The Hanged Man

by Simon Kernick

  ‘That’s the basement at the farm in Wales,’ I said.

  Dan looked at me. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Absolutely. I’m never going to forget that place.’

  I’m hugely claustrophobic, a result of an extremely traumatic childhood incident, but I’d forced myself down into the basement in that house to try to rescue the girl who’d been taken there. I’d failed, and Nicole had been burned to death in the ensuing fire.

  I’d been back there twice since then to see how the forensic investigation was going, but it was clear that the killers had had an emergency plan in place in case they needed to destroy any evidence quickly. Such was the intensity of the fire they’d set that it had taken firefighters more than twenty-four hours to put it out, by which time there was nothing left but ash and rubble.

  On the screen, thirty seconds passed as we watched in grim silence. There were bruises and cuts on the girl’s body and, even though the footage was on the lined and grainy side, they looked fresh, as if she’d already been abused by her captors.

  Suddenly the girl’s eyes became fixed on something or someone in the corner of the room, and they widened perceptibly. A long moment passed before three figures dressed in long black robes and grotesque full-face hoods walked into the room in single file. All three wore gloves, too. There wasn’t a single part of any of their bodies that was exposed, making any kind of identification impossible.

  The men gathered round the bed, partially blocking the view of the girl. Then, from beneath his robes, one pulled out a long black knife, which he held up for the girl to see. I swallowed. This was hard enough for me to watch. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for Dan, who had two teenage daughters only a few years younger than this girl.

  The film lasted a further nine minutes as the three men tortured, taunted, beat and sexually assaulted the girl until she was semi-conscious and hardly moving, before finally the one with the knife raised it two-handed above his head and drove it into her heart, at which point the film abruptly ended. There was nothing else on the DVD.

  For some time afterwards, neither of us spoke. I felt profoundly depressed. You think that as a police officer you’ll get used to the depths some human beings can plumb, and then you see something that makes you realize that those depths are bottomless. This was one of those times.

  ‘Why didn’t you try to find out who these bastards were?’ I said at last, my tone less accusatory than resigned.

  Dan sighed. ‘You know, at the time we thought it was probably fake. Like one of those snuff movies. And even now, looking at it, it’s still hard to tell for sure.’

  To a certain extent, I could see his point. Much of the torture of the girl was sexual in nature, and though they struck and stabbed her several times, because of the way they were positioned during the assault it was hard to see the blows actually landing. She was covered in blood at the end, but I guess it was possible – at least if you didn’t know what I knew – to conclude that she was an actress, particularly as the quality of the film was poor. The ending, though, when the knife went into her chest, had looked real enough.

  ‘But,’ I continued, ‘the fact that this film was found under the floorboards, along with a pile of cash, very close to the bodies of two people who’d been tortured to death might have got me thinking.’

  Dan stood up and paced the room. He still moved like a boxer. His whole body was tense, the muscles of his lean frame rippling under his shirt, an expression of aggressive concentration on his face. ‘Look, Ray,’ he said, clearly trying hard to keep a lid on his feelings, ‘we were under a lot of pressure at the time and no one thought the film had anything to do with Fisha’s murder. If his killers had been after the film, the way he was tortured he would have given it up straight away. But it was still under the floorboards when we found it. And also, bear this in mind. You’ve seen the film. There’s no way of IDing any of the three men on it. They’re covered from head to toe. You never see their faces. Even the room doesn’t give away anything about where it is. You can’t even see the girl well enough to get a decent ID. So why bother killing Fisha and his girlfriend over it?’

  ‘Did you ever have a workable motive for Fisha’s murder?’

  ‘From what I recall he had quite a few enemies, and not too many friends. We questioned a few people but all of them had alibis. You have a look at the case notes and see what you can come up with.’

  ‘Look, I’m not criticizing you, Dan,’ I said. ‘I do know what it’s like, and I know this is an old case. But Fisha got that DVD from someone. And we’ve got to find out who, because this was definitely filmed at the farmhouse. We also need to ID the girl. Let’s see if we can get a decent still of her we can use.’

  So we burned the DVD to the room’s desktop PC and went back over the film, freezing and enlarging images of our victim. Strangely, watching the footage a second time didn’t elicit the same emotions in me. I was already getting used to the grim content, and I suppose that’s how you survive the job. If you expose yourself to the crap enough, you become numb to it.

  Given the poor quality of the footage, it was almost impossible to get a decent close-up of the girl. In the end, the best we could manage were a couple of shots from the opening minute before the assault on her began. They weren’t good, but someone with eagle eyes and a natural memory for faces might just be able to get an ID. Thankfully, we had such people.

  The Met has a team of some two hundred officers known as super-recognizers, who came to the fore during the 2011 London riots. They share a unique gift of being able to remember faces, even ones they haven’t seen for years. If anyone was going to put a name to the girl, it would be one of them.

  The door opened. It was Sheryl Trinder, who wasn’t the type to knock.

  ‘Any clues from your film?’ she asked, standing in the doorway.

  I told her I was absolutely certain it was filmed at the farmhouse in Wales. ‘I remember the sign on the wall behind the bed. It was exactly the same.’

  ‘The quality of the film’s not good, ma’am,’ said Dan, ‘and it’s impossible to ID the suspects. We’ve managed to isolate some shots of the victim and we’ll get them across to the super-recognizers.’

  ‘Let me watch the film,’ she said, moving into the room.

  ‘It’s not pleasant viewing,’ Dan warned her.

  ‘I’m sure it’s not, but I might be able to help. I’m one of the super-recognizers.’

  I looked at her, impressed. ‘Seriously, ma’am?’

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘Have you ever heard me joke, Mr Mason?’

  ‘No, ma’am,’ I said, ‘I haven’t.’

  We put the film back on, but this time neither I nor Dan watched it. Perhaps I wasn’t quite as numb to its effects as I thought, and I kept my gaze averted.

  At least until Sheryl muttered an expletive, which wasn’t like her.

  ‘Freeze the film,’ she told Dan.

  He did as he was told.

  ‘Go back a bit. There.’

  On the screen we were back to the girl lying on the bed just before the assault began. Sheryl took a deep breath and turned away from the screen so she was facing me. Her icy facade had cracked a little and she looked troubled.

  ‘I recognize her.’

  ‘Her name was Tracey Burn. I remember her from my days in uniform in Hammersmith.’

  The three of us were back in Sheryl’s office now, and she was looking thoughtful. She’d insisted on watching the remainder of the film and it was clear the content had affected her, just as it had affected Dan and me.

  ‘She lived in White City,’ Sheryl continued, ‘and she was in an abusive relationship with a very unpleasant piece of work. She had to call us out on several occasions when he was hitting her, and I attended two of those incidents. We arrested him both times but Tracey never pressed charges. She was terrified of him. I always remember she was a sweet little thing, but weak, with no self-esteem. When I got promoted, I lost track
of her.’

  ‘And you’re sure it’s her, ma’am?’ I said.

  ‘I’m almost certain. The girl in the film looks like she has a large mole just above her right eyebrow, and Tracey had one like that. I’ll call my old colleagues at Hammersmith to see if they can give me full names for her and her boyfriend. Then we’ll track down the next of kin and get a DNA test to see if it matches any of the DNA found at the farmhouse. If it does, this is a real break. Good work.’

  She addressed me when she said this. Then, as we got up to leave the room, she gave Dan a hard look. ‘I don’t know what you and your colleagues were thinking when you found that DVD, Mr Watts, but it looked bloody real to me. And it should have been investigated as such.’

  Eight

  It was gone nine when we left NCA HQ.

  I thought Dan would want to get back to his wife and kids but instead he suggested grabbing a drink and a bite to eat at the pub round the corner – a hipster’s hangout where the beards and students were in plentiful supply, and where the food was good. I’d had little social contact with any of my colleagues in the force since the death of my best friend and partner Chris Leavey the previous year, so I appreciated Dan’s offer. He was a good guy and I liked his company.

  It was still light, but the sun had set and there was a chill in the air, so we found a table inside. I ordered the Thai curry, Dan had a burger, and we both drank lager. We didn’t talk about the case. I knew he felt bad about what Sheryl had said, but there was no point going on about it. Instead we just shot the breeze about this and that, as if we hadn’t just watched footage of a young woman being tortured to death. I could easily have had a second drink and carried on but I didn’t want to keep Dan from his family. Having never had a real family of my own, I’ve always thought of it as a precious thing to be cherished.

  So we called it a night after the one pint. I picked up the tab on the basis that Dan had bought the shitty service-station sandwiches on the way back from Lincolnshire, and we headed our separate ways – him back to Muswell Hill, me back to the apartment in Fulham I’d called home these past three years, but where I tended to spend as little time as possible.

  When I got back, I poured myself a big glass of red wine and read through the notes on the murder of the last person who’d been in possession of the DVD: Kristo Fisha.

  Fisha had been, it seemed, a grade one arsehole. Having been caught entering the country illegally in 1997, he’d successfully claimed asylum, stating that, if returned to Albania, he’d be persecuted for his homosexuality – although there was no evidence he was homosexual. Having established himself in the UK, he’d gained convictions for assault, domestic violence and drug dealing before turning his hand to smuggling in other illegal immigrants. He’d then gone into partnership with a British-born career criminal, Terry Howes, who owned an oceangoing yacht. Fisha’s contacts in Albania got the immigrants – usually young women in search of a better life in the west – as far as Santander in Spain, and from there Howes sailed them across to one of the quieter south coast ports. Fisha then collected them and took them to London. There they were made to pay back the cost of their transportation, usually by working as prostitutes, either directly for Fisha himself or for another of his associates, an individual called Ugo Amelu, who was suspected of running several brothels around London.

  Fisha was earning good money with his business but, because of a gambling and coke habit, he also ended up with big debts, and when one of the people he owed money to, a fellow Albanian, threatened to break his legs, Fisha confronted him outside a social club in Kensal Green. In the ensuing melee, Fisha allegedly stabbed him to death.

  At the same time, Fisha and his associates Terry Howes and Ugo Amelu had been the subject of an intensive investigation by the authorities, and when Fisha was formally identified as a murder suspect, a team that included a younger Dan Watts raided his flat and discovered the bodies of him and his girlfriend. And, of course, the DVD.

  Even though the investigating officers were busy with the huge manhunt for the 21 July bombers, they did manage to question a number of people regarding the murders of Fisha and his girlfriend. One line of inquiry was that it was a revenge killing, but this was quickly discounted, so the investigating team concentrated on Fisha’s associates, Howes and Amelu. Both had cast-iron alibis for the time of Fisha’s murder. Howes was in police custody in Spain, having been arrested for drunkenness, while Amelu was staying with family in Nigeria, having flown out on 17 July. He returned to the UK on the 26th and, when questioned under caution, claimed to know nothing about what had happened.

  After that the investigation seemed to peter out. A cold case review was carried out by Surrey police in 2009, a copy of which was attached to the end of the file, but they got no further forward, and it went back in the drawer. One thing of note, though, was that Surrey police had been unable to re-interview Terry Howes, due to the fact that in September 2005, less than two months after Fisha’s murder, his yacht had been discovered floating empty twenty miles off the coast of Majorca, and it was assumed by Spanish police that he’d been lost over the side, although no body was ever found.

  No police officer believes in coincidence. I was pretty certain Howes had been murdered by the same people who’d murdered Kristo Fisha and his girlfriend, and that it had something to do with the DVD under Fisha’s floorboards. It seemed logical to me that Fisha was using the DVD as blackmail, and that the person he was blackmailing was someone connected to the Bone Field killings, and therefore almost certainly Cem Kalaman. But this begged an obvious question. Why was the DVD still under the floorboards when the police raided the flat? And why were the killers so determined to get hold of it when no one on the film itself could be identified? We were, it seemed, still missing plenty of pieces of the puzzle.

  I finished my wine and poured myself another glass. My girlfriend’s a recovering alcoholic who’s been sober for eight years now and I often stay with her in her cottage out of town, so consequently I drink a lot less these days. But when the opportunity arises, I make the most of it. I took more of a gulp than a sip of the wine, savouring the taste just a little too much as I re-read the file, just in case I’d missed something.

  Nothing stood out, but someone somewhere had to know something. We could no longer talk to Fisha, or his business partner Terry Howes, but if Ugo Amelu was still alive, then maybe we could talk to him.

  I logged on to the Police National Database and looked him up. The mugshots showed an angry-looking, athletically built black man with dyed blond cornrow hair and a strong jaw, the kind of guy you didn’t want to get on the wrong side of – which was a useful trait for a man who was clearly a violent career criminal. Aged forty-one, he had a total of nineteen convictions and had served two prison sentences – the first, an eighteen-month stretch for GBH; the second, a four-year term for trafficking for sexual exploitation, which he served between 2006 and 2010, and which was almost certainly the result of the investigation Dan had been a part of. There’d been no further convictions since his release, which made me wonder if he too had been bumped off by the Kalamans.

  I looked at my watch. It was gone eleven. I’d seen from the file that Dan had been one of the officers who’d interviewed Amelu first time round and I wanted to know what he remembered of him. I decided, though, to let him enjoy what was left of his evening at home. It could wait for tomorrow.

  Instead, I called my girlfriend.

  I’d been seeing Tina Boyd for three months now. I find it hard to build meaningful relationships. So does she. But somehow we’d managed. In many ways we were kindred spirits. If you were looking for truly controversial figures in the Met’s recent history, only two would spring to mind. One was me. The other was Tina. She’d been shot twice, kidnapped once, held hostage, involved in at least three killings that had somehow just about held up as self-defence, suspended more times than I could remember, and was now a private detective.

  It was midnight where she
was, in France, but she answered immediately.

  ‘Hey you,’ she said. Her voice was warm and husky, the product of all the cigarettes she smoked. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘I’ve had better days.’ I told her about how Hugh Manning had slipped our net, leaving two dead bodies in his wake.

  ‘You think you’re going to find him?’

  ‘If he’s still in the country we will. We should be getting his photo circulated in the media tomorrow and that’ll flush him out.’ I paused, finding it hard to say the words I wanted to say. But as I looked round my big, empty apartment, I said them anyway. ‘I miss you.’

  She laughed. ‘Have you been drinking?’

  ‘No. Well, maybe a little. It’s been a long day.’

  ‘Have one for me, eh?’

  There was another pause which wasn’t quite comfortable. We’d been two lonely people for a long time, and we were still not quite sure of each other.

  ‘When are you back?’ I asked.

  ‘As soon as I’ve sorted out this bit of work. It’s a research job. I’ve got a couple of interviews tomorrow and then I’ll be home first thing Friday morning.’

  ‘It’ll be good to see you.’ Pause. ‘Anyway, I’ll let you go.’

  ‘I miss you too, Ray. I’m looking forward to seeing you. Dinner Friday night at my place?’

  I smiled, much happier suddenly. ‘I wouldn’t miss it for anything.’

  Nine

  Dan Watts had been staring at the computer screen for so long he could feel his eyes drying out. The women on the screen, one after another, all in various stages of undress, stared back at him, their poses offering every kind of illicit adventure imaginable.

  The PC bleeped as Gurl4fun’s icon appeared in the top corner of the screen followed by a message: ‘Hiya. Still wanna meet up???XXX.’

  Dan sat back in the chair, shaking the stiffness out of his neck. Did he want to meet up?

  Of course he did. He was addicted to these clandestine meetings. They were what had destroyed his marriage, because destroyed it was. Denise had told him that this time she wasn’t taking him back. He’d gone for help after she’d caught him the first time, so when it had happened again, the sense of betrayal had been too much. Dan understood her position entirely and he was racked with guilt. He’d let down God, although in truth, his faith had taken so many knocks over the years it was now barely a shadow of what it had once been. More importantly, he’d let down Denise and the girls, the only three people in the world who truly mattered to him, and it was eating him up inside.