We Are The Hanged Man

by Douglas Lindsay

Haynes took a deep breath. Dylan was an intelligent woman. If she was getting annoyed, it was because she wanted to be. He didn't really have to explain this stuff to her.

  'There is no disgusted source,' said Haynes. 'They make that stuff up. It's Jericho we're talking about. Can you really see him and Sergeant Light all over each other in public? You know they make stuff up, everyone knows they make stuff up, yet people believe what they read.'

  Dylan was unimpressed with Haynes. She didn't want to have sense talked at her, and especially not by a Detective Sergeant.

  'You know he has a reputation,' she said. 'How many women has he slept with in the last year?'

  'He doesn't tell me,' replied Haynes.

  'Well,' she said, 'I don't suppose he tells me either, but we all know, we all know what he's like. He has a certain celebrity as a police officer, and he uses it. Plays it out for everything it's worth. Yes, yes he does, you know that. Sergeant Light may not be so young, but she does at least appear to be very impressionable. It is not outwith the bounds of probability that the two of them are sleeping together.'

  Haynes stared at the newspapers. Now it was his turn to make an argument that he knew would be easily rebutted.

  'They're not going to be investigating anything at eleven in the evening anyway, are they? What difference does it make if they choose to have sex?'

  'Jesus, Sergeant, don't be so naïve. Yes, yes, fine, have sex! But not up there, not now. They think the press wouldn't pick up on it, find out about it? Even if all the stuff from sources is made up, all those quotes and all that shit, it doesn't matter. They've left themselves open for it by starting some sort of relationship. Jesus, it's a fucking mess.'

  She leaned forward and rested her head in her hands, rubbed her eyes.

  'You're just going to have to go up there. Bloody hell.'

  She looked at him. He returned her stare, expressionless.

  'Can I trust you not to have sex with the DCI?'

  Haynes did not reply.

  'Go. Go now. Pack a bag. You might as well use Light's room when you get up there, because she's coming home. Soon as we can get hold of her. If you see her, and she's not already on her way to the station, tell her to get a fucking move on. I'll deal with her in person this afternoon.'

  46

  'Can we assume that Sergeant Light is too embarrassed to show her face?'

  The noise of the canteen went on around them. Jericho had come to get a coffee with the aim of avoiding the situation room for as long as possible, only to find that the production company had just completed the job of relocating the situation room to a corner of the canteen. The committee had decided late at night that the small room was too drab and they needed a change of venue. Outdoors had been considered, but a check of the weather forecast had finally seen the idea off, and they'd elected for the canteen, with the added hope that occasionally a well-known face might walk past in the background.

  The fact that it would be the first show to be filmed live in the canteen would be used as a selling point, as if it was a fact of any significance.

  Jericho did not reply. He had started to wonder about Light, if not exactly worry about her. She had seemed to have her own agenda at the show, and he assumed that at those moments when she wasn't sitting in on the investigation, she was off in meetings with the show's producers, fighting the police corner against evermore preposterous requests.

  However, he was now getting a nagging sense of worry, and was reminded of the fact that he hadn't been able to get hold of her the previous evening, only minutes after he'd left her room. Didn't like the fact that Claudia did not know where she was either. It didn't feel right.

  Maybe Light was embarrassed. It wasn't as if she'd slept with George Clooney the previous evening and could walk proudly through the television offices with her head held high.

  'What do we deduce from your silence, Chief Inspector?'

  Jericho stared glumly across the table.

  'Cher?' said Claudia, turning to her promptly, changing the course of the discussion with a snap of her fingers. Letting Jericho know that he was in her thrall. The heat would be on him when she wanted it to be. 'I feel it would be best for you to take the lead this morning. You did some solid work yesterday afternoon. Did you watch the show, Chief Inspector?'

  Jericho continued to stare at her, but today Claudia felt that she had the upper hand and was not so intimidated by the black holes through which he viewed the world with such disdain.

  'Of course not,' she said. 'Other things to do. Never mind. We had a long discussion, something else during which you found yourself pre-occupied, which Cher led with the kind of dynamism that we're looking for here… I'm also not saying that Ando and Xav didn't contribute, because they did, they were fantastic… it was decided that the likelihood of Lol having been abducted by one of the previous contestants really is more than likely. More than likely. We had a long talk, and decided that the probable candidate would be Elroy. So, Cher, you can take it from there.'

  Claudia smiled sweetly across the table, having pretty much said everything that had to be said.

  Cher's explanation, which she had been practicing in order to plead her justification to Jericho, had disappeared in an instant, Claudia taking the words from her mouth. She returned the smile, but was as yet more confused than angry.

  'So, yes…' Cher began, a little uncertainly, 'he's being brought in this afternoon, and then we're going to interview him later.' She paused, waiting to see the look on Jericho's face. There was nothing to see. 'We're going to take it in turns to speak to him, you know, like the three of us, on our own. It's part of the process. You'll, you know, you will sit and watch and, you know, like judge. Award marks and shit.'

  'Of course, this isn't the kind of thing that can be left just to you,' said Claudia, 'it'll be the judges who will be judging. This time, though, since it's directly related to police work, you'll be judging too. You'll have a voice, so it would be nice if you could use it.'

  'Who's bringing him in?' asked Jericho. 'The police?'

  'Hah!' barked Claudia. 'If we could ever find any of you. He's coming voluntarily, by train. He should be here in plenty of time for tonight.'

  'And does he know he's going to be accused of kidnapping, or does he think he's being asked to contribute to the show in some more conventional manner?'

  Claudia answered only with a withering look across the table and another check of the watch.

  'Right, people. Let's take fifteen to twenty. A short break, cup of coffee, whatever. No drugs, no running off to some quiet room to have a quick fuck.'

  She smiled sweetly at Jericho as she said it, then pushed her chair back.

  'You're going to interview this guy live on the show?' asked Jericho. 'Tonight?'

  'Yes. Should make great live TV.'

  'You don't actually suspect him of anything? He's just playing along?'

  Claudia looked surprised.

  'Yes, yes, we certainly suspect him. While you've been shagging your abject little police accomplice, we've been doing some serious work here, Chief Inspector. He most definitely is a suspect.'

  'If you have any evidence to suggest it, then we need to bring him in to the station and interview him. There is due process in law. You can't do it live on television.'

  She smiled. Getting him riled. That was perfect.

  'This is our show, and we'll do what we fucking want. We have it on much higher authority than yours, Detective Chief Inspector, that we can interrogate any suspect we see fit, and that our trainees are in a position to arrest someone they think might be involved or complicit in the disappearance of Lol. And no one… no one,' she repeated for emphasis, 'has said anything about not filming it live in a TV studio. We're a TV production company for fuck's sake!'

  She waited for the riposte, but just about knew Jericho well enough already to realise that he only ever got so far and then backed off. Accepted defeat, or more sinisterly, would back down in order to go
and fight the battle in some backstabbing, less confrontational manner.

  'So fuck you,' she added, as she had run out of anything else to say, and then she marched quickly from the canteen.

  *

  Jericho allowed himself to be filmed giving advice to the three contestants on how to interrogate a suspect. It wasn't a great sequence, and watching from the sidelines, Claudia got exasperated and walked out halfway through. He gave solid, sensible advice, and repeatedly knocked down talk of grabbing the suspect by the collar or of threatening to arrest his extended family for trivial offences such as failure to pay the TV licence or driving at 31mph.

  He had begun to worry about Light, not believing for a second that she was so pusillanimous that she would be too scared to walk into an office where people might be laughing at her. He called her room and her mobile then, when there was no answer, made another few calls, including to the station at Wells, to establish that she had not been summoned elsewhere, and then headed back to the hotel, the cries of Morris ringing in his ears as he exited the building.

  On the pavement outside he met Haynes, who had just arrived, and together they went to the hotel.

  47

  The manager refused to give them a key, but agreed to accompany them to the room. They stood waiting for the lift on the ground floor, a slightly uncomfortable silence between them, brought on by Jericho's anger at the manager's reluctance to hand over a key to the room of a paying guest.

  He was a man of average height with a strangulated moustache and an expensive dark suit. He wore the same red tie as the rest of the male staff, and considered that he distinguished himself from them by his very demeanour.

  'You have a bag,' said Jericho to Haynes, as if he'd only just noticed. He had obviously seen it as soon as Haynes had appeared in front of him, but it was the first time that it had really filtered in.

  'The Superintendent wants me to stay until Sunday morning.'

  Jericho didn't reply. He stared at the floor. The manager and Haynes were willing the lift to come, to relieve the awkwardness. Jericho could eat awkward and shit it back out as awkward-enhanced and not care.

  'You've to replace Sergeant Light?' he asked.

  'Yes.'

  Jericho continued to stare at the floor. The uncomfortable feeling was growing. If she was in her room, what state would she be in? Emotional? Could she possibly have decided she couldn't come to work because she was too embarrassed? If she was sitting in there, feeling terrible about the fact that the country knew they'd slept together, how uncomfortable was that going to be? Or maybe she was ill, and wouldn't want three men charging into her room.

  And perhaps, the most likely event he considered, she wouldn't be there at all. And then what would they do? Would they consider that they had another missing person on their hands, another to add to the current list of the Britain's Got Justice Missing One?

  The lift door pinged open, the three men stood back while a family of four Bangladeshis walked past them pulling luggage, and then they trooped into the lift.

  The manager pressed the button; they stood in silence. The door opened on the fifth floor, and the manager found himself saying, 'This is most unusual,' again as they began the walk along the corridor. Haynes glanced at Jericho, but Jericho wasn't one for snide looks behind the backs of people he thought were talking too much.

  The manager stopped at the door and knocked. The three men stood and waited, the manager with his eyes firmly on the door, and ready with all the excuses in the world in case the lady was about to answer with a towel wrapped around her breasts.

  Jericho looked at the floor. Haynes glanced around the corridor.

  'I recognise it from the photographs,' he said, unable to stop himself.

  He smiled in embarrassment; Jericho gave him a look like he was a naughty child, although he almost smiled himself.

  The manager knocked again, seeming not to have heard Haynes' glib comment.

  'We'll just give her another moment,' he said.

  'Oh, for God's sake,' said Jericho. 'How big do you think the room is? Just open the fucking door.'

  He dragged his hands across his chin as he said it. The manager breathed deeply, just as deeply wishing that he could tell Jericho to clear off.

  He straightened his shoulders, took the key from his jacket pocket, turned the lock and then tentatively opened the door. As he did so, he knocked again and said, 'Madame?'

  *

  The room was alive with law enforcement. The entire fifth floor had been closed off, the room emptied. Those guests that were affected were offered other rooms in the hotel, or help in finding completely new accommodation. Rumours of the find of a corpse spread quickly, and for every guest who no longer wished to stay in a hotel where someone had been murdered, there were those queuing up to get a room as close as possible to the police action.

  Despite his desire to crawl off back to his own room, close the blinds and sit in total silence and darkness, Jericho had been utterly professional. He was out of his own patch and therefore was not the one in charge of the resources required at such a time. It was one of the absurd things about the way this whole thing had been done, and no clear line of command or organisation had been laid down when the case had been taken off Shackleton and handed over to Jericho.

  Within a minute of finding the body bundled up on the bed he had put the call through to Shackleton. He had asked that he be as discreet as possible, although under the circumstances it was always likely to be a desperate aspiration rather than something which had the remotest possibility of happening.

  Instantly dispatching the manager, Jericho and Haynes had then had a few minutes to look around the room for themselves before the hordes of police arrived.

  The body of Lorraine Allison had been dumped on the bed, and no attempt made to suggest that this was where she had been killed. She had clearly been murdered a few days previously. Although the local police pathologist might have been able to give them details suggesting an approximate time of death, and further information about the precise blow or injury that had killed her, it was apparent to Jericho and Haynes that they did not actually need to wait for that information to see for themselves.

  Neither of them had ever seen a body so horribly pummelled. Allison had been repeatedly beaten, her body the most awful dirty purple, all over, her face warped and smashed. They didn't touch her, but it was clear from the angle at which she lay dumped on the bed that many bones in her body were broken. Maybe every bone in her body was broken.

  The white sheets around the body were still white.

  There was one small stain on the sheet close to where her head lay, and Jericho realised with the kind of self-loathing that tortured many of his waking hours that it was a semen stain of his making.

  'When Shackleton comes I'm going to hand this over to him,' Jericho had said.

  Haynes nodded. He understood. Some officers might have tried to retain control as long as possible, knowing that there was some self-implication involved and trying to keep as tight a lid on it as they could. Jericho knew that he would have questions to answer and therefore oughtn't to be the one asking them.

  When the first police officers arrived Jericho kept the room clear and put them to duty closing off the floor and working with the manager to clear all the other rooms. Once Shackleton came he handed everything over to him. He was the one with the contacts in the area, who knew the available resources. The conversation between them had been minimal.

  Now Haynes and Jericho were standing at the end of the corridor by the lifts. Haynes had disappeared for a few moments and returned with two cups of coffee. They weren't talking. Haynes had a few questions, but knew that Jericho would be running everything over in his head.

  Shackleton appeared from the room and walked towards them.

  'The place is buzzing downstairs apparently,' he said. 'Media.'

  'I've just been,' said Haynes. 'And, yes, it is.'

  Shackleton had que
stions but obviously found it awkward. He had contempt for Jericho with the way he steamrollered back to London to take over the investigation, but that contempt was mitigated by the fact that he had instantly handed over the investigation as soon as it took this turn.

  'It's all right to ask,' said Jericho.

  Shackleton grunted, kicked his feet, stared at his shoes. He recognised that Jericho was a better, more instinctive police officer than he was, which added to his resentment.

  'This was Sergeant Light's room, yes?'

  It was an unnecessary question, the answer to which he already knew. Jericho took the cue to tell him everything he would need to know, answering many of Haynes' queries along the way.

  'Sergeant Light and I came up here around nine-thirty last night. We had sex, on the bed. I left around eleven-thirty.'

  Haynes' phone stared ringing and he immediately turned it off without looking to see who was calling.

  'On leaving the room I was photographed, as I expect you've seen. When I got back to my room, maybe a few minutes after I got back, I thought to call her to warn her that we were likely to be on today's front pages. She never answered. I assumed that she'd taken herself off for a bath. I didn't call again. Presumed she'd turn up at the TV offices this morning, then I got tied up with some of that shit, started calling around looking for her as soon as I got out. When I couldn't get hold of her, we came over.'

  Shackleton had raised his eyes a few times, but had difficulty holding Jericho's gaze.

  'It's an assumption, but an obvious one, that Sergeant Light was taken by the same person who dumped Lorraine Allison's body in her room, and that perhaps it was done as soon as I left the room. They were waiting for me to leave.'

  'Did you see anyone other than the photographer?' asked Shackleton.

  'No.'

  'We need to get hold of the photographer.'

  'Yes,' said Jericho.

  'Was he credited with the photo in the papers?' asked Shackleton, and was immediately aware of how stupid a question it was. Neither Jericho nor Haynes answered.