We Are the Hanged Man (19 page)

Jericho had meant the last remark as a tease, a threat of some sort. Haynes smiled.

'Wouldn't mind,' he said. 'Reckon I'd look pretty sharp on TV.'

'You're welcome to it. Now,' said Jericho, 'you're going to tell me something else about those cards.'

Haynes tapped his finger on the side of his glass, contemplated downing the rest of it, wondered about having another.

'No, I'm not,' he said. 'Just, nothing else to tell, unless you want me to hand them over to Yeovil. Think you should.'

Jericho stared into his glass. Why was he still keeping it a secret from everyone else? When the story finally broke, when he finally took the evidence to Dylan, it was going to look worse and worse for him the more of it that there was to tell, the more cards he'd received, the more they'd broken into his house, the more they'd toyed with him.

'Television,' said Jericho. 'It's just going to be insufferable if those people get wind of this, and the minute we let it out into the station, they will get wind of it.'

'Dylan then, just Dylan.'

'Because she's discreet…'

'Yes,' said Haynes, 'she can be when it suits her.'

'It won't necessarily suit her this time though, will it? Why should she be discreet when it comes to me? And then there's always the possibility that it's not a coincidence that these have started arriving at the same time as the TV show was being set up. It could well be that whoever's doing it is waiting for TV to get hold of it, and once it's out, they're going to play it even more. Play me even more. Then this thing, whatever it is, will play out on live television.'

He had been, for once, becoming quite agitated, leaning across the table towards Haynes, but with his last words he shook his head and backed away again.

This was what they wanted. The people sending the cards. They wanted him and Haynes arguing, they wanted him getting annoyed at his colleagues, falling out with them. And maybe they even wanted, and had intended, for it to happen on television, every night.

'Think about it,' said Haynes. 'You know they're setting you up to look bad. Why do anything that potentially makes you look even worse?'

Jericho drained his pint, decided he wasn't going to have another. He needed to be thinking clearly, although even clear thoughts did not appear to be helping him at this stage.

*

Durrant had his next victim back at his house, tied to the table where the previous day poor, sad, deserted Lol's fledgling television career had come to an end.

Lol's body was still folded up in a bag in the corner of the room, but Durrant made sure not to look at her.

He had spent a day going quietly insane, staring at the sea, eating tasteless food, walking restlessly up and down the small sitting room. Couldn't keep still, fidgety fingers closing and grasping, relaxing, straightening, tensing. His whole being set on edge due to the discomfort of the Lol situation. He had needed an outlet.

He had driven to Cambridge. Ipswich was easier but was perhaps too close. Wanted a little more distance between where his victim was lifted and where he was going to end up.

Britain had changed a lot since the time of his incarceration, but the multicultural nature of present day British society had not been lost on him. Indeed, given the inflated level of ethnic minorities amongst the prison population, Durrant had imagined there would be an even higher percentage among the populace in general.

He was not interested in the university area of Cambridge, instead had aimed for the poorer parts of the city. There he had picked up a young, unemployed teenager of African descent.

It would be days, perhaps even weeks – and perhaps even never – before the police took the missing persons report seriously. This wasn't going to be the kind of missing person that the white middle class media picked up on. They wouldn't care; they wouldn't want their readers and viewers to know about it.

The media thrive on keeping the public afraid. The kind of missing person storyline they like is the kind where it could have happened to anyone. The kind where an average middle class person from an average middle class family could be affected. The kids that went missing from the poor city housing estates were not representative of the newspaper reading population in comfortable suburbia.

Durrant wasn't fooling himself about what had happened with the girl. It had come from nowhere, and he was honest enough with himself to acknowledge that he was apprehensive about it happening again. And so he made sure that there would be no repeat by picking up a nineteen-year-old boy he found walking alone along a quiet road, just as the streetlights were coming on. A patch of barren grass on one side, a few empty shops and empty houses on the other.

Durrant wouldn't know why the boy got into his car. He just drove, neither of them spoke for the first few minutes.

'Where you taking me, man?' the lad asked eventually.

'To the seaside,' said Durrant, and the lad smirked.

Bound and gagged in a back room in a small cottage at the seaside, he wasn't smirking any more.

Jericho had been mostly avoiding it, because he didn't think it mattered. He also thought that it fell into the shadowy world of the supernatural, something of which he was not entirely scornful, but something that he most definitely did not want to go anywhere near.

The Tarot. He could steer clear of it all he liked, and there was plainly symbolism implicit in the cards that was directed purely at him, but whoever was sending them had chosen Tarot for a reason. They could easily have toyed with him and threatened him with typed notes or cut out pieces of newspaper or recorded messages or e-mails or video.

Yet they had chosen the Tarot, and it was time for him to take a closer look.

They stood at the bottom of the High Street, having left the City Arms after their one and only pint. Haynes looked at his watch, not sure what to do with himself. Still hadn't eaten, not sure whether to go home, call one of his friends, or take his laptop and go and sit in Café Romna and have a chicken tikka.

'What are you doing now?' asked Jericho.

'Not sure.'

Haynes wondered if he was about to suggest they had dinner, although that was something that had never happened before.

'You manage to find out where the country house on the card is yet?'

Haynes knew that Jericho knew he hadn't. It was his way of telling Haynes what the rest of the evening held for him.

'Keep one of the cards, give me the other three,' said Jericho.

Haynes fished them out of his pocket.

'And don't take the most recent. I know it's the best one for your search, but I need it.'

Haynes handed them over, keeping the next most recent card.

'Where are you going?' asked Haynes.

Jericho raised an eyebrow at him, smiled in a curious way, and then turned and walked away from the direction of the station, back towards his house.

*

He looked at his watch and knocked again, then stepped back and looked at the windows above the shop. Started looking at the doors nearby to see if there were any which might lead to the flats upstairs.

He was back in Glastonbury to speak to Newton. He had, on his previous visit, found the woman quite disconcerting, which was one of the reasons he hadn't returned so far. He could, of course, have spent several hours online, or with an actual book, acquainting himself with the Tarot. Equally, he could have gone to someone else. However, he continued to want to keep knowledge of the cards limited to as small a group as possible. And the thought of reading about the cards for several hours depressed him; and books weren't interactive, they wouldn't answer the inevitable questions that came into his head.

He heard a movement in the shop. He had not known that Newton would live above her shop, but it had been an educated stab in the dark.

The door opened. She leant against the frame. She wasn't smiling, but she wasn't surprised to see him either.

'I suppose you knew I'd be back,' said Jericho.

'Come in,' she said.

She was wearing a black kimono, her legs bare, a large v of skin at the top of her chest. Jericho determinedly looked her in the eye.

'Thanks.'

He walked into the shop. She hadn't turned a light on in coming to answer the door, so he waited to follow her through as his eyes were not yet adjusted. Many a fool walks into a cabinet in the half-light. He kept his eyes on the floor as he waited for her to lock the door, then turned and followed her.

'You don't mind coming upstairs?' she asked.

'No,' said Jericho.

Even though she wouldn't catch him looking, he made sure to look to the side as they walked, rather than at the movement of her buttocks against the thin material of the robe.

He remembered the strange collection on the shelves, the curious heads and the dragons and bizarre potions that he assumed were all a joke. In the dim light he could make out eyes and small purple bottles and feathers and small boxes.

She walked up the stairs ahead of him. He looked at her feet and wondered if she lived alone. Maybe there would be a commune. Or a man, wondering what the fuck Jericho was doing there at eight-thirty on a miserable January evening. He had spoken to her before during working hours, why couldn't he have done it again?

He followed her into the small apartment. Expected there to be incense burning, a similar smell filling the air as there was in the shop. There was nothing other than the vague aroma of cooked bacon, but even that went as soon as he walked into the sitting room.

There was music playing – Curtis Jones, Jericho recognised – a single lamp in the corner. A book was turned upside down on the arm of the chair.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
. On the floor beside the chair there was a glass of white wine.

'Can you I get you a drink?'

Jericho realised he was staring at the book. He had heard of it, had never read it. Battling his preconceptions. What had he expected? That he would interrupt her bathing in blood, smearing herself with the severed head of a chicken and reading Denis Wheatley?

'Yes,' he said distractedly. 'I'll… you have… what do you have?'

He shook his head, perhaps in the hope that it might stop him talking like one of the less evolutionarily developed Muppets.

'I have white wine,' she said, without hint of apology at having nothing else.

'I'll have a white wine,' said Jericho.

He thought of the glass of white wine he hadn't drunk at Sergeant Light's house. He thought of Sergeant Light.

She left him standing in the room. He looked at the bookshelves while she was gone, his eyes trailing aimlessly around, taking nothing in, although he did notice that the shelves were not filled with the kind of thing that occupied the shop.

A glass of wine was put into his hand; she raised her glass to him and he reciprocated. She stood less than a couple of feet from him, and finally the smile came to her face.

'You took your time coming back, having not asked everything you needed to when you were here before.'

Jericho didn't reply. Looked behind him and sat down in the chair opposite the one she'd been sitting in before he'd arrived. The room was warm, pleasantly fresh smell in the air, as if she had recently cleaned.

'Pursuing other lines of enquiry,' he said.

'And why have you decided to pursue this one now?'