Murderers Anonymous (7 page)

The killer smiled; fingers twitched on the knife held in his hot right hand, thrust inside his jacket pocket.

'Just been seeing some mates.'

'Right. Excellent,' said Wellingborough.

And so they started walking along together, side by side, with nothing to say. Wellingborough felt uncomfortable.

The killer was a little nervous; this would be the first cold one in some time. McCorkindale had been in the heat of the moment. And it was wrong – at least he had the conscience to know that.

'Do you know what the capital of Djibouti is?' said Wellingborough to break the awkward silence.

'Djibouti? Don't even know where it is.'

'East Africa. I mean, I knew that, but I didn't know what its capital was, you know. Should've guessed, I suppose. Djibouti's also the name of the capital, you see. No imagination these people.'

'That's funny,' said the killer.

'How come?' said Wellingborough, turning to face his nemesis.

'Because that's what I've been thinking about you.'

'What?'

Wellingborough looked at his murderer. A moment's recognition. The dawn of realisation. He saw the knife coming up out of the corner of his eye, but in no way was he expecting it, and so it went, the sharpened blade, into his back and into his kidneys and through the viscera, so that the point emerged at the other side, breaking the skin of his stomach.

Wellingborough's mouth opened, his eyes were wide, his pupils dilated; a hoarse query escaped his throat, followed by a grunt as the knife was thrust deeper into his body cavity and upwards beneath his chest. 'Why?' his final word, that great philosopher's question; and then he collapsed and the killer chose to leave the knife where it was, and among the flashing images that raced through Wellingborough's brain as his life soaked away was the first picture he had of the killer wearing gloves and thinking it was odd as the weather was so mild for December. And men don't wear gloves anyway. Not really.

The killer stood over the body until the spasms had stopped, and the last breath had been taken. A quick glance up the road in both directions, and then he disappeared into the bushes, so that by the time the body was discovered late on that December night, there would be neither sign nor trace of the perpetrator of the crime.

***

He felt the touch of the sheep in the dark. The cold fleece, damp with water and blood, brushed against his face, then swung back into him after he'd pushed it away. He stumbled away from it, tripping over something soft. He steadied himself against a pew. The wind stopped suddenly. He lifted his head; tried to hold his breath, though his chest screamed to pant. The roar from the broken windows was instantly stilled, and now in the quiet he could hear clearly the low prayer from the broken lips of the clergyman, and the shuffling coming ever closer from behind.

Couldn't bring himself to turn, even though he knew in this darkness he would see nothing anyway. A prayer for his soul, that was what he heard; then he became aware of the echo of the words, and the low voice behind accompanying the shuffling. Whatever it was behind him, whatever demon crept up in preparation for laying its hand on his back, it was mimicking the prayer of the minister. Repeating the words, the voice cruel and mocking, a callous burlesque. A prayer for the soul of Barney Thomson, for not only would he die, he would be condemned to an eternity in Hell.

Barney screamed in impotent terror.

And, as ever, he awoke in the night, sheathed in sweat, clutching the blankets, dragged howling from his nightmare before the true nature of the evil could reveal itself.

'You ever consider Jelly Babies, mate?'

Barney Thomson had considered many things; Jelly Babies not being one of them. He shook his head and snipped a couple of unnecessary hairs from just behind the right ear.

'How d'you mean?' he asked.

The bloke submitting to Barney's scissors lifted his hands beneath the cape; making it look, to someone with an eye for that kind of thing, as if he had a pair of massive erections.

'Jelly Babies,' he said. 'I mean, think about it. Is that not just the strangest thing. Jelly Babies. You know, they're always there. You eat them when you're a bairn, you grow out of them, and then you don't think about it when you grow up.'

'Aye,' said Barney, 'you're right. You don't.'

'Well, think about it now, Big Man, that's all I'm saying. Jelly Babies. Consider the concept. They are asking you to eat babies. Is that not just a bit strange? You're eating babies. Every bit of them. The eyes, the nose, the arms, the intestines. You know, folk go on about cannibals as if they're weird, but there are millions of school weans out there eating babies every day. Maybe the body parts aren't too well defined,'n' all, but a baby's a baby. They're asking us to eat babies. You just couldn't introduce something new like that nowadays. They only get away with it 'cause they're an institution. Like mince and tatties, only sweeter.'

Barney stood back and admired his handiwork. His first Jimmy Stewart in nearly a year, only his third haircut in his second day back on the job, and clearly the old magic was still there. Just about finished this one, and he hadn't lost it. Not at all. A firm hand, a steady eye, that was all that was required.

Unlike some...

He glanced over at the work being done on the shop's other chair. Leyman Blizzard was doing his best, but this was a haircut from Satan's own factory; the sort of haircut that two months with a bulldozer, three metric tonnes of cement and a brothel full of politicians couldn't hope to salvage. There had been a time when he would have looked askance upon such tawdry work, when he would have cast aside the conventions of honourable workmanship and denounced the haircut to anyone who would listen. But that was then. Barney had gained a sense of perspective. He was working on a rainy day in a small shop, on the outskirts of an old city on the west coast of an unfulfilled country, on the edge of a divided continent, at the heart of an insignificantly small planet, in an inconsequential solar system, at the bottom end of a meagre galaxy, downtown in the great Gotham City of the universe. Who cared if he, or anyone else, gave a bad haircut?

He nodded at the mince and tatties remark, then stood back from the final snip. His work here was complete. He could send the man packing with a haircut answering to every Euclidean assumption, and turn his attention to the solitary chap in the queue. Although, as it happened, Leyman Blizzard came to the end of his magnum opus in malfeasance just before Barney, and he assumed he would take the next customer.

'That's you, mate,' said Barney, 'all done.' Not before time, he thought. Jelly Babies had been the end of it, but what had gone before had ranged far and wide and touched upon almost every topic in the Barbershop Handbook.

The man looked in the mirror, somewhat surprised. There was yet much in his repertoire which required airing, not least the bare bones of his thesis on Lysenkoism and its applicability to ghetto culture. All his mates had heard it and they'd all told him to shut up the minute he opened his mouth, but barbers had no option but to listen. But he was happy enough with the results, so he rose from his chair as the cape was withdrawn, handed over the required money, stuck a cheeky wee fifty pence into Barney's hand, and was gone; murmuring as he went strange thoughts on the demise of Spangles.

Just ahead of him went Leyman Blizzard's customer, the Hair of Horrors upon his shattered head, all sorts of condemnation and humiliation awaiting him, his haircut set to be the concubine to reprobation.

Barney pursed his lips. He and the old man looked at one another, each with a common understanding of the other's abilities. And Blizzard realised he'd made a good decision.

'You take the next customer, son,' he said.

'You sure?' asked Barney. 'You were done first, boss.'

'Naw, naw, on you go, on you go,' he said, and the customer, his heart singing with triumphant relief, stepped up to Barney's chair. A young man, due to go on a surprise last-minute date with the object of his affections, and desperate not to look like a complete idiot.

Barney did the thing with the cape and the towel at the back of the neck, and could feel The Force returning to him. Just like the good old days. Except nowadays he could make a reasonable job of cutting hair. He was back. He was refreshed. This was his Elvis NBC Special. He ought to have been dressed in black and surrounded by babes.

'What'll it be, son?' he asked.

The lad looked at him, considered again what he was about to do.

'I want to look like Elvis,' he said.

A sign.

'Thin Elvis,' said Barney, 'I assume from the fact that you're thin?' Sharp as a button.

'Aye,' said the lad. 'Thin Elvis. Like he looked in
Girls, Girls, Girls
. Make me look like that.'

Barney had never seen
Girls, Girls, Girls
, but he could cope. And so he set to work with his scissors, a comb, some shampoo, a hairdryer, a Euro-size can of mousse, two litres of olive oil, half a kilo of fettuccine and a certain degree of panache.

Leyman Blizzard sat and watched; didn't say much at first. The lad said nothing, being altogether too nervous. He had heard tell that Wee Jean McBean, a girl of moist reputation, would forego any sort of lovemaking preliminaries – dinner, dancing, presents, desperate pleading – for an Elvis look-alike. If this haircut went well, he was in there and he knew it.

'What did you think of the haircut I just did, son?' asked Leyman Blizzard after a while.

Barney glanced over at his new boss, remembering to stop cutting hair as he did so, something he wouldn't always have done in the past. He considered his answer and thought of this: there are two kinds of time in life. There's a time for candour, and then there's a time for bollocks. This, thought Barney, was most definitely, with bright, spanking knobs on, a hundred-piece orchestra playing
Ode to Joy
, and a herald of exultant angels singing hosannas upon high, a time for bollocks.

'It was brilliant. A fine piece of barbery. Hirsutology from the top drawer. A haircut of stunning eloquence. Pure magic.'

Leyman Blizzard rubbed his hand across his beard and nodded.

'Thought it was a load of shite myself,' he said.

'Oh.'

'Can't cut hair to pee my pants,' said Blizzard, and the young lad looked at him out of the corner of his eye, thanking some higher force that he'd been saved. 'Not since a long time passed. You might just be the man to save this shop, son. That was a good job you just did there. A Jimmy Stewart. I can just about manage one of them myself these days, but not much else.'

'What happened?' asked Barney, although he knew the answer. It happened to them all. Eventually the steadiness disappeared, the hand–eye co-ordination was lost, and even the most basic aspects of barbery became a trial.

'Just the usual, son,' said Blizzard. 'Just the same shite that happens to every bastard when they get old. I've been doing this job for near on fifty year. Now I'm washed up. I'm finished. You know who I am? I'm Muhammad Ali when he fought Larry Holmes. I'm George Best when he played for Hibs. I'm Sinatra when he did the
Duets
albums.'

'Jim Baxter when he went back to Rangers,' said the lad.

'Aye, that's me all right. At a dead end. I'm Arnold Palmer; I'm Sugar Ray Leonard; I'm Burt Reynolds.'

'Steve Archibald when he signed for Barcelona,' said the lad.

'That was at the peak of his career,' said Blizzard.

'Aye, but he was still shite.'