We Are The Hanged Man

by Douglas Lindsay

  'And the attacker?'

  'Legged it.'

  And would never be found. Jericho hadn't even seen the murder mentioned on the local news; which was because it just wasn't news any more. Society has come to expect fights in city centres in the middle of the night, once the bars and clubs have spewed forth their detritus of the evening. It was no one's news.

  'Who was the victim?'

  Another glance at the notebook.

  'Oliver Davis, early twenties. Last year of studying history at Bristol. No immediate family, but has distant relatives… they seem reasonably wealthy. Just got back to Bristol having spent Christmas with them in London.'

  'How's that one looking?'

  'Bit early to say case closed, but, you know…. Two drunks fighting after a night on the piss. The guys in Bristol, you know, they're not getting anywhere. Where is there to go?'

  'Isn't there CCTV?'

  'It was a guy in a hood. Seems to have kept his face covered the whole time.'

  Haynes looked into Jericho's eyes, hesitated. Jericho raised his eyebrows.

  'A guy takes the time to make sure his face is covered, presumably even before he got in a fight. And he was drunk? That doesn't strike you as odd?'

  'Now that you say it.'

  'Check that one out, we need more detail. What else?'

  'Car crash in Cornwall, a couple of teenagers died.'

  Jericho nodded. He'd heard that one on the news.

  'That's it for around here?'

  'Next closest is a car crash in Hampshire. Family of four.'

  Jericho nodded. He'd seen that one too. Car crash deaths make the news. They are everyman deaths. There's not one of us doesn't go in a car on a regular basis; car crashes could affect us all. Drunks fighting at two in the morning, however, was the territory of the young and the hot-headed, the foolish and under-educated, not the middle class who watched the Ten O'Clock News.

  'That one was a little odd,' said Haynes. 'The car burned up.'

  'It exploded?'

  That hadn't been on the news.

  'They're investigating. There was a fire, the fuel burned up. No one got out the car, so they're assuming they all died beforehand, or were trapped in the car.'

  'Was it part of a movie?'

  'What?'

  'Cars don't usually burn up because they drive off the road.'

  He shook his head.

  'This isn't getting us very far. Shit.'

  Haynes looked back at his notes.

  'There's a woman in Hownsl—'

  'Trouble is,' said Jericho, 'if you take each individual case as potentially suspicious and start reading something else into it, every slightly strange death in the country over the past few days…. Bollocks. Even the drunk teenagers. You take it for granted. Drunk teenagers in a car. That's not fucking news, no one's saying, shit how did that happen, society must be on the verge of collapse.'

  He paused. Haynes knew he hadn't finished or, at the very least, that there was no point in him saying anything at this stage.

  'But what if someone spiked a drink, the kid didn't know he was drunk until he was flying along the road, adrenaline pumping and….'

  He ran out of words, as he often did. He bored himself. Saying things that didn't need to be said.

  They would have to investigate every one of the deaths in intimate detail, or at least make sure that the local police had done the job properly. And none of them were going to be happy about being called up for some spurious reason, especially when they found out that it was DCI Robert Jericho behind it. Those who worked with him respected him; those who hadn't just saw someone whose fame was out of proportion to his body of work; that someone who had been in the newspapers as much as he was, really had to want it that way. His upcoming television appearance wasn't going to change anything.

  He quickly rubbed his hands over his face.

  'Right, Sergeant, we're just going to have to bite the antelope on the arse. I doubt there's going to be one of these that we can just happily throw out. We'll split the list. If either of us have a particular contact we can use, then we'll take it, otherwise…'

  He threw a hand in the air. Haynes leaned forward, notebook open, ready to continue.

  14

  It had been four days and Durrant was restless. The matter of vengeance was in hand, yet he knew that man could not live by vengeance alone. If one's life was consumed by vengeance, then it ate away at you, ate your heart out, turned your soul black.

  He had planned vengeance all these years, yet he had also studied and written and published. He knew things that other people did not know, he had widened his base of knowledge. If he had allowed himself to miss anything due to his incarceration, it was the bold experimentation of the months before he'd been arrested.

  It was time to start again.

  He had been in prison so long that he knew nothing of reality television, knew nothing of the explosion of channels and the modern notion of celebrity. There had been televisions in prison of course. There had been talk amongst the inmates, but Durrant had followed none of it. He never watched TV. His years in prison had left him much the wiser on a variety of subjects: the Mongol empire, the ancient Greeks, the history of torture, the life and works of the much misunderstood Vlad the Impaler. 18th century France was a particular fascination. Occasionally he had ventured as far forward in history as the Second World War. The death camps. The firebombing of Dresden. The Japanese treatment of POWs. German plans to invade the south coast of England.

  The modern day, post-WWII, was mostly unknown to him and of little interest. Too much civilisation. Durrant didn't like civilisation. And where there wasn't civilisation in the modern world, there would be some busybody from another country attempting to impose it.

  So although the first person that Durrant would kidnap, rape, torture and murder was currently regularly featured on the front page of three mass-circulation British tabloid newspapers and was well known to people who had no interest in the show in which she starred, Durrant had never heard of her and had no idea that she was enjoying her fleeting few moments in the sun; moments that would be highly unlikely to endure, even if Durrant had not been about to remove her from the harsh glare of public life.

  He drove along the A12 heading towards London, sitting at a steady 60mph, the variable speed limit, traffic and roundabouts notwithstanding. He did not play music. He listened to Radio 4 for less than thirty seconds, then turned it off. News. Durrant was not interested in the news.

  Although he was about to make some.

  *

  Jericho's mood was getting slowly worse, as it often did when he was in a grey humour from the moment he awoke. Each and every one of the constant irritations of the day ate away at him, sucked him further into the well. It never did take anything major.

  He had spent the morning making calls and reading reports. Following up what might have been unexplained deaths. It was the same in every case. If he wanted it to be suspicious, he could find some way in which it could be. He could read something sinister into every nuance of the case, every nut and bolt of the investigation. It didn't mean, however, that any of the speculation would be accurate. And with every phone call came the question as to why the famous detective from out of town was asking, and was he reading more into the death than could be taken at face value, which automatically made the police officer at the other end of the line assume that Jericho knew something that he didn't, which automatically made the police officer annoyed and suspicious when Jericho was never forthcoming.

  A pernicious circle of questions and suspicions that was destined never to get anywhere.

  He gave up at 2:35pm. Haynes was not in a position to give up of his own volition, but had already reached the same uncomfortable conclusions as Jericho.

  Jericho sat and stared out of the window. He would tell Haynes to give up shortly, but was not of the mind to go out of his way to go and tell him immediately. His door was shut. The day was grey. He
had finished work for the afternoon, even if it was likely that he would still be sitting in the same position sometime after six. He couldn't work when his brain shut down like this.

  There was a knock at the door. He didn't move. It made no difference to his mood. What could it possibly be? For a while, for a few years, every knock at the door could have been news about Amanda, but time had taken that away from him. Now a knock at the door was just another interruption.

  Another knock. He didn't respond. The door opened; Sergeant Light stuck her head into the room. She'd been told what to expect, and was approaching with trepidation. Assumed that his dark mood was down to his forced involvement in the television show. Assumed that he thought her useless, as he always seemed to be in a foul mood when they worked together.

  'We need to be downstairs, Chief Inspector,' said Light. 'We had a 2.30, already late.'

  Jericho couldn't remember a 2.30. He was watching a flock of starlings swooping in awkward dark formations across the fields. He finally turned and caught Light's eye. She felt drawn in by his gaze, a horrible, bloody stare. Like looking into the eyes of a killer, she thought.

  '2.30,' she said again, to break the silence.

  'What?' said Jericho, only managing the first word of the sentence.

  'We're back in with Hattie Morris. From the production company. Just a few details to sort through before we go up for the show tomorrow evening. She's brought…… there's another executive down from London with her.'

  Jericho didn't reply. If he'd been in a better mood Light would have felt able to say that the other executive had been brought in because Morris obviously had her doubts about Jericho's fitness for reality television. For any kind of television in fact.

  Jericho didn't move.

  'We should go, Sir, they're waiting.'

  *

  The other executive was one of the three who had originally sat in the room the previous summer waiting for the arrival of their boss in order to begin concocting the next big thing in British television. Of that initial three, he was the only survivor. The others had gone on to other, more interesting things, by some accounts, but in reality they had just been gotten rid of because they had not been contributing.

  The survivor's name was Jacobson, and when the boss wasn't around he assumed the mantle of alpha male, talking louder than anyone else, shooting people down, putting people in their place. And wherever that place was, it was below him.

  He was talking at Jericho, just so that Jericho knew who was in charge, who was dishing out the instructions, who was telling other people what to do.

  'So, you'll have a crib sheet. You don't need to worry about that, and the audience won't see it. Not the TV audience. They're just going to assume that you know everything that's been going on with these people.'

  He stopped, his first break in over five minutes. Jericho looked disinterested, which had made Jacobson slightly uncomfortable with the consequence of making him talk even more quickly.

  'You do know the kinds of things we're talking about with the contestants?' he asked and finally paused for Jericho to say something.

  Despite appearances, Jericho had heard every word. He had to sit with the panel, although, like the rest of the panel he would not have a vote in the final decision. Most of the six contestants had had allegations made against them in the press, many of which involved accusations of criminal behaviour. Jacobson said behaviours, as if it was an acceptable noun to pluralise. It would be Jericho's task to question them on these behaviours, and to try to root out a confession, with the likelihood that outright confessions of misdemeanours would lead to the contestant in question being ejected. Not that they knew this in advance, but it had been in the small print right from the start.

  Jacobson searched Jericho's face for an answer, but not for long. He knew it wasn't coming.

  'And we'll be looking for you to be quite aggressive in pursuit of the information. Quick punches, boom, boom, boom. Don't let them away with anything. They won't like it and most of them will fight back, but that's the kind of thing we're talking about. It'll be great TV. Edge of the seat. Some of the viewers will be on your side, some on theirs. Feisty, fiery talk, quick-witted, sharp. If you can be acerbic for us, but, you know, genuinely funny, that'd be fantastic.'

  Jericho was unmoving. Hattie Morris allowed herself a heavy and hopeless sigh. Light felt embarrassed by Jericho's silence. She was annoyed at him today. How hard could it be for him to play along with these people? They were just delivering a service to the British people, which didn't make them so different from the police.

  'Cher, for example,' said Jacobson, 'the papers have been full of stories about her prodigious drug intake. And not just the mild shit like, you know, shit, but crack coke and ice, all that kind of body-fucking heavy shit. No idea where they're getting their stories, so it's not like we can charge in there and bust her, but obviously we need to know at this stage whether any of it's true.'

  'You'd know about shit,' said Jericho dryly, catching him by surprise and cutting him off, 'because you're full of it. The press will be getting all their stories from you, because you lot are the ones with the vested interest.'

  Morris stared at the floor; Jacobson laughed awkwardly.

  Light tried to contain a smile, found herself drifting back towards Jericho's side.

  'Bingo!' said Jacobson. 'That's what we're talking about. That punchy, acerbic, tough TV cop typa thing. Rebus meets Morse, Barnaby meets Wallander.'

  'Oh, for crying out loud,' muttered Jericho, regretting that he'd made the effort to engage in conversation.

  'What would be perfect,' continued Jacobson, unabashed, 'what we're really looking for, let's imagine that at the end of this, someone made a movie of the whole damned crazy thing, you'd be played by Bruce Willis.'

  Light leaned forward and covered her face with her hand. Aware of the movement, Jericho glanced round at her, and the closest thing to a smile that day came to his face.

  'Or Tom Cruise.'

  The smile quickly left as he looked back at Jacobson. Jacobson had noticed the glance between them, but since the only conclusion to be drawn from it was that the police were laughing at him, he chose not to draw the conclusion, to imagine that he just plain didn't know what they were talking about, and to move on.

  'We wondered about you coming up to London today, meeting the contestants, getting immersed in the vibe of the show, but we brown enveloped the matter and decided it'd work better if you've had as little contact with them as possible. Don't want to run the risk of you making any positive connection with any of them before we make it on air. It'll be edgier without it. They'll be nervous.'

  Jericho held his gaze for a moment then glanced at Hattie Morris. Her mood had picked up and she was generally looking terribly excited about the prospect of a couple of hours of electric television.

  'Brown enveloped?' he asked.

  'Talked about it in secret,' she said, then lifted her eyebrows in some sort of we're-all-in-it-together gesture.

  'For fuck's sake,' muttered Jericho.

  The meeting broke up shortly afterwards.

  *

  'You're going to have to do something about him,' said Jacobson to Light, as she was about to leave. Jericho had walked quickly from the office without waiting for her.

  'Yep,' added Morris, nodding.

  She stopped.

  'Not sure that I can. You pretty much get what you see with the DCI.'

  'He was sold to us as this maverick, Mel Gibson Lethal Weapon typa dude,' said Jacobson. 'I'm not seeing that.'

  'Who sold you that?' asked Light.

  Jacobson shrugged and looked at Morris. Morris shrugged.

  'It's what everyone says,' said Jacobson. 'We read the newspapers.'

  'You believe what you read in the papers?' asked Light.

  Jacobson smiled. 'Sure, you know, I hear what you're saying, but there's no smoke without fire, eh?'

  'That,' said Light, 'is certai
nly something the papers trade on.'

  Jacobson shrugged.

  'So, there you are. And we need to see this cool side of Jericho, the side the papers talk about.'

  Light glanced over her shoulder, then stepped back into the office, closing the door behind her.

  'All that stuff the tabloids are carrying about your contestants. The drugs and the sex and all that other shit. They get those stories from you, right?'

  Jacobson smiled awkwardly.

  'You never heard that from me, darlin',' he said.

  'And you make it all up?'

  'Well….,' he began, then his voice trailed away.

  'So you tell lies to journalists, then believe what you read in the papers,' said Light. 'Nice. No wonder society is so fucked up. I think I might start being as miserable as the boss.'

  She looked from Jacobson to Morris. Neither of them spoke. Confronted with someone who had seen through to the other side of the two-way mirror, as far as they were concerned the conversation was over.

  'You get what you see with the Chief Inspector,' she said again. 'See you tomorrow.'

  She opened the door and left, closing the door behind her and leaving Jacobson and Morris in silence.

  Jacobson didn't really do silence, so it didn't last.

  'Think that went pretty well,' he said, without a trace of irony.

  'Yep,' said Morris. 'Pretty well.'

  'We need to take control of the Jericho situation. Do we have a file on the guy?'

  'Not yet.'

  'Make one. Every piece of shit you can get. And all the stuff about his wife. That should make some pretty interesting live TV when we bring that up. That'll zap some life into the bastard.'

  'Totally,' said Morris, making notes.

  *

  Haynes found Jericho in the City Arms. Jericho didn't have a favourite bar, preferring to share his insubstantial business around the town. Never drank a second pint. Alcohol made him maudlin, and maudlin on top of depressed and fucked off was never a good combination.