'What?' barked Jericho again, although this time in surprise. 'Fuck. When will you be finished?'
Haynes looked at his watch, completely unnecessarily. He knew how much longer he would be. The show ran until 10pm, and immediately it switched to digital for a further two hours of Britain's Got More Justice, in which Haynes was expected to participate. It was going to be at least four and a half hours, maybe more, before he'd be able to get to Tottenham Court Road.
'Sergeant,' said Jericho, his voice low.
'I'm coming,' said Haynes quickly.
He clicked the phone off before Jericho could say anything else. It would, after all, be an enormous relief to get out of the studio, away from the crowd.
He stood up, looking at the clock. One minute, six seconds.
'Time, Sergeant!' barked Washington, tapping an invisible watch on his wrist.
'I'll just be a minute,' said Haynes, holding up his hand and heading off in the direction of the toilet.
'Wanker!' he heard someone from the audience call after him as he left the studio floor.
*
Dylan had wanted Haynes followed on the basis that at some point he would be summoned by Jericho, and Haynes would dutifully trot off to see his master. When she realised that Haynes had left the building without Constable Drew on his tail she was spewing rage.
Drew had been feeling slightly discomfited at having to follow a fellow officer who, as far as he could tell, had been guilty of nothing other than doing his job. Assuming that Haynes was happily tied up for a couple of hours on the show, he had taken himself off to the studio canteen, to eat dinner slowly, while keeping an eye on the television. As the show returned to the screen they did not display Haynes' empty chair, instead spending the entire segment on a camera angle that excluded Haynes' end of the desk.
The constable was just beginning to feel a little concerned when his phone rang to tell him that Haynes had left the building. With Haynes' phone bugged, there were currently fifteen officers on their way to discreetly hang around Tottenham Court Road Tube station.
Unfortunately for the pursuing officers, before splitting up that afternoon Jericho had informed Haynes that if he mentioned a tube station over the phone, he would automatically mean the one further along the line, moving away from Trafalgar Square.
Haynes duly alighted at Goodge Street, and Jericho duly made himself known to Haynes who then followed him back to the hotel.
Jericho had picked up two coffees just before he'd picked up Haynes, and now they were back in his hotel room, Jericho sitting in the seat by the desk, Haynes standing by the window.
'Did you watch any of the show?' asked Haynes, indicating the small television on the wall.
Jericho shook his head. 'Were you raped?' he asked sourly.
'Something like that,' said Haynes.
'I need you to get into the office, wherever. If you can do it up here, fine, if you need to get back to Wells… Just get onto the system and check up on a few people for me.'
'Sure,' said Haynes. 'I might just go home, get away from here. Especially since Dylan is up here now.'
'She's staying?'
'As far as I know.'
'Two lists,' said Jericho handing over two pieces of paper. 'Trying to think of anyone who's going to hold a grudge.'
He had scrawled and scribbled as he'd reduced his long list of former clients. He had then tidied it up and made two shorter lists to give to Haynes, with concise information on each to steer him in the right direction. There were five names on the first list, ten on the second.
'These are people that I've helped put away. Right from the very start.'
'What's this list?' asked Haynes, indicating the second. 'Blokes whose wives you've slept with?'
The smile died on Haynes' face as he said it, replaced by a look of apology. There was nothing on Jericho's face.
'The short list is the people I think most likely. Don't start chasing any of the others until you've done everything you can to track down the first five.'
Haynes nodded.
'The list of five are the four men and one woman I helped put away for life.'
'Any of them likely still to be inside?'
Jericho shrugged.
'They're all from the London days, most of them long enough ago that they might have been released by now. Except Merkins. He was in '99. Murder, aggravated assault. Might still be in. And one other.'
He indicated the bottom of the list.
'Durrant. He's…. he's a bad man. He'll never get out. There won't be enough years left in the history of civilisation for him to serve the length of sentence he deserves.'
'Never heard of him,' said Haynes shrugging.
Jericho nodded.
'Must have been thirty years ago. Very dangerous. Intelligent, sullen… The story was mostly buried. Got in the papers that he'd been convicted of murder, but the CPS, or whatever the fuck it was called back then, blocked the details. They could do that shit in those days.'
'What did he do?' asked Haynes, with a certain amount of awe. It was unusual for Jericho to sound impressed by anyone's criminal activity.
'Torture. He called it scientific experimentation. He wrote papers on pain threshold, using humans as his subjects.'
'Fuck. How many?'
'Nine, I think. He'd written up notes on nine, but we only found five bodies. So…. never found out what happened to the others. Or who they were.'
Haynes looked back at the list, read the short note that Jericho had written beside Durrant's name.
'Were you the arresting officer?'
Jericho nodded.
'It should just be a quick call to make sure he's still inside, then you can concentrate on the others.'
'Could he have someone working for him on the outside?'
'Durrant?'
Jericho had a sudden vision of him, the man at work. Durrant had videoed some of his experiments. Early 1980's, primitive home recording equipment by modern standards, but every second of it was still ingrained into the heads of those officers who had been forced to sit through it.
There had been several hours of tape, and Jericho and two others had been tasked with watching every minute. They'd been about to send a man away for the rest of his life; they had been detailed not to skip anything. Of course they'd had to watch it all, but what had his bosses thought they might have missed? The moment when Durrant showed some compassion? The moment when the victims looked at the camera and winked?
He remembered that none of the senior officers involved in the case had looked at more than ten or fifteen minutes of film. The jury had been shown only a few edited highlights. After Jericho had done the editing.
It hadn't plagued him all these years, long ago managing to put it out of his head. Now it was back. The screaming, the horror, the desperate agony on the faces. The look of business-like, cold calculation of Durrant.
'No,' said Jericho, 'not Durrant. He never worked with anyone.'
'A lone wolf?'
Jericho grunted.
'Let's call him a lone fucking psychopathic freak. Make sure he's still banged up, then move on to the rest.'
Haynes checked his watch.
'Almost ten. Missed the rest of the show. Wonder how they coped without me.'
'They probably took it off the air,' said Jericho dryly.
He sat forward, elbows on his knees, hands rubbing his face. The stress of a long day catching up with him, suddenly feeling incredibly tired.
'You should get some sleep before you head back down the road,' said Jericho. 'You can check that stuff in the morning.'
'If I get down the road tonight, catch a few hours, I can be at the station by seven.'
Jericho sighed, finally took his hands away from his face. Haynes thought he seemed to have aged as he sat there, like some low budget Jekyll and Hyde movie when they make the change to the face as its covered by the hands.
'Ten o'clock?' said Jericho.
Haynes nod
ded, and Jericho leaned over and switched on the BBC News at 10, the sound of the opening credits breaking the still of the room.
They sat in silence. The first image on the screen was a picture of Jericho.
'Wanted for questioning: nationwide search for the detective who stands to inherit over £15m… Reality TV star found dead, as a police officer goes missing… The police hunt for DCI Robert Jericho, suspected in the deaths of as many as seven people…'
The full report took almost nine minutes. There was a lot of detail about the Larrousse estate in the Loire, mention of how he had committed suicide after visiting London the previous day, a quick run through the trail of death that led from Larrousse to Jericho, and how the police were at this stage not looking for anyone else in connection with the investigation.
They watched it all, then Jericho pressed the off button when they'd moved on to continuing unrest in Syria.
They sat in silence for another few minutes, Haynes waiting for Jericho to say something. Eventually he realised that Jericho might well have shut down for the evening.
'They didn't get any of that from me,' said Haynes, feeling cheap for saying it. 'I didn't talk to anyone about it.'
'The cards,' said Jericho. 'We showed the cards to a couple of people.'
Haynes thought of Professor Leighton. Wondered if he'd said too much, but knew even as he had the thought that he hadn't.
'How could they know about the ones in between, the path between you and Larrousse?'
Jericho nodded.
'Some lawyer must have worked it out,' said Jericho.
'Bloody quick if they did,' said Haynes.
Jericho grunted and threw a hand to the side.
'Fuck. Fucking lawyers. If they… the various steps, from one to the next, those connections will already have been made, it just needed someone to put it together. Some fucking lawyer's always likely to be able to put that shit together more quickly than we are. They talk to one another a lot more freely that they'd ever talk to us.'
'And then one of them's talked to the press,' said Haynes.
Jericho stared at the carpet, then checked his watch.
'Fuck,' he muttered. 'Sorry, Stuart, can I ask another couple of things of you before you go?'
Haynes nodded. How much sleep did he need anyway?
'Of course,' he said.
57
Jericho sat up until two in the morning, scribbling on various pieces of paper, notes and thoughts, and lines drawn all over the place trying to make connections.
If he really was distantly related to someone who owned a French chateau, then who could possibly know about it, and why would they want to set him up? It was a lot of murder, it was a lot of planning just to get him back for something that he might have done in the past. And the only reason he could think of for someone wishing to gain some vengeance upon him was, as he had discussed with Haynes, a criminal he'd locked up. Who else cared? Especially since he'd spent the bulk of the previous ten years living in sleepy West Country anonymity.
Then there was the connection with the television show, the murder of Allison and the disappearance of Sergeant Light. Was there any way for it to be related? There were no lines to be drawn here, no boxes to connect. Yet, it had to be tied up. Whoever had been behind the Hanged Man cards could easily have been behind the decision to include him in the show.
All the people who had agreed to it, the Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police, Dylan, even Washington and Claudia at the show, they could all have been going along with someone else's suggestion.
Could the entire show be part of whatever plot was being constructed? That thought had brought instant self-admonishment, a low oh for fuck's sake get a grip, Jericho uttered to the silence of the room, but the thought did not completely go away. Whatever had been constructed was already far more elaborate than he could have imagined and it had to start somewhere.
Ultimately he had to conclude that he did not have enough information to do anything other than speculate, and that there was little point in doing that. What he had to do was formulate a plan on where to go next, yet even here he seemed to run up against solid walls of brick. Everything he thought of, everything that his experience had taught him, brought him to a path that required him to be part of the police system, working through regular channels. At the very least, he would need to be in a position to be able to make phone calls and visits.
There were so many things to follow up. Where had the Hanged Man cards been printed? What organisations might have used them? The last card had been delivered to his hotel room. Could it be possible that the CCTV hadn't been turned off when the card had been slipped under the door? The whereabouts of Sergeant Light. If Larrousse had indeed been present in London the day before, who was it he had seen while he was here?
There would be a place to start with all of them, but he couldn't call anyone and he couldn't go and see anyone.
He crawled into bed in the middle of the night and finally fell asleep to the sound of the rain clicking against the window.
*
Professor Leighton watched the story unfolding, sitting in her office, her laptop on the desk in front of her. At some point she began to wonder if she was part of the story. Not a crucial character, but she knew something that no one else did.
Sergeant Haynes had brought her the Tarot cards, cards which had seemed to be a mystery to him and to his boss. There had been no mention of them on the news, yet it seemed unlikely that there would be no connection between the two.
The cards had clearly been warning the DCI that some calamity was approaching, and now the DCI was buried up to his neck in calamity. Consequently, for all the apocalyptic news and condemnation that was spewing out over the media, Leighton did not think for a second that Jericho would be guilty of anything that was being said about him.
Maybe it just came down to the fact that she liked Sergeant Haynes. She wanted to talk to him again, and she wanted to do something for him, so that the next time they talked she could be of use. Which was why she was sitting in her office, late on a Thursday evening, checking up on the ancient organisations who had used the Tarot as threat and intimidation, and who might still be working today. Further to that, and hopefully greatly narrowing it down, was the fact that it appeared that Larrousse had come to London the day before, prior to being sent home to kill himself (although she still suspected that he had been murdered), which might mean that the organisation she was looking for was based in London, or at least had some sort of headquarters in London.
She had a notebook and a pen; she was armed with the internet and a great pile of books. Books that had been published in recent years, and books that were up to three hundred years old, the likes of which no one else would have in their possession. She worked slowly through her list, doing unpaid police work, until she came across something that made her eyes narrow in curiosity, and then had her re-reading the passage in the book several times, before spending a long time researching the book's provenance.
She checked her watch and was shocked to see that it was almost 2:45 in the morning. She closed her eyes, shook her head, looked again.
2:45. How had that happened? She'd better not call Haynes on his mobile. She could call him in the morning.
She let out a long sigh, pushed the book away from her. Having realised the time, she had suddenly been overcome with an all-consuming tiredness.
She got up from her chair, her face being overtaken by a yawn, walked over to the couch against the far wall of the room, slumped down into it and fell fast asleep.
58
Sergeant Haynes woke, buzzing. He'd had three hours sleep, but it was perfect. He had things to do, there was something edgy and exciting about it; it was new, challenging and slightly dangerous.
He showered and had a quick bowl of cereal. Sometimes he thought about the cereal while he ate, read the packet, this morning he was too distracted. Too many things to do.
He needed to get
into work and get cracking on chasing up all the people that Jericho suspected might be behind the Hanged Man and the setup overall. He had to find out what was happening with Sergeant Light, and if there had been any follow-up to the last of the three number plates – the second having panned out as inconsequentially as the first. He, like Jericho, had to try to establish a connection between the mysteries surrounding Britain's Got Justice, the warnings of the Tarot and the trail of untimely deaths that connected Jericho and Larrousse, and which the media were now reporting as all being murders. And he had to try to find out who amongst the ancient organisations that had used the Tarot, might still be using it.
Professor Leighton was the only thing about the whole situation that made him feel a bit nervous. Again it felt strangely like asking for a date. Maybe he just had to ask her out for dinner and get that part of it out the way.
He arrived at the station at three minutes after seven, walked past the front desk with a nod in the direction of Constable Loovens.
'Ed,' he said.
A small pause and then, 'Sergeant Haynes?'
Despite hoping to get past the front desk without being stopped, he wasn't really surprised to hear his name. He stopped; he turned.
'Constable,' he said. 'Someone's looking for me?'
'Would you like the full list or just the top five?'
'How about you pretend you didn't see me…'
Loovens was a large man who usually played slow-moving centre-half in the station football team. His days as a fast-moving centre-half had been short lived. He rather liked the American comic book characterisation of the police officer as a doughnut-eating coffee drinker. He liked Haynes, a feeling that was mutual, but at the moment he didn't look as though he liked this idea, which was fair enough. Haynes could avoid people as much as possible, but he couldn't expect other officers to cover for him.
'Give me the full list and leave it with me. Don't call anyone, I'll say that I told you I'd make the calls. As soon as there's someone looking for me, put them through.'
Loovens nodded. The list had been gradually growing beside his phone, and he walked to the front desk and handed it over.
We Are The Hanged Man Page 26
