We Are the Hanged Man by Douglas Lindsay Page A

death.'
    'Yes. For the moment. Start around here, the whole of the West Country, although I think we'd have heard about it if there'd been anything too weird. Then check out my old patch in London, and then the rest of the country. Fuck, there must have been several hundred people died in Britain in the last few days, it's what happens. Just find out the unusual ones, the ones the police are looking into.'
    'And I won't know what I'm looking for until I find it.'
    'Exactamundo,' said Jericho, which was a word he only usually used when he was in a good mood and feeling positive enough to say something stupid. Instead, he had one of those moments when the words coming out of his mouth sounded ridiculous, and so he took a bite from his sandwich and lowered himself slightly further down into the bench. He'd said everything that needed to be said.

12

    There were six contestants remaining on the new TV reality show, Britain's Got Justice . Cher, Lol, Gaz, Ando, Muzza and Xav. That, at least, was how their names had been abbreviated for tabloid usage. Of the six, only Cherie Mansfield had previously used her tabloid moniker in real life, but the people at BGJ had helpfully supplied the newspapers on whom they depended with the relevant nicknames, to remove the possibility of confusion.
    Originally something in the region of nine thousand people had applied for the show, a disappointing number in itself. Ever since, the producers felt, they had been fighting a rearguard action in trying to retain the interest of the public. By the time they got to the live broadcast stage, there were fifteen, and since Christmas nine had been eliminated by a combination of physical exercises, examination and the ever-versatile telephone vote.
    Mostly, anyone who remotely looked like a thuggish police officer and a shoo-in for the title had been removed. They didn't want forty-year-old brutal ex-Army thugs on the show, they wanted attractive nineteen-year-old girls and men in their mid-twenties who shaved their chests. They wanted to do crime prevention for the YouTube/Facebook generation. Their perfect police officer was to be some weird combination of Justin Beiber and Gemma Arterton, not Ray Winstone and John Thaw.
    The only one of the six to slip through the net was Gary Templeton, thirty-six and a former Royal Marine. He looked like a police officer; he came top in virtually all the tests; he was attractive enough to satisfy the girls and the media. When he smiled he had dimples. The Mirror had implied that he had been involved in a variety of top secret operations; the idea had stuck, and now whenever he was mentioned it was implied that he was some kind of superspy figure. The producers just didn't want someone that old winning the title, and so it was beholden on them to come up with a way for him to lose. Some said that he was in line to be the next James Bond, even though the current James Bond didn't seem to be on the point of going anywhere.
    The other five, who for the most part fitted the bill that the producers, advertisers and audience demanded, were Cherie Mansfield, a twenty-year-old media studies student from Burton-on-Trent, Lorraine Allison, nineteen, reading Greek history at Magdelen College Oxford, (she hated being known as Lol, just as much as she hated being called the posh one because she was at Oxford), Andrew Payne, a Scottish teenage building apprentice, who claimed to already have bedded four hundred women, Murray Forsyth, who was unemployed and termed himself a performance artist having put three short films about himself on YouTube, and Xavier Yateras, a twenty-year-old hairdresser from Putney. He'd been getting the gay and lesbian vote – despite being neither – as well as the votes of those who hated the very idea of the show and wanted to subvert it by voting for the least likely police officer in the competition.
    Cher, Lol, Gaz, Ando, Muzza and Xav. The producers had picked their final six before the first show