Victor O'Reilly - Games of The Hangman

The Bear laughed. "Living art," he said. "Actually there is an explanation. They were knocking down that section of the museum anyway to make way for a new extension, and they thought it might be fun to let artists take part in the process."

"Ah," said Fitzduane.

"No matter how bizarre the event, there is almost always a straightforward explanation. Don't you agree?"

"No," said Fitzduane.

The Chief Kripo had learned to regard the Project K headquarters as a haven. Only there did he have any thinking time; only there was he relatively free of interference from his political masters wanting progress reports; only there could he escape the profusion of foreign antiterrorist agencies that all wanted a piece of the Hangman, doubtless to skin and stuff and hang on their respective bureaucratic walls; only there did any serious progress seem to be made on the case itself, as opposed to the international hunt, which appeared to have become an enterprise in its own right with the objective almost incidental; only there could he avoid his wife and two mistresses, each of whom blamed his now excessively long absences on some relative advance in his affections for one of the others. It was no picnic being Chief of the Criminal Police in Bern these days.

As luck would have it, the Chief was in the main computer room when Henssen finished the computer runs the Bear had requested. He stared at Henssen's screen. Could this be it? Had they got a real answer at last? Could they ship that albatross of an Irishman back to his bogs? Could they think in terms of no Hangman and a nice steady traditional Bernese two corpses a year? Hell, it was going to be champagne time.

The Chief tried to rein in on his hopes. "Are you sure? Absolutely sure?"

"Nothing is sure in this life, Chief," said the Bear, "except death, a strong Swiss franc, and that the rich get richer."

"Convince me, convince us." The Chief included the rest of the Project K team with a sweep of his arm.

Kadar hadn't expected Lodge to be discovered, and he had absolutely no idea how it could have happened. He had been so careful with this personality. He hadn't taken the risks that had characterized his behavior in other guises. How then could it have occurred?

Losing Lodge was worse than the death of a friend. Of course, that was only natural. After all, he was Lodge, wasn't he? There were times he wasn't sure. His Lodge identity represented his one true link with the past, but now he could never use it again. He felt – he searched for a word – orphaned.

Perhaps he was being too negative. His use of a stand-in during the immigration proceedings – a minor actor, now resting permanently under half a meter of concrete in the house in Muri – could give him a way out. The man whose description and photograph they had wasn't Kadar. He could reappear as Lodge and indignantly protest this usurpation of his name. He'd have to do it from another country, or things would get confusing. Still, it could be done. It might work.

No, it was too risky. Well, he'd think about it.

Only two days were left before he was due to leave Bern to commence what he thought of as the ‘active’ phase of the operation. It might be wiser to leave immediately. Then again his plans were made, and he had taken precautions against discovery. It could even work to his advantage.

He checked the temperature probe set into Paul Straub's body. The corpse was defrosting, but too slowly. It would have been handier to have used not water to thaw out Herr Straub, but he wasn't too sure what effect that would have. It was the kind of thing some forensic scientist might pick up. A body destroyed by fire shouldn't really be waterlogged. It shouldn't start off as a block of ice either; it wouldn't burn properly. A scorched outside and entrails cold enough to chill a martini might cause some head scratching.

He turned up the heat. He thought it was rather neat to be using his sauna for the purpose. He could tone up and sweat off some weight while keeping an eye on things. If his experiment with the frozen pig was anything to go by, Straub should be adequately thawed out in about another six to eight hours. That would be just about right. Then he'd be kept in the large Bosch refrigerator, nicely chilled but on call if required. If he wasn't needed, he could be refrozen and kept on hand for a rainy day.

"It's ironic," said the Bear, "but what pointed me in the right direction wasn't the computerized power of the Nose or old-fashioned police work; it was our Irishman's intuition." He looked across at Fitzduane. "You should have more faith, Hugo.

"Hugo suspected the painter Simon Balac was our man. There was some circumstantial evidence, but it was far from conclusive. Then the computer identified Lodge, and the raid confirmed him, and naturally all our efforts were concentrated in that direction. I had plenty of time on my hands in the hospital, and I wasn't distracted by the details of the hunt." He glowered around him. "You people kept me starved of information."

"For your own good, Heini," said Charlie von Beck, "and on doctor's orders."

"What do doctors know?" growled the Bear. "Anyway, sparked by Hugo's candidate, I got to thinking about the nature of the Hangman and how he operates, and that led me to an intriguing hypothesis: Could Lodge and Balac be one and the same man?"

"Proof?" said the Chief. "But why be greedy? At this stage I'll settle for reasons and an hour alone with him in a police cell."

"Patience. Rubber hoses are un-Swiss. We're supposed to be a logical people. Follow my reasoning, and you'll see how it all fits together. First, let's remember the Hangman's habit of always having a way out. If the authorities hit one of his bases, to things can be virtually guaranteed: the place will be extensively booby-trapped, and an elaborate escape route will already have been planned. The Hangman doesn't fling himself through the fourth-floor window as the police come rushing through the front door and hope to work things out on the way down. No, this guy is prepared for the down side in detail. It's the way he operates. He's a compulsive planner, and he likes to think he has every contingency covered."

"He normally has," grumbled the Chief.

"Now, combine this behavior with his habit of operating in a compartmentalized way through a series of apparently autonomous gangs, and you have someone who almost certainly works through two or more meticulously prepared identities. The Hangman is a perfectionist. His won't be just paper identities that will fold under investigation. No, he will have created what appear to be real living people. If one cover gets blown, he migrates to identity number two and continues on. Also, we know he likes to take risks – strictly speaking, unnecessary risks – so it is my hunch that he doesn't go away and hide under a stone when he switches identities. His new persona is right out there, most likely an upstanding member of the community, the last person you'd suspect.

"My next step was to go back to the computer and reevaluate our suspect list in a different way. Up till then we had concentrated on two prime targets, von Graffenlaub and Lodge, and had ignored the rest when we got lucky with Lodge. However, there were, in fact, several hundred other names on the ‘possible’ list.

"We could have slogged through the names in order of probability rating, but the banks would have given up secrecy by the time we had any results. Then it occurred to me that we should tackle things another way. Given that Lodge is part of the puzzle, we should evaluate the suspect list with him as part of the equation. His known activities should be matched with those of each of the other suspects to see who fits the best. Now remember that although few people ever saw Lodge, were still managed to accumulate masses of data on the man. We have travel details, credit card usage, financial data, magazine subscriptions, and so on. That's the kind of stuff that led us to take a look at him in the first place. We had no hard evidence that he was the Hangman. It was merely that his profile hit.