We Are the Hanged Man (35 page)

'How long until Dylan gets here?' asked Jericho.

'Not long. Fifteen, twenty minutes maybe.'

'OK. I'll deal with her, and then I'll try to get on with looking for Sergeant Light, if I can. Can't leave that to Shackleton.'

'Assuming she's been taken off to the same place as Allison, you're going to have a bit of a search.'

'Yes,' said Jericho. 'But the more he does it, the more chance there is of him making a mistake, leaving something behind. And while we don't know how willingly Allison went, despite the manner in which she came back, we can be fairly certain that Sergeant Light did not go of her own volition.'

He checked his watch. He felt the darkness of the worst of his moods encroaching. He had to keep his shoulders straight, keep thinking positively. Stay focussed, not let the shadows intrude.

He nodded, surprised Haynes by tapping him on the shoulder and walked from the room.

Not for the first time Jericho had come looking for CCTV footage from a particular period of time, and once again he had found that it had either been erased or had never been taken in the first place.

Unlike the Lorraine Allison disappearance, this one had been very specifically cropped short. There was a thirty-minute window. There was footage of Jericho leaving Sergeant Light's room, and of him getting into the lift, and at that point it was cut off. It came back on again twenty-nine minutes and fifty-three seconds later. There was no more sign of Jericho moving around, and naturally neither was there any sign of Sergeant Light.

As Jericho watched the last few moments before the CCTV blacked out, he once more had the uncomfortable feeling that he was rather splendidly and precisely being set up. Not only was there nothing to indicate how and when Sergeant Light had left the building, there was nothing to tell of how Allison's body came to be dumped in her room and there was nothing to show that Jericho had returned to his own room and stayed there.

If anyone chose to interpret the evening's events as something in which Jericho might well have been complicit, then Jericho had nothing to prove otherwise.

If the other two police officers in the room had any such notion, they did not share it with Jericho. Indeed, it was not until Shackleton arrived that they realised that Jericho ought not to even have been there.

At finding the man he had just replaced sticking his nose into his investigation, Shackleton was not surprised, but he was exceptionally annoyed.

Deep breath, he quelled the objections which were queuing up to find a way out of his mouth, and indicated the door.

'Your Superintendent is waiting. She's taken up the room two along from Sergeant Light's.'

Jericho nodded and left, as Shackleton viewed the attending officers with anger. He would take his annoyance with Jericho out on them.

*

Superintendent Dylan had brought three officers up with her, but had cleared the room as soon as Jericho arrived. She was in the process of installing herself, making the bedroom as much like an office as possible.

The bed had just been removed. Jericho stood in the space.

'How long had this relationship been going on?' asked Dylan. She hadn't said hello.

'We'd had sex twice in the last week,' Jericho. 'The only relationship beyond that was work.'

'Would I get the same answer from Sergeant Light?'

Jericho did not answer.

'Are there any women at the station with whom you haven't had sex?'

Jericho did not answer that either. In the beginning Dylan had found herself inexplicably drawn to him, just as most women did, and Jericho, unable to stop himself, had either drawn her in or allowed himself to be drawn in by her. He had never thought about it long enough to decide which way round it had happened.

For the first eight years after his wife had vanished, he hadn't so much as looked at another woman. Then there had been a strange night with his wife's cousin, and it had opened the floodgates within him. Although he did not think of it in such terms, he needed the physical closeness to compensate for the total lack of emotional depth in any of his relationships or friendships, for the guilt at his inability to solve the mystery surrounding Amanda's disappearance, and more than anything, to compensate for the horrible black depths of his loneliness.

Their one night in bed, followed by Jericho's cold shoulder the following morning, had been the beginning of Dylan's antipathy towards him, an antipathy which Dylan had been small enough to allow to grow into wrath and contempt.

'Do you have anything that you think might help in the investigation into her disappearance?'

Jericho stared at her, once more did not answer. She was staring back, her gaze hardening, becoming more and more angry.

'I take it you claim that once you left her room last night, you did not return and had no further contact with her?'

Jericho wondered how much accusation there was in the question. Rather a lot, he supposed.

'That's correct,' he said.

She breathed out heavily again; her gaze dropped to the floor. How many times had they been through this kind of routine, thought Jericho? This kind of pointless game, where she asked him questions and he told her nothing? Did the fact that this was more serious, that there was an officer's life at stake, really make it any different from all the other times?

'I sent you up here to blend in. Do a job, not put a foot out of line, and stay out the news. Instead, what have we got? Every day… every fucking day I look in the paper and there you are. What is it? Are you addicted to this shit? Are you incapable of doing anything without splashing yourself all over the fucking papers?'

Her charges were utterly preposterous, but the questions delivered in such a way that Jericho well knew there was little point in defending himself. He had finished talking for the moment.

'I've stuck my neck out for you, possibly for the last time,' she said. 'You're suspended pending this investigation into Sergeant Light's disappearance. I personally don't think you have anything to do with it, but you know what? There are going to be people who do, and you know how happy I am that I'm about to have to spend all my time defending your arse? How happy do you think?'

Jericho did not drop his gaze. It was moments like this that made him hate everyone else on the planet.

'You'll stay up here for another night in case anyone off the investigation wants to take a statement. Tomorrow morning, assuming you've been given the all-clear, you're going back down to Wells. You're suspended from duty until further notice, so do not go to the station. Go home and stay there. Sit beside your phone. Do not fucking move an inch, unless it's to open the door to another officer bringing you in.'

His eyes stayed steady on hers; she did not have such consistency of gaze.

'Do we understand each other, Chief Inspector? Go to your room. I think you've done enough damage for one investigation.'

Jericho turned and walked out.

*

He went straight to his room, packed his bag and walked to the lift. As the doors pinged and slid open, he was greeted by one of the officers with whom Dylan had travelled up from Wells.

They looked at each other, Constable Drew standing in the entrance to the lift.

'The Superintendent asked me to make sure you never left your room, Sir,' said Drew.

'Tell her you never saw me,' said Jericho.

Drew stared at him and then lifted his eyes to the CCTV camera on the wall, looking down upon them. Jericho glanced over his shoulder, then turned back to the constable.

'Tell her you told me to stop and that I told you to fuck off.'

Drew looked at Jericho, his actions becoming more and more tentative, despite his best intentions.

'Now fuck off, Constable,' said Jericho.

There was a short pause during which Drew realised that Jericho was being serious, and then he stepped forward out the lift, allowing Jericho to enter. Immediately Jericho pressed for the ground floor.

'Give me forty-five seconds,' said Jericho as the doors started to close.

The lift opened on the ground floor. Jericho stepped out and quickly walked through the hotel lobby and within a minute of leaving the constable had become part of London life on the street.

Sometimes Washington liked to imagine himself as Robert De Niro playing Al Capone in
The Untouchables
. He would look at something with the same sardonic eye, making the choice between rude acceptance or beating someone's head to a bloody pulp with a baseball bat.

He hadn't yet had a baseball bat installed in his office, but he was thinking about it. He certainly would when he opened up his American office later in the summer – which was still dependant on whether or not he managed to sell the idea of
America's Got Justice
to the networks – and they would respect the presence and idea of the bat much more than a Brit would.

He was looking at the viewing figures for the previous few nights. The numbers for Wednesday were pretty good, although naturally lower than they'd been for the weekend shows.

He looked up; his eyes cast around the collected flange of television executives.

'One mustn't be too harsh, but let's just say that purely from a viewing figures perspective, it's a good thing that Lol's dead. Now how are we going to make the most of it?'

'We have to be careful what we do it with it,' said Morris. 'Now that it's a murder enquiry the police are going to want us not talking about it.'

'You know what?' said Washington, cutting her off before she could say anything further. 'Fuck the police. Fuck them. What have they contributed to this show so far? Let's not forget, we paid them for their involvement, and we're not just paying for whatever legitimacy they think we're going to get from them. They're supposed to be contributing. So what do they send us? Some fucking deadbeat. They go out of their way to find the dreariest wanker on Planet Earth, a man with no feel for television and utter disdain for the great work we're trying to do here. Then he fucks his assistant, very possibly for all we know murders her and hides her body, and then fucks off. Anyone know where he is now?'

Heads were shaken around the table.

'I heard he'd been told to stay at the hotel and he jumped ship,' said one. 'No one knows where he's gone.'

Washington held his hands open in a gesture of giving in to the inevitable.

'See what I'm saying?' he said. 'Fucking police. I'll tell you what we're going to do. We're going to make whatever show we fucking want, we're going to say what we want, and we are going to get our own three special investigators onto the task of tracking down Lol's killer. And would any of us be surprised if oh… it turns out to be DCI Jericho all along?'

There were a few blank expressions.

'That doesn't seem very likely,' said one of the others. A small nameless executive, who was ever destined to stay that way.

'At the very least,' said Washington, slightly taken aback that someone had picked up on the outrageousness of his previous suggestion, 'I suspect that it will emerge he knew far more about what was going on than he previously let on. Claudia?' he said sharply.

Claudia looked up from her iPad.

'Yes?'

'What are they doing now?' said Washington. 'The Three?'

'They're at the hotel with a film crew,' said Claudia. 'Looking for clues.'