We Are the Hanged Man (41 page)

Jericho sighed, finally took his hands away from his face. Haynes thought he seemed to have aged as he sat there, like some low budget Jekyll and Hyde movie when they make the change to the face as its covered by the hands.

'Ten o'clock?' said Jericho.

Haynes nodded, and Jericho leaned over and switched on the BBC News at 10, the sound of the opening credits breaking the still of the room.

They sat in silence. The first image on the screen was a picture of Jericho.

'Wanted for questioning: nationwide search for the detective who stands to inherit over £15m… Reality TV star found dead, as a police officer goes missing… The police hunt for DCI Robert Jericho, suspected in the deaths of as many as seven people…'

The full report took almost nine minutes. There was a lot of detail about the Larrousse estate in the Loire, mention of how he had committed suicide after visiting London the previous day, a quick run through the trail of death that led from Larrousse to Jericho, and how the police were at this stage not looking for anyone else in connection with the investigation.

They watched it all, then Jericho pressed the off button when they'd moved on to continuing unrest in Syria.

They sat in silence for another few minutes, Haynes waiting for Jericho to say something. Eventually he realised that Jericho might well have shut down for the evening.

'They didn't get any of that from me,' said Haynes, feeling cheap for saying it. 'I didn't talk to anyone about it.'

'The cards,' said Jericho. 'We showed the cards to a couple of people.'

Haynes thought of Professor Leighton. Wondered if he'd said too much, but knew even as he had the thought that he hadn't.

'How could they know about the ones in between, the path between you and Larrousse?'

Jericho nodded.

'Some lawyer must have worked it out,' said Jericho.

'Bloody quick if they did,' said Haynes.

Jericho grunted and threw a hand to the side.

'Fuck. Fucking lawyers. If they… the various steps, from one to the next, those connections will already have been made, it just needed someone to put it together. Some fucking lawyer's always likely to be able to put that shit together more quickly than we are. They talk to one another a lot more freely that they'd ever talk to us.'

'And then one of them's talked to the press,' said Haynes.

Jericho stared at the carpet, then checked his watch.

'Fuck,' he muttered. 'Sorry, Stuart, can I ask another couple of things of you before you go?'

Haynes nodded. How much sleep did he need anyway?

'Of course,' he said.

Jericho sat up until two in the morning, scribbling on various pieces of paper, notes and thoughts, and lines drawn all over the place trying to make connections.

If he really was distantly related to someone who owned a French chateau, then who could possibly know about it, and why would they want to set him up? It was a lot of murder, it was a lot of planning just to get him back for something that he might have done in the past. And the only reason he could think of for someone wishing to gain some vengeance upon him was, as he had discussed with Haynes, a criminal he'd locked up. Who else cared? Especially since he'd spent the bulk of the previous ten years living in sleepy West Country anonymity.

Then there was the connection with the television show, the murder of Allison and the disappearance of Sergeant Light. Was there any way for it to be related? There were no lines to be drawn here, no boxes to connect. Yet, it had to be tied up. Whoever had been behind the Hanged Man cards could easily have been behind the decision to include him in the show.

All the people who had agreed to it, the Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police, Dylan, even Washington and Claudia at the show, they could all have been going along with someone else's suggestion.

Could the entire show be part of whatever plot was being constructed? That thought had brought instant self-admonishment, a low
oh for fuck's sake get a grip, Jericho
uttered to the silence of the room, but the thought did not completely go away. Whatever had been constructed was already far more elaborate than he could have imagined and it had to start somewhere.

Ultimately he had to conclude that he did not have enough information to do anything other than speculate, and that there was little point in doing that. What he had to do was formulate a plan on where to go next, yet even here he seemed to run up against solid walls of brick. Everything he thought of, everything that his experience had taught him, brought him to a path that required him to be part of the police system, working through regular channels. At the very least, he would need to be in a position to be able to make phone calls and visits.

There were so many things to follow up. Where had the Hanged Man cards been printed? What organisations might have used them? The last card had been delivered to his hotel room. Could it be possible that the CCTV hadn't been turned off when the card had been slipped under the door? The whereabouts of Sergeant Light. If Larrousse had indeed been present in London the day before, who was it he had seen while he was here?

There would be a place to start with all of them, but he couldn't call anyone and he couldn't go and see anyone.

He crawled into bed in the middle of the night and finally fell asleep to the sound of the rain clicking against the window.

*

Professor Leighton watched the story unfolding, sitting in her office, her laptop on the desk in front of her. At some point she began to wonder if she was part of the story. Not a crucial character, but she knew something that no one else did.

Sergeant Haynes had brought her the Tarot cards, cards which had seemed to be a mystery to him and to his boss. There had been no mention of them on the news, yet it seemed unlikely that there would be no connection between the two.

The cards had clearly been warning the DCI that some calamity was approaching, and now the DCI was buried up to his neck in calamity. Consequently, for all the apocalyptic news and condemnation that was spewing out over the media, Leighton did not think for a second that Jericho would be guilty of anything that was being said about him.

Maybe it just came down to the fact that she liked Sergeant Haynes. She wanted to talk to him again, and she wanted to do something for him, so that the next time they talked she could be of use. Which was why she was sitting in her office, late on a Thursday evening, checking up on the ancient organisations who had used the Tarot as threat and intimidation, and who might still be working today. Further to that, and hopefully greatly narrowing it down, was the fact that it appeared that Larrousse had come to London the day before, prior to being sent home to kill himself (although she still suspected that he had been murdered), which might mean that the organisation she was looking for was based in London, or at least had some sort of headquarters in London.

She had a notebook and a pen; she was armed with the internet and a great pile of books. Books that had been published in recent years, and books that were up to three hundred years old, the likes of which no one else would have in their possession. She worked slowly through her list, doing unpaid police work, until she came across something that made her eyes narrow in curiosity, and then had her re-reading the passage in the book several times, before spending a long time researching the book's provenance.

She checked her watch and was shocked to see that it was almost 2:45 in the morning. She closed her eyes, shook her head, looked again.

2:45. How had that happened? She'd better not call Haynes on his mobile. She could call him in the morning.

She let out a long sigh, pushed the book away from her. Having realised the time, she had suddenly been overcome with an all-consuming tiredness.

She got up from her chair, her face being overtaken by a yawn, walked over to the couch against the far wall of the room, slumped down into it and fell fast asleep.

Sergeant Haynes woke, buzzing. He'd had three hours sleep, but it was perfect. He had things to do, there was something edgy and exciting about it; it was new, challenging and slightly dangerous.

He showered and had a quick bowl of cereal. Sometimes he thought about the cereal while he ate, read the packet, this morning he was too distracted. Too many things to do.

He needed to get into work and get cracking on chasing up all the people that Jericho suspected might be behind the Hanged Man and the setup overall. He had to find out what was happening with Sergeant Light, and if there had been any follow-up to the last of the three number plates – the second having panned out as inconsequentially as the first. He, like Jericho, had to try to establish a connection between the mysteries surrounding
Britain's Got Justice
, the warnings of the Tarot and the trail of untimely deaths that connected Jericho and Larrousse, and which the media were now reporting as all being murders. And he had to try to find out who amongst the ancient organisations that had used the Tarot, might still be using it.

Professor Leighton was the only thing about the whole situation that made him feel a bit nervous. Again it felt strangely like asking for a date. Maybe he just had to ask her out for dinner and get that part of it out the way.

He arrived at the station at three minutes after seven, walked past the front desk with a nod in the direction of Constable Loovens.

'Ed,' he said.

A small pause and then, 'Sergeant Haynes?'

Despite hoping to get past the front desk without being stopped, he wasn't really surprised to hear his name. He stopped; he turned.

'Constable,' he said. 'Someone's looking for me?'

'Would you like the full list or just the top five?'

'How about you pretend you didn't see me…'

Loovens was a large man who usually played slow-moving centre-half in the station football team. His days as a fast-moving centre-half had been short lived. He rather liked the American comic book characterisation of the police officer as a doughnut-eating coffee drinker. He liked Haynes, a feeling that was mutual, but at the moment he didn't look as though he liked this idea, which was fair enough. Haynes could avoid people as much as possible, but he couldn't expect other officers to cover for him.

'Give me the full list and leave it with me. Don't call anyone, I'll say that I told you I'd make the calls. As soon as there's someone looking for me, put them through.'

Loovens nodded. The list had been gradually growing beside his phone, and he walked to the front desk and handed it over.

'Have a nice day,' he said with a smile.

Haynes glanced quickly at the piece of paper. There were nine names on it. Dylan was at the top, having called on at least five occasions. That was to add to all the calls he'd been ignoring on his own mobile.

Up the stairs to his desk, time to get on with it, although he would mostly be using the computer system as there likely wouldn't be too many people about at this time of the morning for him to call.

He trusted Loovens not to go phoning people to let them know he'd arrived, but he had to accept that he would put calls through once they came in. He had to crack on and get as much done before he was summoned away.

As it was he hadn't even drunk half of his first cup of coffee before he potentially resolved one of the things that he thought he might have to spend several hours on. Jericho's list of cons and ex-cons, men and women who might still hold a grudge, came crashing to his attention with the first name that Jericho had told him to check. The one that would be straightforward, the one that would be easy to strike from the list.

Gordon Durrant. Released from prison two weeks previously.

Haynes sat and studied the details, which weren't too involved. Seven words caught his attention.