We Are the Hanged Man (48 page)

'Fucking brilliant,' muttered Claudia, who was convincing herself as the seconds passed that this was all a show. 'Absolutely fucking brilliant.'

A thought came from nowhere and she wondered if even Lol might actually still be alive.

Crowthorne, keeping a wary eye on Durrant's knife, knelt down beside Morris and felt her neck. He couldn't avoid getting blood on his hands.

'She's dead,' he said, looking up.

This did not seem to change Claudia's view at all. She had convinced herself that it was all a scam. Television could fake anything. Perhaps Morris had known all along.

'You guys have got guns, remember,' she said to Ando and Xav. There was a light amusement in her voice.

They'd forgotten about the guns.

'Who's got guns?' barked Webb.

Guns. That changed Durrant's plan.

He shattered the uncomfortable stand-off by stepping forward and bringing the knife swiftly up under Crowthorne's chin. Crowthorne reached for Durrant as he did so, but then his arms dropped quickly to his side.

With the knife embedded, Durrant powerfully tugged Crowthorne's limp body to the side, knocking him into Webb as he sprang to his feet. Then the knife was withdrawn, and stabbed brutally down into Webb's face, out and back in again, as Webb fell to the floor.

Ando had his gun in his hand, was frantically fingering for the catch. Xav only momentarily held his gun before it slipped form his fingers.

Norrie, the sound guy, made a move for Durrant as Durrant stepped towards Ando. He transferred the knife to his left hand and swiped to his side, catching Norrie in the arm and throwing him off balance. Norrie's arm started spurting blood and hurt like he'd never experienced before. He staggered to the side, inadvertently bringing him closer to Ando.

The knife back in his right hand, Durrant stabbed the two men in the forehead, quickly, smoothly, one after the other.

Five down, four to go.

Claudia's face still held a disbelieving wonder, as if she wasn't quite prepared to accept that any of this was real.

'This is just fucking extraordinary,' she breathed.

Mikey, the camera guy, had lowered his instrument once again. He was pushed back as far as he could go.

Durrant was not finished, his movement fluid and sweet around the room, from one grotesque act to the next.

Xav's gun was swiped out of his hands and sent across the room, then he was grabbed by the throat by Durrant's left hand, and then brought forward and his nose broken, face smashed by a crushing blow from the forehead, and although he wasn't dead, he was out of the game.

Cher braced herself. Hadn't she fought a thug on live television only five days earlier? She held up her fists for the fight. Durrant brushed them aside, punched her brutally in the face, forced her back against the wall and buried the knife in her chest.

Withdrew it quickly, with a loud suck of blood and flesh, and impaled it in Mikey the cameraman's head.

Claudia stood a few feet away, her back against the wall, sprayed with blood. Durrant stood before her, red all over.

At last she believed it was real, and yet she still strangely thought that she would not be included in the carnage; she still felt some strange thrill of it all. She was on her way to New York. She was going to be bigger than Steven Washington.

Blood dripped from Durrant, from his hands and his face, from the end of his erection.

Claudia's throat was dry. Durrant took one step towards her and buried his knife in it, and suddenly her throat was wet with blood. He held it there for a second, her eyes wide, and then dragged it out, running it across her throat as it went. Claudia collapsed, dead, to the floor.

At some point, in the midst of it all, Hoagy had moved on to
Ballad in Blue
.

Durrant looked around the scene, already knowing who he had killed and who needed to be finished off. Nevertheless, he had to be sure.

He walked quickly round the room, stepping over bodies, slitting every throat that had not already been slit, and doing it again on those that had.

Jericho stood two hundred yards along the beach, no sense of what was taking place inside the house, the only sounds the wind and the sea and the tumbling stones. He checked his watch; he ground his shoes into the shingle.

It had been long enough. No one had come back out of the house, but it was time for him to put himself into the middle of what was going on. The thought of appearing out of nowhere, to be back in front of the cameras, squeezed horribly at his stomach, but then so did the thought of what might be happening, if it really was Durrant behind that old door. The house he'd walked passed so often when strolling along this beach. Durrant's house.

Head up, hat pulled low, he started walking along the stones towards the house, looking like any dog walker out on a bleak January late morning. A dog walker in a suit. Without a dog.

*

Durrant stepped into the shower, took the nozzle from the wall and directed a jet of cold water over his body for thirty seconds, washing off the blood. He grabbed a towel, barely dried himself, and then walked through the sitting room, picking his way through the blood, to the bedroom and quickly pulled on a t-shirt and a pair of jeans.

It was time to leave. He had no mind to clear up the mess he'd made, but neither did he want to live amongst it.

As he pulled the t-shirt over his head, he noticed the figure approaching the house from along the beach.

For the briefest moment he felt his throat dry, the most minor increase in heartbeat. Jericho.

Had he expected Jericho to arrive with the group that had just walked in on him? Of course not, as he had not even begun to think about them. Hadn't known they were coming, had dealt with them as soon as they had. Now that Jericho was approaching, however, it seemed odd that he should arrive now, a few minutes after his police confederates.

Durrant did not for a minute think of running away. Thirty years previously he had not had the chance. When Jericho had turned up to arrest him, Durrant's house had been surrounded by at least thirty armed officers. There had been no escape.

Once Durrant was taken into custody, the police had naturally enough found the basement. However, they had not found the hanging ground, the holiday home by the sea. He had been arrested not long before he was due to take a trip out there, to deliver his new set of corpses, where his experiments regarding rate of decomposition in traumatised bodies continued.

He had never been back, and so the house had lain dormant all that time. Thirty years he had been waiting for his cell door to open, thirty years expecting Jericho to be standing outside, a folder of photographs in his hand, along with a raft of new accusations and charges.

Jericho had never come. He'd wondered if the man had forgotten about him after all that time. He had certainly never forgotten about Jericho.

He had waited. He had researched. He had learned. He had kept his outside associations as quiet as possible. It had been some years earlier that he had had his plan in place. It evolved somewhat as time had gone on, but he had always been ready. Upon his release he'd intended dragging Jericho down to his level, as quickly as possible.

Durrant had never known that the plan wasn't his plan.

And now, here came Jericho, walking along the beach to the crime scene. Poor, miserable Jericho, wanted for murder. About to face him on level terms at last.

Durrant walked quickly through the sitting room, this time picking up blood on his bare feet as he went, and into the back room. He turned on the light and closed the door behind him.

The four old victims hung perfectly still, where they had always hung. There was another place. Had he intended that all along for Jericho? He wasn't sure, but he had other uses for it first.

He looked down at Light as he walked past her. Her eyes, wide and fearful and confused, followed him round the room.

'What are you doing?'

He grabbed some heavy tape from the small work bench, then pulled out a stretch and quickly and roughly strapped it around her mouth, gagging her, hurting her as he wound it securely around her head. Her eyes widened.

He lifted the small chair and placed it under the fifth hook. There was rope on the floor, and he lifted it and quickly tied it into the old knot. The noose. He hadn't forgotten how, even though it was the first time he'd made the knot in over thirty years.

Then he walked over beside Light and placed the knot around her neck. She looked at him searchingly, pleadingly.

Why are you doing this to me?
she screamed. The words emerged as a formless, dull noise.

He made loose her bonds, and then as she began to struggle upwards he grabbed the rope and dragged her swiftly and harshly off the table, so that she fell backwards, thumping on to her buttocks, her neck strangled by the noose.

He pulled her quickly and, gasping for breath, her arms flailing, she struggled to get to her feet to keep up with him. Then, in one movement, he hoisted her up onto the chair, and hung the noose from the hook.

Her legs comfortably reached the chair, but as soon as she put weight on them they folded from the effort, having been strapped down for so long.

Her face was turning purple; her arms were dead and useless and thrashing helplessly; she stared desperately at Durrant, eyes pleading.

Durrant turned his back, walked around the table, and turned off the light.

Lazy River
was playing. The song told him as much as the scene of carnage, as much as the absurd walls covered in Tarot cards. Blood on the cards on the walls, blood on the floor, blood on the furniture. And Hoagy was singing.

He looked around at the four closed doors. Glanced into the small kitchen area. Imagined the house from the outside, so that he could get a sense of the size of rooms behind each of the doors. One would be a bathroom. Three bedrooms? Closed his eyes again, pictured the house. Two at most. Another check around, not much storage space. The other door would be a cupboard, but it could be a walk-in cupboard, somewhere with plenty of space for a man to stand waiting.

A quick check of the house had shown there was no back door. Just a window that seemed to let in no light. Curtains drawn or boarded up, he couldn't be sure.

If they weren't boarded up, then Durrant would have been able to get out the back, run away. Jericho knew that wouldn't happen. He would be waiting, on the other side of one of these four doors.

He stood with his feet adjacent to Morris' head. He barely looked down at her. She had meant nothing to him, and now he felt nothing at her death. He wasn't interested. The same could be said for the rest of the eight bodies in the room, and the same could be said for the hundreds of Hanged Men, now scornfully smiling at him from the walls and the ceiling. He blanked it all out.

He studied the four doors, sure that he would pick the right one, then he looked around at the bodies, their positions where they'd fallen, and tried to imagine how it had played out. He did not wonder how Durrant had taken on nine people and triumphed.

He took the phone from his pocket. There were three missed calls. He thought about it for a second, then dialled 999. Waited no more than four seconds.

'I'm in Shingle Street… the town… nine murders. Yes. Nine. There are police vans parked outside, probably from Woodbridge.'

He hung up as she continued to ask him questions, the unprofessional incredulity in her voice at the report of nine murders.

The phone rang within seconds of him putting it back into his pocket, and he reached in and clicked it off, then held his finger on the button long enough to turn the phone off.