The Hanged Man

by Simon Kernick

  ‘So you’re going to meet him then,’ said Tina. It was a statement rather than a question.

  I nodded. ‘I guess so. I’ll have to put Dan on standby so I can hand Manning over to him at HQ. That way I know he’ll get proper protective custody.’

  ‘And you trust Dan a hundred per cent?’

  I shrugged. ‘With the possible exception of you, I don’t think I trust anyone a hundred per cent. But it’s close enough with Dan.’

  ‘And do you think Dan or anyone else is going to do anything about Anthea Delbarto?’

  ‘I doubt it. There’s still no evidence against her, but I know she’s involved with the killers, and so do you.’

  ‘Well, you know what, Ray? I feel like I have a personal interest in this case too. The Kalamans have tried to kill me twice now, and they came very close both times. They destroyed the life of Charlotte Curtis, a completely innocent woman who’d never done them any harm, but someone I was meant to be protecting. So I feel like I owe her.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m going to bug Anthea Delbarto’s house. I’ve got all the necessary equipment. That way we can find out who she’s talking to and listen to her conversations.’

  I sighed. ‘Except if you get caught, you could end up in prison. And you’ll definitely make yourself a target for the Kalamans.’

  Tina looked at me coolly. ‘I’ll take that risk. I’ve done plenty more dangerous things in my time than plant a few bugs. And you know that doing this makes sense. If Delbarto’s involved, she’ll be spooked, and she’ll be talking. If and when we find out something useful, we just feed it through to Dan. Or the press.’ She shrugged. ‘Or even act on it ourselves. You know, being outside the force can have its advantages.’

  I knew there was no point trying to persuade her otherwise. Tina might not have been particularly stubborn, which was one of the things I liked about her, but she was strong, and rightly confident in her own abilities, and when she thought she was doing the right thing, she wasn’t one to be shifted.

  ‘OK,’ I said reluctantly. ‘You do what you have to do.’

  ‘But before I do anything tomorrow, I’m going to book us a holiday. Somewhere hot, somewhere sunny, and most of all somewhere quiet. Are you up for that?’

  I leaned down, put my hand on her cheek and kissed her gently on the lips. ‘Definitely,’ I said. And I meant it. I remember thinking at the time that a holiday would be a really good way of cementing our relationship.

  But like so many things in life, it was not to be.

  Forty-nine

  Hugh Manning switched off the phone he’d used to call Ray Mason, removed the SIM card and threw it in a bush. He’d made the call from a hill overlooking the M27 motorway a good ten miles from Harry Pheasant’s house.

  He looked down at the car headlights, people just going about their business without a care in the world, and knew this would never be him again. All day long he’d been torn as to what he should do. A small part of him wanted to keep lying low, to wait for that opportunity to get off this island, into Europe, and eventually Panama, where he could at last lay his hands on the money sitting in the offshore bank account. $2.2 million would go a long way, especially as he now no longer had Diana with him. It was strange how quickly he’d got used to life without her.

  But he knew he’d never make it to Panama. The forces ranged against him were too great, and the longer he stayed on the run, the harder it would be to give himself up on his own terms, and the more he put Harry himself in danger. Manning wasn’t used to worrying too much about other people’s feelings but he was genuinely touched by how much Harry was risking by helping him. He also knew that Harry’s idea of handing himself into a police officer who couldn’t be bought or corrupted was the best one of a pretty sorry bunch.

  Harry was waiting in his car with the engine running as Manning climbed into the back seat, getting into the familiar crouching position so he was out of sight.

  ‘How did it go?’ he asked from the driver’s seat.

  ‘It’s all set for tomorrow, but I’m not giving him the location until the last minute.’ Manning sighed. ‘Do you know, if it all goes according to plan tomorrow then this will be my last ever night of real freedom. And it’ll be the last time I ever see you. Once I go into this, there’s no way back.’

  Harry looked at him pensively in the rear-view mirror, then his face broke into a broad grin. ‘Then we’d better make it a good one. I’ve got some decent Margaux in the cellar. Let’s get back to my place tout de suite and crack it open. You know what they say. Eat, drink, and be merry. For tomorrow we die.’

  ‘Let’s not make predictions,’ said Manning, who wasn’t grinning.

  Fifty

  Given what I’d found out about my father, and the fact that he so often haunted my nightmares, I slept a surprisingly deep and dreamless sleep that night and didn’t wake until gone nine. The bright morning sunlight was edging round the curtains and Tina was still asleep beside me.

  I looked down at her for a long time and I felt something for her that scared me. I’d let myself go, and fallen in love with her, and this made me vulnerable. When I was on my own I was hard to intimidate because I didn’t care enough about myself to be scared, but now it was different. My feelings for her could be exploited. Worse, I couldn’t afford to lose her. Not now. I’d lost everyone I’d cared for over the years, and had just about been able to handle it, but I had a feeling that next time it might send me over the edge.

  Careful not to wake her, I got out of bed, threw on some shorts and grabbed my phone from the bedside table. When I got downstairs, I turned off the burglar alarm and checked the front and back doors, just to make sure no one had visited in the night. It was a ritual of ours. The Kalamans knew about my involvement in the hunt for them, and wouldn’t hesitate to bug us if they could. We both swept our homes and cars every day with state-of-the-art bug finders. I’d already found two trackers on my car in the past month, and Tina had found one. It wasn’t foolproof – the Kalamans also possessed state-of-the-art equipment – but it was as close to safety as we were going to get.

  Tina’s cottage had two separate burglar alarms and no one was getting through one without setting off the other, and if they came for us in the night, we were prepared. For more than three years I’d been authorized to carry a gun at all times because of the threat to my life from Islamic terrorists, who’d already tried to kill me once. But that right (I would call it a necessity) had been taken away from me after a case the previous year. I’m not the kind of man who’s comfortable being a target for my enemies, so a month earlier, after a lot of shopping around, I’d bought a brand-new Walther P99C pistol with a spare magazine and a box of nine-millimetre ammunition on the black market. It’s extremely hard to get hold of illegal firearms in the UK and as a result this one had ended up costing me six grand – more than ten times what it would be if I’d been able to buy it legally. It would also cost me a long prison sentence if I was ever caught with it but, even so, I considered it a price worth paying for protection. I didn’t carry it with me all the time but I had it whenever I was staying at Tina’s, under her bed on my side. I’d even offered to source Tina one of her own, since she was firearms trained, but she’d declined, which was probably for the best. I could just about handle going down for five years for possession of a firearm if it came to it, but I’d find it a lot harder to lose Tina that way.

  You may think I’m far too reckless to be a police officer, and I think it’s fair to say you’d be right. But consider this: I have only ever wanted justice for the victims of crime and I’ve worked tirelessly towards that end all my adult life. I have done bad things, but only in the heat of the moment and when I was under great stress, and only to bad people. I have only ever ended the lives of killers, or would-be killers. I have always tried to be fair. I am, I genuinely believe, one of the world’s good people, and that men like me are needed in the battle against the bad ones,
because the bad ones are many in number, and I can tell you from bitter experience that some of them, like the Kalamans and the Sheridan children, are very, very bad.

  But Sheryl Trinder was right. If every cop was like me, the whole system would collapse. And for this reason, more than any other, I didn’t feel bad that morning that I was no longer in the force. It didn’t mean that I wouldn’t keep after the Bone Field killers. I would. But now I’d do it my way.

  I made myself a cup of tea and called Dan, hoping he was feeling better this morning. I was worried about him. His family had always been such a huge part of his life and losing them had clearly hit him hard. I hoped that the news about Hugh Manning would at least cheer him up a bit.

  He sounded a bit shocked when I told him that Manning had finally called me and I gave him the details, explaining how he’d approached me because he knew I wouldn’t betray him. ‘He’s scared of the Kalamans getting to him in custody, so do me a favour please, Dan, don’t tell anyone else about this. Manning’s sworn me to secrecy. He says I’ve got to come alone otherwise the deal’s off.’

  ‘Where are you meeting?’ he asked, his voice quiet.

  ‘I don’t know yet. He’s going to call today to give me instructions. By the way, why are you whispering?’

  ‘I’m in the office. And I’m definitely not meant to be speaking to you.’

  ‘I didn’t think you were going in today.’

  He sighed. ‘What else have I got to do?’

  ‘I’m sorry about how things have turned out for you and Denise,’ I said.

  ‘Forget it. It’s not your problem. Does Manning know you’re no longer in the force?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So how are you planning to offer him protection?’

  ‘That’s why I’m calling you. My plan’s to meet him, then hand him over to you at HQ. Then you can organize getting him to a secure location.’

  He was silent for a few seconds, and I was just about to ask him again if everything was OK – because in truth he just didn’t sound right – when he spoke. ‘Call me as soon as Manning makes contact,’ he said, then ended the call without even saying goodbye.

  Fifty-one

  Back in the office, Dan Watts was staring at his phone, caught out by this new turn of events. He’d been ordered by Mr Bone to come into HQ this Saturday morning to keep abreast of the hunt for Hugh Manning but there’d been no further developments. The search round Newton Stewart in Scotland where Manning had last been seen two days earlier had turned up nothing, and though calls were still coming in from members of the public with sightings in wildly different locations, there’d been no two sightings in the same place, and none of them had been seen as worth following up on. It was as if he’d disappeared into thin air.

  And now, suddenly, there was this from Ray. Hugh Manning on a plate delivered straight to him. And Dan knew there was no way Manning could make it through the door of HQ because if that happened it was all over for him and his family.

  He’d spent the night tossing and turning, unable to sleep, torn apart by the reality of his situation. At exactly three a.m. he’d received a text message from an unknown number. It contained a photo showing Vicky’s naked body lying in a shallow, open grave. She looked like some kind of grotesque mummy, wrapped from head to toe in clear plastic clingfilm, the tattoo of the butterfly on her belly that he’d kissed earlier while she giggled clearly visible. Resting on her chest was the murder weapon, also wrapped in clingfilm. There was no accompanying text – nothing that could incriminate anyone else for the crime for which they were so expertly framing Dan. But the message was clear enough. They’d buried Vicky as if she was nothing more than household garbage, and as long as Dan behaved himself, there she and the murder weapon would stay.

  And behaving himself meant betraying Hugh Manning and, worse still, Ray, who in spite of their differences had become a good friend.

  But Dan knew he had no choice. The truth was, he no longer cared about himself. He’d behaved badly and rejected his faith by constantly succumbing to his lust and committing adultery, and it was his own fault that he’d ended up in the position he was in. But if he went to prison for the rape and murder of a woman he’d met online – and they would charge him with rape, he was sure of that – then his wife and children would have to bear that terrible shame for the rest of their lives. And in prison there would be nothing he could do to protect them against the Kalamans if the man he’d met last night carried out his threat of disfiguring one of them. And again, Dan was certain he would, if only to make a point.

  He cursed the Kalamans for their power and the way they chose to use it for evil ends, and he cursed himself for being foolish enough to think he could ever stop them.

  And now, after years of trying to bring them to justice, he was reduced to being their messenger boy. He’d been given a number to call as soon as there were any new developments, and this was the biggest development there was ever likely to be.

  Replacing the phone in his pocket, he got to his feet and used a handkerchief to wipe sweat from his brow. He could hear his heart beating rapidly in his chest. He knew he looked a state and he was finding it hard to hold himself together. Thankfully HQ was quiet, but Sheryl Trinder was around somewhere and if she saw him she’d know immediately that something was wrong – she was that kind of person.

  Ten minutes later he was walking in the park near Vauxhall Bridge. The day was sunny and warm, even though it was only just gone half nine, and people were already taking up their spots on the grass. Dan found a quiet place in the shade of a huge oak tree and looked at the phone in his hand, knowing that if he made this call there was no going back. He was sending Hugh Manning to his death.

  ‘You don’t have to do this,’ he whispered aloud.

  But he did. That was the problem.

  Even so, he stood there for a long time, and it was only when he had a vision of his youngest daughter lying mummified in clingfilm in a shallow grave, dead and gone for ever while he rotted in prison, that he brought his breathing under control and, with shaking fingers, made the call.

  Fifty-two

  Cem Kalaman was sitting on the master bedroom balcony overlooking his carefully manicured half-acre garden, drinking black coffee. He’d just had word from Mr Bone via the Drafts section of the email address they communicated through that the insider they’d been cultivating had come up with some more very useful information. Hugh Manning, it seemed, was preparing to hand himself in to none other than Ray Mason, and had sworn Mason to secrecy so both men would be meeting without any back-up.

  It couldn’t, thought Cem, have turned out any better. Ray Mason had been a constant thorn in his side these past few months, and his investigation was getting him closer and closer to the various key members of their network. Three months earlier Cem and a few of his people had paid Mason a visit at his flat in Fulham to teach him a lesson in respect. It had backfired when Mason had ended up threatening them all with a gun and making Cem lose face in front of his men. More than anything else in the world Cem hated to lose face, and since that confrontation he’d been waiting for a chance to pay Mason back. Apparently Mason had resigned from the police the previous afternoon, making him an even easier target now that he no longer enjoyed the protection of his colleagues.

  Cem had told Mr Bone that neither Manning nor Mason was to leave the meeting alive, and had instructed him to use all their resources to make sure that happened. Mr Bone had assured him that it would, although Cem wouldn’t rest properly until he received news that both men were dead.

  The problem was, that wasn’t going to be the end of it. The years of murder for pleasure were over. He had loved the ritual of the kill, the comradeship he’d felt with his fellow killers. He had never been as interested in the occult side of it as the others. For him, it had always been about power. But now the whole thing was becoming far too risky. If they continued, eventually they would be caught, and Cem’s huge business empire which he�
��d built up singlehandedly would be destroyed. And he couldn’t have that.

  One useful thing his father had taught him, back in the early days when Cem was still listening to him, was that a man should never be sentimental in business. When you identify weakness, you must ruthlessly cut it out. You have to keep moving forward, and if those around you lose their usefulness in the process, then it’s time to cut them out too.

  Cem put down his coffee and stared into space, knowing that that time would be coming soon.

  Fifty-three

  I spent a surprisingly relaxing day with Tina. We stayed in bed most of the morning doing the things that couples who’ve recently found each other do. We even found the time to book that holiday. Two weeks in Costa Rica, a place neither of us had been, leaving in three days’ time. It was something to look forward to. I hadn’t had a holiday away with someone for more than seven years, and I knew I needed the break. My behaviour had been becoming progressively more manic since I’d been involved in the Bone Field case, and it was time to take stock.

  After a very early dinner in her garden, during which I gave her the low-down on what Anthea Delbarto’s house was like both inside and out, it was time for us to part company. I watched as Tina got her surveillance kit together and checked her car thoroughly for bugs.

  ‘I think I should come with you,’ I told her when she was done. ‘As back-up. You know, just in case.’

  She gave me a withering look. ‘You think the little woman needs the big man’s help?’

  ‘We all need help, Tina. It’s not like you haven’t got yourself into situations before.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Ray, I’m not going to do anything rash. I’ll check the place out. If Anthea or the girl are in, I’ll plant devices and cameras outside, and get a tracker on the car. If I can, I’ll get inside, but I’m not going to do anything that blows my cover.’