We Are The Hanged Man

by Douglas Lindsay

  He sat and considered the man for a while. What kind of ego had there been behind the madness? Would he have demanded that everyone know who he was, or would he have thought that the process and the science were more important that the name of the person delivering the results of the study?

  It didn't take too much thinking about. He would have to find books and papers and essays on the subject and then make a quick assessment on whether it was likely to have been written by Durrant.

  He rubbed his face, checked the clock. He'd already been there for two hours, could easily be there for another three weeks.

  'Fuck it,' he mumbled at the screen. 'How much of this stuff can there be?'

  The place had filled up. The guy two computers along glanced at him, then looked back at his own mail.

  Good way to keep your head down, Robert, he thought to himself. Yet, he felt at least in some way inspired. Serious papers on torture and pain were not like crime fiction. There weren't going to be hundreds and thousands of them, endlessly poured out by funny little people who'd never been near a crime in their lives, sitting at computers, making shit up. Durrant had been a serious man doing serious study.

  He set to work with renewed vigour, checking and disregarding, making notes, cross referencing when it was required.

  The phone rang at 7:47 a.m. He'd been at the computer for nearly three hours.

  'Jericho,' he said.

  The previous evening, before allowing him to leave London for the night, Jericho had sent Haynes out to buy a couple of cheap phones and SIM cards. He didn't doubt that already his own phone, and probably that of Haynes, would be bugged.

  'Your man Durrant was released from prison two weeks ago,' said Haynes.

  'Fuck,' muttered Jericho. 'I knew it.'

  He had known it too. That was why he was sitting here desperately following up any lead he could on the man.

  'You want me to keep checking the others?'

  'No. Focus on Durrant. Get up to Broadmoor, speak to someone about how he came to be let out. Jesus…'

  'Already on it,' said Haynes. 'Got a meeting with the deputy governor.'

  'Keep me posted. Anything else?'

  'That's it,' said Haynes.

  Jericho clicked the phone off and kept trawling through the pages. The names of writers and students and scientists meant nothing to him. Roberts and Cohen and Watts, Hamilton, Hoagland, Zimmerman, Lubetski. He made a list of names, anyone he could find who had published on the subject, and then he began to cross-reference.

  He had to work on the basis that if Durrant had published, then it would not have been too widely. He'd been in prison all that time, hardly part of the wide circle of academics who always supported each other and quoted form each other's work. He needed someone that appeared on the periphery.

  The more he found someone's name mentioned, the less likely he thought it would be Durrant. At some point he realised that he was taking his hypothesis as the truth, that Durrant was here, buried in the endless pages of the internet, under an assumed name.

  Then suddenly it jumped out at him; the pit of his stomach felt hollow.

  Hoagland.

  'You're just like me.'

  The words with which Durrant had taunted him. He'd known immediately what he'd meant, although at the time he hadn't wanted to believe it. The same self-possession mixed with self-hate, the same misanthropy, the same basic lack of interest in the rest of the world, what they did and what they said. It had even found its way into music.

  Jericho remembered the distaste he'd felt on finding all the Hoagy Carmichael albums in Durrant's collection; old twelve inch records stacked up in the room in which he'd tortured his victims. He had played them Carmichael while he'd worked, while they'd screamed.

  Jericho hadn't listened to Hoagy Carmichael since. At first it had been a conscious choice; over time it had just drifted away. Now, although it wasn't too often that he heard him, if he did – playing in a movie or on the radio – it made no difference. He thought it had made no difference, he thought he'd forgotten the association; except now, when the association suddenly leapt out at him.

  Hoagland. The name Hoagland appeared only briefly in relation to the subject. Michael Hoagland. A simple play on the name Hoagland Carmichael. One article on the subject of burning and pain threshold.

  It felt right as soon as he'd found it. It had been published fourteen years previously. The writing was clipped and formal. Dry. He read a couple of pages, but having made the decision that this Hoagland was the man for whom he searched, he was not so interested in what he'd written on the subject of pain, but on whether he had left any other footprints on the internet.

  He did not have to search for too much longer. Suddenly the work of Michael Hoagland was everywhere, and it all tied in with what he knew of Durrant's time in prison.

  He had been an academic. He'd read, he'd studied, he'd learned, he'd written, and somehow he'd published. Michael Hoagland had been a prolific historian. From Kubla Khan to Alexander, from Charlemagne to 18th Century France, from the Russian revolution to World War II. And then he came across a short essay that Hoagland had published a few years previously, and Jericho instantly knew that he'd found what he was looking for.

  You're just like me.

  Jericho felt sick.

  By 8:34 he had left the internet café and was heading quickly to Oxford Street tube station.

  61

  Once again Durrant was wrestling with desire. He didn't know where it had come from. He didn't want it. He didn't like the fact that he was feeling this way. Yet through the locked door there was a woman lying strapped to a table, a woman that could be his.

  He still lay naked on top of the bed, his penis erect. He imagined her in the next room, imagined lying on top of her, slamming his erection into her, smelling her, tasting her, his tongue all over her skin. Her breasts, her nipples.

  His head twitched. His only movement, one that he could not control. He had to try to defeat the thoughts; he had to make sure he did not touch himself, because that would only inflame his desire.

  He felt a drop of fluid dribble down his penis. He swallowed.

  *

  There had been a discussion at the station, before the arrival of the helicopter carrying the TV personalities and the camera crew, between the Superintendent and the Desk Sergeant. They had been of the same mind.

  Two men had been about to go to the sea-front house to check out the car and knock on the door. With only two more police officers on duty at that time, they had been contemplating drafting in outside assistance, until they were informed that the television company intended turning up and taking charge.

  'We're not turning it into a bloody circus,' said Superintendent Matthews. A dry man, slightly strange sense of humour. No one ever knew how to take him. His wife recognised his quality. Most other people thought him a little odd.

  'So we don't call in outside help on this?'

  'That's correct, Sergeant.'

  Sergeant Hawkins agreed entirely, but knew that the superintendent generally liked to hear the opposite view.

  'There's a possibility that they're going to find the man responsible for the death of that girl off the TV, plus the possibility that he's holding a police officer captive. Should we really send two officers along to babysit a television crew?'

  'You have to ask yourself, Sergeant… if London had really thought there was anything in this, would they have ordered us to wait for the television crew?'

  He held up his hand, waved away any objections.

  'I know,' he said. 'They'd suck up to anyone with a TV camera if they thought their lips would look good in brown, but even I'm not going to assume they'd put officers lives at risk if they didn't have to.'

  Sergeant Hawkins nodded. His hand had been resting on the phone throughout – albeit it was a figurative thing and he hadn't actually been on the verge of calling anyone – and now he removed it.

  'We can be ready for them,
swing into action if Constable Crowthorne or Webb think it's necessary.'

  'I'd like to see anyone around here swinging into action,' muttered Hawkins.

  The superintendent wandered off down the short corridor, as ever walking as if he only vaguely knew where he was supposed to be going.

  'Keep me posted,' he said as he walked off. 'Get Webb to call in the second they think there's anything suspicious.'

  *

  'What do you mean there are only two of you?' asked Claudia.

  She was looking around the small airfield as if expecting to see at least a hundred squad cars. Instead there was a minibus, plus one police car. Constables Webb and Crowthorne were standing in front of her.

  'We can handle it, ma'am,' said Constable Webb.

  'What a joke. Are you armed?' she snapped, doing her best to enhance the incredulity in her voice.

  'No, ma'am,' Webb replied, 'we're not armed. We are trained to deal with situations without the use of firearms.'

  Claudia snorted.

  'We're supposed to be making a fucking TV show here,' she said, her voice low, a barbed aside that was spoken quietly and meant to be heard at the same time.

  She looked into the camera that was filming from a distance of two yards.

  'I'm really scared now,' she said, softening the tone of her voice. 'This is what these endless bloody government cutbacks have done. Where do these people think we go from here?'

  She looked around as if hoping against hope that the cavalry were suddenly going to appear at the top of the hill. But they were in Suffolk. There were no hills.

  'I'm really sacred now,' she repeated. 'Really, really scared.'

  She looked stressed. She wiped her fingers beneath her right eye. Webb looked curiously at her, wondering if she was crying.

  'We'll be fine,' he said, touching her arm.

  She shook him off, turned her back on the camera, covered her hands with her face and walked quickly away. The camera followed her for a while and then turned back to look at Webb and Crowthorne.

  They had nothing to say.

  62

  Jericho's phone rang when he was on the train. Normally he would hesitate before taking any call, but this was Haynes.

  'What?' he barked.

  'Dylan was involved in getting Durrant released,' said Haynes hurriedly down the phone, sitting in his car outside Broadmoor.

  'What?'

  'Couldn't get all the details, but she's been involved in some way or other.'

  Jericho didn't say anything. He watched the countryside flash past. Dylan. And Durrant. How did that work? She had spent all her career in the West Country. How could she ever have had anything to do with Durrant?

  'Does that make sense?' asked Haynes.

  'I don't think so,' replied Jericho. 'You need to get to Shingle Street.'

  'Where?'

  Haynes sounded confused.

  'Get to Ipswich and then head for the coast. You can't miss it. It's a town. The town's name is Shingle Street. How long will it take you?'

  Haynes had no idea.

  'Two hours,' he said. 'Need to do the M25. Maybe three.'

  'Blue light and drive on the hard shoulder. I need you there in…' He checked his watch. '…an hour and a half. Less.'

  He hung up.

  *

  He took the train to Woodbridge, changing at Ipswich, and then got a taxi to Shingle Street. He paid the driver and got out next to the small coffee shop at the bottom end of the village. He automatically pulled his coat close around himself as the taxi drew away. The wind was cold, the sea agitated, the day a dull featureless grey. Low-lying clouds but it did not feel like it would rain. The sullen sea rumbled up onto the beach, stones clacking against one another.

  On a day such as this, on such restless waves it was said, had the sea burned.

  His phone rang as soon as he got out from the taxi but he didn't hear it.

  He stood for several minutes taking in his surroundings. From where he was standing the beach spread out a few hundred yards in either direction. It curved away down the coast towards Felixstowe to the south, and to the north turned into the long snaking estuary of the River Ore. The tide was in, leaving about thirty yards of exposed beach, made up mostly of small grey stones. There was no one else on the beach at that moment.

  The light was flat and dull, had a peculiar quality about it. It was an absurdly romantic thought to Jericho that this was the kind of place that was haunted, but at the very least it was held in the grip of a most terrible melancholy.

  The sea held his gaze for a while and then he turned and looked at the buildings which made up what had been left of the town of Shingle Street following its abandonment during WWII.

  There was a row of buildings between the road and the beach, with nothing but fields on the other side of the road. A few straggling houses at either end, with a series of ten buildings grouped together in the middle.

  He'd come to this place as a child, had grown to love the desolate loneliness of it; then he and Amanda had stayed in one of those houses for a week, every year of their marriage. He hadn't been back since she'd vanished.

  There was no one around.

  Jericho wondered how much the place was insinuating itself under his skin. Did he really sense that this was where he'd find Durrant, or was it just this place, grim and bleak, weighed down by so much sadness?

  How many buildings were there? A quick count. Seventeen, that was all, a few of them with more than one home in the building. Some semi-detached houses, a couple terraced. Did he go and knock on every door? He was a policeman; it wasn't as though he hadn't done similar in the past. Yet behind every door could lurk Durrant, the killer of every police officer's nightmares. Or there could be a family of four, or a single mother, or an elderly couple. Or, quite likely, there would be no one, the house solely used as a holiday home, and locked up for the winter.

  He would wait and then he would pick a door, and he was confident he would have the right one. He knew Durrant. He had not seen him in thirty years, but he knew him. Durrant would not have changed, just as he himself had not changed in that time.

  He looked to his right and left, at the houses at either end, slightly detached from the heart of this small village. Was this where Durrant had hidden all those years ago? Had this been his secondary home, the one that they had never found, where the other bodies had been kept?

  In all the writing that Durrant had done and published over the previous thirty years – the work of Michael Hoagland – one piece had stood out, had grabbed Jericho the instant he'd seen it.

  In most of the interviews that he'd had with Durrant following his arrest, Durrant had said nothing. Neither a no nor a fuck off, not a shake of the head, not a change of expression. Just occasionally he would break an interview up with a glib comment intended to burrow its way under Jericho's skin.

  You're just like me.

  I will lead you into the fire.

  We stand at the edge of the same places.

  Psycho-babble. That's what Jericho's colleagues had said. Working his way insidiously under Jericho's skin.

  Now, thirty years later, in one moment on the internet Jericho had understood.

  Durrant, under the name of Michael Hoagland, had written a long essay on the wartime myth of the German invasion of the Suffolk coast. The night in the summer of 1940 when the British had set fire to the sea, burning the invasion force alive.

  Durrant had written about it as if it was real, had written about burning flesh and screams in the night. He'd written about the gainsayers and how the political and anti-conspiracy agenda had sought to deny the event ever took place. And it had happened here, off the coast of Shingle Street, and now the ghosts lived on.

  Durrant had written about the place from the perspective of someone who knew it well, although he couldn't have been there in more than two decades before he wrote the paper.

  Yet he did know it; just as Jericho knew it. Now, here he w
as, standing at the end of a desolate shingle beach, once more in search of the man they had all thought of as the most dangerous person in the United Kingdom, and he knew instinctively he'd been right to come here.

  We stand at the edge of the same places.

  He saw the car and the van before he heard them. A police Astra and a police minibus. He had no idea how they had come to the same conclusion that he had, or at the very least had come to the same place, if their conclusions had been different, but immediately there was no doubt in his mind that these police, whoever they were, would be after the same thing as he.

  There's nothing more suspicious than a man standing still, so he pulled his hat a little further forward over his face and walked in the direction that the police were coming from. He was a man in a suit walking along a deserted shingle beach, but there was no point in turning away and perhaps missing where they were going.

  Ahead they turned off the road before they got too close to him, down towards a row of three detached houses overlooking the beach. They stopped short of the houses, and immediately people began to emerge from the minibus.

  The cameraman and soundman first. Jericho stopped and watched them. His face was expressionless as the rest of the hapless crew followed.

  The two police officers emerged, and then the group of nine had a quick discussion. There was a lot of pointing. Jericho could make out Claudia's voice, louder and more forceful than the others, but not well enough to catch what she was saying.

  Nine people against Durrant. Who were they kidding?

  As they started walking towards the house, this flange of TV people, camera crew and actual police officers, Jericho began walking after them at a steady pace. He did not know the two police officers in attendance, but he had to presume that there would be none among them even remotely capable of dealing with Durrant.