We Are the Hanged Man (14 page)

He laughed.

'A dementor at my table,' said someone anonymous from the far end of the long desk.

'What?' barked Washington.

'You know…' and she hesitated.

'What?' he barked again, looking at her strangely.

'You know that New Zealand film,
An Angel At My Table
. We could have kind of a play on that.' She couldn't look him in the eye. 'A dementor at my table. That's all,' she added.

Washington glanced around the room, looking for someone to share in his confusion.

'Sounds too art house,' he said eventually, and then he shook his head as if to get rid of the previous fifteen seconds of his life, fifteen seconds that he would never get back, then he clapped.

'Right, fuck yes, dementor. Hattie, get on it, get out to the usual people. Quite happy for it to become the story of the show for the next coupla days. It should work for us. We can use him.'

Morris nodded and started scribbling in her notebook. Washington laughed.

'Fucker,' he said.

Light and Jericho were staying in the same hotel. The same hotel, in fact, as the
Britain's Got Justice
collective, although on a different level.

She'd been thinking about him all day, and not because they were working together. He was not especially good looking, neither would he have been thirty years previously. Hair was thinning. Unlike Light he had never felt the urge to get his teeth whitened. Middle age was beginning to show around his waist and his belly and in the flab around the top of his back and shoulders. The lovemaking, however, had been beautiful and intense. She hadn't been sure what to expect, but it wasn't what had happened. A man who was more interested in giving, who spoke to her throughout, tenderly at first, then harshly and excitingly as desire flamed and orgasms neared.

She'd had five of them in the end. Five orgasms. That had never happened before. How many women did that happen to? She could ask at the station, but then she'd likely have to divulge the identity of the bringer of such joy.

And so she had spent the day hoping for a repeat of the night before; and yet she had watched his mood deteriorate throughout and she'd recognised the arrival of his depression; which, taken in conjunction with the arrival of Haynes, meant that she would be going to bed alone.

Which was probably just as well. She could not count the ways that it was wrong for her to fall for Jericho.

Nevertheless, as she sat in her room watching the aftermath of that night's
Britain's Got Justice
, she waited for the knock at the door, the feeling of sexual tension resting heavily and nervously upon her.

*

Jericho was in the bar of the hotel, sitting at a small table in the corner with Haynes. The three cards were laid out in front of them, in a line. The two drinks had been pushed back to ensure there was no contamination of the cards. Haynes had his fingers resting on the large country house drawn into the background of the third card.

'You notice anything different?' he asked, then lifted his finger out of the way.

Jericho leant forward, studying the three cards closely. It wasn't a game, so he wasn't playing.

'Tell me,' he said.

'Now, I'm not sure about this and it could just be some slight fault in the card, but it occurred to me that the house in the background is slightly bigger in the third card than the first, and when I checked closely – that is, measured – there's a distinct, if slight, increase in its size between one and two, and two and three.'

Jericho looked at it again. Now it seemed obvious, and he wondered if it was really bigger or if he was only seeing it because Haynes was pointing it out to him.

'You think the next one will be bigger again,' said Jericho, letting the thought formulate, rather than asking a question. Haynes nodded, then sat back looking at Jericho, watching the thought process play out.

Now it wasn't just about the change in the skeleton's expression, the sense that whatever it knew and that Jericho didn't was increasingly dangerous; somehow it might be that there was a building, a large country house involved.

Jericho's eyes didn't leave the cards. Haynes let his gaze drift down towards them too, although he had been studying them most of the evening, with little else to do.

'Looking for a pattern,' said Haynes.

'Yes. Have you seen one?'

'Just the obvious. Building increasing in size, the look on the face increasing in…'

He waved his hand at the card. Didn't say
fucking smugness
.

'Laughing at us,' said Jericho.

He rubbed his eyes and when he took his hand away he looked up at the ceiling.

'This house, if it really is a thing, growing in importance with each card… What's the significance?'

'So, we're giving this some credence?' asked Haynes.

'Let's not go charging into anything, blindly making an arse of ourselves… but at the same time, we need to treat it as real. And the more I see it and think about it, I believe it is.'

Haynes nodded, having already come to the same conclusion.

'We need to find out where this house is,' said Jericho.

'I've been trying, no luck so far.'

'Find some luck,' said Jericho.

*

Haynes had intended driving back down the road at the end of the day, but by the time he had finished analysing – or over-analysing as he saw it – the three cards with Jericho, it was almost midnight, so he booked himself into a room at the hotel.

Jericho hesitated as he passed the door to Light's room. Yet the hesitation was merely paying some sort of lip service to the possibility of them spending another night together. He was in no mood for it, the black mass still festering in his gut.

Light and Haynes were at breakfast together. Light had been instructed to spend the day with the producers, working further on details for the following few days when the show would decamp to the West Country. There was an advance team already heading to Wells. She was intending heading home that night, after the big Sunday evening vote show, when the contestants on
Britain's Got Justice
would be reduced to three. Haynes was intending to eat and dash, although he had no particular agenda to be gone before Jericho arrived.

They were sitting like an old married couple, each of them with a newspaper. There was silence between them born of knowing that when Jericho arrived he would immediately be plunged into a foul mood. If he wasn't already in one.

Light was reading the Observer, headline a simple but engaging:
Government In Crisis
. Haynes had the Sunday Mirror and the Sunday Express. The Mirror led with:
The Dementor In The Room
, over a picture of Jericho at his most sullen in the midst of the TV pandemonium. The Express had a picture of Haynes and Jericho drinking in the hotel bar, with the words:
Coppers' Booze Shame As Lol's Mum Weeps
. Haynes had read it and smiled, then turned to the sports pages.

They'd had one drink each; they'd been working; and they weren't the investigating officers in the Lol case anyway. The whole story was absurd, but the Express didn't care, and the readers didn't care, so why should Haynes? He didn't care either, but he did want to read the football reports from the previous day.

He did know that it would have an effect on Jericho, and there was no point in hiding it from him. It was out there and he'd want to know about it.

They looked up as Jericho walked across the restaurant floor towards them. Some peculiar part of Jericho was pleased that they were ignoring each other, their heads buried in the news. Haynes was younger and infinitely better looking; why wouldn't Light be more attracted to him than Jericho? If they'd been laughing, seemingly intimate, would Jericho have wondered if Haynes had gone to her room the previous night when he himself hadn't?

A mind of stupid, petty jealousy. He could get rid of it by sinking further into his depression. He was never jealous when he was depressed.

He glanced at the Observer, but took no notice of the tabloids.

'Self-service?' he asked, then looked round at the breakfast bar.

'Yep,' said Haynes. 'You need to look at these.'

He pushed forward the Mirror and folded the Express over so that he could see the headline. Jericho looked down, his face impassive. They could tell from the movement of his eyes that he was quickly scanning the first couple of paragraphs of each story. Then, without a word or a glance, he turned away and headed slowly towards breakfast.

Haynes and Light shared a glance, then Light turned and watched Jericho stand for a while in front of the food. Either considering his options, or mind encased in concern and despondency.

'Didn't get my best side,' said Haynes, indicating the photograph on the front of the Express.

*

Light had taken the Express and the Mirror so that she could throw them angrily down on the desk in front of Morris when she arrived at the studio.

Morris looked concerned and shook her head, holding her hands out to her side in a gesture of hopelessness.

'I know, these people are just…. they're just rude. Rude. I don't know where they get this stuff from.'

'You mean you don't know whether it's you who gives it to them, or someone higher up your food chain?'

Morris continued to look perplexed and understanding of Light's anguish.

'I don't suppose there is anyone lower down the food chain than you, is there, Executive in Charge of Production?' added Light as a barbed aside. Not subtle, but she enjoyed it nevertheless. The look on Morris' face hardened.

'When do we start?' asked Light, confrontation still in her voice, as she sat down.

Durrant spent the day sitting outside his house, watching the sea. Sat down with a cup of coffee at 9:03, and did not move again until some time after four o'clock in the afternoon. It was a cold day, but he sat outside without a coat. Shorts, a t-shirt and a jumper that he'd been wearing for nearly ten years. Did not feel the cold, ignored the looks of dog walkers and ramblers, did not respond to those who spoke to him.

He was troubled by the day before. It was to have been his first scientific experimentation in thirty years; instead it had ended up simply his first sex, followed by his first kill. That he had felt empathy for her, and something bordering on genuine attraction, was bad enough; but that he had then completely lost his composure, continuing to pound her flaccid body long, long after she had died was also inexcusable.

He never lost control. Never. Not in all those years in prison, surrounded by all those wankers. Not once. And yet this woman had driven him mad inside twenty-fours hours. Had driven him to contemplate not killing her, and then had driven him to bludgeoning her to death. And she had done nothing during that time, but lie in painful impotence, strapped to a table. That was the thing. It wasn't her, it was him. All in his head.

The uncertainty of it, the terrible instability of his actions, had all come from within. He had spent so many years, so many decades living with order and control, in command of his surroundings and environment. Suddenly he had been released, and it seemed he was not as ready for it as he would have imagined himself to be.

He sat outside all day, until darkness came. He liked the smell of the sea, the sound of the waves. It had been so long. Yet the doubts haunted him all day, and he wondered if he just did not want to return inside because that's where she was.