We Are the Hanged Man by Douglas Lindsay Page B

had aired, and had managed to get five out of the six they'd been looking for. They intended no such slip-ups when it came to the final three.
    Stories about the six had been getting leaked to the media for some weeks, the stories themselves getting more and more desperate and outlandish as it became apparent that the interest of the public was waning. Cher: drugs and an incredible amount of sex; Lol: posh, a one-off instance of a mass student orgy, and possibly related to the Royal family; Gaz: previously a murder suspect, three ex-wives, caring father, heart of gold; Ando: all those women, although regularly he couldn't get it up because of his drug habit; Muzza: the twenty-two year-old virgin who had almost been adopted by Madonna; and Xav: arrested four times on Gay Pride marches, and who had once had a threesome with two fellows out of Take That.
    All of the stories were made up by a group of people sitting around a desk in an office, but it wasn't as if there was a newspaper out there who would take the time to check the facts. It was, as their Svengali producer had noted to the team, like shooting into an empty net.
    Why then, they had been left to wonder, as the series had drifted dangerously into the nation's disinterest, were they currently 5-0 down?
    Things were about to change, however, and it wasn't just because the producers had roped in reluctant detective Robert Jericho. One of the dull and uninteresting six, about whom they had made up so many fibs and exaggerations, was about to disappear for a while, before dying a rather unpleasant, painful and brutal death.

13

    Friday morning. Jericho awoke with an uncomfortable feeling in his gut, something he quickly attributed to the impending doom of the upcoming weekend. He wasn't going to have a part in choosing the three final participants in the show, but he had been instructed to attend the Saturday and Sunday night two-hour TV shows to sit with the judges and to pronounce on how the finalists handled the various trials and questions that were sent their way. In a further act of ratings desperation, each of the contestants had been told to sing a song on the basis that at some point in their police enforcement careers they might have to go undercover and sing karaoke.
    Having been determined to mentally close down and block out the upcoming week, Jericho was beginning to wonder if maybe he would be better off resigning and finding a way to live with the decision. Model airplanes. Jigsaws. Walks on the Somerset levels looking for cranes.
    He couldn't eat anything for breakfast. He looked across the fields and drank coffee and watched the grey light creep across the land, and thought about how he hated the media in Britain; but he also thought that the media were just giving the people what they wanted, so shouldn't he also hate the people? And he thought that in fact, yes, he did hate the people. So what was the point in being a police officer and serving them, serving the course of natural justice?
    He thought all those things, but still, when he got into the office forty minutes later than normal – and he was normally later than everyone else – he did not type out a resignation latter.
    *
    Haynes was leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees, a notebook open in front of him. He liked the feel of a notebook, even though some of his peers thought him dreadfully old-fashioned, or worse, trying to mimic the old-fashioned ways of Jericho. Jericho was leaning back in his chair, a dead cup of coffee sitting on the desk in front of him.
    'So, I guess the question is, if the cards are some messenger of death, then were you getting them as a warning before the deaths happened, or as a kind of calling card, letting you know that something had been done. In the name of the Hanged Man. Like the Pink Panther, or that Milk Tray dude you used to get in the old adverts.'
    'Talk us through what we've got,' said Jericho.
    'So we have, in the last six days or so around