0713hrs  London, England

It was a scene like so many others. The corpse lay slumped in a heap over the desk, in the position in which it had been left. The room was filled with Scenes of Crime Officers, dusting and photographing and scraping and recording. Outside the office, Sir Leon Worthington-Worthington’s secretary - she had refused ever to be called his personal assistant - was sitting in a state of shock, staring blankly at the carpet. The tears had passed, but they would come again.

The police officer in charge of the investigation, Detective Chief Inspector Frank Frankenstein, walked out of the office and looked over at the stunned and numb figure of Margaret Holmwood, a woman who had been with Worthington-Worthington since before the Boer War. Frankenstein’s new detective sergeant, Luke Hewitt, strolled over.

‘Well, this won’t exactly send shockwaves through the country,’ said Frankenstein. ‘Cheating, money-grabbing, fraudulent MP murdered; only sixty million suspects.’

Hewitt laughed. ‘Like, totally,’ he said. ‘This is like, you know, some sort of comeuppance and stuff.’

‘Exactly,’ said Frankenstein, clapping Hewitt on the shoulder and walking over to Margaret the secretary. ‘Comeuppance and stuff.’

He pulled a seat next to the desk and sat down opposite her.

‘How are you doing there, love?’ he asked. ‘Can we get you anything?’

She lifted her glazed eyes from the carpet and shook her head.

‘I’m fine,’ she replied.

‘Can you talk for a moment?’ asked Frankenstein.

Hewitt looked down at his boss, impressed by the change of tone, a softness in his voice that he hadn’t heard before.

Margaret nodded.

‘I just need to ask you a couple of questions,’ said Frankenstein.

‘Of course.’

‘How long had you worked for Sir Leon?.

She straightened and seemed to ease her way into the character of someone being interviewed by the police.

‘Sixty-three years,’ she said.

‘Holy f.....,’ said Frankenstein, but managed to stop himself. ‘That’s a long time.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He used to say that I’d been with him longer than his intestine.’

‘I’m sure he did,’ said Frankenstein, turning to Hewitt and giving him a look. ‘Listen, I know this might sound like a harsh question, but do you know of anyone who might have had something against Sir Leon? Any enemies that you knew about?’

She looked surprised by the question, and Frankenstein backed away an inch or two waiting for the rebuttal.

‘Don’t you read the papers?’ she said, rather sternly. ‘Everyone hated Sir Leon. Everyone.  Me more than anyone else. And why not, he was an absolute wa....’

‘Yes,’ said Frankenstein, interrupting, ‘thank you. We appreciate you not allowing us to reduce the suspect list by even one.’

0812hrs  London, England

Barney Thomson was standing behind the Prime Minister, ministering to his hair for the day. The previous day had passed off well for the PM, one glorious public engagement after another, including blowing the Leader Of the Opposition away at PMQs. He was on fire, and it was all thanks to the astonishing hair which had been delivered straight to his head, by Barney Thomson.

‘Two things, Barney Thomson,’ said the PM, chuckling into his chin at the great write-up he had received in the papers for his demolition of the chocolate bar eating, Eton-educated muppet on the other side of the house. ‘Firstly, what are you going to do for me today?’

Barney looked down at the hair before him.

‘What would you like?’ asked Barney.

‘Yesterday went well...,’ began the PM.

‘With the Churchill, Obama, Dylan, Hansen mix,’ said Barney.

‘Exactly. Today I thought I’d got for something completely different. How about a Bruce Willis, Die Hard 4. What say you, Barney? It’d give me that explosive action hero look, the voters love that. The British People want to know that their Prime Minister would be comfortable using a machine gun.’

Barney glanced round for Bleacher but he wasn’t there. Already he had fallen into a routine of exchanging looks with the man. Although he knew that he wouldn’t trust Bleacher any further than he could throw one of the moons of Saturn.

‘There’s not a lot of coming back from a Bruce Willis Die Hard 4,’ said Barney. ‘Not any time soon, at any rate. Why don’t we do something more conventional? How about if we go for a JFK look? He had a lot of hair, and the ladies swarmed round him. You’d have the same hair/man-in-power combination.’

The PM barked out a laugh. ‘I like it. Engage,’ he added, throwing his forefinger forward.

‘Second thing is,’ he continued, ‘climate change, what d’you think?’

‘Well,’ said Barney, more than willing to make his contribution to the British government’s lack of effort to do anything about it, ‘I reckon....’

The door behind opened and Bleacher walked in.

‘Give me ten minutes,’ said the PM, not even bothering to look round.

‘There’s been a thing, sir,’ said Bleacher.

‘Make it fifteen,’ said the PM, and he barked.

‘We need to talk now, sir,’ said Bleacher. ‘In private.’

‘If you must,’ muttered the PM, ‘but Barney can stay. He’s part of the furniture of this place already. Barney and I are going to be together for a very long time, aren’t we Barney?’

Barney did not reply, although strangely the theme tune to The Great Escape came into his head and suddenly he felt like Steve McQueen.

‘There’s been a murder at Westminster, Prime Minister. An MP. Killed in his office.’

The PM did not turn, only too aware of the dangers of a quick swivel when there was a man with a pair of scissors at your shoulder.

Barney Thomson, however, had already lowered the scissors. There had been, in the possibly apocryphal words of the blessed Taggart, another murder. His insides slumped and he no longer felt like Steve McQueen. Now he was Gordon Jackson, just after his speaking-English boob.

‘One of our lot?’ said the PM, and immediately a list formed in his head of who he hoped it might be.

‘Leon Worthington-Worthington,’ said Bleacher.

‘That old buffoon! Thank God! Are you sure he’s been murdered? Wasn’t he due to die anyway?’

‘His throat had been slit, Prime Minister,’ said Bleacher, but he was looking suspiciously at Barney as he said it. He had warned the PM. With this man came the inevitability of death, murder, slaughter, blood, horror, mutilation and genocidal abomination. One day, that was all, and it had started. ‘There’s a detective here to speak to you.’

‘Me?’ said the PM. ‘They’re accusing me of murder now, are they? The Sun’ll be pishing in its pants.’

‘Courtesy call, that’s all. You are Prime Minister, Prime Minister.’

‘Very well. But I need my hair seen to, so I’m not bloody getting up.’

‘Yes, Prime Minister.’

Bleacher left the office, leaving the door open.

‘Get on with it,’ said the PM gruffly, and Barney set about making the man look like JFK, at least from the hairline up.

Two sets of footsteps behind them, and Bleacher returned with DCI Frankenstein. Frankenstein stopped the second he’d walked in the door. Barney paused with his pampering and general bouffanting of the hair and turned.

‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ said Frankenstein.

Barney smiled wryly and shook his head. Then he once more started snipping carefully around the periphery of the PM’s hair.

‘What? What?’ barked the PM.

‘We have history,’ said Frankenstein.

‘I warned you about Thomson,’ said Bleacher, his voice low in the background.

‘I used to be his deputy,’ said Barney glibly, albeit speaking in truth. Which was more than could ever be said for the one politician in the room at that moment.

‘Funny,’ said Frankenstein. ‘I said it before, Barney, you’re a biblical flippin’ plague.’

‘Did you kill this MP?’ asked the PM, glancing at Barney in the small mirror that was set up in front of them.

‘No,’ said Barney, his voice flat.

‘Fine,’ said the PM. ‘Tell me everything you know, Chief Inspector, and make it snappy. I’ve got a country to run.’

Just After Lunch   Houses of Parliament   London, England

Suddenly the MPs and the support staff of the House of Commons had something to talk about other than the Prime Minister’s new dynamic hairstyle. The corridors were buzzing with talk, the media were crawling all over the roads and parks outside the Palace of Westminster. An MP had been murdered, and the word was, no one had any idea who had done it.

The killer himself had disappeared into thin air. Gone in an instant. Like the stable world economy or the Amazonian rain forest. Here one day, vanished the next. And in his wake he had left chaos and gossip and in the hearts of some men, fear.

For if someone felt strongly enough about the MPs expenses scandal that they wanted one of their number dead - and few doubted that that had been the motive - then how many more MPs would die here?

1934hrs   Number 10 Downing Street   London, England

The PM was looking through the last of the red boxes, signing off a couple of pieces of paper at which he barely glanced. The penalty of being Prime Minister. Your name went on everything, everybody came under your control; but you couldn’t possibly look at it all, not in the time that you had. You’d need three hundred hours in a day. Which was one of the reasons he considered himself a martyr to his country for all that he did for them.

Barney Thomson was sitting in a comfy chair. He had been told to wait, presumed that the PM had a function later that constituted some kind of haircutting emergency.

‘Climate change, Barney?’ said the PM looking up. ‘We never got to finish our chat. What’s your take?’

‘Well,’ said Barney, looking up from Private Eye, ‘I’m not a scientist.’

‘Neither am I, and I talk about it all the time. Besides, you’re a barber, barber’s know stuff.’

‘It’s like everything,’ said Barney, quite happy to chat, he was so bored. ‘It’s all about big business. Businesses fighting it because they’re affected by new regulations, businesses trying to make fast money out of the new energy sources. Everyone’s just trying to make money. Really, what are you going to do? If we really are affecting the climate by the way we live, are you going to put £1000 tax on a flight to Paris, close down four of the terminals at Heathrow, and make flying only for the seriously wealthy? Are you going to put £20 tax on a litre of petrol? Because if you were serious, that’s the kind of thing you’d have to do. But you’re not. And you’re a government who has to court business, so you open up new terminals everywhere and allow new runways. And anyway, compared to India and China we’re small potatoes, very, very small, tiny potatoes, so it hardly matters.’

‘So, you think I should do what?’

‘Nothing,’ said Barney. ‘The planet’s going to Hell anyway. I’d just issue a leaflet advising people what to do once society has fallen apart. Stockpile tinned pineapples, that kind of thing.’

The PM nodded sagely, running over the political implications of telling everyone that it was too late and that the very infrastructure of human life on earth was going to vanish, so they might as well make the most of it.

‘Thanks, Barney,’ he said, ‘you can go now.’

Barney looked up, having delivered his latest homily while still reading the magazine.

‘I thought you wanted your hair looked at again?’

‘My hair’s fine.’

‘Well why am I still here?’

‘Because I wanted to speak to you about climate change.’

‘You could have done that ten hours ago.’

‘I’m Prime Minister.’

Barney Thomson rose to his feet and headed towards the door.

‘You’re coming to Copenhagen with me next week,’ said the PM.

Barney turned to look at him, wondering if it was an offer. But it wasn’t.

‘My days are already numbered,’ he said to himself, as he left the office and closed the door behind him.

Later That Night    London, England

Later that night, in London, England, as the lights slowly went off, one by one, in the offices of the Houses of Commons, the killer once more appeared, as if by magic, and began to skulk the corridors of the old palace, searching for his next victim.

Next exciting instalment: Friday 4th December 2009