We Are the Hanged Man (37 page)

'Did you expect him to, Ma'am?'

'What?'

Haynes found himself in one of those situations where he decided, much as Jericho usually did, that it was better to keep the answer to a question in his head.

'Have you had contact with him in the last hour?'

'No, Ma'am, I haven't.'

She seethed. Jericho, she was at least pleased to realise, was not going to survive the investigation. She didn't want him on her force, and now she had a good reason for getting rid of him, and it was a fair bet that no one else would want him either.

'They want you at the television studio,' she said curtly, and put her hand to the door.

'What?' he said. 'I'm doing…'

'I know what you're doing. You're searching for a fucking needle, that's what you're doing. Now get over there, and you can deputise for your boss, wherever he is.'

Haynes took a last look at the two screens, made a note of what time he'd reached, and then got to his feet.

By the time he'd reached the television studio he knew how he would play it.

*

'It's dull as shitwater,' said Claudia. 'No. Just, no.'

'You film it for two minutes…' began Haynes, but she wasn't listening.

'No, Sergeant. If you want to suggest a car chase, then fine. Our people, our three brave and decent people who have done training that you would not believe over the last few weeks… they are, and I'm serious when I say this, more highly qualified in all sorts of shit now than most of the police service, and they're not spending the next three hours looking at fucking CCTV footage. What kind of fucking show do you think we're trying to make here?'

'I'm not asking them to.'

She paused. She stared across the desk. She was standing with her hands held at her side, her feet a yard apart. She looks like Ronaldo, thought Haynes suddenly. Just about to take a free-kick. He stopped himself laughing. She looks so like Ronaldo, he thought, that she must have modelled her stance on his.

'What,' she said very slowly, 'are you asking them to do?'

'Your three guys do whatever it is you want them doing. Car chases, shoot outs, whatever. I don't care. Meanwhile, you get a team of researchers on this. A big team. Draft them in. We need to find any car that was driving around London on Friday evening, and late last night, in the vicinity of the Crowne Plaza. Now, it's not that much of a push. The cameras in the hotel and the ones within a hundred yards were disabled, but once you get round the corners they're back on. It's not outwith the bounds of possibility that we can identify the car that took the women away. If, I admit, it was the same car. If you throw resources at it, and we can identify the car, then we could have someone to legitimately question within the next couple of hours.'

Claudia was thinking. He could tell because of the way her face had changed slightly. It was a good idea, and one she had to go along with. It was just a matter of how she would back down.

'And if you're lucky,' said Haynes, 'when you turn up to question the guy with the car, he'll do a runner and you'll get your car chase.'

Claudia was aware of a feeling of sexual excitement at the thought. This could be her best bit of television yet.

'Hello?'

Sergeant Light asked the question very tentatively. She realised that her voice sounded much too weak. She didn't want to sound this pathetic, even though she was having trouble keeping the fear at bay.

'Is someone there?' she said, much more firmly. She did not bother to soften her voice. If the room was miked up then she would be picked up regardless. If not, then it would seem unlikely that sound could get out of the room given that she had been left ungagged.

'Who's that?'

The voice sounded weak. A man. Light filtered everything as quickly as possible.

'Sergeant Light,' she said. 'I'm Sergeant Light of the Somerset & Avon Police Force.'

There was a pause, another grunt as the voice moved its head.

'Where are we?' he asked.

'I don't know.'

'Can't you get me out of here?' he said, and now there was a little more quality to his voice. A quality of desperation. It was a man, mid-twenties she decided, African origin.

'No,' she said.

'Why not?'

He would have said more in other circumstances.
Why not if you're the fucking police?

'I'm tied up,' she said. 'What's your status?'

She heard him groan and then a noise as he lowered his head. It had been an effort keeping his head upright, talking to her. She realised that it had been stupid to say she was a police officer and then tell him she could do nothing to help.

'How long have you been here?' she asked.

Another groan, but no immediate reply. She needed the conversation and hoped she didn't lose him. It felt such a relief to hear another voice in the sepulchral dark.

'Not sure,' he replied eventually.

'And you don't know where we are?' asked Light.

Another negative grunt.

'Are you bound?' she asked.

There was another noise from the floor. It sounded as if he might be about to start sobbing. That would constitute losing him just as much as if he retreated inside himself and stopped talking.

'What's your name?' she asked. 'Quick.'

'Lewis,' came the reply.

'Right, Lewis. I can't see you, so I need you to tell me where you are and what your situation is. Can you do that for me?'

She waited. Lewis sniffed; there was a further rustling. She tried to think of what the sound might be, tried to imagine what position Lewis was in. It didn't sound as if he'd been bound to a table in the same manner as her.

'On the floor,' said Lewis. 'By the wall. Not sure where. Not far from you. It's not a big room.'

'Are you bound?' she asked again.

'No. Not any more.'

'Have you seen the room with the lights on?' she asked quickly, not wanting to lose the momentum of conversation.

'Yes,' said Lewis, and the thought of it, the thought of lying there with the lights on, so that he could see everything that was coming, filled him with even more fear.

The thought of the four things hanging behind him. The four dead things, which he did not understand, which scared him, which were still there, somewhere, in the room with him.

'Describe it to me.'

She could hear him whimper. She had to focus on the facts, not on the possibilities, not on why she was lying bound to a table in a dark room.

'I can't.'

He sounded like he was starting to cry.

'Stay with me, Lewis,' she said.

She closed her eyes.
Stay with me
. For God's sake, Light, you're not in some shit piece of Sunday evening melodrama.

'Why aren't you bound, Lewis?' she asked. Nothing. Rustling. 'Why aren't you bound, Lewis?' she asked again, her voice more insistent.

'Don't know.'

'Are you hurt?'

Another pause. He sounded at least like he was trying to control himself.

'Yes,' he answered eventually.

'Where?'

Nothing.

'Where does it hurt?'

'All over.'

She was bound tightly to a table, but there was someone else in the room – a man – who had been dumped unbound in the corner. Why would her kidnapper do that? It could only be because he'd assumed he was dead.

If that was true, and she had to cling to any kind of advantage they might have, they had to use it. Strangely it felt like a race against time, because there was no time. A dark room with no lights and no sound. Time hardly seemed to exist. He could be back in five seconds, five minutes, five hours. Never.

Never seemed unlikely. Her mind started to work. What if they caught him? What if the police caught him and he never let on where his prisoners were held? She could lie here for the rest of her life. Which might not be very long.

Don't think like that.

'Can you move?'

Another whimper from the corner.

'Can you move, Lewis? I need you to move. I need you to get up, come over here and undo whatever's holding me down.'

He said something that was indistinguishable because of the sobbing.

'Jesus, Lewis, focus. Really. Focus. I need you to find me and work out how to undo the constraints.'

Still sobbing.

'Lewis!'

Even though she was convinced she couldn't be heard outside the room, she was aware that when she raised her voice she involuntarily began to shout in a whisper.

'I can't,' he said eventually.

'Yes, you can, Lewis.'

'My fingers are broken,' he said, through the sobs. 'They're fucked. My hands are fucked.'

Sergeant Light closed her eyes.

Jane Ray was a clerk in the London offices of the international law firm Manhausen, Seigfried & Schleck. She would have categorised that Thursday morning as a slow day, although there was, as ever, a lot of work to be done.

She was thirty-one, and had been working as an assistant to a man named Carlton Jeffries for nearly two years. Having started with a determination to move up through the firm as quickly as possible, two years in she found herself in the same place she'd started, amidst a corporate climate of actually having to work for what was coming to you. For a long time.

She was bored and thinking of leaving. She had friends in the City who worked, as far as she could tell, an average of two hours less each day and were being paid at least double what she earned. It was not – as her young niece liked to say about everything that happened in life – fair.

Yet she was an intelligent woman, good at her job and, despite her reservations, hard working, especially so when she had something interesting into which to sink her teeth.

A call came through around ten a.m. from the Paris office. One of their wealthiest clients, Gerard Larrousse, had committed suicide the previous evening. He died leaving no close surviving relatives and, curiously, no will. The only name they had anywhere in terms of a family contact was a Malcolm Motson who lived in Leeds, England. Would the London office be in a position to track down Mr Motson and try to establish the exact nature of the relationship between them?

She had taken the message and then set up a quick note on the computer to remind her to look at it an hour later. An hour later she extended the note by another hour. She still hadn't chased the matter when the Paris office phoned back to establish whether they had managed to contact Mr Motson. She said she'd been trying, and would get back to them as soon as possible.

Ten minutes later she set about establishing the whereabouts of Mr Motson. Within a very short space of time she discovered that he too was dead, having been burned to death in his home a few days previously.