This area, in a neglected part of our city, is known as the zone of silence. There is no simple, rational, explanation. It is not the configuration of tall buildings on the perimeter creating a Faraday cage as some people initially suggested. Nor is it about the positioning of phone masts, their potential sabotage or malfunction, since the problem goes beyond mobile phones. It is not the effects of microclimate. No, none of this accounts for the fact that here, in this part of the city, there is no signal.

#

When Michelle gets to the scene, crosses under the police tape, and enters the forensic tent she stops to examine the evidence markers. A few streets back, as she entered the zone, she took out her phone and watched the indicator bar flutter and die. There is a satisfaction in this. She likes being alone, uninterrupted.
        
Soon she will move forward to examine the body, begin her swabbing and tweezer picking, her search for the type of signals that she is interested in. Not the discrepancies and feints of language but rather the incontestable leavings of human contact. Back in the laboratory, she will examine them under a microscope. She will revel in the landscapes that she finds there.
        
I have every faith in Michelle. She is diligent and professional. As a girl she plucked the wings off butterflies and examined them under magnification, gazing upon an iridescent stained glass more mesmerising that the windows of gothic cathedrals.         

#

Duncan stands some few metres away, outside the forensic tent, just beyond the crime scene tape. He is cold. He has been here for over an hour, arriving with the first responders and told to guard the scene. He has been a police constable for nearly two years and attended five murders. At previous scenes he has had to tell gawkers who want to take pictures with their phones to stand back, to show some respect. But here, in the zone of silence, hardly anyone has come to do that. A few people stand around silently such as the woman at the entrance to the housing estate and a weirdo up close to the police line.

Duncan would like to text his girlfriend. He would like to know what she is doing at this exact moment because he suspects she is having an affair.
        
But there is no signal.
        
Instead, his thoughts go over, once again, the many signs he has detected. Her lateness coming home. The receipt for a bottle of champagne he found when he was searching through the bin. Along with some tags for lingerie he has never seen. Most telling are the phone conversations he has walked in on. When she suddenly changes intonation, and her voice rises just a degree. The words becoming meaningless labels for situations he knows are not real.
        
All these traces will cohere very soon into a signal. Yet here, right now, there is no signal.

#

Mildren has arrived late, but it doesn't matter, he is still the only reporter here. No one takes much of an interest in the zone of silence. The inhabitants read no online news, produce no tweets or other social media messages. They generate no content at all. Mildren only knows about the murder because of a friendly detective at the nearest station outside the zone.
        
As he entered the zone, he took out his phone and watched the signal stutter and die. No convenient uploading of copy here.
        
He asks the shivering police officer standing by the tape what the situation is and, to Mildren's surprise, gets a useful response. Perhaps the copper is bored, in need of distraction.
        
"Victim is still unidentified. Middle aged man. Stabbing. Forensics are in there now."
        
Mildren is disappointed. Very run of the mill. Even though he knows he is a good journalist it is hard to make a mark when you don't get the stories. If only he got something juicy. Like a young woman. Or a child. A child would get him noticed, would send a signal. But there is no signal.
        
"I knew him."
        
It is a woman, standing at his shoulder.
        
"He lived near me," she says.
        
After she has given her details to the police officer, Mildren approaches her. While he is here, he might as well see if there is any human interest.

#

Deidre wonders why she takes the reporter to the flat of the dead man. What business is it of hers? Except that she wants, somehow, to let the world outside know what it is like here.
        
As she leads him into the housing estate she sees the familiar with fresh eyes, the reporter's eyes, hoping that he notes the piles of televisions, laptops, internet hubs, phones and e-readers that have all been tossed from balconies into the courtyard. They form piles and cairns of what is no longer necessary. She hopes he sees, amongst all this, the books, newspapers and magazines. In the zone, all forms of communication are being discarded. There was a smell here once, rain-soaked paperbacks and the soft corrosion of plastic and metal. Now either the smell is gone, or she no longer registers it.
        
She leads the reporter up a stairwell and along a balcony past the doors to the flats.
        
She stops outside one of the doors.
        
"It's open," the reporter says, pushing it slightly.
        
"Yeah. People do that. No one has much to nick anymore. And perhaps they hope that one day someone will come in."
        
Inside she shows him an emptiness hardly broken by the few sticks of furniture, the discarded food wrappings.
        
"It's all like this round here," she tells him. "It's as though we're being erased."
        
The reporter runs his finger though his thinning hair, then reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone. Then remembers and puts it back again.
        
"Who was he?" he asks.
        
"I think his name was Roy. Or Roger. Something like that."

#

As Roy or Roger lay dying, he tried to think about his life, about what mark he had made, what trace of him there would be when he was gone. Over the years, the people he had met had become vague, outlines barely distinguishable from one another. His life had become a series of routines that involved occasionally traipsing to the nearest cashpoint outside the zone. Like other inhabitants, he knew he could no longer exist out there, in a world of incessant contact, intrusive interaction. The quiet absences of the zone have become an addiction. Yet, as the wounds in his chest and neck bled out, as his body began to falter, his brain generated a long illusionary moment of light, a signal in search of a home.
        
He looked at me and understood what I had done.

#

I'd followed him that last evening as he made his way back from the edge of the zone. I already knew his habits, like the habits and routines of all the people here. The hours of nothingness passed within our dwellings. The venturing out between dusk and darkness to buy food in one of the corner shops.
        
I tracked him through the streets and passed other solitary people. Their time would come, soon enough. As I proceed with my plan, as the enormity of it mounts, Michelle, with her DNA and fingerprints, her fibres and particles, will lead them to me. Then, at last, we will be noticed.

As I wait at the police tape, as I watch, I know all of them. Their lives, their fears. The signals they want to send. I know too, the traces they will leave and how silence can, at last, finally become eloquent.