Waiting for Godalming (11 page)

And I guess that’s all OK if you’re one of those tormented-soul detectives with a drink problem and a broken marriage, who’s had some big trauma in his childhood and is searching after his feminine side, or however that load of old toot always goes.

But hey, this is Woodbine.

The
man.
The
detective.

The guy who makes his own wind and doesn’t shoot the breeze.

“OK, Barry,” I said. “We’re gonna make a move.”

“Are you going to change your clothes, chief? You look a right palooka in that charred hat and mash-up trenchcoat.”

“I’ll wear my old tweed jacket,” I said. “It’s always good for a bit of disguise.”

“And just why would you want a bit of disguise?”

“Because we’re going under cover, Barry. We are going to return to the crime scene in search of clues. I shall adopt one of my many alternative personas and probe this case with a penetrating eye. You just stick with me, little guy, and you’ll see why I’m the best.”

“Perhaps I’ll grow to like the compost heap.”

“What did you say, Barry?”

“Nothing, chief.”

The alleyway was rather crowded now. There were policemen coming and going and wandering around and stepping on evidence and getting in each other’s way and generally carrying on in the manner that all policemen do. They’d set up some lights and stretched a lot of that yellow tape about. And they’d parked their police cars up real close and left the beacons flashing on the tops to give that extra bit of atmosphere.

I shouldered my way tweedily into the blue serge throng. “Make way,” I said. “Member of the press.”

A guy turned to face me. And I knew this guy. It was none other than Police Chief Sam Maggot of the L.A.P.D. He and I had run up against each other on more than one occasion and he and I did not see eye to eye.

Possibly due to the difference in height, as he is something of a shorty.

Police Chief Sam Maggot had not been having a good day. He rarely, if ever, had a good day. It was not in his remit to have good days. Police chiefs always have bad days. Every day is another bad day, that’s the way they do business.

“Who are you?” asked Police Chief Sam.

“Molloy,” said I. “Scoop Molloy of the
Brentford Mercury
.”

Police Chief Sam looked me up and up. “Molloy?” said he. “Molloy?”

“That’s me,” said I. “What happened here?”

“It’s not you,” said Sam. “It’s Woodpecker. Lazlo Woodpecker, private eye.”

“The name’s …” Well, he nearly had me there. “The name’s Molloy,” I said. “Scoop Molloy. Some call me Scoop.”

“Well, I’ll be,” said Sam. “But you do bear an uncanny resemblance to Woodpecker. Although he wears the snap-brimmed fedora and the trenchcoat and you’re wearing—”

“An old tweed jacket,” I said. “So I must be a news reporter, mustn’t I?”

“Well I guess you must. And naturally, as the police always want to help out members of the press, I’ll be glad to tell you anything you want to know.”

“That’s fine. So what happened here?”

“Murder,” said Sam. “Murder most foul. Two Greek businessmen. A Mr Georgious Bubble and a Mr Mikanos Squeak. Gunned down in cold blood.”

“And the other guy?”

“
What
other guy?”

“I thought there were three bodies.”

“No,” said Sam. “Just the two. Just two innocent men viciously murdered. Brutally slain. Cruelly done to death by some pathetic psychopathic scumbag. Some piece of human filth. Some vile loathsome degraded specimen of sub-humanity. Some—”

“Just the
two
bodies?” I said. “Just the
two
?”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking, chief?”

“Not now, Barry.”

“What did you say?” said Sam.

“Nothing,” said I. “But you’re absolutely sure that there’s only two bodies?”

“Absolutely sure. And I’ll tell you more. The murderer barged open that rear door to the Crimson Teacup, then ducked back into shelter. Then he leapt from cover and shot both men dead. Two clean shots. The work of a professional.”

“You’re right there,” said I.

“Forty-four calibre ammunition,” said Sam. “I would say from a trusty Smith and West Indian steel band.”

“Hm,” said I.

“The killer then walked along the alleyway and kicked the corpses. One mean son of a bitch, eh? One heartless evil murdering slimebag. One—”

“I suppose you can tell me next what he was wearing?” I said.

“Absolutely,” said Sam. “He was wearing a trenchcoat and a fedora. And he was talking to himself. They do that, you know. The real loons. Voices in the head. God tells them to do it. That kind of caper.”

“I’m impressed,” said I. And I was. “And you worked all this out from scene of crime evidence?”

“No,” said Sam. “From that.” And he pointed.

I turned my head and I looked in the direction of his pointing. High on the wall above the rear door of the Crimson Teacup was mounted one of those sneaky closed-circuit TV cameras. The type you see, if you look real hard, overlooking nearly every street in the big city nowadays. The type that are linked up to VCRs and record everything they see.

Everything.

“Ah,” I said. “That was handy.”

I smiled back at Sam.

But Sam wasn’t smiling.

Sam held a gun in his hand and that gun was pointing at me.

“You’re under arrest, Woodpecker,” said he. “Loons like you always return to the scene of the crime. They like to have a gloat, don’t they? Get off on what they’ve done.”

“Now just you see here.” I reached for my piece.

“Don’t touch that gun,” said Sam. “That’s the murder weapon or my name isn’t Sam Maggot and yours ain’t Lazlo Woodpecker, private eye.”

“The name’s Wood
bine
.” I
had
to say it. “Lazlo Woodbine”, and “Some call me Laz.”

“Raise your hands and turn around,” said Sam.

“Now listen, please. You’re making a big mistake.”

“Just raise your hands and turn around.”

“Aw come on now, Sam.”

“Don’t Sam me, you psycho. Raise your hands and turn around.”

“OK. But you’re really making a …” I raised my hands and turned around “… big …”

And then he hit me hard on the back of the head.

“… mistake. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!” I went.

“I’ll join you in that one,” said Barry.

And I was falling once more into that deep dark whirling pit of oblivion that all great genre detectives fall into.

But not at this point in the case.

When the hurricane hit, Icarus was in a long dark automobile, sitting next to a creature of Hell and being driven to an unknown destination.

“Where are you taking us?” Icarus asked, when he could find his voice to do so.

The creature that was Cormerant flickered its quills and moved its terrible mouthparts. “To the Ministry,” it said. “Where you will be interviewed.”

“I have nothing to say.”

“But you will. You will tell us everything we need to know.”

The car took a sudden lurch to the left.

“Drive carefully, damn you!” shouted Cormerant.

“I’m trying.” The chauffeur glanced back across his shoulder. “The weather’s gone mad. A storm’s come out of nowhere.”

“Always the weather,” said Cormerant. “Gets blamed for everything, the weather does. Have you ever thought about that, young man? The way the weather affects everything that people do? The wrong kind of leaves blown onto the track and the trains can’t run. The trains can’t run, so some man is late for an important meeting. The meeting is cancelled, a business goes bust. Its shares are wiped out on the stock exchange. A shareholder loses everything, goes mad, hangs himself. Leaving a wife who might have given birth to a child who would have one day become the President of the United States and saved the world from terrible war that would wipe out half of mankind. All because of some leaves blown onto the track by weather. Is it fate, or is there a purpose behind it? What do you think, young man?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Icarus hunched himself up and glanced towards the handle of the door.

“Central locking,” said the creature that was Cormerant. “A new innovation. All the doors and windows are locked. You have nowhere to run.”

Without, the storm raged madly on. Within the car, Icarus Smith sat trembling.

The Ministry of Serendipity is situated beneath Mornington Crescent underground station. Much legend is attached to the station, which for many years was closed to the public and which now does not remain open later than nine thirty at night. The belief amongst conspiracy theorists is that the Ministry of Serendipity is the English Area 51. That a vast tunnel network and massive underground complex exists beneath Mornington Crescent station. And that dirty deeds, involving alien spacecraft and back-engineering and indeed those little grey blighters with the Ray-Ban eyeballs, are done there, whilst Londoners walk blissfully unknowing on the pavements far above.

Icarus knew of such theories, but had paid them scant attention, according them the disbelief he’d always considered they deserved. Such nonsense had always been, in his opinion, more the province of his barking mad brother.

The storm-ravaged automobile turned left at the Station Hotel, crossed the road, and somehow entered the station opposite. Exactly how this happened, Icarus never understood. For at one moment the car was above ground in the wind and the rain and the next it had entered a tunnel and was purring along down a tube of darkness bound for no place pleasant.

The journey time was short, but as to the distance covered, Icarus could only wonder. But he was presently in no mood to wonder. His thoughts centred on a single goal, this being one of escape.

The automobile cruised out of the tunnel and into a great cathedral of a place. It was clearly the work of Victorian artisans, having all those wondrous soaring cast-iron roof-ribs, rising from those marvellous fluted columns, with the rivets and the rusty bits, where pigeons love to roost.

Icarus and Johnny Boy were encouraged to leave the car by the gun-toting chauffeur, who explained to them that hesitation would be rewarded by death. And Icarus found some relief in this, as his nearness to the creature that was Cormerant had troubled him no little bit.

Johnny Boy looked out and up and all around. “From down here where I am,” he observed, “this is one bloody big building.”

“And one very deep in the ground,” said Cormerant, climbing from the car. “Welcome to the Ministry of Serendipity. Take care with all those papers, young man. We wouldn’t want any to get lost on the way, now would we?”

Icarus felt that indeed, yes he would. And had been hoping at least to toss the lot out of the window while the car was in motion. As far as he was aware, there were only two men living on the planet who had taken the Red Head drug and knew the truth about what was really going on in the world. And those two men were himself and Johnny Boy and it looked to be a terrifying likelihood that the secret would shortly die with them. “Go on,” said the chauffeur, “move.”

Icarus and Johnny Boy were steered across a massive concourse. There were wooden crates and boxes, many bearing enigmatic symbols and letterings, stacked in mighty bulwarks. And thousands and thousands of barber’s chairs, all wrapped up in plastic. And on and on, beneath these and between, the two men plodded. Urged at the point of a gun and followed by the loathsome being that was Cormerant.

Icarus did take time to wonder over Cormerant. When first he had encountered him, in his guise as a man in the shop of Stravino, he had seemed a meagre creeping nervous body. Just some put-upon clerk in a city-gent’s rig-out, that few would have noticed at all.

And Icarus wondered whether this was what the chauffeur was seeing even now. Whether the chauffeur could hear the cold cruel edge to the creature’s voice, or see the arrogant, bombastic manner of its movements.

Evidently not, thought Icarus.

Although, possibly so.

Which didn’t really help much at all. So Icarus thought on hard regarding the matter of his escape.

“Down there,” urged the chauffeur. “Through that door.”

Through that door led them into a hallway. It was a long carpeted hallway. High-ceilinged, papered in richly patterned silk, ornamented with red circles and beryl coronets. Marble busts stared blindly from niches in the walls. Icarus counted six of Napoleon, three of Wellington, one of Churchill and none at all of Noel Edmonds. Icarus didn’t count these busts for fun. He was passing many doors and Icarus counted these also. He wanted to remember exactly where the way out was, when he chose to make a run for it.

At length he was brought to a halt before door twenty-three. Just beside the empty niche that awaited Noel Edmonds.

Cormerant knocked and a voice called, “Enter.”

Cormerant turned the handle and opened the door. “In,” said he to Icarus.

As Icarus harboured no preconceptions as to what might lie beyond the opening door, he was neither surprised nor disappointed by the sight that met his troubled gaze. But neither was he impressed.

Baffled, yes.

But not impressed.

Beyond the doorway lay a barber’s shop.

It was a regular ordinary down to earth, spit and proper barber’s shop. It might well have been that of Stravino, but it wasn’t. For this one was way deep down in the ground and this one had smarter barber’s chairs.

But all the rest was very much the same. The same fag-pocked linoleum on the floor. The same yellow nicotine up on the ceiling. Same pitted mirror with its souvenirs and whatnots. A row of faded cinema seats and even a brown envelope.

Of the smarter barber’s chairs, there were three. Stravino had only two in his shop. The second one, he’d told Icarus, was for the son who would one day succeed him. But that particular chair remained for ever empty, as Stravino had fifteen daughters, but no son.

But that is by the by, for we are here. In this subterranean barber’s shop, which has
three
chairs. And leaning against the furthest and smoking a cigarette, there stood … a barber.

This barber, like Stravino, was obviously a Greek. He had the complicated cookery thing that they always wear above the left eyebrow and the shaded area on the right cheek that looks a bit like a map of Indo-China. And he stood and he grinned and he dished out a welcome.

“Welcome,” he said, “and come in.”

Johnny Boy edged nervously forward. “I don’t want a haircut,” he muttered to Icarus. “I do my own. I have a four-in-one home hairdressing set.”

“Shut it, squirt,” said Cormerant.

“Come sit here,” said the barber.

Johnny Boy shook his tiny head.

“No, not you, dolly man. The big boy. The one with all the presents. Someone take his presents, please. And has someone had a look-see in his pockets?”

Cormerant shook his hideous head.

“You no search this boy at all?” The barber raised his unencumbered right eyebrow. “You no check to see whether he carry big bomb that blow our bottom parts off?”

Cormerant shook his hideous head a second time.

“Then perhaps you’d better do it now, damned clerk with runny nose.”

The chauffeur wrenched the papers and the boxes and the spectremeter from the grip of Icarus. Cormerant reached forward to go through his pockets. Icarus bit hard upon his bottom lip as the creature’s terrible scaly hands probed about his person.

“My wallet,” said Cormerant. “And where is my watch fob and where is my briefcase?”

“All in the time that’s good,” said the barber. “The boy will tell it all to us.”

Icarus eyed the barber. Here indeed lay a mystery. He was not a wrong’un. Not some demon. He was a man, as Icarus. And he was not a bad man. Icarus could see the man within the man and what Icarus could see was loyalty. This man was honest and loyal. He believed in what he was doing. He thought that what he was doing was right. Icarus shuddered. That was how it worked, of course. That was how it all worked. People mostly did believe that what they did was for the best. For the good of others. This man worked here. In this evil Ministry, run by demons in the guise of men. And he believed he was doing the right thing. For queen and country, perhaps? For national security?

“You come sit down here my boy,” said the barber, indicating the middle chair. “You look like you need a haircut. What shall it be, do you think? Perhaps a Tony Curtis?”

“No thanks,” said Icarus.

“But you sit here all the same.”

Icarus saw the flicker of colour darting round the barber’s head. Dark blue for determination. Not a man to be argued with.

Icarus made his way to the chair and sat down hard upon it. The barber flourished a Velocette and swung it over the lad’s shoulders.

“We don’t have time for this pantomime.” The cold cruel tone of Cormerant’s voice jarred in the relocator’s ears. “Call her out, make her get on with it.”

Her
? Icarus glanced into the mirror. The barber’s expression was grave. The colour of his thoughts was yellow. Fear, that colour was.

“She come soon,” said the barber. “She out clubbing it up, you know what young ladies are. I just give this boy a Tony Curtis, make him look a regular back street prince.”

“No need for that.” Icarus turned his head at the voice. A woman had entered the barber’s shop. She was a most attractive woman. Five feet two and eyes of blue, in a black leather dress and a high-heeled shoe. Golden hair, wide-lipped smile, she moved with elegance and style. Beyond the beauty and the grace, Icarus could see a brooding menace.

“Miss O’Connor,” said the barber.

“Introduce me properly,” said Miss O’Connor.

“Boy in chair, this is Miss Philomena Christina Maria O’Connor. She is an exo-cranial masseuse. She massage your head all nice. Make you feel all dreamy dreamy. Very good for the scalp. Make follicles spring up like little lambs eat ivy.”

“No thank you,” said Icarus.

“Yes thank you,” said Philomena.

“It not hurt a bit,” said the barber. “You feel grand, I promise.”

Icarus could see the lie and Icarus wanted out. He gripped the arms of the barber’s chair, prepared to spring and make a fight of it.

Click and click went the arms of the chair and two steel bands curled to fasten his wrists. Icarus wrenched and twisted, but the steel bands held him captive.

“Just relax,” said Philomena, approaching the chair. “It really won’t hurt
much
. It’s just a little massage.”

Icarus fought to keep his head down, but her hands were suddenly in amongst his hair. “My mother taught me this,” said Philomena. “Back in the old country. She was a hairdresser, but she’d studied phrenology. She could tell people’s fortunes by feeling the shape of their heads. She became very good at it; she had the gift, you see. And she could see a potential in it that few people ever sought to realize. That by applying subtle pressure to precise areas on the skull, you can actually cause changes to occur within the human brain. It’s a bit like acupuncture, or acupressure. Once you know exactly where to press and how hard and for how long, you can achieve the most remarkable effects. Here, for instance.”

Philomena pressed a finger down upon the crown of the captive’s head. Icarus gasped as a sensation of absolute joy overwhelmed him. A feeling of pure happiness.

“Nice, isn’t it?” said Philomena. “My mother used to get really big tips from her clients when she pressed their heads like that. And yet …” Icarus felt a pressure over his right temple.

“Aaaaaagh!” Knives of pain tore through his body. Knives of burning pain.

“That one really hurts, now doesn’t it?”

Icarus groaned and tears ran down his cheeks.

“You do have to be very precise, though,” said Philomena, stroking the head of Icarus Smith. “Just a little bit off and the effects can be devastating. Blindness, paralysis, permanent incontinence, or a total vegetative state. It takes a lot of practice to get it just right. I have a lot of ex-boyfriends who can’t do much nowadays but dribble. Shame, but there you go.”

Icarus was shaking now. His eyes rolled and his lips were turning blue.

“So let’s see,” said Philomena. “Let’s just see what you have to tell us.”

Icarus awoke in a sweat from a terrible terrible dream. He clutched at his head and blinked his eyes and let out an awful scream.

“Calm down, please, calm down.”

The eyes of Icarus focused on the face of Johnny Boy.

“Can you move?” asked the midget. “Are all your body parts still working?”

Icarus twitched; his hands were numb. He tried to rise, but his legs offered little support.