The Barbershop Seven (145 page)

Minnie Longfellow-Moses
married
Dr Rebecca Blackadder
in Reno, Nevada. They were both killed when the Southern Californian lesbian commune in which they were living was stormed by the FBI, looking for Moon Landing Conspiracy Theorists.

Dr Herman Blackadder
is the Director of MI6.

Veron Veron
is living in London, working for Stella McCartney. He is unmarried, and still bears a tattoo of Minnie Longfellow-Moses on his spleen.

The Amazing Mr X
was picked up, as he hoped, by Hollywood. He was sacked from his position as personal bodyguard to Cameron Diaz for dressing in his employer's underwear. He is currently appearing in Oklahoma, off-Broadway.

James T Eaglehawk
was proven to be a shallow, cheating, conniving, ruthless, duplicitous, underhand, lying bastard. He transferred to the Westminster Labour government and is now Foreign Secretary.

Dr Louise Farrow
moved to St Andrews where she eventually married Prince William.

Parker Weirdlove
was arrested for the twenty year-old murder of Alan Davis. He was repeatedly gang raped in prison, until his release, when he became principal secular advisor to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.

Winona Wanderlip
was sentenced to ten years in jail for her part in the murder of Alan Davis. She escaped on her way to prison and fled to Beverly Hills, California. She was killed when the house in which she was living was stormed by the FBI, searching for New World Order Conspiracy Theorists.

Conrad Vogts
is Chancellor of Germany.

The Reverend Alison Blake
was tried for the murders of the eight cabinet ministers and found Not Proven. Unable to find employment with the Church of Scotland, she transferred to the Catholic Church and is now Archbishop of Argyll.

The Scottish Parliament
was closed down and all executive powers transferred back to Westminster. The beautiful £400m building, which grew out of the land, was turned into a Museum of Modern Art. It was later inadvertently burned down by council workers after being mistaken for a landfill site.

Barney Thomson
is walking the earth and getting in adventures. You can next read about him in the upcoming thriller,
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Barber
.

###

Published by Blasted Heath, 2012

copyright © 2006 Douglas Lindsay

First published in 2006 by Long Midnight Publishing

––––––––

J
onah Harrison was the kind of guy who twisted the seatbelt every time he sat in a car.

The town of Millport on the island of Cumbrae in the Firth of Clyde. 2:46 on a grey and bleak Monday afternoon in April. Jonah had been sitting at his laptop for three hours. On-line, fingers tapping. Awaiting the outcome of the 2.40 at Kempton Park. He was two thousand down on the day, nearly thirty thousand down on the year. January had been good, but he'd lost all his gains in one abysmal afternoon at Taunton in late February, and the six weeks since had been increasingly ugly. He was out of control, and the time he didn't spend at his computer was generally used to complete credit card applications. A few months earlier he'd had no interest in the horses whatsoever, but he'd been given a copy of
Seabiscuit: An American Legend
for Christmas, he'd devoured the book, and he'd immersed himself in horse racing ever since, uncovering a gambling addiction along the way. It's good to discover new interests in your later years, other than drooling and shouting at teenagers.

Jonah was also unhappily married, his wife was having an affair with the local Church of Scotland minister, and he had a small malignant tumour in his colon which was still some vicious wasting months short of making itself known.

However, none of that actually mattered as he was about to die on his way to taking a pish.

His legs were shaking under the desk; from the waist down he looked like Elvis. In fact, from the waist up he looked like Elvis. Circa '77, serious contender for the lead role in the upcoming Hollywood action flic,
Fat Bastardman
. No stranger to the buffet table, no alien at the fish and chip shop, doughnut poster child for the new millennium, it was Jonah who had eaten all the pies. He had been needing to go to the bathroom for over an hour, but had continually put if off, such was his obsession.

At 7-1,
Brother's Leap
had seemed a decent bet. He had placed well in a couple of previous outings at Goodwood Park and Thatcham, the ground suited him. So Jonah had gone for a clear thousand on the bet, in the hope of wiping off a quarter of the year's losses in one swoop.

He rose hurriedly from the desk, pushing the laptop away from him and finally logging off, as
Brother's Leap
trailed in ninth of ten. A month earlier the loss of a grand in one go would've had his insides curling up like a snake, but now it was nothing. Forget about it and get back on with the business. Only ever one click away from the next big score.

He walked briskly up the hall and pushed on the bathroom door. Locked. No surprise, as Ruth more or less lived in there. He knocked loudly.

'Ruthie, come on!'

Ruthie, however, was not about to escape the enslavement of the bathroom mirror, to which she was as much beholden as was he to the heirs of Seabiscuit.

'I'm still doing this,' she replied calmly, although she could tell from the peculiar quality of his voice that he must be desperate.

'Ruthie!' he ejaculated.

'You bursting?' she asked calmly, while applying Duraglut Face Cement to the canyons in her cheeks.

'Aye!' he called, hopping pathetically from one leg to the next, 'I am bursting. Are you done?'

She paused, keeping Jonah at his barn dance shindig for another few seconds, while her mind drifted to the Reverend Dreyfus, a delicious man of upstanding character.

'No,' she said eventually. 'Go and pee in the kitchen sink.'

He banged his fist against the door to accompany the heartfelt exasperated grunt. Leant his head against it for a second, before quickly accepting his fate.

He turned hurriedly and broke into a run over the five yards of the upstairs landing. The stairs were steep, not to be taken in a rush and certainly not by the man who'd eaten all the curry. On top of which Jonah had his weak ankles to think about.

He blundered down the first few steps much too quickly. His ankle gave way – didn't break or anything, just twisted round as if someone was ringing water from it – and he pitched forward. Twenty-two and a half stones of unsightly animal blubber flew through the air. He landed on his head on the step fifth from the bottom. Ought, at least, to have stopped himself with his arms, but they were too busy flailing around trying to grab at banisters. And while his ankle had survived the twist without breaking, his neck was not so fortunate. Sudden rupture of the top of the spinal cord, the neck buckled and snapped, slight crunching of bone, and less than a second later his full weight thundered onto the bottom of the steps and down onto the floor.

The house shook.

In the bathroom, Ruth Harrison watched the gin ripple in her glass. She glanced at the door, waiting for the tyrannosaur. When it didn't appear, she looked back at the mirror and continued her in-depth study of the latest blackhead in the collection.

In death, Jonah Harrison's bladder held firm and there was a certain serene beauty about his squashed and pudgy cheeks.

***

T
he other death occurred not on that day, but on a Monday afternoon almost thirty years previously, during the long, hot summer of '76. Water shortages, ice cream wars and grass parched a very pale brown.

Azarael Corinthian was the kind of man who had been bred for great things, his entire life pointing in one direction, to one great end. A life that involved many secrets and a lot of waiting. And so, naturally, he had rebelled through most of his life and had reached his mid-thirties with none of the required poise and maturity which had been expected of him.

He had been brought up in Millport and had a robust contempt for the place. Yet even though both of his parents were dead by that summer and he had no other family on the island, something brought him back there every year. Some dedication to duty perhaps, which found its way out, no matter how deeply buried it was in his subconscious.

That summer he returned to Millport after having spent the better part of seven months in Las Vegas. Too much gambling, although it had surprisingly all but evened itself out over the piece, too many women, too much alcohol, too much junk food, too many nights spent in luxurious hotel rooms with expensive drugs and prostitutes.

He had come to Millport to dry out and reconnect with his past. Unfortunately his immediate past of cocaine and burgers and cigarettes and vodka had more of a connection. After three days on the island he had decided that he was feeling good enough about himself to take some light exercise. He had started with the time honoured Millport tradition of cycling leisurely around the island, which had been straightforward. However, he had then made the unsound judgement call that he could go for a short run in the afternoon up to the top of the hill at the centre of the island, from where one can look west down over the golf course to the hills of Bute and Arran, and north back up the firth to the mountains of Argyll, and east and south to the mainland.

He never made it to the top of the hill, instead suffering a severe heart attack on the way up. It was at least twenty minutes before a car passed by to stop for a look at the prone body and by the time he had been taken to the small hospital at the foot of the hill, it had been too late. Azarael Corinthian was dead at the age of thirty-six, and the unhappy world of at least a few other people would be thrown into turmoil.

––––––––

'T
hink of a new way to commit murder.'

Everything was new in the room although it had the appearance of senescence. The dark brown leather had been sprayed to give mustiness, the books had been coated in dust. Out of town visitors to the house thought it early Victorian. James Randolph knew better, having seen the house grow stone by stone, but he was impressed with the feel of it. Why build in today's style, which would be outdated in a decade, when you could create a house which looked like it had been part of the landscape for a hundred and fifty years?

But a new method of murder? That was far more interesting.

'Define new.' said Randolph. 'A new implement of death or a new way to extinguish life?'

Bartholomew Ephesian stood with his back to Randolph, looking out over the Clyde. The Isle of Bute was dull and grey across the water, the mountains of Arran mostly shrouded in cloud. The sea was restless and for the moment there wasn't a single boat to be seen. Ephesian glanced at the small clock on the mantleshelf. Quarter to three. Quarter to eleven in Hong Kong, and he wondered how many women Ping Phat would be in bed with at that moment.

'A new implement means nothing,' he said, making a small gesture with his glass. 'You could kill someone with a candy bar. I'm talking about something much more fundamental, something far more intrinsic to human life. A cardinal death.'

'You'd need to know medicine,' said Randolph.

Ephesian turned for the first time in ten minutes, gave Randolph the benefit of his eyebrow, and looked away. Never actually looked Randolph straight in the eye.

Had Bartholomew Ephesian been born in the 1990s, he would have been taken to a psychologist and would have been quickly diagnosed as having some condition which had recently come into vogue in the United States. However, he'd been born into a wealthy family in the west end of Glasgow just after the second war, and so he'd just been marked down as another gifted but spoiled kid. Couldn't relate to his classmates, got into too many fights, and could multiply one thousand three hundred and forty-one by eight hundred and seventy-six in under a second. However, much more than most, his personality and behavioural patterns had dominated and shaped his life. From his need to self-employment from an early age, to a total inability to relate to the one woman who had ever loved him, his existence had been dominated by a continuing effort to find a space in amongst everyone else in the world.

'And how would you know it was entirely original?' Randolph added. 'You have access to Scotland Yard files? FBI? Interpol?'

This time Ephesian didn't turn. Randolph had felt amused by his own question but he found the silence disconcerting. He could see the gulls circling above the water, could hear their doleful cries; the sound of the sea, waves on the shore far below. Intimidation by silence, against the weakness of spirit which allowed one to be thus intimidated; the polarisation between the two men. Ephesian had power, even if, to those in the town, it did not seem to extend much beyond the small bays and the shops along the shorefront of Millport. Randolph was a man who lived in a house by the boatyard, with little else to define him.

'Yes,' said Ephesian, looking out to sea, 'as a matter of fact I do.'

Randolph felt a dryness in his mouth. He should have known better than to try and engage Ephesian in any kind of verbal exchange. A discussion about garden weeds was likely to leave him feeling as if he had a death threat hanging over him.

'Imagination,' said Ephesian coldly. 'That's what's required.'

'How long do I have?' Randolph asked quickly. Get it over with, abrupt retreat, and he could be back in the sanctuary of his own garden in five minutes.

Ephesian turned slowly. He swallowed the remnants of the glass and placed it carefully on the desk.

'Midnight Wednesday,' he said, looking at a point somewhere to Randolph's right, his eyes falling on a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson's
The Merry Men
.

'Two days?' said Randolph, weakly.

'I'm glad you can count.'