We Are The Hanged Man Read online

  We Are The Hanged Man

  by

  Douglas Lindsay

  Published by Blasted Heath, 2012

  copyright © 2012 Douglas Lindsay

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission of the author.

  Douglas Lindsay has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by Blasted Heath

  Photo: http://www.istockphoto.com/rockard

  Visit Douglas Lindsay at:

  www.blastedheath.com

  ISBN (ePub): 978-1-908688-24-8

  Version 2-1-3

  There was a record playing on an old turntable. Hoagy Carmichael singing Lazy River. Recorded in the 50's with a full jazz band. The music was mellow and relaxed, spoke of warm days, Pimms and lemonade, summer fruits, children running in the breeze, blue skies up above and everyone's in love.

  He stood in the frame of the doorway. Behind him the cold grey sky merged with the cold grey sea. Waves washed noisily up onto the shingle beach. In front of him a sea of blood.

  They were all dead. There was no need to walk through the room checking for signs of life. Nine bodies, including the two police officers. The throats of everyone in the room had been slit, although some of the victims had been attacked and brutalised in a variety of other ways.

  He hadn't heard any weapons fire, but there were a couple of handguns lying on the floor. One of the guns was lying in a dark red puddle, the other thrown to the side of the room, away from the carnage. Or, at least, as far away as it could get in such a small space containing so much death. The position and the make of the guns suggested that it was not the police who had brought them to the party. On the contrary, the two police officers had come to make the arrest unarmed.

  You get what you ask for in life, he thought.

  1

  Three men in a room, waiting for a fourth. A warm summer's morning. Windows open, the sounds of London drifting up to the ninth floor. Traffic and people and somewhere the ever-present wail of an emergency vehicle. Two of them were looking through paperwork at a desk, the other standing with his hands in his pockets, looking out the window. He saw nothing.

  They knew there was no point in talking until the fourth man arrived. He would be the one who conducted the orchestra, not to mention chose the venue and picked the tunes they would be playing.

  The door opened; the men at the table turned. One of them even half stood as the fourth man pulled a chair out at the table.

  'You know why we're here?' he asked. He assumed they'd been talking before he arrived. Despite everything, he didn't really understand that they were all aware that nothing happened without him being there.

  The men at the table shrugged; the one from the window came and sat at the table.

  'We've been working on other things,' he said. 'I thought it would be best to leave it to you to open the fridge door.'

  The fourth man nodded. It didn't really matter whether anything had gone on before he'd arrived.

  'The problems for the network are obvious,' he said. 'You've got this great rush in the pre-Christmas period, this fabulous double hit of X-Factor and Celebrity, and then you hit the fucking wall. The fu-cking wall. What is there post-Christmas? It's the flattest time of the year, everyone's fucking miserable, and what do we get? Noel Edmonds Plays Celebrity Suck My Cock On Ice. It's bull-shit. We need something new, and really, does it have to be all that difficult?'

  He paused, but the other three knew that it wasn't so that one of them could speak. The Fourth Man still had the stick.

  'And let's not fool anyone with talk of originality. Fuck originality. You TV people talk about it all the time, but you know what, originality is like… sushi… Do the British public like sushi? Yeah, well, maybe they do. It's different, it's fresh, it's healthier than pie and chips. But does that mean they want it every night? No, it fucking doesn't. They want the usual shit every night, that's what they want. They want pie and chips every night, and if for some reason some wanker gives them sushi when they're not expecting it, they'll put the fucking sushi in a butty and eat it with fucking chips and ketchup. Or they'll deep fry the fucker. Deep fried fucking sushi…'

  He paused again. Looked around the table. He still had the stick.

  'So, it's not rocket science. Putting it simply, we need a talent show with celebrity judges. That's it, period. We don't want to find a singer, so we need something else. I know, it's kind of the Holy Grail of the peak time networks, but it's about time we went after it. A talent show that's not about singing or dancing, something bold and brave that's really going to affect people, something that really touches their lives.'

  He glanced around the table. A warm breeze blew across them. The fourth man glanced around the room to see if it had been set up for coffee and doughnuts and was disappointed.

  The others hadn't realised that he had passed over the stick.

  'We need ideas,' he said, rather coldly.

  'How about a help the aged, carer of the year kind of thing? That'll really, you know, touch people.'

  The fourth man sat back and drew his thumb and forefinger of his right hand down the corners of his mouth.

  2

  He lay in bed staring at the ceiling. The window was open, the room cold, not yet bright. Someone was lying next to him, although he couldn't remember her name.

  It was going to be a bad day. He could feel it already. Some days events conspired to induce his depression, and some days depression came with the dawn and his first waking moment.

  There was no clock in the room, his first act every morning to turn off the alarm on the phone. Today he had awoken before it had gone off; or he had forgotten to set it in the previous evening's rush to the bed. He stared at the light beige of the curtains, the vague hint of dawn behind them and decided that it was not quite eight o'clock.

  He wondered how awkward it would be when she awoke and whether or not he would be forced to talk to her. He thought of getting up, taking a shower, getting dressed, heading into work, but the day sat too heavily upon him and he couldn't move.

  *

  The City of Wells, smallest city in England. Population hovering around the 10,000 mark. On the tourist route, thanks to the Cathedral and the Bishop's Palace, and its proximity to Glastonbury. More coffee shops per head of population than anywhere else on earth.

  The police station was on the outskirts of town, on the Glastonbury Road, next to the Health Centre, across the road from the football ground. Wells was small, and the police could be anywhere in the city within five minutes. Despite the one-way system. A quiet city. Drunks at two in the morning – or two in the afternoon – the occasional car theft, the usual acts of mindless violence. Sometimes the alcohol would lead to violent assault, very occasionally to murder. Not much else happened. The kind of place to which a police officer might seek a transfer in order to escape.

  DCI Jericho took the phone from his pocket and checked the time as he walked up the short driveway to the station. 0844. Half an hour he'd lain in morose and tired silence, listening to her breathe, then he had forced himself out of bed and into the shower. She had still been asleep when he left. Even though he didn't know who she was, he did not fear leaving her alone in his house when he went out in the morning. There was nothing to steal. At least, nothing that he couldn't replace.

  Through the outer doors, he nodded at reception. Loovens was there. Recognised the look on Jericho's face and returned the nod. No point in c
onversation. The DCI had been seen in the King's Head the night before talking to a woman some said was a good twenty-five years younger than him, but it wasn't one of those mornings when Jericho could be made fun of.

  Along the corridor, up the stairs to the first floor. Stopped at the coffee machine, looked down at it with morbid patience as it ground its way towards his first coffee of the day. He could hear shuffling from the office next to the machine but didn't look round to see who it was. He didn't know who would be on duty. Took the coffee, walked through the open plan, did not even glance at Constable Adams who was staring at him, ready to offer advice on his choice of sexual partners, walked into his own office and closed the door behind him.

  Fighting the urge to crawl under his desk and curl up into a ball, creating a rigid defence that the day would not be able to break through, he sat instead behind the desk in the grey leather chair and took a first sip of coffee.

  *

  The sergeant was oblivious as usual. Talking too much, too quickly. Jericho presumed he was oblivious. In fact Haynes had been advised by his predecessor that this was the way to deal with the DCI's depression. To talk him out of it. The advice had been passed down through seven of Jericho's assistants, based on one incident nine years previously when Jericho had faked good humour in an effort to get his then DC to be quiet.

  'So, we're really just looking at paperwork today,' said Haynes. 'Course, we still need to go and speak to that retired major in Paulton about the, you know, insurance thing.'

  Jericho was looking through the few items of mail that Haynes had brought in. None of it was work. A police officer's work didn't arrive in the post. This was mostly letters forwarded on from Met, sent by people who didn't realise that Jericho was no longer interested in being a well-known, celebrity police officer. Some were of the I love a man in uniform variety, even though he hadn't worn a uniform in over thirty years, some were threats, some were cries for help. All of them went in the bin, although even on his darkest days, Jericho felt duty bound to read each and every one in case he missed something.

  'I know, it's me who has to go and speak to the retired major. You're giving me that look. I'm on it. Don't think for a second that the bloke intimidates me or anything, it's not that. God he's just dull. And then his wife offers you a cup of tea and insists you stay, and before you know it you've been sitting there for four hours, you've eaten your own bodyweight in cake and the old duffer's boring the Calvin Klein's offa you with his tales of fighting the fucking Argies and how he got his leg blown off by a land mine at Goose Green, and you spend the rest of the time staring at his legs wondering if he's wearing like a, you know, what do you call it...'

  The word was in Jericho's head, but he never said it. Usually, though, he didn't need to.

  '... wondering if he's wearing a prosthetic, and wanting to do that thing that Bond does to Henderson in You Only Live Twice where he banjoes him on the leg with like a wooden stick or something... But, you know, I'm on it. Might not get out there today, because, you know, there's paperwork coming out every orifice, but shortly. Monday. Probably Monday.'

  The second-to-last envelope was small, blue, with a London postmark. Even though he knew they were all rubbish he still did the job properly. Took the time to glean everything from the outside, sometimes played the game of deciding what sort of letter he thought it would be before reading it, and then invariably scrunching it up and throwing it in the bin. He could feel that this one wasn't a letter, but a card. Probably an invitation. He still received plenty of those. Gallery openings, sometimes film premieres, if the subject matter was remotely connected to law and order.

  Using the same old cutlass-shaped letter opener, once his father's, he slit open the top of the letter, fished out the card. Haynes was watching him and immediately broke off as Jericho placed the card on the desk.

  It was a Tarot card. Number twelve. The Hanged Man. Jericho placed it front of him, so that the picture revealed a skeleton, dressed in rags, hung by the neck, a grotesque grimace on its face. It was hung from a tree, a half moon in the background, its legs tied together at the ankles.

  Jericho didn't say anything. Haynes whistled.

  'That's pretty cool,' said Haynes. He was looking at the card upside down, but was turning his head to see it from Jericho's perspective.

  'No it isn't.'

  'But if you look at it…'

  Jericho breathed heavily for a moment, his eyes lowered to the card.

  'I'll tell you, Sergeant,' he said eventually. 'It's the ever-threatening Tarot card. I'm…'

  Aware that he was beginning to sound miserable and petulant, he let the words go and pushed the card away from him.

  'Yes, but it's interesting,' said Haynes.

  Jericho dragged his hands across two days of stubble and indicated for Haynes to keep talking.

  'It works both ways round. It's your usual Tarot Hanged Man this way, with the legs tied together, so that the figure is hung upside down. But then, the other way up it's hung like a regular sort of, you know, hung guy, rather than the Tarot type of hanging.'

  Jericho turned the card round, so that it now showed the skeleton suspended by its ankles from a tree, looking out at the picture, viewing the world turned upside down.

  'Exactamundo,' said Haynes. 'That's what I'm talking about.'

  'Anything else?' said Jericho.

  Haynes smiled slightly awkwardly.

  'That's me kind of exhausted my knowledge. Had a girlfriend once…'

  Jericho lifted the card, studied the back. A faded red pattern with yellow edging. Turned it back over. He sighed, rubbed his hand across his face once more.

  'Whatever this is…' he said, 'whatever it's supposed to be… it takes an act of banality, and of having watched too many movies, to start sending an unmarked Tarot card to a police station.'

  'What was the movie?'

  Jericho glanced up at his sergeant.

  'But is it less banal because whoever did it has chosen to subvert the imagery in some way,' said Haynes, and then he shrugged and added, 'or is it just banal in a different way?'

  Haynes stared across the desk, waiting to see if he got an answer, although he knew he wouldn't.

  'It's a cool picture, though,' he said.

  Jericho ignored him, ran his fingers over the card to make sure there were no markings that he'd missed, committed the picture to memory, then pushed it across the desk towards Haynes.

  'All right,' he said. 'This one's not going in the bin. Just in case.'

  Haynes nodded. Felt relieved that there at least had been something to drag Jericho marginally up out of the pit of his depression.

  'You want me to do anything?'

  'Look for that image. See if it's been used before. Maybe try and find a Tarot expert. There're experts on every piece of crap on the planet.'

  Jericho held his gaze for a short while and then dismissed him with a short wave. Haynes lifted the card and turned to go. Experience had told him not to ask the boss what he was going to be doing with his time. He stopped as he got to the door, turned back. The fact that Jericho had actually started speaking at all was a positive sign.

  'King's Head last night, eh?' said Haynes. 'Who was she? Pretty fit by all accounts.'

  Jericho was looking at the cover of the next letter. He recognised the handwriting as being that of a woman in her seventies or eighties. Postmarked Brighton. This one was going to ask him if he could help deal with the yobs who congregated at the bottom of her garden. He slit the envelope open and took out the short letter and did not look up. Haynes left the room.

  3

  'You all right?' the Superindendent asked, once she was safely seated behind the defensive shield of her desk.

  DCI Jericho stood at the window, looking over the barren fields and bare trees towards Glastonbury Tor. The light was beginning to fade, taking an undistinguished day with it. A bright morning had become a grey afternoon.

  'Everyone seems to think you're
a bit ragged today.'

  He shrugged in reply, didn't bother looking over his shoulder.

  She knew better than to push him any further. That coupled with the fact that she didn't care about his depression, if that's what it was. For the most part, she thought he was just sullen and rude, hiding behind a preposterous diagnosis.

  'I've got something for you that you're not going to like,' she said.

  Don't give it to me, then.

  He didn't turn. He felt the grip tighten.

  'I know you don't have much on at the moment. In fact, we both know that given your talents and the nature of the work you get down here, you're never going to be busy. You're not going to like this but it makes sense, so I recommended that you be put forward for it.'

  She stopped and looked at him, expecting something in response. A question or a grunt. Jericho stared out of the window, seeing nothing.

  'The police... well, the Met, they've been speaking to the producers of that show, Britain's Got Justice.'

  Still he didn't speak.

  Superintendent Dylan had been determined not to be put off by his absurd rudeness. His 'affliction', as a police psychologist had once described it in a show of support for one of her officers that Dylan had not particularly cared for.

  'You know the show?' she asked firmly. 'On Saturday night.'

  'No,' he said.

  'Everyone's been talking about it.' She took a breath. Tried not to look at him, his disdainful back pointing at her. 'Front page of the newspapers. God, they're talking about it around here often enough.'

  'I only ever talk to Haynes and he knows not to bother me with that kind of thing.'

  You elitist fucking wanker. She didn't believe him. Even if you didn't want to know about popular culture, how could you avoid it?