Statement of Lee Rentoul, on the murder of his associate Paul Noriega.
Statement[]
Lee Rentoul and Paul Noriega have a chequered history. They worked together for 8 years before Lee was arrested instead of Noriega for beating up Toby McMullen. Lee served 5 years in prison for GBH and wanted revenge upon release.
Lee went to McMullan, who explained that, whilst he was in the hospital, Noriega had promised him drugs if he blamed Lee, although he never got them. McMullan suggested they use magic to get revenge; although Lee was sceptical, McMullan convinced him to try.
The two men went to see Angela, an old lady in Bexley, and Lee was somewhat vexed, having expected some kind of hardened killer. Her house was chintzy and the walls covered with framed jigsaws. Angela asked Lee if he wanted Noriega dead. He said yes but more than that, he wanted him to suffer. Angela asked for something that belonged to Noriega that was not a gift and Lee gave her Noriega's lighter.
After 3 weeks of Lee waiting, nothing had apparently happened to Noriega. Lee took the matter into his own hands when he heard Noriega was going to be meeting with Salesa, a large Samoan man and dealer in stolen art, down at the docks. Not wishing to tangle with Salesa's goons, Lee waited for them to leave with the same wooden crate they had arrived with, then moved in and slew Noriega with a combat knife. After the murder, Lee realised that Noriega had a glass eye and was missing a few fingers and various teeth, not something that Lee was aware of. He disposed of the body and lay low whilst Noriega's men were searching for their boss.
Five days after killing Noriega, Lee was in Tottenham Marshes on a metal bridge when he found a box wrapped in brown paper with Lee's name on, "for immediate consideration". He opened it to find a small black box with a finger inside. Thinking it was a threat, he hurried home but tripped and accidentally cut his own finger off. He was not able to find the finger but the scar had somehow already healed, so he rushed home.
When he got home he found another box with two toes in it. Later, his television fell off the wall, severing the same two toes. Over the next two weeks, similar events happened, causing him to lose 4 fingers, most of his toes, an eye, several teeth and a hand. Each time a box arrived just prior with the same body part inside. He tried to spend the whole day in an empty room but the next morning he awoke to an incredible pain in his foot and found his big toe was missing.
He went to Angela's, demanding she stop whatever was happening. She shrugged and said "some hungers are too strong to be denied." Lee went to attack her, but somehow he ended up losing a hand, apparently having chewed it off.
The day of the report he had another box, this time with a tongue, forcing him to seek the aid of the Magnus Institute.
Post-Statement[]
After the statement, Lee became violent and somehow, details are again hazy, ended up in hospital, presumably without a tongue. He said he had come to the Institute after his mate Hester had given a statement about ghosts some years previously.
Sasha looked into the arrest records of Lee Rentoul and Paul Noriega and confirmed their background. The last time the police had dealt with Noriega was 2 months before Lee's statement.
Martin tried to find Angela but found nothing after three days.
Tim tried to find Lee, but he appears to have disappeared in early April 2011. His landlord went to clear his flat, finding it empty except for hundreds of cardboard boxes.
Continuity[]
| ATTENTION! SPOILERS AHEAD!! This section contains information from later episodes of The Magnus Archives and may contain major spoilers for the setting and plot. Continue at your own risk. |
- Related entity: The Flesh, and possibly The Web.
- Angela is mentioned again in MAG 199 where she reportedly has her own domain in the Post-Change world.
- The curios-dealer Salesa is Mikaele Salesa. He appears again throughout statements and in the Post-Change world.
Trivia[]
- The Season 3 Q&A reveals that this statement was originally written with a large amount of swearing, but producer Alexander J. Newall requested that it be removed in order to avoid an explicit rating on iTunes.
- Jonny Sims (writer) found it very funny that it was the swearing and not the body horror that would lead to an explicit tag.
- Sims pronounces Paul Noriega's surname as "Nor-ee-ga", while it is more typically pronounced "Nori-ay-ga".