Free Black Noise by Pekka Hiltunen Page A

their own. We’ve never seen anything this methodical.’
    Not necessarily in their brutality though, she went on to point out. Most of the crimes against sexual minorities in London and the UK in general were small and undramatic. But savage murders happened every year too.
    ‘How many?’ Lia asked, making some quick notes.
    The number was difficult to pin down precisely, Bayhurst-Davies said. Greater London police recorded some 1,200–1,500 crimes as homophobic each year, but researchers estimated that a much larger number never came to light or the connection to homophobia was unclear. Every year two or three murders occurred in the area with apparent anti-gay or anti-gender minority sentiment.
    ‘But usually it’s impossible to know how much the victim’s sexuality had to do with the case,’ Bayhurst-Davies said. ‘Like what they did to Stuart Walker in Scotland.’
    Lia remembered the news reports well. The brutal murder of a thirty-year-old gay man in a small village had shocked the whole country. A barman by trade, Walker’s family became worried when he failed to show up at his grandmother’s birthday party. His body was found in an industrial estate on the outskirts of town. During the night he had been tortured, killed and his body set alight. Walker had been well-liked, and his homosexuality was public knowledge, but the police avoided talking about the case as a possible hate crime for as long as they could.
    Suddenly Bayhurst-Davies stood up behind her desk.
    ‘Excuse me,’ she said, and then began riffling through a filing cabinet in the corner until she found the paper she was looking for and handed it to Lia.
    ‘This is how it looked at first,’ she said.
    Lia stared at the enormous headlines. GAY MAN KILLED IN SCOTLAND – TIED TO LAMPPOST AND TORTURED.
    ‘Fortunately that wasn’t true – that they found Stuart tied to a lamppost,’ Bayhurst-Davies said. ‘That detail was wrong. But the rest was right. He had been tortured. He had been violated. Just think – a grandmother was waiting for her grandson to come to her eightieth birthday party, the boy who had always been the family comedian. Walker was like that, always talking. Making people laugh, bringing joy.’
    Walker’s murder had sent the whole village into mourning, and nearly a thousand people attended the funeral.
    ‘That’s how it always is,’ Bayhurst-Davies said. ‘There’s always something not quite right in the initial information, but the general picture almost always is. And there is always a village worth of people left suffering. The funerals aren’t usually that big, but every one of these cases affects dozens if not hundreds of people.’
    Big murder cases where the motive was homophobia were rare. But Gallant had always known they happened regularly. And nothing indicated they were on the decline. If anything, the opposite was true. Violent attacks on gay people were a serious problem all around the world. Although the most brutal acts usually occurred in developing countries where homosexuality was completely banned, the West didn’t have any room to flatter itself that it didn’t have a problem too. Violence against women and ethnic minorities had diminished in many countries, but in some areas gays and lesbians were in greater danger than ever before.
    Statistics on hate crimes in general in Britain seemed to show a decline. But it was hard to trust statistics because a large percentage of cases were never recorded.
    ‘Who is behind the attacks?’ Lia asked.
    Usually relatively young adult men, Bayhurst-Davies said. For a long time skinheads were the major culprits, but nowadays the skins were telling the police that Muslim extremist youths were doing it more.
    ‘We don’t have any evidence of a change like that, but there have been cases. It’s hard to classify these current attackers since they’re all so different.’
    Before Stuart Walker and the videotaped killings, the gay murder that had