We Are the Hanged Man (2 page)

The second-to-last envelope was small, blue, with a London postmark. Even though he knew they were all rubbish he still did the job properly. Took the time to glean everything from the outside, sometimes played the game of deciding what sort of letter he thought it would be before reading it, and then invariably scrunching it up and throwing it in the bin. He could feel that this one wasn't a letter, but a card. Probably an invitation. He still received plenty of those. Gallery openings, sometimes film premieres, if the subject matter was remotely connected to law and order.

Using the same old cutlass-shaped letter opener, once his father's, he slit open the top of the letter, fished out the card. Haynes was watching him and immediately broke off as Jericho placed the card on the desk.

It was a Tarot card. Number twelve. The Hanged Man. Jericho placed it front of him, so that the picture revealed a skeleton, dressed in rags, hung by the neck, a grotesque grimace on its face. It was hung from a tree, a half moon in the background, its legs tied together at the ankles.

Jericho didn't say anything. Haynes whistled.

'That's pretty cool,' said Haynes. He was looking at the card upside down, but was turning his head to see it from Jericho's perspective.

'No it isn't.'

'But if you look at it…'

Jericho breathed heavily for a moment, his eyes lowered to the card.

'I'll tell you, Sergeant,' he said eventually. 'It's the ever-threatening Tarot card. I'm…'

Aware that he was beginning to sound miserable and petulant, he let the words go and pushed the card away from him.

'Yes, but it's interesting,' said Haynes.

Jericho dragged his hands across two days of stubble and indicated for Haynes to keep talking.

'It works both ways round. It's your usual Tarot Hanged Man this way, with the legs tied together, so that the figure is hung upside down. But then, the other way up it's hung like a regular sort of, you know, hung guy, rather than the Tarot type of hanging.'

Jericho turned the card round, so that it now showed the skeleton suspended by its ankles from a tree, looking out at the picture, viewing the world turned upside down.

'Exactamundo,' said Haynes. 'That's what I'm talking about.'

'Anything else?' said Jericho.

Haynes smiled slightly awkwardly.

'That's me kind of exhausted my knowledge. Had a girlfriend once…'

Jericho lifted the card, studied the back. A faded red pattern with yellow edging. Turned it back over. He sighed, rubbed his hand across his face once more.

'Whatever this is…' he said, 'whatever it's supposed to be… it takes an act of banality, and of having watched too many movies, to start sending an unmarked Tarot card to a police station.'

'What was the movie?'

Jericho glanced up at his sergeant.

'But is it less banal because whoever did it has chosen to subvert the imagery in some way,' said Haynes, and then he shrugged and added, 'or is it just banal in a different way?'

Haynes stared across the desk, waiting to see if he got an answer, although he knew he wouldn't.

'It's a cool picture, though,' he said.

Jericho ignored him, ran his fingers over the card to make sure there were no markings that he'd missed, committed the picture to memory, then pushed it across the desk towards Haynes.

'All right,' he said. 'This one's not going in the bin. Just in case.'

Haynes nodded. Felt relieved that there at least had been something to drag Jericho marginally up out of the pit of his depression.

'You want me to do anything?'

'Look for that image. See if it's been used before. Maybe try and find a Tarot expert. There're experts on every piece of crap on the planet.'

Jericho held his gaze for a short while and then dismissed him with a short wave. Haynes lifted the card and turned to go. Experience had told him not to ask the boss what he was going to be doing with his time. He stopped as he got to the door, turned back. The fact that Jericho had actually started speaking at all was a positive sign.

'King's Head last night, eh?' said Haynes. 'Who was she? Pretty fit by all accounts.'

Jericho was looking at the cover of the next letter. He recognised the handwriting as being that of a woman in her seventies or eighties. Postmarked Brighton. This one was going to ask him if he could help deal with the yobs who congregated at the bottom of her garden. He slit the envelope open and took out the short letter and did not look up. Haynes left the room.

'You all right?' the Superindendent asked, once she was safely seated behind the defensive shield of her desk.

DCI Jericho stood at the window, looking over the barren fields and bare trees towards Glastonbury Tor. The light was beginning to fade, taking an undistinguished day with it. A bright morning had become a grey afternoon.

'Everyone seems to think you're a bit ragged today.'

He shrugged in reply, didn't bother looking over his shoulder.

She knew better than to push him any further. That coupled with the fact that she didn't care about his depression, if that's what it was. For the most part, she thought he was just sullen and rude, hiding behind a preposterous diagnosis.

'I've got something for you that you're not going to like,' she said.

Don't give it to me, then.

He didn't turn. He felt the grip tighten.

'I know you don't have much on at the moment. In fact, we both know that given your talents and the nature of the work you get down here, you're never going to be busy. You're not going to like this but it makes sense, so I recommended that you be put forward for it.'

She stopped and looked at him, expecting something in response. A question or a grunt. Jericho stared out of the window, seeing nothing.

'The police... well, the Met, they've been speaking to the producers of that show,
Britain's Got Justice
.'

Still he didn't speak.

Superintendent Dylan had been determined not to be put off by his absurd rudeness. His 'affliction', as a police psychologist had once described it in a show of support for one of her officers that Dylan had not particularly cared for.

'You know the show?' she asked firmly. 'On Saturday night.'

'No,' he said.

'Everyone's been talking about it.' She took a breath. Tried not to look at him, his disdainful back pointing at her. 'Front page of the newspapers. God, they're talking about it around here often enough.'

'I only ever talk to Haynes and he knows not to bother me with that kind of thing.'

You elitist fucking wanker
. She didn't believe him. Even if you didn't want to know about popular culture, how could you avoid it?

'You're doing the show,' she said brusquely.

Dylan found it somewhat challenging to have a much more talented and intuitive police officer beneath her in the chain of command, and their relationship was never helped by his sullen ill-humour, the complete lack of positive interaction. It put her on edge the instant she knew it was coming, and usually she avoided him until the episodes had passed. However, when London called…

The meeting was almost finished. Jericho didn't speak, didn't move, although he was oblivious to the dying of the day over which he looked.

'You need to go up to London tomorrow. You're on the 07:26 from Castle Cary. You're going to the offices of 1
^st
May Television. Sergeant Light has the tickets and other details.'

Her voice sounded strong, but she was aware that her strength was disappearing with every word.

'Haynes is coming with me,' he said, a statement rather than a question. He often hid behind Haynes. Haynes was his voice. The acceptable face of DCI Jericho.

'No,' she said. 'Just you.'

He didn't respond, stayed standing still in uncomfortable silence. Eventually, Dylan's weary eyes having fallen to paperwork on her desk, Jericho realised that the interview was over, and he turned without looking at her and walked from the office.

*

Ten minutes later he was attached to a cup of coffee. Haynes sat opposite him.

'You told her that?' asked Haynes.

Jericho nodded.

'You said you'd never even heard of it?'

He nodded again. He wasn't smiling.

Haynes laughed.

'Did she believe you?'

Jericho took a long drink of coffee, as it had reached the kind of temperature which allowed him to drink it like he was drinking water.

'Doubt it.'

'She tell you what they wanted you for?' asked Haynes.

Jericho shook his head. 'Didn't ask. Some piece of consultancy crap probably.'

He spat out the word consultancy. Maybe it would be some sort of revenge on someone, although he wasn't entirely sure who, if he was the one dispensing condescending and unnecessary advice for absurd amounts of money.

'No,' said Haynes.

'What?'

'It's not consultancy work.'

Haynes gave a slight raise of the eyebrow. He might have been the only one who could talk to Jericho when he was encased in gloom, but it didn't mean that he enjoyed it. Especially when telling him something this ridiculous.

Jericho's face dropped even further at the look from Haynes.

'Oh crap.'

He shook his head, held up his hand. 'Don't want to know. I'll find out soon enough. Tell me about the card.'

Jericho had taken another look at the card before leaving the office, but he hadn't needed to. He had committed every detail to memory and had given it some thought over the course of the afternoon.

If it was a joke there was no dividing it up into sub-sections. It could be dismissed. However, the seeming originality of it made him wonder, made him invest it with more potential than he would otherwise have done; and if it was a threat, there were sub-sections. Lots of sub-sections. Was it something that had already taken place, or a portent of something to come? Why him? Was the threat directed at him specifically, or was someone toying with him, taunting the famous detective?

Not that Jericho thought of himself in that way. Famous. Famous, however, he undoubtedly was. The name had brought him to the attention of the media almost from the moment he had become a Detective Constable. There had been the first big case, Durrant, although the full horror of that had not been widely reported. Then there had been Bigalo and Watkins; the Marble Arch murder; the girl in the cellar; the Littlewoods conspiracy, which in the late 1997 had even managed to keep the death of Princess Diana off the front pages of the tabloids, albeit only for two days. A long career.

Ever since, he had been a magnet for the weird and the lonely, the mischievous to the criminally insane. It had quietened down as his months in the spotlight had drifted into years, but they were still out there. Most people still sent mail to the Metropolitan police and there was someone there who shielded Jericho, checked the mail and sent less than half on to him. The card, though, had come from one of the few people who realised that Jericho had long ago been moved quietly down to the south-west.