We Are the Hanged Man (46 page)

They had nothing to say.

Jericho's phone rang when he was on the train. Normally he would hesitate before taking any call, but this was Haynes.

'What?' he barked.

'Dylan was involved in getting Durrant released,' said Haynes hurriedly down the phone, sitting in his car outside Broadmoor.

'What?'

'Couldn't get all the details, but she's been involved in some way or other.'

Jericho didn't say anything. He watched the countryside flash past. Dylan. And Durrant. How did that work? She had spent all her career in the West Country. How could she ever have had anything to do with Durrant?

'Does that make sense?' asked Haynes.

'I don't think so,' replied Jericho. 'You need to get to Shingle Street.'

'Where?'

Haynes sounded confused.

'Get to Ipswich and then head for the coast. You can't miss it. It's a town. The town's name is Shingle Street. How long will it take you?'

Haynes had no idea.

'Two hours,' he said. 'Need to do the M25. Maybe three.'

'Blue light and drive on the hard shoulder. I need you there in…' He checked his watch. '…an hour and a half. Less.'

He hung up.

*

He took the train to Woodbridge, changing at Ipswich, and then got a taxi to Shingle Street. He paid the driver and got out next to the small coffee shop at the bottom end of the village. He automatically pulled his coat close around himself as the taxi drew away. The wind was cold, the sea agitated, the day a dull featureless grey. Low-lying clouds but it did not feel like it would rain. The sullen sea rumbled up onto the beach, stones clacking against one another.

On a day such as this, on such restless waves it was said, had the sea burned.

His phone rang as soon as he got out from the taxi but he didn't hear it.

He stood for several minutes taking in his surroundings. From where he was standing the beach spread out a few hundred yards in either direction. It curved away down the coast towards Felixstowe to the south, and to the north turned into the long snaking estuary of the River Ore. The tide was in, leaving about thirty yards of exposed beach, made up mostly of small grey stones. There was no one else on the beach at that moment.

The light was flat and dull, had a peculiar quality about it. It was an absurdly romantic thought to Jericho that this was the kind of place that was haunted, but at the very least it was held in the grip of a most terrible melancholy.

The sea held his gaze for a while and then he turned and looked at the buildings which made up what had been left of the town of Shingle Street following its abandonment during WWII.

There was a row of buildings between the road and the beach, with nothing but fields on the other side of the road. A few straggling houses at either end, with a series of ten buildings grouped together in the middle.

He'd come to this place as a child, had grown to love the desolate loneliness of it; then he and Amanda had stayed in one of those houses for a week, every year of their marriage. He hadn't been back since she'd vanished.

There was no one around.

Jericho wondered how much the place was insinuating itself under his skin. Did he really sense that this was where he'd find Durrant, or was it just this place, grim and bleak, weighed down by so much sadness?

How many buildings were there? A quick count. Seventeen, that was all, a few of them with more than one home in the building. Some semi-detached houses, a couple terraced. Did he go and knock on every door? He was a policeman; it wasn't as though he hadn't done similar in the past. Yet behind every door could lurk Durrant, the killer of every police officer's nightmares. Or there could be a family of four, or a single mother, or an elderly couple. Or, quite likely, there would be no one, the house solely used as a holiday home, and locked up for the winter.

He would wait and then he would pick a door, and he was confident he would have the right one. He knew Durrant. He had not seen him in thirty years, but he knew him. Durrant would not have changed, just as he himself had not changed in that time.

He looked to his right and left, at the houses at either end, slightly detached from the heart of this small village. Was this where Durrant had hidden all those years ago? Had this been his secondary home, the one that they had never found, where the other bodies had been kept?

In all the writing that Durrant had done and published over the previous thirty years – the work of Michael Hoagland – one piece had stood out, had grabbed Jericho the instant he'd seen it.

In most of the interviews that he'd had with Durrant following his arrest, Durrant had said nothing. Neither a
no
nor a
fuck off
, not a shake of the head, not a change of expression. Just occasionally he would break an interview up with a glib comment intended to burrow its way under Jericho's skin.

You're just like me
.

I will lead you into the fire.

We stand at the edge of the same places.

Psycho-babble. That's what Jericho's colleagues had said. Working his way insidiously under Jericho's skin.

Now, thirty years later, in one moment on the internet Jericho had understood.

Durrant, under the name of Michael Hoagland, had written a long essay on the wartime myth of the German invasion of the Suffolk coast. The night in the summer of 1940 when the British had set fire to the sea, burning the invasion force alive.

Durrant had written about it as if it was real, had written about burning flesh and screams in the night. He'd written about the gainsayers and how the political and anti-conspiracy agenda had sought to deny the event ever took place. And it had happened here, off the coast of Shingle Street, and now the ghosts lived on.

Durrant had written about the place from the perspective of someone who knew it well, although he couldn't have been there in more than two decades before he wrote the paper.

Yet he did know it; just as Jericho knew it. Now, here he was, standing at the end of a desolate shingle beach, once more in search of the man they had all thought of as the most dangerous person in the United Kingdom, and he knew instinctively he'd been right to come here.

We stand at the edge of the same places.

He saw the car and the van before he heard them. A police Astra and a police minibus. He had no idea how they had come to the same conclusion that he had, or at the very least had come to the same place, if their conclusions had been different, but immediately there was no doubt in his mind that these police, whoever they were, would be after the same thing as he.

There's nothing more suspicious than a man standing still, so he pulled his hat a little further forward over his face and walked in the direction that the police were coming from. He was a man in a suit walking along a deserted shingle beach, but there was no point in turning away and perhaps missing where they were going.

Ahead they turned off the road before they got too close to him, down towards a row of three detached houses overlooking the beach. They stopped short of the houses, and immediately people began to emerge from the minibus.

The cameraman and soundman first. Jericho stopped and watched them. His face was expressionless as the rest of the hapless crew followed.

The two police officers emerged, and then the group of nine had a quick discussion. There was a lot of pointing. Jericho could make out Claudia's voice, louder and more forceful than the others, but not well enough to catch what she was saying.

Nine people against Durrant. Who were they kidding?

As they started walking towards the house, this flange of TV people, camera crew and actual police officers, Jericho began walking after them at a steady pace. He did not know the two police officers in attendance, but he had to presume that there would be none among them even remotely capable of dealing with Durrant.

Yet he could not just walk over there and introduce himself. He would, effectively, be handing himself over to police custody. And in front of the television cameras. Bad enough if Durrant was in the house, completely pointless if he wasn't.

He slowed, then decided to stop. He would sit and wait. For all that this could be where Durrant had hidden himself upon his removal from prison, he had obviously not spent the entire time in the house, and might well be out at that moment. Or perhaps he would be in, sitting with a cup of tea admiring the sea, a reformed man.

That he doubted, but he did not doubt his decision to stand back.

There was music playing.

Once more Durrant had lost his senses, had lost control. He did not understand what was happening to him. He had never been like this in the past; he had never had these kinds of urges in prison.

Inside, the other prisoners had all had sex. They were all allowed time with their wives or girlfriends or prostitutes. Prison denied you nothing, except the right to walk down the street when you felt like it. It certainly did not deny you sex.

Durrant had never had sex in those thirty years. Had never wanted to. He'd made an acquaintance, they had worked together, she had kept in touch after she'd left. She'd loved him, he knew that, but he had not been capable of returning the love. Or interested in returning it.

And yet, now that he had been released, now that he had pleasured himself at the expense of the first girl, he found that he was insatiable. He craved it. He couldn't get his mind off it. And it turned out that it was not just about Lorraine Allison. He'd thought he'd fallen for her, but here he was, a few days later, Allison was dead, there was a different woman strapped to the table, and he wanted her just as much. The woman he'd known all those years ago in prison, and who had not tempted him at all in that time. The woman who'd loved him, and who he could not love in return.

He'd lain in bed for as long as possible; he'd tried to think of other things; he'd tried not to play to his own excitement. But his erection was rock hard and damp, demanding his attention.

Now he was standing beside the table, between her legs, lovingly cleaning her, the way he had cleaned Allison a few days earlier. Lewis's body still lay in the room outside, only a few feet away through the open door. He felt disgust with himself at the same time as he was filled with lust.

She was clean; her legs were pulled apart. The lips of her pussy glistened. Sergeant Light did not look at him. She was scared. She had been since the moment she'd opened the door to him naked, assuming that it was Jericho, and his fist had caught her full in the face.

After that she had not seen him – although she had felt his fist again as he removed her from the car – until the moment when Lewis had tried to escape and Durrant had caught him lying on the floor.

She had not imagined prior to that moment that any of this could have involved Durrant. She had been blind to it for fifteen years. As a prison guard she had come to know the man, the quiet studious man, who worked hard and formed interesting opinions and who spoke Latin and who knew about European history. She never thought about what he had done before he'd been put in prison; she had never been able to reconcile the two men, to believe that they could be the same person. She'd put his past out of her mind, and had focussed on the man she knew and with whom she had kept in touch once she had transferred from the prison service to the police force.

She knew nothing of Jericho's involvement with Durrant, that he was the principal investigating officer who had put him away. That she had ended up at the same station had been a strange accident. That she had ended up falling for Jericho, perhaps less of an accident and more another peculiar instance of Durrant and Jericho's similarity, drawing the same things towards them.