Hangman

by Daniel Cole

  “I have a suspicion that the town planner wanted to keep this place secret,” said Rouche as he looked for house numbers. He was unable to resist enviously imagining his family coming home to one of these perfect properties. “What’s this one, Dog Shit Drive?”

  Baxter laughed, as did Rouche at the unfamiliar sound.

  They turned into a driveway at the end of the road just as the twilight activated the automatic sensors leading up to the triple garage. It was not looking hopeful. None of the lights were on inside the house, and unlike the neighboring properties, an unspoiled layer of snow covered the driveway, garden, and path up to the front door.

  They parked up and stepped out into the silent garden. Wind chimes played softly on the breeze from the porch of another house, and they could hear a car speeding along a road somewhere far off in the distance. Baxter was shocked by the cold; it felt several degrees cooler than it had back in the city. They crunched loudly toward the front door in the fading light, the tall trees that surrounded them draining of color and definition with every passing second.

  Rouche rang the doorbell.

  Nothing.

  Baxter trampled the flower bed to peer through a large window, the dark bulbs of fairy lights nailed into the frame reminding her of Rouche’s neglected family home. She squinted, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness. She thought she could make out the hint of a warm glow coming from another room.

  “Might be a light on,” she called to Rouche as he knocked at the door.

  She stomped over more flower beds, turned the corner, and peered through the side windows, where she thought she had seen the light. But the house was completely dark inside. She sighed and made her way back to Rouche.

  “Probably on holiday. It is nearly Christmas,” she said.

  “Probably.”

  “Wanna try the neighbors?”

  “Nah, not tonight. It’s too cold. I’ll leave a card, and we can make some phone calls in the morning,” said Rouche, already heading back toward the warm car.

  “Plus you promised us dinner tonight,” Baxter reminded him.

  “Well, yeah, if we find Curtis. I wasn’t rude to you.”

  “You were a bit rude.”

  Rouche smiled. “Yeah, maybe a bit rude.”

  They climbed back into the car and turned up the heater. Rouche reversed down the long driveway, guided by the twinkling lights of the house opposite. With one final glance back at his dream home, the car wheelspun down the curb, and they drove away back to Manhattan.

  A few minutes passed, in which the night swallowed up the last of the dying light. And then, somewhere inside the lifeless house, the warm glow returned, burning against the darkness.

  Thomas woke up at the kitchen table with Echo’s rear end pressed into his face. He sat up as the clock on the cooker changed to 2:19 A.M. The remnants of the dinner he had cooked for himself and Baxter sat in the center of the table beside his phone: no new text messages, no missed calls.

  He had kept abreast of the latest developments from New York throughout the day, assuming that Baxter would be involved in some capacity. He had fought the overwhelming urge to contact her, just to ensure that she was all right, to let her know that he was there should she need to talk.

  He had felt her slipping away from him over the past couple of months, not that he could say he ever truly had her in the first place. It seemed that the harder he tried to hold on to her, the further he ended up pushing her away. Even Edmunds had warned him off pressuring her. He had never considered himself a needy person, in fact quite the opposite. He was self-assured and independent. But the ridiculously unreasonable demands that Baxter’s job made of her had left him in a state of perpetual anxiety.

  Was it “clingy” to want to know whether his girlfriend was still alive?

  She would go nights without sleep, entire days fueled by coffee alone. She could be roaming any part of the city, at any hour, in the company of the very worst that London had to offer. She had grown so accustomed to the horrors she witnessed that she had become desensitized to it. And that was what worried him most: she was not afraid of anything.

  Fear was a good thing. It kept one alert, careful. It kept one safe.

  He got up, took the plate he had set aside for Baxter, just in case, and scooped the contents into Echo’s food bowl, who looked down at him as if he had just soiled a perfectly good pile of biscuits.

  “Night, Echo,” he said.

  He switched off the lights and went up to bed.

  The dark bags under Edmunds’s eyes looked ghastly as they were thrown into shadow by the light radiating off his laptop. He switched on the kettle and had to remove his thick jumper because the small fan heater had excelled itself. Had the lamp he was working by not been resting on top of a lawnmower, he might have convinced himself he was somewhere more glamorous than his own decrepit shed.

  He had spent hours wading through the killers’ financials. Blake had also been good enough to keep him in the loop regarding the Met’s investigation into the sixty-one-year-old cop-killing arsonist, Patrick Peter Fergus. This was on the proviso that Edmunds put in a good word with Baxter, which, of course, he had no intention of doing.

  Due to his incarceration, Dominic Burrell’s accounts had taken a matter of minutes to work through; however, the same could not be said for their first killer, the bridge-diving Marcus Townsend. Despite being written as an endless list of transactions and balances, his financial history had been a riveting read. Edmunds could track it right back to his first tentative foray into illicit trading, watching his confidence growing proportionally to his various bank balances.

  It had been a disaster waiting to happen. As the trades became more and more blatant, Edmunds could sense the addiction behind the numbers until the sudden cessation in mid-2007, the very worst thing that Townsend could have done. Edmunds could picture the scene: the police arriving at his offices, looking through the records, spooking him into incriminating himself through a drastic drop in personal profits, and Townsend admitting his guilt in trying to save himself. From there, it had been a tragic story for Townsend: fine after fine hacking away at his fortune before the value of whatever assets he still possessed crashed along with the worldwide markets.

  He had been ruined.

  Before moving on to Eduardo Medina’s accounts, Edmunds opened up the website for the Streets to Success initiative, in which Townsend had still been enrolled when he strung a body up over the Brooklyn Bridge. It was inspirational stuff, seeing the photographs of homeless people, who looked too far detached from society to ever return, dressed in shirts and ties on their first day of work. Perhaps that was why Edmunds lingered on the site for longer than he normally would have.

  He came across a hyperlink, contained within one of the true stories, that caught his attention. He clicked on it and was redirected to another part of the site. He only read down to the third item on the list before excitedly throwing the dregs of his coffee across his lap. He checked his watch, counted out the hours on his fingers, and phoned Baxter.

  Baxter was fast asleep. They had eventually caught up with Curtis back at the hotel, where Rouche had made a heartfelt apology, and she had reluctantly agreed to join them for some food. All a little drained after the eventful day, they had called it a night in order to get an early start in the morning.

  Baxter reached for the buzzing phone: “Edmunds?” she groaned.

  “Were you asleep?” he asked, a little judgmentally.

  “Yes! Funnily enough. It’s all right for you—it’s . . . Wait, no, it’s not. What are you still doing up?”

  “Going through the files you sent me,” he said, as though it were obvious.

  Baxter yawned.

  “Are you OK?” he asked.

  He had finally learned how to speak to Baxter. If she wanted to talk about what had happened that morning at Grand Central, she would. If not, he would receive a one-word response and move on until such time as she did.


  “Yeah.”

  “I need you to get hold of some more stuff for me,” said Edmunds.

  “I know. I’ll get you the files on the Mall and Grand Central tomorrow.”

  “I’ve already got the London file.”

  She didn’t even want to know how he had managed that, so decided not to ask.

  “I need complete medical records for all of them,” said Edmunds.

  “Medical? OK. Looking for anything in particular?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just a hunch.”

  Baxter trusted Edmunds’s intuition even more than her own.

  “I’ll send them to you tomorrow. I mean, later.”

  “Thanks. I’ll let you get back to sleep. Good night.”

  “Edmunds?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t forget why you left the team in the first place.”

  Edmunds understood the underlying sentiment. This was Baxter’s way of saying that she was worried about him. He had to smile.

  “I won’t.”

  Chapter 14

  Sunday, 13 December 2015

  7:42 A.M.

  “Possession!”

  Baxter stood half dressed in her hotel room, immediately regretting switching on the television. Although no surprise to find the murders a topic of debate on one of the country’s biggest breakfast shows, the conversation appeared to have veered into uncharted territory.

  “Possession?” one of the perfect-looking news presenters prompted the unfailingly controversial televangelist.

  “That’s correct—possession,” Pastor Jerry Pilsner Jr. confirmed in a thick Southern drawl. “The work of a single ancient entity, leaping from one broken soul to another, driven by an insatiable lust for torment and pain, which it inflicts indiscriminately upon the weak and unvirtuous . . . There is only one way to protect ourselves . . . The only salvation is God!”

  “So,” started the show’s female presenter carefully, “are we talking about . . . spirits here?”

  “Angels.”

  The woman looked lost and turned to her male counterpart to let him know it was his turn to ask the next question.

  “Fallen angels,” the pastor elaborated.

  “And . . .” faltered the male presenter, “are you saying that these fallen angels—”

  “Just one,” the pastor interrupted. “It only takes one.”

  “So this fallen angel, whoever they are—”

  “Oh, I know precisely who he is,” their interviewee interjected again, stumping the presenters completely. “I’ve always known who it was. I can even give you his name, if you’d like . . . One of his names . . .”

  Both presenters leaned forward in anticipation, clearly aware that they were forging sensationalist-TV gold.

  “. . . Azazel,” whispered the pastor as the show cut to a perfectly timed commercial break.

  Baxter realized that the hairs on the back of her neck were standing on end as a cheerful advert for the latest invention in fruit-flavored sweets flashed and shouted at her from the screen.

  The pastor had made a passionate case and, to be fair, had come up with a way of linking the bizarre murders together, which was more than the Met, NYPD, FBI, and CIA combined had managed. But then she felt a shiver when the news program returned with footage of the pastor’s white wooden church, isolated at the end of a dirt track that cut a scar across a vast barren field.

  The congregation had swarmed from as far as three towns over, emerging from the tree line like eidola, dressed in their Sunday best, desperate to stake their own claim to salvation. The crowd surrounding the fragile building swelled to five people deep, drinking in every word as the preacher addressed those who wanted to be saved.

  Baxter found something about the scene deeply sinister: these people in nowheresville America huddling together like sheep, surrendering themselves entirely to their opportunistic shepherd, who had no reservations about unabashedly exploiting other people’s real-world misery to promote his delusional bullshit: having the nerve to call the victims, two of whom were honest police officers, “weak and unvirtuous.”

  God, she hated religion.

  Unable to tear herself from the screen, she watched as the pastor bestowed his parting thoughts to his adoring audience before him, and the countless others seeking salvation from the comfort of their sofas at home.

  “You know, I look around at you fine people here today, at my own self in the mirror, and do you know what I see?”

  The congregation waited with bated breath.

  “Sinners . . . I see sinners. Ain’t not one of us perfect here. But as people of the Lord, we dedicate our lives to making ourselves better!”

  The audience broke into applause, murmurs of agreement, and the sporadic call of “Amen.”

  “But then,” continued the pastor, “I look further afield. I look at this world we’re living in, and do you know how that makes me feel? It frightens me. I see so much hate, so much cruelty, so much malice.

  “Can we even look to the Church for help? When just the other week, yet another member of the clergy—a man supposedly at one with God—was alleged of molesting a seven-year-old boy! This is not a good place! I love my God, but He is not here!”

  A professional at the very top of his game, the pastor broke eye contact with his transfixed audience to address the camera directly.

  “I’m speaking to all the nonbelievers out there . . . I want you to ask yourselves:

  “What if there is a God?

  “What if there is a heaven?

  “What if there is a hell?

  “And what if . . . just what if . . . we’re all already there?”

  Baxter hung up the phone and sighed heavily. Through the partially obscured glass, she was able to make out Lennox getting up from behind her desk to give Curtis a reassuring, but no doubt uncomfortable, hug. Apparently the special agent in charge would not be throwing her to the wolves as predicted. Baxter tried to imagine Vanita doing the same for her and shook her head at the absurd thought.

  She had just had a thirty-five-minute conversation with her superior back in London. They had barely had a chance to check in the previous day after the events at Grand Central Terminal. Following a protocol-dictated display of concern for Baxter’s emotional state, Vanita had asked her to take her through the details to ensure that it matched the report that the Americans had sent over. They discussed the imminent probability of a similarly disturbing murder occurring in London, the frightening lack of progress all around, and agreed that Baxter should remain out in New York as the Metropolitan Police’s representative while Vanita held the fort at home.

  She typed out a quick text to Thomas while waiting for Lennox and Curtis to finish. She had completely forgotten to tell him she was not coming home and realized that she probably had not helped the situation developing between them any with her lack of contact.

  Hey. How is Echo? Talk later? ☺

  Lennox emerged from her office, Curtis trailing close behind:

  “Can I have everyone working on the murders today in the meeting room, please?”

  Over a third of the office got to their feet and crowded into the space, some having to stand outside, listening in, reminiscent of the scenes outside Pastor Jerry Pilsner Jr.’s church. Baxter squeezed through and joined Rouche, Curtis, and Lennox at the front. Across the large whiteboard, Rouche had written out details of their five killers:

  US

  UK

  1. MARCUS TOWNSEND

  3. DOMINIC BURRELL

  (Brooklyn Bridge)

  (Belmarsh Prison)

  MO: strangulation

  MO: stabbing

  Victim: Ragdoll-related

  Victim: Ragdoll-related

  2. EDUARDO MEDINA

  4. PATRICK PETER FERGUS

  (33rd Precinct)

  (The Mall)

  MO: high-speed impact

  MO: blunt-force trauma

  Victim: police officer

&
nbsp; Victim: police officer

  5. GLENN ARNOLDS

  (Grand Central)

  MO: Unpleasant

  Victim: - ?

  “Everyone here?” asked Lennox pointlessly, seeing as several people were stood behind a wall. “Good. For those of you who have not yet met: Detective Chief Inspector Baxter with the Metropolitan Police and Special Agent Roooch with the CIA.”

  “Rouche,” Rouche corrected her.

  “Ruch?” she tried.

  “It’s not pronounced Roach?” asked a muscular man sitting in the front row.

  “No,” said Rouche in bewilderment that a) the man believed him stupid enough not to know his own name and b) several other members of the audience made their own attempts at his surname in a drone of incorrect pronunciation:

  “Rooze?”

  “Roze?”

  “Rooshy?”

  “Rouche,” Rouche corrected again politely.

  “My neighbor definitely pronounces it Roach,” insisted the man in the front row.

  “Is that perhaps because their name is Roach?” reasoned Rouche.

  “It’s Rouche,” Curtis told the room. “Like ‘whoosh.’”

  “OK! OK!” Lennox shouted over the din. “If we could please get back on track. Quiet! Over to you, Agent . . . Rouche.”

  He got to his feet.

  “So . . . these are our killers,” he started, pointing to the board, “presented in an easy-to-read, bite-sized format just to ensure that we’re all up to speed. Can anyone tell me anything that we can ascertain from it?” he asked, as if addressing a class of schoolchildren.

  Mrs. Roach’s neighbor cleared his throat:

  “Pieces of shit have murdered two of our own, and for that, they’re going down . . . Yeah!” The burly man cheered his own comment and then proceeded to applaud himself as several of his colleagues followed suit. “Come on!” he shouted excitedly.