The Barbershop Seven (230 page)

'All right, all right, I can be off duty for half an hour.'

'I don't mind,' he said, as Cheyenne the Happy Waitress appeared beside them and placed Barney's food and Monk's drink on the table.

'Is everything all right for you, sir?'

'Thanks,' said Barney.

'You're welcome,' she chanted. 'Enjoy your meal.'

And off she scuttled to check on the progress of the pair of salmon tagliatelles.

'So, you getting anywhere?' he asked.

'You can start,' she said, in response to his reluctance to lift his cutlery. 'If you give me some of that garlic bread.'

'Sure,' he said, and they tucked in.

'We're pretty shagged,' she said, in reply to the question about whether or not they were getting anywhere, as opposed to the fact that they were now destined to prematurely run out of garlic bread.

'Nothing?'

'Got a couple of things, but they're a little suspect. We have a suspicious set of fingerprints, but we're not sure what we can do with them yet.'

'And the other?' he asked.

She hesitated. Shouldn't really go discussing police business with an outsider, and in particular one who worked at the company where all the murders were being committed. And someone who might be a suspect. Who really ought to be a suspect.

Still, talking to Frankenstein was like talking to the old brick wall, so where else did she have to go? Going on her familiar gut feeling, she knew well that Barney wasn't one of them across the road, one of that crowd. He was even more out of place in there than she was.

'What do you know about Margie Crane?' she asked.

'The name on the door?' he asked in reply.

'Yeah.'

'Nowt,' he said, which didn't surprise her in the least. 'I've heard her name mentioned, along with the other guy, but that's it. She back on the scene?'

'Quite the reverse,' said Monk. 'She's disappeared, no one's heard from her in over two months. Checked with South Midlands CID. She lives in Birmingham. Reported missing in the middle of January. Nothing since then. Checked out her apartment. It'd been trashed.'

'Connected to this?' asked Barney.

'She'd been getting letters from several employees at the company. Weird shit, difficult to follow. Coded, presumably. No idea what she was up to. Started something, and then just walked away from it. Or was dragged away from it.'

'Who sends letters anymore?' asked Barney. 'Particularly this lot, the poster children of the text generation.'

'Exactly,' said Monk.

And, as if by magic, but actually by the hand of Cheyenne, the first lot of salmon tagliatelle arrived on a golden plate and was deposited on the table with the usual rounds of obeisance.

'Enjoy your meal,' said Cheyenne.

'I'm going to take a sample of this,' said Monk, 'and have it analysed, and if there's so much as a trace of saliva in it, I'm coming back and shutting this place down.'

A hesitation, and then the lizard-tongue hand of Cheyenne crept out, slowly removed the plate, and she was gone. Without so much as an 'I'll be right back, madam'.

'So who was actually sending the letters?' Barney asked, more specifically.

Monk paused again, tapped her fork on the table wishing she had some pasta to put it in, then once more plunged into discussing the investigation with someone to whom she really ought not to be talking. Someone who had a couple of hours previously, after all, happily suggested that his fellows commit murder.

'Fitzgerald,' said Monk, then after a pause, 'and Hemingway.'

Barney raised his eyebrows. 'Cool,' he said, 'the deceased. Any others? You know who's going to be next?'

'Three more,' she said, and she stopped, thinking that she really, really ought not to divulge any more information. They had already assigned officers to watch over the three remaining individuals who had gone on this new list of potential victims; assuming that there was some link between the murders and the letters to Crane, which they had no reason to actually suspect at all.

'Orwell, Waugh and Wodehouse,' she said, unable to stop her mouth. An age-old problem. Got her into no end of trouble in the past.

'Ah,' said Barney. 'What about the master?'

'Bethlehem? Nothing.'

'So have you told the happy trio that they're potentially next in line?'

Monk shook her head, took a long drink, ice cubes freezing against her teeth.

'Talked to each of them about Crane, nothing specific. Might not be linked, but they're all lying about having had any contact with her. Not sure how to play it yet. Anyway, we've got the three guys covered, so we should be all right. And if we're lucky, they'll lead us to her.'

'Why are you telling me?' asked Barney, interrupting the flow of non-essential information.

'Good question, Barney Thomson,' she said, and she looked deep into his eyes to give him the answer, which he'd known anyway, even before he'd asked the question. She was feeling the same thing he was. A real connection between them, instant and honest, a connection that would go beyond the need for conversation.

'Apart from this thing that appears to be going on between us ... ' she began.

'You think there's a thing?'

'You don't?' she asked, undaunted.

He smiled and shrugged. Of course there was a thing.

'Apart from this, you're a curiosity, and you're involved in this in some way whether you like it or not. You're not down here because you were summoned by the Devil.'

Barney hesitated, his fork at his lips, then started eating again. Didn't look her in the eye.

'So,' she continued, 'we haven't put these three guys in the picture yet. No point in frightening them.'

'They wouldn't be frightened,' said Barney. 'They think they're invincible. Supermen one and all.'

'What on earth are you doing there?' she asked. 'And I don't mean, just as that idiotic marketing executive. Why aren't you just working in some shop somewhere, doing what you do?'

Barney tucked into some more pizza. Shrugged. No real answer.

'Just walking the earth, getting in adventures,' he said.

'No wife, no kids, no mortgage?'

'Pretty much. Every day is a blank page.'

She looked into his eyes, swallowing up everything that they gave away. Took another drink, using the glass to cover her face.

'What's that like?'

Cheyenne appeared beside them, armed to the teeth with what was the second of the two salmon tagliatelles, which she placed in front of Monk.

'Enjoy your meal,' she intoned.

'I'll also check for all other foreign substances which would not normally be present in a fish pasta dish with a cream sauce.'

Cheyenne gave Monk a blank stare. 'Enjoy your meal,' she said, although this time she delivered the time-honoured catchphrase with all the malice she could convoke, and then turned on her heels and made for another table.

'It's a mixed bag,' said Barney. 'Like everything else. There's nothing with a good side that doesn't have its bad.'

'Yeah,' she said. 'I know about that.'

And she finally got to take her first mouthful of salmon tagliatelle, which was damned fine, and then she looked at her watch and realised that she had twenty-seven minutes to get back to the station for that afternoon's briefing, which was going to be a bit of a struggle.

'Shit,' she said.

'Got to go?'

'Yeah. Shit,' and she quickly crammed in two more mouthfuls and reached inside her jacket.

'I'll get it,' said Barney. 'On you go.'

She hesitated, nodded, forked a final mouthful, downed some of her drink.

'Cheers,' she said. 'Sorry. Next time.'

'Aye,' said Barney.

And Monk was gone, leaving Barney Thomson alone with a mid-Pacific pizza and the remainder of the pasta.

He was just contemplating his current state of affairs, and affairs seemed the appropriate word, when Cheyenne appeared at the table once again, clutching the second lot of cola/pasta in her hot little hands. She looked quizzically at Barney, having noticed Monk's dash for the door.

'I'll eat 'em,' he said, and Cheyenne smiled, feeling more comfortable with the man alone, and edged the condiments out of the way to place the plate on the table.

'Is there anything else I can get for you, Sir?' she asked, smiling.

'I'm fine, thanks,' said Barney, and Cheyenne, teeth bared to the world, turned and went about her business.

––––––––

J
ude Orwell was a man on a mission; the mission codenamed
Get Into Taylor Bergerac's Pants
. Not that it was a great codename. In fact, it was more of a mission statement than a codename.

That morning had seen his latest round of cool moves. Firstly, a change of billboard outside her house – this time a giant poster of him, standing on a beach, sun-tanned and be-muscled in nothing but a g-string, looking out to sea at a glorious computer-enhanced sunset. In fact, the entire picture had been constructed by computer, as underneath the $2,000 suits, Jude Orwell was a bit of a pasty weasel. Happy enough to deal with the problem of what Bergerac would think when she finally saw him naked, when the time came.

He had also covered her route from home to work in many more posters, including space on the back of buses and taxis using the route, outlining in a variety of ways his qualities as an all-round top bloke. It'd cost a lot at such short notice, but Orwell had money and he knew which strings had to be pulled to get things done in London. The fact that he was spending so much time on it, while his executives were murdered and others plotted against him, was an irritation, but he imagined that Bergerac would succumb at any moment, and then he could return to the main business of exploiting the difficulties suddenly thrust upon BF&C to his own advantage.

To add to the billboard overkill, he'd also developed the strategy of the previous day a little further, in terms of e-mail, gifts and a singing ensemble to greet her in the morning. This time he arranged for an acoustic four-piece to do a kind of REM
Automatic For The People
-esque paean on how miserable his life would be without Bergerac in it, although once more they only managed to get to the end of the first line –
Jude Orwell and the game of life, yeah, yeah, yeah
– before she had them forcibly removed from her immediate vicinity. Taylor Bergerac had seen enough. It was time to have a little chat.

***

I
nto the lion's den came Harlequin Sweetlips. Actually, given that she was the lion, she was in fact walking into the wildebeest's den. Yet she felt a little threatened in the offices of Bethlehem, Forsyth & Crane, surrounded as she was in her perception, by enemies.

Saturday afternoon, and strangely it was business as usual at BF&C. The troops were rallying to the beleaguered cause. Appointments arranged, the stout men and few women of the firm giving up their weekend to aid the infirm firm. And so, as Sweetlips entered the dragon's lair, Imelda was sitting straight-backed and efficient at her desk, doing a variety of things on her PC, and there were two others in the exceptionally sterile waiting area. One was a potential client, oblivious to the traumatic events at the company, and keen to enlist Jude Orwell's help in recruiting more people to join MI6. (Their previous three campaigns under the slogans
You No Longer Have To Keep It A Secret
;
Just 'Cause You're A Lager-Drinking Ned Doesn't Mean We Won't Take You;
and
Just Imagine How Cool You'll Sound When You're Chatting Up Birds Down The Boozer
, had failed to catch on, and the department was suffering a bit of a recruitment crisis.) The other in the waiting room was a potential new employee, still not finished his final year at Cambridge, but Waugh had heard news of him and had dragged him down for a chat with the promise of an enormous starting package.

Harlequin Sweetlips gave them the once over, pegged them both for what they were, then approached Imelda, who in turn immediately blanked her screen.

'Good afternoon,' said Imelda, with her usual amount of reserve when approached by an attractive woman.

'Hi,' said Sweetlips, who had met Imelda before on any number of occasions, but who today was wearing a fetching, and entirely convincing blonde wig and dark glasses, with her face clarted in enough product to mask the most recognisable face on the planet. Whoever that might be. Imelda couldn't spot Harlequin Sweetlips coming, not from two damned feet. 'I have an appointment to see Barney Thomson.'

Imelda looked unsure, aware of no such appointment, checked the appropriate list to make sure, then turned back to Sweetlips, shaking her head.

'I'm sorry, I don't have a note of any appointments for Mr. Thomson this afternoon. What did you say your name was?'

'Sweetlips,' said Sweetlips, and as always, Imelda was drawn to look at her lips, and while not recognising them as belonging to anyone she knew, at least recognised that they were indeed sweet. 'Harlequin Sweetlips,' Sweetlips breathed, in a way that oozed sex, even to members of her own sex who'd never considered having sex breathed at them by a woman.

Imelda shivered, felt a little disconcerted and tapped through to Barney's office.

'Just hold on a second, please,' she said, this time unable to look Sweetlips in the eye. Sweetlips, the brutal bastard, kept her eyes on Imelda the whole time, daring her to return the stare.

'Aye?' said Barney, lifting the phone.

'There's a Harlequin Sweetlips here to see you, Mr Thomson,' said Imelda. 'Says she has an appointment.'

Barney sat forward in his chair, having been, to be honest, almost asleep when the phone rang. Heating up high in his office, no meetings organised, he, at least, was wondering what he was doing there when he could be sitting at home trying to stop himself falling asleep. Head wandering through various conversations he could have with Daniella Monk; and some ideas already concocted and written out in preparation for the next group therapy session, masquerading as a promotional meeting. Barney was on top of things, so that the announcement of Harlequin Sweetlips was a bit of a jolt to the system. He was awake now. He hadn't learned the name of his brief encounter at the bar, but he knew this would be her.