The Barbershop Seven (120 page)

'There are certain rewards in it for you,' he said. 'But we can talk about that later.' Solomon checked his watch. 'Look, you'll have to be going soon. To cut the bullshit, we now need you to poke your nose into the cabinet's business, if you can. Find out who's behind these two disappearances. You think you can do that?'

Barney smiled. It was like he was being made a deputy. How utterly bizarre; if it was true. Couldn't believe anything, of course.

'You mean, can I be discreet, perceptive, incisive, trenchant and shrewd?' he asked. 'I seriously doubt it.'

Solomon smiled. Kent regarded Barney with a little suspicion.

'I'll speak to you again in a couple of days,' said Solomon.

And with that he walked past Barney, Kent in his wake. Barney smiled at them, then shook his head and stared at the carpet. Just how many more explanations about his presence here was he going to receive?

The door opened and closed again, and Barney let out a long sigh and drummed his fingers on the arms of the chair. Maybe it was time to just walk out. Get out of this prison of a hotel room, out of Edinburgh, because this city wasn't his city, get on the road and see where he ended up. He could go and live overseas for the first time in his life. He could be Barney Thomson, International Barber of Mystery. He laughed at the thought.

There was a cough behind him.

He rose quickly and looked at the door.

Parker Weirdlove was standing inside, arms folded across his clipboard and chest. Must've crept in silently, as the police officers departed.

'Who the fuck were they?' he asked.

Barney Thomson did not answer immediately.

––––––––

L
ongfellow-Moses looked as though he was studying the work Barney was doing on his hair – today he'd requested a Gregory Peck
Mocking Bird
– but his mind was elsewhere, grappling with big thoughts, whilst trying to ignore the continuing throb in his loins. Weirdlove was standing in the corner, checking his clipboard. The Amazing Mr X was standing silent, mean and tall, by the door.

'Can you get some figures for me?' said JLM, from the depths of his reverie.

Weirdlove looked up from the bullet points he had noted down to help JLM negotiate his way through the radio appearance; they consisted mostly of differing ways to shift the conversation away from his sexual affairs, Hookergate, his other dodgy business affairs, his denial of Disney videos to his children, and the Rwandan war criminal thing.

'No problem, sir,' he said. 'What kind of figures would you like?'

'Space,' said JLM, and he pursed his lips in a Churchillian kind of a way. Looked sombre and serious and statesmanesque.

Barney raised an eyebrow. The Amazing Mr X stood poised with his surface-to-surface missiles primed and ready to rock.

'How d'you mean that?' asked Weirdlove. As he said it, he glanced suspiciously at Barney, as he had been doing for the past half hour. He did not believe that the two men who had been leaving Barney's room as he arrived, had been Jehovah's Witnesses.

'It's just so vast,' said JLM. 'I mean, seriously, it's like this lovely, huge, enormous blancmange.'

'D'you actually know what a blancmange is, sir?' said Weirdlove.

'Whatever,' said JLM. 'There was some show, used to be on tv, where they said that space was the final frontier. Can't remember what it was called. Lovely stuff. Anyway, you know, they were right. Space is like this, well, thing.'

'What kind of figures were you looking for, sir?' asked Weirdlove, recognising one of his boss's flights of fancy, wanting to get to the crux of it, so that he could shoot it down in flames and then move on to something worthwhile.

'Have you any idea,' JLM began, 'of the size of NASA's annual budget?'

'Is this a test, or are you wanting me to find out?' said Weirdlove dryly.

'God, Parker,' said JLM, 'I don't have that kind of info at my fingertips. Find out, man.'

'$13.6billion,' said Barney. 'That's about £7billion, give or take.'

JLM smiled, gave Weirdlove a wry 'you'd better keep up' look. JLM had been impressed so far by Barney's general silence and good behaviour since they'd had their little chat.

'Lovely,' said JLM. 'Thanks, Barn. What's our annual budget?'

'About £24billion,' said Weirdlove quickly, annoyed at himself that he was actually bothered that he answered before Barney. 'That's about $40billion,' he added.

'Yes, thank you' said JLM, 'I can do the math.'

Weirdlove shot an imaginary dagger into the back of JLM's head. JLM looked statesmanesque and pondered his position.

'All that money more or less accounted for?' he asked. 'Our 24 billion, I mean. It's rather a lot, isn't it? You'd think there'd be a few spare pennies.'

'Is it all accounted for?' said Weirdlove, wearily. 'Every last penny, sir. And we've still got three-hundred-year-old hospitals, the central belt road system is hopelessly inadequate, our tourism policy is shambolic, the rail network is wretched, the councils are impotent and bankrupt, our social services are in chronic decline, our fisheries policy in disarray, police numbers are plummeting, there's an increase in reported crime across the board, the prisons are overcrowded yet arrest rates are down, anyone of any talent, be it in sport, business, science or the arts must go to England or abroad to meet their potential, the west is riven by bigotry and sectarianism, education is desperately short of money, the exam system is in chaos, the young feel let down and ignored, the old feel betrayed, your care for the elderly package is a prescriptive hash job, and the rest of us in the middle can only find the strength to carry on because our applications to emigrate to Australia have been denied. All that, and our football's shite and BBC Scotland comedy output is pathetic. There are,' he said, voice slowing at last, 'no spare pennies.'

'Be that as it may,' said JLM, waving a dismissive hand, 'how d'you feel about instigating a space programme of some description?'

Weirdlove breathed deeply. Barney continued to study the back of the royal head, and wondered if Gregory Peck's hair ever actually varied from film to film. Like his facial expression.

'We could probably push it through parliament without too much trouble,' said JLM, continuing unabashed. 'I could give them one of my vision speeches, you know the ones. Space is just such a lovely thing, don't you think? How much d'you think it would cost to have a space programme of some sort, Parker?'

Weirdlove mentally tapped his brain on the clipboard. Count to ten. Count to ten. Don't lose your temper.

'It depends what you were looking ...'

'You see,' said JLM, cutting him off, and raising his temperature a little further, 'I was reading this article in the Herald Tribune. Did you know that NASA are still using the same rocket technology as they were in the '60s? Did you know that not only have they not made advances in manned space flight, they've actually regressed to the point where it would take longer now to get a man to the moon, than thirty years ago? It's madness! Complete madness! There's a big universe out there. It's beautiful and lovely and delicious. And we're stuck down here. It's time someone did something about it.'

'Well,' said Weirdlove, starting again, 'it depends what you're looking for, sir. If you want to buy a box of fireworks out of Woolies, let them off and get someone to make a note of their trajectory, that'll probably only cost you about a tenner. If you want to push the boundaries of rocket science and send men into deep space, that would probably take up most of our 24 billion. Course, we'd have to shut down the schools, the hospitals, the prisons, the police forces, the fire service...'

'We could call it,' said JLM, oblivious, 'the Jesse Longfellow-Moses Space Research Centre. Lovely ring to it, don't you think?' he said. 'I'm sure I could push that through parliament. What d'you say, Barn?'

'It would certainly be something for the country to rally around, sir,' said Barney, sounding like Jeeves. Then he gave Weirdlove a defensive look which said, 'that was what you told me to say'.

'Indeed,' said JLM. 'Get me some figures, Parker, will you?'

'Have you a specific objective in mind?' asked Weirdlove, barely masking the acerbity.

JLM looked at the ceiling, as if pondering the stars. Barney stood back, having finished the cut. Hands off, and the man looked more or less the same as he did whether he was supposed to be George Clooney, Frank Sinatra, Gregory Peck or Ella Fitzgerald.

'Men on Mars by the year 2010,' he said grandly.

'Right,' said Weirdlove, making a note, 'and do you want to bring any of them back alive at all?'

JLM hesitated. Would the public think the mission a failure if the men never got back? Probably bloody would, the ignorant bastards. They never cared about the boundaries getting pushed; always had to pee their pants every time somebody pegged it in the furtherance of human knowledge.

'Don't care myself,' said JLM, 'as long as they send pictures. But, I suppose we'd better or the press'll get on their bloody high horse.'

'Very good, sir,' said Weirdlove.

JLM finally noticed that Barney had finished. He examined the hairstyle for signs of Gregory Peck-idity, found them, stood up and walked round the chair.

'Champion,' he said to Barney, slapping him on the arm. 'Smashing job. Right men, let's go and kick the BBC's arse for them.'

The Amazing Mr X leapt to open the door, jumped out ahead of JLM, checked the vicinity for spies and terrorists, then cleared the First Minister for egress.

––––––––

'D
ifferent class,' said Wally McLaven, rubbing his hands together. 'That's what I mean by quality. Absolutely brilliant. That's the kind of thing that makes all the difference in life. Real quality, to be fair. Different class. Now, can you show us your other breast?'

McLaven was recruiting a new secretary. Just because some people had moved on in the world, and thought that it was horribly sexist, disgusting and primitive to ask a teenage girl to show you her breasts before you considered offering her a job, didn't mean Wally couldn't still exist in the Dark Ages. Amanda Cartwright was his fourth interviewee; two of the previous three had downright refused to take their clothes off and had been asked to leave; the other had reluctantly given Wally a look at her breasts, but had stopped short of offering a feel, despite Wally's claims that he was making sure she was lump-free.

Amanda Cartwright, however, was altogether more accommodating. She popped the second of her boobs out into the open, and Wally leant across his desk for a closer look.

'Lovely,' he said, 'really wonderful. Have you had any work done, anything like that?'

'Oh, aye,' she said. 'I got implants when I was sixteen. What d'you think?'

'Beautiful, babe,' he said. 'They're top quality breasts. And how have the implants affected the feel of the breast. Are they still as supple as before the operation?'

'Oh, aye,' said Cartwright. And she stood up, leant towards him so that her breasts were almost in his face, and said, 'Why don't you try them out for size? And I've also had my labia minora clipped, if you want to check 'em out.'

There was a loud rapping at the door. Wally woke up.

He sat up quickly, having been slouched massively in his office chair, enjoying a midmorning doze. He was due in committee at some point, but he couldn't entirely remember when. They were to have some ridiculous discussion about Scottish opera; as if anyone gave even the slightest shite about it.

'Come in,' he said, straightening his tie and running a hurried hand through his hair. Quick run of the tongue over the teeth to make sure there was no obvious food remaining from the leftover curry that he'd had for breakfast.

The door opened. It was his secretary, the spectacularly unattractive Miss Rutledge. He had spent most of his year incumbent in the post being horribly rude to her in the hope that she would resign, thereby allowing him to get a younger, better-looking model installed.

'What?' he said, sharply. 'I'm busy here.'

'You've got a message from the First Minister's office,' said Karina Rutledge. 'Wants you to meet him in Conference Room 6F.'

'6F?' said McLaven. 'That's like, what? Is that even in the building? Are you sure you took it down right?'

She bit her tongue, once again. The four hundredth time this year. The ignorant little bastard was going to get his comeuppance one day. One day soon.

'6F,' she said again, sharply. 'It's on the ground floor. It's where they have regular meetings of the Culture Council, but there's no reason why you're going to know anything about that, is there?'

'Enough of that tone, Miss Rutledge,' barked McLaven. 'When's the meeting?'

'Now,' she said. She swivelled, closed the door and was gone.

And, seeing as her back was turned when McLaven left the office a couple of minutes later, it was the last time she ever saw him. Alive, at any rate.

***

T
he First Minister was squirming through his radio interview, and not just because his knob ached when he sat in certain positions. For once he was extremely pleased that he wasn't on television. Despite his great hair. He didn't have too much influence on the BBC, but he was working at it, and when he'd established a bit more of a salient into the organisation, the first thing he was going to do was get Bertie Shaw shagged out of his position as midmorning talk show bastard. Lovely chap though he'd thought him up until now.

'You cannot deny the right of the Scottish people to know whether there are any more skeletons in your closet, First Minister,' said Shaw, who was having a great time. Getting to rip the pish out of the First Minister, in full knowledge that the public would be enjoying every second.

'Really,' said JLM, 'this is intolerable. I've answered the question a hundred times now. The details of my previous mistake have been given a full and proper public airing, and Minnie and I now consider the matter closed.'

'But you haven't answered the question,' said Shaw, exasperated.