We Are The Hanged Man

by Douglas Lindsay

  He wasn't the greatest person with technology, but he did at least know how to muddle his way through the internet on his phone, so as he sat, the dregs of a coffee going cold on the table in front of him, he read the same newspaper home pages that Washington had been reading.

  Every one of them now had a headline about the case, even the broadsheets. Lol was dead, horribly murdered, and the story had been transformed. Conspiracy theorists could run wild and there was a dead celebrity in town. Jericho, who had gradually been becoming the villain of the piece – at least in the eyes of the newspapers – was dragged onto the home pages of many of them.

  Lol Dead As Randy Copper Kicked Off Case yelled the Mirror, once more using the picture of Jericho leaving Sergeant Light's hotel room.

  Heroic Lol Dead, Rozzers In Turmoil: The Sun Demands, What The F**k Is Going On?

  The Spook, The Chief, The Plod And Her Lover, said the Telegraph, over pictures of respectively, Lol, Dylan, Light and Jericho. Bit of a stretch, he thought, without anything of a smile on his face.

  And so it went on, a panoply of outrage and concern, fear and loathing and ridicule, with enormous levels of excitement surrounding the fact that Lol's body had been discovered by Jericho in Sergeant Light's bedroom, two facts which gave weight to the very possibility that Jericho was responsible for the murder.

  He read it all without so much as an ounce of judgement or concern, except for one thing which made him angry and filled him with concern for how this was going to progress over the following couple of days. The press already had much more information than they should have had, and which they would have done had he been in charge of the investigation. Which meant that someone in the police was either happily leaking information at an alarming rate, or else giving the television production company far too much respect and passing them case details concerning Lol's death which they somehow expected to be treated with discretion.

  He sat in Victoria station for an hour and a half. Hiding in plain sight. He kept his head down and followed the evolving story throughout. Much of what was written was utterly fatuous, but it didn't mean that he wouldn't be able to pick up any useful pieces of information.

  At one point he came across a site which stated that he had not only been kicked off the investigation, but that he had been told he was likely to be taken into police custody and had consequently absconded. This was an exciting development that soon spread across all the news sites he was following.

  As he sat in a café, doing nothing, having not developed his part in the story in any way over a long afternoon, he had evolved into a suspect. The suspect. The police hadn't actually said as much yet. They hadn't, in fact, made any official comment about Jericho at all, yet to the media it seemed quite apparent.

  No one runs unless they've got something to hide.

  Since leaving Mary's house he had been wondering what to do next. He had sat with his sister compiling a list of names, as she made a few phone calls on his behalf. They sketched a rough family tree, as much as they could at short notice without employing an outside agency.

  He did not suppose they were going to be able to completely explain away the six death cards he'd received, but he now knew he didn't need to. He had the connection to him, through Oliver Davis, and he had the obvious connection to the final card with the grotesque sight of Gerard Larrousse suspended from a fourth floor window. It seemed obvious that there would be a trail between Davis and Larrousse, which would ultimately mean a connection between Jericho and Larrousse. A connection that someone, somewhere, had obviously made some time ago.

  He realised he was drawing a large amount of conclusions in going from one to the other, yet it seemed quite obvious that it all tied together. The discussion with Mary had been an attempt to gather a little more proof, and so it had.

  Jericho had been surprised to learn that she knew the name Miranda Miller, the woman who died in the surfing accident, that she was someone she had heard their mother talk about many years previously. When Jericho pointed out that she'd been only twenty-seven when she'd died, she decided that it must have been their father.

  They found out that one of the other, far removed relatives that they included in the list, had died in the past week, and this was in addition to the letter which Mary had let him see on his arrival.

  Another firm of lawyers, another death, someone else chasing the nearest surviving relative to inherit what had been left by the recently departed. They had already contacted the lawyers representing the estate of Oliver Davis, through which Jericho was connected to this other deceased. He would likely, the letter stated, also be hearing from Oliver Davis' estate.

  It was all falling into place, all very obvious, and ultimately the time he spent with Mary had been unnecessary. He'd known where it was leading, and there were enough lawyers queuing up to tell him what was quickly unfolding and becoming apparent.

  The reason for spending the time had been to escape, give himself space to think. Unfortunately he was still thinking. What would come next?

  If he was being set up, would the extent of it continue until he had actually been implicated in six deaths? Would he be required to prove that he'd had nothing to do with them? Would he be forced to trawl through the previous couple of weeks, trying to remember what he'd been doing on any given evening? Perhaps beyond that, as he had come across people in the chain who had died the previous year.

  With a harsh, rueful smile he realised that that was the kind of thing which he regularly demanded of suspects.

  Where were you five weeks ago on Monday?

  Now he was about to become the one who was being asked the questions. So, did he spend the time before they caught up with him establishing his whereabouts for each of the deaths, or did he get on with his investigation into finding out what the hell was going on?

  It had to be the latter, and all he had to do was work out where to start.

  He got to his feet and began to walk through the station. He needed to get money before disappearing into the system, and he probably needed to give himself more of a makeover than taking off his coat and wearing a hat.

  As he moved through the train station, his shoulders even more hunched than normal, the hat pulled low over his eyes, his eyes looking at the dirty ground, he began to be overcome by a dreadful, sapping melancholy.

  Did he care? Everything about what had happened so far suggested that he was at the centre of some elaborate setup. Whoever had sent the cards had been toying with him.

  Ultimately what hold were they going to have over him? His career had been as good as over for nearly ten years. For all that time he'd been a bloke sitting at a desk waiting to retire, retirement being that thing that was going to occupy him before he died. And death…. death would be a release.

  His wife was gone, they'd had no children. He cared nothing for the endless series of women that occupied his bed and his time. He cared nothing for the police service, or the station. And although he tried to care for the likes of Haynes and a few of his contemporaries, he was aware that it was a feeling that did not run deep. He would do anything that was required for Haynes, yet perhaps that was because of his own complete lack of interest in himself, rather than his compassion for Haynes.

  What was there that they could do to him, he wondered, as he stood on the escalator to the Underground. Yet at the same time, he knew it was too casual a thought, too flippant. They can always do something.

  In any case, it was built into him. He needed to find out what was going on, and not just because he was at the centre of it. It had, at the very least, aroused some curiosity in him.

  He needed space. A change of clothes, a hotel room, no suspicions. Pen and paper, head down, try to work something out.

  Things like this didn't just fly out of the blue. It was all about him, and he knew more about himself than anyone else on the planet. He had to sit down, stop feeling so bloody miserable, and identify whatever it was in his past that might have led to t
his kind of attention.

  55

  'What in the name of fuck do you think you're doing?' shouted Haynes, a strained shout, trying not to raise his voice.

  He was walking up the front path belonging to one of the drivers whose cars they'd identified from the CCTV footage. His intention had been to ring the bell, the cameras at a reasonable distance behind him, the two trainees strategically positioned either side of him, but with strict orders to keep quiet.

  What hadn't been part of the plan, was for the two of them to pull guns from shoulder holsters, and approach the house from either side of the path, the guns lowered dramatically at the end of straight arms, dashing from bush to bush.

  'Where did you get them? Where did you get them?'

  Neither Ando nor Xav had anything to say on the matter. They kept their guns down, poised to fight. They also lowered their eyes, happy to let Claudia, who had come along and was standing at the back with the cameraman, take the flak.

  'Who the fuck gave you the right to carry weapons?' said Haynes, now directing his questions at Claudia.

  It was dark, and the front path was illuminated only by the nearby streetlight. There was a light smearing rain in the air, and Claudia's face looked slightly demonic in the wet orange neon glow.

  'Didn't you see that episode?' she said.

  'What?'

  'You must have seen the episode. The firearms episode. It had our highest ratings, or at least it had until the past week and this dreadful business with Lol.'

  'I don't care about the firearms episode.'

  'Well, if you'd paid attention,' snapped Claudia, 'you wouldn't be picking this incredibly tense moment to question it. We were given full authority by the Met for the contestants who passed the firearms training to use their weapons in real life, actual tense situations, where, you know, it was considered appropriate for firearms to be drawn.'

  'Considered appropriate by whom?'

  'Me,' she snarled.

  She held his gaze for a moment, full of ire and hubris and confidence and triumph. Haynes turned away and looked at Xav.

  'Give me that,' he said.

  Xavier immediately looked abjectly at Claudia, who stared daggers at him, don't you dare written all over her face.

  Xavier did not move, so Haynes took two strides towards him and snatched the gun out of his hands, then he made sure the safety catch was on and thrust the gun inside his belt behind his back.

  By the time he'd got to Ando, Ando had already given up any thought of hanging onto his weapon, and was holding it out towards Haynes.

  'Fucking idiot,' said Haynes as he grabbed it from him, although the words were really directed at Claudia.

  A light came on above the front door, the door opened, a man in his forties looked down from the wooden door of his semi-detached three-bedroomed house at the people on his front path. Ando, Xav, Claudia, the cameraman, the soundman, and Detective Sergeant Haynes, with a gun in his hands.

  'What the fuck?' said the man at the door. Martin Lawes, a station guard who worked shifts at Charing Cross. Naturally his eyes drifted first to the camera, but then he noticed the gun and backed away, putting some of his body behind the door. His eyes widened, he looked frightened.

  Haynes automatically stored the weapon in the same place as the other, and then took a step or two forward, his arms raised slightly away from his sides.

  Ando dived onto the dirt behind a bush, Xav pressed himself back against a wall. The cameraman and soundman closed in a few paces, getting a great shot of a householder terrified by a police officer, juxtaposed with that officer raising his arms in abject supplication.

  Claudia didn't move, but she did squeal with delight.

  56

  Jericho had had a good couple of hours. Head down, he'd taken the train and walked through London. He'd never intended going far. Booked himself into a small hotel two blocks away from the Tottenham Court Road, not far from the bottom end of Regent's Park.

  He'd walked along Oxford Street and shopped in a couple of small, cramped stores. The kind that were less likely to have CCTV in the corner, or at any rate, less sophisticated versions of the technology.

  His initial thought had been to buy casual clothes, but that was something in which he was liable to feel more uncomfortable as they would be so unnatural for him. Instead, he went the other way, and bought a sharp suit, crisp white shirt and a new tie, a few steps up in sharpness from his usual shambling shirt and tie combination.

  He stopped to buy himself a bacon roll and some water, which he had eaten and drunk while walking up the back streets behind Tottenham Court Road, and then he'd booked himself into a small hotel, paying with cash at the desk.

  His room was small, simply furnished. The window had a heavy net curtain and if he pulled that back he could see a small alleyway containing several skips full of rubbish and a small, burned-out Fiat.

  He changed, straightened his new tie, studied himself in the mirror, and then sat down at the small desk with a notebook and started making a list.

  Everyone he had convicted over the years. The list was long. The list of people he had tried to convict and had failed was blank; the only case he could never truly solve, that of his missing wife, might not have been a case at all. Amanda, for all he had ever known, might well have got on a plane to Australia and never looked back.

  At first he just tried to remember everyone, no matter how trivial. He concentrated his memories on his London days, as that seemed far more likely. In his London days he'd been a player; a player in crime prevention and detection. Since his move to Wells nine years previously, he'd been drifting. One could never rule anyone out, never strike anything off a list as being too unlikely just because it sounded far-fetched, because people did the weirdest things for the weirdest motives. However, this thing that was engulfing him, that had brought him up to London and had now thrust him into the shadows, felt too big to be as a result of an arrest for drunken assault or petty theft.

  He wrote down everything he could remember, and then spent a short time cross-referencing. When he was done he made himself a cup of coffee from the packets that were sitting beside the kettle, remembered how much he hated instant coffee, then tipped it down the sink and made himself a cup of tea. Then he went through the list once more, and this time he made judgement calls on what he thought would be too insignificant. It could just as easily have been any one of them, but at this stage he was not in a position to check out every single name on the list. He had to start somewhere, which would be with the biggest four or five cases, the cases where someone had lost the most as a result of the actions of DCI Jericho.

  Not long after 8pm, as that evening's sensational episode of Britain's Got Justice had just got underway, Jericho sat back, a list of five names in front of him.

  He stood up and stretched his arms out to the sides. He needed to speak to Haynes.

  *

  Haynes was sitting on the set of Britain's Got Justice, live on television. Not something for which he'd been prepared.

  The talk was sensational, or at least sensationalist. Everyone was shocked, horrified, devastated. People blamed themselves; albeit no one who did so actually meant it. People cried. They showed three pictures of Lol's broken and bloody corpse, apologising profusely each time for doing so.

  Haynes, of course, was not there to provide expert police advice or opinion. He was there to be the brunt of the collective anger of the show. Of the nation, Washington said. The audience howled in indignation whenever Haynes tried to answer a question.

  How could the police have let this happen? What kind of world was it when the police had no control? Why had Haynes just sat back and said nothing while Jericho had spent the night shagging?

  Elroy, who had been brought down as a suspect to be bated and interrogated, now sat off-set detached, unlikely to be brought out of the wings. His presence on-stage would only have detracted from the growing clamour against Jericho.

  Haynes sat
and listened to it all with the kind of sullen detachment he'd learned from Jericho. He would have got up and walked at the start of the second commercial break, if not for the fact that he knew that was what they wanted him to do.

  He had his phone in his pocket on silent, and three times between the first two intermissions did he feel the vibration in his pocket.

  'Are you all right?' someone said to him, as he removed the phone from his pocket.

  He looked up. Washington was leaning towards him.

  'You're doing a good job, son,' he said, which contrasted significantly with what he'd just been saying to the cameras as he'd goaded the crowd. 'Would you like a drink? Coffee? Something a bit stronger maybe?'

  Haynes shook his head. Washington smiled some more encouragement, then turned back to the Sugababe on his left. 'Think Cher's holding it together pretty well tonight,' he said. 'Her tits look great in that top.'

  Haynes switched off, read the three texts. The first was from his mum. Straighten your shoulders, and don't be so supine. He smiled; unconsciously his shoulders straightened. The next, he was pleased to see, was from Professor Leighton. He smiled again, a different kind of smile. U never said U were TV star?? Nice suit! The third was from Jericho. Call me now.

  Haynes checked the time on the clock which counted down until they were back on air. Two minutes, seventeen seconds. He dialled the number. Jericho answered immediately.

  'Get the Northern Line to Tottenham Court Road,' he said by way of hello. 'Walk down Oxford Street. I'll find you.'

  'I've just started this show…'

  'What?' barked Jericho.

  Haynes could hear cars in the background, wondered which road Jericho was standing beside.

  'I've taken your place in the panel on the show,' said Haynes.