We Are The Hanged Man

by Douglas Lindsay

  Jericho didn't move. He had woken feeling all right for once, if a little discombobulated; a strange bed, the feeling that something had happened in the night. Yet he had arrived at the station feeling unusually sanguine.

  Hadn't taken long for that to change.

  'Now,' said the constable, although there was a hint of nervousness to his voice. 'She asked me to stay with you until you came to her office.'

  Another short hesitation, then Jericho turned. He contemplated leaving his breakfast on the table so that he could enjoy it when he got back, but he was fairly certain that he wouldn't be coming straight back and that if by some chance he was, he'd be in no mood to be enjoying breakfast.

  He was eating the croissant when he walked into Dylan's office, the constable finally leaving him to it once he was sure that Dylan had made visual contact with Jericho and knew that the constable had done his job.

  Jericho closed the door, then stood in front of her, putting the last of the croissant into his mouth and taking a sip of coffee. Still too hot, burned his lips.

  'What?' he said.

  'I think I'm fed up shouting at you,' she said.

  'Can't think what you're going to do about that,' said Jericho.

  'Well, fortunately, as it happens, I don't have to do anything. You're being dispatched.'

  He didn't ask the question. Put the coffee to his lips, although he didn't actually drink any of it.

  'I don't think any of us need be surprised by the fact that the television people have had their way. You managed to dig a big enough hole that even I couldn't get you out of it.'

  Even you, thought Jericho. He kept the cup at his face, tentatively took a sip.

  'So you're going to London. In a van, with a television crew, and three expert trainee assistants. I do think the bloody girl who suggested it probably imagined she'd get to do it on her own, but you've been landed with all three of them.'

  'What about Shackleton?' asked Jericho, immediately wary of stepping onto someone else's patch.

  Dylan shrugged. 'He'll hand over to you. On the one hand the minute you walked onto the television set on Saturday he was probably expecting it, and on the other, given that it's an absurd piece of fucking theatre, he'll also be delighted.'

  'How did you know he was at the set when I got there?' asked Jericho, finally lowering the cup.

  Dylan smirked.

  'You'll likely be there until the weekend, so you may as well go home and pack a bag. Don't be too long about it. They'll pick you up on the way. Get going.'

  'I'd like Haynes,' said Jericho.

  'You're not getting him. It was bad enough what you said yesterday, but if we go implying that we can afford to have every one of our fucking officers swan off to London on the whim of a television crew, what the fuck is that going to look like?'

  Jericho turned and walked out the room.

  He found Haynes in reception, talking to Constable Loovens. He caught his eye and indicated that he follow him to his office. Haynes left Loovens behind with a shrug, and walked after the boss.

  A minute later they were behind a closed door, Jericho at his desk looking absent-mindedly in drawers.

  'Take it you heard already?'

  'Yep,' said Haynes.

  'If I need you, you're going to find a way to come up.'

  Haynes nodded, even though Jericho wasn't looking at him. He knew what it meant. He either worked at the weekend, and if it was prior to that, he worked his day in Wells and then got in his car and drove to London to work for a few hours in the evening, before being back in Wells for eight the following morning. Had already made a mental note to keep a bag packed.

  'Did you get anywhere with the house on the card?'

  'Nope,' said Haynes. He was going to further justify his lack of success, but decided there was no point.

  Jericho pushed the drawer closed and looked up.

  'All right. Keep looking. And here's another thing. Find out… look, this is going to sound, I don't know, fucking stupid, but, look, I know these things could have been sent by some freak in a gorilla suit… anyone could have sent them… but here's what I want to know. On the off-chance that they've been sent by some organisation or something, some sort of…'

  'Organisation? What sort of…'

  'I don't know,' said Jericho, uncomfortable with his instructions. 'Who knows anything about this kind of shit? Try and find out. Apparently… some people say… apparently there are organisations that use these things. Tarot cards. People use them.'

  'What kind of organisations?'

  Jericho walked round from behind his desk, determined to put his discomfiture to an end.

  'I don't…fucking…know,' he said. 'So I want you to find out and tell me.'

  He stopped, looking into Haynes' face from a couple of feet away.

  'All right,' said Haynes.

  'Thank you.'

  He walked out, leaving Haynes alone in the office.

  'So who have you been talking to?' said Haynes to the empty room.

  Then he rolled his eyes at the thought of who it was likely to have been and followed Jericho out of the room.

  32

  There were four executives sitting in the room, three of them as usual in thrall to the fourth. It was a medium-sized conference room, capable of hosting about twenty people. The four of them were at one end of the table beside a television, which was showing a live feed from the van bringing the stars of their show up the A303 to London. The sound was turned off, the television remote lying at Washington's right hand. He had had the volume on and off a couple of times, but had finally acknowledged that there was nothing worth listening to, and had pressed the mute button.

  One of Claudia's assistants, also travelling in the van, was sending constant messages to Washington, with updates on any interesting developments, something she was alternating with updating the show's Twitter account.

  Washington had a Macbook in front of him with several pages open, squeezed in beside each other on the screen. He held up his hand to stop Jacobson talking, while he concentrated on the latest Tweet from his Researcher in the Field.

  Hot in car. Wish they'd turn down heating. No 1 saying much. Hungry. Feel like chocolate.

  He nodded sagely to himself, as if reading something of great importance.

  'Sounds like it's pretty fucking tense in the van,' he said, then he looked up. Smiled at the fact that he had regained the conversation.

  'So, we need a strategy for this Lol thing. Correction, we need two strategies. One for if she comes back, one for if she doesn't.'

  'What if she turns up dead?' said one of the others, his hand defensively scratching the back of his head as he did so.

  'You know something I don't?' asked Washington.

  Chipperman shook his head.

  'Doesn't matter,' said Washington. 'I truly do no think she's going to turn up dead. I think we'll find she either legged it because the stress was getting too much for her, and she'll turn up on some Caribbean island getting knobbed by Rod fucking Stewart, or she's done a deal with someone like Maxi Clifford, and she's going to play it for all she can get. Either way, we need to be ready.'

  'But what if she is dead? It's a possibility,' said Jacobson.

  Washington clapped his hands together.

  'Well, fucking brilliant for us,' he said. 'A dead contestant. Jesus, it'd be fantastic. Could you buy better publicity for the show?'

  Jacobson partially nodded, although the thought of Lol being dead made him a little nervous.

  'You'd have to cancel the show,' said Chipperman.

  'No we fucking wouldn't,' said Washington. 'That's not what Lol would want. No one would want that. The show would go on; and I'll tell you what, it'd be a lot fucking bigger. We've got a bigger purpose here. We're trying to tackle the crime which is endemic to British society. What better illustration of that than one of our contestants getting her throat slit? It's fucking perfect.'

  'You sound like you hope
she might be dead,' said Chipperman.

  'Of course not,' said Washington. 'Lovely girl, if a little too full of herself because of her supposed intelligence. University Challenge my arse. Bubbly personality, great tits, nice smile. She'll turn up and it will be to the advantage of us all. But what we need to be working on here is this; what if she doesn't turn up?'

  He looked around the room with his eyebrows raised.

  'Anyone thinking, or do we need to get some new executives in here?'

  'We could do a Lol memorial episode,' said one of them quickly.

  *

  Jericho went straight to the local police station to find Shackleton and sort everything out. There was a delay of around ten minutes while Claudia argued that the conversation between the two men really ought to be recorded on camera, the two men said no, she put a call through to the chief constable, and he informed Shackleton that he would be obliged to have the cameras in the room.

  So now Jericho was taking over the running of a case from someone who did not want to give it to him, and the whole situation was being made inevitably more uncomfortable by the presence of two television cameras and a soundman.

  'I've e-mailed you most of the things you'll need to see. The people we've talked to, witnesses, family.'

  'What was it that the witnesses witnessed?' asked Jericho.

  Shackleton glanced at the camera, then looked at his desk.

  'They witnessed Lorraine Allison leaving the building… the television studio that is. We have witnesses to her arriving at the hotel, the Crowne Plaza, but none of her leaving.'

  He looked awkwardly at the camera again, then forced himself to look at Jericho.

  It was preposterous that they had felt the need to get a washed-up loser like Jericho. What did they think Jericho was going to do that he couldn't?

  Bloody television, he thought, but really he didn't think it was bloody television. He thought it must have been Jericho making a nuisance of himself, demanding to be the star in front of the cameras.

  'And she never left the Crowne Plaza?'

  'Well, not that anyone saw. They've been over the building, top to bottom, and found nothing. So, I think we can say that she definitely left. Checked all the footage of other people leaving, there's no one that fits the bill. Turns out the CCTV was disabled. We're looking into that.'

  'Disabled?'

  Shackleton looked blank.

  'You're looking into it? Is that it? It seems… curious. Suggestive.'

  Shackleton shrugged.

  'Yeah, sure. Of course. More than likely she went out wearing some fabulous bit of make up so no one noticed.'

  He shrugged when he'd finished talking.

  'You have any actual paperwork?' asked Jericho. 'I prefer paperwork.'

  Shackleton sighed and looked around, his eye finally settling on his right hand desk drawer. He opened it and removed a thin black folder.

  'Such as it is,' he said, pushing it across the desk. 'I'm afraid you're going to have to look at the computer files too. It's how we do things around here.'

  The last line was said with an intended edge. Jericho took the folder without comment. Watching the uncomfortable meeting on video, Claudia perked up in the next room, now that a little edginess had been introduced.

  Jericho turned and glanced at the cameraman, looked back at Shackleton. Shackleton, for his part, had no intention of helping Jericho out of any moment of unease.

  Jericho turned back to the cameraman.

  'Can you turn that bloody thing off?'

  'Ha!' barked Claudia in the next room. 'Got the wanker.'

  The cameraman poked his head round from the side of the camera, shook it briefly, then hid himself back behind the eyepiece. Jericho looked into the lens, the annoyance written all over him, then looked back at Shackleton. Typically he then let his annoyance get the better of his good judgement.

  'So, Chief Inspector,' he said, 'what's your feel for the case?'

  Shackleton was in no mood to make anything easier for Jericho. He looked blankly back. If either of them were going to say something stupid or indiscreet in front of a camera, it wouldn't be him.

  'We have a young girl who's disappeared and we're using all means available to us to locate her and bring her safely back to her friends and family,' said Shackleton, as if he was sitting in a press conference.

  Jericho bristled. This was why you couldn't have the television camera with you everywhere you went. No one could be honest. Or, at the very least, some people refused to be honest.

  'Go on,' said Claudia in the next room, 'say it, you spineless wanker.'

  Shackleton raised his eyebrows questioningly at Jericho.

  'Why do you think she went missing?' asked Jericho.

  Shackleton answered with a shrug, and then, 'Really, it's impossible to say at this stage until we're in possession of more evidence.'

  'You think that, at least, it makes sense to draw the conclusion that it's related to the show?' asked Jericho.

  Claudia was leaning forward, her hands squeezed tightly together.

  'Come on, you prick,' she said, 'almost there.'

  'I don't think we can draw that conclusion,' said Shackleton, determined to step away from the edge. Jericho, on the other hand, just wanted to get on with it and seemed quite happy to plummet over the cliff.

  'You don't think you can draw a conclusion between a young woman being on television most nights for two months and the fact that she disappears at the height of her popularity?'

  Shackleton eased himself back in his seat and spread his hands out. Nothing else to say. Jericho could hang himself if he wanted, but he wasn't going to tie himself to the train tracks with the oncoming train heading straight for them.

  Jericho steeled himself, mentally dismissed the camera.

  'Look, Chief Inspector, just cut the shit. I know you don't want me here, and maybe you think I engineered it, but really, it's not my doing, and I would genuinely prefer to be at home in Wells investigating small time fraud.'

  Jericho left it a moment to see if he was making any headway. Shackleton's face was expressionless. At the station in Wells they would have said that he was doing a Jericho. Or that Jericho was being out-Jerichoed.

  'Did you get any feeling that this was a set-up of any sort?' asked Jericho.

  Shackleton looked surprised at the question.

  'By who?' he asked.

  'By whom,' retorted Jericho, and Shackleton sneered and felt pleased that Jericho was in the process of shooting himself in the foot.

  'Whomsoever could you mean?' said Shackleton, because he thought it was funny, although he immediately recognised that it wasn't and regretted having said it. If he wanted to look like the cool one, then the less said the better.

  Jericho leant forward, stared at the floor. The room was completely silent, bar the low hum of the cameras, one on either side, no more than three feet from his head. He was filled with contempt for the cameramen, for intruding into his life this much. He didn't care if they were only doing their job. They didn't have to do it. They could be out doing a proper job, like filming people falling into swimming pools or cute cats or cute dogs or cute kids, then sticking it on YouTube and getting a million hits a day. So damned fuck if that wasn't even a fucking proper job.

  'Have you investigated the possibility that no crime has been committed, and that the whole thing is a set-up by either the producers, or by Lorraine Allison herself, in order to get maximum publicity for this low-life, execrable piece of television shit?'

  There, thought Jericho. Said it. At least he'd taken care of the elephant in the room, even if it did guarantee him several more bollockings at the hands of a variety of women.

  'You think the producers kidnapped her?' said Shackleton, with so much badly feigned shock in his voice he could have been paid by the producers to say it.

  'I'm not saying they kidnapped her, I'm saying they're putting her up in a five star hotel somewhere in the middle of Lond
on, while we waste our time looking for her.'

  'I really don't think we have anything to support that allegation,' said Shackleton.

  'I wasn't making an allegation,' said Jericho, 'I was just asking if you'd considered it and investigated the possibility.'

  'You just said something along the lines that they were putting her up in a five star hotel in the middle of London,' said Shackleton. 'That sounds like an allegation to me.'

  Jericho stood up, leaning in towards Shackleton.

  'Listen, you fuck…' he began, then from somewhere the metaphorical cautionary hand tapped him on the shoulder. He leant on the desk for a moment, composed himself, then lifted up the file which Shackleton had pushed across to him, and walked quickly out of the room.

  Shackleton stared straight into the camera and said nothing.

  In the other room, Claudia stood upright, her arms stretched high out to her sides, her blouse pulled tight across her chest, her mouth open in a silent yell of triumph. She stood like that for nearly thirty seconds, as if England had just won the World Cup and she was standing in the crowd cheering. With the mute button on.

  Eventually she relaxed, smiling, running her fingers across her face, feeling the dryness of her skin.

  'Got you, you arrogant bag of fuck!' she shouted, then she pumped her fists a few times in triumph.

  33

  There was a knock at the door. Jericho didn't turn, didn't speak. Another knock, and eventually the door was tentatively opened. Sergeant Light poked her head round, saw that Jericho was standing with his back to her, looking down on a grey January day in London. She walked in, closed the door behind her.

  She waited, looking around the room. As usual the walls were lined with pictures of famous TV talent: Morcambe & Wise, Des O'Connor, Bob Monkhouse, Dermot O'Leary, Benny Hill, Ant & Dec.

  She looked at the desk, where various pieces of paper had been strewn around, as Jericho had rifled through the case notes bequeathed to him by DCI Shackleton.

  'Waiting for me again, are they?' he asked.

  His voice was dull and grey; she recognised that he'd descended into the pits of his regular depression. If there was anything good to come of that, at least he wouldn't care when the shit hit the fan over what he'd said to Shackleton on camera.