We Are the Hanged Man (34 page)

Shackleton nodded. 'Don't go too far,' he said.

He looked at Haynes.

'I won't be requiring your assistance either, Sergeant, but hang around in case I need to talk to you.'

He walked off back in the direction of Sergeant Light's room. Haynes and Jericho shared a glance, and then Haynes remembered to look at his phone.

One missed call. It was Professor Leighton at the British Museum. He was about to put the phone back in his pocket – he would call her later – when a text message came in. It was from Leighton and came with an attachment.

This from Le Monde website today. The last of the Larrousse family. Call me.

He opened the attachment. It was a photograph of Gerard Larrousse hanging by the neck from a top floor window of his chateau in France. He stared at it for a while, then held it towards Jericho.

The expression on Jericho's face did not change, then he reached into his jacket pocket and took out a Tarot card.

In composition it was almost perfect, as if whoever had drawn the card had used the photograph of Larrousse in death as the model.

'Left under my door this morning,' said Jericho.

'You didn't see…'

'It was there when I woke up.'

Jericho exhaled, put the card back in his pocket. Turned away from Haynes, rubbing his hands over his face.

'This is….' he began, and then tossed the comment aside as he looked along the corridor. From where he was standing he could see four police officers. 'We'll go to my room. It's on the floor above. Get a bit of quiet.'

He walked towards the stairs, Haynes following. The police officers on duty watched them and noted the time they left and the exit they'd used.

*

Dylan was on her way to London, sitting in the back of an unmarked police Jaguar, on the phone. She was angry and shouting. Even the Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police Force did not escape her wrath, although he recognised in it the harsh words of a worried woman, who felt that she was to blame for the way things seemed to be spiralling out of control. A missing television celebrity had turned up dead; one of her officers was missing; and another, while not yet being implicated – and she was fully prepared to accept that Jericho might well be – was at the very least mired in a colossal mound of shit up to his neck.

A strong woman was needed to take charge.

Washington was in his office looking over photographs of a variety of contestants for the next show he was planning. It would be celebrity television, but like most celebrity shows he was aware that he would by necessity have to populate it with celebrities that most people, himself included, had never heard of. Which was why he was looking at photographs of a variety of D-listers who had been on other reality shows, had recorded a CD once, had had a small part for a few months on Eastenders or had appeared in a video that had received forty million hits on YouTube.

There was a knock. The door did not open. Everyone in the building knew they had to wait to be invited.

'Come,' he shouted, after a short pause. He knew that people thought he needed the gap in case he was in there either fucking some TV starlet over the desk or wanking off to online porn, but Washington never did anything erotic in his office, never did anything that he wouldn't mind people walking in on. The gap was all about authority. He had it and other people bowed to it.

Claudia opened the door, stepped into the room and closed it behind her. Washington didn't look up.

'They've found Lol,' she said.

All about her there was the aura of nervous excitement. If they'd wanted something unbelievably exceptional for their show – and didn't everyone? – it had just fallen onto their plate.

Washington asked the question with a raised, perfectly-plucked eyebrow.

'Dead,' she said. 'There's more. A lot fucking more.'

'Good,' said Washington, and he knew that she knew he thought it was good that there was more, not that it was good that Lol was dead. She knew that he just didn't give a shit whether or not Lol was dead.

*

Jericho and Haynes were in his hotel room, Jericho standing at the window with his back turned to the room, Haynes standing in the small area of floor space between the end of the bed and the television; standing in silence as Jericho finished off his coffee and looked down on the road beneath them.

'Talk to me,' said Jericho eventually. Haynes knew what he meant, and found it funny that Jericho frequently used a line that Haynes associated with women in a post-coital situation.

It was not an association that he allowed to distract him.

'There are two things. The Tarot cards, plus whatever it is that's going on here, with Lol's kidnapping and murder, and now the apparent disappearance of Sergeant Light.' He paused, which he would do every now and again, but Jericho always let him talk until he was finished, unless something he said sparked a thought he didn't want to lose. 'You received the first of the Tarots less than two weeks ago, they've arrived at regular intervals, and now you've received six in all. The nature of the most recent, combined with the death of Larrousse, would indicate that we've come to some sort of climax. The death also, finally, puts an end to any possibility that the cards are some sort of prank.'

Another pause. Haynes looked at Jericho's back. Perhaps his shoulders were slightly more hunched than usual.

'One of the many questions they raise is why the cards have been getting sent to you. Working on the presumption that they will be related to people dying, and presumably murdered, we've now come across one death for an individual literally related to you. Is it possible then, drawing on from this, that you are related to five other people who have died in the past few weeks?'

Jericho grunted.

'And logically, following on from that, to Larrousse?'

Jericho grunted again. A supposition at which he had already arrived. It seemed utterly absurd, but then, how would he know? How many of one's distant relatives does anyone know? The first couple of layers, the odd distant cousin. Eventually, and very quickly, there will be names of people to whom one is not too distantly related, of whom one will have never heard.

'In the interests of time, rather than checking up on all the people who've died in the past few weeks in close proximity to the days on which you received the cards, we could start with you and work out from your family tree, see if we arrive at anyone else. Has anyone ever done a tree for your family?'

Jericho shook his head, then he shrugged.

'How much of an extended family do you have?'

Jericho finally turned and looked at him. His initial look was one of annoyance, but it left his face as soon as he met Haynes' eyes. It was hardly his fault, and he was right. If there was a possibility that this was all related to Jericho's family, then they needed to check.

'I'll call my sister. She might know,' he said.

'You have a sister?'

Haynes knew nothing of Jericho's life.

'Did you think I was some kind of one-off human experiment?'

Haynes smiled, waved away his own question.

'Should I leave that part of it to you?' he asked.

'Yes. Do some checking up on Larrousse.'

Haynes nodded.

'Do you think he's going to turn out to be some long-lost cousin of yours?'

Jericho looked sceptically at Haynes, the annoyance creeping back.

'I really don't think that's going to happen, Sergeant. But someone…. someone seems intent on dragging me into something that I don't know anything about.'

He paused; he turned away again.

'Maybe it's not me, maybe in even thinking about it I'm displaying some sort of absurd narcissistic defence mechanism. Making it about me, when it just isn't. Although addressed to me, the cards could have been aimed at the station as a whole. Maybe, rather than mocking me, they're from an informant, warning me about something. I'm standing here internalising.'

'Then there's Oliver Davis, Sir,' said Haynes. 'Too much of a coincidence. It's not just you who thinks these are directly aimed at you. I'm not being narcissistic about it.'

Jericho didn't reply, didn't turn back.

'If it was a chain linking people between me and Larrousse,' said Jericho, 'what about the ones in the chain who died last year? It all seems to have been set up for these last two weeks.'

'Maybe they died anyway,' said Haynes. 'People die. Or maybe whoever was setting this up made a calculation of a trail of murder, and decided that six was the right number, a do-able number. Did some advance work. Perhaps there will turn out to be ten in the chain. Or twenty. Maybe the cards don't relate to specific deaths and were just there to suck you in, to toy with you, taunt you… Maybe it turns out there's a great chain of deaths, all related to you, and ultimately it stops with you and you inherit… I don't know, millions. A chateau. A wine empire.'

'All right, Sergeant!' barked Jericho. 'All right. I really don't think that's going to happen.'

He didn't understand it. Somehow he'd thought that when it was revealed to him it would be clear and apparent, but now it was unfolding in stages and he couldn't understand what was happening. He was being swallowed up by it.

Haynes waited for Jericho to speak again.

'OK, that's the Tarot side of it,' Jericho said eventually. 'Now the other half.'

He finished the sentence, as he frequently did, almost as if he were running out of words.

'So far,' said Haynes, 'we have no connection between the cards and the show. No seeming connection at any rate, apart from the timing. That's one coincidence that could be just that. Someone sending you all these cards is one thing. But the timing of an entire TV show, and all that it entails, in order just to set you up in some way? Unless you're related to Lorraine Allison. You think that's possible?'

'I doubt it. If the idea we're following here is of people dying in a chain, so that ultimately I find myself the beneficiary of something that I wouldn't have if that person hadn't died… that's a lot of people who are going to have to be killed around Lorraine Allison. She's got a mum, dad, three brothers, fuck knows how many other people.'

'OK. So how about they're just looking for you to be in the public spotlight as much as possible? You've been in the public eye before, but it's been a while. A long while. This way, they get you in the newspapers for another couple of weeks, and then boom, this thing comes out. DCI Jericho and the trail of death, and it's all about money.'

Haynes let out a long sigh as he said it. Put like that it seemed utterly absurd. Or maybe not absurd. Maybe complicated and entangled and ridiculously far-fetched, yet not impossible.

'I'm being set up by the entertainment industry?' said Jericho, turning around. He smiled. 'Television and the newspapers and god knows who else?'

'They're all in it together,' said Haynes, 'all owned by the same few companies and individuals.'

'That's nice that they should hold me in such high regard. I could see it if they were setting up David Beckham or the Prime Minister. What the fuck's the point in setting up an unattractive, miserable, middle-aged police officer? Really?'

'Am I supposed to contradict that you're unattractive?'

Jericho gave Haynes the appropriate look.

'Maybe that's something else we need to be checking out,' said Haynes.

Jericho nodded. He had fully turned round, and had straightened his shoulders. Haynes could tell from his body language. He'd had enough sorting out where they were, and it was time to get on.