By himself, under these circumstances, of course, meant with an entourage of many. Lol's mother had, in any case, come to London, as that was the last place her daughter had been seen. This fact alone made Jericho assume that she was as in the dark as the rest of them, as surely she would have stayed at home if she'd known that her daughter was safe.
It seemed to him more the case that he had to delicately prise from her whether or not it was possible that Lol was the kind of girl who would happily let her mother think she'd been kidnapped, when she was absolutely fine.
For some reason Jericho had imagined Lol's mother to be a Daily Mail-reading woman in her fifties. She turned out to be thirty-seven years old, would have been unlikely to have read the Mail as she would have considered it too intellectual, what with it containing words, and she further surprised him by having a lawyer present.
'I'm suing the television company,' she said to Jericho by way of introduction. 'Mr Watson, my attorney…' She didn't read much, but she did watch American TV shows. '…recommends that he be present during all my dealings with them or their representatives.'
'I work for the police,' said Jericho.
She stared at him, and then let her eyes wander to the accompanying collective that now followed every one of Jericho's moves.
'You think?' she said.
Well, she may have been right about that, but it wasn't something Jericho was going to think about at that moment.
'Why are you suing them?' he asked.
She glanced at the lawyer who nodded.
'Stress,' she said, looking back at Jericho. 'You don't know what it's like missing someone, not knowing whether they're alive or dead.'
Jericho stared at the floor. Amanda came calling, loud and clear, her never-changing face as fresh and beautiful as it had been ten years previously.
'The stress I've been through the last few days. Even if she comes back, even if she's OK…' and she broke off to sob quietly. She wasn't doing it intentionally because the camera was running, it being more of a Pavlovian reaction to the television camera so prevalent among certain sections of society.
Jericho said nothing. She hadn't meant anything by the you don't know what it's like comment. There was no reason why she should know anything about him, especially since she never read any newspapers, but even so he felt instant burning resentment towards her for having made the glib assumption in the first place.
She pulled herself together, as her lawyer rubbed her shoulder.
'Mr Watson contacted me. He knows about this kind of stress, don't you?'
Watson nodded seriously.
'He said that even when Lol comes back, the effects on me are going to be long-lasting. I might never work again.'
'What do you do?' asked Jericho.
'Well, I'm on benefits at the moment…'
She was silenced by a shake of the head from Watson.
'When was the last time you spoke to your daughter?' asked Jericho, hoping to move things along. He was curious as to how this woman's daughter had ended up at Oxford, but had learned long ago not to bring judgements into his line of questioning.
She blew her nose, allowed Watson to continue to massage her shoulder.
'About three months ago,' she said.
Jericho was no longer surprised by anything she said.
'That seems like a while for a mother and daughter,' he said.
'We fell out over her getting through to the latter stages of the show,' she said.
Jericho nodded.
'You never wanted her to do it in the first place?'
'No,' she said vehemently, looking at the camera. 'I'd applied 'n' all, and when she got through and I didn't…God, you should have heard her. Bloody full of herself, the little gobshite.'
My time here is finished, thought Jericho. The worst part of being a detective, he had once mused to Haynes, was having to speak to the public.
'Any of you got any questions?' he said, glancing over his shoulder at his three associates.
'Yes,' said Cher straight away, but she was quickly beaten to it by Xavier who had a new determination after his recent encounters with senior management.
'How did Lol seem to you when you watched the show?' he asked. 'Did you notice anything different about her, anything peculiar about her mannerisms, was she acting funny?'
Cher leaned forward, grinding her teeth. He had stolen her question.
'Like,' said Ando, 'yeah. That was what I was going to ask.'
Lol's mum appeared slightly incredulous at the question which the three of them had been queuing up to deliver.
'You think I watched the show? You think I'd watch that shit when they wouldn't have me on it?'
None of them had a follow-up question to that.
'It's OK,' said Watson, rubbing her shoulder harder. 'Maybe you've asked enough,' he said, aiming his gaze at the assembled television presence.
He looked harshly at the camera and then turned to Jericho, annoyance appearing magically on his face.
'You think maybe now you can turn your camera off? You think perhaps you've intruded enough into her life?'
Lol's mum glanced up from behind a tissue.
'Look at what you've done. You're all the same, you people,' said Watson, 'so bloody quick to jump on the weak and take advantage. It's disgusting.'
The three contestants felt chastened, stared at the floor. The cameraman's hand moved to switch off, but he caught sight out the corner of his eye of Morris waving discreetly at him to leave it running. Jericho, without trying to intimidate or play any game, directed a look from the pits of Hell at Watson. The full weight of his sunken, dead eyes. As usual, however, he chose not to say all the things that came into his head.
He got to his feet and walked quickly from the room, not waiting to see if any of the others would immediately follow him.
'Thanks very much, Mrs Allison,' said Morris, 'it was kind of you to allow us to film that.'
'Well,' said Watson, and then he realised that he really didn't have anything to add, so instead he wagged a desultory finger with which he then waved them from the room.
*
They were sitting in the back of the van on the way back to the studio. None of the three contestants had picked up on any disingenuousness. The tears of Lol's mum. They were all upset; Xavier because he was genuinely upset, and Cher and Ando because they thought they'd better look upset for the camera.
Morris was scribbling in her notepad, writing voiceover copy for that night's show. Jericho was staring out of the window. Thinking about Amanda. About the last time he saw her. The look on her face. The clothes she'd been wearing, the cut of her hair.
They'd parted at Paddington; he'd gone for the Bakerloo, she to the District & Circle. The station had been warm, morning rush hour. A quick goodbye, a see you later. There'd been nothing special planned for the night. Usually they would eat dinner together and then sit on the same sofa working. Reading files. They would talk sporadically.
That evening should have been no different.
'What now?'
The back of a van is by necessity a confined space. Morris was leaning forward, her face no more than a few inches from Jericho. He snapped out of the morbid gloom, raised his eyes; she automatically backed off a little, then glanced at the other three who had all instantly taken the opportunity presented by some conversation to stop looking so upset and chastened by their previous traumatic experience.
'It's a long shot,' said Jericho.
'Great,' interjected Morris. 'Long shots are great.'
'Why?'
'That's, you know, that's what happens on the TV shows, in the movies. It's always the long shot that pans out. That'd be really cool.'
'Like, yeah,' said Ando, getting with the groove. 'Like some sort of Lethal Weapon type shit.'
'Is there any chance we'll get to use guns at some point?' threw in Cher.
Everyone looked at Jericho. The camera caressed his face.
&nbs
p; 'You have guns?' said Jericho.
'What's the long shot?' asked Morris.
Jericho stared at her, making her retreat another inch or two. They had guns. Did he want to know about them having guns?
Not for a second.
'It's a long shot,' he began again, 'but there's an awful lot of CCTV that we haven't looked at, and at which Shackleton never got around to.' He continued, but could tell his audience were losing excitement as he spoke. 'We could try the nearby train stations for that evening, maybe even give it a shot for Heathrow or Gatwick. She could have been disguised, travelling on a false passport.'
He looked around the sea of disinterested faces. Cher was looking downright annoyed. Morris was fishing around in the small leather folder which she carried around with her.
'This is it, people,' said Jericho. 'Police work. It's dull and repetitive. That's how it goes. They just don't show these bits on the TV.'
Morris thrust a piece of paper in front of him, a document folded back to one of its middle pages.
'Read it,' she said.
Jericho glanced at it and then looked up at her.
'No.'
'Read it!' she said with more furious force.
Another look from Jericho. He did not push the paper away, but just ignored it. He looked at the three.
'We'll get back, get the map out and make a list of the three most likely places from which she might have travelled. You take one each. When you've done that, you move onto the next three. And so on.'
'Until what? We've done every tube and train station and bus stop and taxi rank in fucking London?' said Cher, her voice rising in pitch. 'You fucking serious?'
'We'll see how it goes,' said Jericho.
'Read it!' exclaimed Morris one last time, now slightly hysterical. She was beginning to crack in the face of Jericho's constant deadpan obstinacy.
'No.'
She thrust it at him and let go. It fell to the floor. Everyone looked at the document as it lay on the small floor area of the van, in amongst several pairs of feet. The camera lovingly closed in on the document as it settled into the dirt.
If Jericho had been Clint Eastwood he would have stood on it and ground it in.
'Fuck!' said Morris. 'You are so pissing me off with your passive aggressive shit.' It was all right for one of the TV show executives to lose their rag, as that could be easily cut from the show. 'Jesus! If you'd bother to look at it, you condescending fucker, you would see that it totally stipulates in the contract for the show, between the producers and the police service, that the contestants will not be required to undertake any mundane repetitive tasks that will result in boring television. It's written there!'
Jericho was staring at her. His face was dead, as usual, allowing her to read all sorts of things into it. He was mocking her, laughing at her. Or he was crushed. She had told him, put him in his place. He was in their thrall, not the other way round.
'Now, pick that up,' she barked.
She got nothing from him in return.
Making the appropriate hand gesture, Xavier said, 'Awkward turtle.'
Ando laughed. Cher glanced at him dismissively.
'Look,' said Cher, turning her attention back to Jericho, 'you may not like it, but as you said, it was like a total long shot. Why don't we like track down Lol's ex-boyfriends and shit? One of them might be jealous, something like that.'
Jericho glanced at her and not for the first time thought that she was the only one of them who deserved to be anywhere near this thing, but that didn't mean it was all right for her to be so bloody annoying.
39
The chateau sat on the northern bank of the Loire, midway between Blois and Orléans, a few miles inside the départment of Loiret. It had been built in the early 18th century by the Comte de Larrousse. It had its heyday in the decades before the Great War, and then had gradually fallen into decline. It had been used for various military purposes during WWII, and then finally in the 1960s the last surviving member of the family had returned, planted grapes in the long sloping fields which surrounded the chateau, and had gone about the process of reviving the family fortunes and restoring the grand family home.
The early years had been naturally hard, as the vines had grown and the years had passed waiting for the first great crop. Eventually the vineyard had become established, the wine had started to flow, the required permits and paperwork were all in place, and the chateau had been able to take its place amongst the wine producers of France.
The current owner, the man who had revived the family and turned around the business, was Gerard Larrousse. In his early twenties when he had taken control of the chateau, he was now seventy-one, an age he considered some years short of natural retirement.
He had married in 1978 and had two children. His personal life had been neglected, had become consequently unhappy and, as a result, neglected even more.
His daughter was a drug addict and died alone in a bedsit in a small town south of Berlin in the summer of 2000. Neither Larrousse nor his wife had seen her in the last year of her life, although they had been unknowingly funding her habit through a generous allowance.
Pierre, his son, was being groomed to take over the family business, although that was not something that Larrousse imagined happening for many years. In his early twenties he still showed greater inclination to enjoying his father's wealth, taking off around the world, as addicted as his sister, but to the adrenaline rush of extreme sports. Motor racing, base jumping, freefall parachuting, deep sea diving.
He died ten years to the month after his sister when an updraft slammed him into the side of a Norwegian fjord, his parachute collapsed and he plummeted nine hundred feet to the rocks below.
Larrousse's wife had divorced her husband three years earlier, had happily cut herself off from him and his fortune, and married a Catalan named Raoul. They lived in a villa in the hills behind Barcelona, with barely a thousandth of the income she had enjoyed before, and if it hadn't been for the death of her children she might have been happy for the first time since she'd met Larrousse.
Larrousse, for his part, lived on in the chateau alone, bar the staff. He had five of them to keep the place in order, including two gardeners. There was a steady rotation of maids, although they were invariably there to provide him with sex when it was required. The maids were paid accordingly, and then well paid off when he felt the need for a change.
The wine continued to improve, and sales had never been affected by the influx of New World wines to the western markets.
On the same Wednesday that Jericho was wondering where he could take the investigation into Lol's disappearance and arguing with the producers, Larrousse had been invited to London. He had received a call from a man he had never heard of, claiming to be speaking for an organisation that Larrousse had once been told about by his father more than sixty years previously. A group of men that he had neither heard of nor from since; a group that he had assumed no longer existed, as even his father had doubted whether it had survived the war.
His first inclination had been to dismiss them. Indeed, that was exactly what he had done. Then he had received another call, from a more august member of the institution. A name he recognised. And this time money was mentioned. Business. It would be good for business, it would be good for the name Larrousse, a name which threatened to die out when Larrousse himself passed away.
Larrousse landed at Heathrow at approximately the same time as Jericho returned to the situation room at the television studio, and sat down with his three new Sancho Panzas and the producers of the show to establish what he could contractually ask them to do next.
*
Durrant too was in London. While Larrousse had been collected from the airport and delivered directly to the Dorchester, Durrant was left to his own devices.
He had to do what he had to do, and make sure he wasn't seen. The proliferation of CCTV since the previous time he was loose amongst society had been impressed upon him.
Hats and hoods and big coats were required, to be changed regularly.
Discretion was also needed.
He booked into the Easyjet hotel in Victoria under the name of Burton. He wouldn't be staying the night, but just needed somewhere to lie out of sight while awaiting his moment.
He lay on the double bed in a room with no spare floor space and no window. Lights off. The only thing that snapped the total darkness was a strip of light beneath the door.
He set the phone down on the bed beside him as he lay. He waited and did not sleep.
*
'To be honest, I thought you'd have more,' said Claudia. 'You'd give more, have more to contribute. What have you done so far? What do we have? I'm not just talking, you know, about the show. Let's forget the show, because it's not important. What's important is Lol. What have you done? What have you given us, given her, and that poor desperate woman sitting alone in a hotel room wondering if she'll ever see her daughter again?'
She stared intensely at him. Jericho looked blankly back. It seemed to him, if he was any judge, that there was an honest integrity about her. She believed what she was saying, regardless of its utter preposterousness.
The world was passing him by. People had always talked rubbish, but hadn't there been a time when they had acknowledged their own mendacity? Now everyone seemed to own everything they said. If they chose to believe it, it was true.
Maybe that was just the definition of truth, and had been for centuries. Maybe that was how religion existed.
His thoughts meandered on. His face, of course, betrayed nothing. More than anything, however, more than any random thoughts on the nature of truth and lies, more than the fact that he was hungry and more than the fact that he vaguely needed to go to the bathroom, he just wanted not to be there anymore. The four days that stretched ahead seemed a very long time.
The door opened. Sergeant Light. He hadn't seen her all morning, and he was surprised to find that her arrival felt like he was stepping out into the sun.
Claudia had been staring at him, in the way that a doctor might stare at a coma patient, wondering if there was any brain activity. She turned sharply.
We Are The Hanged Man Page 17