We Are The Hanged Man

by Douglas Lindsay

  For his part, Xavier just wanted to win the prize money, and was going all out for the female vote, reckoning that the female voting public would comprise much more than 50%, and that a lot of those women would be unimpressed with Cher, finding her too harsh and demanding.

  'You sometimes have to wonder about the soft furnishings they put in these hotel rooms,' said Xavier picking up and dropping a pillow.

  The room wasn't large, made smaller by the presence of the camera crew, the three contestants and Hattie Morris, who was back on the job, making sure that Jericho towed the line. Or rather, making sure that Jericho got as annoyed as possible, and therefore stupidly stumbled into as many awkward and embarrassing situations for himself as they could squeeze into a one hour reality TV show.

  Jericho looked over from where he was checking the door for signs of forced entry, even though he knew there had been no forced entry, and he knew that Shackleton's people had already been all over this room. He'd read the report.

  He'd wanted to look at the room himself, but normally that would mean that he would have come on his own and sat in silence with the door open, trying to get the picture of what had happened the last time Allison had left the room. Perhaps Haynes would have been with him, but he would have known not to say anything.

  The television crew, producer, contestants and inane talk of soft furnishings did nothing for his thought processes. He knew there was no point in asking them to leave, just as there was little point in asking them to be quiet as he sat in silence. So, frustratingly, he looked at various things in the room because he knew that was what they expected him to be doing. He was acting, playing the part of a detective for the television cameras. He might as well have been reading from a script.

  His earlier period of hopeless depression was being replaced by that other beast, the angry depression, the depression where his hatred of everyone else on the planet consumed him.

  He stood up from looking at the door and glanced around the rest of the room, ignoring the remark on soft furnishings.

  'Anything?' asked Cher. 'The report suggested she must have, like, totally let her abductors in. What d'you think? Can you see anything that the CIS folk might have like missed and shit?'

  'These curtains are completely different from the ones in my room,' said Xav. 'You'd have thought there'd have been some uniformity in these big places, at the very least for cost purposes.'

  Jericho looked right past Cher. He was, as it happened, staring straight at the curtains, but not out of any interest in what Xavier had said.

  'You're looking at the fucking curtains?' said Cher. 'Seriously?'

  Jericho glanced at her, and then turned away and walked into the centre of the room. He turned back and looked at the distance from the bed to the door, the shape of the small hallway into the room with the bathroom door only a few feet from the main door. Opposite it there was an open cupboard space, with Lol's clothes still hanging where she'd left them.

  He studied the walls either side of the short passage, but he already knew that Shackleton's men had gone over them minutely and had established that she had not been pushed back against the wall.

  Then he ran his eyes over the rest of the room. The ruffled sheets, the clothes draped over the two chairs, the shoes kicked off into a corner, the book on the bedside table.

  'The curtains?' said Xavier hopefully, taking Cher's statement as gospel, and slightly disconcerted that Jericho seemed to have lost interest in them.

  'What?' barked Jericho turning quickly.

  He looked at Xavier, but from the corner of his eye caught sight of Morris scribbling hurriedly in a notebook.

  'Curtains,' said Xavier, although any sign of assurance had completely deserted him. 'I thought you were looking at the curtains.'

  Jericho was not one to say of course I wasn't looking at the fucking curtains. Wasted words, but from the look on his face, he didn't have to say them anyway.

  He turned back, glanced at Morris and at the camera, drew a reluctant breath.

  'You,' he said harshly to Ando. 'What d'you think happened here?'

  It was the first time that Jericho had spoken directly to him, and Ando was shocked. He immediately looked at Cher for help, and caught the look of disdain on her face before she'd managed to wipe it off.

  'Not her,' said Jericho. 'You? What d'you think happened? I presume you didn't get this far just by standing there like a lemon and looking pretty.'

  Sadly, Jericho had pretty much just nailed Ando's recipe for success. He was gorgeous, and Britain's Got Justice had been the first show to not take the time to look past the good looks to discover the true nature of the inane, unthinking dullard beneath.

  'What?' he said. 'I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure what you mean.'

  'What do you think happened the night this girl disappeared? Can you see any signs of a struggle? Do you think she allowed her kidnapper to walk into her room, do you think she put up a fight?'

  Having it explained to him in intimate detail wasn't really helping.

  'There's no obvious sign of a struggle,' said Cher from the door.

  'And what does that mean?' said Jericho, still directing his question to Ando, who immediately looked to Cher for assistance.

  'That either…' she began.

  'Not you,' barked Jericho.

  'Eh…' said Ando, and then he pretty much had to leave it at that.

  Jericho scowled at him and then turned towards the window.

  'What about you, curtain boy, any thoughts?'

  'If she was abducted from this room, then she knew her attacker?' said Xavier, with no courage to his words.

  'Yes. Or what else?'

  Xavier was very aware of the camera zooming in on him, and finally he dropped the curtain that he had been holding for the previous minute or so.

  'She wasn't taken from the room at all.'

  'Possibly. Or if she was taken from the room…?'

  Xavier grimaced and fell in line with Ando by looking to Cher for help. Jericho shook his head, not intentionally trying to make Xavier feel as small as possible, but carrying off a good job of it nevertheless.

  'Her attacker surprised her with such force, she was in no position to put up a struggle,' said Cher.

  Jericho bowed his head and looked at his shoes.

  'Yes,' he said. 'And we all know from reading the files that the CCTV on this floor was not operational on the night in question. On the basis that this seems like far too much of a coincidence, I think we can assume that this was part of the plan, and therefore more likely that she was taken from this room.'

  He looked around the three of them, completely ignoring Morris and the television camera.

  'What now?' he said, looking back at Ando.

  Ando looked scared for a moment or two, and then shook his head. Jericho turned to Xavier, wishing that one of the men had an ounce of sense, as he didn't want to be constantly hearing from Cher. She irritated him and he hated the stress of irritation.

  'Supper?' said Xavier rather pathetically.

  'We need to establish how Lol could have left the building without being seen, and then attempt to trace her movement forwards from there,' said Cher.

  Jericho sighed heavily, nodded, and then turned and led the procession through the door and along the corridor towards the stairs.

  37

  'You're just like me.'

  Jericho woke with a start, sitting up in bed. No idea where he was. He looked to his left, but he was alone. Looked around the unfamiliar hotel room, then out the window. He hadn't closed the curtains and could see the lights of the building opposite, the dark sky behind, not yet lightened by the dawn. There was rain on the glass.

  He looked at the clock. 06:59. He had set the alarm for seven. Wednesday morning, London, four more days of Britain's Got Justice. The despair that the thought of the day brought to him was so tangible that he felt nauseous.

  He closed his eyes and turned over in bed, pulling the duvet
up around his head. The alarm went off.

  *

  Haynes was sitting at his desk, tired after the previous evening's drive up to London. Not long after eight. He had arranged that he could call Leighton around ten. Prior to that, he had a few things to do involving the more mundane work of the station. One or two interviews that were overdue.

  He knew that Dylan was watching out for him, making sure that he did what he was supposed to be doing, and wasn't running after Jericho on any errands. He also knew that if she suspected he'd been going anywhere near London, she would have found something to keep him in Wells for the evening.

  Authorised to open the boss's mail in his absence, he was sitting with two envelopes in front of him. One of them contained the latest Hanged Man card to add to the collection. Even the first sight of it had made Haynes shiver.

  There was no pastiche about this one, no mimicry or impudence. The skeleton had a look of much greater evil now, a look of intent in its eyes. This was no warning, no joke. It was still only a picture of a skeleton suspended from either its feet or neck, but the nature of it crept under his skin, particularly after all the others, which had somehow seemed almost playful.

  The house in the background had now been brought right forward – no more advancement by degree – so that the skeleton seemed to be hanging in the garden before it. There was detail in the window and the doors, in the stonework around the roof and columns at the front door. And perhaps now there were faces in the windows, or perhaps that was what Haynes wanted to see. His brain processing the picture so that it became even more sinister than it already was.

  The card was lying in front of him, inside the envelope in which it had been posted. He had discreetly studied it at length, and now it was sitting there, hidden from the view of the rest of the office. He already knew every detail of it however.

  Next to it was a letter from a firm of lawyers in London – Cullen, Harvey & Daniels – asking that DCI Jericho go to see them in the matter of the inheritance of a recently deceased person by the name of Oliver Davis.

  Of the two envelopes before him, this latter was by far the more troubling. There had been no need for Haynes to track down the name of Oliver Davis to try to establish cause of death and how he might be connected to Jericho. Not that, in fact, he would have done either. There was no reason to think that the matter might be in any way suspicious apart from one fact.

  Oliver Davis had been on the list of unusual deaths which Haynes had been investigating the previous week. It was the first direct connection between any of those deaths and Jericho, and a connection that neither of them had been looking for. Interesting too that the lawyers had a London address when Davis had died in Bristol.

  There was only one way for them to establish what it was that needed Jericho's attendance at the law firm, and it wasn't within Haynes' ability to find out.

  He looked around the station; he thought about the other tasks on which he was working. Did any of them require that he go out for the better part of a day?

  He tapped a ruminative finger; he watched Constable Adams as he tried to work out what was wrong with the coffee machine.

  It was warm in the office, the heating turned up to deal with the bitter cold of the previous day, when this day was ten degrees warmer, wet and bleak.

  He rose quickly, lifted the two envelopes, grabbed his suit coat from the back of his chair, slipped it on and walked from the office. He glanced in the direction of the Superintendent's office as he went, but as usual the door was closed. At the front desk he stopped to tell Loovens that he would likely be out most of the day. The words were on the tip of his tongue, but Loovens didn't ask the question. He didn't need to.

  Haynes walked quickly out of the station, jumped in his car, and was soon heading off towards the A303 for another drive to London.

  38

  Morning call in the situation room. The television people had set it up before any of the detectives or contestants had arrived. The morning papers had been lined up, the broadsheets mostly buried at the back.

  Jericho's vicious verbal assault on Shackleton, along with his outrageous allegations against the TV show's producers, had made the front page of the Sun, Mirror and The Star. All claimed that Jericho had caused outrage, upset and embarrassment, it being one of those occasions when the newspapers ignored what everyone was thinking – that Jericho had said what everyone else already thought, and that the show's producers were delighted, rather than outraged – and told their readers what they wanted them to believe was the story, rather than anything closely resembling the truth.

  Jericho's statements were the kind of things that Light ought to have been reporting back to Dylan, but she had neglected to. It was never going to go down well, and she'd decided that she was happy waiting to see the fallout in the day's press before letting Dylan know what was coming.

  The cameras were already running; the three contestants were already in place. Morris had her notebook ready, and Claudia was also there, deciding for some reason that more hands would make good work. The previous night's show, which had gone out at 9pm, had been good, but not as scintillating as it ought to have been.

  She had spent the late evening going around most of the participants attempting to inject them with a new sense of purpose. Morris had been told off for not inducing enough sarcasm and rage in Jericho, not getting enough juicy moments of police bluster, over-confidence and brutality. Xavier and Ando had also separately received visits from her and given a stiff talking to regarding their performance.

  On the evidence of the previous day Cher was walking away with it. The show depended on tension and drama and neither of them were providing it. They were each given one more day to shape up, or else threatened with being kicked off the show allowing Muzza or Gaz to be brought back off the substitutes bench.

  Given how much time Muzza and Gaz had spent burning their bridges in the tabloids over the days since their eviction from the competition, this hardly seemed likely, but Xav and Ando had been well warned. They were expendable.

  Claudia had visited Sergeant Light's room, but more to see if she would be there alone, as she rather suspected that something was going on between her and Jericho. On finding Light reading a book in her pyjamas, she had blustered out a few encouraging words on how well it was going, but if she wouldn't mind keeping her Chief Inspector under close watch, and left her to it.

  She did not visit Jericho, having nothing to say to him. He was performing perfectly, his behaviour as rude, sullen and aggressively depressive as they had hoped for when his involvement had first been mooted. He was giving them headlines, and there was pretty much nothing else they could ask from him. The perfect unwilling accomplice.

  The door to the situation room opened. It was not Jericho, as everyone had been expecting, but Washington. There was an audible gasp from the room, which impressed him. He liked it when people gasped at his presence.

  He made a settle down gesture, scanned the small room for a genuine police presence, then looked scornfully at Claudia.

  'Where is he?' he asked.

  'Expecting him any minute, sir,' she said. 'Thought that would be him now when the door opened.'

  Washington scratched his ear. He was wearing a pink open-necked shirt, with a light blue sweater draped around his shoulders and sunglasses propped in his hair. He could have been sitting at a bar, sipping a glass of Chablis and eating olives on the Riviera, rather than working a dingy little room in a studio in London on a bleak and grey January morning.

  'Good show last night,' he said.

  Everyone said 'thank you' except the cameraman.

  'Glad you liked it,' said Cher, so that she would stand out from the others. She smiled flirtatiously.

  'But not good enough,' said Washington, ignoring her. The others would have enjoyed it, had not the rebuke been aimed at all of them.

  'Look,' he continued, 'this is a great concept and finally it's coming together. Last night was the best
bit of TV to come out of this show yet. But tonight… tonight we have to grab the audience by the fucking balls, we have to say to the audience, keep fucking watching or your balls are going to get crushed. You've seen the papers?'

  Everyone nodded.

  'Fucking A,' said Washington. 'Absolutely nailed perfectly to the fucking cross. Great press, great. You can't buy shit like that. Those guys, you know, Maxi Clifford, Jesus he'd be pishing in his pants for that kind of press. Hey, Jesus would be pishing in his pants for that kind of press. Fan-tastic. But I'll tell you what. After that, after those headlines today, everyone, I mean, everyone is going to be tuning in tonight to see the latest. Everyone wants to know about Lol, everyone wants to see whether the Chief Inspector is bothering his arse, and everyone… everyone wants to see which one of you three is going to come out on top. Which one of you three is going to help make Britain a safer and better place to live.'

  He looked from contestant to contestant. Xavier and Ando both noticed that his eyes lingered longest on Cher. Cher bit her bottom lip.

  He looked at Claudia. A significant look. Claudia looked significantly back, understanding the importance of the day.

  The door opened. Jericho walked in on the frenzy of posturing and looked around the assembled company.

  He nodded at those who were sitting down, then looked at Washington.

  'Come to lend us your expertise?' said Washington glibly.

  *

  As far as Jericho knew, although he was not familiar with many nineteen-year-old girls, most of them were close to their mothers. It seemed reasonable to talk to Lol's mother, to gauge whether or not she knew that her daughter was safe and well somewhere, sitting with her feet up sipping cocktails, while the police ran around looking for her.

  Shackleton had already spoken to her, of course, and discerned that she knew nothing, but it was one of those calls that Jericho knew he would have to make himself.