Hangman

by Daniel Cole

  Baxter was struggling to hold it together, but Rouche seemed perfectly composed, just trying to articulate his thoughts:

  “The second I thought about that, everything just sort of made sense: they weren’t really gone. I could feel it, and now I’ve been led back down here today and . . . Am I making any sense at all?”

  “I prayed this morning!” Baxter blurted, before putting her hand over her mouth as if she’d given up an embarrassing secret.

  Rouche looked at her suspiciously.

  “What? I don’t even know if I did it right, but I thought, What if I’m wrong? What if there is someone or something out there and I don’t? There’s just too much at stake today not to, right?” Baxter’s cheeks went bright red, but fortunately, the garish assortment of colors somewhat diminished the effect. “Oh, shut up,” she snapped when she caught him smiling at her. She quickly moved on to her real point. “While I’m making a complete fool of myself, I might as well tell you what I prayed for.”

  “That we stop these sick bastards from—”

  “Well, obviously! But I also prayed for you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you. I used my one and only prayer I’m ever going to make on you. I prayed that you’d make it through today with me.”

  The unexpected revelation looked to have had the desired effect.

  Whether Rouche’s God wanted him to live or die that afternoon was out of their hands, but Baxter hoped he might now, at least, pause for a moment before actively inviting it.

  “What time is it?” groaned Baxter, her head in her hands and lit by the bluish light of the monitors in the makeshift command unit.

  “Ten past,” replied Rouche, keeping his eyes on the live camera feeds from all over the station.

  “Ten past what?”

  “Three.”

  She sighed heavily:

  “Where the hell are these shits?” she asked the room.

  The heightened terror threat level had resulted in an interesting day in the capital. A man had been arrested attempting to smuggle a knife into the Tower of London; however, all signs were pointing toward stupidity rather than mass murder as the driving force behind his actions. There had been a bomb scare at an event in Kensington Olympia. That, too, had ended anticlimactically with an irate, but admittedly forgetful, exhibitor learning that his missing laptop had been subjected to a controlled explosion.

  Baxter and her team of twelve had detained five people throughout the day due to suspicious behavior. Although none had been involved with Green and his minions, it had highlighted the alarming number of weird people roaming the city at any given moment.

  “Where are the MI5 guys?” Baxter asked. She didn’t raise her head off the desk.

  “Still in with the FBI on the Piccadilly line platform,” someone answered.

  She made a nonspecific noise in acknowledgment.

  “Weirdo alert!” Rouche called out.

  Baxter looked up excitedly. A man in a Santa hat, clearly concealing some sort of live animal inside his jacket, strolled past one of the cameras. She was just glad for something to do.

  “Let’s check it out.”

  Back at New Scotland Yard, Constable Bethan Roth had been assigned the task of reviewing camera footage relating to the case but of too poor quality to be utilized by facial-recognition systems. Over the week, she had compiled an entire album of fuzzy screenshots, which, after being processed through image-enhancement programs, had led to the arrest of two more Puppets.

  She had spent the day studying footage from the Sky Garden security cameras, watching the narrowly evaded disaster play out from every angle. The current black-and-white video was as mind-numbing to watch as the two hours of people passing in and out of shot as they visited the bathrooms.

  She was reviewing a recording from the indoor bar area. Unable to see any of the action out on the terrace, she could tell when Rouche had taken his shot only by the reaction of the crowd. Several people turned away, others continued filming, phones extended, and one elderly lady fainted, taking her zombie-looking husband down with her.

  She leaned forward to select the next video file when one of the monochrome figures in the background caught her attention. She rewound the footage and watched again as the crowd reacted accordingly to seeing a man killed in front of them.

  Bethan kept her eyes fixed on the dark figure at the back.

  Just as the fainting woman dropped out of frame, he turned away and walked calmly toward the exit. Everything about his demeanor, even the way that he walked, suggested a complete emotional detachment to what he had just witnessed.

  Bethan zoomed in but couldn’t find anything better than a pixelated circle where the man’s face should have been.

  She had an idea.

  She loaded up the footage from outside the toilets again and continued from where she had stopped watching. After a few moments, the unidentified man rounded the corner and passed beneath the camera, making sure to keep his head lowered at all times.

  “Bastard,” whispered Bethan, now positive that she was onto something.

  She replayed the snippet of video in slow motion, wondering what the shiny circle on the ground could be. She zoomed in further: a tray surrounded by broken glass. She zoomed in further still until the reflective surface dominated the entire screen and started flicking through frame by frame, her eyes wide in anticipation.

  A shadow spilled over the upturned tray; a few clicks later, the top of the man’s shoe entered the frame. She continued clicking.

  “Come on . . . Come on . . .” Bethan smiled. “Got you!”

  Framed in a circle of silver, a workable image of a middle-aged man’s face.

  “Boss! I need you over here!”

  Chapter 37

  Tuesday, 22 December 2015

  3:43 P.M.

  Blake pulled up outside the property at the same moment as the Armed Response Unit. En route, he had been passed the information the team had cobbled together at short notice on their new prime suspect.

  Lucas Theodor Keaton was the multimillionaire owner of a telecoms company that had been bought out in the 1990s, providing him with a healthy payoff and a place on its board. From that time on, he had concentrated predominantly on his charity work and on helping start-up businesses.

  Encouragingly, S-S Mobile, whose servers had contained the hidden messages, was a subsidiary of Keaton’s original Smoke Signal Technologies. In addition, the depot that supplied all the compromised mobile phones had links to this little-known parent company.

  Keaton had a wife and two children, all deceased.

  He and the two boys had been caught up in the 7/7 bombings. Although Keaton had escaped relatively unscathed, one of his sons had been killed outright. The other had succumbed to his injuries over a year and a half later, following which Keaton’s wife had taken her own life by fatal overdose.

  “Cheers for that,” Blake had said to his colleague on the other end of the line, now feeling suitably depressed.

  “But it gets worse.”

  “Worse than him losing his entire family?”

  “His brother”—the constable back at New Scotland Yard clicked about on his computer—“had taken his place attending a charity event back in 2001 over in the States . . .”

  “Don’t say it!”

  “. . . September 11.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Blake almost started to pity their prime suspect. “How unlucky can one man be?”

  “The brother had no business whatsoever at the World Trade Center. He was just walking past at the wrong time.”

  “Reckon this Keaton bloke’s cursed or something?”

  “All that money and he’s had the most miserable life imaginable. Goes to show, doesn’t it?” was the constable’s rhetorical farewell before hanging up.

  With Saunders engaged with the operation at Piccadilly Circus, Vanita had sent Blake alone to accompany the team to Keaton’s enormous Chelsea residence.

 
As the armed officers hurried up the steps to break through the front door, Blake sheltered out of the wind behind a postbox to light up a cigarette. Despite the prestigious postcode, the leafy street wasn’t a particularly pleasant place to be: almost a third of the houses appeared to be undergoing major building works—lorries, vans, and even a mini-crane were scattered among the sports cars in the resident parking bays. The noise was obtrusive.

  “Mate!” Blake called to one of the passing construction workers, producing his identification. “What’s going on? Street falling in or something?” he asked, wondering whether it might be in some way relevant.

  “This?” asked the rotund man, gesturing to the mess. “Nah. With property prices at such a premium, every square inch you can stake a claim to counts. So some enterprising billionaire, becoming stir-crazy confined to his measly ten bedrooms, realized that directly beneath his basement, everything down to the Earth’s core was wasted space that he could be utilizing . . . and now they’re all at it.”

  Blake was a little surprised by the articulate response.

  “Course, if I started digging through the floor of my place, I’d just end up in the kebab shop downstairs,” the man added with a sigh.

  “Detective!” a member of the Armed Response Unit called from the doorway. “All clear!”

  Blake thanked the well-informed, kebab-scented man and hurried into the house. The entrance hall alone was larger than his entire Twickenham flat. A sweeping wooden staircase ascended from the mosaic floor, the other seven officers already lost within Keaton’s sprawling home. Fresh flowers burst from expensive vases, and a large portrait of the family hung on the back wall.

  “If you’re in a hurry, I’d start on the third floor,” the team leader advised Blake with a knowing nod.

  Blake started in the direction of the staircase.

  “Sorry. I meant down,” the officer clarified, pointing toward the corner. “The third floor down.”

  Descending the stairs, Blake’s phone made a quiet beep as he lost signal. There, just one level beneath the property’s wholesome facade, the first signs of a tainted mind began to bleed through.

  The room appeared to have been an office at some point in the past, but now the walls were suffocating beneath pictures of the happy family: another professionally commissioned portrait beside casual holiday snaps, hand-drawn sketches neighboring their photographic counterparts, each and every one of them framed and hung with precision.

  “Computer in the corner,” Blake told the officer, expecting it to be in the van by the time he resurfaced. “Phone there . . . and this picture,” he said, choosing what looked like the most recent, based on the ages of the two boys—gap-toothed smiles and matching haircuts.

  They moved on, the temperature dropping as the stairs creaked underfoot, the stale air thickening in their lungs. To Blake, it felt as though they were sinking deeper into Keaton’s subconscious . . .

  This was where he slept.

  A small camp bed stood unmade against the far wall, surrounded by what could only be described as a shrine. Items of jewelry, clothing, childish drawings, and toys sat in ordered piles around the bed. Candles had melted into the wooden floor around the perimeter.

  “Christ!” Blake jumped, only just noticing the depiction of the crucified Jesus hanging on the wall behind them: feet and wrists nailed to the wooden cross, hands dangling uselessly, a tangled crown of thorns tearing into his head: a violent inspiration for the atrocities of the previous few weeks.

  Blake frowned and reluctantly took a step backward into the room to read what had been scrawled in finger-paint either side of the Son of God:

  WhEre tHe FuCK weRE yOu?

  He almost tripped over the cushion on the floor as he took a photograph of the wall to include in his report.

  “Moving on?” he suggested eagerly to the officer.

  As the temperature dropped another couple of degrees, they negotiated the narrowing staircase to the property’s lowest level.

  They’d made it two steps into the room before Blake’s heart sank.

  Books, journals, folders, diagrams littered every conceivable surface—stacked several feet high or else adding to the paper floor underfoot—years of work, the harvest of an obsessive mind.

  They had less than an hour.

  Two other officers were already sorting through the mess, a recovered laptop bagged up and ready for transport.

  “This pile contains just about every newspaper story on the Ragdoll murders,” one of them called across. “On the desk is everything we’ve found so far relating to Alexei Green. This Keaton guy’s completely obsessed with him from the looks of it—been collecting stuff on him for years.”

  Blake moved over to the stack of articles and CDs, handwritten notes labeling Green’s various interviews and talks at conferences. He picked up a journal and flicked it open, the first page simply titled “Session One,” followed by what looked like a word-for-word transcript of Keaton’s first meeting with the psychiatrist.

  The lead officer was reading over his shoulder:

  “Looks as though this Keaton was just another recruit, then.”

  “But he can’t be,” whispered Blake, looking again at the mind spilled out in ink around them.

  There was a crash as one of the officers knocked a precarious stack of books across the floor. Very calmly, he leaned down to take a closer look at what he’d uncovered:

  “Boss?”

  “What?”

  “Do ya wanna get the bomb squad boys down here?”

  The team leader looked concerned: “I don’t know. Do I?”

  “Doesn’t look live . . . homemade, but still . . . yeah, I think so.”

  “Shit . . . Everybody out!” he ordered.

  “I’m staying,” Blake told him.

  “Live or not, first sign of an explosive, I am to get everybody to safety.”

  “If Keaton’s our man—” Blake started.

  “He’s not!”

  “But if he is, we need what’s down here. Get your men out. Get these computers to the tech guys, and get the bomb squad here . . . please.”

  The officer looked torn, but then collected up the recovered laptop and followed his men up the stairs, leaving Blake alone to wade through Keaton’s thoughts.

  He quickly picked the journal back up, opened it to Session One, and skim-read the page. Aware of their time constraints, he skipped forward to Keaton’s ninth session with the psychiatrist, rapidly losing hope that they had found their Azazel after all.

  Session Nine

  Thursday, 3 July 2014

  2:22 P.M.

  “. . . and the world just carried on as if nothing had happened,” said Lucas, lost in his own thoughts. “I have nothing left. I go home to an empty house, a mausoleum of everything they were, every night. I can’t throw any of it away. It’s all I have left of them, but I feel like I’m drowning in memories every time I step inside . . . I can still smell my wife’s perfume . . . Are you all right?”

  Green quickly got up from his seat to pour himself a glass of water.

  “Yes. Fine . . . fine,” he said, but then his face scrunched up as he began to cry. “I am so sorry. This is so unprofessional. I just need a moment.”

  “Was it something I said?” asked Lucas in concern, watching Green compose himself.

  Outside, it started to rain harder. It must have rained all day.

  “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” said Lucas, getting to his feet. “All I seem to do is upset everyone.”

  “It’s not you, Lucas,” Green said quickly. “It’s me and my own issues.”

  “Why?” Lucas asked innocently. “Did . . . did you lose somebody too?”

  “Let’s just focus on you, shall we?”

  “You can tell me.”

  “No, I can’t,” said Green firmly.

  Lucas got up and started heading for the door.

  “Lucas!”

  “Everything you say is bullshit!
I pour my heart out to you twice a week, but there’s no trust here,” he told the psychiatrist, hurt.

  “Lucas, wait! OK. OK. Yes!” said Green. “You’re right. I apologize. We do have a trust, and yes, I did lose somebody very, very special to me.”

  Keaton closed his eyes, exhaled in victorious relief, and let his flicker of a smile fade before slowly returning to the sofa. He lingered, pausing to stand over Green as the cool and collected psychiatrist finally broke down.

  He leaned down to address the troubled man, passing him a handful of the “man-sized” tissues he kept on his desk:

  “Please . . . tell me about her.”

  Blake urgently flicked through the pages to find the final entry—Alexei Green and Lucas Keaton’s eleventh session together.

  Session Eleven

  Thursday, 10 July 2014

  6:10 P.M.

  “Why the fuck are we the ones who got punished?” asked Keaton, pacing around the room as Green listened. “Still being punished! We are good people—my family, your beautiful Abby, were good people!”

  He sighed heavily as he stared out the window, the early evening sunshine warming his face:

  “These Ragdoll murders,” Keaton started casually, “you’re following them, I presume?”

  “Isn’t everybody?” replied Green, utterly drained by the conversation. He hadn’t managed a decent night’s sleep in over a week.

  “Can you name the victims? Actually, let’s make it a challenge. Can you name them in order?”

  “Why, Lucas?”

  “Just . . . humor me.”

  Green let out an exasperated groan:

  “Fine. Well, there was Mayor Turnble, of course, and then Khalid’s brother. Something Rana? . . . Vijay Rana. Jarred Garland, and the other day it was Andrew Ford . . . Again, why?”

  “Immortalized—a backpedaling politician, the brother of a child-murdering serial killer, a greedy and opportunistic journalist, and, finally, a disgusting, alcoholic specimen of human refuse. Their unworthy names etched into history simply because they died in an ‘entertaining’ fashion.”