professor have any health problems that you know about?’

  Rees looked at them uncomfortably. ‘Physical health problems? No, not that I know of. He was very fit, a keen cyclist. But you could say, mental health problems? He had synaesthesia. I mean, that’s not in itself a mental health problem, and that’s why he’s so brilliant at what he does. What he did. He saw sounds as colours, shapes. It was a curse on him really. It took over his whole brain. And recently it had been bothering him more than before. He was getting, well, paranoid.’

  ‘Paranoid about what?’

  ‘To be honest, crazy stuff. His research was going off the rails a bit.’

  ‘What was his research?’

  ‘Psychoacoustics is basically the study of how people perceive sound, and are affected by sound. But there are many different aspects, and Professor Neilson was an expert on the occupational health aspects of sound, in particular groundborne sound. You know, from manmade vibrations, that sort of thing. It has a lot of commercial applications and he was often called to consult on building projects and so on.’

  ‘Was he consulting on anything in particular at the moment?’

  ‘No, not that I know of. He… was becoming quite difficult to deal with.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Well, my research is on subliminal messages…’

  Darren and Colette raised their eyebrows, but Rees reassured them. ‘In advertising, that sort of thing, all perfectly standard. You know – earworms, jingles, the links between music, branding and consumer manipulation. Sound branding is really the future of advertising, of corporate identity. That’s what I want to do. And in many ways, Professor Neilson was the perfect supervisor. His insight into psychoacoustics was… well, genius. But recently he had been taking it too far. He was steering me down the route of conspiracy theories. You know all those spooky noises in the city that everyone’s talking about? He was convinced it was some sort of plot. I kept telling him – it’s just the wind, and the traffic, and the underground trains. It’s just modern life, isn’t it? Modern life is noisy. But he wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘So he was imagining things?’

  ‘Yes. Exactly. It’s called pareidolia. Misinterpreting sounds, hearing things that aren’t there. It’s a specific form of apophenia, which means seeing imaginary connections between unrelated things. It can signal the beginnings of schizophrenia. But he said I couldn’t possibly understand since I didn’t have his synaesthesia.’

  ‘Any family? Wife and kids?’

  ‘No. He lived alone.’

  ‘How many people work in this department?’ asked Darren. ‘Anyone that might have had something against him? Any reason he might have had t
o kill himself?’

  ‘You don’t think…? I thought it was a heart attack or something.’

  ‘There’s no evidence of anything suspicious. We’re just asking questions, that’s all.’

  ’Did you know he was sleeping in a cupboard?’ asked Colette.

  The student nodded. ‘It’s not a cupboard, it’s more than that. It’s an anechoic chamber. It blocks out all sound. Very unnerving, you can hear your own blood vessels circulating. We have a proper one in the department, downstairs. You know, a professional one, which is used for experiments. But Neilson built his own.’

  ‘What was he afraid of?’

  The student hesitated. ‘I don’t know. Like I said, he was paranoid. Or maybe it was all part of an experiment.’

  ‘Do you have a key to his… cupboard?’

  ‘Well yes, I do actually. I mean, we all do. The individual offices themselves are private, but the storage and research units here all open with a skeleton key which is provided to all postgraduates and staff. So we have full access to the facilities at all times. Lots of acoustic experiments take place at night or over long periods of time, so the place is open twenty-four hours a day.’

  As they drove back to Canning Place, Darren asked Colette, ‘So, what are your thoughts?’

  ‘There’s something bothering me.’

  ‘Me too. Can you put your finger on it?’

  ‘It’s that student. He seemed… not guilty, but…’

  ‘Troubled.’

  ‘Exactly. Troubled. There’s something troubled about him. But I suppose if you spent your life studying subliminal messages you’d eventually start questioning everything.’

  ‘To be honest, I didn’t even know psychoacoustics was a thing. You learn something new every day.’

  ‘Well. Let’s check out this USB and wait for pathology to see if it was a heart attack. More than likely, there’s no case for us here.’

  In the evidence room at Canning Place, Darren and Colette inserted the USB device into a PC drive. It contained only one file, an mp3 audio file which appeared on the screen with the file name LISTEN. Colette double-clicked on the play button, and the noise blasted at them so loudly out of the computer’s speaker that they were torn between covering their ears and scrabbling for the volume control.

  ‘Jesus! Who the fuck left it on full volume?’

  With the volume safely lowered, nursing their ear drums, they listened to the recording. It was set to last for three minutes, and they listened to the whole thing, but they soon realised that it was just a few seconds of audio playing repeatedly on a loop. And it was a terrible sound; like a thousand snakes hissing, on top of storm waves crashing on a beach, on top of a giant orchestra tuning up, on top of screams, cries, shouts. It was a cacophony of static, feedback and distortion, and the whole effect was almost white noise. But not quite. White noise would have been generated randomly, and this didn’t feel quite random. There were tones and pitches in there somewhere. Barely discernible, but there.

  ‘What the fuck is this?’ said Darren, switching it off. ‘Do you think there’s a hidden message in it? I’ll get audio forensics to have a go.’

  ‘Good luck with that,’ said Colette, rolling her eyes. ‘Apparently they’re backed up two weeks at the moment. Vice has had a big wire-tap operation on so they’ve got hundreds of hours to get through.’

  ‘Shit. Maybe I can try and sneak this up the list. Especially if anything odd comes back from the autopsy.’

  ‘But then, the student did say Neilson had paranoia. So this could be absolute rubbish.’

  ‘Sends shivers down your spine though, doesn’t it, that sound?’ said Darren. ‘You know what it reminds me of? Heavy metal.’

  ‘You can ask our friend Mikko Kristensen – he’s coming in tomorrow, isn’t he, to see his statement before the trial?’

  Four

  The next morning, Darren was lost in thought at his desk when the phone rang; it was reception. ‘We’ve got a Mikko Kristensen here to see you.’

  ‘Nice one, send him up.’

  Darren couldn’t help but smile as he stood up and signalled to the skeletal figure who was traipsing his way across the office. Mikko Kristensen, lead guitarist in Norwegian death metal band Total Depravity, walked with a half-swagger, half-slope; looking furtively from side to side from under his trilby hat with an expression that was an odd combination of sleaze and earnestness. His clothes were varying shades of black, and tattoos escaped from his clothes up his neck and onto his fingers, like thorns on a bush, poison ivy on a tree. A confusing beard straggled in blond wisps from his chin. The only clue that he had in fact studied this look in detail was the freshly applied eye make-up. This was the ridiculous person who had solved a murder case quicker than Darren and his team, and probably saved Helen Hope’s life. They shook hands, and as Mikko struggled to meet his eye, Darren remembered that despite this man’s terrifying appearance and presence when he was on stage, he was actually very shy.

  They went through his statements, in which Mikko explained how he had been contacted by the police in October of the previous year in connection with a murder investigation. The inverted axe carved into the forehead of a murder victim was an exact match with the logo of his death metal band, Total Depravity. It was a strange coincidence that his band happened to be touring the UK at the time, and had been in Liverpool on the night of the murder. Mikko had also been contacted by Sister Helen Hope, who had made the inverted axe connection herself, independently of the police. Fearing themselves suspects, he and Helen had conducted their own parallel investigation, and in many ways had got further than the police.

  As they wrapped things up, Darren remembered his USB, and decided to take a chance.

  ‘Can I ask you something? If I play you a recording, can you tell me what type of heavy metal it is?’

  This was a little unorthodox, Darren knew, but how long might he have to wait for the audio team? He felt that he and Mikko had a unique shared history that had created trust between them and made it somehow acceptable. He handed Mikko some ear phones and pressed play. Mikko listened intently, and after a few seconds began nodding in recognition. Surely he doesn’t actually like that terrible noise? Darren thought. After about thirty seconds Mikko took out the earphones and said, ‘Ok.’ He gave Darren a knowing look.

  ‘Ok what? Don’t tell me, it’s top of the heavy metal charts. It’s from your new album.’

  ‘No way. That isn’t even music, dude. It’s noise. But it is backmasked as fuck. And backmasking is like super-metal.’

  ‘Backmasked?’

  ‘You know. It’s recorded backwards. I can tell from the sound. It probably has like a hidden message or something.’

  ‘Hidden message? But why is that… metal?’

  Mikko waved his hand in dismissal. ‘Oh, it was this whole thing in the 1980s. They accused metal bands of hiding satanic messages in their songs, telling people to kill themselves, or whatever. They even put Judas Priest on trial for it, there was this whole court case when a kid committed suicide after listening to heavy metal in his bedroom.’

  Darren raised his eyebrows sardonically. ‘The music must have been really terrible then.’ Mikko put up his hands in protest.

  ‘Hey, you can’t blame it on metal, dude. It was the Beatles who did it first.’

  ‘The Beatles?

  ‘Yeah, on their Revolver album. Not one of their best, I have to fucking say. I think it was Yoko Ono’s idea.’

  ‘Anyway. So you’re telling me that if I play this in reverse, I might be able to decipher something.’

  ‘Exactly, dude. Fucking cool. Or, maybe not so cool. Maybe the person who made this was really scared of something.’

  Darren walked Mikko back down to reception.

  ‘Thank you for coming in, Mikko. Are you going back to Norway until the trial, then?’

  ‘No, they told me they don’t know how long it will last, so we decided to stay around here for a while.’
<
br />   ‘We? The whole band is here?’

  ‘What can I tell you? We like the place! Even though you did accuse us of murder. We’re going to record our new album here, do some gigs… make a little sonic warfare on this city. We rented a studio with a place to sleep, you know. It’s actually in Formby. I’ve really got a thing for those spooky pine trees. That forest was metal as fuck even before it was taken over by evil nuns.’

  ‘Nice. Are you going to see Helen Hope?’

  ‘Yes indeed.’ Mikko put his hands in his pockets, looked at the ground and shuffled from foot to foot awkwardly. ‘She is the other attraction of this city. Tonight, actually. I’m kind of nervous, to be honest with you. It’s been almost a year since I last saw her.’

  Darren watched him drift, like an ethereal being, out of the revolving doors into the street. There was no denying the coincidence that Total Depravity had turned up in his city at the same moment that a body was found, just as they had last year. Back at his desk, half absent-mindedly, Darren typed Total Depravity into the search engine and clicked on the Facebook page. The latest post, uploaded the previous day, said, ‘DEPRAVED ONES! We are stoked to announce that our new album is going to be recorded this autumn at Squirrel Studios in Liverpool, UK. Which is basically a spooky house in the woods. While we’re here, we’re gonna be playing a few ‘intimate’ gigs so watch this space… because we’re gonna be waging some sonic warfare on this fine city.’

  An acoustics professor, scared to death of something. A backmasked recording. A heavy metal band waging sonic warfare. Darren shook himself and went back to work on the Shepherd documentation.

  Five

  ‘Silence.’

  The first time it was uttered as a roar, echoing around the stone pillars and wooden rafters, causing the congregation to hold their breath in terror, spellbound by wild eyes and rage.

  ‘Silence.’