We Are The Hanged Man

by Douglas Lindsay

  'I'm not asking them to.'

  She paused. She stared across the desk. She was standing with her hands held at her side, her feet a yard apart. She looks like Ronaldo, thought Haynes suddenly. Just about to take a free-kick. He stopped himself laughing. She looks so like Ronaldo, he thought, that she must have modelled her stance on his.

  'What,' she said very slowly, 'are you asking them to do?'

  'Your three guys do whatever it is you want them doing. Car chases, shoot outs, whatever. I don't care. Meanwhile, you get a team of researchers on this. A big team. Draft them in. We need to find any car that was driving around London on Friday evening, and late last night, in the vicinity of the Crowne Plaza. Now, it's not that much of a push. The cameras in the hotel and the ones within a hundred yards were disabled, but once you get round the corners they're back on. It's not outwith the bounds of possibility that we can identify the car that took the women away. If, I admit, it was the same car. If you throw resources at it, and we can identify the car, then we could have someone to legitimately question within the next couple of hours.'

  Claudia was thinking. He could tell because of the way her face had changed slightly. It was a good idea, and one she had to go along with. It was just a matter of how she would back down.

  'And if you're lucky,' said Haynes, 'when you turn up to question the guy with the car, he'll do a runner and you'll get your car chase.'

  Claudia was aware of a feeling of sexual excitement at the thought. This could be her best bit of television yet.

  52

  'Hello?'

  Sergeant Light asked the question very tentatively. She realised that her voice sounded much too weak. She didn't want to sound this pathetic, even though she was having trouble keeping the fear at bay.

  'Is someone there?' she said, much more firmly. She did not bother to soften her voice. If the room was miked up then she would be picked up regardless. If not, then it would seem unlikely that sound could get out of the room given that she had been left ungagged.

  'Who's that?'

  The voice sounded weak. A man. Light filtered everything as quickly as possible.

  'Sergeant Light,' she said. 'I'm Sergeant Light of the Somerset & Avon Police Force.'

  There was a pause, another grunt as the voice moved its head.

  'Where are we?' he asked.

  'I don't know.'

  'Can't you get me out of here?' he said, and now there was a little more quality to his voice. A quality of desperation. It was a man, mid-twenties she decided, African origin.

  'No,' she said.

  'Why not?'

  He would have said more in other circumstances. Why not if you're the fucking police?

  'I'm tied up,' she said. 'What's your status?'

  She heard him groan and then a noise as he lowered his head. It had been an effort keeping his head upright, talking to her. She realised that it had been stupid to say she was a police officer and then tell him she could do nothing to help.

  'How long have you been here?' she asked.

  Another groan, but no immediate reply. She needed the conversation and hoped she didn't lose him. It felt such a relief to hear another voice in the sepulchral dark.

  'Not sure,' he replied eventually.

  'And you don't know where we are?' asked Light.

  Another negative grunt.

  'Are you bound?' she asked.

  There was another noise from the floor. It sounded as if he might be about to start sobbing. That would constitute losing him just as much as if he retreated inside himself and stopped talking.

  'What's your name?' she asked. 'Quick.'

  'Lewis,' came the reply.

  'Right, Lewis. I can't see you, so I need you to tell me where you are and what your situation is. Can you do that for me?'

  She waited. Lewis sniffed; there was a further rustling. She tried to think of what the sound might be, tried to imagine what position Lewis was in. It didn't sound as if he'd been bound to a table in the same manner as her.

  'On the floor,' said Lewis. 'By the wall. Not sure where. Not far from you. It's not a big room.'

  'Are you bound?' she asked again.

  'No. Not any more.'

  'Have you seen the room with the lights on?' she asked quickly, not wanting to lose the momentum of conversation.

  'Yes,' said Lewis, and the thought of it, the thought of lying there with the lights on, so that he could see everything that was coming, filled him with even more fear.

  The thought of the four things hanging behind him. The four dead things, which he did not understand, which scared him, which were still there, somewhere, in the room with him.

  'Describe it to me.'

  She could hear him whimper. She had to focus on the facts, not on the possibilities, not on why she was lying bound to a table in a dark room.

  'I can't.'

  He sounded like he was starting to cry.

  'Stay with me, Lewis,' she said.

  She closed her eyes. Stay with me. For God's sake, Light, you're not in some shit piece of Sunday evening melodrama.

  'Why aren't you bound, Lewis?' she asked. Nothing. Rustling. 'Why aren't you bound, Lewis?' she asked again, her voice more insistent.

  'Don't know.'

  'Are you hurt?'

  Another pause. He sounded at least like he was trying to control himself.

  'Yes,' he answered eventually.

  'Where?'

  Nothing.

  'Where does it hurt?'

  'All over.'

  She was bound tightly to a table, but there was someone else in the room – a man – who had been dumped unbound in the corner. Why would her kidnapper do that? It could only be because he'd assumed he was dead.

  If that was true, and she had to cling to any kind of advantage they might have, they had to use it. Strangely it felt like a race against time, because there was no time. A dark room with no lights and no sound. Time hardly seemed to exist. He could be back in five seconds, five minutes, five hours. Never.

  Never seemed unlikely. Her mind started to work. What if they caught him? What if the police caught him and he never let on where his prisoners were held? She could lie here for the rest of her life. Which might not be very long.

  Don't think like that.

  'Can you move?'

  Another whimper from the corner.

  'Can you move, Lewis? I need you to move. I need you to get up, come over here and undo whatever's holding me down.'

  He said something that was indistinguishable because of the sobbing.

  'Jesus, Lewis, focus. Really. Focus. I need you to find me and work out how to undo the constraints.'

  Still sobbing.

  'Lewis!'

  Even though she was convinced she couldn't be heard outside the room, she was aware that when she raised her voice she involuntarily began to shout in a whisper.

  'I can't,' he said eventually.

  'Yes, you can, Lewis.'

  'My fingers are broken,' he said, through the sobs. 'They're fucked. My hands are fucked.'

  Sergeant Light closed her eyes.

  53

  Jane Ray was a clerk in the London offices of the international law firm Manhausen, Seigfried & Schleck. She would have categorised that Thursday morning as a slow day, although there was, as ever, a lot of work to be done.

  She was thirty-one, and had been working as an assistant to a man named Carlton Jeffries for nearly two years. Having started with a determination to move up through the firm as quickly as possible, two years in she found herself in the same place she'd started, amidst a corporate climate of actually having to work for what was coming to you. For a long time.

  She was bored and thinking of leaving. She had friends in the City who worked, as far as she could tell, an average of two hours less each day and were being paid at least double what she earned. It was not – as her young niece liked to say about everything that happened in life – fair.

  Yet she was an
intelligent woman, good at her job and, despite her reservations, hard working, especially so when she had something interesting into which to sink her teeth.

  A call came through around ten a.m. from the Paris office. One of their wealthiest clients, Gerard Larrousse, had committed suicide the previous evening. He died leaving no close surviving relatives and, curiously, no will. The only name they had anywhere in terms of a family contact was a Malcolm Motson who lived in Leeds, England. Would the London office be in a position to track down Mr Motson and try to establish the exact nature of the relationship between them?

  She had taken the message and then set up a quick note on the computer to remind her to look at it an hour later. An hour later she extended the note by another hour. She still hadn't chased the matter when the Paris office phoned back to establish whether they had managed to contact Mr Motson. She said she'd been trying, and would get back to them as soon as possible.

  Ten minutes later she set about establishing the whereabouts of Mr Motson. Within a very short space of time she discovered that he too was dead, having been burned to death in his home a few days previously.

  Her interest was immediately piqued, being no stranger to a conspiracy theory. A rich man had died leaving no relatives; the closest person to him, a man who potentially stood to inherit a large sum of money that he might well have had no idea even existed, had also died.

  She was on the trail and she was voracious. Everything else on her desk was immediately dropped. She was on the phone and on the internet, and in the space of a few hours it opened up in front of her, an unfolding drama of death and conspiracy, one name linking quickly and curiously to another.

  She got lucky on a couple of occasions when she found herself requiring confidential information from other law firms where she was owed favours. She called them in; she charged on with her quest.

  While Jericho plodded through the process from the other end, only arriving at the same conclusion as Jane Ray because he knew where it started and where it was going to end, she had the connections made and the process mapped by six in the afternoon.

  That morning's Sun was still lying on a table in the open plan office, and she glanced over at the front cover more and more as she began to realise where the trail from Larrousse's death led.

  It had taken her six hours, and at the end of it she had found a distant relative of Gerard Larrousse who wasn't dead.

  *

  The camera had lovingly documented the reaction of the Three Musketeers as they wept at the news of Lol's death. There had been some discussion in the production office about who should be given the task of breaking the news to them. It ought to have been Jericho, but once he'd left the office that morning it seemed a fairly safe bet that he wouldn't be coming back. Sergeant Light had vanished, and although they'd known they would then have Sergeant Haynes in the line-up, they needed to tell the three of them sooner rather than later. They were bound to find out eventually, despite being kept for the time being in isolation, and they wanted their reaction on camera to be real and raw. The three of them had not got to where they were on the back of their acting ability.

  It was decided that Washington would be the best person to break the news. He was the godfather of the show; he was known to have had a thing with Lol; it would make the best television.

  He started with Xav, then Ando, finally Cher. He did not break it gently to any of them. And then, as their tears flowed, he partly looked at them and partly looked at the camera, said that in this job they had to learn to have hardened hearts, and then produced a series of photographs illustrating Lol's bloody, brutalised unrecognisable body.

  Cher had screamed. And screamed. Xav fainted. Ando was sick.

  *

  It pained him to do so, but Haynes knew he was under orders to bring the TV people in on everything that he discovered; and he had to admit that the only reason they had identified three cars in the area of the hotel at the time of both disappearances was thanks to the manpower the producers had been able to throw at the problem. The police would likely have taken much longer to find anything.

  And so he walked into the production office where the Three Musketeers were sitting drinking hot cocoa and trying to come to terms with the brutal death of their colleague. It was all being captured on film, and there had been some discussion on whether the show had been cancelled; a discussion that Washington had allowed to take place as lip service to any sort of decency, while of course having every intention of forging ahead.

  As usual in team discussions Washington took part with his MacBook before him, endlessly flicking through news sites trying to get a handle on what was being said about the show; and it was with enormous gratification that he saw that Lol, Jericho, BritainsGotJustice, #BGJffs and he himself were all trending on Twitter.

  Washington had never thought that they'd be able to match the heady days of the peak of the singing and talent shows they'd put on in the late noughties, but Lol's death and the irascible DCI Jericho had been the most extraordinary blessing.

  Cher was agonising on camera over whether to make a unilateral statement of withdrawal. She accepted that the show had to go on, yet at the same time thought it callous and unforgivable. She didn't want to offend anyone, of course. The producers were letting her talk it through, knowing that she would more than likely come to her own decision not to quit, and that if she didn't, then they would come to the decision for her.

  Claudia was spending a lot of time squeezing her arm as if she cared.

  Everyone stopped and looked at Haynes. Haynes found himself looking at Washington. Outside it was already dark, and the early January evening was turning cold and bitter.

  'They've finished searching the databanks of CCTV footage from the hotel environs. We've identified three cars that were captured on film on both evenings in question.'

  Washington smiled and rubbed his hands together, although he did manage to stop himself saying, 'Fuck, yeah!'

  'So we go and get them?' said Claudia, already disengaging her arm from Cher and beginning to stand.

  'You must have, like, car number plate info on computers and shit,' said Ando helpfully, determined that he was going to take every opportunity to say something in a desperate last-ditch effort to endear himself to the voting public.

  'Yes,' said Haynes, looking curiously at him, 'that we do. Unfortunately one of the cars isn't registered, anywhere. If it turns out that this hasn't been a wild goose chase, then the chances are it's that one. We've put out a bulletin for the car, and we've got police forces all over the country checking. But you know, when it comes to this kind of level, it really is a needle in a haystack. Nevertheless…'

  'What about the other two?' asked Claudia, who was halfway between her seat and standing upright, as if stuck in some middling evolutionary step.

  '… nevertheless,' Haynes continued, 'I've set the team we've assembled onto the task of tracking other CCTV cameras in London on those nights in the hope that we see the car again. Particularly last night, as it was much later and there was a lot less traffic about. If we can find what road it was on we can get a better idea of whereabouts in London it was heading, or which way out of the capital.'

  'What about the other two?' said Claudia again, this time with her annoyance not at all concealed.

  'We have their addresses and we're about to go round there now.'

  Claudia heard herself say, 'Hot damn!' and then looked slightly embarrassed as she straightened up.

  'You people are going to want to film it?' he asked.

  He was appalled at the thought, but knew that it was a given. There was at least the plus side that he was the one who was doing it, rather than Shackleton, who he already did not trust.

  'Of course,' said Washington.

  'Is there going to be a car chase?' said Ando, getting to his feet, determined that the camera would look at him.

  'No,' said Haynes dismissively.

  'Maybe,' said Ando, 'you know, maybe
we could give them a couple of minutes warning, not long like, and see if they leg it. Then we could chase them with like five cars and a load of helicopters and shit.'

  He looked enthusiastically around the room. The other TV people seemed to like the idea.

  'Don't be stupid,' said Haynes. 'As I said, the chances are that if one of these cars was used in the kidnapping, it's likely to be the one that's not registered. These other two visits are part of the process of ruling people out of the investigation.'

  'That's bullshit!' ejaculated Claudia, finding Haynes every bit as annoying as Jericho.

  'What is?' asked Haynes dryly.

  'You've already made your mind up. We could be about to turn up on the doorstep of some deranged killer. Shouldn't we get all sorts of back up, an armed SWAT team, all that stuff?'

  'Because that's what would happen on TV?'

  'Yes,' said Claudia. 'That's what people expect. How stupid are you going to look if it turns out one of these men is the killer and you've arrived with three trainees and a soundman?'

  'And how stupid are we going to look if we turn up with an armed response unit and it turns out they were each on their way home from an evening shift at Burger King?'

  He looked around the room, aware that he was instantly filling Jericho's shoes in terms of contempt for these people and this process.

  'We're leaving now. Anyone who wants to come, then come. But no bullshit and no overreacting.'

  He walked out. Everyone followed except Cher, who was staring at the table, her eyes once more beginning to fill with tears.

  54

  Jericho sat in a café at Victoria station watching the passers-by. He had removed the coat that he seemed to wear permanently, as he realised that it was his most identifiable feature. Mary had given him one of her husband's old hats, which Jericho now sat beneath, with it pulled down over his forehead. He looked slightly odd, and yet no one really noticed him, this man who had been on more front pages in the last three days than any of the bloated, plastic, deformed C-listers who usually dominated the country's newstands.