We Are the Hanged Man (27 page)

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.

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 18
^th
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.

'What?'

Light ignored her, stepped forward and spoke to Jericho.

'I've been speaking to all of the contestants that were eliminated in the past few weeks. See if there's any connection with Lol. Relationships, jealousy, that kind of thing.'

Thank God, thought Jericho. Someone's actually been doing some police work. He asked the question with his eyebrows.

'She had sex with three of the guys. One of them's here already, if you want to speak to him, the other two are on their way, although we're having to bring one down from Edinburgh. And looking back through the old shows, there was obviously a thing between her and a contestant called Valerie Marsden. We're bringing her in as well.'

'What?' asked Claudia. 'You think…'

It was absurd to her that insignificant little Valerie would have given Lol a second thought after the show, and the producers had done their best to exaggerate the aggravation between them. Still, she cut that thought off in the process, recognising immediately that it could work beautifully.

'Who are the three guys?' she asked.

'Todd, Wayne and… eh, the Nigerian fellow…'

'Toz?'

'Toz,' said Light, nodding, feeling stupid for using the tabloid abbreviation.

'Shit,' said Claudia. 'He shagged Lol? Holy fuck.'

She looked at Jericho, as if he might share her astonishment.

'Who's here?' said Jericho, ignoring her.

'Wayne. Lives in Balham.'

Jericho got to his feet.

'Might as well get one out of the way. I presume we'll need to do it with the Three Stooges.'

*

Wayne cried on cue. Jericho, who didn't watch television and didn't realise that everyone cries on TV, even Jeremy Clarkson, wondered what was going on. He doubted that Wayne spoke the truth when he said that he loved Lol, but similarly he doubted that he was in any way connected with her disappearance.

Haynes had arrived at the television studio while Jericho was out on his mission to interview Lol's mum, so instead he called Professor Leighton to find out if she was available for a meeting rather than a telephone call. She'd sounded delighted.

Today she'd offered him a cup of coffee and was keeping him waiting. He sat in the seat by the desk, looking around him at the shelves of books. Occasionally the title of one would grab him, but the room was warm and he didn't feel like moving now that he was sitting down. Tired after the drive.

The door opened behind him and Leighton came in holding two cups on saucers. She placed one down in front of him and took her seat around the other side of the desk.

'It's hot,' she said.

'What have you got for me?' asked Haynes, laying the cup back down having started to lift it.

She clapped her hands together.

'A great miasma. I'm rather afraid that you have some work ahead of you, Sergeant. I can start you off, but I'm afraid I don't have the resources to devote much more time to this, fascinating though it is.'

'That's all right,' said Haynes.

'Well, I've found four definite, but another five possibles. There are all sorts of ancient institutions in Europe, all sorts of groups plying their business in the shadows. Many of them have changed names through the years. Re-inventing themselves for political advantage. Or through necessity, or for marketing purposes... Some of those changes were just as much in the shadows as the organisations themselves. And so…'