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Barney Thomson & The Westminster Christmas Massacre - Episode 14by Douglas Lindsay - 09:37 on 21 December 2009The story so far: The Prime Minister has saved Planet Earth from extinction. Basking in the full glory of his success, and with all likelihood of winning the 2010 Nobel Prize for Utter Genius, he has returned to London to make a final decision on whether or not to invade the United States of America. Meanwhile, Barney Thomson, maverick barbershop uber-crimper, languishes in police custody, while the work of the killer, Trelawny, is not yet complete.
0143hrs Saturday London, England
The killer Trelawny took a very early morning walk along the corridors of power. His work in the Commons was swift and precise. There were seven MPs working late into the night, and he killed them all in under half an hour. Short, sharp and brutal. Heads bludgeoned, throats slit; one penis dickutated, another’s liver removed. In one wicked case, a left buttock sliced off and then thrust into the victim’s face until they had suffocated. An accomplished array of brutality, as the killer honed his skills.
He moved on to the Lords, not expecting to find many of them about at that time of night. Doors were locked, corridors were silent. He flashed his Downing Street pass at the guards as he passed them. Those that did not check, lived. Those who did, and like Greg Lake, saw through his disguise, died swiftly with much blood spilled.
The killer Trelawny had a way about him, somehow managing to never get any blood on his own clothes. It was an accomplished life skill, for which he would have received a Box 1 marking, had anyone ever written a report on his job performance. Which was unlikely.
From inside a room he heard the strains of Bob Dylan singing Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, and he quickly knocked and entered. The killer Trelawny did not need to think before he acted.
‘Lord Pip!’ cried the killer Trelawny with excitement, informally addressing the old Tory who he found sitting behind his desk. In fact, by the standards of the Lords, the old Tory was rather youthful, having lived through no more than fifty-nine winters. Trelawny had at last encountered someone who would not lay down.
Lord Pippinger of Anniesland Cross lowered his head and looked gravely at Trelawny. He did not recognise the man from the dreadfully inaccurate photofits which had been in circulation, but he had no doubt who it was who had entered his office. And, for the first time since Trelawny’s killing spree had begun, one of his potential victims even recognised him.
‘It’s you!’ said Pippinger with shock.
Trelawny looked slightly taken aback by the look of recognition on Pippinger’s face, and as much by the tone of his voice.
‘Hah!’ he barked derisively, but he did not have the conviction of his derision.
‘Don’t think you’re coming in here with any of your fancy serial killer moves,’ said Pippinger. ‘You can bugger off. And if you want a fight, I’ll ruddy well give you one!’
This exhortation seemed to lift the spirits of Trelawny and he smiled suddenly.
‘So be it!’ he cried, and then he leapt up on to the desk for all the world like he was Errol Flynn.
Trelawny pulled his knife, and Pippinger was reminded of his grandfather’s words to him as they’d sat in the church, all those years ago.
He pulls a knife, you glass him with a broken pint; he puts one of your men in the hospital, you put one of his head first down the toilet and drown him in his own pish. That’s the Glasgow way.
Pippinger, who’d unfortunately left his pint glasses at home, pushed back his chair and stood, poised and ready to accept Trelawny’s attack, in a Kung Fu stance. Trelawny leapt, Pippinger kicked out a leg, catching him off balance and in mid-air. Trelawny clattered to the side, swinging wildly with the knife as he did so. Despite Pippinger’s desperation right armed swipe, Trelawny caught him on the side of the neck, and the man fell back clutching at the pulsing blood.
And in an instant, that was that. Trelawny regained his footing, the Lord was on his back, desperately trying to stem the flow of blood from the wound in his neck, and suddenly vulnerable to the final thrust of the knife.
‘Very spirited, your worship,’ said Trelawny standing over him. ‘Time to die, now.’
There was a movement behind him, and Trelawny turned in time to see the Lord from across the corridor, who had been disturbed by the racket - that would be Bob Dylan singing Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, rather than the attempted murder - making a grand entrance after the fashion of Steven Seagal or Chuck Norris.
‘Ah!’ cried Trelawny. ‘Lord Sim! Come in Harry, you old bugger and join the fun!’
Lord Harold Sim, Harry to those who knew or were about to murder him, saw the prone Lord on the floor, blood leaking from his neck like money from the RBS, and immediately threw himself into the fray.
‘Cry Havoc! and let slip the dogs of war!’ cried Lord Harry, running full pelt, with all the fervour and passion of a great figure from Shakespearean tragedy.
And tragedy was right enough. Trelawny brought his knife up and caught him full whack in the chest, the knife slicing brutally through clothes and flesh, imbedding itself in his body, the heart skewered. Lord Harry croaked, looked shocked and was dead within the second.
Pippinger looked up in horror; Trelawny did not keep him waiting, bent to his task, and finished the man off with one more thrust of the dagger.
Trelawny, unusually panting, and with the first beads of sweat on his brow, straightened up and looked down with satisfaction at his latest victims.
Bob, for his part, had moved on to the execrable I’ll Be Home For Christmas, as fitting a serial killer Christmas song as there possibly could be.
0957hrs Sunday London, England
Barney Thomson was sitting with his back against a wall. There was a new kind of torture being inflicted upon him this wintry Sunday morning, the last Sunday of Advent. Easy-listening Christmas classics were being piped into his cell, and not Bing Crosby level easy listening classics, but the much more insidious Brooke Benton and Bill Pinkey and Rosemary Clooney. Waterboarding seemed preferable.
The door opened, and he lifted his head for the first time in almost seven hours. Presumed it would be the evil Three Beards, or perhaps DCI Frankenstein; instead, it was Bleacher, the PM’s personal aide; a man who made Alistair Campbell look like a vicious, two-faced, back-stabbing political thug.
Bleacher switched on the single bare light bulb and closed the door. As Barney had not been given a toilet, the room did not smell too great, but Bleacher acted like he did not notice. He looked down at Barney without contempt, without judgement.
Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas - the writer of which has spent the last sixty-three years in Federal prison for this blatant crime against the Yuletide period - blared miserably through the speakers.
‘Why don’t you just tell them who your contacts are at the American embassy?’ said Bleacher, bluntly.
Barney looked up, his head still low, his eyes narrow.
‘Why don’t you just tell them that it was you and your boss who got me down here in the first place?’
Bleacher snorted, and like his bosses the politicians, completely ignored the logical question.
‘Despite everything that you’re involved in, the Prime Minister wants you back full time.’
On the one hand, Barney was suspected of murdering, or conspiring to murder, more than twenty people; and yet he was not at all surprised that the PM could look past this in order to get someone to give him a decent haircut. Generally Western society has developed in such a way that good hair transcends everything.
‘There were another nine murders on Friday night,’ said Bleacher, filling the silence. ‘It’s beginning to look like there’s going to have to be an early election. So many by-elections. We’re almost at the cut-off point.’
‘I’m amazed you’d think I’d care,’ said Barney.
‘Enough crap,’ said Bleacher, as if it had been Barney who’d been the one talking it. ‘You can wallow in your own filth in this depressing little room with no natural light and no food or water, or you can come back to Downing Street to cut the Prime Minister’s hair and act as his advisor as he prepares for war.’
‘What?’ said Barney. ‘War with whom?’
‘America,’ said Bleacher humourlessly. ‘It was your idea, if I remember correctly.’
Barney sighed heavily and dropped his head. Maybe if he went back he could persuade the Prime Minister to re-admit himself to the asylum.
2034hrs Sunday London, England
The snow continued to swirl outside the windows of Number 10 Downing Street, as the Prime Minister stood looking down on the perfect white of the road below. A few minutes earlier he had hung up the phone after a long call to the commander in charge of the British invasionary force, sitting off the coast of Maine. He had reluctantly informed the commander that he would wait another two days before making the decision on whether or not to invade. The commander, fully aware that the invasion was an act of complete and utter political and military folly, was quite happy.
The door opened and Barney Thomson stepped into the room. The PM, his back turned to the door, could tell that only one man had entered. Barney had been delivered and handed over to the PM’s charge.
‘It’s like a beautiful white carpet,’ said the PM in a statesmanlike way. ‘Or a blanket,’ he added.
Barney, having just been driven through the snow, did not feel the need to join the PM at the window. Finally the PM turned, his hands thrust into his pockets.
‘We stand at the precipice, Mr Thomson,’ said the PM. ‘We are on the brink of war, I am on the verge of calling an election. These are momentous times, Mr Thomson, and now, tonight, the X-Factor winner doesn’t have the Christmas Number One. What are we to make of it all, Mr Thomson?’
Barney was silent. He no longer just wanted to go home; he no longer wanted anything. But it had felt good to get a shower and a change of clothes and to get away from musical Christmas abominations.
Suddenly the PM strode forward, clapped Barney firmly on the shoulder, said, ‘We all live or die by our hair, Mr Thomson. See you tomorrow morning at 6.30 sharp,’ and walked quickly from the room.
Barney turned and watched him go, and so suddenly found himself alone in the office of the Prime Minister. He stood in silence of a minute. Then he walked to the window and looked down at the pure and perfect carpeted blanket of white.
Except now there were the prints of a pair of size ten and a half shoes striding across the road and through the back entrance into the Foreign and Commonwealth office across the street...
Nothing perfect ever lasts, thought Barney Thomson.
And somewhere he could hear the strains of chestnuts roasting on a stupid, toxic open fire.
To be continued: Tuesday 22nd December 2009
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