We Are The Hanged Man

by Douglas Lindsay

  'Do you think it would be possible to get details of these two individuals. That's the kind of thing, you know, that we'd really be interested in. Assault works great on TV. It's, you know, well it can be, you know, really visceral.'

  'Blood,' she added, when neither Jericho nor Light looked like they were going to say anything.

  'Right,' she said, and she looked down at her short list of notes, then raised her head and embraced them both with a smile.

  'That's just, like, you know, plenty to work with for the moment, a lot, a lot of scope. Um….';

  She flicked through her book, her lips pursed. Light recognised that she was about to ask something she knew she shouldn't. Jericho brought the coffee cup back up to his face, didn't recognise anything in Morris' demeanour.

  'So,' said Morris, 'as I was saying earlier, and I think we all agreed on, this …em, a lot of this, but you know, not all, a lot of this is going to come down to you, Robert, and I, you know, we, you know we're thinking that this is a great opportunity for you to go centre stage, for you to become the, you know, you're going to be like Ant and Dec meets Brucie, or Davina meets… Robot Wars…' She laughed in an attempted self-deprecating manner. 'Oh, I'm going off on one… Robot Wars. Heck, you know what I mean. It's just, like, kinda crazy. But, you know, that's what we're looking for. You're going to be the man here, you really are. I'll tell you what it's going to be like. Davina meets Yoda, that's who you're going to be.'

  Jericho was staring at her over the top of his cup. If someone had given him a piece of paper and a pen at that moment, he could have written a list of over six billion places he'd rather be, and a similar number of people to whom he'd rather be talking. Light was just staring at the desk, waiting for the question, wondering what Jericho was going to say. Morris burbled on, unaware. Or very aware but determined.

  'So, I guess, what I'm saying is that you're going to be, like, you know, out there, centre stage in some respects. So we were wondering, I mean, you know, some of the guys back at the studio were wondering, are you happy with this kind of level of attention? You know, obviously you're charismatic, you're an attractive man, your TV manner is just going to be awesome, but you know…. You know, how do you feel about us running a bit of a story on your wife?'

  Light felt the room implode. Morris, apparently feeling no shame, looked expectantly at Jericho.

  Jericho held her gaze for a moment, and then carefully set the coffee cup down on the desk. For some minutes now it had only contained the cold dregs in any case. He rose to his feet, caught Light's eye, and then walked from his office, grabbing his jacket off the peg by the door as he went. He closed the door behind him.

  Morris stared at the closed door for a few moments, and then looked at Light. Light also got to her feet.

  'So, what was that?' asked Morris.

  'Sorry?'

  'Was that a no, was that a… I'll think about it…?'

  Light held her gaze for about as long as Jericho had done, then walked to the door, opened it, and stood by it waiting for Morris to leave with her.

  'We'll go down to the canteen and we can discuss further arrangements with regard to the start of filming,' she said.

  *

  'Well, we're going to have to get him to lighten up. He's just, you know, we've all seen it. Deer caught in the headlights. So excited by the thought of TV he can barely bring himself to go to the toilet. Just, like, clammed up. I know, it's kind of tiring. These people should just get over themselves. It's only TV. Yeah, I know, it's like totally sad. But you know, I reckon, give him an episode or two, he'll like totally open up. And we'll be able to totally play on it, you know. The blossoming of the flower, that kind of angle. And we all know, you know, we know who's going to get through to the last three, and when he's spent any time at all with Cher or Lol, he's just going to melt. It'll be like, you know, the Taming of the Shrew or some shit like that. The melting of the iceberg. Yep, it would be awesome, you know, if he falls for one of them, I mean, Yoda starts banging one of his students, that would be so cool. Well, like yeah, he's like fifty or something, it'd be pretty gross, but hey babe, it's television. Anything can happen…'

  11

  Jericho and Haynes were sitting on a bench beside the moat around the Bishop's Palace. A classic Well's tourist spot. Albeit not in the middle of January. Occasionally someone would walk by, huddled against the cold, but mostly they had the place to themselves. The sounds of a tractor drifted over from the nearby fields; occasionally flocks of starlings would descend and then fly off noisily in a great dark cloud.

  Jericho saw none of it, had just wanted to get away from the station. Morris was still there, pouring over specifics with Light, and he'd decided the only way to guarantee not getting called back in to speak to the woman was to not be there.

  He'd been sitting for ten minutes waiting for Haynes, who had just arrived with sandwiches from Gregg's.

  'I can feel the damp in my buttocks,' said Haynes after a while, through a mouthful of char-grilled Mexican chicken, a sandwich which had never actually been anywhere near Mexico.

  Some days Jericho might have had a barbed comment to make about Haynes' underwear or about wearing a longer coat, but today he didn't have any unnecessary conversation in him.

  'Tell me about the card,' he said.

  'Nothing to tell,' said Haynes. 'She gave it the same going over, said it had been produced from the same template as the previous one, but slightly amended. Which is what we thought. So, nothing new.'

  Jericho ate his tuna mayonnaise and stared at the ducks on the far side of the moat. As ever, when he looked at ducks, he wondered if he might have duck for dinner that night.

  'What do you think?' said Jericho.

  'About the cards? Or about Newton?'

  Both men thought of Newton in her summer dress in the middle of January.

  'The cards,' said Jericho. 'If we were at a busy office, would we have given these cards even a seconds' thought? Instead, there's nothing much going on and we're investing all sorts of time in them. Time which we'd never spend if we were in London. Or Bristol.'

  'So two Tarot cards with peculiar markings become more important because of where we are, something which does not in fact inherently relate to the cards in any way.'

  Jericho nodded silently, something which he had the ability to do without even moving his head.

  'Doesn't mean,' said Haynes, 'that implicitly they're not important. Or, at least, that they don't herald something important.'

  When was the last time you had duck, asked Jericho. But the words just formed in his head. He could talk about work, but nothing else. Despite himself, he had been completely disconcerted by his conversation with Morris. He wanted to be cool about the whole TV thing, but it was beginning to bother him. He hated the idea, he hated the thought of his every movement being on television, he hated the intrusion. He had come down here to get away from it all, and now, years later, it had followed him, and once more he would be in the newspapers. Hattie Morris would not be the last person to ask about Amanda.

  'There's nothing been happening the last couple of days, is there?' he asked.

  'Nope.'

  Haynes casually let a small piece of bread go flying into the moat. The nearest duck gave it a glance and swam on.

  'So, either these cards are telling us there's something going on somewhere else, or else it's a threat of what's to come.'

  'Seems reasonable. Unless it's just some wanker having a laugh.'

  Jericho rubbed his forehead, massaged his closed eyes, finally looked up although his eyes never lifted above the height of the wall around the moat. The flock of starlings settled noisily into the trees beside the nearest field. Somewhere a crow vented its gravelly rage.

  'Don't let anyone know about it for now. If it turns out to be nothing, or some clown's idea of a joke, then no one finds out about it. But if it is important, then we need to know about it before whoever's sending them wants us to know. I'm goi
ng to be bogged down with this bloody TV business, so you'll need to take care of it. Just don't, for God's sake, let anything slip about it in front of them. The TV people.'

  'What do you want me to do?'

  'A general check of what's been going on. Anything unusual. Anything that might tie in with the timing of these two cards.'

  'You mean, everywhere? Countrywide?'

  Jericho breathed out. Took another bite of sandwich. Allowed himself to think about it for a while. Haynes, well used to the long gaps in his conversations with Jericho, similarly ate his sandwich and waited.

  'Let's ignore the Tarot stuff for a second. The concept of a hanged man in general suggests death, someone who's been hanged. In the regular Tarot concept it means something completely different, but then these cards are also subverting that concept by implying death.'

  'So we go with death.'

  'Yes. For the moment. Start around here, the whole of the West Country, although I think we'd have heard about it if there'd been anything too weird. Then check out my old patch in London, and then the rest of the country. Fuck, there must have been several hundred people died in Britain in the last few days, it's what happens. Just find out the unusual ones, the ones the police are looking into.'

  'And I won't know what I'm looking for until I find it.'

  'Exactamundo,' said Jericho, which was a word he only usually used when he was in a good mood and feeling positive enough to say something stupid. Instead, he had one of those moments when the words coming out of his mouth sounded ridiculous, and so he took a bite from his sandwich and lowered himself slightly further down into the bench. He'd said everything that needed to be said.

  12

  There were six contestants remaining on the new TV reality show, Britain's Got Justice. Cher, Lol, Gaz, Ando, Muzza and Xav. That, at least, was how their names had been abbreviated for tabloid usage. Of the six, only Cherie Mansfield had previously used her tabloid moniker in real life, but the people at BGJ had helpfully supplied the newspapers on whom they depended with the relevant nicknames, to remove the possibility of confusion.

  Originally something in the region of nine thousand people had applied for the show, a disappointing number in itself. Ever since, the producers felt, they had been fighting a rearguard action in trying to retain the interest of the public. By the time they got to the live broadcast stage, there were fifteen, and since Christmas nine had been eliminated by a combination of physical exercises, examination and the ever-versatile telephone vote.

  Mostly, anyone who remotely looked like a thuggish police officer and a shoo-in for the title had been removed. They didn't want forty-year-old brutal ex-Army thugs on the show, they wanted attractive nineteen-year-old girls and men in their mid-twenties who shaved their chests. They wanted to do crime prevention for the YouTube/Facebook generation. Their perfect police officer was to be some weird combination of Justin Beiber and Gemma Arterton, not Ray Winstone and John Thaw.

  The only one of the six to slip through the net was Gary Templeton, thirty-six and a former Royal Marine. He looked like a police officer; he came top in virtually all the tests; he was attractive enough to satisfy the girls and the media. When he smiled he had dimples. The Mirror had implied that he had been involved in a variety of top secret operations; the idea had stuck, and now whenever he was mentioned it was implied that he was some kind of superspy figure. The producers just didn't want someone that old winning the title, and so it was beholden on them to come up with a way for him to lose. Some said that he was in line to be the next James Bond, even though the current James Bond didn't seem to be on the point of going anywhere.

  The other five, who for the most part fitted the bill that the producers, advertisers and audience demanded, were Cherie Mansfield, a twenty-year-old media studies student from Burton-on-Trent, Lorraine Allison, nineteen, reading Greek history at Magdelen College Oxford, (she hated being known as Lol, just as much as she hated being called the posh one because she was at Oxford), Andrew Payne, a Scottish teenage building apprentice, who claimed to already have bedded four hundred women, Murray Forsyth, who was unemployed and termed himself a performance artist having put three short films about himself on YouTube, and Xavier Yateras, a twenty-year-old hairdresser from Putney. He'd been getting the gay and lesbian vote – despite being neither – as well as the votes of those who hated the very idea of the show and wanted to subvert it by voting for the least likely police officer in the competition.

  Cher, Lol, Gaz, Ando, Muzza and Xav. The producers had picked their final six before the first show had aired, and had managed to get five out of the six they'd been looking for. They intended no such slip-ups when it came to the final three.

  Stories about the six had been getting leaked to the media for some weeks, the stories themselves getting more and more desperate and outlandish as it became apparent that the interest of the public was waning. Cher: drugs and an incredible amount of sex; Lol: posh, a one-off instance of a mass student orgy, and possibly related to the Royal family; Gaz: previously a murder suspect, three ex-wives, caring father, heart of gold; Ando: all those women, although regularly he couldn't get it up because of his drug habit; Muzza: the twenty-two year-old virgin who had almost been adopted by Madonna; and Xav: arrested four times on Gay Pride marches, and who had once had a threesome with two fellows out of Take That.

  All of the stories were made up by a group of people sitting around a desk in an office, but it wasn't as if there was a newspaper out there who would take the time to check the facts. It was, as their Svengali producer had noted to the team, like shooting into an empty net.

  Why then, they had been left to wonder, as the series had drifted dangerously into the nation's disinterest, were they currently 5-0 down?

  Things were about to change, however, and it wasn't just because the producers had roped in reluctant detective Robert Jericho. One of the dull and uninteresting six, about whom they had made up so many fibs and exaggerations, was about to disappear for a while, before dying a rather unpleasant, painful and brutal death.

  13

  Friday morning. Jericho awoke with an uncomfortable feeling in his gut, something he quickly attributed to the impending doom of the upcoming weekend. He wasn't going to have a part in choosing the three final participants in the show, but he had been instructed to attend the Saturday and Sunday night two-hour TV shows to sit with the judges and to pronounce on how the finalists handled the various trials and questions that were sent their way. In a further act of ratings desperation, each of the contestants had been told to sing a song on the basis that at some point in their police enforcement careers they might have to go undercover and sing karaoke.

  Having been determined to mentally close down and block out the upcoming week, Jericho was beginning to wonder if maybe he would be better off resigning and finding a way to live with the decision. Model airplanes. Jigsaws. Walks on the Somerset levels looking for cranes.

  He couldn't eat anything for breakfast. He looked across the fields and drank coffee and watched the grey light creep across the land, and thought about how he hated the media in Britain; but he also thought that the media were just giving the people what they wanted, so shouldn't he also hate the people? And he thought that in fact, yes, he did hate the people. So what was the point in being a police officer and serving them, serving the course of natural justice?

  He thought all those things, but still, when he got into the office forty minutes later than normal – and he was normally later than everyone else – he did not type out a resignation latter.

  *

  Haynes was leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees, a notebook open in front of him. He liked the feel of a notebook, even though some of his peers thought him dreadfully old-fashioned, or worse, trying to mimic the old-fashioned ways of Jericho. Jericho was leaning back in his chair, a dead cup of coffee sitting on the desk in front of him.

  'So, I guess the question is, if the cards are some messenger
of death, then were you getting them as a warning before the deaths happened, or as a kind of calling card, letting you know that something had been done. In the name of the Hanged Man. Like the Pink Panther, or that Milk Tray dude you used to get in the old adverts.'

  'Talk us through what we've got,' said Jericho.

  'So we have, in the last six days or so around the country, seventeen deaths that the police are currently looking into as unexplained, potentially suspicious or at the very least, not obviously due to natural causes. Can't rule out the possibility that we're dealing with someone in a position to murder someone so that it looks like natural causes, but that's obviously going to open up another enormous can of shit, so you know…'

  'What have we got?' said Jericho again. 'Start with the West Country.'

  Haynes looked down at his notebook. He'd already organised the deaths geographically.

  'There's a forty-three-year-old died of a heart attack in his bed on Saturday night. Outskirts of Bath.'

  'What did the investigating officer think?'

  'They're looking into it because it's kind of weird, and there has to be a post mortem 'cause the fellow wasn't in the heart attack demographic and he seemed healthy enough, but…… ultimately he thinks it was just a freak event. One of those weird medical things that crops up. He'll let me know if anything comes up.'

  'Who was the guy?'

  'Stuart Westlake, plumber. Didn't seem to work much.'

  'Part-time plumber?'

  'Part-time plumber. Married, separated, no kids. Played football on a Sunday morning.'

  'OK, better keep on top of that one. Could be the kind of thing we're looking for. What's next?'

  'Fight on Saturday night in the middle of Bristol.'

  'There was a fight on Saturday night in the middle of Bristol?' said Jericho, a rare excursion into dry humour.

  'Witnessed by a couple of officers. Couple of drunks, one of them smashed a bottle and chibbed the other bloke. Got him in the neck. Bled to death before the ambulance arrived.'