Barney Thomson & The Westminster Christmas Massacre - Episode 8

by Douglas Lindsay - 09:58 on 10 December 2009

The story so far:  The Copenhagen climate change talks are going badly, scuppered by self-interest and big business. The World of Men is about to fall, leaving the planet in the hands of insects and bacteria; the Time of Cockroaches is upon us, yet most people don’t seem to care, as long as they can get a cheap flight to Greece and can over-indulge their children at Christmas. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister of Great Britain & Northern Ireland senses that the United States of America is attempting a coup d’etat by serial killer and is looking for options for invading Maine.

0117hrs   London, England

The middle of the night in London, England. The parliamentarians of Westminster had departed en masse, assuming the the killer Trelawny had finished his work, and had moved on to other pastures. Other killing fields. They had no reason to make that assumption, but it was the most convenient thing for them to think; it was the one which immediately allowed them to get on with their lives, so that was what they chose to believe. The modern Brit is not mentally set up for the Dunkirk spirit, to settle down into a period of hardship, to fight through to the bitter end. They just want everything to be OK, and are prepared to believe anything in order to allow that to happen.

Strangely, however, it was the four MPs and one Lord who decided to live with the hardship of spending a second night in Westminster who suffered - while the desperate souls who’d taken themselves off to do Christmas shopping and to spend an expenses-filled night at their plush London abodes on the taxpayer, slept safely in their plush double beds, with mistresses and prostitutes and, in three cases, sheep.

The killer Trelawny knocked softly and entered the office of drooling old member, Lord Pascalides of Bristol. The Lord looked up from his desk, where he was working his way through the finer points of an upper chamber bill on local government financing.

‘Hi, Nicholas,’ said Trelawny in a friendly manner. ‘Do you have a minute?’

‘I think so,’ said the old man, glancing at his watch.

The photofit that had gone round of Trelawny was so inaccurate that he didn’t recognise him, and he assumed that he was a safe late night visitor to his office as he had been allowed in by the two officers standing guard outside. Pascalides did not know that the two officers standing guard outside his office were both dead.

Trelawny closed the door behind him.

‘I’m from Number 10’s office,’ he said. ‘The PM’s set up a new, you know, section to tackle the expenses scandal head on.’

Pascalides grumbled and shook his head.

‘Why now?’ he said. ‘Everyone’s moved on. They’ve forgotten about it. The MPs got away with it, and no one really came after us.’

‘Yes, said Trelawny, ‘but that’s the thing. The PM’s feeling a bit guilty about that, and he’s worried that someone will kick the whole thing off again and he’ll look bad because he hasn’t done anything.’

Pascalides snorted. ‘Bloody typical,’ he said. ‘The PM worried about how it’ll look for him. Who are you anyway?’

‘Trelawny,’ said Trelawny smiling. ‘The name’s Trelawny.’

Well, the the old man had perhaps not recognised him from the photofit, but he knew the name. However, before he could shout out, or move, or Tweet or put an entry on Facebook, Trelawny had leapt across the desk and buried a knife in his throat. Quick, efficient and fatal.

Pascalides croaked right enough, but not nearly loud enough for anyone to notice. Although most people in the vicinity were already dead anyway.

Trelawny withdrew the knife, wiped it on the curtains, looked down at the river, and then turned and walked quickly from the office.



0647hrs   London, England

Barney walked in to the PM’s office at Number 10, with the great leader already in position, waiting for his Hairstyle of the Day. He turned and glanced at Barney, a look of smug satisfaction on his face.

‘Barney!’ he barked. ‘Thanks for coming in so early. Smashing day today.’

Barney hadn’t noticed that it was smashing as he’d huddled into the cold on his walk through the dark.

‘I get a great write-up in the papers for the way I bludgeoned that Etonian tossbag into submission in the Commons yesterday. The press love me at the moment. I’m on fire, crushing that guy in my iron fist on a daily basis. Think I might call an election in January. What d’you reckon?’

Barney placed a cape around the PM’s shirt, tucked it in at the back of the neck, and lifted a pair of scissors.

‘Great idea,’ he said, his voice completely flat. ‘You might have to anyway, there are so many by-elections to be had.’

The PM glanced sternly at Barney in the mirror.

‘What do you know? Were there more murders last night?’

‘I don’t know!’ said Barney, annoyed. ‘But you’re already at twelve dead MPs, that’s a decent number.’

‘Yes, but they’re across all parties,’ said the PM. ‘Isn’t close to affecting our working majority, that’s all that matters. Anyway, what are you doing for me today?’

‘What would you like, Prime Minister?’ said Barney, voice the colour of grey cloud.

‘Well, I’m due for a big climate change speech. Expanding on my Flat Earth talk the other day that everyone loved so much.’

‘What’s today’s theme?’

‘Sustainable Fossil Fuels in A Sustainable World.’

Barney started combing the PM’s hair, and snipping at the odd little loose end; although after five haircuts in a week, there weren’t actually any loose ends; he was just snipping to give the impression that he was doing something, as he knew that it made any customer feel good about the haircutting experience.

‘How can you have sustainable fossil fuels?’ asked Barney, going about his business with an early morning atrophy.

‘Well,‘ said the PM, ‘we plant beds of dead insects and small animals, then we crush them. Eventually they’ll turn into fossil fuels.’

‘And is there a timeframe on that?’ asked Barney.

‘Anywhere between fifteen and six hundred and fifty million years,’ said the PM.

‘So it’s a long term plan,’ said Barney.

‘Exactly,’ said the PM. ‘We can say that we planning for your children’s future. And your children’s children.’

Barney continued to snip away, decided in the absence of a Prime Ministerial diktat that what was required was an Albert Einstein.

The PM smiled smugly. ‘Some say that in a few million years the human race will have evolved into a beer-drinking sloth species with no appendages and no ability to think for itself.’

‘You think it’ll take that long?’ said Barney glibly, and the PM snorted.

The door opened behind and Bleacher entered looked flustered.

‘You haven’t heard the news,’ he said, a bald statement of fact.

‘That Etonian twit thrown in the towel, has he?’ barked the PM, then laughed to himself at the thought.

‘More mayhem at Westminster,’ said Bleacher. ‘Another four dead. Four MPs at any rate, seven security staff, and a Lord.’

Barney stopped cutting hair, and suddenly the PMs eyes were upon him.

‘What was that you were saying earlier about by-elections, Thomson?’ said the PM.

Barney shrugged.

‘You should be all right until there are another fifty or so dead. Then maybe you’ll have to start worrying about it.’

The PM turned back and faced the mirror, his face suddenly solemn. Sooner or later people were going to be talking about this murder crisis, rather than how well he was doing as PM, and he didn’t want anything to be distracting from that. And then there was the possibility of the coup d’etat by serial killer, a nagging doubt that refused to go away.

‘Get me the defence chiefs again,’ said the PM into the air and Bleacher rolled his eyes and walked from the office.



1234hrs   London, England

‘Prime Minister, we cannot possibly attack the United States of America,’ said the Chief of the Defence Staff drily. ‘They’d fight back. We’d get hurt.’

The PM was looking for options, not excuses.

‘And meanwhile,’ he grumbled, ‘we sit back while they overthrow the government of this country by individually murdering every single MP and Lord in the Houses of Parliament.’

‘You don’t know that, sir,’ said Bleacher. ‘In fact, not only do you not know that, the very idea is preposterous. This is not a coup, absolutely not. It is obviously someone, somewhere, who is very disgruntled about the expenses scandal and is taking their revenge.’

The PM didn’t look at Bleacher, but stared insanely around the group of military chiefs who were gathered around the table, which had laid out upon it the map of the full eastern seaboard of the United Sates. More than one of those military chiefs was reminded of the scenes of Hitler in Downfall, insanely berating his chiefs of staff for not fighting off eight billion Russians with a platoon of four teenagers, a bombed out tank and a bag of jelly babies.

Barney Thomson, who had finally been invited to join the pre-War Consultation group, was sitting at the back imagining what kind of haircut he would give each of the officers if any of them were to ask.

‘I just want to know this,’ said the PM. ‘If I said to you that I wanted to launch an invasion of the north-east coast of the US mainland before Christmas, how many men would you be able to put on the ground? That’s all. Simple question.’

The Chief of the Army, Sir Jock Testicles, folded his arms and looked sternly across the table at the PM.

‘About five,’ he said.

‘Five what?’ barked the PM. ‘Five battalions? Five hundred men? Five divisions?’

‘No, sir,’ said Testicles resolutely, ‘about five men. Five. You and successive governments before you, have cut and cut and cut and cut this army until we are able to fight one war at a time. Just the one. And not a very big one at that. We have five spare men to invade the US, and we’d better be quick, because even they’re due to go to Afghanistan in the New Year.’

The PM shook his head and took a guzzle of cold coffee. He looked around the room for some support, but there was none coming from the military. They were keeping a tight ship, all bizarrely reading from the same script on being unable to launch a ground attack on Maine. Finally his eyes found Barney Thomson.

‘Barney?’ he said.

The military chiefs shook their heads. Bleacher closed his eyes.

‘It’s obvious,’ said Barney. ‘You need to introduce conscription. It’ll massively cut youth unemployment, it’ll train the workforce, you’ll be able to put men on the ground, and the Mail and the Express will love it. An extraordinary vote winner. Plus you’ll have the bounce from being the underdog in a war. It’ll be 1939 all over again, and you’ll be laughing all the way to the polls.’

As Barney had spoken the PMs shoulders had straightened; and as the PMs shoulders straightened, everyone else in the room slumped further into their seats as they saw a politician thinking with his politician’s brain, which is good for several things, but none of them useful. Or sensible.

‘I like it. Look,’ he began, and he glanced down at the map, ‘who knows the state capital of Maine? Anyone?’

There were blank looks around the room.

‘Bangor,’ said one of the military. ‘You know, First boxcar, midnight train, destination, Bangor, Maine...’ and he had broken into song by the time he’d reached the end of the line.

The PM nodded, and looked for Bangor on the map.

‘It’s Augusta,’ said Barney. Barber’s know stuff. ‘It’s not the biggest city, and it’s not on the coast.’

The generals leant over the map to look for Augusta, while the PM sat back and stroked his chin. Things were beginning to come together.

‘I want a plan, a positive plan and no excuses, for the invasion of Maine and the taking of the state capital, on my desk by nine this evening.’

The generals grumbled in low voices, and some raised their eyes, and in the air was the feeling of Christmas.



2213hrs   London, England

Late in the evening. DCI Frankenstein, DS Hewitt and Barney Thomson were having a sandwich in Frankenstein’s office. The body count was rising, the temperature was falling, in the air was the feeling of panic.

‘So you’re not going to tell us what you and the PM were talking about all afternoon?’ said Frankenstein.

Barney smiled. ‘National security,’ he said.

‘Fo shiz,’ said Hewitt. ‘Totally understand.’

Frankenstein squinted at Hewitt, was going to comment, decided there was no point, and looked back at Barney.

‘I take it that means they were discussing the plan to invade America?’

‘If I told you...

‘You’d have to kill me,’ finished Frankenstein. ‘Well, given that you’re Barney Thomson, I don’t think I’ll wave that possibility before you.’

‘Like, totally,’ said Hewitt, and the three men took bites out of their sandwiches.

To be continued: Friday 11th December 2009

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