The Barbershop Seven (218 page)

'The company is awesome,' he continued, as she was giving him some space. He was warming to his subject, building to the climax that would result in his evening's conquest. 'We are totally going to be kings. That's why you're making a good move, babe. Bethlehem is good, Orwell's good, but you and me together, we can be better than any of them.'

'Still,' she said, the smile a little more wicked than before, 'only the eighth biggest in Britain at the moment.'

'Seventh,' he said. 'Three years ago we weren't in the top twenty. Now we're kicking butt. Thomas for sure, but all of us. Another two years and we'll be up there, especially with you and me at the helm.'

She ran her finger along her bottom lip. A fine final eruption of enthusiasm from the lad Fitzgerald, she thought, and now presumably he will make his move. Good luck to him.

Fitzgerald incorrectly read the whole finger along the lip thing, but that was inevitable, given that had he known the true agenda of Harlequin Sweetlips it was pretty much a dead cert that he wouldn't have invited her to dinner.

'It's time,' he said. She nodded.

His hand shot out. He grabbed her roughly by the hair, and brought her head forward so that their faces met across the table. His tongue plunged into her mouth. Her head twitched, her lips matched his, she took it for a few seconds, then bit hard onto his tongue.

His head shot back, surprise on his face, tasting blood in his mouth, but the smile broader than before, the pain flaming his desire. He loved pain; loved it when they fought back.

'Hey!' he said. 'That was brutal.'

She didn't say anything. Her eyes blazed.

'Let's do it,' he said, leaning forward again.

She nodded her head slowly.

'Yeah,' she said. 'Let's.'

She lifted her empty wine glass and held it up to show him, as if offering it for a toast. He looked at her quizzically, assuming she had some weird sexual thing in mind. But when she moved it was with speed and grace, an almost balletic quality to the motion.

She brought the wine glass down on the edge of the table, so that the cup snapped off with a loud crack at the top of the stem and spiralled into the air, then in the same flowing movement she brought the stem up and plunged it into his right eye, through the ball and deep into the socket, forcing it in the full six inches, so that the base of the glass rested up against his face.

The initial spurt of blood was arrested by the bottom of the glass, so that as Fitzgerald pitched forward, his head thudding noisily on the table, the blood squirmed uneasily from underneath the glass and began to spread across the white table cloth, which had up until now only been despoiled by a smidge of blette.

Then she caught the cup on its downward spiral.

She drained the dregs from the glass, pushed her chair back and rose to her feet. She looked down at the back of Fitzgerald's head, the blood now spreading to contaminate his Harvey Nicholls smart but casual.

'Brunoise of scallops,' she said softly. 'Pretentious little shit.'

And with that, Sweetlips lifted her bag, took out the small kit she had brought along to wipe the scene clear of evidence while planting more evidence along the way, and got to work.

***

T
hree-thirty in the morning and Fitzgerald's place was a throng of Feds. The scenes of crime officers were doing their bit. Taking prints, picking up hairs with tweezers, doing the DNA thing.

The body was where it had sat for just under six hours. Prints had been taken from the bottom of the wine glass, but the stem had still to be removed from the eye socket. Harlequin Sweetlips had added a new set of fingerprints to the mix, and so the SOCOs were in the process of collecting them from a variety of different places around the house.

The officer in charge of the investigation – having been dragged from a mundane assault along the bottom end of the Tottenham Court Road – Detective Chief Inspector Frank Frankenstein, 43, stood over the corpse.

'Hugo Fitzgerald,' said Daniella Monk, looking at the few notes that she had made since arriving in the apartment ten minutes prior to her boss. 'Thirty-three. Worked for a firm of marketing consultants just along the river. Bethlehem, Forsyth & Crane. Pretty big, apparently. Unmarried. Member of the MCC.'

'Jesus,' said Frankenstein.

'None of your prejudices,' she said.

'Zip it, Danno,' said Frankenstein. 'What else?'

'Not much. Did you know you could get Endive & Beetroot scented shampoo?' she asked.

Frankenstein grunted. 'Sounds like a packet of crisps,' he said gruffly.

'Big into Bulgarian folk music,' she added.

'Oh, for God's sake,' said Frankenstein.

'Apart from that, nothing. The flat's all show and no substance.'

Frankenstein let out a long sigh, then straightened his back, as his sergeant was always telling him to do to get rid of the humph, and stretched his arms out wide. As soon as he had done it, however, his mind moved on and the humph returned. He looked around the room.

'All show, no substance. Not often you see that these days,' he said glibly. 'What the hell do marketing consultants do anyway?'

Frankenstein was in his second year with the Metropolitan Police, having transferred from Strathclyde. Unusually amongst his colleagues, he enjoyed his work. However, he still hadn't got used to London. Every day he thought about going home.

'They're the people who decide what kind of chocolate bar we're all going to like next year,' said Monk. 'It's because of them you get miniature Mars Bars, wipes for absolutely everything on the planet and limited edition packets of crisps.'

'Ah,' said Frankenstein. 'That's good. At least one of them's dead.'

And with that he turned his back on Monk and the corpse, and began to walk from the apartment.

'I take it you know where to find the offices of Bethlehem, Humpty & Dumpty?' he threw over his shoulder.

'Yeah,' she said, in his wake.

'We'll go there in the morning,' he said. 'I'm going to bed. Expect you'll be wanting to get back to Sergeant Khan.'

'Dumped him,' she said.

Frankenstein grunted. 'About bloody time,' he said, as he pulled open the front door, before stepping back with some annoyance, as another three SOCOs entered to continue their intelligence gathering activities.

––––––––

B
arney Thomson awoke suddenly, bolt upright in bed, looking around the room, trying to remember who and where he was. Almost thirty seconds of confusion, a strange divine madness of having no idea to his identity or location, and then the already chaotic noise of the buses and other traffic outside weaved its way insidiously into his head, and he remembered London and he remembered haircutting and the offices of Bethlehem, Forsyth & Crane.

He let his head fall back onto the pillow, ran his hand through his hair, which he'd had cut very short. A long breath. Recognised the uneasy feeling that had dragged him from a deep sleep. Another of the dreams that constantly troubled him, although all recollection of it had gone. Closed his eyes, tried to see where he had just come from, but the dreams were always impossible to get back. Maybe this time there had been something more.

He shivered, a violent shudder throughout his body, and he opened his eyes again seeking daylight. Swung his legs out from under the sheets, sat on the edge of the bed, feet on the floor.

Murder. There had been murder.

Or was that just London on any given night? Of course there had been murder. But this was close to home, this was going to have been someone he knew. It was starting again. It followed him everywhere he went, his eternal curse. He hadn't even been able to escape it by dying, couldn't escape it by running from town to town, city to city, couldn't escape it by settling down in small town Scotland. Didn't even have to be told that it had started, he instinctively knew.

'What did I do to deserve this?' he said bitterly, rose from the bed in his T-shirt and boxer shorts, then pulled the curtain and looked down on another bleak morning in central London.

Somewhere, someone knew exactly what Barney was thinking. They knew the question that Barney had just asked in what he'd thought was an empty room, and they knew the answer.

***

J
ude Orwell was sitting at his desk. Rose had just shown Frankenstein and Monk into his office, after she herself had informed him of Fitzgerald's death. While Thomas Bethlehem was away, trawling the Continent for new clientele, Orwell led the line, and took the heat when one of the employees unexpectedly received a wine glass in the eye.

Orwell waited. Monk was looking at the wallpaper; a rich velvet, with '60s retro, sub-Warhol banana imprint. Frankenstein was looking around the office, his eyes finally settling on a Monet print. All style, no substance, he had already decided, and that was even without knowing how much the wallpaper cost.

'So, God,' said Orwell, because neither of the officers seemed to be on the verge of saying anything.

'I quite like Monet,' said Frankenstein, and Orwell squirmed as he pronounced the
t
. 'Course, they're saying he's the new Charlie Brown,' Frankenstein added.

Frankenstein turned and gave Orwell a knowing smile, as if they were two art connoisseurs together, sharing a private joke, and Orwell forced the smile back.

'You don't pronounce the
t
in Monet,' said Monk.

Frankenstein gave her a look over his shoulder then smiled wryly at Orwell, continuing the thing between the two of them, as if they were superior.

'Look, eh, you know, like, God,' said Orwell, trying to retrieve the situation, before Frankenstein suggested that they hoof it across the river to the Tate Modern for a couple of hours' art appreciation, 'Hugo. You know, what happened?'

'Danno,' said Frankenstein, as he turned his attention to another print in amongst the bananas. Modern art this time. However, as he couldn't actually decide what it was a picture of, he was destined not to look at it for too long.

'His body was found in his apartment in the middle of the night by a neighbour. Door left open. He'd been dead for around six hours.'

'My God,' said Orwell, 'He was young, eh? Like, twenty-nine or something?'

'Thirty-three,' said Frankenstein over his shoulder, taking the words from Monk's lips.

'Right,' said Orwell. Thirty-three. Bloody Hell. He'd looked young for his age. Definitely popping all sorts of stuff. Live fast, die young, we all get what we deserve.

'He was murdered,' said Monk, waiting for the reaction.

Orwell's mouth opened and a strange little sound escaped. His pupils shot out large. His eyes were wide. He showed no effort to mask the initial surprise, and nor did he seem to be faking it. He closed his mouth and, as he stared at her, he tried to remember what he'd been doing the night before in case they were here to question him in connection with the murder.

'You all right?' she said, taking a step closer to him.

Orwell nodded. Under other circumstances – that is, circumstances where he wasn't obsessing about Taylor Bergerac, Waferthin.com gal – he would've found Daniella Monk extremely attractive.

'Yeah,' said Orwell, 'yeah. I mean, God, Hugo. What happened? You know who did it? Are you questioning anyone?'

'The investigation is in its infancy,' she said, taking an expedient seat. 'I wonder if we could just ask you a few things?'

Frankenstein had moved onto just idly staring at the wallpaper and was nodding his appreciation of pop culture.

'Sure,' said Orwell, feeling ridiculously unsettled. It wasn't as if he'd murdered Hugo Fitzgerald.

'Warhol's the new DC Comics, that's what they're saying nowadays,' said Frankenstein, turning around with a knowing smile.

***

F
rankenstein and Monk walked back through the large open plan office of the station. The place was buzzing as always, but the frenetic activity, the voraciously thumped computers, the phones being shouted at, the cell phones ringing, belied the fact that it was all routine, all mundane, all slaves to the prosaic nature of everyday crime.

'Didn't get much,' said Monk, as they walked into Frankenstein's office, which was an untidy affair bereft of any noticeable order.

'Danno,' said Frankenstein, as he walked behind his desk, slumped down into the chair and looked at the desktop to see if there was anything in amongst the mire of paper that was new and should be considered, 'you never do in this life. When did we leave there?' he added, looking up at the clock on his wall which hadn't worked in six months.

'Forty minutes ago,' she said.

'Good,' he said. 'Go back there on your own.'

'Why?'

'Because,' said Frankenstein, 'you're a woman. Seemed to be mostly men in that building. Talk to some of them. Start with Orwell again, then work your way up from the bottom. And I heard they've got a barber. Speak to him. Barbers know shit. People talk to barbers, say things they shouldn't.'

'Why didn't you just tell me to stay when we were there?' she said, making her way to the door.

'I was thinking,' he shot back.

She pulled the door open.

'Pain in the neck,' she muttered, as she went.

'Zip it, Danno,' said Frankenstein and, with another derisive look thrown his way, she headed out of the door.

––––––––

P
iers Hemingway and John Wodehouse were in Orwell's office, discussing the division of Fitzgerald's work. The man's body might almost still be warm, but they couldn't let things lie in this business. Orwell had touched base with Bethlehem somewhere in the south of France, and had been given the go-ahead to sort out the bulk of Fitzgerald's in-tray. The conversation had been brief. Bethlehem had sounded distracted, almost disinterested. Orwell found it fascinating; wondered if Bethlehem was losing interest, saw his chances of making inroads into the company grow with every day Bethlehem was gone. Had the go-ahead to appoint Fitzgerald's successor, a problem to which Orwell was already giving thought; albeit, not as much thought as another problem that was playing on his mind.