Free We Are the Hanged Man by Douglas Lindsay Page B

asked Haynes.
    Even if he hadn't already heard the story from Light he would have known. Any conversation between Jericho and the likes of Jacobson was never destined to go well.
    Jericho shook his head in reply, didn't look up from the cards. He had been staring at them for close on an hour. They were speaking to him, he just couldn't work out what they were saying. And they were laughing at him, and he couldn't work out why.
    'Had a tough afternoon,' said Haynes. 'Not many forces like the sound of a sergeant from the West Country calling up and asking if they've done a decent job investigating their latest suspicious death. How d'you get on?'
    Jericho shook his head, tutted, looked up.
    'Sorry, Sergeant, I meant to say to you earlier. Get you to stop. It's a waste of bloody time.'
    Haynes sat back, taking a sip from his pint.
    'You didn't get anywhere either?'
    'Chucked it after a couple of hours. Everyone, at this stage, could be something more than it looks. We need some sort of specifics before we can go stepping on other people's toes. No one's going to like us barging in on their patch. And if they knew why…'
    He pushed the cards away from him. Haynes took the lead, and turned the cards round so that he could see them properly.
    'We need to know whether they're a warning or a calling card announcing the deed's been done,' said Haynes.
    Jericho grunted. He was fed up asking himself the question.
    Haynes lined the two cards up together and started poring over them one more time, thinking that if it was just a stupid joke the person who sent them would be laughing his bloody socks off at that moment.

15

    The final six Britain's Got Justice contestants were allowed out for two hours each evening. Nominally it was to give them some freedom from the "claustrophobic bubble of the intense pressure of the UK's biggest ever game show", however the producers really just hoped that the six people would use the time to have sex, get drunk, get into a fight, get arrested, or otherwise meet a drug dealer, prostitute, journalist or member of the royal family. Anything that would be news.
    Friday night at the Britain's Got Justice hotel, and all the inmates were ready for an evening out. Except Lol. Lol said that she was tired, and had had enough of the media intrusion into her life. She wouldn't be going out in public again until she was kicked off the show, and then she was going to go back to Magdalene College and never raise her head in public again.
    That was what she said.
    Holed up in her room, however, she had no intention of spending the evening watching television and reading magazines. She sat a little nervously in the single comfy chair, the note from the Mirror journalist in her hands.
    Only later, when she had become acquainted with the man she was to meet, would she realise that he was not a Mirror journalist. Durrant, in fact, had never even read the Mirror.
    *
    A little before nine in the evening, Jericho was back at his desk. Trawling through what paperwork they could get on the variety of potentially suspicious deaths from around the country in the previous week.
    Too many of them stood out as having potential.
    Haynes had gone home after they'd chatted in the City Arms; Jericho had said he was heading home too, but somewhere between the pub and his front door he had veered back to the station. Wide awake, much too early to go to bed, no desire to sit at home in front of the television. No desire to do anything, and so he determined that he would hide behind his desk searching for something he was highly unlikely to find.
    Jacobson had suggested that he spend the evening watching the Britain's Got Justice coverage on digital TV or the internet. That had been at a point in the conversation when Jericho hadn't felt the need to respond.
    The door opened; Sergeant Light leaned into the office without stepping across the threshold.
    'Still here, Chief Inspector?'
    She knew that he had little work to do, although there