We Are The Hanged Man

by Douglas Lindsay

  'You're a really famous detective,' threw in Claudia.

  'So this segment of the show lasts five nights from next Monday, leading up to the final night a week Saturday. The three finalists – and I think we already know who those three are going to be…'

  The women smiled knowingly. Jericho didn't.

  '…will be getting in-house training, everything from riot policing to filling in paperwork, although obviously for the latter we're going to have to spice it up with office sexual politics, that kind of shit. But the real focus, of course, for those five days will be the time that each of them spends with you. Then on the final night, obviously we deep six two of the contestants and have ourselves a winner. And we're talking, you know, a pretty intensive approach. An hour or two each night regular TV, at least two to three hours a day on digital. I know, you're laughing, but although they don't get a big slice of the cake, the digital audience is high quality. You know what I mean? It's a good audience. They have spending power. The advertising rakes in more than you'd think. And, of course, we're looking at no end of online tie-ins and promotions. And, from your point of view, above all else, this is going to be great for your career. The opportunities for you after this are going to be colossal. Holy Jesus, you're going to be the most recognisable face of crime-fighting on Planet Earth. The Yanks will probably want you to be guest starring on actual episodes of CSI for a kick-off. All sorts of shit.'

  The room had several large windows overlooking the city, but the glass was thick. Triple glazed. The door to the outer office had a seal that had been invented by NASA. No sound got in or out.

  When the man in the middle stopped talking, there was complete silence. And despite what he had implied, Jericho wasn't laughing.

  *

  There were four of them in a row. Hung by the neck.

  Once upon a time there had been music. Sometimes mellow and smooth, cool bass and muted trumpets, brushes on drums; sometimes crackly piano and rusty old vocals. The four of them had swayed in time to the music, or so it had seemed, although there was no one there to watch.

  Perhaps they just moved in the wind that crept in beneath the door; perhaps they swayed with the house, blown by the sea winds.

  Perhaps they didn't move at all. That was more likely. They hung in dead silence. At first the smell was suffocating, all-encompassing, rancid. Crept into the walls and the sparse furniture. It dripped onto the floor along with the decomposing flesh.

  They never touched each other, as if each corpse was repulsed by the festering, rotting carcass hanging next to it. A few inches apart, they hung still and lifeless, slowly decaying in wretched silence.

  Eventually the music, which had been left playing on endless loop, the scratchy needle returning to the start of the record every twenty minutes or so, was ended by a power cut and never restarted.

  The overpowering stench, the grim and total darkness took over. There was no music; there was no light. There was nothing for those bodies to do other than decompose and stink and rot in their Stygian oblivion.

  In time even the stench faded to a musty aroma of decay; the clothes hung loosely from bodies that frittered away to skeletons.

  Years passed.

  6

  They were sitting in the car on the way back from the station at Castle Cary. Hadn't spoken yet. Haynes was waiting for Jericho.

  They'd all been talking about it at the police station in Wells; they all knew why Jericho had been dragged up to London. They weren't laughing at Jericho; he wasn't the kind of man to inspire that. They liked him, respected him, to a man and woman were glad that they worked with him. Yet, in some kind of way or other, they were still laughing. Of all the people they could have ordered to do it…

  Some thought that Jericho would resign.

  'You knew already,' said Jericho, finally talking as they passed around the edges of Shepton Mallet.

  'Yes,' said Haynes.

  Jericho nodded.

  'You were right not to tell me.'

  They drove on, Jericho stern-faced, staring straight ahead.

  'What are you going to do?' asked Haynes. Sentences thrown out into long silences, minutes apart.

  Jericho had been trying to not think about it for the previous three hours; but every time he tried to not think about it, or managed to think about something else, he began thinking about it anyway.

  He didn't answer.

  *

  Dylan was filing her nails when he came into her office. She hadn't needed to, it wasn't something she ever did at her desk, but she knew that Jericho would be indescribably annoyed by this, his senior officer filing her nails at her desk while there was work to be done. She also knew that some would consider it extremely petty, but this was office politics and she wasn't going to be beaten by anyone, regardless of how well known they were.

  Usually she would have been jealous of one of her officers being selected to go on television, but that would be when the officer was excited to be doing it. She knew Jericho would hate the idea, and so had taken great pleasure in the whole absurd notion since it was first mooted.

  He sat down without invitation. She held a nail up to the light and studied it intently. He waited. She dusted the nail and blew on it, dusted it again, ran a finger over the top of it searching for ragged edges, checked it again, seemed happy, laid down the nail file, smiled across the desk.

  'Happy?' she said.

  Jericho looked through her. She was expecting him to complain. She was expecting him to come in and demand to be withdrawn from the stupid show. She was expecting sarcasm and anger and disaffected outright bloody moral outrage.

  She had sat there on at least three occasions in the past and listened to Jericho's Al Pacino routine, spit flying and wrath spewing forth. He could go days without saying anything, yet when something worked its way under his skin, he let fly with the venom of the old Gods, vomiting his self-righteous bile onto her office floor. She saw him as a classic Mail or Express reader, appalled by modern Britain; except she knew he was also appalled by the Mail and the Express.

  He did the calculation once more in his head, as he had been doing all afternoon as he tried not to think about it. She was in control of the situation, and would not be disposed to consider his objections kindly. If he complained she would go straight to confrontation. He could do the show or he could resign. Resignation would be a fine bloody-minded thing to do, but then she would be quite happy and he wouldn't have a job.

  He didn't love the police force that much, but it was all he did. He didn't hanker after retirement, because he had no hobbies, no friends, no life other than this. And maybe it was shit, and maybe his predominant emotion on waking up was misery and dread about the day ahead, but it was his life, and if he threw it away, what was he going to do then? What did people do when they retired?

  Play golf. Go on a cruise. Write a book. Play Wii Fit and Nintendo Brain Training. Grow vegetables. Crochet. Watch snooker and cricket. Develop a taste for real ale. Buy a boat and sail to the Channel Islands. Slowly slide into senescence and waste away until you die.

  All that was coming anyway, and soon enough. There was no reason to hurry it along. Especially when it was exactly what the Superintendent was expecting and wanting him to do. The alternative was spending a week with the television cameras at his shoulder, trailed around by the kind of pre-pubescent wankers of all ages who applied for these kinds of shows. And once he was back on the television, the press would be after him again, their interest in his story once more reactivated, pictures of Amanda once more on the front pages.

  Between a rock and a hard place, the Devil and the deep blue sea, the frying pan, the fire, the bag of stinking, festering crap.

  'Yes,' he said suddenly. She had looked at him throughout, could see his brain moving in all directions. He may have been cunning, introverted yet full of himself, and more often than not, downright weird, but she still had plenty of moments of being able to read his thoughts, because his petty di
slike of her matched her petty dislike of him. She'd been expecting indignation, yet at the same time, she was not surprised by his dull acceptance.

  'Good' she said. 'I thought you might enjoy it. That's why I put you forward.'

  You never put me forward, you lying bitch.

  'They say when they'd be down?'

  Jericho shook his head.

  'I've made Sergeant Light the special liaison with the company. She can sort out the logistics. I expect they'll be down in a day or two to take a look around, and start setting up. The whole show seems to be working to some sort of crazy deadline. Not unlike police work. Perhaps you can explore the similarities as part of your involvement with the process.'

  She smiled again, her head cocked marginally to one side, eyebrows raised. Jericho had one of those blinding, flashing moments when he allowed his imagination to run darkly amok. He looked into her eyes and imagined grabbing her by the hair with his left hand, tilting her head back, and running a blade swiftly across her neck. Slicing again, so that her head came away in his hands. His mind ran on, unspeakable horrors, as he looked into her eyes. He would walk through the office, her severed head in his hand, dripping blood over the beige carpet.

  She held the smile, even as it wavered, and then finally Jericho stood, his hatred unspoken as it spilled out over her carpet, and walked quickly from her office, closing the door behind him.

  She shivered and lifted the phone. Her face was grim and dark until a voice said hello at the other end, and then Dylan leant back in her chair, the smile engaged once more, and she proceeded to use the word darling more in five minutes than Jericho would use in a lifetime.

  7

  Accepting that he was locked into his television hell, Jericho managed to turn the idea off for the afternoon. It would happen when it would happen. It would happen when Sergeant Light came to collect him.

  Light was relatively new, and Jericho probably hadn't said more than a couple of words to her so far. Based on nothing more than walking past her in the office, however, he liked her, something that he had not communicated to anyone else. He knew that Dylan's pettiness would have extended as far as ensuring that some other officer was assigned the task if she'd known that Jericho was happy with Light.

  Not thinking about the television show allowed Jericho to push cases around his desk. There wasn't much doing. A serious assault from a few weeks previously on Wells High Street. Two drunks beating up another drunk. Jericho pondered if three was enough to call it a brawl, or whether the word brawl implied greater participation in terms of numbers. Sadly, none of them had died; they would all live to drink and fight again.

  There had been a few graffiti tags around the town. Not really his province, but he'd been in on the investigation, such as it was, because he was there, and people tended to defer to him. Complaints about a farmer off the Shepton Mallet road not letting walkers cross his field. One of the sergeants had asked Jericho to become involved just so that everyone knew how seriously the police were taking the matter. Reports of teenagers driving recklessly around the Westway carpark at 1.30 in the morning, trying to pitch their mates off the car bonnet. A window smashed at the bottom of Portway the previous Tuesday.

  It was quite common for Jericho to be used just so that people could see how seriously the police were taking matters. There certainly wasn't much work that warranted the attention of a Detective Chief Inspector, and rare were the jobs he'd been given since coming to the West Country that would have come his way in London when he was there.

  Still, people got beaten up, cars drove too quickly, houses were broken into, every now and again a victim would meet his killer.

  Haynes knocked and entered. Jericho was staring at a piece of paper. His expression was blank, but Haynes new that he defied appearances. That he would be taking everything in. The man plucked information form nowhere on a daily basis.

  Jericho looked up; Haynes stood in the doorway.

  'So, what's the plan?' asked Haynes.

  'Plan?'

  'Are you doing the show?'

  Jericho nodded.

  'Shit,' said Haynes. 'I really thought you might blow 'em off. You're going to be on TV. You'll be getting marriage proposals and endorsement deals from, I don't know, Smith & Wesson… Pepsi…. You could be the next Cheryl Cole.'

  'Do you have anything to tell me, or are you just in here to give me abuse?'

  Haynes laughed.

  'Nothing. Just checking it's all right for me to knock off for the day.'

  Jericho nodded and looked back at the report from the witness to the High Street beating. The spelling and the grammar were terrible, but Jericho knew it would have been written by a police officer and signed by the witness.

  'Any more thoughts on the Tarot card?' asked Haynes. 'You know, I'm saying that, but it's not as if I've had any.'

  Jericho shook his head again, spoke without looking up.

  'We'll wait and see. If nothing else comes in and nothing extraordinary appears to have happened, we can bin it.'

  'Maybe someone just wants you to view the world from a different perspective.'

  Jericho didn't immediately raise his eyes, although Haynes could tell he had stopped reading. Finally the eyebrow lifted, his eyes followed.

  'That would be someone who didn't know that I already do that every day.'

  Haynes smiled, made a small gesture with his hand and headed out of the door. Stopped, looked back in.

  'The Crown?'

  Jericho ignored him, Haynes turned away.

  *

  'They'll be talking about you again.'

  Jericho was sitting up in bed. Amanda was standing by the window, looking out over the view, although it was dark, so he presumed she couldn't see anything. She was humming a tune he recognised. Memphis in June. It sounded soft and beautiful.

  'I wish they wouldn't,' he said. 'I never say it to anyone. I never grab the newspaper and rip it up. I never tell the journalists to fuck off when they call.'

  She turned. She was smiling.

  'It's all right,' she said.

  He shook his head. When she looked at him like that he wanted to cry.

  When he heard the tune again it was Hoagy singing. Amanda turned back to the night.

  *

  She was never there when he was lying beside another woman. She knew not to come into his dreams when he had fucked someone else. Regularly, however, she would be there when he hadn't. Sometimes lost, sometimes lonely. Sometimes she smiled. He never understood it when she smiled.

  He awoke depressed. Sat in the near dark, watching the dawn while he ate breakfast. Grey light, but no sun, spreading across the cold fields and barren hedgerows. Coffee and toast spread with just butter. Shoulders hunched as he sat at the table.

  The apprentice police officers of Britain's Got Justice awoke to orange juice and figs, bran and decaf, stretching and exercise, showers and anxious hours spent in front of a mirror. The man who would be their leader for a few days, who would show them what it was truly like to be on the front line of law enforcement, who the tabloid press would try to define as their Jedi Master, sat slouched over an old wooden table and wondered if the shape he could see in the distance was really a deer, or whether his eyes were going the same way as his flat stomach and his enthusiasm.

  It was true what they said. Jericho had no friends. He had enemies though.

  He sat for half an hour after finishing his breakfast, until the morning had completely broken. It rained. The dull gloom looked settled for the day. He went back upstairs, cleaned his teeth, down to the front door, shoes and coat on and out into the chill of morning.

  8

  Durrant had not been surprised to be let out of prison. Nothing surprised him, just as nothing pleased him or annoyed him or upset him. Life happened to Durrant and he dealt with it as it came along. The last thirty years had come along in prison.

  There had been no one waiting for him, not when he was initially let out the front door
, a small bag over his shoulder. Some clothes, a few manuscripts he'd been working on, and a book he'd picked up in the prison library. No one seemed interested in whether it would ever be returned. He wondered if they assumed he'd be arrested again so quickly that it would still be in his possession when he was sent back.

  He had been sitting in a small café when a man in a grey suit had pulled the chair out across the table from him and taken a seat. Uninvited.

  Durrant had a photographic memory. He had everything in the café installed in his head the second he walked in. Pregnant teenager, baby sleeping in a pram next to her. She might have been waiting for someone but Durrant didn't think so. Getting away from someone maybe. Lived at home with her mother and needed to get out. If he'd studied her he could have worked it out, but didn't want to. Two guys came in after him and bought a can of Coke each, sat at the table talking in low voices about betting on football and which one of the women behind the counter in the William Hill around the corner they'd have. That was it for customers. There were only five tables, so it could be said that the place was more than half full, albeit it would be a statement from the table of lies, damned lies and statistics.

  The woman behind the counter was called Michelle, a sturdy woman of unattractive disposition. Durrant had not engaged her since asking for a cup of tea. It was not a lack of money that prevented him ordering a piece of cake or a pastry to accompany the tea, but the rank awfulness of what was on offer. It was as if the sanitised sugary goodness of Starbucks and Costa hadn't happened, and since Durrant had missed society's development over the previous thirty years, he assumed that the world was more or less as he'd left it three decades previously.

  The man in the suit didn't speak. Looked at Durrant for a while, sizing him up. Looked over his shoulder after a while and asked Michelle for a coffee, something that he was destined not to drink once he got his first whiff of Nescafé. Michelle accepted the order with a minimal nod.