We Are Death (7 page)

*

H
aynes knocked on the door and walked in. Jericho was standing at the window, looking out across the new houses and the fields. The sun was lower in the sky, the day coming to an end, but nothing of the heat had left it. Nevertheless, he’d put his jacket on, ready for the walk home. His house, at least, was likely to be a little cooler than the station.

‘So, this thing just got ramped up. Might be getting out of our league.’

Jericho turned.

‘What?’

‘Connolly got murdered in Switzerland yesterday.’

Jericho held his gaze for a moment, then turned away.

‘Shot from a distance of three feet?’

‘Hundreds of feet, from across the valley. This time, a perfect sniper shot to the head.’

Jericho put his hands in his pockets and looked down on the cars backing up on the road outside, the endless building works still impacting on the flow of traffic.

‘Any contact or news from the other three?’

‘Can’t get hold of them.’

‘So it’s possible they’re already dead.’

‘Entirely,’ said Haynes.

‘Or two of them are dead, and the one with the grudge has taken care of business. Crap.’

He continued to look sadly down on the road outside. When he spoke again, his voice was a little heavier than before.

‘Come on, we should go and see the boss.’

––––––––

‘W
ell, there’s some confirmation of the impressions we’ve been getting, which is that this thing is about the expedition to Kangchenjunga. Always possible, of course, that Connolly and Carter knew each other anyway and had some other business. That should be easy enough to check out. That aside, we really ought to be finding these other three.’

‘So, how do we tackle it?’ asked Dylan. ‘Who is it we should be speaking to?’

‘The Swiss, Interpol, probably the Met. The Foreign Office, I guess, and UK Borders to see if it’s possible to pick up someone who came from Switzerland and left again this afternoon. The chances of them doing that on the same passport you’d think would be nil, but let’s look.’

‘You haven’t spoken to the Swiss yet, Sergeant?’

‘No.’

‘How did you find the news?’

‘The local police in Cheltenham had been alerted to go and tell his family. His brother, I think, said that we’d been asking. I’d left my details. So Cheltenham called us. They’re obviously not involved, they just had messenger status.’

‘It is possible that they’ve already arrested someone and we’re looking at two different shooters? You’ll need to put–’

‘I looked online,’ said Haynes. ‘The reports indicated that the police are pretty clueless on the matter.’

‘All right.’ She looked at the clock on the wall. ‘So, it’s almost eight thirty in Switzerland. You never know. Give them a call, Robert. We should make contact. Our case impacts on them just as much as their case does on us.’

Jericho nodded.

‘I’m going to speak to the Chief Constable. We may find by tomorrow morning that this has got away from us, but we need to keep running with it, so let’s see how it plays out.’

‘Right,’ said Jericho. ‘Anything else?’

She looked down at the open file in front of her and made a small movement with her fingers.

‘Thank you, gentlemen.’

Jericho and Haynes got to their feet, walked from the office and closed the door behind them. They both paused for a minute, facing the awfulness of stepping out of the air-conditioned fantasy world of the superintendent’s office and into the clammy discomfort of the open plan.

‘What’s with you two?’ asked Haynes, as they walked through the office.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘You’re usually like a pair of velociraptors fighting over the last nugget in McDonald’s.’

Jericho walked on. He’d known full well what Haynes had meant. Not that he was entirely comfortable with this strange new state of affairs with his boss, it seemed so alien.

‘Maybe we’re more mature,’ he said.

*

J
ericho opened the door and walked into his house at seventeen minutes past ten. Darkness had come and with it, at last, a slight chill in the air. Very slight.

An unsatisfactory end to the day, struggling to get anywhere with the Swiss police, too many people not speaking English, or claiming not to understand. He’d finally given up and decided to try again in the morning.

His house was warm and muggy, so the first thing he did was go into the sitting room and bedroom to open the windows. Wide, to let in as much of the night as possible.

He stood at his bedroom window and looked out into the dark. The clouds were gone, clear skies, a slender, crescent moon. There had been stars aplenty as he’d walked home.

He’d gone beyond hunger, having not eaten anything in such a long time, but he did feel like a drink. Gin and tonic, he thought. Lots of ice.

As he walked back down the stairs he got that feeling again. Oddly, he hadn’t done so when he’d walked into the house a few minutes previously. Now he paused halfway down the staircase, trying to establish what it was.

Someone was here. Someone was in the house. But it hadn’t felt like that earlier. Why now? Had they come in through the wide-open downstairs window? He stood still, in complete silence bar the noise of the few cars on the Shepton Road, trying to sense what was happening in the house.

The hairs stood up slowly on the back of his neck.

‘This is stupid,’ he muttered.

Back to the ground floor, into the kitchen, lights on.

What he saw didn’t make sense. An optical illusion. Like staring at an Ames trapezoid window or Penrose steps.

What does your brain do when faced with something that it cannot understand?

It creates its own reality. Blocks it out. Doesn’t think about it. Can’t think about it.

Everything was so clear-cut in Jericho’s world. He didn’t know what to do with something that made no sense.

His visitor was sitting at the table, wearing an old jumper, legs hidden beneath the table, hands clasped together on top of it. The head was slightly lowered, eyes open, but Jericho couldn’t make out what they were saying. Were the eyes speaking, or were those words coming from the lips?

Nothing made sense. The sound, the words, his presence in front of him at the table.

Jericho swallowed. Was that fear? Fear, somewhere tucked inside his head? When was the last time he’d been afraid of anything?

‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

The doorbell rang. Jericho jumped at the sound, turned round, looking at the front door. It was wooden with no glass panel, so he was unable to see who was standing there.

No one came to his door at this time of night. Suddenly, even the doorbell ringing didn’t make any sense, it seemed to add to the overall feeling of confusion. Something else to have his heart racing, his mouth dry, the peculiar twist of his stomach.

He turned back to the kitchen, and the kitchen looked back at him.

There was no one there. There was no one sitting at the table. Jericho stood still for a moment, trying to recover the sense of what had been there, the sense he’d felt walking down the stairs.

It was gone, although the hairs still stood on the back of his neck.

The doorbell rang again, another small shock fizzed through his body, then he gave himself one of his regular, two-second tellings-off, steeled himself and walked to the front door. Didn’t bother looking through the peep-hole. Opened the door to find Haynes, who had left the station forty-five minutes previously.

‘Sergeant,’ said Jericho.

‘You all right?’ asked Haynes. ‘You look... I don’t know, you just don’t look all right.’

‘Seeing ghosts,’ he said. ‘What’s up?’

As he asked the question, he noticed that Haynes was holding something in his right hand, which he then lifted and showed to Jericho. A tarot card with the image of Death.

‘You found something interesting on it?’ asked Jericho.

‘It’s not that,’ said Haynes. ‘This is a new one. It was waiting for me at the house.’

––––––––

J
ericho had made a pot of tea, and they were sitting, a mug each, at the kitchen table, looking at the two tarot cards. The previous moment in the kitchen, the one that didn’t make sense, had been pushed out of his head. Forgotten. Placed in a compartment and relegated to the back of the cupboard.

The two cards were quite different, which Jericho hadn’t immediately realised when glancing at the second one in Haynes’s hand. While the first showed Death riding on his horse, the legion of the dead littered on the ground around him and stretching far into the distance, this one showed Death riding past a forest, and in the trees behind were five bodies hung by the neck. Five men. The heads of two of them were slumped forward, already dead. The faces of the other three were contorted in pain, their heads depicted frantically thrashing, desperately fighting for breath and relief from the crushing agony.

‘Five hanged men,’ said Jericho.

‘At least it implies that the other three are still alive.’

Jericho looked up at Haynes.

‘It wasn’t delivered by Royal Mail? If it was put–’

‘It had been placed beneath my door. Unmarked envelope.’

‘Could have been done by Carter’s killer.’

‘Possibly. But then, he would have had to hang around Wells long enough to make sure I was out the house.’

‘He presumably knew you were going to get called into work early. Maybe he was watching.’

Jericho took some tea, slurping, then shook his head.

‘Wilful blindness, that’s what we have here,’ he said. ‘I knew they were coming back, they had to be. They didn’t do all that shit last winter for nothing. Yes, it’s a game, it’s all a bloody game, but these people... everything has a reason. They were always coming back, and what have I been doing for the last seven months? Break-ins and fights on the rec and God knows how long on that damned stupid rape allegation against the old bastard up in Horrington. Jesus...’

He stood up and walked away from the table. Stood over the fireplace, looked down into the cold hearth. The hearth he hadn’t cleaned out since the fire had last been lit, three months previously.

‘And what were you going to be investigating, sir? They were invisible. They’ve been invisible all this time.’

‘They killed a lot of people. They got Durrant out of jail...’

At the very mention of the name the fear started to return. The hairs on the back of his neck. The clawing at the pit of his stomach. He waved a hand to get rid of the thought.

‘They somehow got a rich vineyard owner to commit suicide. It’s not like there weren’t about fifteen different ways we could have started the investigation. But I couldn’t face it, I didn’t want to face it, and neither did anyone else. It was like... a collective thing, a great collective,
let’s not talk about it
. It’s like your teenage daughter getting pregnant and sending her off to live with her aunt in Scotland until the baby’s born, then when she comes back pretending the baby’s your wife’s. Complete fucking denial.’

He turned and looked at Haynes.

‘No one wants to go there. Not Dylan, not anyone higher up. And what did I bring to the table? Supine acceptance. Jesus... No wonder they’re letting me go. Don’t deserve to be in this bloody job.’

‘They’re not letting you go, sir.’

‘Stuart, they’re letting me go,’ said Jericho, the agitation starting to leave his voice. ‘Yes, I can apply for jobs, but they already sorted Dylan out, didn’t they? Dylan wasn’t applying for any jobs. But me? A senior Detective Chief Inspector? Up against men and women fifteen years younger. No, I’m not getting any jobs. We all know that damned game show was a total disaster, for everyone, not just those idiots who died... career-wise, it killed me off. They would have loved for me not to come back, you know that. No, this is it, I’m afraid. This is it...’

He walked away from the fireplace, hands in his pockets.

‘Well, if it is,’ said Haynes, ‘and I’m not so sure, you’ve got one last interesting case to tackle.’

Jericho stopped pacing, turned, looked at Haynes, then lowered his eyes. He had never had control during that last time he’d come against them. They had controlled events every step of the way. Nevertheless, that he’d personally tracked down Durrant had been his own doing, he was sure of that. And that point, when he was working and figuring things out for himself, was the only time he’d really been engaged, really felt he had any semblance of direction, even if that feeling had been something of an illusion.

‘I don’t particularly like the odds,’ said Jericho, ‘but you’re right. They may be faceless, all-powerful and completely invisible, but we need to give them a go. That is, if we’re still on the case this time tomorrow.’

‘We’ve got the cards,’ said Haynes.

Jericho walked back over to the table, took another drink of tea, and looked at the cards again as he placed the mug back down.

‘I don’t like the fact that this new one has been sent to you.’

‘It’s cool.’

‘No, it isn’t. What happened to me in January wasn’t cool. I don’t want it happening to you.’

‘I...’ began Haynes. Then he smiled. ‘I won’t say it. You’re right, I’ll try to be careful. Watch my back.’

‘You might want to watch your sides and front as well.’

They shared a grim smile, then Jericho pulled the seat out and sat back down.

‘Have you done the thing you were going to do with the iPad?’ he asked.

‘Haven’t had a chance. Anyway, for best results I’ll need to scan it in, not take a photo with the iPad. Should have done it at work. My own scanner’s bust. I’ll try to get in in the morning, then I can e-mail it to myself and look at them on the train up to London.’

Jericho nodded, looking back at the cards.

‘Five hanged men. Are we to assume it refers to the five climbers, or is it referencing the five hooks hanging in Durrant’s back room? Or, indeed, something completely different?’

Knowing the questions were entirely rhetorical, as they could not possibly have any idea at this stage, Haynes did not answer. Despite the likelihood of the five men correlating to the members of the Kangchenjunga expedition, the thought that he himself might be one of them had not escaped him.