We Are the Hanged Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

up in bed. Amanda was standing by the window, looking out over the view, although it was dark, so he presumed she couldn't see anything. She was humming a tune he recognised. Memphis in June . It sounded soft and beautiful.
    'I wish they wouldn't,' he said. 'I never say it to anyone. I never grab the newspaper and rip it up. I never tell the journalists to fuck off when they call.'
    She turned. She was smiling.
    'It's all right,' she said.
    He shook his head. When she looked at him like that he wanted to cry.
    When he heard the tune again it was Hoagy singing. Amanda turned back to the night.
    *
    She was never there when he was lying beside another woman. She knew not to come into his dreams when he had fucked someone else. Regularly, however, she would be there when he hadn't. Sometimes lost, sometimes lonely. Sometimes she smiled. He never understood it when she smiled.
    He awoke depressed. Sat in the near dark, watching the dawn while he ate breakfast. Grey light, but no sun, spreading across the cold fields and barren hedgerows. Coffee and toast spread with just butter. Shoulders hunched as he sat at the table.
    The apprentice police officers of Britain's Got Justice awoke to orange juice and figs, bran and decaf, stretching and exercise, showers and anxious hours spent in front of a mirror. The man who would be their leader for a few days, who would show them what it was truly like to be on the front line of law enforcement, who the tabloid press would try to define as their Jedi Master, sat slouched over an old wooden table and wondered if the shape he could see in the distance was really a deer, or whether his eyes were going the same way as his flat stomach and his enthusiasm.
    It was true what they said. Jericho had no friends. He had enemies though.
    He sat for half an hour after finishing his breakfast, until the morning had completely broken. It rained. The dull gloom looked settled for the day. He went back upstairs, cleaned his teeth, down to the front door, shoes and coat on and out into the chill of morning.

8

    Durrant had not been surprised to be let out of prison. Nothing surprised him, just as nothing pleased him or annoyed him or upset him. Life happened to Durrant and he dealt with it as it came along. The last thirty years had come along in prison.
    There had been no one waiting for him, not when he was initially let out the front door, a small bag over his shoulder. Some clothes, a few manuscripts he'd been working on, and a book he'd picked up in the prison library. No one seemed interested in whether it would ever be returned. He wondered if they assumed he'd be arrested again so quickly that it would still be in his possession when he was sent back.
    He had been sitting in a small café when a man in a grey suit had pulled the chair out across the table from him and taken a seat. Uninvited.
    Durrant had a photographic memory. He had everything in the café installed in his head the second he walked in. Pregnant teenager, baby sleeping in a pram next to her. She might have been waiting for someone but Durrant didn't think so. Getting away from someone maybe. Lived at home with her mother and needed to get out. If he'd studied her he could have worked it out, but didn't want to. Two guys came in after him and bought a can of Coke each, sat at the table talking in low voices about betting on football and which one of the women behind the counter in the William Hill around the corner they'd have. That was it for customers. There were only five tables, so it could be said that the place was more than half full, albeit it would be a statement from the table of lies, damned lies and statistics.
    The woman behind the counter was called Michelle, a sturdy woman of unattractive disposition. Durrant had not engaged her since asking for a cup of tea. It was not a lack of money that prevented him ordering a piece of cake or a pastry to accompany the tea, but the rank awfulness of what was on offer. It was as if