The Barbershop Seven (234 page)

***

A
nd all the time he sat beside Daniella Monk, running his fingers through her hair, Harlequin Sweetlips stood across the road, looking up at the window. The curtains were drawn, and from down there she would not have been able to see in any case, but she stood and watched. Feeling rejected, feeling usurped, and feeling that maybe it was about time that something was done about Barney Thomson.

––––––––

B
arney let Monk sleep long into the morning. Even dug out her cell phone and switched it off. Changed the clocks in the sitting room and also her watch, so that when she awoke she didn't dash up and fly around in a mad panic.

She woke at a little after midday to find Barney sitting looking at her. Cloudy day outside, no way to tell that the sun was high in the sky. Checked her watch, looked curiously at Barney, shook her head to clear the fug.

'It's before eight?' she asked.

'Aye,' said Barney. Had spent the laziest of lazy Sunday mornings sitting beside her, reading the Observer, finding it hard to look at the paper.

'Feel like I've been asleep for days,' she said. 'I should get going.'

'Aye,' said Barney. 'Have a shower first. I've laid out a towel and a clean shirt.'

Gave him a look, felt some of the feelings she suddenly remembered extinguishing just before falling asleep.

'Thanks.'

'No problem. Go, get on with it. You'll be late for work.'

She nodded, stood up, stretched and walked from the sitting room.

***

'F
eels later than eight-twenty,' she said, as they walked down the stairs, she to head into the station, Barney to go into the centre of town. Walk in a park, do whatever, didn't want to sit around his flat all day.

'It is,' said Barney.

'Go on.'

He got to the bottom, held the inner door open for her, then the outer. Once outside, she felt the plain early-afternoon-ness of the day.

'Jesus, Barney,' she said, 'what time are we talking here?'

'Twenty past twelve.'

'What? God, Barney, you're kidding me?'

'You needed the sleep,' he said, not in the least defensively.

'What time is it? Really?' she asked, looking at her watch again. Started digging out her phone.

'It's twelve-twenty,' said Barney. 'I know you're going to get your arse kicked, but you're exhausted. You're not going to be able to work anything out when you've not slept enough.'

Arrived at the car, saw the time on her phone, checked for messages, found the most recent of seven, all of which were from the station.
Whr fck ru?

'God, Barney, you're not my mother. Jesus. We're in the middle of the biggest investigation in London in years.'

'It's fine,' said Barney, exuding the air of a Jedi master. No way for him to know it was going to be fine. In fact, it pretty definitely wasn't going to be fine, but with events about to take the turn that they were, she was more or less going to be excused being five hours late for the office.

'Fuck,' she said. Didn't have the words for the level of exasperation she was feeling. 'I'm dead.'

'It's cool,' said Barney. 'Could you give me a lift?'

She did a bit of a girlie squeal thing, about which she immediately felt embarrassed, then opened up and got into the car. Started up, barely giving Barney time to get in, squealed the tyres, drove off.

'I don't believe this,' she said. 'You switched my mobile off?'

'Aye.'

'And what have you done all morning?' she asked.

'Went through your bag, sat and watched you like some deranged serial killer. Nothing much, but I had fun.'

She tried to stop herself smiling at him, turned a corner too fast, tyres screeched again, nearly hit an oncoming white van.

'Monk, you're late,' said Barney. 'Accept it, don't die.'

Still felt like she was sitting next to her mother, but was aware of her foot lifting a fraction from the accelerator. Able to stop at the next junction without a scream of brakes. Tapped her fingers on the steering wheel waiting for an old geezer to crawl out into the traffic.

'Who was she?' asked Monk, thinking she might as well get that particular part of the evening out into the open.

Barney pursed his lips. Monk was the real thing; don't start with a lie.

'Picked her up in a bar the other night. Maybe she picked me up, hard to tell. Went out to dinner last night. Poons.'

'Oh, yeah, what did you have?' asked Monk, trying to be normal. She liked Poons, hadn't been there in a couple of years. Not since she'd split with Maurice. God, there'd been a guy. Well, a Muppet, more than a guy.

'We both had duck,' said Barney. 'Not the same dish.' Mundane chat, a necessary rehabilitator. Still, had to get on with the facts. 'Anyway, back to my place for coffee, she left. Bit awkward at the end. I don't really get women sometimes. We weren't looking for the same thing.'

'Who is she?' asked Monk, getting out onto the main road on the back of the old geezer, and receiving a hefty honk from a BMW. Wanted to ask about sex, didn't feel able to yet.

Barney thought about Sweetlips. What did he actually know, and what did he want to tell Monk?

'To be honest, I'm not really sure.'

She looked at him, too long really, what with her driving a car in heavy traffic. Could've been Cary Grant in a '50s Hitchcock drama, until Barney gave a little nod with his eyebrows, and she turned back just in time to veer around a stationary yellow Daf 7T lorry.

'Crap,' she said, as she moved into the outside lane and automatically slowed a little further.

'You mess with my head,' she muttered. 'Just don't talk to me until you tell me where you want dropped off.'

Barney smiled, rested his head back on the seat. Closed his eyes. He was tired. Had been awake all night. A preposterous night. A few hours with Harlequin Sweetlips and a few hours with Daniella Monk. A bizarre night for him to have. Barney Thomson and two women. Amused him, made him uncomfortable at the same time. Maybe he needed to escape from this just as much as he needed to escape from the insane firm of marketing consultants.

His eyes shot open. Had he been asleep?

He looked at Monk, who was staring straight ahead, expressionless. He stared along the road, suddenly aware that there was something wrong, his sixth sense rocketing from nought to sixty.

He looked over his shoulder, the hairs starting to rise on the back of his neck. Monk picked up on his agitation, took a quick glance at him.

'What?' she said.

'Don't know,' he said. 'There's something.'

He looked through the trees in the park to their left, turned and glanced up at the windows of the houses across from the park.

'What? Come on, Barney, you're freaking me out.'

The moped appeared beside them, overtaking on the outside. They both turned at the same time.

The rider was a slender figure dressed in black leather, with an old-fashioned helmet and dark goggles. Long brown hair flowed beautifully from beneath the helmet. The head turned towards them. Barney and Monk were transfixed. Beneath the goggles the lips, the full red lips, sweet and gorgeous, parted in a wide smile.

'Is that her?' said Monk. Knew it was. Feelings scattered between loathing and anger, disdain and fear. Not fear, terror.

The black helmet nodded curtly in brief acknowledgment of them. They couldn't see the eyes, yet they transfixed them. Dark pools, invisible behind the goggles, yet they stared crazily into their depths.

The rider lifted her right hand from the bars and pointed forwards. Monk looked round.

Monk's car, travelling at forty-three miles per hour, smacked into the back of a stationary Volvo.

The car crumpled. Barney Thomson and Detective Sergeant Daniella Monk went from forty-three miles per hour to stationary in a fraction of a second.

The wreckage sprayed into the air in a tumult of noise, crashing metal, air bags and wrecked body parts.

Body parts. Car and human.

The small moped with the rider in black, accelerated along the road, evading the flying wreckage, turned a corner and was lost to the early London afternoon.

***

O
rwell looked down on the Thames from his position on the tenth floor. Back in work, nowhere else to go. Wondering about Bethlehem for a rare few minutes, rather than Taylor Bergerac. Had received a text message that morning, as long-winded as Bethlehem's usually were. The man had studied English at Cambridge, and you knew from his texting that he couldn't bring himself to write abbreviated or bad prose.

I will be returning tomorrow late afternoon. Assemble whoever is left for a five-thirty, although just the main players, not the pond life. Recruited new Head Of Other Contracts; do not, repeat do not fill that position yourself. Alert Waugh. She will be coming with me. Lay out the red carpet. Bethlehem.

Orwell lifted his phone and read the message for the eighth time. How long must it have taken the man to write that? For someone so switched on, he had so many bizarre little foibles and eccentricities. Maybe they were all like that.

He turned away from the river and sat down once more at his desk. The laptop had switched to the screensaver he'd had made up of Taylor Bergerac's face, bouncing around from side to side. He'd spent the morning firing off another barrage of exceptionally cool material, guaranteed to get her back over here and guaranteed to get her to reveal this big gesture she had talked about. It had taken a lot to get his mind off it, but the message from Bethlehem had been enough.

Bethlehem had had nothing to do with recruitment in all Orwell's time there, yet here he was out of the blue, recruiting into the marketing positions. Must have known that everyone else was scheming in his absence, so he was defending his corner. At least Waugh wouldn't be able to get his hands on the position of Head of Other Contracts, as he might have done. Better that the power lay with the devil he knew, the one he'd been preparing to deal with.

But a woman, what was he thinking? There'd never been a place for women in this company, not since Margie Crane. And the red carpet?

Had a sudden moment of realisation, that the time spent on Taylor Bergerac should really have been spent on strengthening his position in the company in the last few days. A lot of Bethlehem's men were gone, it would've been the perfect opportunity to manoeuvre his own troops into good positions. But he'd been preoccupied, and now he was battling Waugh as much as Bethlehem.

Orwell looked at Taylor Bergerac's beautiful head pinging around the monitor, and the moment of realisation was gone. When she was his, and all his efforts had paid off, he would then have the confidence and power to attack the company from all sides.

Still looking at her face, he folded his arms, slouched down into his seat and rested his chin on his chest.

***

T
here was the stillness of the battlefield after the last shell has been sent down, after the last bullet has been fired. After the last soldier has died. The hubcaps had stopped rolling, the glass had stopped tinkling to the ground, the noise of bending, catastrophically collapsed metal had ceased.

Steam rose silently from in amongst the morass of the two cars into the chill winter's afternoon. The Volvo had been parked, unoccupied. Of the two occupants of the Peugeot, one of them had been saved by the airbag, although bruised and hurt and traumatised. The other had not been so fortunate, if to survive would have been any kind of fortune. Head on chest, blood running from the mouth, the body limp and smashed and broken, tangled up and mangled in an horrendously peculiar position.

A bloody and horrible death.

––––––––

'W
hat the fuck's it all about? That's the fucking question.'

Monk stared blankly at the end of the bed, as she had been doing for most of the last thirty minutes. There weren't many parts of her body which she could move.

DCI Frankenstein was very exercised about the fact that there had been an attempt made on her life, because that was how he saw this. Black and white. The woman who had been killing members of the BF&C clan, had come after one of the investigating officers. Logically she might well have been going after the barber turned executive at the company, but in the change of modus operandi, Frankenstein detected a change in strategy. The killer, or whoever was behind the killer, was coming after the investigating officer.

Monk wasn't so sure and was solely exercised by the fact that Barney Thomson, the man she thought that she would love, was dead.

She had already made her mind up on the matter of where the threat might have come from, but was too confused to have any real idea what it meant. Had not voiced her thoughts to Frankenstein, but she had barely spoken to him since he had arrived. Disinclined to begin with, his opening words of, 'Your friend's head was squashed like a cabbage,' had not encouraged her to get involved in the conversation.

'Don't know,' she mumbled.

She had been driving the car. She was the one who had been distracted. Barney Thomson had died because she had caused the car to crash. The face behind the mask, the mask of goggles and lipstick, what had that meant? A distraction. A fatal distraction. But there was no point in blaming her. She had not made Monk look away from the road. She had not forced Monk to be so inattentive.

Daniella Monk was not part of the new millennium's blame culture. She did not believe that everything could be pinned on someone else. She did not believe that she had been held by pure force of evil to keep her eyes off the road. She was at fault and Barney Thomson was dead because of her.

Frankenstein burbled on, unaware.

'Jesus, they'll go after anyone these days. And in our line of work, there're so many bastards out to get us, when it does happen, it's impossible to tell who's responsible.'

Monk nodded. Not that impossible, not if you had seen the look on the face of that woman, the eyes behind the goggles. The woman who held the door open for her the night before as she entered the building at Barney's house. The face that had smiled at her from the black moped.