The Barbershop Seven (227 page)

He glanced up; no one said anything. He got a bit of a
get on with it
feel.

'
A Woman's Heart
,' he continued, earnestly, '
A Woman's Voice
and
Any Woman's Blues
.
I'm a Good Woman, vols. 1
and
2, Love of a Woman, Power of a Woman, A Woman in Love, Woman and Love,
and
Woman to Woman.
'

'Like the sound of that one, mind you' said Orwell, and Hemingway nodded. Barney was staring out of the window, thinking about women in his own way. Daniella Monk and Harlequin Sweetlips. Wodehouse's voice was low and dull, the office was warm, and he could feel the first creep of sleep cuddling his eyes. Give into it and it would be over him in waves. Delicious sleep.

'
Natural Woman
,' said Wodehouse, '
100 Hits – Women, Woman – The Collection, New Woman Classics
, and a bunch of others in the
New Woman
range,
The Very Best of All Woman
,
Real Women Have Curves ...
'

'Oh my God ... ' blurted Orwell.

'
A Woman's Place is in The Groove
, and
Story of a Black Woman
,' said Wodehouse, and looked up from the list. The others were shaking their heads, but of course, he wasn't finished. 'Then there's
Female, Female of the Species, The Female Touch vols 1
and
2, Favourite Female Vocalists, The Greatest Female Vocalists, The Greatest Female Voices Ever
and another couple of country and blues things. That's just a quick check of the main ones out there at the moment. Expect there'll be more.'

'It's like a whole different artform,' said Hemingway. 'They've probably all got the same songs on them.'

'Exactly,' said Orwell. 'Which is why we're here. Have to make the Margies and Joes who have bought all that crap, go out and buy this crap. So, let's have it. John, you've been the lead man on this so far, any ideas?'

Hemingway felt a tingling of the spine. He couldn't sit there like a lemon making weak jokes, letting his former deputy take over.

'
A Woman's Place Is In The Kitchen
,' said Wodehouse seriously.

Good, thought Hemingway, the lad doesn't have a clue.

'Yeah,' said Orwell, 'it's easy enough to come up with gags,' which was big of him, seeing as he hadn't come up with anything himself, 'but we need sensible ideas,' and he looked around the three men, already accepting that he was probably dependent on Barney for anything decent.

'
Women Rock
,' said Hemingway, quickly.

'
Women Roll
,' said Wodehouse.

'
All Woman
,' said Hemingway.

'
Total Woman
,' said Wodehouse.

'
Total Rock, Total Woman
,' said Hemingway.

And suddenly, with a snap of the fingers, they were rolling, jousting like knights of old, nerves strained, adrenaline pumping, hot-palmed and armpits sweating. Barney was vaguely amused. Orwell was bored. He wanted to be tackling the issue of Taylor Bergerac.

'
Utter Woman
,' said Wodehouse.

'
The Consummate Woman
,' said Hemingway.

'There's no such thing,' said Wodehouse, who could've been the company's poster child.

'There is to our target audience,' said Orwell.

'
The Complete Woman
,' said Hemingway.

'
Absolute Woman
,' said Wodehouse.

'
Completely Absolute Women Rock
,' said Hemingway.

'
Absolutely Complete Women Roll
?' said Wodehouse.

'
Assuredly Female
,' said Hemingway.

'
Absolutely Incontrovertibly Totally Completely Utterly Definitely Woman
,' said Wodehouse.

'
Naked Women Go Rock!
' said Hemingway.

'
Complete & Perfect Woman
,' said Wodehouse.

'
Just Woman
,' said Hemingway, returning to basics.

'
Totally Bare-Bummed Woman
,' said Wodehouse.

'
Whole Woman, Utterly Female
,' said Hemingway, getting carried away.

'
Butt-Naked Pygmy Women Go Jesus!
' said Wodehouse, losing control of all mental functions.

Barney was falling asleep, Orwell had stopped listening to them some time previously, and to be fair to the lads Hemingway and Wodehouse, they had probably already come up with at least ten perfectly adequate titles. After all, who really cared?

'You just don't get albums with men glorifying their maleness, do you?' said Orwell, pondering the question himself. 'Not PC, I expect. And would you really want to buy a CD entitled
Man To Man
anyway? I don't think so.'

'
A Woman's Touch
,' said Hemingway, ignoring Orwell's ruminations because he was so pumped.

'
A Woman's Feel
,' said Wodehouse.

Barney Thomson sighed.

'
Woman Is As Woman Does
,' said Hemingway.

'
A Woman In Your Bush Is Worth Two In The Hand
,' said Wodehouse.

And so they went on ...

***

M
onk took the train to Birmingham. Margie Crane sounded the best option for a woman with a grudge, driven to wreak this kind of terrible vengeance. Rose had given her the phone number, but she had decided that turning up on the doorstep was a better option. And it got her out of London for a few hours, away from Frankenstein and away from Barney Thomson, as if that might stop her constant visions of him.

She'd never been to Birmingham before and was pleasantly surprised. Cafés and trees and boulevards and statues and fountains. She wondered what lay beneath it all, but stopped herself thinking about it.

She stood on the pavement outside Crane's house and looked up at the row of terraced homes. Victorian, probably, but she was no expert. Near the centre of the city. Well maintained, trees surrounded by metal fences lining the street, as well as rows of BMWs and Audis and Jaguars, and it was obvious that however dismissive the people at BF&C had been about Margie Crane, she was doing all right for herself.

She walked up a short flight of steps, which led off the street, up to the maroon door. Rang the bell and waited.

The street was quiet, no cars, no one out walking. Just after eight on a cold and damp evening in March. Everyone already safely locked up in their house, kids already packed off to bed, after mummy and daddy had got home from the office and spent the requisite ten minutes reading
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
.

She rang the bell again, left it another short while, then produced a set of keys, tried a few, found one that fitted, and walked into Margie Crane's house.

***

P
iers Hemingway had finally escaped – after the meeting had settled on
A Woman's Magic
, Barney's first suggestion – and now he and Harlequin Sweetlips were walking along the Thames embankment, looking across at all those stern government buildings, which give that part of London an Eastern European feel. Chill evening but dry, still a few people abroad. You would think old Piers had nothing to worry about.

Sweetlips was dressed full on. High, Chinese neckline, all the appropriate bumps displayed to their best advantage, hair in a very, very erotic short black bob. The full femme fatale routine, and yet Hemingway just didn't see this coming. Too busy talking about himself. And the company.

'I'm working on this insurance portfolio at the moment. Total scam.'

'Your entire business is a scam,' she said, smiling her killer smile.

'Yeah, well, maybe. Anyway, it's called
Brazil
. The name means nothing, it's just a cool name they've given it so that they can use sun, sea and sex to sell it.'

'Good idea,' she said simply, and she held onto his arm a little more tightly, pressed her body up against his a little more closely, and laid her head on his shoulder, so that he felt like a man.

'Exactly. So I've come up with this great line.
Brazil: first it was a country, then it was a nut. Then it was a football team, next it was Terry Gilliam's motion picture event. Now, the Royal Bank of Scotland, in association with Picture Perfect Assurance brings you, Brazil, The Life Insurance Policy. For all those times when life's a beach.
'

She stopped. She looked at him. He finished, the smile on his face changed to a quizzical look.

'What?' he asked.

'You wrote that?' she asked.

'Sure, Babe.'

'That's so brilliant,' she gushed. 'I mean, really, you are so talented.'

Hemingway's smiled returned, his biggest smile ever. The poor fool, completely sucked in.

They started walking again.

'Yeah,' he said, 'I guess it is pretty amazing.'

And they laughed. Which was nice for Piers, seeing as he was about to die. Good to peg it with a smile on your face. There's not many of us will be able to say that.

At this point there were another fifteen people on the embankment in their close vicinity. However, none of them were actually watching the seemingly happy couple, the woman with the black hair, snuggled into the tall, gangling man, and so their eyewitness accounts of the ensuing events would be shaky.

'So, Miss Sweetlips,' said Hemingway, suddenly feeling imbued with the confidence of kings, 'how about heading back to my place and getting it on? I mean, no messing about, no foreplay, let's just do it.'

Sweetlips laughed. She was almost genuinely amused.

'Can't,' she said, however, with a damning finality.

He was curious. All part of the old game, he presumed.

'Why?'

''Cause,' she said, and she wrinkled her nose as if she was in a sitcom, 'I'm not a necrophiliac.'

He screwed his face up, just a few seconds behind the curve.

'But I'm not dead,' he said, rather stupidly.

The look on Sweetlips' face changed. Laughter to death in an instant. He could see it, right there, a witness to the transformation. The microwave equivalent of Jekyll into Hyde. And the horror rose in his throat, the sure and certain knowledge that he was about to die. And the cry that he ejaculated was deflated and cramped as the knife was brought up and thrust deep into his stomach, up under the rib cage and into his chest. His body jerked up with an awkward movement, his mouth opened and only a dull croak emerged. And then, continuing the flowing movement of it all, Sweetlips had him up and over the barrier, and within three seconds of her taking the knife from within her light summer coat, Hemingway's body was splashing heavily into the water.

She cried out for help, screaming, terrified because her boyfriend had fallen into the river. She screamed wonderfully well. The crowd gathered; none of them had seen a thing.

Hemingway's body floated face down in the water. Sweetlips screamed even louder. Two men jumped into the river to try and rescue him. In a frantic flurry of arms and legs they swam to the body. They lifted the head out of the water and started dragging him to the side.

And as they clumsily hauled the dead weight up onto some steps, and as the growing crowd of onlookers stared down and saw the knife embedded into his chest cavity, the screaming had stopped. And when, shocked and frightened, they looked round for the woman with the bobbed black hair who had been walking with the victim, they could not see her. For Harlequin Sweetlips had already moved on.

***

M
onk was back on the train one hour and fifty-three minutes later. She'd taken a call from Frankenstein telling her about the death on the Thames, a murder in early evening in a public place, that no one had witnessed; but she had been on the verge of leaving anyway.

Margie Crane's house had given up few secrets. That could possibly have been because someone else had already been there ahead of her. The house – a tastefully decorated affair of beautiful paintings, rococo sculptures, Moroccan rugs, elegant furniture, with shelves of original editions of classic literature – had been completely trashed. Impossible to tell if it had been done during a search or purely as an act of vandalism. But it had been a thorough job, the entire house laid waste. The effect had been presented as vandalism, with paintings unnecessarily slashed, sculptures needlessly shattered, wallpaper stripped. But that did not mean the whole was not there to hide the piecework; the minute detail that might have been searched for, and might have been found.

There were layers of dust on everything, a couple of months' worth of junk mail behind the door.

Monk had removed all the letters that might be remotely personal, had decided against calling the local Feds, and headed for New Street.

And as she sat on the train reading through the various pieces of correspondence, she discovered that Margie Crane had not been as dormant in the world of Thomas Bethlehem as Orwell had implied.

Amazing, she thought, that some of these people realised that the Royal Mail still existed.

––––––––

B
arney Thomson leaned his head back and stared at the ceiling. One day down as a marketing executive, who knew how many to go? How long would he last before he was drawn back to his life's natural place? More pointedly, how long before this whole thing came to a head and the purpose in his being dragged down to London became apparent?

Maybe it wasn't so much the manipulation of the hair of men that grabbed him; more the position of a barber, standing behind another man whilst clutching a sharp instrument which could, under other circumstances, be used to slit his throat or be plunged into his head. Total control, that was what you possessed as a barber. Total control without necessarily having any inherent self-confidence or ability.

Maybe he just felt the immediate pull back to the barber's chair because of habit; it was all he'd ever known.