We Are The Hanged Man

by Douglas Lindsay

  'Yes.'

  She was going to add to it, but there was nothing else to say. No point in rubbing it in, no point in hurrying him along. At least up here he wasn't about to have Dylan come descending upon him, screaming her head off for not co-operating, for not being where she thought he ought to have been.

  He turned slowly. She had spent the last few days trying to wean herself off thoughts of him, or at least, the inappropriate thoughts. The thoughts she shouldn't have been having. The thoughts that led to trouble, that had led to her spending the night in bed with him.

  Wasn't romance complicated enough in life without adding a depressive misanthrope in permanent mid-life crisis to the mix?

  She couldn't feel sorry for him, didn't want to be taken in by the look on his face. He had come down from the heights of his anger and fallen darkly into a depressive hell.

  'You all right?' she asked, taking a step closer to him.

  'Been better,' he said.

  He slumped down into the seat and morosely stared at the array of paperwork scattered across the desk.

  'What are we doing?' he said, waving a hand across the sea of papers. 'How did the police service get so beholden to a bunch of television… I don't know… wankers?'

  'They have money,' said Light. 'We don't.'

  'Doesn't that say it all?' said Jericho. 'Modern society in a nutshell. Television has money, the public services have fuck all.'

  He leant forward, rested his face in his hands. Light sat down across the desk from him.

  'You want me to cancel it? Say you're unwell?'

  'No,' said Jericho, then he shook his head and sat back. 'Just need to… you know…'

  She nodded.

  'What are we doing?' he said again. 'These people, all of them, not just the three whatever the fuck they are… contestants. They are at least witnesses, and very possibly suspects. Yet we have to treat them as police officers assisting the investigation. Jesus. We should be questioning them, not letting them handle and investigate the evidence.'

  Light had nothing to say. She caught his eye. He was staring at her across the desk, his eyes large and sad and empty.

  'I made the decision right at the start that I wouldn't resign over this…' he said, 'but now…'

  But now, she thought, they will probably find a way to sack you. But she didn't say it. He was bad enough as it was.

  'Dylan would be delighted,' thought Jericho. 'Maybe one day I'll be just about miserable enough to not care.'

  He finally lowered his eyes, looking back down at a photograph of Lorraine Allison taken during a Saturday evening show two weeks previously.

  'I'm sorry, Constable,' he said. 'We shouldn't have had sex… Or, at least, once we'd had it, I shouldn't have been such a shit. I really didn't mean it to be that way.'

  'That's all right.'

  You don't need to apologise again.

  Her voice was straight, level, giving nothing away.

  'No,' he said. 'It's not.'

  He looked at the desk. Wondered whether he should charge on, say more, put her off even further. Mentally he was in the right place for putting people off.

  'I slept with someone else last night,' he said.

  'Oh.'

  'A woman…' he began, then hesitated. 'Just someone… an expert I was talking to for background.'

  He looked up; she was staring at him. Her face hadn't changed.

  'Related to this investigation?' she asked. Somehow that would make it worse, although she would really have had to think about why that was.

  'No,' he said.

  'What?' she asked, then shook her head. He was the DCI, and she had no place asking what else he was working on. 'We should go,' she said quickly, getting to her feet.

  She walked to the door without turning to see if he was making any move to follow her.

  34

  Haynes had spent the afternoon making assumptions, starting with drawing diagrams on a pad of paper, linking everything that had been happening over the previous few days.

  The first assumption that he made was that it all had to be linked. Jericho could perhaps have started receiving the Tarot cards before he was called onto the panel for the television show, but the more Haynes thought about it, the more he could not believe that two such significant things would not be linked. The cards clearly gave the impression that Jericho was being set up; and set up was exactly what had been done to Jericho with the television show. Two set ups in the same week were not going to be a coincidence.

  The next assumption he made was that Jericho more than likely had gone to see Newton the previous evening, and it would have been her who told him that he ought to be checking out various organisations. (There was also a fair chance that Jericho would have slept with her.) Haynes needed someone else with whom to have a discussion on the Tarot.

  If he was to take the first two assumptions as read, then it seemed likely that the matter of the Tarot was not some little local West Country difficulty, and there was no need for him to do the asking in Glastonbury. If he was to find someone with potential knowledge of who might be behind the cards, then he was possibly more likely to find it in London.

  Which led him to his inevitable conclusion that he was more than likely going to have to go to London that evening to continue the investigation.

  By the time he left Wells he had compiled a list of people to see in London, booked himself a room, and was prepared to be in his car and heading back down the road by 6 a.m. the following morning.

  *

  Claudia was waiting for Jericho outside the briefing room. Inside the briefing room the three pubescent detectives waited, camera crews in tow.

  For some reason she was surprised that Jericho had nothing to say and was about to walk right past her into the room, so she stepped to her right and blocked the door. Jericho stared at her stomach. Sergeant Light brought up the rear.

  'I've just seen the footage of your discussion with Detective Chief Inspector Shackleton,' she said. At other times Jericho might have been thinking that she was lying. At this point, he just wasn't thinking.

  His depression had grown so dark, so suffocating, he was close to being unable to function.

  'Those were very serious allegations you were making in there, Chief Inspector,' she said coldly.

  He raised his eyes so that they stared at each other, a foot apart. She swallowed. Such deep and desperate pits of sorrow. Such brutal loneliness. Such hatred of life. She did not recognise hatred of her, but of everything. She steeled herself.

  'Obviously we have no intention of screening it as part of the show, but sometimes these things get out. People talk. The presence of a tape becomes known…'

  The black holes stared through her. She swallowed, she battled on.

  'Once that happens, everyone's all over it, the press are clamouring, money gets handed over, the tape is leaked. Give it a couple of hours and that kind of thing goes viral. I hope it doesn't happen, but we rarely have control over it. And once it's out there, once the allegation has been made public… It's hard to say what will happen. To you….'

  Her mouth was dry. Jericho's stare was unwavering. Previously she might have thought that it was all part of the act, but this close to the abyss she had no doubt that whatever was going on inside made him as black and empty as he appeared.

  'You're going to want to speak to your lawyers,' she said.

  The natural assumption from someone in television was that not only would everyone already have a lawyer, but that they would have more than one.

  She was finished. When she had been envisaging this moment for the previous twenty minutes it had seemed a lot more triumphant; the conversation in her head had been a lot more crushing.

  Jericho continued to look straight through her. Claudia swallowed again.

  'Perhaps the Chief Inspector could go in now and get on with the job,' said Light.

  Claudia glanced past Jericho at the slender form of Light behind him. Under othe
r circumstances she would have been incandescent with rage at the interruption. Sadly, and incredibly, given how glorious she had imagined this scenario to be, she was relieved.

  She nodded; she stood to the side. Jericho's eyes did not move, as if he'd been staring at the door the entire time. He walked forward, pushed open the door and entered the small situation room that had been established for the investigation. Light followed, her eyes averted from Claudia as she went.

  35

  Haynes was sitting in a small room lined with books in a corner of the British Library. Naturally the room, like the building, was not old. The books, mostly, were. However, he was here to see a professor with whom he had had a brief telephone conversation earlier in the day, and so he had given the books no more than a cursory glance.

  She was looking at the single Tarot card he had in his possession, studying it closely through a magnifying glass. He watched her at work, the way her fingers moved across the top of the card like she was reading Braille. She said nothing, did not look up. She had been studying the card for nearly five minutes.

  Professor Leighton was in her late thirties, bright eyes, a neat bob of blonde hair, this year's spectacles. The kind of woman, Haynes thought grimly, that Jericho would end up spending the evening with in bed.

  'French,' she said finally, sharply, looking up.

  'French?'

  Her eyes widened in some sort of mockery at his surprise.

  'Yes, of course,' she said. 'They may not have been the ones who invented the Tarot, but they certainly popularised it. So, why not?'

  He nodded.

  'Anything….' he began, but she instantly cut him off, her hand waving in a peculiar fashion at the side of her head.

  'Well, I say French. It's done very much in the French style. It could of course be some sort of mimicry, but if it is, it is a job well done.'

  She looked at Haynes, as if waiting to see if he would have any more questions, and mildly curious as to how inane they would be. She smiled. Her teeth were slightly dishevelled but had been recently whitened.

  'What makes it French?' asked Haynes.

  She nodded, as if accepting that the question wasn't as banal as she'd been expecting, although he struggled to imagine what could have been more basic, then she looked behind her at the closest bookshelf.

  She stood up, stretched to a shelf a little above her head, seemed to know exactly what she was looking for, then turned back with the book in her hand. A quick flick, straight to the relevant page, and then passed the book over the desk so that Haynes could see.

  On the page were three depictions of the Hanged Man, and each of them looked not entirely dissimilar to the cards that had been sent to Jericho. There was no house in the background, but in the skeleton, in the way it was mocking whoever was holding the card, and in the way that the skeleton could either be viewed as being suspended from neck or head, they were entirely similar.

  Haynes immediately wondered why Newton had not known of these.

  He read the caption along the bottom, indicating that the cards were used as threats and warnings in 18th century France.

  'The caricature never… There was a movement for a short while that seemed like it might change the nature of the meaning of the Hanged Man, but ultimately it never caught on. These few…. these are just a few examples. It seems to have died out quite quickly.'

  'Is this widely known?' he asked, looking up.

  She shook her head, shrugged.

  'You seemed to know exactly where to look?'

  She took the book and turned it over so that he could see the front page. The History of the Tarot in French Society, by Professor Margot Leighton.

  'Ah. A seminal work?' he asked, awkwardness taking his voice as he spoke.

  'Hardly,' she said. 'An obscure academic work, I'm afraid. Neither widely reviewed nor purchased.'

  She made the same strange gesture with her hand as if dismissing the very notion that her book might have been anything other than widely ignored.

  'Can I take this?' he asked.

  'No, you cannot,' she responded sharply. 'You can read it sitting here now, although the relevant question covers something in the region of thirty pages if I remember correctly… or you can ask some questions as you have my attention for another ten minutes or so.'

  He looked back at the pictures, then lifted the page to leaf through the accompanying chapter. The words were densely packed, like pine trees forced into a forest, size 10 typeset, an occasional illustration lightening every third page or so. He looked up.

  'You wrote a lot about it,' he said.

  'Yes.'

  'Are you the leading expert, or are there more of your kind?'

  'Do you mean, is there someone else you can talk to?'

  She smiled ruefully.

  'That wasn't what I meant.'

  He contemplated asking her out for a drink. That's what Jericho would do. Or dinner. More questions over tuna steaks and a bottle of wine, and then to bed.

  'Is there anything in all this that might connect it to the present day?'

  She raised her eyebrow.

  'Anyone….' he continued, 'any organisations who used this as a means of threat or warning… organisations that are still around today, that might in some way be recalling their past?'

  This was a question that she had obviously not considered, and the surprise showed on her face. She obviously liked it too, as she sat back and ran a contemplative finger along her lower lip.

  'I need to give that some thought,' she said. 'Take another look through my notes. I can certainly think of one or two off the top of my head, but I wouldn't like to give you an incomplete answer.'

  'Really, anything will do at—'

  'I'll get back to you tomorrow.'

  She looked at her watch.

  'I need to be somewhere quite soon, but I'll take this home and have a look over things later on tonight.'

  She reached across and took the book away from him.

  'Yes…' she said, looking at pictures of the mocking Hanged Men, the quality of her voice drifting, as if she had already forgotten that Haynes was in the room. Suddenly she looked up.

  'Can you come and see me in the morning?'

  'No,' said Haynes, 'sorry. Can I call?'

  'Yes, of course.'

  *

  Durrant inadvertently killed Lewis at some time just after three in the afternoon. The final act was not particularly significant – gauging pain levels at various spots in the abdomen – but it was enough ultimately to finish him off. Lewis had passed out repeatedly during Durrant's testicle work, and so he had moved on to a less sensitive area in the hope that it might allow him to remain conscious. Alas, the cumulative effect of almost a day of torture had finally taken its toll and Lewis had given up.

  Durrant sometimes wondered if one could force death on oneself. Could you make yourself die in those circumstances? Could you force the life out of your body because you couldn't stand it anymore? Or was the act one of letting go, rather than of force? Could you choose to give up?

  Perhaps it was something which required more research.

  He had bundled Lewis' body into the same kind of thick bags he'd used for Lol, and then dumped him in the same corner of the room. Nestled together in black plastic death. There was a hook to hang one more body beside the four ghouls at the rear of the room, but that hook wasn't for Lewis.

  After that he had made himself a cup of tea and had sat in silence in the living room.

  There was a cold wind blowing in off the sea and the old window frame shook slightly. He could feel a slight draft but did not close the curtains. It was getting dark as he made himself the tea, and night had fallen by the time he'd finished the drink, sitting in silence in a cold room.

  He did not move. Having placed the mug on the small table, he then sat with his hands on his knees staring straight ahead. He sat like this, in the manner in which he had spent so much of the previous thirty years of his lif
e, staring straight ahead, eyes wide open. He did not feel tired.

  At 2016hrs the mobile phone that he had been given beeped once. He did not move for a couple of minutes as he gave himself time to attune to the idea of more instructions. He wondered if it would be another victim, or directions on what to do with the body of the first victim. He had no feelings either way.

  The following day he would likely get himself another subject for experiment regardless of whether or not he was so instructed. It made no difference whether that person was of his or their choosing.

  Eventually he rose slowly, walked over to the front door, where he had left the phone lying on a shelf, and looked at the message. He read it without feeling.

  He needed to go to London the following day. Dump the body and pick up his latest target. This time he'd been given a name.

  He stared at the name. Nothing registered on his face.

  He walked through to the bathroom, urinated for a long time, washed his face, cleaned his teeth, went to bed and was asleep within ten minutes.

  36

  Jericho was in Lorraine Allison's room at the Crowne Plaza, his three new confederates for company. Ando, Xav and Cher.

  Cher had been the most vocal throughout the day, the one keenest on drawing attention to herself. Naturally this made her Jericho's least favourite. Ando had said little. Indeed, had Jericho taken the time to consider it, he would have realised that Ando had in fact said nothing. He had entered the contest, much in the same spirit in which he entered every single television contest it was possible to enter – from the X-Factor to Total Wipeout – in the total belief that he had absolutely no chance of getting anywhere. He had no desire whatsoever to be a police officer, even for ten minutes on television, and was therefore somewhat out of his comfort zone. Nevertheless, he was at least aware that in his world some television exposure was better than no television exposure, and so was intent on trying to get something from the experience, even if it wasn't a job in law enforcement.