Murderers Anonymous (16 page)

'You're making this up,' said Barney.

'What?'

'You're not just talking shite, you're actually just making it up as you go along. When you're a barber you spend your life listening to shite, and you can recognise it from fifty mile. And you're full of it.'

'You can think that if you like, my friend, but the fact is that if you don't employ a consultant in this forward-thinking day and age, you'll be left behind. Make no mistake. Analysts predict that by the year 2015 the only businesses left will be those employing a full-time consultant. Don't do it and you're dead.'

'And how many of those remaining businesses will themselves be consultants?' asked Barney.

Spiers stared at him then pulled a notebook from his jacket pocket. A wafer-thin computer notebook. Thinner than any panty liner. He flicked it open, tapped in a few numbers, looked up and smiled.

'About seventy-three per cent,' he said.

Blizzard had stopped wailing. Barney smiled.

'So in fact, the best way for any business to survive is for them to move into the consultancy world?'

This gave Spiers some pause. He looked at Barney and thought he recognised a rare intellect. A man at the peak of his mental powers; or, at least, at the meagre hilltop of his mental powers.

'Aye,' said Spiers, 'I suppose that might be the case.'

'So really, rather than us do all this crap about matrices and shite like yon, we really ought to just become consultants? Blizzard and Thomson, we could call ourselves. What d'you think of that, Leyman?'

'Sounds like a load of shite to me, son,' said Blizzard, 'but I'd go along with it. It'd be better than sitting here listening to this heid-the-ba'.'

'Perhaps,' said Spiers, 'we at MKPC might be able to give you a consultation on how to consult?'

'You mean,' said Barney, 'that the consultant consults another consultant for a consultation on how to consult?'

'Aye, we do it all the time. That's why there are so many of us.'

'Right. So how about if we give you a wee consultation on the cheap, just as a practice run.'

'You give me a consultation?' said Spiers, breaking into a condescending smile, from which his face would never recover. 'All right, why not?'

'Right,' said Barney. 'My advice to you is this. Fuck right off. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred pounds, don't even stop to go to the fucking toilet. Just get the fuck out of this shop before I stick this broom up your arse. I've killed someone with one of these before, you know.'

Spiers's condescending smile travelled a little farther to the outer reaches of his face.

'I don't think you fully understand,' he said. 'We're talking about multidisciplinary, interdepartmental, cross-purpose ...'

'Fuck off!' said Barney, grabbing Spiers by the arm. 'That's a multifunctional, no questions asked, no shite, final and irrefutable offer.'

He opened the door and shoved Spiers out into the street.

'I obviously caught you at a bad time,' said Spiers. 'I'll be back next ...'

Barney slammed the door closed and pulled the Venetian blind. He turned back to Blizzard, who was watching him with an amused look. Barney considered his actions of the last two minutes and how his heart had not even picked up a beat. Two years previously he wouldn't have had an argument with a feather duster. Now he was telling people they were talking shite, threatening them with a broom and throwing them out of the shop. And more than that, thinking nothing of it.

'Very impressive, son,' said Blizzard.

'Thanks,' said Barney, as he slowly walked back to his station and began again the cheerless task of sweeping up. Unseen misery still resting on his shoulders.

'You've obviously got a knack for this kind of thing. A wee bit of a mean streak behind that placid exterior. Maybe you are that murdering bastard after all. Good on you.'

'Thanks,' mumbled Barney. Wasn't that just going to make all the difference in the world?

'Oh aye, I was going to tell you about this group,' said Blizzard, after a couple of minutes' attempting to drag his previous thoughts into the present. 'I know a bloke who knows a guy. Think I might be able to get you someone's phone number. You know. Seeing as you're a serial killer 'n' all that.'

Barney looked up; stopped sweeping.

'What kind of group?'

'One of they self-help groups. You know, for folk that've done the kind of shite you done.'

'A self-help group for killers?'

'Aye. That's what the bloke said. Think I know where I can get hold of the bastard.'

Barney stared at him. A group of like-minded people. People who might know what he was thinking. Maybe that might be worth it.

'Aye, all right,' he said. 'You never know, eh?'

'Right,' said Blizzard. 'I'll see if I can get you the number.'

'Aye,' said Barney, and once more returned to his sweeping.

Blizzard rustled the paper. Already beginning to forget the last conversation. His mind the same tangled mass of pointless information as anyone else's.

'What d'you make of these four birds,' he said. 'Would you shag any of them?'

There are two kinds of men in the world. There are those who are crap at sex; and then there are those who have never even had sex. So thought super-spy Jade Weapon, as she lay back on the cool grass of a Kingston summer's evening. The three men attending to what they believed to be her erogenous zones were making a lousy job of it, and she couldn't wait until she got the green light from Walter Dickov, watching the action via satellite back at HQ in Geneva, to take the three of them out.

'Come on, Walter,' she said pointlessly to the humid night. As usual, she could hear him, but had no link-up to speak back to the bastard.

'Who's Walter?' said the abject British agent, the best that M16 could manage, as he thrust manfully, barely touching the sides of Weapon's disinterested sex hole.

'Walter?' she said, between the panting breaths of her sexual assailant. 'He's a guy with a dick. Unlike you three women.'

'Yeah, right,' said the British agent, as he continued to trudge away.

'Come on, Walter, you bastard,' she said once more to the night. 'You must've seen enough by now, for God's sake.'

And so, at last, it came, the crackling voice in her ear. Eliminate the spies. Those three words that fired her sexuality much more than any man she had ever met.

Jade Weapon grabbed the throats of her two mammiferous assailants and, with a gentle tweak of her thumbs, killed them both instantly. The other agent looked up with an air of British curiosity.

'Time to die, Dickless,' said Jade Weapon.

'Don't mind if I finish,' said Bond. Jeremy Bond.

'Didn't even know you'd started,' said Jade Weapon, as she closed her thighs firmly around the weak ribs of the agent, and squeezed the little breath out of him that was required. Done and dusted in ten seconds.

Men are so weak, she thought, as she sat astride her fifteen-litre Harley Davidson, fired off a volley of bullets from the side-mounted machineguns, just in case there happened to be any men watching from the nearby forest, then tore off across the hills and mountains to where her boat waited at the other end of the island.

***

'God, I wish I could be like Jade Weapon,' muttered Erin Proudfoot quietly. Cool, smooth, fit, quick-thinking, testicle-crushingly confident, horny as hell and breasts like a behemoth.

She leaned back in her chair as she read. Feet perched on the desk. Tea break. The report on the four missing teddy bears in Byres Road could wait. As could the phone call to the woman who thought her husband had been abducted by the Federation of Alien Presbyterian Churches. And both of those were ahead of the student locked in the basement of the QM Union, reputedly transmogrifying into an insect.

The noise of the station went on around her, but no one spoke to her these days, not unless she spoke to them first. A bit of a mad glint in her eye, that's what they all thought, and so they tended to be wary of her. Even Detective Sergeant Ferguson had retreated from the sexual innuendo that he had once permanently employed.

If I were Jade Weapon, she thought, I'd take care of guys like Ferguson.

'Busy as ever?'

Proudfoot kept staring at the book. She stopped reading, but her eyes didn't leave the page. A voice from the not-so-distant past, but it might as well have been twenty years ago for all that it mattered. Still, for all the lack of feeling to which she aspired, for all that she would be as cool and unemotional as Jade Weapon, her heart immediately started thumping voraciously, her throat went into a dry panic, and ants began crawling up and down her spine.

She looked up at him eventually, hoping her face did not betray her emotions. He hadn't changed, but what had she been expecting? Massive weight loss? Eyes like black holes? Hollow cheeks? Bela Lugosi?

It had been six months since they'd seen each other. The last time had been another passionate night, when they'd talked as much as made love, when his intensity had been overwhelming, when she had thought he might kill her; yet in the morning his eyes had been dead, and she'd known there was something in his head that wouldn't be communicated.

They had escaped with their lives from an infamy of adventure, they had thrown everything of themselves at each other for a few months, and he had been the first to burn out. Just another sad little love story. The momentum of it, the speed with which it had all happened, the fear and the loathing, had carried them through, but once the emotions had been spent and at last a day had dawned cold and grey and hopeless, Mulholland had forced them to accept the reality of what had gone before.

'Not much to do,' she said eventually, after some endless eternity of a stare.

'Don't trust you with anything, eh?'

'No, no, it's not that,' she said, 'just don't have much on at the moment.'

'You don't have to lie, Sergeant. I know what it's like. I've been getting the same treatment up the coast. If some Councillor's wife's cat goes missing and they want to stick a chief inspector on it to try to impress the bastard, I'm the man. Otherwise, I get nothing. There are prepubescent constables getting more to do than me. I'm still supposed to be a detective chief inspector, but I'm getting the biggest load of shite that's ever been handed down.'

'You can't have,' she said.

'Why?'

'Because I've been getting that. You're right. I'm not busy. I've got plenty to do, but it's all alien abduction and teddy bears, and spending half my life following some stupid blond-haired bimbo who may, or may not, have killed her boyfriend five months ago. It's driving me nuts. Course, they think I'm nuts anyway.'

Mulholland laughed. Had sympathy for her; as well as all the other feelings packed neatly in his baggage.

'I had to investigate a sighting of Elvis,' he said.

'Robbing banks?'

'No, no, he was sweeping up leaves in Tarbet. The tax people read about it in the local paper and asked us to chase the guy. Thought that if he'd been domiciled in Britain for the last twenty-three years they'd be able to make a killing.'

Proudfoot smiled. Beat her teddy bears case, although only just. Her heart had settled, she had an unexpected feeling of relief. Some part of her, she was realising, had been afraid that Mulholland would be getting on with his life with no trouble at all, that she would have suffered scars that never touched him.