The Wormwood Code

a novella

Douglas Lindsay

Published by Blasted Heath 2013

any form or by any means without permission of the author.

Douglas Lindsay has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act

1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons,

living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cover design by Blasted Heath

Visit Douglas Lindsay at:

www.blastedheath.com

Version 2-1-3

Prologue

It is the spring of 2005, and Britain is in the grip of election fever. The young,

dashing Prime Minister – with two general election victories already under his belt,
as well as successful and entirely legitimate military campaigns in the Balkans, Iraq

and Afghanistan – is up against an actual descendent of Count Dracula in the race to
lead the country.

Monday 18th April 2005

0714hrs

Dan Williams nodded at the two secretaries, saved an extra smile for Janine,
hesitated, took a deep breath, knocked on the large, solid brown door and walked

quickly into the room. Closed the door behind him and stopped. Exhaled, shoulders
slumped a little, the adrenaline stopped pumping. The Prime Minister was not alone.

It was the same every morning, and no matter how much he rushed, no

matter how early he set the alarm, how little breakfast he ate, how quickly he

brushed, flossed and mouth-washed, Thackeray was always there ahead of him,
standing at the side of the PM's desk, clutching that morning's newspapers. Williams

nodded at Thackeray, who returned the gesture. What was even more annoying for
Williams was the knowledge that the Paper Boy, as he thought of him, did not have a

trace of jealousy or competitiveness in his body.

'Good morning, Prime Minister,' said Williams.

The PM mumbled incoherently in reply and continued to stare into the

mirror. There was nothing obvious happening with his face; no preening, pouting,

lip-baring or clearing morning gunk out of his eyes. He was perfectly still, staring at
himself, while his two aides stood behind him. It might have been slightly

uncomfortable for them, if not for the fact that the same thing happened every single
morning that they came to work.

The large wooden clock on the mantleshelf – a controversial gift from the

German ambassador in 1913 – ticked solidly, the only sound in the room. Outside a

car drove away from the front door, and Williams racked his brain to think who
would be calling at this time in the morning. Checked his watch, couldn't think of

anyone. People were always coming and going. He became aware that Thackeray
was staring at him, and finally he glanced at his rival. Thackeray winked, pulled his

lips back from his teeth in some sort of grotesque, plastic surgery smile, and then

nodded at the PM. Williams stared blankly at him, then turned and looked at his

boss. The PM was still expressionlessly looking at himself in the mirror. And then, as
if he was taking his queue from Thackeray, he drew his lips back and revealed all his

teeth, in their faded glory.

'Oh God,' he muttered. 'They don't get any better.'

'Prime Minister?' said Williams. It was always up to him to force the agenda.

Thackeray would stand staring at the boss all day, almost as much as the PM would

stare at himself.

'I just,' began the PM, 'you know, Dan Dan, I know what you're saying, but

really, really, I think it's vitally important, vitally important, that I see a dentist this
week.'

'Sir,' said Williams, 'you can't be seen to be worrying about this just now. The

people of Britain need to know you're concentrating on the real issues. Decent

hardworking people want to know that their Prime Minister is concerned about
crime and health and poverty, not his own teeth. There'll be time after the election.'

'Thackers?' asked the PM.
'Couldn't disagree more, Sir. It's presentation, not substance that matters.

However, at this stage, it might be a little insensitive. It's a pity you had to cancel the
appointment last week...'

'Cannot believe that the bloody man picked this time to die,' muttered the

PM. 'Dreadful timing. And now we've got this awful conclave business keeping me

off the news.'

He sighed heavily through his grimace. Williams shot a death ray at

Thackeray.

'Any mention of my teeth on the front pages today?' asked the PM.

Thackeray shook his head.
'Only two headlines with you. The Guardian says you're retreating from the

EU vote, and the Independent is bitching about green issues.'

'Only two? God's sake. What about the vampire?'

'Just the Times.'

The PM muttered something under his breath, closed his lips and stroked his

hair subconsciously. The usual election morning press conference awaited.

'Anyone seen Ramone?' he said, finally turning away from the mirror and

looking at Williams and Thackeray.

They could advise against him getting his teeth done mid-campaign, but they

could bloody well sod off and work for the opposition again if they tried to tell him

he couldn't get his hair seen to.

Thackeray shook his head.

'Still hasn't been seen since Saturday night,' said Williams.
The PM sighed bitterly, took a quick look back in the mirror and then turned

finally to his two advisors.

'Right, gentlemen, this morning's news conference. What d'you think?'

Thackeray laid the papers down in front of him and pulled up a seat opposite

the large dark brown desk. Williams did likewise, opening up the folder he'd been

clutching to his chest since he'd entered the room.

'It's desperately vital that we press the health issue and concentrate on the

breast screening proposals we were talking about last night,' said Thackeray.
Williams nodded. The PM glanced between the two of them, slightly concerned.

'No,' he said, 'I meant my hair. Do you think it's time to call in another

hairdresser?'

Thackeray was silent. Williams opened his mouth to say something and then

remembered that it was even worse working for the other guy, and closed it again.

There was a knock and the PM looked up expectantly as the door opened and

a young woman poked her head round.

'It's time for your 7.20, Sir,' she said.
The PM smiled. Bit of a Martine McCutcheon about her. He rose from his seat

and nodded at the two men.

'We'll talk later,' he said.

'Your 7.20 what, Prime Minister?' asked Williams.

The PM looked at him strangely, as if he ought to already know.
'Sun bed,' he said. 'I've got to do something to get attention away from my

teeth.'

1027hrs

A slight wind came in off the water, bringing the smell of the sea in through the open

door of the shop. Seagulls swooped outside, diving into the blue crystal waters,
while other gulls cried to the pale sunlight of a spring morning. The grass along the

promenade waved gently in the breeze. The palm trees on the far side of the bay
stood unruffled by the wind. A couple of small yachts tacked against the breeze out

past the two tiny islands, no more than fifty yards away from the beach. A few
people walked along Shore Street, lightly dressed for spring, the promise of a warm

summer hanging delightfully in the air of a beautiful morning.

Millport.

Barney Thomson, barber, turned away from the window of the shop and

nodded at his deaf-mute hunchbacked assistant, Igor, who was slowly brushing up

the remnants of the previous customer's cut, a man with great swathes of matted
hair, who had asked for a Steve McQueen (Great Escape).

'Gorgeous day,' said Barney.
'Arf,' said Igor.

'Course, it'll be pishing down within the hour,' added Barney.
Igor nodded and once more bent double to his onerous task.

There were footsteps in the doorway and Barney turned. Joshua Mindkeep,

one of his crusty old regulars. Millport, the small town on the island of Cumbrae off

the west coast of Scotland, was one of those places where people came to die, and
Barney sometimes wondered if he was already one of them.

'Mr Mindkeep,' he said. 'Beautiful day.'

'It's crap,' muttered Mindkeep, helping himself into the chair nearest the

window.

Barney smiled, as he prepared the cape and the small piece of white cloth to

go around the neck.

'Sun shining, lovely breeze, the cry of the gulls.'
'I hate it,' scowled Mindkeep. 'Bloody gulls. Never shut up, shit everywhere,

keep me awake all night. I'll have finger length on the top and a tapered number two
at the sides and back.'

And with that his face settled into an ugly grimace and he slouched down into

the seat.

Barney looked at Igor and shrugged. Igor couldn't hear, yet he picked up

everything that was said. All human life is here, thought Barney, and Igor smiled

wickedly and walked through to the back of the shop to stick the kettle on.

1151hrs

'I cannot believe the nerve of the fucking man,' snapped the PM, marching along the

corridor of the hospital.

'We're going to be public in under twenty-five seconds,' said Williams, lips

tight together.

The Health Secretary raised one of his vicious Scottish eyebrows, which had

once been charged in their own right with GBH after a fight in a Motherwell night
club.

'Where did you get the tan? Cheeky fucking bastard.'
He looked at Williams and Thackeray and the Health Secretary, also glaring

briefly at Gail and Winsome, two of his PR people, then addressed them all.

'I give fucking Murdoch free reign in this country, let him do what he bloody

well likes, and this is how he repays me? The fucking Count makes the cover of the
Times, and that bloody Sky bastard asks me where I got my tan.'

He raised a finger at them as if about to announce the way in which he was

going to damn Murdoch to Hell, but since there was nothing for him to actually say,

he stormed off towards the double hospital doors which were about to lead him to
his next engagement. Silence from his entourage, who knew better than to speak to

him as he was getting himself under control for his next big event.

The PM stopped at the door, everyone else coming to an abrupt halt behind

him. He turned and looked straight at Williams, who had long ago stopped being
unnerved by this kind of thing.

'Dan Dan, any news on Ramone?'
Williams shook his head.

'What about Raphael?'
Williams had already checked, as he'd known the question would be put to

him.

'Sorry, he's Gordon's homeboy, won't touch anyone else.'

The PM cursed and stared at the floor.
'There must be someone,' he said. 'Someone exceptional.'

He looked around the crowd, staring them in the eye, demanding that one of

them think of something, whilst also taking in their hair, to see if any of them had

visited a hairdresser with the kind of competence he required. He certainly wasn't
going to find it on the head of the Health Secretary.

There were a couple of shrugged shoulders, a pair of eyes dropped to their

shoes.

'Right,' said the PM, 'there's only one thing for it. Get me…' he began,

demanding that they all look at him, '…Barney Thomson!'

1643hrs

It had been a slow day in the shop, but Barney hadn't minded. That was why he was

here. Slow days with the sound of the sea and the weeping of gulls, in a sleepy place
where nothing much ever happened. This was what he'd needed after a few years of

grotesque murder and comical mayhem.

He was sitting with his feet perched on the edge of the counter, Igor still

sweeping laboriously behind him, although even Barney did not know what it was
that he swept. The day had turned cold and wet and grey, sure enough, and it had

been some time since the door had opened on any customers.

'Might be time to just call it a day,' said Barney quietly, more to himself than

Igor. Igor nodded. Nothing much on the TV, but he was looking forward to Rick Stein
on BBC2 at 8.

The door to the shop opened and two men walked in. Barney and Igor looked

at them. Barney did not immediately lower his feet. They were dressed in black

suits, wore stupid sunglasses, the like of which are never needed on the west coast
of Scotland in the height of summer, never mind on an afternoon in April that had

clouded over, and had both recently seen the inside of a barber shop. These men
were not here for a haircut and Barney's heart immediately sank. Couldn't life just

leave him alone for a few months?

'Barney Thomson?' said one of them, looking straight at him and ignoring

Igor.

'I'm Barney Thomson!' said Igor from behind, standing as tall as he could,

although the words pretty much came out as 'Arf!'

Barney finally lowered his feet and stood, smiling at Igor and shaking his

head.

'Yeah,' he said to the bloke who had spoken, 'what d'you want?'

'You're needed in London,' said the man.

Barney stared at him, then at his companion. He slumped back down into the

seat, his face deadpan, shoulders sagging.

'Go on,' he said.

'The Prime Minister needs you to work his hair for the last two-and-a-half

weeks of the campaign,' said the man. Voice steady and firm, no argument accepted.

Barney looked at Igor and then back at the FBI, or whoever they were.
'And if I don't?' he said.

'Three words,' said the other man. 'Guan Tanamo Bay.'
Sounded well hard. Barney would have shivered in his boots; if he'd been

wearing boots. As it was, he was bored.

'If you're doing the syllable thing,' he said pedantically, 'it really ought to be

five words. Guan Tan A Mo Bay. Hmm, doesn't really work, but three words would
be something along the lines of Bug Ger Off.'

The man twitched. Outside, the ominous form of a black Audi with dark

mirror windows pulled up outside the shop.

'It's time,' said the first man.
Barney looked at the car, and then turned to Igor. He shrugged. He felt

entirely phlegmatic and relaxed. In this quiet place, who would even notice he was
gone for two weeks?

'Come on, Igor,' he said. 'You're coming too.'
Igor smirked and grabbed his broom. The two agents of whichever

government department they belonged to looked at each other, wondering if they
should make a move, but as Barney picked up his jacket, turned off the lights and

pushed past them to the door, Igor in his wake, they stood aside and let them go.
There was space enough for all of them in the Audi, and space enough in the small

private jet waiting at Abbotsinch.

Igor stopped and looked at the two men as he came to the door. He stared for

a full ten seconds, as Barney opened the back door of the car.

'Arf,' said Igor eventually, and then followed his boss outside.

2310hrs

London, late at night, the city under cloud. The end of another hard day's

campaigning, the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition and the leader of
the real alternative all endlessly flicking between news channels, thinking about the

following day's strategy and hair and teeth and make-up and hair and teeth and hair.

However, there was one person who wasn't thinking about hair, even though

he had thought about hair every day for the previous seventeen years of his life. One
person who would never think about hair again.

Ramone, the hairdresser, sat alone in an armchair in a small hotel room. The

TV played before him, the tail end of whatever was on BBC2 that night, although no

one, even the people in charge of BBC2, knew. He was naked except for a pair of
socks and a New England Patriots woollen hat. And quite pale. Very, very pale.

Deathly pale.

Tuesday 19th April 2005

0712hrs

The PM was laughing with a mixture of curiosity and delight, the first time that

either of his aides had seen him genuinely laugh in several weeks. Williams and
Thackeray glanced at each other, not entirely sure what the PM found so funny.

'Rotted Brain of Maniac Killer?' said their boss through the smile. 'Good on

the Daily Star.'

Thackeray waited a second, until the laughter had died down a little more

and he could catch the PM's eye.

'It's not about the leader of the opposition, Sir,' he said.
The PM stopped laughing instantly, straightened up and looked across the

desk at the front page.

'Oh.'

'It's not really very funny, Prime Minister. It's the serial killer who was

allowed out of prison a year before he committed multiple murder.'

'No, no, of course not, not at all funny,' he said. 'It's important and vital that

we take every conceivable step against crime and the causes of crime and the fear of

crime, that valuable resources are not wasted, and that...'

'You're not on television, Sir,' said Williams, 'you don't need to grandstand.'

'No, no. No.'
The PM stood up, turned his back and looked out of the window, down onto

the grey wet pavement below. His heart immediately sank with the thought of the
day ahead. Health, health, health. That was all they ever had to talk about. And

crime. He couldn't wait until the election was over and he could get back to talking
about big issues, the kind of things that would help cement his place in history. No

one ever got remembered because waiting lists were low or because they had

introduced prostrate cancer screening for over-50s. Settling the Northern Ireland

issue, creating democracies across the Middle East, bringing China and the west
closer together, extending British influence across the republics of the former Soviet

Union, bringing Britain further into the heart of the European Union and subtly
easing Germany and France away from the centre of power. Those were the big

issues, the issues which would see him remembered for the rest of history. Not NHS
funding and MRSA and consultants fees.

He wanted to place a call to George right now and discuss the plans to invade

Iran.

'Any of them mention my teeth?' he asked.
Williams rolled his eyes. Thackeray glanced at the front pages, although he

knew there was nothing there to see.

'You only get personally headlined in the Telegraph, in connection with the

pensions issue.'

'Pensions,' the PM said, muttering darkly. He turned and looked from one of

his men to the other. 'Suppose the serial killer made more front pages than I did?'

Thackeray nodded.

'That's what grabs the news, isn't it? That's why George has got the right idea,

sending his troops in all over the place. Murder, death and fear, that's what people

want to read about. Maybe I'd get more press if I sent all those troops back to
Ireland.'

'No!' said Thackeray and Williams together.
'I suppose,' said the PM. 'Peace in our time, and all that. Any chance of a

doughnut?'

0856hrs

The cleaner knocked on the door again. The 'Do Not Disturb' sign had been up for

three days now, the room had been paid for until the end of May and yet she had a
bad feeling. She'd been getting the shivers every time she walked past the room, and

even though she had been told by management that it was none of her business, and
that the sign meant what it said, the strange mixture of curiosity and fear had taken

hold of her imagination. It ran in the family, down through the women in her
mother's side. Some sort of psychic ability, which most of them had tried to ignore in

recent generations. But she couldn't deny that it was there, she couldn't deny the
feelings of unease which she felt each time she passed a place of sadness or despair.

And she had a feeling about this bedroom.

She knocked again, and then finally, her hands shaking, looking nervously up

and down the corridor, she took the key from her pocket and put it in the lock. She
tentatively opened the door and stuck her head round to look into the room.

A small room, large double bed taking up most of the space. TV in the corner,

playing one of those awful makeover shows; Changing Rooms In The Toilet or

Newsnight In The Garden. An armchair positioned in front of the TV, its back turned
to the door. She could just see the top of a blue woollen hat, and a pale hand resting

on the arm of the chair. She swallowed, knew already that the person was dead.

'Hello?' she said nervously. 'Hello. Are you all right?'

The corpse of Ramone MacGregor was silent.
The cleaner, Juniper Lopez, had all the symptoms of near panic – racing heart,

dry mouth, cold sweat, shivers, shakes, the hairs on her head standing to attention,
everything – yet felt herself more and more drawn into the room. She had no

thought of turning round and getting help, even though she now knew she had seen
enough to alert hotel management.

'Mr?' she asked, stepping slowly forwards. She swallowed again, but her

mouth and throat were dry, harsh.

Deep breath, doing everything to conquer the fear which gripped her, a fear

so much greater than any of the myriad phobias which plagued her life. Spiders,

flying, confined spaces, crowds, open spaces, chips served with pasta. She edged

nearer to the chair, moving away to the side, pressed against the bed, as far away as
she could. Stopped again, another deep breath, steeled herself, closed her eyes, and

then she walked quickly round, turned about a yard in front of the chair. She
hesitated, and then finally she opened her eyes and looked down at the body of

Ramone MacGregor.

0859hrs

Barney Thomson trudged along the road, hands thrust deep in his pockets, head

bowed to the grey morning drizzle. Igor walked beside him, Donkey to Barney's
Shrek. They were on their way for their first meeting with the Prime Minister. No big

deal. Politically perhaps he was the most important person Barney had ever met, but
that was like saying that someone was the most important maker of jelly that he'd

ever met. Who cared?

Barney turned his head sharply at the sound of a scream, a distant sound, yet

one so full of terror and fear, so piercing and ominous and loud, he stared up the
length of the street for half a minute, as the noise from almost two blocks away filled

the dull morning air. Igor gazed at him quizzically, following his look. He heard
nothing, yet he felt the sense of fear and horror and dread. And then, as suddenly as

it had begun, the terrible noise abruptly ended, and the city seemed to return to
normal. The cars, the motorbikes, the chatter of pedestrians. Barney stood still for

another few minutes, his head slightly cocked to the side, listening, as if he expected
something else to happen. Yet London was as it is, and by the time he looked at his

watch and realised that he was going to be late for his first meeting with the Prime
Minister, he had trouble remembering exactly what had been so blood-curdling

about the scream in the first place, and whether or not that was what he'd actually
heard.

'We should get going,' said Barney.

'Arf,' said Igor.
And with that, Barney Thomson, barber, and Igor, barber's assistant, turned

and walked on through the crowd, Igor clutching his broom as they went.

0923hrs

Barney snipped away at the very ends of the hair. Nothing worth taking off. He

could've got his razor out and scalped the man, but that hadn't been asked for. It was
more of a styling job, which to be honest, wasn't entirely his thing, but he wasn't

going to come all this way, to be in the employment of one of the country's top
10,000 most important people, not to do what he was told.

They were in the Prime Minister's bathroom, a small affair just off the main

office. It had been redecorated under Major, an expensive job given out to the

highest bidder, and was consequently still in excellent condition. Williams and
Thackeray, the eternal duo, stood at the back, hoping to engage the PM during the

course of the cut; however he was off on another of his tangents. Igor also lurked at
the back, a slightly uncomfortable presence for the others, waiting with his broom

for a bit of mess to clear up.

'I know all about you,' said the PM, catching Barney's eye in the mirror.

Barney nodded.
'I know all about you too,' he replied. Didn't everybody?

The PM smiled. Always nice to have that kind of acknowledgement.
'I feel like I have the hand of history on my head,' said the PM.

'You sound like an idiot,' said Barney. Actually, he never said that one, he just

thought it. Didn't quite yet have the measure of the man enough to know whether he

could get away with that sort of comment. This was the man, after all, who dropped
bombs on innocent civilians at the drop of an American hat.

'You have lived through the most extraordinary of times,' said the PM,

making Barney sound like he was in his early hundreds and could remember the
Boer War.

Barney snipped at a rogue lengthy hair, which Ramone must have missed

before his unfortunate end, then continued on his more mundane way around the

back of the head. There was a sound at the door, and Janine the secretary appeared,
looking very pale, to whisper something in Williams' ear. Williams listened,

swallowed, nodded and ushered her away from the bathroom. The PM had
witnessed the short scene in the mirror and raised his eyebrows at Williams. The

PM was experienced enough to know that you didn't turn round mid-haircut. That
had happened to him once before, and he'd had to fake a heart problem in order to

get out of the public eye until he could get it repaired.

'What's the score, Dan Dan?' he asked.

Williams looked pale himself. There was a lot of blood being drained out of

faces, and it was a good thing that none of it was leaking onto the carpet. Barney

glanced in the mirror, saw the look in Williams' eyes and stopped the cut. Here was
something, he thought. He recognised the look. Death had come to call. It followed

him everywhere, as sure as thunder followed lightning, as sure as a headache
followed a night of grape and grain.

Williams looked at the PM, who turned round, now that Barney had stopped

the cut. Williams couldn't say it straight away, glanced at Thackeray, ended up

looking at Barney, as he seemed the one with the most authority in the room.

'Who's dead?' asked Barney.

Williams swallowed. The PM looked at Barney, then back to Williams.
'Someone's dead?' he asked. 'Bloody hell, something else to keep us off the

front pages. Who is it now? Probably flippin' Camilla, that would really finish us off.'

'Ramone,' said Williams, his voice breaking as he spoke. He cleared his throat,

said 'Ramone' again a little more clearly. Barney nodded. That made sense. He
hadn't heard the name of the previous hairdresser, but it was pretty obvious from

the PM's napper that he had been getting his hair cut by someone called Ramone for

the last few years.

'Arf,' said Igor.

The PM glanced at him, then at Barney.
'You knew Ramone?' he asked. 'You know, you being barbers?'

Barney shook his head, then he looked at Williams and said, 'Cause of death?

Timing, suspects, arrests, anything out of the ordinary?'

Williams, Thackeray and the Prime Minister stared at Barney curiously,

wondering suddenly if the sense of assurance which the new barber carried came

from the fact that he worked for MI6. Or MI5. Or the CIA. The PM looked at Williams
and nodded.

'Yes,' he said, 'any of that stuff. I feel it's vitally important at this stage to have

all the facts, with fully documented, verifiable evidence to support them.'

'Found in a hotel room, not far from here. He'd been dead a couple of days.'
Williams hesitated. The PM glanced at Barney, as if the barber was in charge

and might be able to hurry Williams up a little. He looked at his watch, his curiosity
mixing with his desire to get his hair finished before the press conference that

morning.

'He'd had his stomach cut open and stuffed with a chicken. The chicken's

head had been cut off and thrust down his throat.'

The PM blanched. Thackeray suddenly felt the vomit rise from his stomach,

and seeing as he was in the bathroom, he didn't have far to go anyway. He dived for
the toilet, as Barney rolled his eyes and looked at Igor.

Same old, same old, thought Barney. This kind of murder was always all show

and no tell.

'Arf!' exclaimed Igor.

1857hrs

The day had been spent in mass cover up. It wasn't as if the PM had had anything to
do with his barber's grotesque death, for he certainly hadn't, and neither, as far as

he knew, had anyone else in his party or organisation, but he couldn't let the story
get out. Not at this stage, possibly not ever. And so the right words about national

security had been said, Williams had been admonished for relating the story in front
of Barney and Igor, and the number of people who knew about it was in the process

of being kept to the absolute minimum. Health and crime and squabbles over
immigration had seen the day trudge by in the usual two-weeks-to-go banality.

Soundbites and counter-soundbites, with nothing new to be said. Big lead in the
polls, and it wasn't as if anyone doubted who was going to win.

There was a knock at the study door, and the PM immediately sat down

behind his desk, feeling guilty that he'd almost been caught idly staring out the

window yet again. Found it so hard to concentrate these days.

The door opened and Thackeray stuck his head round, without actually

coming in, just in time to see the PM stumble back into his seat.

'There's a new Pope, Sir,' he said.

'Thank God,' said the PM, without irony. 'One more day of that on the front

pages and we can get on with the real business. Some awful Italian, I expect, is it?'

'German,' said Thackeray.
'You're kidding me!' exclaimed the PM. 'I thought that lot all reformed in the

17th Century?'

'16th Century, Sir, and that's a little simplistic.'

The PM shook his head and stared at his desk.
'German,' he said under his breath.

'Sorry about earlier,' said Thackeray. 'In the bathroom.'
The PM looked up and nodded. Seemed to notice Thackeray for the first time,

and wondered perhaps if he'd been crying.

'Go home, Hugo,' he said.

'Thank you, Sir,' said Thackeray, and then he stepped away from the office,

closed the door and went back to work for another four hours.

1141hrs

The end of another mundane old election day, and another mundane day which had

brought murder once more into the life of Barney Thomson. He looked at his watch,
took the last sip of his second glass of Chilean chardonnay; full length, yet showing

undercurrents of pears, apples, gooseberries and Barbara Windsor. He looked
around the bar, noticed that it had thinned out a little since the last time he'd lifted

his head from his ruminations and looked across the table at his companion.

'Time to go,' said Barney. 'We have a seven o'clock with our new boss.'

'Arf,' came the reply, and Barney Thomson and Igor rose slowly from their

table and headed for the exit.

As they left, there were seven other tables in the establishment occupied. Just

under half of them were taken by people who were there to keep an eye on the two

newcomers in the city. And, as Barney and Igor stepped out of the wine bar, three
men and a woman surreptitiously rose from their seats just a little behind, whilst

another man spoke quietly into his watch.

'The barber and the deaf-mute hunchback have left the building,' he said,

before relaxing and delving once more into his Californian merlot.

The stalking of Barney and Igor had begun.

Wednesday 20th April 2005

0647hrs

The Prime Minister was already up, sitting at the side table in his office eating toast

and eggs, drinking coffee, even though he knew with every cup that his teeth
became more and more stained. (It was on seeing him sitting in just such a position

that Thackeray had come up with the execrable idea for the PM/Chancellor
breakfast party political broadcast, about which the PM was still kicking himself.

He'd already heard rumours that black market copies of the video were selling for
$50 a time in the porn shops in Amsterdam. Chirac was said to have literally pissed

himself laughing when he'd first seen it and had been giving him dirty phone calls
ever since.)

Between every mouthful of toast and egg, he would stop and sigh heavily.

Breakfast turned to ash in his mouth. In his head he made a list of the good and the

bad of being Prime Minister.

Good: you got to be a world statesman and affect the future of the planet; you

got to travel first class; you had your own close protection team; you got to eat lots
of nice food; you never had to actually do anything for yourself, not even wipe your

own bottom if you didn't want to; you got to beat up on small countries which
couldn't stand up to you and your big brother; you got to drive around in flash cars.

Bad: everybody thought you were a complete arsehole; when you ran for re-

election you had to visit schools and appear on GMTV, both with Gordon Brown, and

sometimes both on the same morning. Then you had to go to flippin' Leeds to meet
"Real People" and had to be interviewed by that bastard Paxman for the bloody BBC.

Why?
He thrust another piece of egg into his mouth and stared disconsolately at the

array of morning papers which Thackeray had brought in ten minutes previously.

The man had wanted to spend half an hour running through them, as if the PM was

incapable of reading, but he had dispatched him quickly. He needed to be alone. This
morning he had been beaten 7-0 by the Pope in terms of newspaper headlines, but

that was to be expected. He had given up on the day for headlines, as soon as the
news of the Pontiff's appointment had been made. However, it was for one day only,

and on Thursday – after the packed programme he had today – he could expect to be
beating the Pope by a similar margin. He looked at the Sun. From Hitler Youth to

Papa Ratzi.

The true genius of the British journalistic press at work.

Detective Chief Inspector Grogan and Detective Sergeant Eason stared at the dead,

unplucked beheaded chicken, which had been found in the gouged-out stomach of
the PM's personal hair stylist Ramone. They had been looking at it for most of the

night; neither of them had slept in nearly thirty-six hours. Grogan liked to stare at
clues for as long as was required, in the belief that eventually the truth would come

to him, by epiphany, downright obviousness, or by some other more supernatural
means. He never cared where it came from, but it usually came.

'You thinking what I'm thinking?' said Grogan, then laughed at his own little

election-related joke.

Eason had been imagining he was James Bond, lying naked in one of those

Japanese mountain spas, being pleasured by seven or eight Japanese girl agents,

while the snow monkeys looked on.

'I doubt it,' he said.

'Two weeks before the election and the Prime Minister's personal barber

gets murdered with a chicken,' said Grogan. 'It's no coincidence.'

Eason looked away from the chicken for the first time in four hours. He

stared at Grogan, whose eyes remained locked on the decapitated poultry.

'Sir?' he said.
Grogan answered with a raised eyebrow, without looking at him.

'We've been sitting here all night looking at the last chicken at Sainsbury's,'

said Eason, 'and all you've come up with is, it's no coincidence?'

Grogan did not reply.

'Can I go and get breakfast now?' asked Eason.
'Contribute,' said Grogan. 'Then you can go and get breakfast. Or lunch, or

dinner, depending on when it is you actually think of something.'

Eason stared at him, not in the least incredulous, because that was what he'd

been expecting.

'Look at the chicken,' said Grogan.

Eason stared for another couple of seconds, then turned back and looked at

the chicken.

The clock ticked. Eason's stomach rumbled loudly. Grogan clucked his

tongue, unconsciously getting inside the mind of a chicken. Outside, the horn of a

London bus blared, as a black BMW cut him up on the inside.

'The chicken wasn't acting alone?' ventured Eason.

0712hrs

'Big day today,' said the Prime Minister, catching Barney's eye in the mirror.

Barney was fussing around the Prime Ministerial napper, with nothing to do

other than snip at a couple of non-existent hairs, and apply the odd bit of hairspray
here and there.

'Paxman?' ventured Barney.
The PM made some unattractive grunt.

'Paxman,' he agreed. 'Course, I'll make mincemeat out of the wanker. What

can he say? He'll question me on Iraq, and I just pull the old, I did what I felt was

right routine. I own the statement, he can't fault me on it. I'll stop short of pulling
George's God stuff, but it's not far off. What can he say?'

'Well,' said Barney, 'he can imply that you only invaded Iraq so that you could

support the West's arms and logistics industries, because your government is
principally interested in the profit of big business, in whose pocket you belong.'

Barney snipped away, quite unconcerned. His caution of the day before had

vanished on the back of one day on the campaign trail. If he got kicked off it, all for

the best. He was bored now, after a day in the Big Smoke, and found himself
strangely yearning for the quiet solitude and gentle waves of Millport. Of course,

there was always the possibility that what had happened to Ramone would happen
to him, but then, what did he care? He'd been dead once before with his brain in a

jar. After that, nothing seemed particularly intimidating.

The Prime Minister smiled uncomfortably, until he caught sight of his teeth in

the mirror, and then he grimaced and looked sternly at Barney.

'I can assure you, and the real people of Britain, that at the end of the day, I

want to make it absolutely clear that I have already answered that question, and I
believe that the hardworking families of Britain understand this.'

Barney stopped for a second as he looked down on the balding head of the

PM, his hair a great swathe on which Ramone had worked his magic, covering up the

rampant progression of baldy napperness. A brief insight into the clichéd world of
the PM. Barney turned and looked at Williams, who was waiting patiently behind,

and then he glanced at Igor.

'Arf,' said Igor, and Barney nodded. The PM caught his eye in the mirror, then

looked at himself once more. Perhaps he hadn't been so wise in bringing Barney
down to London in the first place. He bared his teeth. He paled at the sight of the

dead tooth on the lower jaw, then let his lips close over, like a fridge door closing on
stale cheese.

1141hrs

They were on their way to Leeds to meet real people. A stage-managed meeting with

real people, but a meeting all the same. The PM was edgy, the GMTV/school gate
part of the day out of the way, but with a real people situation lying imminently on

the horizon. Barney and Igor had been brought along for the ride, and were sitting at
a four-man table on the train, staring out the window as another dull English spring

day passed them by. Williams and Thackeray were fussing about, as were Winsome
and Gail, the PR girls. There were a few others in the entourage, a screaming bunch

of journalists, and then there were a couple of other foreign bodies on the train. Men
who were there to ask questions, but who were not from the press.

Barney and Igor were just about to get down to a telepathic discussion on

whether it might be time for an early lunch, when the two empty seats beside them

suddenly became occupied. Igor looked suspiciously at the two newcomers, Barney
gave them the universal eyebrow of curiosity.

'Hello,' said Barney. 'Polis?'
Eason nodded. Grogan flicked open a badge.

'Grogan and Eason, Scotland Yard,' he said.
'Thought you people were supposed to be keeping this thing ultra hush-

hush?' said Barney. 'Walking up and down a train full of journalists, doesn't seem to
be the best way to be incognito.'

'We've got cover as AP,' said Eason. 'The press don't suspect a thing.'
'Seriously,' said Grogan, 'if you're a journalist looking for the PM's smoking

gun, you're not going to imagine that his hairdresser got murdered with a chicken.'

Barney smiled.

'Good point,' he said. 'So what d'you want to ask us? My friend can lip-read,

but you might not understand him. I'll translate where required.'

Grogan looked at Igor with the same level of suspicion that Igor was looking

at him. (Igor had faced persecution from the police on many an occasion, the finger

of suspicion so often falling on the deaf-mute hunchback; albeit not as often as he
had been chased by a mob of torch-wielding angry villagers.)

'What does he know about chickens?' said Grogan to Barney.

'I said he could lip-read,' said Barney. 'Ask him yourself.'
Grogan sneered in a calculated, American TV cop kind of a way, then looked

at Igor.

'What do you know about chickens?' he said, pronouncing every syllable

very, very clearly.

'Arf,' said Igor.

Grogan stared at him to see if he could detect any sign of mockery, then he

looked at Barney with a raised eyebrow.

'You're going to translate that?'
'Certainly,' said Barney. 'He said, 'So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow

glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens'.'

Grogan nodded. He looked expressionlessly at Igor who also nodded. Eason

smirked. Had only been able to grab a Danish and a cup of coffee on the way to the
train station. He was beginning to think about a chicken sandwich with stacks of

mayonnaise and just a little lettuce.

'I take it the two of you comedians can verify your whereabouts on Saturday

evening, between the hours of seven and eleven?' said Grogan.

Barney thought about it, then shook his head.

'I was at home in Millport. Alone. Can't verify a thing, not that it matters.

Likewise for Igor, except he does have verification. I believe he spent the evening

with the three Lamont sisters.'

Barney looked at Igor, who smiled wickedly at the memory of Saturday

evening.

'Arrrf,' he said.

1659hrs

The Prime Minister walked quickly along the short corridor, his fists clenched in

triumph. Williams and Thackeray walked beside him, Thackeray clapping him on
the shoulder.

'Kicked his arse,' said the PM, 'totally kicked his arse.'
'You certainly did, Sir,' said Thackeray.

'Let them show that at peak time on BBCfriggin'1,' said Williams. 'The Death

of Paxman!' he further exclaimed, putting his hands up to represent the banner

headline.

Winsome and Gail walked behind, as usual their assessment slightly more

conservative than their gung-ho colleagues, but the boys did have a habit of getting
carried away. Either that, or a habit of fearlessly sucking up.

The PM turned a corner and walked into the small dressing room. Barney

and Igor were there, sitting in silence, each reading a copy of the Evening Standard.

The PM approached Barney with huge enthusiasm, the palm of his hand aloft, ready
to high-five his new, kick-ass hairstylist.

'Barney!' he said. 'My main man! I was brilliant, but so was the hair! You are

the man!'

The Prime Minister stood over Barney, hand raised.
'My man!' he repeated, as he continued to stand, like a fish supper without

the newspaper.

'You were OK,' said Barney, 'but I thought he let you off the hook a couple of

times.'

The PM gave him another second, and then with one smooth continuous

movement swivelled round, brought his hand across, and Thackeray was there,
open-handed to meet the high-five, as if that was what the PM had intended all

along. Then he clapped his hands, like they were all Cub Scouts together around the
campfire singing songs about adventure and chumminess and baked beans, then he

began to pace around the room, still buzzing, the adrenaline still pumping.

'What a day!' he cried. 'What a day! Gordon and I looked like pals. We

schmoozed our way through GMTV. We school-gated with panache. I kicked that
stupid little student's arse in Leeds. And now I've just buried Paxman. I'm the man. I

am the man. And the hardworking ordinary families of middle England know it.'

They all stared at him, each of the others in the room running over the day

which had just gone by, trying to think if any of it matched the Prime Minister's
interpretation.

'Thought you said I was the man,' said Barney, without looking up, a smile on

his face.

'I want to be the man!' said Igor. Although it more or less came out as 'arf!'

2200hrs

Another day on the campaign trail was over, and every day which did not bring

disaster for the PM, was another day which brought his inevitable victory a little
closer. He went to bed early, happy in the knowledge that a tricky day had been seen

off with honesty and integrity (or, at least, his own brand of those two questionable
attributes), and that the Sun were coming out the following day with their support

for his government, ridiculous reservations notwithstanding. Barney also went to
bed early, tired and longing for home. Igor stayed out until three o'clock in the

morning, enjoying the hospitality of one of the PM's two PR girls. Grogan and Eason
sat up late, discussing the nature of poultry.

And while the evening drew to a close and tumbled into early night in London, the

killer of the PM's hairdresser checked himself into a hotel in Washington DC, where
he was due to spend the next couple of days. For although the chicken thing had all

been his idea, and the timing and execution had been down to him, the killer, like so
many others before him, answered to a higher power.

Thursday 21st April 2005

0728hrs

There was a loud rapping at the door, an incessant clatter, until Barney Thomson

suddenly sat bolt upright in bed. He had three seconds of complete confusion, that
glorious moment of total mental bedlam when you wake up in a strange bed and

don't have the faintest idea where you are; that exotic mixture of fear and concern
and delirious freedom, until you realise you're in the bed that you went to sleep in

and everything becomes clear and obvious and your heart sinks back to normal
level. Barney looked at the clock, he shook his head and then flopped back down on

the bed. The knocking started up again, the sound which five seconds earlier had
seemed to be part of a bizarre dream where everybody he knew was either dead or

turning into snakes.

He stared at the ceiling, the knowledge flooding back of where he was. Hotel

in London, working for the Prime Minister, due in Downing Street at 7:15. Barney
was late for school. He'd be sent to the headmaster, maybe kept late for detention.

The PM was going to Rochdale for the afternoon. More meetings with real people,
another visit to a marginal constituency. Couldn't possibly do that without his

fifteenth haircut in three days.

Barney swung his legs over the side of the bed, straightened up, felt the pains

in every joint and bone in his legs, as ever these days, and walked slowly to the door.
On his way he caught sight of himself in the mirror and stopped. Turned and looked

at himself, floor length. Top to bottom. Nothing sagging yet, but not exactly fit. Hair
just about hanging in there, decent muscle tone in legs and arms, looked OK in a

white t-shirt and boxer shorts, but not so great when they were removed. Sighed,
sucked in his stomach, walked to the door, wondering if this was going to be a

woman.

He opened the door and nodded. It was the two police officers from the day

before. Grogan and Eason. No women. He let his stomach go again, shook his head at
the fact that he'd actually been sucking in the stupid thing in the first place.

'Gentlemen,' he said. 'I couldn't be more excited.'
'We need to talk,' said Grogan.

'Fantastic,' replied Barney. 'I've just woken up, I'm knackered and confused,

feel like shit, barely know what day it is, I look like the Borg, and I'm dying to take a

pish. Come in, sit down, order room service.'

Eason smiled. He loved it when potential interrogatees met Grogan sarcasm

for sarcasm. Grogan wasn't so keen.

'Breakfast downstairs in fifteen minutes,' he said.

'I'm already late for work,' said Barney.
'Call in knackered and confused,' said Grogan dryly, and with that he turned

and walked off down the corridor. Eason looked at Barney, for some reason couldn't
stop himself winking and snapping his fingers at him, and he turned and followed

the boss. Barney watched them go then closed the door and turned back into the
room.

'Bollocks,' he muttered, and then he minced off to the bathroom in search of

cold water.

0733hrs

The Prime Minister sat in the barber's chair, looking a little concerned. Williams and
Thackeray buzzed about in the background, sorting out papers, writing memos,

trying to disengage themselves from the PM's latest hair crisis.

'You know what Gordon's supposed to be doing today?' asked Thackeray,

rifling through a red box full of paper.

Williams said something non-committal in reply, but the PM hardly heard

him. He had switched off as soon as he had heard mention of the name Gordon.
Unless they were talking about the gin, he didn't want to know. He caught the eye of

the man who was standing behind him, poised and patiently waiting, like an
unfettered grizzly bear hovering over the salmon of eternal lunch.

'You're sure you've done this before?' he asked, speaking slowly and clearly.
The man behind him hesitated a second and then nodded. In for a penny...

'Arf,' he said.
The PM breathed deeply and then slowly let the Prime Ministerial napper

drop forward in a nod of approval.

'As Prime Minister, I believe that it is my duty to help the hard working

people of Britain prosper and go forward in whatever field they choose. This, the
present, following on so quickly as it is from the past, is the time when we shall

prepare for the future in whatever way we see best, and I, as Prime Minister, can
only stand back in admiration, as I admire the admirable actions of the reliable

ordinary real people who draw a line and make a stand. Yes, Igor, you can invade
Iran…'

'Arf!'
'Cut my hair, sorry.'

Igor grimaced, for some reason the PM relaxed, and the deaf-mute

hunchbacked barber's assistant leant forward and plunged headfirst into his first

haircut in several years.

0753hrs

'I'm curious,' said Grogan.

Barney buttered another piece of toast and placed a slice of well-grilled

smoked bacon on top. He glanced at the maple syrup, but there wasn't a pancake in

sight, so he decided against. Took a drink of tea that wasn't quite warm enough.

Hotel tea; what can you do?

'That's a fine quality in a police officer,' said Barney. 'Can you not eat

breakfast at the same time?'

Eason laughed, as he took a bite out of a massive bacon, egg, mushroom,

bacon, tomato, egg, sausage, black pudding, egg and hash brown sandwich he'd
created. Grogan looked over the top of his cup of coffee. Grogan never ate breakfast.

Or lunch or dinner. Grogan never seemed to let anything pass his lips other than
cigarette smoke, coffee and alcohol. There were those at the station who thought he

was a vampire; although that would be a nicotine/caffeine/alcohol junkie vampire.

'Why you?' said Grogan.

Barney nodded in acknowledgement of a fine question, as he finished off his

mouthful.

'The way I see it,' he said, 'the first thing he'll have done on the first morning

when his hairdresser didn't turn up, is look for the hairdresser of one of the other

cabinet ministers. However, the likelihood is that they'll all have restrictive clauses
written into their contracts, preventing them from working for anyone else. Then

he'll have turned to celebrity people, and if they weren't already tied up, they'll have
told him to clear off, because that lot all turned against New Labour years ago. Next

he'll have got his guys to go out in London and check all the Toni & Guy accredited
establishments they could find, and they'll all have told him to piss off, because

they'll have had their credibility to think about. Then they'll have started checking
the regions, and before you know it, they would have been at a Scottish outpost

picking up any old geezer they could get their hands on. And, of course, his deaf-
mute hunchbacked assistant.'

Eason took another massive bite from his massive sandwich and sent a great

squirt of egg yolk out over the white table cloth. He looked as sheepish as was

possible with a mouthful of food and Grogan gave him a sideways glance.

'And maybe it was because you worked for the Scottish First Minister and

he'd heard about you.'

Barney smiled.

'You're curious and you do research,' he said. 'You're pretty sharp.'
Eason gave a full-mouthed mumble to indicate it was him who had done the

research. Barney acknowledged him.

'Why do you think the guy was murdered?' said Grogan, suddenly coming to

the point.

Barney took another bite to give himself some time to think. Eason took

another bite at the same time, and a great dollop of maple syrup dripped down his
white shirt.

'The way we see it, there are three possibilities,' said Grogan, not waiting for

an answer. 'One, he was killed by someone in the PM's office because he didn't like

the way his hair looked.' He paused to allow Barney time to react to that outrageous
suggestion. Barney didn't. 'Two, he was killed by his gay lover.'

'He had a gay lover?' said Barney, through a piece of bacon.
'Hell, he was a hairdresser, he's bound to have.'

Barney gave him the appropriate look.
'You're a barber, that's one thing. But these nancy boy hairdressers who poof

about in leather trousers, there's something wrong with them, you know what I'm
saying?'

'I believe you're saying that your thinking hasn't progressed since your

grandfather was born,' said Barney.

'Come on, they're all called Ramone and Raphael and Julio and Juan for crying

out loud. Juan...'

'Really? You ever actually met a gay hairdresser called Juan?' asked Barney.
'Commendably new man of you,' said Grogan, 'but in this case we checked. He

had a boyfriend.'

'Doesn't mean you're not ignorant,' said Barney, 'and doesn't mean that the

guy killed him just because they were both gay. What kind of TV have you been
watching? So what was the third suggestion? He was an illegal immigrant? His

parents weren't from England? He had a hunchback?'

'Number three, someone's trying to mess with the PM's re-election campaign,

and this is a good way of buggering him up.'

Barney nodded.

'Can't really argue with that one,' he said, 'however I think you're being a bit

limited in your evaluation of motive. There are a whole host of motives out there.

Revenge, money, blackmail, bad haircut on a previous client, hundreds of things.'

'We have been doing some work,' said Grogan. 'We've narrowed it down.'

'Ah,' said Barney. 'Good job. Are you Starsky and Hutch or Batman and

Robin?' he added, showing his age and cultural reference points.

'We want you to work for us,' said Grogan, ignoring the sarcasm.
Barney took another two quick bites of toast and bacon, finishing off the slice.

Downed some tea.

'Our man on the inside,' said Eason, finally adding something to the

conversation, as a squirt of ketchup dribbled down his chin.

'No,' said Barney.

'What?' said Grogan sharply.
'No,' said Barney. 'Did that in Scotland, I hated it, I'm not doing it.'

He dabbed his mouth with a napkin, pushed his chair back and stood up.
'Gentlemen,' he said, 'I'm late for the Prime Minister. Have a nice

investigation.'

He smiled and nodded and walked quickly away from the table. Grogan and

Eason watched him go, Eason taking a gigantic mouthful of sandwich, squirting
mayonnaise up his face.

'Despite the fact that he's a sarcastic pain in the arse,' said Grogan, 'I quite

like the guy.'

Eason nodded. 'What was all that Juan, Julio crap all about?' he asked,

through the food. 'You don't give a shit about that stuff.'

Grogan took another sip of coffee, glanced at Eason over the top of the cup

and tapped the side of his nose.

0821hrs

Barney walked into the PM's office over an hour and a half late. He stopped, he

looked at the PM, he was about to apologise for being a little behind the curve and
then, before he could say anything, he noticed the Prime Minister's hair.

'D'oh!' said Barney.

1301hrs

1.01pm in London, 8.01am in Virginia. A grey morning on the other side of the

Atlantic, and the killer of Ramone had not slept well. For years he'd been crossing
the Atlantic for various reasons, and he still couldn't get used to the jet lag. It was

stupid, it was only five hours, and yet his sleeping patterns were always completely
knocked to hell by it. He had spent the night watching reality TV, slowly going

demented, as he'd learned about Cops Who Steal, Thieves Who Arrest, Bored
Housewives Who Can't Cook, Judges Who Can't Judge, Undercover Agents Who Can't

Act, Actors Who Can't Go Undercover, and Government Officials Who Can't Govern.
That last show had lasted seven or eight hours and was part three of four hundred

and fifty.

Hadn't even tried going to bed, had eaten breakfast at just after six, and now

walked quickly in through the gates of CIA HQ in Langley. Showed his pass to four
different guards, walked along a series of increasingly bland corridors, and turned

into the small office on the fourth floor. The single man working in the office had

been alerted to his impending arrival, and duly had his head down working through
a short document on Balkan drug smuggling operations when the man walked into

the office. Ramone's killer pulled out the seat across the desk and sat down.
Prepared to wait.

'You haven't made the news,' said the man behind the desk.
'The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!' came the reply.

Carmichael, the guy in the office, looked up, shaking his head.
'You're such a friggin' asshole,' he said.

'Macbeth,' said the killer.
'You're still an asshole. I don't even know who that is,' said Carmichael. 'Tell

me what you got?'

The killer laid down his briefcase on the desk and quickly pulled out the file

which had been given to him by his agent deep in the bowels of the British party of
opposition.

'It's coming together,' he said, and he laid four photographs out on the desk

for Carmichael to see.

Carmichael leaned forward, looked at each of them slowly in turn, then

finally looked up. A long look into the other's eyes, a slow tap of the finger on the

desk.

'They're good but you could've e-mailed them,' he said. 'You're not a delivery

boy.'

'I know,' he said. 'But I couldn't e-mail this.'

And he reached inside the bag, took out a wooden box and pushed it across

the desk. Carmichael kept his eyes on the man, then reached out, pulled the box

towards him and slowly lifted the lid.

2009hrs

Some days things happen, and some days they don't. Barney had had a long slow
day, after being woken slightly later than intended. He'd taken twenty minutes to

repair the damage inflicted on the PM's hair by Igor, and had had trouble stopping
himself laughing throughout. Decent job done and the PM had dispatched Barney

and Igor for the day, their services not required until the following morning. Igor
had gone off to do London, and Barney had sat drinking coffee, had foolishly gone to

see Constantine at the cinema and had mooched through Hyde Park and St James'
and around Whitehall, waiting for something to happen. And it didn't, because it

wasn't that sort of a day. And the three different groups who were following them
had had to split up to keep an eye on them both, and they too had had a quiet day.

And so, at just before ten past eight in the evening, Barney finally retreated to his
room and collapsed in a melancholic heap, wondering how bad he and Igor would

have to make things on the PM's head for them to be sent permanently back to
Millport.

Friday 22nd April 2005

0917hrs

The Prime Ministerial helicopter rose quickly away from London, leaving behind the

morning streets, and the national newspapers with polls showing Labour's
continuing four to eight point lead. The PM was in a relaxed mood, confident about

the day ahead. Halfway through the campaign, and as long as no disaster reared its
head in the following thirteen days, a sound victory in the making. And, with any

luck, the opposition would be left in such disarray, and the Lib Dems would make
enough gains against them, that the other side of the House would be split even

more for the next four years and Labour would already be set up for another
comfortable victory in 2009. Four years and carte blanche to do whatever the hell

they liked, happy in the knowledge that the next victory was already in the bag. Any
difficulties in that time, of course, would come from within.

Joining him in the back of the helicopter were Williams and Thackeray, his

principal aides, at least for the length of this campaign, Winsome and Gail his PR

girls, and Barney Thomson his hairdresser. Barney was there to deal with any
hirsutological emergencies which might inadvertently affect the PM's napper, what

with him having to disembark from a helicopter to make a speech at the seaside.
There was no space in the helicopter, however, for Barney's deaf-mute hunchbacked

assistant Igor, who was being taken to Dover by car.

Williams and Thackeray were conspiring together as usual, desperately

covering up the fact that they couldn't stand each other. Gail, the PR girl, was sitting
with her eyes closed, absolutely petrified. Winsome, her assistant, was sitting next

to the PM, looking over his shoulder at the holiday brochure he was reading, the two
of them occasionally commenting to each other on various hotels and destinations.

Barney was sitting on the other side of the PM and, if he was honest, was

struggling a little against fear himself. First time in a helicopter.

'You going on holiday?' he said eventually, hoping that a pointless

conversation would take his mind off the thought that at any moment the helicopter
could suddenly blow up into a ball of flame, or start spinning out of control towards

a fiery demise.

The PM shook his head, the brochure open on a page on Tunisia.

'You wonder sometimes, don't you?' he said. 'I mean, the ordinary,

hardworking people must wonder too, obviously. Obviously, everything one

wonders, is in relation to the real people of middle Britain and what they wonder.'

'Pardon?' said Barney.

'I'm a decent man. I think the British people realise that and know that, even

if they don't actually vote for me or agree with everything I say. I'm honest, above all

else, and people respect me for that.'

Mad, thought Barney, completely mad.

'But look at today, look at what we're doing. I'm flying to the south coast to

make a speech on immigration, the others are talking about red tape in the police

and discrimination against women. Honourable things, but not the stuff of history.
It's the tittle-tattle of politics. I think now, eight years on, the real ordinary,

commonplace, regular, decaffeinated people of Great Britain, I believe, have come to
expect more of their Prime Minister. Strategic issues, not micro-management. There

are more important issues out there than women.' A pause. 'No offence, Winsome,
you understand,' he added with a smile. Winsome smiled back, although there was

hidden malice within.

'So you want to go on holiday?' said Barney.

'Not at all,' said the PM. 'It's not about that. Consider President Bush, George I

mean, and his programme of invasions. He's got his next four years, and when we

win our next term, we'll be freed up to back him all the way, help him out in the UN
and make mincemeat out of the French and Germans.'

'And that programme would be?' said Barney.

'Oh, you know,' said the PM, 'the usual suspects. It's not like they're not

preparing the ground. Dan Dan, what was the order again?'

Williams broke off from his conflab with Thackeray.
'They're going to do Syria and Iran together in a kind of Buy One Get One

Free deal with the UN. Then, when the world's at its most distracted with that,
they're going to take care of North Korea, and then next on the list are Laos and

Belarus. After that there'll be time and budget considerations, but there are
obviously a few more ex-Soviet states to deal with, although the CIA are doing a

great job of sorting them out already, and then there's a host of African republics.'

'It's a world of opportunity!' Thackeray chipped in, and the PM laughed.

'And you're looking to see if Thomson's do any package deals to Iran, as a

cheaper way to send the Army in?' said Barney.

Winsome laughed until the PM gave her a swift look.
'To be honest, and I think the people of Britain would respect this, all these

places we're looking to take over, or rather, I should say, restore democratic
governments to, are the most awful countries to spend time in. Iran, Syria, Laos. I

mean, frankly, sometimes the sums just don't add up and realistically speaking
Middle England would respect a bottom up anti-top down approach to these things,

that we'd aim to draw a line at the end of the day, and the ordinary people have to
understand this and I think they do.'

Barney looked out of the window on a green part of England he had never

looked down upon before, no idea where he was, no idea, he had to admit, even

what county they were flying over.

'I didn't understand a word of that,' he said, turning back to the Prime

Minister.

The PM sighed. He closed the holiday brochure and rested his head back

against the seat. Maybe he should close his eyes for ten minutes and be super-fresh
for when they arrived in Dover.

'I just think, you know, that it would be really nice sometime to restore

democracy to a country that was nice to visit on holiday.'

1200hrs

Detective Sergeant Eason hung up the phone and looked around the station room.

DCI Grogan was nowhere to be seen; his office door open, his room empty. Probably
outside taking a smoke. Eason rose quickly from the desk. Three days in and finally

they'd been given something they could act on. And even better, he got to go and
grab Grogan and take him away from something he was doing, rather than the other

way around. Eason polished off the brie and black grape on honey, rye and
strawberry yogurt bread sandwich, and nodded to Constable Mockingbird at the

door.

'Grogan come this way?' he asked, barely slowing to hear the answer.

'Seven minutes ago,' said Mockingbird, an attractive girl in her early 20s.

Eason smiled, winked and snapped his fingers at her.

'Topperooni,' he said and left the office to Mockingbird's smile.
'Topperooni,' he muttered to himself as he walked past the guard down the

stairs on his way out of the building. 'You sound like an idiot.' One day he was going
to walk past Mockingbird, say something smooth and natural, follow it up with an

invitation to dinner, and have the best evening of his life.

Grogan was in the carpark, leaning against his Rover 75 (spare parts difficult

to come by). He always took his fag breaks in threes, lingering over each one,
smoking them all the way down to the filter. He was coming to the end of his second.

'Got a call,' said Eason, walking towards him. 'Anonymous,' he added. 'We

need to go.'

Grogan sucked the last of the blood out of his smoke and tossed it to the

ground, coughing mildly.

'Anonymous phone call?' he said with scorn. 'There are no three words more

guaranteed to get me excited. Come on, Sergeant.'

'Said they were from Tory party central office, and that they had information

on the barber murder. We're meeting them in the Sherlock Holmes. Now.'

Grogan groaned and shook his head.

'You're kidding me,' he said. 'The Sherlock fucking Holmes.' He opened the

driver's door and got in, as Eason climbed in the passenger side. 'I mean, let's pick a

place where no one's going to see us. The most popular sodding tourist and civil
servant dive in London.'

'You just don't like it because they serve Strongbow,' said Eason.
'Exactly,' muttered Grogan. 'Next time...'

He reversed out of his space and put the car into second.
'…I told you to find somewhere around here with Thatcher's Dry, didn't I?'

1217hrs

The person who had put the call through to Eason was waiting in the Sherlock
Holmes at just after quarter past twelve as promised, drinking a half of Strongbow

and eating a packet of Blue Cheese and Italian Chive, Limited Edition Chips. Sitting to
the left of the bar watching the early lunchtime news on TV. Blair in Dover, various

sides of the argument on immigration and what it did and didn't mean for Britain.
He watched Eason and Grogan enter the room and walk to the bar. They leant there

casually, an elbow apiece, waiting to be approached. From where he was sitting he
could hear every word of the short, stilted conversation.

'Who's going to make the move?' asked Grogan.
Eason shrugged. This part probably wasn't going to sound so great.

'He said he would know. Him. He's going to make the approach.'
Grogan looked at him, his lips pursed.

'So we're just going to stand here like lemons?' he said.

Eason mused over the lemon aspect of it and then nodded.
'I'd dispute the lemon thing, but… well, that might be a way to put it.'

'God's sake,' muttered Grogan.
He looked around the bar, his eyes swiftly glancing over the man with the cell

phone watching television, and then he did what he frequently did, and chose to act
on his gut instinct.

'Let's get out of here,' he said. 'Come on.'
Eason was about to object, but he knew to trust Grogan's intuition. He

resented his boss's sixth sense, but there was no doubt that it worked. And, as the
barman began to ask the question of what they wanted to drink, they turned their

backs on him and walked quickly from the bar. And though they would never know
it, that sixth sense of Grogan's would mean that the man with the phone, having

noticed their presence, and having been about to leave the establishment and
remotely detonate the small bomb planted under the bar, instead chose to finish his

Strongbow and packet of over-marketed crisps, and left the device unexploded.

This man was indeed working for Tory party central office, but was here in

his capacity as the double agent of a shadowy overseas organisation. He was also,
however, more of a Monopoly and Marmite man than a bomb man, and so, in fact,

the bomb would never have gone off anyway, even when detonated.

The world, as Winston Churchill once observed, is full of goddam Muppets.

1345hrs

The helicopter buzzed away from the south coast on its way back to London. The PM
was buzzing himself, happy with the way things had gone, and happy with the praise

which had been lauded upon him by the sycophants with whom he surrounded
himself. And the main event of the afternoon to come was a bit of a no-lose affair in

which he himself did not even need to become involved. The leader of Her Majesty's

Opposition was being interviewed by Paxman.

Count Dracula was never going to win over the votes of very many people

against Paxman; however, there was always the possibility that Paxman would
pummel him into the dirt and support would crumble around him, so that by the

time the Sundays went to press late the following night, the opinion polls would be
showing Labour twelve points ahead and the election would be as good as over.

Worst case scenario, one where Herman Munster actually managed to put in a good
show, then they might scrape back a point; but a lead of three to seven is not so

much worse than a lead of four to eight, and Labour would still be on for a huge
majority. It wasn't as if he could afford to take a day off, or be seen to do so, but

perhaps it was time to scale back on all those awful meetings with real people. Let
the Deputy Leader handle them. The press loved it after all. A fist was as good as

wink to a blind bat.

'You're very quiet,' said the PM to Barney.

Barney dragged his eyes away from the disappearing English channel.
'Not paid to talk,' he said. 'Just hair.'

'I've come to value your opinion,' said the PM.
Barney looked at him. He stared deep into the Prime Ministerial eyes and

then turned away with a shiver. He shook it off, looked at the grey waters of the
channel for the final time as the helicopter disappeared into a slight, white cloud

formation.

'I can see right through you,' said Barney, still looking out the window. He

paused. The Prime Minister felt a little uncomfortable with the remark. 'I don't think
you want me to tell you what I think,' he added.

The PM looked at the back of Barney's head, and then once more opened up

the in-flight holiday magazine, and looked wistfully at pictures of Greek beaches.

Greece, he wondered. Hmm. NATO and the European Union. Tricky, tricky,

tricky.

1943hrs

Early evening, almost the end of another day on the campaign trail. Hard to imagine,

as the Paxman interview played out on the TV, and the PM watched with Thackeray
and Dan Dan; as Barney and Igor laughed in a melancholy manner over pasta in

Leicester Square; as Gail and Winsome raced around the office compiling polling
figures on a variety of important governmental issues; as the leader of the

opposition sat in self-congratulatory mode at head office, his ego massaged by a
small group of hangers-on which included the undercover agent for a nefarious

foreign body; and another group of pollsters called and doorstepped more hapless
British voters, to come to the conclusion that nothing had changed in the last four

years; it was hard to imagine that the future of the election, and of the political
leaders and of the country itself, lay in the contents of a small, ancient wooden box,

which currently lay in a drawer of a small office on the fourth floor of CIA
headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Yet that was how it was.

Saturday 23rd April 2005

0818hrs

Another day, another hair re-styling. Barney and the PM were in the bathroom in 10

Downing Street as Barney attended to his hair before a new day on the election trail.
There was nothing to be done with his hair, of course, but the vanity of world

leaders who believe in their own greatness demands constant attention. Williams
and Thackeray, the PM's advisors, had been dispatched. The PM was in melancholic

humour, looking at himself in the mirror as Barney fussed around the Prime
Ministerial napper, without actually really doing anything. The morning papers had

been the usual mix, more credence and interest given to the stories of the day rather
than his own grand visions. He'd made three headlines, right enough, a rise on the

Pope-dominated early days of the week, but two of them had been derogatory. In
particular, the Independent was pissing him off with its constant banging on about

green issues. The future of the planet? As if there weren't a hundred bigger issues to
talk about. The PM bared his teeth again and looked gloomily at the dead tooth on

his lower jaw.

'Apparently people tend to remember things in sevens,' said the PM

suddenly, wanting to break the self-imposed despondency of the moment.

Barney bouffed a section of limp looking hair at the back. Didn't reply. Was

moderately melancholic himself although not quite in the same gloomy depths as
the PM. Happy enough to work in silence, unthinking. Ask any barber what are the

best days in a shop, and they'll tell you they're the ones where the customers don't
want to talk and the day can be passed in quiet rumination. Apart from those

barbers who never shut up and talk about the stupid weather all the time.

'Plus or minus two,' the PM said, when Barney didn't say anything.

Barney caught his eye in the mirror, decided to think about what the man had

actually said.

'Sorry?' he said. 'Seven?'

'Yes,' said the PM. 'That's why there are so many things in seven, particularly

in the ancient world. Seven Deadly Sins, Seven Wonders of the World, The Seven

Commandments, that kind of thing. George Miller came up with the theory in the
'50s, even before The Magnificent Seven was released.'

Barney snipped away.
'That's why people can remember the names of the Magnificent Seven, but

not the Dirty Dozen or the Four Tops.'

Barney stopped for a second. He looked down at the top of the PM's balding

head, and then looked him in the eye.

'It might be time to focus, Prime Minister,' he said. 'Big day ahead,' he added,

even though he had no idea what the day ahead held.

The PM breathed deeply and looked at himself in the mirror. Bared his lips,

allowed his heart to sink that little bit further at the sight of his teeth, which his
advisors wouldn't allow him to have re-whitened mid-campaign, and then he

switched back into serious world leader pretend. No time for gloom when you've got
a planet to help destroy.

'Press conference with the chancellor this morning,' he said, looking Barney

in the eye. 'Don't know why we bother with all the pretence, it's not like everybody

doesn't know.'

'What's the problem?' asked Barney.

The PM shrugged. 'Just hate each other.'
'Why?'

The PM stared at himself.
'That's a very good question,' he said, completely switching in to PM-mode,

'and I believe strongly as a politician first and a Prime Minister second, that it is my
duty to answer questions asked by ordinary hardworking people. Such as yourself.'

Barney nodded. Oh God, don't start monologuing, he thought, I'm not going to

vote for you anyway.

'Well, he hates me because I've got the sweetie jar and I'm not giving it to

him,' he said smiling. He liked that analogy, and just wished that he could use it with
the press. That bunch of comedians would be all over him, of course, if he said it.

Usually only his wife and the Health Secretary and a few others got the benefit of it.
'And why do I hate him? No big reason. Don't like the cut of his Scottish jib. I hate the

noise he makes when he eats, and that thing he does when he draws his lower lip in
beneath his top one, you know what I'm talking about?'

Barney nodded just to keep him happy.
'And he farts,' muttered the PM darkly. 'Big Scottish farts. Stinky.'

Barney snipped off a piece of hair which, strictly speaking, didn't need to go.

0945hrs

Detective Chief Inspector Grogan and Sergeant Eason, the men investigating the

murder of the Prime Minister's previous barber, Ramone MacGregor – who had
been killed one week earlier with a chicken – were sitting in the office of the Chief

Superintendent, M Jackson McDonald. Grogan, while not actually smoking at that
instant, was oozing the stench of cigarettes. Eason had a large tomato ketchup stain

on his tie from breakfast. M Jackson McDonald was scratching his beard.

'How do you know that this man came from Conservative Party HQ? It could

have been any old crank.'

'We checked the phone records, Sir,' said Eason.

McDonald nodded. That one was too easy, which was a pity. There was no

way he was letting them take this any further, but he didn't want it getting too

messy, and he didn't want them deciding to do something behind his back.

'Why didn't you wait for him in the pub then?' said M Jackson McDonald

sharply. He was about to cover them in bullshit, and so was taking an aggressive
stance right from the off, in the usual manner of authority which knows it's in the

wrong. 'You turned up and then left without meeting him? That doesn't sound like
good police work to me, Chief Inspector. Don't go making waves now just to cover

up your own mistake.'

'Making waves?' said Grogan. 'We received a call from Tory HQ relating to a

murder investigation. It's perfectly reasonable that we follow it up.'

He was getting annoyed, although he generally got annoyed just at the

thought of entering McDonald's office.

'It's probably just some crank call,' said M Jackson McDonald.

'We won't know unless we check it out!' barked Grogan.
M Jackson McDonald straightened his shoulders. To be honest he found

Grogan quite intimidating, but he couldn't show it.

'Goddamit, Grogan,' he said, theatrically bringing his fist down onto the desk,

a genuine thespian at heart, 'it's taking all our efforts to keep this thing out the press
in the first place. Imagine the stink it'll cause if it gets out that part of the

investigation into the murder of the PM's barber is taking place at the opposition
HQ. Jesus Christ, it'll be the news story of the millennium, even if it does lead to

nothing. My bollocks will be roasted.'

Grogan leant forward, in what Eason recognised as his pre-Rottweiller

position.

'And what if the killer just so happens to come from Tory Party HQ? We just

let him away with it because it'll get in the papers?'

M Jackson McDonald rose to his feet and once more brought the fist of Equity

down on the desk. It might have been effective if he hadn't been such a bearded fop.

'You can't go making such judgements from one meaningless phone call!

Calm it down, Steven!' he bellowed. 'Or you'll be directing traffic...'

Up the King's Road?

'...up the King's Road!'

Grogan got to his feet and walked quickly to the door.
'I'm not finished,' yelled M Jackson McDonald.

Grogan turned and looked at him, hand on the door.
'I need a smoke,' he said, then he quickly opened the door and walked out.

M Jackson McDonald slammed his fist once more on the desk, looking angrily

at the door, while actually being rather relieved that the unpleasant scene was now

over. He turned to Eason at the sound of him pushing his chair back and getting to
his feet.

'And I need a doughnut,' said Eason, then he too walked out the office, only

with a little less drama.

M Jackson McDonald slumped down into the seat and looked at the small

report which Grogan had compiled on the investigation so far.

'Aw, shite,' he muttered. 'I need a doughnut and a cigarette 'n' all.'

1017hrs

Barney and his deaf-mute hunchbacked assistant Igor were sitting watching the PM

on television, eating breakfast. Second breakfast which, properly handled, can be
even better than first breakfast. There was a lot of bacon involved. The PM was

giving some line about how people should vote for Labour if they valued their
achievements, and both Barney and Igor snorted.

'That's just a bizarre thing for any serving government to say,' said Barney.
Igor nodded.

'Not like I care, because one's as bad as the other,' he began, and Igor glanced

at Barney over his humph, 'but every single policy the government has is about

privatisation and private finance initiatives and giving money to big business and
consultants and damn to hell whether it's best for patients or rail passengers or

whatever. But the real stuff that they do wrong, the real mismanagement and the

real wastes of public money, the opposition can't complain about, as they started it,
and they'd do exactly the same stuff if they got in. Load of pish, the whole thing.

Complete load of pish.'

'Arf.'

'It'd make you want to go and live in France, if it wasn't for the fact that

they're worse.'

'Arf.'
He took another bite of a bacon sandwich and watched another little guarded

look in the PM's eyes, as the Chancellor said something else he disagreed with, while
at the same time doing that thing with his bottom lip.

1056hrs

Grogan and Eason were leaning on a railing above the Thames, staring down into
the grey water. Grogan was smoking his seventeenth cigarette of the day, Eason was

eating a cream cheese bagel with bacon, lettuce, honey, marmite, more cream cheese
and more bacon. There was already a dollop of cheese on his tie, to add to the

ketchup, and another smear on the tip of his nose. Grogan was letting the cheese on
his nose go for the time being.

'So, we have a decision to make,' said Grogan.
Eason bit into the bagel, sending more cream cheese squishing out the

middle, like cold white lava oozing from a volcanic bakery product.

'Where to go for third breakfast?' he said.

'No.'
'Lunch?'

Grogan blew smoke to the side, tossed the cigarette butt out towards the

water, although a slight wind made sure that it never made it that far, and gave
Eason the usual look.

'Tory HQ?' said Eason.
'Yes,' said Grogan. 'We need a plan.'

Eason chewed food and wiped his arm across his mouth.
'Why do I hate the sound of that?' he said.

'Because I'm going to sit in the office and do sod all while you have to go

undercover and suck up to a bunch of Tory wankers.'

Eason took another huge bite of bagel, and then crammed the rest of it into

his mouth, so that his cheeks bulged with food.

'Huck's sake,' he said.

1657hrs

The PM stormed into the office and slammed the door behind him. Williams,

Thackeray, Barney and Igor were sitting around the room, having a discussion on
Chelsea's impending Premiership triumph, and whether it could just as easily have

been Hartlepool or Wigan or Rushden & Diamonds who were in that position if a
Russian gazillionaire had pitched up to buy the club. Barney and Igor were being

drawn into the PM's inner circle, which didn't seem to bother anyone.

'Did you hear it?' said the PM. 'Did you hear it?

They looked around the room at each other, wondering if he was talking

about another one of the Chancellor's farts.

'Liar! He called me a liar!'
'Oh that,' said Williams, and Thackeray nodded and looked back at the notes

he was making for the following day's keynote speech. Barney shrugged and turned

back to Barber's Monthly, with all the news on the latest scissor technology coming

out of the big hairdressing technology industries in Nevada.

'Liar!' repeated the PM. 'He called me a liar! A liar! I mean, do I say that he's

the spawn of the undead? But it's going to come to that. Liar! Jesus suffering Christ!'

'Well you are,' said Thackeray matter-of-factly, looking up from his notes.

'What?' said the PM.
'Well, you know, you are a liar. You lie all the time. I write your speeches, and

they're full of lies.'

The PM looked a bit taken aback, wasn't sure what to say.

'I mean, it's no big deal. You're a politician, of course you lie. Everyone

expects you to lie. Even if you told the truth, everyone would think you were lying

anyway, so you might as well just lie in the first place.'

'I think you should lie even more,' added Williams.

'But...' began the PM, but he wasn't sure what to say after that. Thackeray had

a point after all. 'Well, there was also his line about the wishy-washy, pussyfooting

government.'

Williams and Thackeray stared at him. Neither of them said, 'if the cap fits',

but it was implicit in their eyebrows.

'You're saying I'm over-reacting?' said the PM eventually.

'Yes, Sir,' said Williams.
'Sit down and have a doughnut,' said Thackeray.

'Let me tell you about the new combs coming out of the States,' said Barney.
'Arf.'

2213hrs

Saturday night, another day of the campaign behind them all, election day another
day nearer. Barney sat alone in a bar just off Marble Arch, nursing a slow beer.

Didn't want to drink too much, another early start with the PM's thinning hair the

following day. Igor was having dinner with a couple of young American ladies on
tour who he'd met on The Mall whilst out for a walk earlier in the day. The PM sat in

bed in his pyjamas trying to concentrate on a report on world hunger for the
following day. Eason and Grogan worked late, devising a stratagem which would

allow Eason entry to Tory Party HQ.

And meanwhile, across the Atlantic, it was mid-afternoon in Virginia, where

the real power lay, and where the real decisions which would affect the outcome of
the British General Election would be taken. Except, it was a Saturday afternoon, and

no one with any interest in it was at their desk.

Sunday 24th April 2005

1345hrs

A quiet Sunday, eleven days before the general election. Anywhere between a four

and ten point lead for the government in the opinion polls in all the Sundays, and for
all that the politicians and the media might try to make something of every little

snippet they could get their hands on, it was dull, dull, dull and there was little that
any of them could do about it. If only they'd all known that the Prime Minister's

personal barber had been murdered with a chicken just over a week earlier. The
leader of the opposition had turned to personal attacks on the Prime Minister's

integrity, with his principal speech writers arguing over whether to call the PM a
"liar", a "despicable liar", "very naughty and bad" or a "cheatin', lyin', bitch-slappin'

muthafukka". The alternative opposition, in its desperation to break away from the
21% point mark in the polls, had finally turned to Iraq, which it had been holding off

on for two weeks.

The Prime Minister was sitting on the London Eye with his main assistants

Thackeray and Williams. Also along for the ride were his two new assistants, Barney
Thomson, the barber, and Igor, the deaf-mute hunchbacked barber's aide, who had

originally been brought in to deal with his hair, but were more and more becoming
dragged into the PM's inner circle; although more in an agony aunt kind of position

rather than in a policy making capacity. The PM had thought that the Eye might give
him a different perspective on things. Had also thought that going amongst the

public in central London might be a bit of an election coup, but of course everyone
had just been hacked off at him for taking up an entire capsule on the Eye, with his

security guys on the one before and the one after, and most of the people there had
of course been foreign tourists anyway.

The four men in the capsule were waiting for the PM to start any discussion.

Thackeray had tried as soon as they'd moved off, but the PM had been distracted
and had talked excitedly about the vision which the Eye afforded them and how it

was a wonderful corollary for his government and the vision which it had brought to
the country. Thackeray had shut up, they had allowed the PM to grandstand for a

while, and then he had talked even himself into silence. Now, as they reached the
apex of the loop, a melancholy had descended upon them, as they looked out over

London in all its grey, low-rise ordinariness. From up here it looked vast and
unremarkable, but had that silent beauty of any of the great cities. Barney glanced at

the PM, recognised the feeling of gloom which had begun to dominate his meetings
with him. Could tell the man wasn't happy, wasn't enjoying the campaign. Would

probably have been more upbeat with more of a fight.

'What d'you think about God?' the PM suddenly threw out into the capsule.

Thackeray and Williams glanced at each other, and immediately decided that

this was one which was probably aimed at Barney in any case.

'Arf,' said Igor.
The PM nodded. Even he was beginning to get a handle on Igor's

monosyllabic utterances, which contained so much in such a short bark.

'It's absurd, isn't it?' the PM began, looking down at the river. 'Most of the

British public don't believe in God, couldn't give a stuff. No one goes to church
anymore, the media don't even pay religion lip service. The only aspects of religion

that a majority of the country actually care about are The Da Vinci Code and the
architecture, but just imagine.' He looked at them intently, demanding attention.

'Just imagine I gave a press conference and said just that, said that I thought the
whole God thing was a load of crap. We live in a world of natural selection, with no

outside influence whatsoever. God? I mean, please. But can I say that? Just imagine
the stink. Jesus, they'd be all over me like a viral infection.' He looked around the

four men. None of them had anything to say. Belief in God aside, he wasn't wrong
after all.

'Liar?' he said. 'The Undead Bastard calls me a liar. But if I am, it's the media

which makes me one, with their fucking piety. Imagine, you know, imagine I
suggested that God was indicted by the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague for mass

genocide after the Noah's Ark debacle. What then? D'you think I'd get decent press?
I don't think so.'

They looked at him a little curiously. There are tangents and there are

tangents. The Eye lumbered on. The PM burbled away.

'But, you know, if they came to me and said, do you believe in the story of

Noah's Ark, what am I supposed to say? If I say I don't, they'd crucify me. If I say I do,

then I'm in a position of having to justify mass genocide, and why we're chasing
Karadic and Mladic but not the Lord. It's a tough one, don't you think?'

'All I can say, Prime Minister,' said Williams, to break his flow, 'is that I'm

glad Paxman didn't bring up the subject if you're going to talk like that.'

'I have genuine angst about this,' said the PM.
'Noah's Ark?' asked Barney.

'Yes,' said the PM. 'I mean, what if people start talking about it?'
He looked at them, searching their faces for some sort of help with his

internal angst.

'What if the politically correct brigade start to ask questions about why this

tale of mass slaughter is taught in Sunday schools and in books for little children?
They'd immediately look at me, as the most important person in the country, and

then what am I going to do? I'm screwed, and those other two Muppets would just
be able to sit back and laugh. It's madness.'

'I think, Prime Minister,' said Barney, 'that this might be what you're

descending into now.'

The PM glanced at him. It was the kind of remark which would have had

Williams or Thackeray dispatched to Afghanistan on the next plane, but they both

knew that Barney could get away with it. And while they both resented the hell out
of Barney and his new position as confidante to the PM, they had begun to wonder if

they could use him to feed opinions and information to the PM which they knew he

wouldn't want to hear from them.

'You say that Barney, but then there's the plague of cancers after the

Philistines stole the Ark. I mean, he doesn't just grab the first couple of chaps who
got their hands on the thing, does he? He does everyone, the whole flippin' lot.

Thousands of them. Cancer! And they didn't have radiotherapy in those days, and
even if they had, who knows what their health service would have been like. Worse

than ours probably. Women, children, everyone. Politicians, even those who spoke
out against the Ark theft in the first place. I know in modern translations they've

downgraded it to benign tumours or a bit of a cold or web viruses or something, but
in the original Greek or Latin or Aramaic, or whatever the heck it was written in, it

was cancer. I mean, how can you possibly justify that? You can't. But if the press
bring it up, I'm screwed. If I say that I don't think it was actually a true story, they

kill me. If I say I believe it, then they start asking about God being called to account
for his actions. Law suits, the whole thing.'

He stared at them, each of the four other men in turn.
'And you think I'm mad?'

Thackeray and Williams recognised that their boss was off on some deranged

tangent and had long ago decided to leave him to it. Barney thought about adding to

the Prime Ministerial angst, but then decided to remain in silence, as the capsule
began its slow descent back to earth.

'Arf,' muttered Igor, as he too looked grimly down into the grey waters of the

Thames.

A slow Sunday in the middle of the election campaign. Four to ten points

ahead in the polls, the politics becoming increasingly personal, nothing really to be

gained or lost, the country just wanting it all over with so that they could get back to
normality, and talking about Posh & Becks, and qualifying for the next year's World

Cup, and the Ashes series in the summer, and 'I'm A Celebrity Get Me A Haircut', and
'Big Brother 15' and 'Celebrity News At Ten' and 'What Not To Wear In The Summer

House'. The only minor blip in the slow march to victory for the government had

been the murder of the PM's personal barber Ramone, but the addition of Barney
Thomson to his staff had made sure that there had been no ill effects on his hair, and

the police were doing a good job of making sure that no one, other than those
involved in the investigation, got to hear about it. Such was the discretion being

shown by Scotland Yard, that the PM and his people had almost forgotten about it, in
the rush of polls and campaign speeches, so that the possibility of the whole sad

affair of his barber and the chicken blowing up in his face before election day, had
been completely forgotten.

Beneath them London muddled through another ordinary Sunday afternoon.
'You know, sometimes I wish I'd never bothered invading Iraq,' said the PM,

looking forlornly down at the river.

Monday 25th April 2005

0716hrs

The PM's inner circle were sitting around the breakfast table discussing the day

ahead. The Prime Minister, Thackeray and Williams, Barney and Igor. Outside the
room, a gaggle of advisors and parliamentarians, all of whom wanted the Prime

Ministerial ear, were waiting in glum silence, wondering why they had become so
excluded from election party strategy.

'Are you thinking what I'm thinking?' asked the PM, sniggering slightly

through a pecan Danish as he said it. No one else laughed.

'It's not funny anymore, Sir,' said Williams.
The PM took another bite of pastry.

'You do have a point, though, Prime Minister,' said Thackeray, whose slogan

for the day was going to be, If You Value It, Suck Up To It. A Lot. 'They're panicking.'

'They certainly are,' said the PM. 'New slogan, personal attacks, the war in

Iraq, they're pulling out all the stops. Desperation stuff. New slogan, for God's sake.

What do they think that's going to get them?'

'You just changed your slogan,' said Barney.

'Totally different,' said the PM. 'We always intended a rolling slogan

programme, in which we would address the needs of the hardworking people of

Britain, delivering value sloganeering to the point of need. As Prime Minister...'

'You're not on TV, Sir,' said Williams.

'Very good, Dan Dan,' said the PM, slurping noisily at a cup coffee, 'but I think

we can at least take a moment to enjoy the pathetic attempts of the opposition to

claw back the odd point in the polls. Taking A Stand. Who are they kidding?'

'Trying to pull a Churchill, Sir,' said Thackeray.

The PM bit into a croissant, flaky pastry crumbling over his shirt and tie, then

he gestured around the table with the remnants of the pastry.

'That's it, isn't it? He's invoking Churchill. The cheeky sod. He'll be wanting to

fight us on the bloody beaches next.'

He looked around the table. Igor was eating toast and marmalade, Barney

had a bacon sandwich, Williams and Thackeray were existing on coffee and ProPlus
tablets.

'Well, if he's going to be Churchill,' said the PM, 'then I'm going to be...I'm

going to be...'

'Hitler?' suggested Barney.

0819hrs

Detective Sergeant Tony Eason was going undercover for the investigation into the

murder of the PM's previous personal barber Ramone MacGregor, who had been
murdered nine days earlier with a chicken. The story had been kept out of the

papers, and the police were nowhere near coming to a conclusion in the matter. The
only hint of a clue which had come their way was an anonymous telephone call from

Conservative Party Head Office, which had of itself led to nothing. The Chief Super,
M Jackson MacDonald had, however, barred them from investigating the link. Thus,

Eason was being sent in undercover, unbeknownst even to MacDonald.

A short man with hair which was going the way of the Amazonian rainforest

and glasses which were twenty years too young for him, greeted Eason in a small
office, decorated in blue. He was poring over the morning's newspapers; a television

was on in the corner with the sound turned down on the leader of the real
alternative.

Eason took a seat across the desk and waited to be spoken to. Under his

cover he had come highly recommended from a marketing agency in the city, and

was here to help the Tory party turn things around in the last few days. Eason,

naturally, knew nothing about marketing and had no skills in that direction
whatsoever. Slightly nervous, waiting to be caught out in the first five minutes.

Wasn't a natural undercover cop. His was more of an 'arrest first, investigate later if
you have to, employing violence when required' approach. And he hadn't had

breakfast.

'Look at this,' said the small man. 'Front page of the Sun.'

Eason nodded. Wondered how long it would be before he was able to take a

tea break and grab a doughnut or a bagel.

'Posh Pyjama Drama, for God's sake,' said the little fella, talking at a hundred

miles an hour. 'What the hell is that all about? Serve us much better if they did one

of those equivocal government backing things they do. If they're not going to
support us, the least they could do is slag that lot off when they support them. Tried

to get our man to go out in his pyjamas today, but he went for a suit and tie instead. I
mean, you may think the pyjama thing is mad, but there are others here who want

him to wear a black cape, for God's sake. So what d'you think of the new slogan?'

Eason had been thinking about food.

'What?' he said.
'The new slogan. Taking A Stand on The Issues That Matter. You think it will

resonate with the voters?'

Eason nodded and shook his head. He needed food, and then he needed to

subtly get on with the investigation. The actual undercover part of the scam was just
going to get in the way.

'I know, I know,' said the man. 'It's kind of bland, really bland. The thinking

was to go for something that they couldn't rip the pish out of like the last one. And

he also wanted to echo Churchill, you know. Take a stand and all that. Anyway,
we've decided to go for a rolling programme of slogans over the last week. New one

every couple of days or so.'

'Good idea,' said Eason. 'What's next?'

'Don't know. That's your job. Straight off the top of your head, give me the

first slogan you can think of.'

Eason stared, a little wide-eyed. The bloke snapped his fingers.

'Now!' he barked.
'Vote Tory and Get More Doughnuts!' said Eason quickly.

The little man stared across the desk at Eason, drumming a curious finger on

the table. He nodded, pursed his lips.

'I don't think it's quite there yet,' he said, 'but it's a good start. Go out there,

find yourself an office, and come up with new slogans. A host of them. You have

carte blanche to free-think and conceptualise.'

'Cool,' said Eason. 'Do I also have carte blanche to go and get breakfast?'

The little man nodded, and then looked back at the papers.
'Certainly,' he mumbled. 'Get me some French toast while you're at it, will

you?'

0956hrs

The PM sat dourly on the train, staring out of the window. At a four-seater table,

with Williams, Barney and Igor. Thackeray had been late getting to the train and so
had had to sit at a table with the Deputy Prime Minister, and was currently being

bored to death by a long story about chicken and leek pie.

'That's the trouble with being PM,' said the PM, 'the trouble with

electioneering. You have to go to Bristol. I mean, should anyone really have to do
that if they don't want to?'

'Arf,' said Igor.
The PM nodded, although he hadn't picked up the nuance inherent in this

particular arf.

'And what's that thing we're going to have to do later, Dan Dan?'

'Speak to ordinary, real, hardworking people on local radio phone-ins, Prime

Minister,' said Williams. 'It plays great with the electorate.'

The PM exhaled, toyed with his tea which was going cold on the table.

'I know, but really, truly, madly, deeply, do we have to?'
'It'll go down well, Sir,' said Williams. 'Even if you make a mess of it, it won't

cost you anything.'

The PM rolled his eyes.

'It'll end up being more flippin' questions on the Iraq war and the NHS.'
'Hellish when you have to justify yourself,' said Barney, 'isn't it?'

'Arf.'
The PM looked across the table at the two of them.

'Well, yes, frankly, it is.'
He glanced at Williams, looked out the window, contemplated getting into an

argument and defending the invasion of Iraq, but he had to spend too much of his
life doing that without forcing a discussion which he didn't need to have.

'I was wondering,' he began again, the tone of voice indicating a new,

meandering tangent, 'if by some miracle we don't get elected… Might be time for a

career change.'

'Sir?' said Williams.

'They're looking for a new James Bond, aren't they? I could be just the man,

don't you think? Instant name recognition, I'm suave, I have panache, elegance, élan,

verve and a chic style which not many British actors have anymore, yet I also have
the edge of someone who would happily invade a smaller country as long as I knew I

could get away with it.'

He looked around the assembled table, waiting for a reaction.

'Course, I'd need to get my teeth fixed.'
'Excuse me,' said Barney, quickly, and he rose from the table and headed

towards the toilet at the end of the carriage, even though he didn't actually need to
go.

'We're not going to lose, Sir,' said Williams.

'Arf,' said Igor.
Barney looked over his shoulder, caught Igor's eye, nodded and then turned

and walked from the carriage. Decided against going into some small, vile toilet and
stood at the window of the door, looking out as the countryside of south-west

England rolled by. Ten more days to go. He wasn't a prisoner, and there was nothing
stopping him from jumping ship and going home, but it wasn't long. Almost enjoying

the comfortable life of the big city on a big allowance, and he would appreciate the
solitude and quiet of Millport even more when he returned. He leant against the

door and closed his eyes, enjoying the rhythm of the train, the swaying and the
clatter of the tracks. In its way as peaceful as the rhythm of waves up on the shore, a

sound in which he could lose himself.

'Mr Thomson?'

Barney opened his eyes. Another rude awakening. A train steward dressed in

black trousers and a maroon jacket was standing beside him, hands behind his back.

'I'm all right, thanks,' said Barney. 'I've eaten.'
'The leader of the opposition has been very impressed with the Prime

Minister's hair since you took over hairdressing duties,' said the steward.

Barney stared at the man.

'Excuse me?' he said.
'The Prime Minister's hair,' said the steward. 'We've been very impressed.'

Barney glanced into the carriage, but he was out of sight of the PM and his

entourage.

'I take it you're not really a steward,' said Barney.
'No,' said the Steward. 'I'm with the opposition, tracking the PM's

movements. Nothing sinister, just a bit of low-level surveillance and political
espionage. They do it to us too.'

'Why are you telling me?' asked Barney, which was a more polite version of

what he wanted to say, which had contained the word 'off' at the end of a short
sentence.

'We've had you profiled and we know you're a man who can be trusted, even

if you don't take our side.'

'Well, that's very kind of you,' said Barney.
'You're welcome,' said the steward. 'The leader of the opposition would like

you to transfer allegiance, and cut his hair instead of the Prime Minister's. He feels
that a new hairstyle might be all that separates us from overturning the six point

deficit.'

Barney held the man's gaze for a short time, and then turned away and

looked back out of the window at the green farmland of England.

'He doesn't have that much hair,' said Barney eventually.

'The best artists, the true geniuses, can work with the most slender of tools,'

said the steward, attempting to appeal to Barney's ego. Barney looked back, a

withering glance, just as the door to the carriage fizzed open and Thackeray stepped
through. He looked suspiciously at the steward and Barney.

'So, that would be one bubbly mineral water and one cream cheese with

Mongolian chives on butterscotch rye bread, Sir?'

Barney ignored Thackeray and gave the steward a stiff glance.
'No,' he said, 'it wouldn't.'

1551hrs

'We're Really Brilliant, The Other Lot Are Shite!' said Eason, holding his hands up in
banner fashion. As he had done for the previous twenty-three slogans he'd thought

of for the great Tory party election revival.

The young guy across the desk, whose day had been spent sorting through

ties for the leader to wear over the next week and a half, didn't even bother shaking
his head this time.

'Which company did you say we got you from?' he asked.
'Our Leader May Be Undead, But At Least His Teeth Are White!' barked

Eason.

The tie guy nodded.

'Better,' he said. 'Not sure that he'd like the undead reference, all the same.'
'Troops Out! Re-Nationalise The Railways! Ban Consultants and PFI!'

This time the tie guy laid down the four blue ties between which he was

choosing for the following day.

'I don't think any of those are actually representative of our policies. Did you

read the manifesto?'

'The mani-what?' asked Eason.
The door opened and a man in his 30s stuck his head round, looking at the tie

guy.

'Hey, Charlie, we're going to need the go-ahead on...'

He stopped. He saw Eason. Eason glanced at him only when he'd stopped

talking, and saw the flash of recognition in his face before he switched on a smile.

'Sorry, sorry, you're busy, Charlie, I'll come back later.'
And with that, he was gone, the door closed.

Eason watched the retreat and then turned back to Charlie.
'Who was that?' he asked.

'Maybe you'd like to read the manifesto tonight,' said Charlie. 'Or right now. It

might help.'

'That guy?' asked Eason.
'One of our PR people. Bledsoe, Dane Bledsoe. What's the deal?'

Eason shook his head, trying to shake off the conversation, like he'd never

asked.

'A Conservative Britain,' he said, holding up his hands, 'The Great Melting

Pot.'

2156hrs

The end of another day on the campaign trail. Nothing had happened, not really, but

at least it was another day nearer the end of the road, another day closer to it all
being over, and the press could get down to discussing who the next leader of the

opposition was going to be, who would be the next man to get the chance to trade
childish insults at PM's questions in the Commons. And as the current leader of the

opposition tucked into a late dinner, he constantly ran his hands through his short
hair, and wondered how good it would be, what a breakthrough in his chances of

success it would be, if only he could persuade the mesmerizingly brilliant Barney
Thomson, the necromancer of the hair, to join his staff.

Barney Thomson, the most sought-after barber in London, was already fast

asleep, and the three different agencies which were watching his movements, had

already stood down for the night.

Tuesday 26th April 2005

0619hrs

Early morning in London, still the depths of the night in Virginia, USA, where the

real decisions would be taken about the result of the forthcoming General Election
in the UK. Locked in a small cupboard in an office on the fourth floor, under no more

security or protection than any other file or cabinet in the entire building, was a
small wooden box, which had been brought to CIA Headquarters a few days earlier.

The contents of the box were known only to a few, yet the result of the General
Election would hinge entirely on whether any of those few decided to go public with

the information which they held.

There were those amongst Her Majesty's Opposition in London who would

be preparing to go to the press in the very near future, but they needed the box as
proof. Without the box, without the damning, incredible evidence within, there

would be no point. They would be dismissed as hoaxers, and if the claims were seen
to come from the opposition itself, then the damage would be huge and the "Real

Alternative" LibDems would likely form the next opposition. If the truth was to be
revealed, and the result of the seemingly one-sided General Election was to be

swung at the last minute, the box had to be in the hands of the right people. But, at
the moment, those people were the Central Intelligence Agency.

And so, in the middle of the night, with the country sleeping and the HQ

mostly deserted, three men sat in a small room, smoking cigarettes and drinking

twelve year-old Islay Peat Bog Single Malt, discussing the if, when, where and who of
whether the secret of the box should be revealed, and if it was now time for the

hardworking, honest people of Great Britain to learn the truth about which of the
three party leaders in the country was truly undead.

0659hrs

The PM was already at breakfast, looking over the morning's newspaper headlines.
Lousy press pretty much across the board, almost as if most of the country weren't

going to vote for him. He put it down to the media stirring things up, hoping that the
polls would get a little closer and the campaign might get a bit more exciting. He

looked at the Mail, calling him a liar, and tossed it onto the floor. Wasn't his fault if
he was running the country well, that people liked him and that the opposition were

a bunch of tubes. He smiled, picked up the Independent. "Enough is Enough - Labour
Peer Defects to LibDems." Shook his head, added it to the pile dumped on the floor.

Just something else for the media to ask him about this morning, while he was at a
successful London school talking about the real issues.

The door opened and Barney Thomson, barber, and Igor, deaf-mute

hunchbacked barber's assistant, came into the room. The PM looked up and smiled,

although it has to be said that the smile was pretty much etched permanently onto
his face now. The wind had changed at some point when he was out meeting real,

ordinary, hardworking people, and his face had stuck. Of course, that had been in
1997.

'Barney, Igor, come in, come in. Bacon, pancakes and maple syrup?' he

offered. 'There's plenty.'

'Arf,' said Igor, and he sat down and immediately began to tuck in.
Barney had already had breakfast at the hotel, but he wasn't about to turn

down bacon, pancakes and maple syrup.

'Thank you, Prime Minister,' he said, taking a seat at the table. He glanced at

the papers strewn around the floor, as he helped himself to food. The trouble with
bacon, of course, is how quickly it loses heat once it's at the table.

'What is it today?' he asked.
The PM smiled and looked at the ceiling.

'Education, education, education,' he said, and the smile increased a little bit

more. 'Giving the press conference from a school this morning. The place used to be
rubbish, you know, under the Tories, but thanks to this government's policies it's

now a model for all that is good about our system, and illustrative of why a Labour
government is the only way forward for Britain and the hardworking, decent

honest...'

'You're not on TV, Prime Minister,' said Barney.

'Yes, well, I need the practice.'
'I don't think so.'

'Got the headmaster doing a nice little speech, then me, then...'
'That's forcing him to be a bit partisan, isn't it?' said Barney.

The PM crammed down another piece of cold bacon, the smile racked up a

notch or two.

'Not sure what it is this afternoon, usual stuff, you know how it is. Tonight

we're going up to Liverpool. You want to come?'

Barney and Igor looked at each other and shrugged.
'Arf.'

'Sure.'
'Dan Dan's written me a great little number for tonight talking about Count

Dracula and all his crap. Really, you should see his record on all the main issues, the
real issues which affect the hardworking people of middle England. It's incredible

that someone like that...'

'Prime Minister,' said Barney. 'Eat your breakfast.'

The Prime Minister nodded, accepting his admonishment. He looked back at

the pile of papers, the smile waning slightly, but not going completely.

'Daily Star are talking about flippin' Beckham again,' he muttered.

1203hrs

Detective Sergeant Tony Eason, investigating the murder of the Prime Minister's
original personal hair stylist, Ramone, was undercover at Conservative Party HQ; his

cover was that of Tony Eason, crack London marketing executive, brought in to beef
up the opposition's election campaign and to bring some fresh air to the heavy

stench of defeat which already seemed to hang, like thick, rancid smog, over the
building.

A day into his undercover investigation and he hadn't progressed very far.

Yet to come up with any insights into the case, neither had he produced a killer

election slogan. He was sitting at his desk, playing around with the words, education,
crime and poverty, when the door behind him opened and the leader of the

opposition stuck his head round, the smile already stamped to his face. He was
accompanied by one of his young PR guys, Dane Bledsoe, the only other man in the

building who knew that Eason was not who he was supposed to be. Not that Bledsoe
had shared this information with anyone else, being a bit undercover himself.

Eason lifted his head and stopped thinking about lunch. Although he had

been playing around with education, crime and poverty, he'd been concentrating

more on the words, pizza, lasagne and hot dog.

'You must be the new chap,' said the leader of the opposition, extending his

hand. 'Lovely to have you on board.'

Eason stood and accepted his hand, nodded, didn't say anything. Felt stupidly

overawed to be meeting someone who he normally only saw on the TV.

'What have you got for us so far?' asked the Prince of the Undead.

'Eh...' began Eason, and he turned and looked down at the endless doodles

and notes he'd being making for the past twenty-four hours.

'We're looking for something really punchy and cool. The damned press, you

know, they've ripped into my Taking A Stand phrase. Damnable people. Should've

expected it, I suppose. Piece of nonsense. We need one of two things. You listening?'

Eason nodded. A little wide-eyed. Wished he was out somewhere arresting a

drug dealer.

'We either need a beautiful set of words, something clean and fresh and

inspiring, but something which can't be mocked, and something which isn't going to
turn out to have been used by one of those dreadful Kims in PyongYang, or by Cary

Grant in a romantic comedy in 1943. Or Hitler. Don't come up with anything which
was used by Hitler or then we're really screwed. Alternatively, something which

really slags off the Prime Minister. Don't care how nasty. He deserves it, and at least
it'll get us media attention. You know, something like He Lied Over Iraq, So How Do

You Know He's Not A Paedophile, Drug Dealing Rapist?'

'That might be a little harsh, Sir,' said Dane Bledsoe at his side.

'Yes, yes, perhaps. Eason, you have anything worthwhile?'
Eason looked back at his scribbles. Thought he might have got away with it,

but the man seemed now to have shut up and was waiting for him to say something.
Bledsoe stared at him intently, piling on the pressure.

'Vote Conservative,' he began. Then stopped.
They looked at him, waiting for the rest of the hook.

'That's it?' asked the Dark Lord eventually.
Eason looked back at his scribbles and swallowed.

'We're Not Rubbish,' he suggested.
The Prince of Evil stroked his chin in a vaguely diabolical manner.

'Vote Conservative. We're Not Rubbish,' he said, imagining it on a poster. 'No,

don't like it. Have lunch with Dane, let's see if the two of you can't chew the grist and

sort the great from the grime.'

'Lunch!' said Eason, perking up. Eating lunch was one of his strong points.

The Lord of Death turned and walked out, leaving the two undercover

operatives alone together for the first time.

'Come on,' said Bledsoe, 'I know a little salad bar round the corner.'

He turned and followed The Crypt from the room, leaving Eason mouthing

'salad bar?' incredulously in his wake.

1213hrs

Barney was attending to the Prime Minister's hair. Again. Another short TV spot to

be filmed for broadcast later in the campaign. Barney was snipping away, Igor
standing to the side, poised with a brush, to collect the detritus from the Prime

Ministerial napper.

'Education really is so very, very vital,' said the PM, breaking a long silence.

'I'm just cutting your hair,' said Barney.
The PM grumbled and nodded, as much as he could.

'Fed up talking about education, to be perfectly honest. At least we've

managed to get away from the environment. That just does my head in, all the time.

Green this, green that. For God's sake. Leave it alone, don't stand in the way of
economic progress, that's what I say.'

'Arf,' muttered Igor in the background.
'Exactly,' said the PM, picking up the wrong end of the arf.

'You don't think you've got the future of the planet to think about?' said

Barney, himself sliding into barber mode, throwing a Devil's advocate question into

the middle of a customer's monologue. Wasn't so different from being in any old
shop.

'The planet will be fine,' said the PM. 'Look, this is how I see it. There's no

blueprint for the planet, is there? There's no specific way it should be, no written

down number of species which should be allowed to exist. The face of the planet, the
mountains and ice caps and rainforests, the species that live there, are forever

changing and evolving. Millions of years ago there were rainforests at the polar caps.
Why shouldn't that happen again? Species come and go, it's been happening since

time began. There's the slightest bit of change and people start complaining. They

complain that our summers are getting warmer! They complain about that! There
are different types of insects and animals and marine life, because of that increase in

temperature. They complain!'

He stopped monologuing for a second and looked Barney in the eye. Barney

kept up with the cut, hoping to be done as quickly as possible.

'The planet will survive us all. Maybe the rainforest won't, maybe a bunch of

bugs won't, but other things will. Everything evolves, everything changes, there's
nothing we can do about it. So what if some of these current changes are as a result

of the actions of man? It's still part of the evolution of the planet. You see what I'm
saying?'

Barney nodded. Almost done. Of course, the PM's hair looked exactly the

same as before he'd started the cut.

'Think I'll vote for the Green Party,' said Barney, and the PM cast him a

barbed smile.

1237hrs

Eason was eating four salads, Dane Bledsoe just had the one. Eason was drinking
Budweiser, Bledsoe a nine pound fifty bottle of mineral water.

'What sort of work were you doing before?' asked Bledsoe, forking an

exciting piece of lettuce.

Bledsoe had almost murdered Eason and his boss DCI Grogan a few days

earlier, and knew exactly what sort of work Eason had been doing.

'Oh, you know, standard marketing type stuff,' said Eason vaguely.
'What sorts of lines were you working on?' asked Bledsoe.

Eason nodded and stuffed seven pieces of chicken into his mouth to give

himself more time. He looked around the room, knowing that he should be able to

say just about anything. First thing that came into his head. A woman walked past,

short skirt, low cut top.

'Panty liners,' he said, for some reason.

Bledsoe smiled.
'Cool,' he said. 'Which brand?'

Eason stared at Bledsoe and then looked back at the woman, as if that might

help him. He knew nothing about panty liners.

'Tampax,' he said eventually, saying the first brand name which came into his

head.

Bledsoe smiled.
'So you also did tampons?'

Eason stopped with the beer bottle halfway to his mouth.
'There's a difference?' he asked.

'I can see why they got a new man such as yourself into the post.'
Eason smiled, feeling very uncomfortable. Beer, he thought, stick with beer.

Or food. When he asks if there was anything else, say beer or food.

'Still,' said Bledsoe, 'it's interesting work to be giving a detective sergeant at

Scotland Yard. Not enough crime for you to investigate anymore? Labour must be
cutting it down almost as much as they make out.'

Eason took a drink and then slowly placed the bottle back down on the table.

Only his second day and already rumbled. Although, of course, he had seen the light

of recognition in Bledsoe's face the first time he'd seen him the previous day.

'It was you who called us last week?' asked Eason.

Bledsoe nodded.
'Who are you working for?'

Bledsoe smiled and lifted his hands.
'The Leader of the Opposition, who else?'

'No, really?' asked Eason. 'Really?'
Bledsoe skewered a radish and crunched into it.

'MI6,' he said. 'There's a few of us dotted around the campaign.'

'So why the anonymous phone call?' asked Eason.
'You mean, given what you're investigating, you think I was just going to

invite you along to Vauxhall Cross?'

Eason thought about that, felt put in his place, yet at the same time, couldn't

think of why that would actually have been a problem. Bledsoe leant forward,
elbows on the table, a small dash of mayonnaise at the corner of his lips.

'This goes way beyond the murder of the PM's barber, Sergeant. Way beyond.

Tread carefully, my friend. There are forces at play here that the likes of you and I

could not begin to challenge, or comprehend. These are dark times.'

Eason nodded, mouth slightly open. Wasn't actually one to be particularly

impressed with such grandeur of threat. People were just people, no matter who
they were.

'You mean, like the Matrix?' he said.
Bledsoe laughed and sat back. He took another drink of ridiculously

expensive mineral water, then pushed his unfinished plate away.

'You'll not get any dessert,' said Eason.

Bledsoe smiled, although there was now an edge to it. Unhappy that his

grandstanding had not impressed. He stood up and put on his coat.

'Get the bill, will you?' he said.
Eason, unaware of the price of the mineral water, nodded.

'This is going to explode,' said Bledsoe, darkly, 'and there is no way you are

going to understand any of it. Be careful, Sergeant.'

And with that dark warning, he turned and left.
And so, at lunchtime on the eight millionth day of campaigning, as Barney

Thomson tucked into a burger and fries, and as Igor wellied into a pizza; as the PM
ate a lettuce sandwich, and Thackeray and Williams drank coffee and popped

caffeine pills; as the Prince of Darkness ate sausage and egg and the chairman of his
party got stuck into beef Wellington; Detective Sergeant Tony Eason, duly warned

about the dire future which awaited them all, finished off his plate, then Bledsoe's

plate, and asked for another beer.

Wednesday 27th April 2005

1351hrs

A strange sort of day, the weather unsettled. Threatening storms, unsure whether to

be hot or cold or muggy or wet or windy. Like virtually every other day in Britain.
The Prime Minister was in reflective mood as he sat on the plane taking him on the

short flight back to London. His assistants Thackeray and Williams had jousted for
the seat next to him, as had a few senior members of his party and a variety of

journalists. However currently occupying the seat was the PM's hairdresser, Barney
Thomson.

The PM turned away from the gathering clouds and looked at Barney. He may

have been in reflective mood, but it didn't mean that the plastic smile wasn't

stamped on his face. There was nothing he could do about it now, it was
permanently etched there. Even if a journalist asked him about cancer treatment or

dead people or the tsunami, the PM had to reply through the fixed grin. When plastic
surgery goes bad.

'How d'you feel it's going, Barn?' said the PM.
Barney Thomson looked up from the latest US bestseller, Michael Moore Is

Fat, George Bush Is Stupid, The World Is Being Fucked By Big Business And We're All
Going To Die From Obesity.

'As expected,' he replied.
The PM nodded.

'You really think so?' he asked.
Barney sighed, closed the book over and let it rest in his lap. It was typical

that the PM should select Barney to sit beside as he was just about the only person
on the plane who had nothing to say to him. It was like the way a cat will always find

the person in the room with an allergy.

'You know, I do worry about this Iraq business,' said the PM. 'The press won't

let it go, and I do worry that some of the hardworking, decent, honest people of
Britain and England might start to doubt my integrity. Sometimes, as I meet the

honest, decent, hardworking...'

'Of course they doubt your integrity,' said Barney, hoping to cut off another

hardworking, decent, honest speech before it got into full swing.

'What?'

'Everybody thinks you're a liar. Of course they do. Look, consider the US

President. When Gerald Ford said in 1976 that there'd been no Soviet domination of

eastern Europe under his administration...'

'Did he say that?'

'Yep. And when he did, it was disastrous. Everybody thought, God, what a

Muppet, what a complete and utter twat-brained loser, and they voted for Jimmy

Carter. But think about your friend George. He comes out with stuff like that every
day. Every single day. He makes words up, he stumbles over sentences, he clearly

has no grasp of facts, he makes gaffes every time he opens his mouth. He has Muppet
stamped on his forehead. He defines the word Muppet for a new generation too

young to have seen the original Muppets. When the Muppets are remembered
centuries from now, it will become lost in time whether Kermit was President and

Bush was a stuffed frog, or the other way round. And yet, the people still vote for
him. He still wins all those states that the Republicans always win, and he still wins

Ohio. They're used to him doing it, they expect him to constantly gaffe.'

The smile increased a notch or two on the PM's face. He nodded. He thought

about what Barney was saying.

'What are you saying?' he asked.

'Everybody knows you're a lying, low-life, political scumbag. So what if

anyone comes up with a smoking gun and reveals you to be a big fat liar? That

thirty-six to forty percent of voters who are polling in your favour, are just going to

shrug and say, "we know, we know, enough already." You might be in more trouble

if it was proved that at some point you'd told the truth.'

The smile stayed on the PM's face, although that one had him a little

confused.

Suddenly there was a sharp crack and the plane juddered. At the bottom end

of the cabin a woman let out a high-pitched involuntary scream. The PM gripped the
armrests; Barney looked out the window. The momentary shudder of the plane had

passed, and it resumed a normal, verging on bumpy, flight towards London.

'What was that?' asked the PM. 'What d'you think that was?'

Barney shrugged, heartbeat coming back down to normal.
'Maybe we've just been Tango'd,' he said.

'You don't think,' said the PM, ignoring the marketing reference, 'that there

was a higher force at work?'

Barney glanced at the fake smile, now mixed with wonder and bemusement.
'Pardon?'

'You don't think,' said the PM, 'that we've just been touched by the Hand of

God?'

He stared at Barney, the corners of his mouth touching his ears. A stewardess

came alongside and leant slightly over Barney in order to speak to the PM.

'Everything all right, Sir?' she asked.
The PM nodded.

'Yes, yes,' he said. 'I feel that today, without wishing in such surroundings or

company to fall into soundbite banality and cliché, that I have the Hand of God on

my shoulder.'

The stewardess forced a smile, but it was something which she was also used

to doing.

'The pilot just wanted me to let you know that the plane had been struck by

lightning, but that everything's OK. Planes are designed to absorb the electricity.
We'll be landing shortly.'

She smiled again, turned and walked back to her seat. The smile remained

etched on the Prime Minister's face. He glanced at Barney and then looked back out
of the window.

'The Hand of God,' Barney heard the PM muttering to himself, mixed in with

the noise of the plane.

1431hrs

Detective Sergeant Tony Eason, undercover at Tory Party HQ, trying to find clues to
the murder of the Prime Minister's former barber, Ramone MacGregor, had sneaked

away from his new temporary place of work, to have lunch with his boss, DCI
Grogan. Eason was eating a triple club sandwich with French fries and a side order

of deep-fried mushrooms and onions; Grogan was eating cigarettes and coffee.

'So what's your man been up to today?' asked Grogan, referring to the contact

Eason had made the day before with a PR man at Tory HQ called Dane Bledsoe, who
had claimed to be working for MI6. 'You've got ketchup on your chin,' he added.

Eason wiped his face with his sleeve.
'Haven't seen him. He's been with Count Dracula all morning, press

conference and stuff.'

'And what have you been doing?'

'Stuck in the office. Still supposed to be coming up with a new election

slogan.'

Grogan laughed, stubbed out a cigarette and lit another.
'You were taking the pish when you came up with my cover story, weren't

you?' said Eason.

Grogan laughed again and slurped some coffee.

'Partly,' he replied. 'On the one hand you couldn't market water to a wealthy

dehydrated man in the desert. On the other, it's what? Like the Tory party needed a

heavy-handed food slob, who likes to arrest people for wearing the wrong colour t-

shirt? They needed a marketing genius, so that's what they got. What've you come
up with?'

Eason took a large bite of club sandwich, a great splurge of mayonnaise

erupting forth from within the layers. He shrugged and looked reasonably sheepish.

'The Conservative Party,' he said, 'Tough On Crime, Tough On Stains.'
Grogan looked over the top of his cup and shook his head.

'Thought it might appeal to the housewife vote,' said Eason.
'I should have sent you in as an undercover toilet cleaner,' said Grogan.

Eason wiped his arm across his mouth again. Took another bite so that his

face was bulging with food.

'You speak to your guy at Vauxhall Cross?' he asked, the question almost

unintelligible.

Grogan nodded.
'We had coffee this morning,' said Grogan. 'He knows nothing about Dane

Bledsoe.'

Eason chewed on, savouring the blend of turkey, bacon, mayo, tomato,

lettuce and toast. Took a drink of a chilled Chilean Chardonnay, light and crisp with
hints of Gwen Stefani.

'Can you trust him?' asked Eason.
Grogan snorted.

'Are you kidding me?' he said. 'He works for MI6. You can't trust any of that

lot. So, Bledsoe might well be who he says, or he could be working for someone

totally different. At least we know, because he had you pegged already, that he ain't
just a normal Conservative sap. If my guy's telling the truth, Bledsoe's lying, but then

we'll never know if my guy's telling the truth, because inherently he's paid to lie
anyway. That's his job. Kind of pointless talking to any of them.'

'So what d'you want me to do?' asked Eason.

'Simple,' said Grogan. 'If Bledsoe is getting to travel around with the Prince of

Darkness and be with him all day, then that's what you have to do. You have to come
up with something brilliant which makes the guy like you and makes him want to

have you beside him all the time. Like that barber guy who's suddenly going
everywhere with the PM.'

'That's a bit strange,' said Eason.
'Yeah,' said Grogan. 'I'll be speaking to him again, I think.'

Grogan drained his coffee. Eason took another massive bite out of his

sandwich. Nearly finished and contemplating ordering another one.

'So I need a cool slogan which they're going to love,' said Eason through the

food.

'No problem,' said Grogan. He held his hands up in true advertising fashion.

'Into Europe With Confidence,' he said.

Eason looked at him, wondering if he was trying to be funny. Thought about

it.

'Is that what the Tories are about?' he asked.
'Oh, yes,' said Grogan, and he hid the smile behind the dregs of his coffee.

2235hrs

Late evening in London, late afternoon in Washington. The President of the United
States was sitting in the Oval Office watching baseball highlights from the night

before, eating a burger. Ten minutes respite before the next round of engagements
which he didn't quite have a grasp on. There was a knock at the door and the

Director of the CIA stuck his head round and looked at the President.

'You still have five minutes, Sir?' he asked.

The President smiled that smug smile of his, a smile moulded in the same

ancient plastic surgery factories as the smile of the PM.

'Sure,' he said. 'I'm just eating a burger here. Can I buy you one?'

'No thank you, Sir,' said the man. His predecessor had been known to accept

everything offered by the President, and then stick it in his pocket and take it away

to be embalmed and preserved for his own private collection.

The President bit into the burger and didn't notice the puke of sweet mustard

which exploded across the desk. The Director of the CIA sat down opposite him, laid
his briefcase on the desk, opened it quickly and took out the small wooden box,

which had been brought over from Britain a few days earlier by the man who had
murdered Ramone, the PM's hairdresser.

'I think you should take a look at this, Sir,' said the CIA man.
The president glanced over and smiled. Looked back at the TV.

'It's a lovely briefcase,' he said. 'I think I might get me myself one of those.'
'The box, Sir,' said his visitor, 'look at the box. What's in the box.'

He held it out, then placed it on the desk and pushed it across. The President

of the United States stared at it curiously as he wolfed down another great wadge of

cow, then he wiped his fingers on his trousers and pulled the box closer. It was
heavier than it looked, and he picked it up with two hands.

'Wow,' he said, 'what's in this thing?'
'Look inside, Sir,' said the CIA man.

They exchanged a glance, and then the President slowly opened the box and

looked at its contents. He stared at it a long time, comprehension growing, and then

he closed it back over and laid it down on the desk.

'Wow,' he said again.

The CIA man nodded.
'If this gets out...' said the President.

'Exactly.'
The President looked back at the box.

'We need to talk about it, Porter,' he said.
'That's why I'm here, Sir.'

The President nodded and looked back at the TV. They were talking about

the Red Sox. He was fed up hearing about sports teams from Boston.

'I'm going to have another burger,' he said.

2341hrs

The PM sat and looked in the mirror, baring his teeth every now and again.
Depressed, as ever, by the fact that he hadn't been able to get to a dentist before the

campaign had begun. At least he could see himself when he looked in the mirror,
unlike the leader of the opposition.

Now, however, as well as his teeth and his varying degrees of suntan, he was

depressed because the Attorney General's initial advice to the government on war in

Iraq had finally been leaked. They had been waiting for it for months, and now it
was out there and the press were all over it. He just had to hope that Barney

Thomson was right, and that it wouldn't be telling people anything they didn't
already know about him.

The door opened and Williams and Thackeray came in. Neither of them had

slept in over two months, and they were beginning to look a little rough, the caffeine

tablets having an ill-effect on hair colour and eyes.

'Sir?' said Williams.

'Sir?' said Thackeray.
The PM turned slowly.

'How does it look?' he asked. He was tired; so tired, that he didn't notice that

his two men were zombies compared to him.

'It makes five front pages, Sir,' said Williams.
'Five,' repeated Thackeray, who had drunk fifteen cans of Red Bull and was a

little wired.

'Any of them positive?' asked the PM.

'You mean,' said Williams, 'something like Proof That The PM Lied, But If He

Lied To Us, Then He Can Also Lie To The French?'

'Yes,' said the PM, 'something like that.'

'No,' said Williams.
'No,' repeated Thackeray.

'All bad,' said Williams.
'All bad.'

The PM looked sadly at them and then let his eyes drift away. He needed to

get to bed and then wake up the next morning invigorated. Question Time the

following evening, and he couldn't afford to be flat for that.

'Thanks guys,' he said. 'Get some sleep.'

Williams nodded.
'Good night, Sir,' he said, and opened the door.

'Sleep, sleep, yes,' said Thackeray, 'nice sleep, precious sleep.'
And off they scuttled.

The door closed and the PM looked forlornly at the dull brown varnish in the

dim light of early night. He rested his head in the palm of his hand and wondered if it

was too late now to hand the reigns over to someone more honest, someone more
charismatic and, more than anything else, someone fresher. Like Igor.

Thursday 28th April 2005

0617hrs

An early start. The PM was standing at the window of his office in Downing Street

looking out at the grey skies of morning. One hand thrust in his pocket, the other
clutching a cup of coffee, already his second of the day. In the room were his two

assistants, Williams and Thackeray. The PM, at least, had had some sleep. Williams
and Thackeray had spent the night reading the papers, talking to journalists and

eating caffeine chewing gum. Williams looked tired and strained, slumped in a chair
at the back of the office, rubbing his eyes. Thackeray, however, had overdosed and

was chattering wildly to himself in strange tongues, pacing up and down the office,
doing a passable Jim Carrey impression.

'We have to do it, Sir,' said Williams. 'It's out there now anyway. We put it on

the website, we take the flak for the day, we move on.'

'It's not you who has to take the flak,' said the PM, voice edgy, without

turning round.

'Flak, flak,' muttered Thackeray quickly, his mouth guzzling at words like a

landed fish at the air, 'noun, anti-aircraft protection, missiles, or fragments, military

slang: adverse criticism: heated disagreement, dissension. Flak jacket, a heavy
protective jacket reinforced with metal. From the German 'fliegerabwehrkanone'.

Flak. Roberta Flack...'

The PM turned and looked at Thackeray who gave a skip and turned at the

wall, began to pace back.

'Are you all right?' he asked.

Thackeray muttered at the ground, realised the PM was addressing him.

Stopped, did something sudden and unnecessary with his hands and nodded.

'Sure, sure, Prime Minister. Fine, fine, totally, you know, like, fine. I agree with

Williams, yes, agree I do.'

'Agree you do?' asked the PM, slightly concerned.

'Yes, yes, release it we must.'
The PM was about to say something else, but he was a little put off by the fact

that he was suddenly having a discussion with a Jedi master.

The door opened, and the PM's third, un-credited advisor, walked into the

room. Barney Thomson, barber and the PM's new-found sage.

'Barber, barber,' muttered Thackeray, turning his back and scuttling off to

the corner, mouth mincing at syllables. 'Near the master, must not let him, no.'

'Barney,' said the PM, raising his coffee mug to him, 'thank goodness you're

here.'

Williams rubbed his forehead, sunk another centimetre into his chair. Had

been bothered at first, when it had become clear the influence Barney Thomson was
going to have over his boss – regardless of whether or not he actually wanted to

have any influence – but he was too tired now to get stressed about it. In fact, now
that Thomson was here, it took a little of the pressure away from him. Thackeray

turned and looked over his shoulder at Barney, muttering darkly. Barney had had an
early night, and so was at least in a decent enough state of repair to deal with the

morning.

'I came as soon as I could,' said Barney, although it was too early in the

morning for that level of humour, and none of the other three men in the room
realised he was joking.

'Shite's hit the fan,' said the PM. 'We're discussing whether to release the

Attorney General's legal advice on the war in Iraq of 7th March, 2003.'

'You mean, now that it's been leaked and everyone's seen it anyway?' said

Barney.

The PM stopped. Held his coffee in mid-air.
'Well, yes, I suppose,' he said.

Barney walked over to the small table where there was coffee, tea and

croissants laid out.

'Might as well,' he said. 'Might as well.'

0814hrs

Detective Sergeant Tony Eason, undercover at Tory Party HQ, investigating the
murder of the PM's previous barber, Ramone MacGregor, who had been brutally

killed with a chicken almost two weeks previously, had woken early with a brilliant
idea. He needed something solid to take to the Leader of the Opposition, something

which would allow him into the man's inner circle, so that he could get closer to one
of Count Dracula's PR men, Dane Bledsoe, a shadowy figure who had claimed to

Eason to be working for MI6. Eason, who had taken to sleeping with a notepad
beside his bed, had woken from a dream with the perfect election slogan for the

Tories to use over the final few days of the campaign. This was what the Prince of
Darkness had been waiting for. This was what would allow him into the very heart

of the Tory campaign.

Eason arrived at work, shirt already flapping out of his trousers, tie a little

out of line, and the remnants of a very sugary doughnut dotted around his upper
cheeks. He nodded at Chardonnay the receptionist, winked at Melanie the security

guard, snapped his fingers at Greta the pastry girl and strode purposefully into the
reception area outside the Count's office. His secretary, Loella, looked up from that

morning's correspondence.

'Loella,' said Eason, 'hi darlin'. Is the boss in?'

Loella nodded, toyed with a pen at her lips. There was something different

about Eason today, and she tried to think what it was.

'See you later, sweetlips,' said Eason, and he snapped his fingers and winked

at her. Loella caught herself giggling, but since there were no other women there to

judge her for the outrageous retaliatory flirt, she let it go. Eason knocked, then

stepped quickly into the room.

The Leader of the Opposition was sitting at his desk, fiddling with his tie. PR

man Dane Bledsoe was already there, as was the Shadow Chancellor.

They looked at Eason as he entered and all recognised him as being a

marketing executive, which he hadn't had the air of up until now. For the previous
few days he'd looked more like a wildebeest at a predators convention.

'Come in,' said the Count. 'You've met Dane. You know Oliver,' he said,

indicating the Shadow Chancellor.

Eason smiled at the man, stopped himself winking.
'Love the cooking show,' he said, because he'd never heard of or seen this guy

before and couldn't think of anything else to say. The Shadow Chancellor smiled,
was about to speak, but his sentence was cut off in its infancy by his boss.

'What have you got for us today?' asked the Count. 'We need something

extraordinary, yet solid. Something to back up the leaked Attorney General memo.

That thing's good, but not what we were hoping for.'

'Sure, sure,' said Eason. 'I've got it. You listening?'

The two politicians nodded. Dane Bledsoe raised the universal eyebrow of

scepticism. Doubted that Eason could come up with a marketing slogan to sell World

Cup tickets in Rio if Brazil were in the final.

Eason held his hands up in banner formation.

'We Wouldn't Have Invaded Iraq; We Would Have Caressed It Into

Democracy.'

He looked at the three men, waiting for some reaction. Bledsoe knew it was

complete mince, of course, and obviously unusable. The Shadow Chancellor knew he

couldn't have an opinion until he'd heard his leader's opinion. The Count sat and
stared at Eason, all the time running the words over in his head, imagining how it

would look in print, and the picture they would have behind the words. Finally he
clapped his hands together and broke out into a huge smile.

'I love it,' he said. 'I'm not saying we'll use it,' he added, and the Shadow

Chancellor immediately relaxed, 'but it's a quality slogan. Stay with me today on the
campaign trail. Dane will fill you in on anything you need to know. Might spark some

more ideas.'

The Count rose to his feet, Eason and Bledsoe exchanged a glance. The

Shadow Chancellor switched off and once more began to dream about the time
when this election would all be over and he could start to mount his challenge to

become the next leader of the party.

1305hrs

The PM was having a nightmare. He was Ronaldo and this was the 1998 World Cup

final. He had taken his rallying cry of 'Education, Education, Education!' out into the
world, and the world had replied with its rallying cry of ,'Iraq, Iraq, Iraq!' Given a

grilling at the press conference, he had been forced to rely on the flippin' Chancellor
to bail him out, which was disastrous. He was more honour bound than ever now to

hand the reigns over to the man when it came to it, and the "it" now didn't seem so
far away. He was lying back in a chair, a few minute's respite between vitriol meals,

having instructed his personal barber to give him a head massage. That had been a
little more close contact than Barney Thomson might have wanted with any man,

yet the PM had looked so completely bereft of spirit that Barney had actually found
himself feeling sorry for him.

'I mean,' the PM was saying, words burbling forth as they would all day,

defensive words – if the Italian team in the 1994 World Cup final had had to defend

a war in Iraq, they would have done it like this – words delivered consistently on the
back foot, 'what was I supposed to do? It wasn't like George would've held back on

the invasion anyway. I couldn't have stopped him. I just thought, well if it's going to

happen anyway, we might as well join in, lend a hand. It would've been even messier

without us. In fact, if they'd let us do more...'

'I agreed to the head massage thing,' said Barney, 'but it doesn't mean I have

to listen to the war justification speech, even one that's more honest than normal,'
said Barney.

'Yes, yes,' said the PM, 'I just feel that I must be absolutely firm on this point,

so that the hardworking, decent, honest people of England and of Britain, realise

that...'

'Prime Minister!' Barney barked sharply.

The PM opened his eyes, closed them again, settled back down. Mouth shut,

he thought to himself. Still had to meet the public, still had Question Time on the

BBC later. The day might have been going badly, but it was going to get much worse
before it got better. He had to take the ten minute timeout.

'I know,' he started again, talking the instant he stopped concentrating on not

talking, 'that I coerced the Attorney General, that I lied to the party, parliament and

the people. I know I forced MI6 to hand-pick and twist intelligence, I know I paid
Hutton fourteen million pounds of government money to denounce the BBC and

exonerate us, but what else could I do? You try working with the hand of history on
your shoulder, Barn. Barn? Barney?'

He looked round. Barney had gone, walking out on another fine example of

his monologuing. The PM glanced at the clock, realised that he would have to be

going soon anyway, then closed his eyes and rested his head back against the chair.
Suddenly the door burst open, and Thackeray careered into the room, bouncing off

the walls.

'Late you are, Prime Minister,' he said. 'Come you must!'

1317hrs

Igor, Barney Thomson's deaf-mute hunchbacked assistant, was eating lunch at a

small sandwich place not far from Whitehall. A seventeen pound bottle of mineral
water, and a cream cheese bagel with blue grapes, red oranges, Senegalese capers

and lettuce. He had pitched up with Barney, clutching his broom, for the PM's latest
haircut, only to discover that the man had wanted a massage of the hair rather than

a cut, and Barney had allowed him to go and find something to eat.

He leant forward, his hump seeming to hang over his head as he did so, and

took another bite of bagel, the cream cheese squishing out the side. Mopped at his
lips with a napkin, took a drink of water. The seat opposite him was pulled out and a

man sat down quickly at his table. He laid out his own sandwich - a lettuce, cabbage
and rocket on rye crispbread - and took a drink from his glass of thirty-four pound

sparkling water.

'You must be Igor,' said Dane Bledsoe, who had snuck away from Tory Party

HQ for a short while.

Igor gave him the once over, did not like the cut of his sleek, public relations

jib one little bit, and nodded.

'Arf,' he muttered.

Bledsoe smiled.
'I take it I can trust you to be discreet?' he said, then he smiled again.

'Obviously you're not going to say anything to anyone, but I'm trusting you not to
write it down either.'

Igor took a bite of bagel, kept his dark brown eyes locked on the man. Wasn't

going to commit himself to anything.

'I work for the government,' said Bledsoe. 'MI6 to be precise.' He glanced

over his shoulder to see if there might be any men with raincoats and sunglasses

listening in. 'We believe that the Prime Minister is going to resign before the general
election takes place next Thursday.'

Igor raised an eyebrow.

'And he's not just going to resign as party leader, he'll resign from the House

altogether.'

He let the words sink in. Igor said nothing, took another bite of bagel.

Regretted, a little, not going for the smoked salmon option.

'We can arrange it for you to take his place as the Labour candidate for

Sedgefield, and then to become leader of the party.'

Igor raised another eyebrow.

'When Labour wins the General Election, Igor,' said Bledsoe, the man who

may or may not have been from MI6, 'you'll be Prime Minister.'

Igor raised his third eyebrow. Dane Bledsoe stared intently across the table

at him. Igor did not let his gaze waver.

'Well?' said Bledsoe. 'What d'you say?'
Igor thought about it, thought about the absurdity of the proposal,

considered everything he knew about election law and whether any of what Bledsoe
had just said was even remotely possible, which he was pretty sure it wouldn't be.

But then, MI6 had their ways.

'Arf,' he said eventually.

2211hrs

It had been a long day, the PM's worst on the campaign trail by a long, long margin.
He was exhausted and beaten. He had no idea that someone from MI6, if they were

who they said they were, had tapped Igor to replace him, claiming that he was about
to resign, but they weren't that far from the truth. He sat alone in his study, nursing

a slow glass of single malt, staring morosely at a pile of papers on GP's waiting lists
which Williams had given to him after the battering he'd received on Question Time.

He was bruised, bloody and sore. To paraphrase Nietzsche, as he often did: 'The

thought of resignation is a great source of comfort: with it a calm passage is to be

made across many a bad night.'

He muttered the words softly to himself, sat back in the chair and closed his

eyes.

The other players in the strange little saga all busied themselves with

whatever part they had to play, big or small. The main source of comfort to them all,
however, was that there was only one week left and it would all be over...

100

Friday 29th April 2005

0812hrs

The PM sat still for his morning haircut, watching the breakfast news on the TV. Felt

a little more relaxed after the horror of the day before. Had woken up at just after
five feeling much calmer, as if knowing that the hot coals he was going to have to

tread upon this day would be more temperate. Or, at least, he was going to get to
wear boots as he trod on them.

The newspaper headlines were full of the Iraq war, and it wasn't as if any of

them were saying what a great move it had been. Express, Mail, Telegraph, Financial

Times, Guardian, Independent, a great panoply of outrage. And yet, watching the
news, it was apparent that the tempest had already passed. For the previous few

days the storm clouds had gathered and a hurricane had threatened to sweep
through his campaign, then yesterday it had arrived with all its great force, winds

and rain seeming to tear the roof off his election battle and his premiership; yet now
suddenly it had blown itself out, in an instant, overnight. The papers may have been

full of it, but it was typical of why newspapers were becoming more and more
outdated. They were already behind the curve of the new calm. It was almost as if

everybody else involved in the election campaign, including the opposition, had
suddenly thought, wait a minute, if we keep this up the Conservatives might get in.

Let's start talking about something else.

So today he was going to have to discuss the GP waiting list crisis, which was

tricky in itself, but there would be no cries of liar, liar, pants on fire, and at least it
wasn't a resigning matter.

'I can feel the winds of change, Barney,' he said quietly.

101

Barney Thomson bouffed the top of the Prime Minister's head, following

instructions to make his hair as big as possible to exaggerate the difference between
him and the leader of the opposition.

'That's just the hairspray, Prime Minister,' said Barney.
The PM didn't hear him. Too busy thinking over the day ahead, another day

when he and the Chancellor would ride around the country like Butch and
Sundance. The day before notwithstanding, it was all going well.

0821hrs

Over at Conservative Party HQ the leader of the opposition was standing at his office
window, looking down on a London which was slowly beginning to warm up to

spring. He was tucking into a strawberry jam doughnut, his back turned on his two
new main advisors, Dane Bledsoe and Tony Eason.

'It's going well,' said the Count. 'He had an awful day yesterday and today's

only going to get worse.'

'We need to move on from Iraq,' said Bledsoe.
The Count turned.

'What? We've got him on the flippin' ropes. He's squirming like, God, I don't

know, a worm. He's all over the place.'

Eason bit into his third doughnut of the morning. Didn't have an opinion. The

Count may have thought of him as his advisor, but he wasn't about to start giving

anybody advice.

'Tony, what d'you think?'

Eason caught the look from Bledsoe, stared at the carpet
'I think you should try the blueberry,' he said, holding up the doughnut.

The Count stared at the two of them, his mind in flux.

102

'You're so damned sage sometimes,' he said, although neither of them knew

to whom he was talking. 'I need to go poo-poo,' he muttered, and walked quickly
from the office.

They watched him go, then Bledsoe sat down in the boss's chair and started

looking through the small collection of papers which lay on the desk. Eason walked

over to the side table and helped himself to another doughnut.

'So what have you come up with, Sergeant,' said Bledsoe from behind the

desk. Appropriate that he should be sitting in the boss's seat, as he was definitely
going to be in charge of the conversation.

Eason was hugely intimidated by him and so would use his usual defence

mechanism. That of the overweight buffoon, the man who ate all the pies.

'Think I prefer the Danish to the doughnuts,' he said, without looking at him.

'At least, that's what I'm going to put in my report.'

'Look at me, Sergeant,' said Bledsoe, and Eason reluctantly caught his eye

over a sugar-frosted topping. 'You came here to investigate the murder of the PM's

last barber. What have you found?'

Eason stuffed an entire doughnut into his mouth, giving him an excuse not to

say anything for a while. Unusually for him he dabbed at his cheeks with a napkin,
taking all the sugar off.

'I've been pleased to discover,' he said through the food, 'that political

campaigns involve a lot of bakery products on the go. And I have to go.'

He walked to the door. Bledsoe sneered and looked witheringly at his back.

Eason turned at the door and smiled through the middle of the doughnut.

'The Conservative Party,' he said, 'For All Day Minty Freshness!' then he

quickly left the room and closed the door behind him, feeling like he'd been put

through the mincer.

1143hrs

103

Barney Thomson had been given the day off. The PM was out and about on the
Battle Bus, touring the country, smiling at people who didn't want to be smiled at,

making excuses for mistakes, promising to do things differently from the way he'd
done them for the last eight years, promising anything in fact, to get an easy ride and

another couple of votes. Igor, however, had asked if it was all right if he tagged
along, and the PM had readily agreed, pleased for the chance to pitch for the deaf-

mute hunchbacked vote.

So Barney had decided to do London for the day. Only one week left before he

could go home, and he could look out over streets where hardly anyone walked, and
he could listen to the mournful cry of the gulls and waves splashing up onto the

rocks. He'd eaten second breakfast in a small café, drunk a cup of coffee and spent
fifty quid on mineral water, and now he had meandered amongst the tourists up to

Trafalgar Square and found his way into the National Gallery. Intending to do the
Portrait Gallery next, if he'd not had enough of looking at paintings.

He was on the third floor looking at 16th century Italian religious works, you

know the ones with the baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary, accompanied by hundreds

of huge breasted naked lesbians. He remembered that that was what Wullie used to
talk about in the old shop. Seemed so long ago, and suddenly he was taken by one of

those moments when the past rushed over him, and he was engulfed by a shiver. He
stood looking at a nativity painting, a scene bedecked with naked angels, and he was

overwhelmed with melancholy. He shivered again, tried to break the thought and
the feeling. It wasn't as if he'd been happy in those days.

'You have to admire the vision of the artist,' said a voice next to him.
Barney didn't turn. The path to the past had been snapped, which was no bad

thing.

'How d'you mean that?' he said. He had been saved from his own gloom

perhaps, but he didn't necessarily want to get drawn into a discussion on some
perverse Italian, who saw naked women everywhere.

104

'It's great how there are so many naked women and no naked men. You have

to admire that.'

Barney turned. His mood dropped a little further, he rolled his eyes.

'Detective,' he said. 'Nice to see that you appreciate art on your day off, and

that you don't conform to the coffee-drinking, cigarette-smoking, alcoholic

stereotype of your kind.'

'Sod off,' said Detective Chief Inspector Grogan. 'I'm here to see you.'

'Ah,' said Barney. 'How did you know I'd be here?'
'We've had you followed since the day you arrived in London,' said Grogan.

Barney nodded. He was working for the Prime Minister after all. It sort of

made sense and wouldn't have been too hard to do either.

'Course, we're not the only ones following you, but we're not sure who the

others are.'

Barney glanced over his shoulder. Had had no idea that he was so popular.

Wondered if the group of old women up on a day trip from Bath, currently admiring

a painting where the artist had had the vision to include as many naked men as
women, were after him.

'I must be popular,' said Barney.
'Not as popular as your little hunchbacked guy,' said Grogan.

Barney gave him a quick look and then moved on to the next painting. It was

more of a battle scene than an actual nativity painting, but there were still three

naked women to every soldier. Assumed that Grogan was referring to the fact that
Igor rarely went a night without attracting some woman or other back to his bed.

'He's a good looking guy,' said Barney.
'I'm not talking about the women,' said Grogan, unable to keep the edge of

jealousy and bitterness from his voice.

'What then?' asked Barney, feeling disloyal even having the conversation.

'There's a character called Dane Bledsoe working for the leader of the

opposition. Shadowy, if you know what I mean.'

105

'He's one of your lot?'

'No,' snapped Grogan, 'he's not. He's a spy. Says he's MI6, but he could be

working for anyone.'

'Should you be telling me that the guy works for MI6?' said Barney. 'I mean, if

the guy does work for MI6, then I probably ought not to know that.'

'He tapped up your friend yesterday at lunch, when you were giving your

boss a lovely head massage.'

Barney gave Grogan a swift glance. God, they really do have me followed, he

thought.

'What d'you mean, tapped up?' he asked.
'Not sure. We were wondering if the little fella had mentioned it.'

Barney moved on, walking through into the next small room, which seemed

to have more of a landscape feel to it. Grogan walked beside him, still pretending to

give a stuff about art.

'He's mute,' said Barney caustically, 'how could he have mentioned it?'

Barney stopped at a depiction of a Tuscan hillside, with naked women lying

in amongst the trees.

'You got anything for me?' asked Grogan.
Barney shook his head, an edge to the smile.

'I told you I wasn't doing that. Do your own investigation, Chief Inspector, I'm

not working for you.'

'Very public spirited of you,' said Grogan.
He looked at the same painting as Barney. Was struck by the resemblance of

one of the women to his late Uncle Arthur.

'Anyway,' he said, turning. He stopped. Barney Thomson was gone.

He looked around. The gaggle of old women were still in the next room, and

there were a couple of Spanish tourists. Grogan shrugged and moved on to the next

painting. Had another three minutes before his craving for a cigarette would drive
him outside.

106

Barney Thomson walked quickly down the stairs, wondering who else was

following him, and curious as to why his deaf-mute hunchbacked assistant was
being approached by MI6.

1614hrs

The Prime Minister was having the easy day he had hoped for. Sure he was
promising everything that anyone asked him for, and by default was admitting that

many of his policies were rubbish, but he was relaxed and smiling again after the
brutalisation of the day before. Williams and Thackeray, his advisors, groaned every

time their man promised something new, but they knew that this kind of thing was
inevitable this late into the campaign. Igor, Barney Thomson's assistant, had

followed the PM around, dispensing advice as and when it was asked for, and
wondering if what he'd been told by Dane Bledsoe the previous day had been true,

and if it would be possible for him, Igor the deaf-mute hunchback, to become the
next Prime Minister.

The leader of the opposition had taken the advice of his senior advisor and

had dropped Iraq as a topic of discussion, yet had been curious as to how the PM

had managed to wriggle off the hook.

Barney Thomson had walked around London, enjoying the mix of the free

and the ridiculously expensive. He was currently combining the two, sitting in Hyde
Park, enjoying the sun, and eating a smoked bacon, olive and melon sandwich on

sun-roasted peanut bread, a snip at nine ninety-nine.

And, as the campaign continued on its slow, dreary way in London, the man

who had murdered the PM's previous barber with a chicken, thus starting off the
interesting sideline to the election which had yet to make it into the newspapers,

boarded a plane in Washington DC, which would bring him back to London. He had
taken the small wooden box which he'd stolen from Ramone MacGregor. He had

107

shown it to the head of the CIA, who had in turn shown it to the President of the

United States. Now he was bringing the box back to London, along with his
instructions passed down from the leader of the free world. And, bizarre though it

might have seemed to people in Britain had anyone known about it, the result of the
General Election, and the future of the country, lay within that small box. That would

have been something for the Express and the Mail to get their pants in a twist about.

Travelling in first class, with no one beside him, the killer opened his

briefcase, looked at the wooden box one more time, and then took out the
photographs and profile of the next person he had to murder in the continuing

covert manipulation of the British General Election.

108

Saturday 30th April 2005

0814hrs

The current leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, who was still going to be in post a

week from now, or at least until he resigned, slumped down heavily into his seat, his
back turned to the room, looking out on a decent morning in London. The weather

was brightening up but not, it appeared, his chances in the election. Saturday
morning, five days before the vote, and he hadn't made a single front page headline.

The tabloids had all gone for celebrity tittle-tattle, and not one of the papers
mentioned the war. After the vitriol the day before, the story had suddenly died a

death. A few of them took a stab at the PM in varying ways, but it was a mishmash
with no co-ordination. For something to have an effect, it needed to be a bold front,

newspaper after newspaper singing the same tune. Like the day before. Yet, he'd had
the Prime Minister on the ropes and now he was back on the beach, lying on his

towel, soaking up the sun. Or, at the very least, lying on a sunbed.

'We've made a total mess of it, a total mess. He was squirming around like a

half-squashed bug, and now he's lapping it up again, larging it with that twat of a
chancellor. What a balls up, what a total balls up.'

He turned and looked around the room. Not only was no one listening to

anything he was saying, there wasn't actually anyone in the room.

'Oh,' he muttered, feeling rather stupid, although there was no one there to

enjoy his embarrassment.

'I'm just going to have to roll my sleeves up and do this thing myself,' he

muttered, referring to the fact that he was after a cup of coffee. He stopped, raised

his eyes to the ceiling. 'That's pretty good,' he thought, 'I might just use that.'

109

1114hrs

The Health Secretary commanded the attention of the press corps as he always did,

with his fearsome Scottish accent and his bluff manner, which suggested that he was
even more on the point of thumping someone in the face than the Deputy Prime

Minister.

'So are you accusing the Tories of lying?' asked an innocent little bystander

from one of the more mundane daily nationals. Not so much cowed by the Health
Secretary, as bored of having to wipe Scottish spit out his eye. The Hattersley-esque

ogre with the Shrek accent thundered away about yet another trivial point of order.

'I'm not saying they're lying,' he barked. 'I'm saying they're telling the truth,

as far as they know it. The problem is that their sums don't add up...' The press
mouthed the words 'sums don't add up' in time with the Health Secretary, being

anywhere between the ninety-ninth and three thousandth time they'd heard them
in the past month. '...so even though they think they're being honest, they're not. So

they're not actually lying, they're just stupid. Now I don't seek to label anyone here,
but the effects of Conservative NHS policies would be to kill thousands and

thousands of patients. Through their stupidity, they're practically murderers.'

'Practically murderers?' piped up someone from the Guardian and the Health

Secretary glowered at him, then nodded.

'You're right,' he snapped, 'not practically. They are murderers. Killers.

They're the Khmer Rouge of British politics, and although they seem like normal
men in grey suits, they are in fact cold-blooded assassins whose health policies

would lead to the possibility of them being called before the International Court on
charges of genocide...'

The Prime Minister hit the off button on the TV and turned to his advisors, a huge

smile on his face. It was his turn for a day off, more or less, and he was enjoying

110

seeing some of the others take the flak. He could always depend on the Health

Secretary to put in a robust performance.

'Cracking stuff,' he said. 'Think I'll have another cup of tea.'

'Caffeine,' said Thackeray, his ace strategist. 'Good idea, Prime Minister.

Tablets I have. You want one, no?'

The PM's fake smile edged out a little further towards the ears.
'No thanks, never know when you're going to have to give a sample of your

pee. You have one though.'

Williams and Barney Thomson gave each other a glance. Urine sample?

'One, yes, have I will,' said Thackeray, whose appearance was more and more

becoming like that of Gollum, with great bulging eyes and skin the colour of half-

cooked nan bread.

'I love the Health Secretary,' said the PM, calling him by his title because he

couldn't actually remember his name. 'So brutally ethnic, you know. Very Celtic,
always looks like he's on the verge of charging over Hadrian's Wall and invading

England.' He paused and stared at a small area of patterned carpet, as he imagined
the Health Secretary in a kilt, tackle to the wind and brandishing a claymore, leaping

over the wall into Englandshire and mightily smiting northerners. 'That might
actually be a job for him in the next parliament,' he said quietly.

'What might?' asked Williams, and the PM slowly returned to reality and

waved away the thought.

A silence descended upon the room, no one really sure what to say now that

the TV had been switched off and there didn't seem to be anything else to talk about.

'What's happened to the Defence Secretary, Dan Dan?' asked the PM

suddenly. 'Haven't heard a peep out of him since this whole thing started.'

'You banned him from talking to the media because everyone hates him, Sir,'

said Williams.

'Oh,' said the PM, who once again lapsed into silence.
'Banned him you did,' said Thackeray from behind the couch. 'Yes.'

111

'Apparently Chelsea might win the league today,' said the PM suddenly.

'That's who I support, isn't it?'

1203hrs

Ramone MacGregor's killer had paced the room most of the night, had gone out for a

walk around the streets of London early in the morning before the city had got going
for the day, and had been back in his room for five hours, walking back and forth

across the narrow area of red carpet. One more murder to be taken care of, by a
method of his own choosing, and then, as the campaign wound its way down to the

final few days and hours, he had to make the utmost use of the small wooden box.
For all that the outcome of the General Election seemed like a foregone conclusion,

for all that opinion poll after opinion poll gave the Labour party a significant lead,
the simple fact of the matter was that the PM was going to be forced to resign before

Thursday 5th May, and there was nothing that anyone could do about it. By then he
would have been replaced, possibly by Igor, the deaf-mute hunchbacked barber's

assistant, and possibly by someone else. It didn't really matter. The real power in
London had long ago been yielded across the Atlantic. Long, long ago.

1456hrs

A slow afternoon in London. Sunny day, football fixtures about to start, nothing
much to do for a campaign team who were bored and in need of a challenge. This

was becoming more and more a campaign by the numbers. For the moment they
just had to wait and see what the Sundays would come up with. The last hurrah of

the heavyweights before polling day, and if any of them had anything up their
sleeve, now would be the time for them to produce it.

112

Barney Thomson had taken to cutting a little hair in his spare time, as he had

so much of it. He had already done Thackeray, which had been a tricky business
given how much the man's head had been twitching, but they had both escaped

without serious injury; now he had moved onto Williams, who had been sceptical at
first that Barney would be able to do anything other than cut his hair like the PM's,

but had now accepted that his head was in the hands of a hirsutological genius.

'So,' said Williams, who had fallen into the usual customer trap of drivel-

talking, 'what are you going to do after it's all over?'

'You make it sound like a war,' said Barney, smiling.

'Oh, it is,' said Williams. 'In a democracy, election campaigns are the new

wars.'

'Really?' said Barney. 'So, in a democracy, what is war then? The new

ketchup?'

Everything had to be the new something these days. It couldn't just be what it

was. And if by some miracle it was what it was, then it had to be the new what it

was, as in, black is the new black.

'Mayonnaise is the new ketchup,' said Williams sprightly.

'So what's the new mayonnaise?' asked Barney.
'Sweet American mustard,' replied Williams. 'So what are you going to do

when it's all over?'

Barney snipped at a foppish piece of hair dangling on the right hand side.

There was no equivalent piece on the left hand side, pointing to one of three things:
Williams had an odd taste in haircuts; his last cut had been done by one of the lower

invertebrates; his hair grew in mysterious ways. Barney cut it off, evened the sides,
and negated the discussion, which no one was having in any case.

'Igor and I are going to go back to our little shop in Millport, we're going to do

the odd haircut, and we're going to sit and look out the window at the sea and the

sun and the gulls and the waves and the rain. Aren't we, Igor?'

113

Igor swept laboriously at the floor, making sure he caught every little piece of

hair which had been sent flying from the jerking head of Thackeray.

'Arf,' he muttered.

Barney stopped cutting and turned and looked at him. Igor gave him a quick,

seemingly guilty glance, and then bent once more to his task. Wonder what's going

on with him, thought Barney, then he turned back to his cut.

'What about you?' he asked, although he didn't care.

'Likely go back to the marketing business,' said Williams. 'Used to be fantastic

in kitchenware items.'

'Very exciting,' said Barney.
'I did this great series on apple corers for Asda once. It was a blast.'

'I'm sure,' said Barney. And he closed his mind and thought, don't tell me

about it, don't tell me about it, don't tell me about it.

'Let me tell you about it,' said Williams, and before Barney could act,

Williams was off on a long story about kitchenware and its place in the home of

tomorrow.

1745hrs

The killer walked down the stairs of the hotel – he never trusted elevators – turned

the corner into the lobby and approached the doorman.

'Can you call me a cab, please,' he said.

'Certainly, Sir.'
'You can put it on the room, right?' he said.

The doorman nodded.
'Of course, Mr...?'

'Roosevelt,' said the man, 'Mr Roosevelt.'
'Just a moment, Sir.'

114

And Roosevelt stood just inside the door and waited as the doorman got him

a cab, as he didn't like to stand around in the sun. The cab was called, he walked
outside and got into the back seat.

'Downing Street,' he muttered, and the cab driver turned to look at him,

wondering if he might be someone.

'American?' asked the cabbie, as they drove off into traffic.
Roosevelt stared out of the window at the passing pedestrians, already

dressed for summer at the first sign of the sun. The British were so weird.

'You must be one of those rare people who watches American movies and TV

shows in this country,' he said, laying on the sarcasm.

'Cheers, mate,' said the cabbie. 'Yeah, I guess I am. Never been anything

better than Twin Peaks, that's what I always say. The distilled essence of American
small town life,' he added.

'How would you know?' asked Roosevelt sharply.
'Well, I'll tell you...'

'Just stop talking,' said Roosevelt. 'You're a dick. So, shut up and don't say

another word.' He caught the cabbie's eye in the mirror, recognised that he had won.

Half an hour later, after the driver had exacted his revenge by leading him on

a fine tour of the streets of London, Roosevelt was dropped at the end of Downing

Street, and the cab puttered away into the late Saturday afternoon traffic. He
watched it go, made a mental note of the number and a further mental note to have

the car destroyed at some point in the next few days, then he approached the two
policemen at the end of the road.

'Afternoon, Sir,' said one of them politely. PC Docherty recognised an

American tourist a mile off.

'I have an appointment to see Mr Williams, the Prime Minister's assistant,'

said Roosevelt.

The policeman nodded.
'I wasn't told to expect you, Sir, if you could just wait until I call that in.'

115

'Certainly.'

Roosevelt turned away and stared up and down the road, while Docherty

called the office and the other officer kept his eye on Roosevelt.

'Thank you for waiting, Sir,' said Docherty. 'Can I just check your briefcase

before you go in?'

'No problem,' said Roosevelt, not doubting for one second that there was any

chance that they would discover his murder weapon.

Docherty opened the lid and looked at the meagre contents of the briefcase. A

copy of The Da Vinci Code; a four cheese sandwich with rocket, sun-baked tomatoes

and yogurt; a magnifying glass. That was all. Docherty took each item out, tipped the
briefcase up and down to check for hidden compartments, and then ran the whole

thing through a scanner. Clean.

'Welcome to Downing Street, Sir,' he said.

Roosevelt smiled, accepted the briefcase back and walked quickly through

the barrier. No weapons to be found in his briefcase right enough, but then, this was

the man who two weeks earlier had murdered someone with a chicken.

Jason V Roosevelt walked quickly up the short street, nodded to the

policeman at the door of number 10, and then walked inside.

116

Sunday 1st May 2005

0712hrs

The final Sunday of the campaign, an early start. The Prime Minister looked over the

Sunday papers, scanning quickly for any new bombshells on Iraq, checking each for
the voting recommendation to their readers. His advisor Dan Williams had already

done this, of course, and given him all the relevant information, but the PM liked to
have a quick check himself. He rubbed his forehead as he read the Observer. It had

come out on his side, but was still damning in places all the same. He bit into some
toast, flicked the crumbs off the top of the paper. Williams sat on the other side of

the office, going over details of the day ahead. He, along with everyone else in the
country, was looking forward to the following weekend, his first chance to relax in

months.

The door opened and Barney Thomson, barber, walked in, accompanied by

Igor, barber's assistant. The Gang of Four, as they had become known amongst the
jealous not-so-elite who had been pushed to the side, who were advising the PM on

his every move, were all in attendance. Except that there were only three of them.
Thackeray had not been seen since the night before. However, given that his

caffeine-overloaded behaviour had become so odd, everyone was glad to see him
taking some time out, and assumed he'd finally collapsed in a great heap

somewhere. Any feelings of grievance that Williams had at the usurper Barney
Thomson, were now a little assuaged by his triumph over Thackeray.

The PM looked up from the Observer then pushed it to the side, as Barney

entered.

'Come in,' he said, a statement mostly negated by the fact that they were

already both in and helping themselves to tea and croissants. 'You seen the papers?'

Barney glanced at the pile strewn around the floor and shook his head.

117

'The last Sunday,' he said, 'they must be going for it.'

The PM snorted and gestured at the pile on the floor.
'Blinkin' Sunday Times, after all I've done for those people. Vote Tory! Are

they kidding me? What the hell do they want to say that for? I'm livid. Fucking
Murdoch. I hate the fact...I hate the fact...' and then finally he gave up on the

sentence, unable to bring himself to say it.

'You hate the fact that he's got more power in this country than you have,'

said Barney, finishing it for him. 'I know. I hate the fact that he's got more power
than me, but what can you do?'

'You're not Prime Minister,' sulked the PM bitterly.
'And neither will you be much longer,' thought Igor, who knew things that

the others didn't, although all that crossed his lips was a soft 'arf'.

'And they've got a leaked Foreign Office memo from well before the war

started. We're going to get screwed by that stuff one day. Totally screwed.'

'We're not,' said Barney, taking a bite into the freshest, tastiest croissant he'd

had in years. 'Wow,' he said, momentarily breaking the conversation, 'this is the
tastiest croissant I've ever had. Very fresh.'

'Arf,' said Igor enthusiastically, having just made the same discovery.
'What d'you mean, we're not?' said the PM.

'It's your baby,' said Barney. 'Everyone holds you accountable. We're not, you

are. Even your number two, your new best friend the Chancellor, isn't tarred with

the same brush. Just you. However, you're not going to be accountable this week, not
yet. It'll be like Nixon winning the election five months after the Watergate break-in.'

The PM sighed heavily, glanced at the rabidly and obviously anti-Labour

Express, threw it onto the pile, and turned round to Williams.

'What d'you think, Dan Dan?' he asked.
Williams leant forward, knowing it was time for a little ego massage.

'You'll be fine, Sir. You did the right thing, and in time, as Iraq stabilises, the

people will realise that. He had to be gotten rid of, Sir, and that's all that matters.'

118

'So invade Zimbabwe then,' said Barney. 'D'oh, no oil! Why bother? North

Korea then. Wait, too tricky. China? No, we'd get massacred. Syria? Mmm, there's a
thought.'

The PM groaned and turned his back on Williams's ego rubdown.
'How long d'you think I have?' he said to Barney.

'Arf,' replied Igor, who knew that moves were afoot to replace him before

polling day.

'Depends on the size of your majority, I suppose,' said Barney, 'and the ups

and downs of party in-fighting. Look, you'll probably be able to stick it out for as

long as you feel like. These things trickle out in dribs and drabs, and people get used
to it. This leaked memo from the Foreign Office. It admitted that there was no case

for war, that the case was going to have to be manufactured, and that you were only
going to support the invasion because your mate George wanted to do it. Yet you've

rebutted it this morning with a press release saying that it doesn't tell us anything
new. And neither does it. Everyone already knows that stuff. We all heard the

evidence at the Hutton inquiry. Except Hutton of course. We all know we went to
war so you could suck up to your mate. Everyone thinks you're a liar, which is your

own fault, but they still vote for you anyway. I've been telling you all week. Sit it out,
then next term invade somewhere else, and you'll be able to put Iraq behind you.'

'Arf,' added Igor.
The PM stared at Barney. His anger had been growing with every word, an

anger born of hearing unpleasant truths. There was a knock at the door and a short
man in need of a haircut entered, just in time to break the tension. They all looked at

him, wondering why he was there. The PM vaguely recognised him, one of the
Downing Street staff with whom he rarely had any business. The man bent down

next to Williams, whispered something in his ear, then straightened up, waiting for a
reply. Williams' eyes opened wide and he stared at an indistinct space in the air.

Colour seemed to go from his face as he sat, then he looked at the messenger.

'Make sure you speak to DCI Grogan or Chief Super MacDonald.'

119

The man nodded, then turned and quickly left the office. Barney bit into the

last of the croissant, although there was no way he wasn't having another one. Igor
stared at Williams, waiting for the news. He assumed it was going to be bad, which

was all the more exciting. The PM gave Williams a raised eyebrow, wondering what
could possibly have gone wrong now. Wondered if someone had leaked the memo

he'd written to George where he'd admitted that invading Iraq was completely
unlawful, but would be cracking fun and great for business.

'Yes?' he finally said to Williams, impatience growing.
'It's Thackeray, Sir,' said Williams. 'They've found him in a broom cupboard

downstairs.'

'Oh, God,' said the PM. 'He didn't fall asleep having sex with a vacuum cleaner

did he?'

Barney gave the PM the benefit of his raised eyebrow.

'No, Sir,' said Williams. 'He's been murdered.'
Igor perked up. Barney sank. Murder, murder, wherever he went.

'Murdered?' said the PM. 'You mean, dead? He's dead?'
'Yes, Sir,' said Williams.

'The same m.o.?' asked the PM. 'You know, the chicken?'
Williams shook his head. This, perhaps, was the most terrifyingly

complicated part of the whole thing.

'He'd been killed by a copy of The Da Vinci Code.'

Igor smiled wickedly. Barney was at least reasonably impressed.
'Oh,' said the PM, 'that sounds intriguing. What d'you think it means?'

1003hrs

Detective Chief Inspector Grogan had taken over a small room at Number 10
Downing Street, to use for interviewing employees and various hangers-on – or

120

"suspects" as he liked to call them. Once again his men and women had been

shepherded in through the back door, the whole thing being kept as much under
wraps as possible. The murder of one of the Prime Minister's principal advisors was

going to be explosive news, and the government machine had immediately moved
smoothly into place, ensuring that the public did not get to hear about it.

The PM had excused himself from Grogan's investigation, an appearance on

Breakfast With Frost to be negotiated. Not that he considered being interviewed by

Frost the most challenging thing on the planet.

There was a knock at the door of the small office and Dan Williams poked his

head round. Eleventh person to be seen in the last hour. Grogan had a way of
identifying quickly whether someone was going to be of any use, and getting rid of

them if he thought they weren't.

'Sit down,' said Grogan. Williams walked forward, took his place in his seat by

the desk. Grogan was perched on the edge of the desk, smoking furiously. The open
window and stiffish early summer breeze were the only things saving the room

from being instantly declared not safe for human habitation.

'You were friends with the deceased, or just colleagues?' asked Grogan

quickly. Had already been given the necessary details on Williams's background.

'Colleagues,' said Williams. 'Rivals, to be honest.'

Grogan raised the old eyebrow.
'Enough to want to kill him?'

Williams laughed and snapped his fingers at Grogan.
'Sharp,' he said. 'Might have thought about it before, to be honest, but he was

falling to pieces anyway. Couldn't stand the pace of the campaign. I was leaving him
for dead.'

'I admire your candour,' said Grogan. 'Now you're going to tell me if you

know of anyone else who might've wanted him dead.'

Williams shrugged, took his gaze away from Grogan and stared at the floor.

121

'Not that I can say. He was an amazing suck-up to the PM, but that's not

actually a capital offence in its own right.'

'Did the PM like that?' asked Grogan.

'Not sure,' Williams replied. 'It's not like I ever did it. I hope you're not

thinking that the PM might have killed him.'

'Of course not,' said Grogan, and Williams relaxed a little. 'If he'd wanted the

man dead he'd have got the RAF to drop a bomb on him.'

'Steady!'
'Who was the visitor you had yesterday afternoon?' said Grogan quickly.

Williams looked a little discomfited, and then nodded slowly.
'Yes, yes,' he said. 'American guy from the embassy, name of Roosevelt. You'll

have seen he was checked in. Observing our campaign, that kind of thing. Very low
level, a few basic, uninteresting questions.'

'You met him before?'
Williams shook his head. Glanced at his watch. Things to do while the PM was

out.

'Would you be surprised to hear that the US Embassy has no one working

here called Roosevelt.'

The look on Williams's face showed that he was surprised right enough.

'So, who was the guy?' asked Grogan.
'US Embassy,' said Williams, a little confused.

'I just told you he wasn't,' said Grogan. 'How was the meeting set up?'
'Through the normal channels. I think. I'll need to check.'

'I already checked,' said Grogan. 'I pegged this guy as my main suspect in the

first five minutes of the investigation. You see Thackeray at all after Roosevelt left

the building?'

Williams thought about it, eventually shook his head.

'The man had a room at the Hilton, checked out last night. This is who we're

looking for, Mr Williams. You are going to have to remember everything you can

122

about him, right down to the length of his individual nose hairs. Sit down,' he went

on, a nugatory statement as Williams already was, 'and start thinking.'

1415hrs

Roosevelt lay on the bed, hands behind his back, in his new hotel room, watching

24-hour news. Very confident that his latest escapade wasn't going to be mentioned,
but he could enjoy watching the calm of the campaign – which was, of course, very,

very calm – while knowing the tumult that would be going on beneath it all. At least
at Number 10, if not at the HQ of the opposition. The small wooden box, which was

going to prove so decisive in this election, sat beside him on the bed. He had taken
another chance or two to look at it, knowing that soon it would be out of his hands

and he would never see it again. The end was almost upon them, and it now mostly
rested on his colleague inside Tory Party HQ, Dane Bledsoe, supposed crack PR man,

to choose the timing and the individuals involved.

1501hrs

Barney Thomson and Igor, his assistant, sat and observed as the world passed by.

They were on the grass by the Mall, watching the tourists walk up and down, a
camera over every shoulder.

'It's awful, Igor,' said Barney, taking a sip of a bottle of mineral water which

had set him back nearly three hundred pounds. 'I'm Jessica Whatshername in

Murder She Wrote. I'm Miss Marple. I'm flippin' Poirot. All I need to do is turn up
somewhere and somebody gets murdered.'

'Arf,' said Igor.

123

'Good point,' said Barney. It was true. Ramone MacGregor had been

murdered before Barney had got here; in fact, he would never have been brought
down, but for the hairdresser's death. He had been brought into an already

murderous situation. 'Even so, it's depressing. I just want to go back to Millport and
be bored. I want to get up in the morning and stroll along the front to get my rolls. I

want to have five customers a day, and go out for a walk in the evening and eat fish
and chips and listen to the waves. That's all.' He thought about the promenade at

Millport, the smell of the grass when it's freshly cut, the smell of the water, the stony
beach which once was sandy when he'd been young. 'I want to be bored,' he said, his

voice low. 'That's all.'

Igor nodded. That was what he himself had wanted for a long time, after

years of being chased out of towns by angry villagers with torches, but he had been
in Millport longer than Barney. He didn't want the simple, boring life anymore. He

had grand plans and grand visions. He wanted to have another meeting with the
man who had told him that he, Igor, the deaf-mute hunchbacked barber's assistant,

could well be about to become Prime Minister.

'Arf,' he said, and Barney nodded, picking the arf up all the wrong way.

124

Monday 2nd May 2005

0714hrs

Bank holiday Monday. A slow start to the day, the Prime Ministerial team leafing

through the papers, extracting opinion polls, pieces that they could use in their
favour, articles that they knew they would have to rebut.

'Anywhere between three and eleven points ahead,' said Dan Williams,

glancing up from the notes he'd been hurriedly making. Not too long out of bed,

refreshed and sharp. After the murder of his colleague, Thackeray, the PM had
ordered Williams to get some sleep; almost as if he thought Thackeray might have

been killed because he hadn't been to bed since the campaign began.

The Prime Minister nodded, although the information had only partially

penetrated.

'You ever wonder why we call them bank holidays?' said the PM.

'Because all the banks are on holiday,' said Williams prosaically.
Barney Thomson glanced over the top of the Independent.

'Arf,' said Igor, Barney's deaf-mute, hunchbacked assistant.
'Everyone else has names for these things, though, don't they?' said the PM.

'They have Labour Day and Independence Day and Corpus Christi and Yom Kippur
and Ascension Day. We have early spring Bank Holiday, late Spring Bank Holiday,

August Bank Holiday. I think we should start giving them names.'

The three other men in the room – who, with the demise of Thackeray had

gone from being the Gang of Four to the Three Musketeers, or the Three Stooges –
raised an eyebrow each, and then returned to reading the paper, making notes, and

buttering a piece of toast respectively.

'We could have the Queen's Birthday, for example. The Royalists would like

that. Then, I don't know, maybe we could have a day named after, say, the Prime

125

Minister of the time. Maybe the name wouldn't change with PM, but would stay the

same as the PM who introdu...'

'It's a British tradition, Sir,' said Williams.

The PM sighed.
'You can fight some of them,' added Williams, 'but you're just going to have to

leave the bank holidays alone.'

The PM glanced over.

'I'm not so sure,' he said. 'Draft me something for later today. Might put it out

there and see what the hardworking, decent, honest people of Britain think about it.'

Williams nodded. Barney Thomson ruffled the newspaper. Igor took a large

bite out of a small piece of toast. The PM tapped at the desk.

'Have to go to Ikea today,' he muttered, not telling anyone anything they

didn't already know. 'That's what it means to be PM, you know. You have to go to

Ikea and eat breakfast. It's that tough.'

'It's the Ikea generation, Sir,' said Williams. 'Lots of votes in it, lots of votes.'

'Barney?'
Barney Thomson glanced up once more from the newspaper.

'Like the meatballs, not so keen on the furniture,' he said.
'Arf!'

1011hrs

It was Barney Thomson's turn to be interrogated by DCI Steve Grogan, the man
tasked with the delicate job of investigating the murders amongst the PM's staff, and

he was surprised it had taken him so long to be called. He was used to being the first
suspect in the queue. He knocked on the door to the small office and stepped inside.

Two windows were open today, and the office was warm and almost smelled as

126

much of the air outside as it did of the cigarette smoke which Grogan belched out

into the world like a 1950s Eastern European chemicals factory.

'Sit down,' said Grogan sharply, and Barney took his place. Wasn't sure how

this would go, as there were plenty of policemen who would blanche at the sight of
his record, and have him in prison in minutes.

'You've been around,' said Grogan. Barney didn't reply. Grogan lit another

cigarette. 'Heard you were tapped up by the leader of the opposition.'

'That's impressive,' said Barney. 'How d'you hear that?'
'Like I'm going to tell you,' he said. 'Anyway, over at Tory HQ they think the

difference in the campaign is the great hair you're giving the PM. You think that?'

Barney smiled. Of course he didn't. The leader of the opposition had the air of

the undead about him and was as charismatic as a block of tasteless Dutch cheese.
That was the difference.

'Rather a liar than a nondescript,' said Barney.
'Very fucking sage,' said Grogan, laughing, then calculatedly wiped the smile

off his face. 'So this all started when the PM's barber got murdered. What's to say
that you're not working with someone in the PM's office, you engineered the murder

of the last guy, your insider here persuaded the PM to get you down here, and now
the two of you are working to undermine the PM's campaign for some nefarious

purpose?'

Barney smiled. It all sounded so simple. Except that the length of time it had

taken to get Grogan round to interviewing Barney, showed that even he didn't think
much of the theory.

'You're right,' said Barney. 'We're trying to get Igor to be the next Prime

Minister.'

Grogan didn't smile.
'I take it you're joking, cowboy,' he said, voice deadpan, 'but that might turn

out to be not a hundred miles from the truth.'

127

1411hrs

The two men sat at the table outside of the small café south of the river, well away
from Westminster and the sparring campaigns which were slowly driving the

country to insanity. Dane Bledsoe, who had installed himself as the main advisor to
the leader of the opposition, and his colleague from Langley, Virginia, whose name

may or may not have been Roosevelt. Four days to go and their work here would be
finished. It may not have all been going exactly to plan, but then what covert

operation ever did? It was the end result which mattered, and they were confident
that their objectives would be achieved. The cost was immaterial.

'Where are you going to be on Saturday?' asked Bledsoe.
Roosevelt drained his coffee, screwing his face up as he had with every sip.

'Why the hell is it that you can't get a decent cup of coffee in this country?' he

said. 'We even gave them Starbucks and they still managed to screw it up.'

'They're backward,' said Bledsoe. 'We're going to be gone in four days. Forget

about it. Where are you going at the weekend?'

Bledsoe sucked at the dregs, as though there might be some vestige of taste

in the remnants of the cup.

'New York,' he said, 'I'm going to New York. I'm going to find a small café and

drink coffee. There are three or four places I like, but it doesn't matter where I go,

because they'll all be better than this crap. I'm going to sit there all day, listening to
the Mets on the radio, drinking coffee and eating doughnuts. Then I'm going to

watch a movie in a decent movie house, then I'm going to a decent hotel and I'm
going to crash, then I'm going to get up on Sunday, read some decent papers, and

repeat the day I had before.'

Bledsoe nodded, smiling. It all sounded so perfect, and would have been too,

if not for the fact that by that weekend, Roosevelt, or whatever he was called, was
going to be dead.

128

'What about you?' asked Roosevelt.

'Miami Beach,' said Bledsoe. 'Check out some babes. Tell me about Saturday

night.'

Roosevelt snapped his fingers at a passing waitress and pointed to his cup.
'I walked in through the front door and I left through the front door. The

place is a joke. Can you imagine getting into the White House like that? I don't think
so.'

'So how did you do it?'
'I took care of my non-business with the guy Williams, then I just happened

to bump into Thackeray on my way out. The guy was wired. Hadn't slept in four
weeks, God knows what he was popping. I offered him a few things, we went into

some small, uninhabited office. The place is a maze.'

'How did you kill him?'

'Bludgeoned him to death with a copy of The Da Vinci Code.'
'Nice,' said Bledsoe laughing. 'Hardback?'

'Totally,' said Roosevelt.
His third cup of coffee arrived. Bledsoe chose the moment to order his third

with a snap of the fingers, which he could've done at the same time as Roosevelt.
The waitress smiled and thought, I hate you, you ignorant American fuck.

'So did you get the information?' asked Bledsoe.
Roosevelt took a drink of coffee, started nodding his head. Into the Italian

gangster part of the conversation.

'Under the hair, just above the left ear,' he said.

'You took in a magnifying glass?' asked Bledsoe.
'Totally. So last century. Felt like Sherlock Holmes or something.'

'What did you get?' asked Bledsoe, pushing the question.
Roosevelt fished around in his pocket for a small piece of folded paper, which

he passed over. Bledsoe kept his eyes on Roosevelt and then opened up the paper
and read the words quickly, seven or eight times.

129

And the name of the star is called Wormwood

Bledsoe looked up at Roosevelt, his eyes narrowing.
'What does that mean?' he asked.

'I have no idea,' said Roosevelt. 'I was hoping you'd know.'

1503hrs

The Leader of the Opposition was having a bad day. His every day was bad. Sure,

when he appeared in public he wore the confident grin of a man who thought he
was just about to become Prime Minister, but realistically he knew he was finished.

He had four more days effectively leading the opposition, and then, come Friday
morning, he was going to have to stand before the press and accept defeat, and

announce that it was time for the Conservative party to find a new leader to take
them through the next parliament, and to try and build a platform which might lead

them to power in 2009 or 2010. A few weeks from now he would return to being a
nobody, like the previous two leaders, and he could crawl back into his coffin and

only come out after the hours of darkness, to make after-dinner speeches at seven
hundred pounds a time to anyone who would take him. (At least, he hoped he might

get seven hundred. He'd heard that Duncan-Smith only got fifty quid and that Hague
would do it for fourteen pints.)

Detective Sergeant Tony Eason, undercover at Tory Party HQ in an attempt to

get under the skin of Dane Bledsoe – a task which he had manifestly failed to do –

sat and looked at the back of the Count. He was bored, wanted to return to his desk
at the office. He wanted to be out investigating commonplace murder and the like,

not the murder of the PM's staff. This wasn't for him, hopelessly out of place as an
undercover marketing executive.

'Where's Bledsoe?' asked the Count.

130

'Wish I knew,' said Eason, forlornly. Not only had he been unable to find out

who Bledsoe was really working for, he generally had no idea where he was on an
hourly basis.

'We're screwed, aren't we?' said the Count pitifully.
Eason tried to put himself into the role of the crack marketing man, which he

was supposed to be.

'Well, you know,' he said, 'kind of depends on what you're looking for.'

The Count turned and gave him a hard stare.
'What d'you mean?'

'Well,' said Eason, struggling. 'You'll probably give the Lib Dems a good

kicking. That didn't always happen back in the 19th century.'

The Count stared at him, wondering if he was being serious, then he let out a

great sigh and slumped further into his seat. Checked his watch. His ten minutes

respite was almost over, then he was going to have to be back out on the campaign
trail. The last three days and, along with the other two leaders, he was visiting as

many marginal constituencies as possible. Kicking himself – or rather, kicking his
advisors – that they hadn't come up with the brilliant Ikea idea of the other mob.

The door opened and Dane Bledsoe walked in, fresh from conspiracy.
'We should get going, Sir,' he said, without trace of duplicity, a true covert

operative.

The Count nodded and tried to switch on the grin.

'Probably should,' he said.
He stood up. Eason joined him, fidgeting, wondering if he could just excuse

himself.

'Either of you know what or who Wormwood is?' asked Bledsoe, with the

brazen lack of subtlety of the intelligence services.

'A plant,' said the Count. 'A bitter plant. You think we could feed it to the

government? I'm afraid it's probably what we'll be eating on Friday. Bitterness.'

He pulled on his jacket, lifted a couple of papers.

131

'Won't need the jacket,' said Eason. 'It's a hot one. Probably an opportunity

for an ice cream photo,' he added. The Count took his jacket off, fished around in the
pockets for a couple of things.

'Something to do with a star,' said Bledsoe, 'a star called wormwood. Anyone

know what that's all about?'

The Count shook his head, distracted, trying to get into the character of a

confident politician.

'Revelations,' said Eason, and Bledsoe looked interested and also slightly

confused. Not a Bible man.

'The third angel,' said Eason. 'There fell a great star from heaven, burning as

it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of

water; and the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the
waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were

made bitter.'

Bledsoe stared at him; the Count was ready and walked out the door. Not a

New Testament man after all.

'You don't look like a Bible thumper,' said Bledsoe.

'Nah,' said Eason. 'You know how it is when you're a teenager. Iron Maiden,

Denis Wheatley, all that shit. You read Revelations to death. All that seven angels

standing in the sun, 666 stuff. The Omen and the like. I looked and behold a pale
horse, and his name that sat on him was Death. Fantastic. Load of baloney, right

enough, but fantastic all the same. Couldn't tell you how many gospels there were,
but I know Revelations inside out.'

Bledsoe looked impressed, for some reason felt pleased with himself for

immediately identifying someone who could help him out, when all that had been

required was a quick two minutes on Google.

'That pale horse thing was in the Bible?' he said. 'I always thought it was just

for the movies.'

'Nah,' said Eason.

132

'So what has it got to do with any of this?' asked Bledsoe.

Eason looked at him, obviously no idea what he was talking about, and

shrugged. And they followed the Count out the door, back onto the campaign trail, to

fight a losing battle against the Magnificent Two – the PM and the Chancellor – out
on their bank holiday afternoon, eating lunch, eating ice cream, drinking pints and

glad-handing it around the marginal constituencies of the deep south.

133

Tuesday 3rd May 2005

0615hrs

Dane Bledsoe hung up the phone and rolled back over in bed. Glanced at the clock.

Just after one a.m. in Washington and these people were still at work. What would
they have been like if Britain had actually mattered to them? He put his hands

behind his head and stared at the ceiling. How many of his days began with an
abrupt awakening via the phone? He needed to get up anyway, the usual early

campaign start. Another day trailing around the marginal constituencies of the
country, giving the leader of the opposition advice that ranged from the pointless to

the ridiculous.

'Work?' said a voice next to him.

Took another look at the clock. If she was awake anyway, then there was still

time to continue what they'd started the night before.

'Yeah,' he answered, and he turned towards her and rested his head in his

hand.

'Bit early for that, in't it?' she said.
'It was the White House,' he said, 'so it was pretty late for them.'

'The White House?' said the woman. 'You're pulling my chain, ain'tcha?'
'Nah,' said Bledsoe. 'I'm CIA, I'm always speaking to those guys.'

She giggled and tossed her long blonde hair to the side.
'Sure you are,' she said. 'And I'm Rosa Kleb.'

The duvet slipped down, revealing her breasts. All two of them.
'Ah,' said Bledsoe, slipping into his best spy persona, 'I was just looking for

those.'

And the leader of Her Majesty's Opposition was just going to have to wait a

little longer for his advice that morning.

134

0659hrs

For the first time in a couple of days, Barney Thomson was back behind the old

Prime Ministerial napper. The PM was reading the Guardian, Barney was standing
behind him clutching a pair of scissors and a comb, Igor was standing to the side,

clutching his broom.

Barney was in a reasonably chipper mood. Only three days to go. It would all

be over soon and he could get back to where he belonged. Beside the sea, a sleepy
town, and a few months of complete inactivity. Maybe the rest of his life could be

like that.

Igor, on the other hand, was beginning to feel rather deflated. He had been

promised much by Dane Bledsoe in their brief meeting a few days earlier, however
as time had dragged on, and not a lot out of the ordinary seemed to be happening, he

had begun to think that the man had been making fun of him. Usually he could spot
it a mile off, but it had been a while since he'd been the butt of all the jokes.

'What do you make of it all?' said the PM. 'The FT has us extending our lead in

the polls, this piece of crap has the polls revealing the fragility of our lead. What

d'you think Barney?'

Barney was trying to make something of the PM's hair.

'D'you want me to be honest?' he asked. Igor perked up.
The PM hesitated. Honesty wasn't his favourite medicine.

'Go on,' he replied, guardedly.
'This is how I see it,' said Barney, not really thinking about what he was

saying, trying to decide if he could do anything dramatically different with the PM's
hair. A mohawk, perhaps. That would give the media something to focus on for the

last couple of days, get his picture on every front page. 'The polls are a bit of this and
a bit of that, but they all show you in the lead, and generally by more than when you

135

started. You're going to win. But there's always the chance, of course, that you won't

have an overall majority, or you'll be left with a small majority, in which case you're
screwed. The war thing, with all these legal cases and criticisms, isn't going to go

away, just get worse. By the end of the summer your party's going to be split and
your authority will be diminished and you'll have to resign. The Chancellor will take

over, there'll be various rebellions in the house, and before we know it we'll be
having another election campaign in October.'

The PM looked back at Barney in the mirror, with big sad eyes.
'You really think so?' he asked miserably, his face not a million miles away

from Shrek 2's Puss 'n' Boots.

'Aye,' said Barney. 'You won't see out the year. So what I think is, you might

as well go for it now.'

'How d'you mean?'

'Let me shave your head, or dye your hair purple or something. Be dramatic.

And as soon as Thursday's over, and you're still in charge for a short while, get out

there and do big stuff. Reclaim all the countries of the Commonwealth, rebuild the
days of Empire, take Ireland back, invade Iran and Syria, start a space programme

and name it after yourself, declare Scotland your own individual fiefdom, and
demand that you have sex with all the wives.'

As Barney had talked the PM had gradually slunk down into his seat, the

interest in his expression had died, and he now viewed Barney with pursed lips.

'Very funny,' he said. Or, at least, it would've been funny if some of the things

on the list hadn't actually been what the PM intended doing in the next parliament

anyway.

0841hrs

136

Detective Sergeant Eason had snuck away from his undercover position as

marketing man to the leader of the opposition for an illicit breakfast with DCI
Grogan, the man heading up the investigation into the murders of two of the Prime

Minister's men, Ramone the hairdresser and Thackeray the advisor. Eason was, as
usual, eating everything on the menu, and already had several squirts of various

condiments down his shirt and tie. Grogan was, as usual, smoking profusely and
drinking coffee thick enough to lie on.

'So, do we think this thing's all coming to a head before Thursday, or are

these two murders completely unrelated to the election, and possibly each other?'

said Grogan belching smoke with every word.

'What do you think?' said Eason through a mouthful of hash browns.

Grogan pursed his lips, making his rubber face even more unattractive.
'You know, my fat friend, if you're ever going to become a grown-up

policeman with responsibility and stuff, you're going to have to do some thinking for
yourself.'

'I'm always thinking,' protested Eason. 'And right now I'm thinking about

having another bacon sandwich.'

'Mr Comedian,' said Grogan. 'I think there's no way it's not connected. Two

guys in the PM's office don't just get murdered, and they don't just get murdered in

the run-up to an election. There's something going on and we need to work out what
it is. What have you got from your friend at the Conservatives?'

Eason shrugged, indicated to a far-flung waitress that he'd like another bacon

with ketchup.

'Not much,' he said. 'Keeps disappearing, doing his own thing. No idea what.'
'God, what are you doing there?' said Grogan with exasperation.

'You know, stuff,' said Eason. 'He vanished for a while yesterday, came in

asking about Wormwood. You know, the quote from Revelations.'

Grogan stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray, eyes wide on Eason.

137

'What?' said Eason, slightly concerned with the look on Grogan's face. 'What

did I say?'

'And the name of the star is called Wormwood?' asked Grogan.

'Yeah,' said Eason. 'How d'you know that?'
'Because those words were carved into the head of Thackeray, the second

victim. Which probably means your man has been speaking to Roosevelt, the guy
who we believe killed Thackeray.'

Grogan tapped a contemplative spoon against the rim of his cup.
'He's not American, Bledsoe, is he?' asked Grogan.

'Could be,' said Eason. 'His accent's kind of weird, did occur to me that he was

putting it on.'

'So let's say he knows the killer,' said Grogan, 'let's say that. But he also

knows that you're working for the police, so why tell you about Wormwood? By

doing that, he knows you're going to tell me, he knows that I'll already know about
Wormwood, and he knows that we'll put two and two together and suspect him.'

Eason nodded all the way through, as he bit the head off a croissant.
'Sounds good,' he said.

'So why do it?' said Grogan.
Eason thought about it, turning the croissant over in his mouth. This was his

chance to shine, to a boss that had rarely ever been impressed by him.

'No idea,' he said eventually.

Grogan nodded.
'Figures,' he said. 'Might be time to talk to the guy.'

'I've already talked to him,' said Eason.
'In a police capacity, you moron,' said Grogan.

Grogan stared at his number two, who was by now dripping breakfast, and

then took a photograph from his inside pocket.

138

'OK, if he's going to screw us about, then we'll do the same to him. When you

go back, show him this picture and see what he says, see his reaction. Think you can
do that?'

Eason looked at the photograph of a man caught walking into 10 Downing

Street on CCTV.

'This is Roosevelt?' he asked.
'Well done,' said Grogan. 'It'd be all over the papers and TV if it wasn't

election week.'

'So I show it to the guy and let you know if he breaks out into assholes?'

Grogan nodded.
'Yeah,' he said, 'although I very much doubt he's going to do that.'

1718hrs

Sometimes the clean-up begins well before the operation itself is complete.

Dane Bledsoe knocked on the hotel room door and heard the restless

footsteps inside come quickly towards him. The door opened, Roosevelt allowed
Bledsoe to enter, checked the corridor, then closed the door behind them. The room

was large, plenty of space around the double bed. The bed was unruffled, the room
pristine, and there was little to tell that Roosevelt had spent the last five hours in it,

pacing up and down, occasionally glancing at the television, which had been on the
whole time, on CNN.

'The police have got a nice photo of you,' said Bledsoe, going to the window

and looking down on Regent's Street. 'Great fake moustache.'

'Thanks,' said Roosevelt.
'Let me see the box,' said Bledsoe quickly. No messing about. It was time to

get on with business, and the sooner he had the box the sooner that could happen.

'No more pleasantries, eh?' said Roosevelt. 'Sure thing, bud.'

139

He went to the bedside drawer. Nestled in beside the Bible was the small

wooden box, which had once been in the possession of Ramone MacGregor, and was
now in the hands of the CIA. He took it out carefully and handed it to Bledsoe.

Bledsoe held it softly in his hands, felt his throat dry. Didn't often have

moments like this in his job. Hair rising on the back of his head moments. He opened

the box and looked inside at the small artefact, two thousand years old. He stared at
it for a long time, Roosevelt standing over him, also looking down into the box, as he

had many times in the previous week.

'It's fitting that something which is going to change the world should be so

beautiful,' said Bledsoe.

'Yeah,' said Roosevelt softly.

Bledsoe looked up at Roosevelt. Suddenly the wonder had left his face.

Roosevelt saw the look in his eyes, was unsure where it came from. Too late he

realised that Bledsoe was wearing a jacket on a warm day in the big city. Started to
react, but five hours cooped up in a room, warm and drowsy, and he was too slow.

Bledsoe whipped the small gun with silencer attachment out from his jacket

and put a bullet into the centre of Roosevelt's forehead. Roosevelt stared at him, his

third eye trickling blood, and then he fell backwards onto the bed, so that there
wasn't even a thump as he fell to the floor. Bledsoe took another look at the contents

of the box, closed the lid, slipped it into his pocket, stood up, fired another four
bullets into Roosevelt's chest just for the hell of it, and then nonchalantly left the

room.

2209hrs

Barney Thomson and Igor had come to the end of another day. They had travelled

north with the PM; they had stood and listened to his apologies and his excuses and
his bluster and his non-excuses and his deferrals to the Chancellor, who the party

140

seemed to think carried more weight in the matter, because he'd always been quiet

on Iraq and everyone thought the PM was a lying scumbag. Nevertheless, it didn't
seem to make any difference, and Barney had been right earlier that morning when

he'd told the PM that he was going to win the election anyway. Just as he'd been
telling him for the past week.

It had been a slow evening, late back from the trip, and Barney and Igor had

ended up at a Garfunkels. Steak and chips for Barney, Caesar salad for Igor, who was

trying to improve his complexion. Not much conversation. Barney was tired,
couldn't wait for the whole thing to end. Knew that the PM was going to ask him to

stay on as his personal hairdresser/advisor, but also knew that the PM would expect
him to say no. Igor was quiet because he had still not heard from Dane Bledsoe, the

man who had, in a roundabout way, promised him that the PM would be forced to
resign this week and that Igor was in line to take his place. Britain's first deaf-mute,

hunchbacked Prime Minister. At least, since Wilson. He had been very excited, and
had spent the week planning his revenge against all those villages out of which he'd

been chased by an angry mob wielding torches.

'You're not yourself,' commented Barney, as they waited for two

cappuccinos. 'You OK?'

'Arf,' said Igor, and he shrugged. Didn't bear Barney any grudge.

'Igor,' said Barney, and his assistant looked him in the eye for just about the

first time that evening.

'Tell me what's up,' he said. 'Is it a woman?'
'Arf,' said Igor shaking his head.

Barney smiled.
'Well,' he said, 'as long as it's not a woman then it can't be too bad. They're

the worst.'

Igor smiled for the first time in a while. In fact, he had a date later that

evening with a Channel 5 journalist he'd met on the campaign trail a couple of days
earlier.

141

'It'll all be over soon,' said Barney. 'Think you'll come back to Millport,' he

asked, knowing that that was one of the things which was bothering Igor, 'or will
you stay down in the big city?'

The cappuccinos arrived. Igor looked over the top of a mountain of cream

and shrugged.

'Arf,' he said.
And Barney Thomson made a small hole in his cream pile and poured in two

sugars and nodded his head in understanding.

142

Wednesday 4th May 2005

0718hrs

'And so,' said the Prime Minister, and Barney Thomson could smell the whiff of

horse manure in the air, 'we come at last to the great election of our times.'

Barney Thomson, barber, rolled his eyes and looked back at that morning's

Sun.

'Can I just ask,' he said, staring at the smiley pictures of the PM and his wife.

'What were you thinking?'

The PM looked over at him, saw the newspaper he was reading, and cringed

from head to foot.

'You think anyone will see it?' he asked.

Barney stared over the paper at him.
'They have a readership of four million. That was why you chose them.'

'Yes,' said the PM, his skin crawling with embarrassment, hoping at least that

the Chancellor wouldn't notice.

The door opened and Dan Williams, advisor to the PM, breezed into the

office, a light whistle on his lips. The last full day of the campaign, the torture nearly

over. The fact that he was whistling I Should Be So Lucky was almost as mortifying as
the joint interview the PM and his wife had given to the Sun newspaper, but

fortunately he started talking almost immediately, so that no one else in the room
had to kill him or anything.

'Morning, Sir,' he said, snapping his fingers. 'Morning, Barn. Igor!'
'Dan Dan,' said the PM warmly. 'The final stretch.'

'That's why I'm so chipper, Sir,' said Williams. 'It's been a long road.'
'Via Baghdad,' said the PM, smiling, and Williams laughed. Barney and Igor

glanced at each other, then they each buried their heads in a newspaper. Barney was

143

already wondering if he'd get flown back to Glasgow in the private jet they'd used to

abduct him, or whether he'd be left to trundle along to the BA desk at Heathrow of
his own accord.

'You all set for the last big one this morning?' said Williams.
The PM nodded. The entire cabinet were pitching up in Finchley, as if putting

all the criminals together in one photo op was going to convince anyone.

'Shame we have to let Hoon out in public, but we couldn't exactly have

everyone and not him. Look a bit odd.'

There was a knock, the door opened and one of the secretaries whose name

the PM could never quite get the hang of, stuck her head round.

'Sorry to interrupt, Sir,' she said, 'but there's someone to see you. Says he's

from the leader of the opposition's team.'

She raised an eyebrow or two as if not entirely sure about what she was

telling him.

'What's the name?' said the PM suspiciously.

'Bledsoe,' she said. 'Dane Bledsoe.'
The PM shook his head.

'Never heard of him.'
Barney Thomson had just got to the five-times-a-night bit of the interview

and was looking at the PM over the top of the paper with even more disdain than
usual. Igor, however, had sat bolt upright. Heart racing, pulse pounding. It was the

man who had offered him the chance to become the next PM, and who he thought
had forsaken him. Barney noticed Igor out the corner of his eye, how the hump no

longer seemed so curved.

'Any ideas?' asked the PM of Williams.

Williams reaction was not that different from Igor.
'Yes,' he said, coldly, 'he works for the Count, all right.'

The PM nodded.
'Well, this should be intriguing. Show him in.'

144

The secretary vanished, and a few seconds later – a few seconds which were

loaded with heart-stopping tension – the door opened and Dane Bledsoe, the man
who had murdered the man who had murdered Ramone the hairdresser and

Thackeray the advisor, walked in, dressed very casually and carrying a small
briefcase.

He smiled at Williams.
'Dan Dan,' he said. 'Glad you managed to hold down the job.'

Williams could barely bring himself to acknowledge him. Barney cast an eye

over the guy and then looked back at Igor. Igor was all eyes.

'What can I do for you, Mr Bledsoe?' said the PM, straightening his tie. 'Are

you here to wave the white flag on behalf of your boss?'

Bledsoe smiled at the weak joke and placed the briefcase down on top of the

PM's desk. Williams immediately sprang to his feet.

'I presume that thing's been scanned,' he barked.
The PM waved at him, Bledsoe smiled again.

'What's in the case?' asked the PM.
Bledsoe stared at him, taking his time to reply. He was going to enjoy this.

'You get to take a look. I would advise, however, that you get these people out

of here before you do.'

'No,' said the PM.
'I think you should,' said Bledsoe.

'Listen, I've no idea who you are or what's in the case, and I'm not about to

get everybody out of here when I'm more likely to call security in.'

'One word, Prime Minister,' said Bledsoe.
'Well it better not be Iraq,' answered the PM sharply.

Bledsoe's eyes narrowed. For the first time the PM began to sense that

something might be wrong. He glanced at the others. Igor and Williams were staring

at the two of them, rapt by the unfolding, small drama. Barney had picked up the
arts section of one of the broadsheets.

145

'Wormwood,' said Bledsoe slowly.

The PM swallowed. Immediately the colour began to leave his face.
'Oh, God,' he said softly.

'Sir?' said Williams. 'What does that mean?'
The PM wiped his top lip with his fingers, staring all the time at the briefcase.

His heart was flying, his palms dripping sweat. This was worse than being
interviewed by the public on Question Time. Face white, eyes bulging, he looked at

the others in the room.

'I'll have to ask you to leave, please,' he said.

'But, Sir!' said Williams.
'Does that mean we can go back to Scotland?' said Barney, perking up. Igor

threw his boss a quick glance.

'Just leave,' said the PM.

Barney shrugged, lifted the paper and walked out the door. Igor was a little

more reluctant to go, but this was what he'd been waiting for. He stared at Bledsoe,

hoping for some acknowledgement from him, but when it didn't come he turned and
followed Barney out the room. Williams didn't want to leave, but realised he had no

option. There was something he could do, however, and he hurriedly scribbled a
note on a torn-off piece of paper. He folded the paper and then, ignoring Bledsoe, he

passed the note to the PM and walked quickly from the room.

The door closed and the two men were left alone. Bledsoe and the Prime

Minister, staring at each other across the briefcase.

'Well, aren't you going to read the note, Prime Minister?' asked Bledsoe.

The PM held the paper in his hands, still holding Bledsoe's gaze.
'It's going to tell you that I'm MI6,' said Bledsoe. 'Or maybe CIA, I can't

remember which it was that I told Williams I belonged to.'

He smiled. The PM's heart rate was slowing down, beginning to get angry

about something which he knew was not within his control, something which he
knew could only turn out badly.

146

'And which are you?' asked the PM.

'Both,' said Williams. 'Although neither of them are my main paymasters.' He

smiled again. 'I'm a triple agent, you see. Very exciting.'

The PM opened up the piece of paper and read Williams' hastily scrawled

note.

"MI6 - don't trust him!!"
The PM folded it again and slipped it into his pocket.

'Open the briefcase,' said Bledsoe.
The PM swallowed, hesitated, then reached out, flipped the clips and opened

the case. Inside was a single, small wooden box. He paused again, his heart once
more picking up pace, a-bad-a-bing-a-bad-a-boom-a-bad-a-bing-a-bad-a-boom. He

swallowed, licked his dry, nervous lips.

He pulled the box towards him and then slowly lifted the small, ornate lid

and looked inside.

He froze. His heart stopped beating for the merest second, his breath caught

in his throat. A great shiver washed over him and suddenly he shook himself back
into life. Then, with the return of life, came an uncontrollable shaking. He set the box

down in the briefcase, looking at its contents, his shuddering fingers touching its
sides.

'Oh, God,' said the Prime Minister. 'Oh my God. Where did you find it?'
He finally tore his eyes away from the box and looked up at Bledsoe.

'Beautiful, isn't it?' said Bledsoe.
The PM swallowed and looked back inside the briefcase, his eyes wide and

the self-assurance, which had been so evident when being interviewed by the Sun
the previous day, now completely gone.

1301hrs

147

The leader of the opposition stormed into the room and threw his teddy

dramatically into the corner. The two men behind him, his new advisor and
undercover cop, Tony Eason, and the shadow chancellor, followed him tentatively

into the room.

'Tell me that again!' shouted the Count. The man was livid.

'He's gone,' said Eason. The upside of that for Eason was it meant he too

could go, as he'd only been here to watch over Bledsoe.

'The...but...I mean...but...the,' stammered the Count, unsure of where to start.
'I'm leaving too,' said Eason. 'It's been nice not advising you.'

The Count slumped into his chair and stared forlornly at Eason.
'You're all deserting the sinking ship.'

The shadow chancellor bowed his head, tapping his fingers behind his back,

his defection letter to the Liberal Democrats in his inside pocket.

'The ship ain't sinking,' said Eason. 'It's sunk. Anyway, I was only here to

watch Bledsoe, and now that he's gone, I'm out of here.'

'I thought you were a crack marketing man?' said the Count, despite all the

evidence to the contrary.

Eason lifted his badge from inside his jacket and flashed it at the two of them.
'I was undercover. Scotland Yard. And so was Bledsoe. CIA or MI6 or

something, not sure.'

'I know,' said the Count sharply. 'He was CIA, and he was going to give us

something we could use against the PM. He was going to grant us certain victory.'

Eason was on the point of saying something about how you can't trust these

people, when he was gripped by a much more fundamental issue. A stomach rumble.

'I've got to get lunch,' he said. 'And report in,' he added as an afterthought.

And he was gone, and with him and Bledsoe went the last hopes of a

Conservative victory. Or so the leader of the opposition believed at that moment.

148

1417hrs

The PM pinged one last magical smile the way of a group of undecided voters and

then dived into the green car and slumped into the seat. All day the incredible
seemed to have been happening. His smile had vanished. Sure, it was still there in

public, but the minute the door was closed and he had his back turned on the
outside world, the perma-smile seemed to die.

He sat back and closed his eyes, fifteen minutes of respite before his next

engagement. Williams was sitting in the small fold-down seat behind the driver,

staring at the PM. Igor and Barney were there too, although no one knew why
anymore. The PM had forgotten all about his hair, all about his smile, all about the

dead tooth on his lower jaw.

Every time they had sat in the car together that day there had been an

awkward silence. Only Barney seemed unperturbed by it, only Barney seemed to be
immune to the anxiety.

'What's wormwood, Sir?' said Williams, delivering the question with a degree

of intensity, as it was the seventeenth time he'd asked it so far, with no reply.

The PM rubbed his brow. Once more a nervous tongue darted out and licked

at nervous lips. Right elbow on the door, head in hands, he stared out the window at

the meagre crowds lining the streets (people who were mostly there to make sure
he went away.)

'I'm going to have to resign,' he said, his voice shaking. Igor perked up, his

own heart thumping. This news at least got Barney's interest. Williams looked

shocked.

'Why? My God, why?' he said, with great drama. 'What is Wormwood, who is

Wormwood? Is it an insurance scam? A woman?'

The PM didn't reply, his face once more returning to the ashen grey which it

did when he was away from the public eye this day, and he allowed himself to face

149

the inevitable truth. Finally he stared sharply at Williams, his eyes full of melancholy

and sorrow.

'It's a woman, Sir?' said Williams, reading the look. 'A woman?'

The PM held his gaze for a few seconds and then dropped his eyes. If only, he

thought, it was that simple.

1141hrs

Late in the evening of the final day before polling. The ballot boxes would open at
seven a.m. the following morning and the next five years of the country's future

would be decided. (Not that there were actually any differences between the two
main parties, so in fact the election was of little importance.) The PM stood at his

office window looking down at the damp pavements below. It had been the longest
day of his life, a day when every conceivable thought of revenge and resignation and

desperation had coursed through his head.

Bledsoe had given him until five a.m. on election day to make up his mind.

Another five hours and nineteen minutes to decide if he wanted to walk away from
politics for good, or stand up and face the consequences, should the contents of the

small wooden box be made public. Just the thought of it had his insides squirming,
the thought of his dark secret being shown to the media for public consumption.

And yet, he could not bring himself to walk away.

If only, he had begun to think once the initial shock had died away, if only he

could find out who Bledsoe really worked for. Besides the CIA and MI6 of course. If
only he could discover the true paymasters behind this outrageous threat to his

premiership.

The PM turned and looked down at his desk, littered with papers and the

remnants of a late night Chinese, which had failed to settle his stomach. For the first
time that day he steeled himself and felt the determination begin to flood through

150

his bones. He gritted his teeth, his lips clamped together. Maybe there was still a

chance, maybe there was indeed a way which would allow him to escape from this
perilous position.

'Barney Thomson,' he said quietly to the empty room. 'Get me Barney

Thomson.'

151

Thursday 5th May 2005

0323hrs

The earliest start on polling day by a sitting PM in living memory. However, he

wasn't up and about in order to do some last minute campaigning. He had his own
immediate future and the future of the entire country to think about.

He stood at the office window looking out at the night. Very early morning,

but dawn was not so far away. He'd had a couple of hours sleep, but now he was

wide awake, alert and ready to fight for his political life. A cup of coffee, a day-old
Danish – which is always better than a day-old doughnut – a clean shirt, fresh

determination, and stiff new starched underpants.

There was a knock at the door and it opened to reveal Barney Thomson, who

walked in already clutching a cup of tea. Barney, too, was wide awake.

'Barney,' said the PM, 'come in, please. Sit down, we need to talk.'

Barney nodded and took his place in the seat on the opposite side of the desk.

Held the mug in his hands, enjoying the warmth on his fingers, although the room

was not itself cold. The PM sat down, seemed to stare off into space considering
what he was about to say, and then finally looked at Barney.

Barney had, in fact, been expecting the summons. A few hours earlier Igor

had finally told him about Dane Bledsoe and his political machinations, and how

even a week earlier he had said that the PM would be forced to resign before polling
day. And then, the day before, the PM had announced to his closest advisors that

resignation was on the cards. The public had yet to hear about it, his resignation had
not yet been tendered, but it was a bolt of lightning about to strike the breakfast

news on polling day itself.

'There's a secret,' said the PM, slowly, as if considering each word before he

let it out into the open.

152

'A dark secret?' asked Barney, still not entirely able to take the whole thing

seriously.

'Yes,' said the PM. 'Very dark. The man who came here, Bledsoe, if that is his

real name, knows it, has proof of it in his possession. He's threatened to reveal it
today if I don't resign. I have until 5 a.m.'

They both looked at the clock.
'Why did he leave it so late?' asked Barney.

The PM shrugged.
'Maximum impact, polling day morning. No time for our spin doctors to get

hold of it, no time for the party to recover. If I don't resign, we're finished, I'm
finished, the party's finished. If I do resign, then they'll hurriedly put someone else

in place, probably the Chancellor, and they might get by, given how insipid the
opposition is.'

Barney took a sip of tea.
'What's the secret?' he said.

The PM laughed bitterly, shaking his head.
'I can't say,' he said. 'I just can't. But if it gets out, I'm done for, that's all.'

'Bledsoe met with Igor last week,' said Barney.
'Igor?' said the PM, surprised.

'Told him that he was in line for your job,' said Barney.
'Igor. God's sake,' said the PM. 'Anyway, they wouldn't be able to do that, not

at this much notice.'

Barney shrugged.

'It's MI6,' he said casually. 'Or the CIA. These people do what the hell they

want, they throw money at stuff. Maybe there are fifty thousand ballot papers

waiting in Sedgefield with the name Igor written on them.'

The PM breathed deeply. Were they that powerful? He smiled ruefully at the

thought. Of course they were. Of course they could do what they wanted. Next to

153

them, next to Murdoch, next to the Americans, next to the banks, his power was

nothing. He bit his bottom lip; he shook his head.

'I need you to help me,' he said. 'But I can't tell you the secret.'

Barney took another long drink, staring across the desk.
'You think you can get out of it?' he asked. 'That there's a way for you to stop

Bledsoe?'

The PM nodded slowly.

'Yes,' he said, 'I think there is. But I need your help.'
Barney drained his cup and thought about it. Nothing to gain, nothing to lose.

Yet, if he helped the PM out and protected his position, how many people would
thank him for it, other than the PM himself?

'All right,' he said eventually. 'What d'you want me to do?'

0443hrs

The same office, a little over an hour later. The grey light of dawn beginning to mix

with the soft light of the two table lamps which had burned all night. There was
another knock, the door opened, and Dane Bledsoe walked quickly into the room,

carrying the same briefcase as the evening before.

'Decision time, my ill-toothed frien....'

He cut the sentence short, looked at Barney Thomson.
'Where's the Prime Minister?' asked Bledsoe sharply.

'He's resigned,' said Barney. 'I'm Prime Minister.'
Bledsoe laughed.

'The friggin' barber,' he said, mockingly. 'What have you done with him? Who

are you working for?'

Barney raised his finger and wagged it at Bledsoe.

154

'No,' he said. 'I'm the PM, this is my house, I'm in charge. None of your crap.

Lose the accent, none of your shite, and show me what's in the briefcase.'

Bledsoe walked forward and sat down in the seat opposite Barney. He leaned

forward, and started speaking very slowly and clearly, as usual in Barney Thomson's
world, after the fashion of George Clooney in From Dusk Till Dawn.

'Listen, bud,' he snapped, accent back to the original North American, 'you

can't be Prime Minister because you're not a member of the parliamentary Labour

party. And if the PM has indeed resigned, which I'm about to make sure of, the name
on all the ballot papers for the Labour party in Sedgefield is going to be one Igor

Djindjic, not Barney friggin' Thomson.'

Barney was completely cool. A few years earlier he wouldn't have been

capable of even sitting here, but he'd been through so much, he'd lived and died, that
nothing bugged him anymore. He was cooler than James Bond. Barney Thomson

was, without question, the coolest man on the planet. He didn't work for anyone, he
didn't owe anyone anything. This was why the PM had turned to him in his hour of

need.

'And who's going to testify that I myself am not Igor Djindjic?' he asked.

Super-smooth. 'Igor?' he added, voice cold. Felt a little bad beating up on Igor like
this, but it was all part of the plan, and Igor wasn't going to come out of it badly. Igor

was a pawn in the whole thing, but not one of Barney's making.

'Listen, barber,' said Bledsoe, spitting out the word, 'it's time for you to leave

this goddam house and let what's going to…'

His sentence drifted off as Barney held up his hand.

'Wait!' said Barney, his face a smile of curiosity and revelation. 'Say that

again.'

'What?' snapped Bledsoe.
'House,' said Barney. 'Say "house" again. Go on.'

Bledsoe scowled at him, the secret agent beginning to lose his cool.
'My God,' said Barney, 'you're Canadian. Who are you working for?'

155

Bledsoe was simmering, teeth grinding together. If it had been a Warner

Brothers cartoon, smoke would've been coming out of his ears.

'The CSIS,' he said. 'Now I'm going to have to kill you.'

'The what?' asked Barney.
'The Canadian Security Intelligence Service,' snarled Bledsoe.

Barney smiled.
'Don't believe you,' he said. 'The Canadians don't have a secret service. I've

seen Bowling For Columbine, you're all too nice.'

Bledsoe stood up quickly, reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out the

small revolver with silencer attachment, cloaked with secret film – developed by the
CSIS – which meant it hadn't been detected by any scanner.

'Goodbye,' said Bledsoe. 'An hour from now, the contents of the box in this

briefcase are going to be revealed to the world. The truth about your undying Prime

Minister will be out, and he will have no option but to resign. On polling day. The
British election will descend into farce, and the Canadian operatives within British

politics will be able to make their move, and we will begin to exert control over the
running of this country. First Britain, and soon the world.'

He laughed demonically.
Barney stared down the barrel of the gun. He may have been cooler than

James Bond, but at a time like this he had to resort to the same tactics as the big
fella. Keep them talking.

'Why Ramone?' he asked.
'Keep me talking, eh?' said Bledsoe mockingly. 'Well, it won't work.'

'You killed him because you were his boyfriend,' said Barney, employing the

same mocking tone. That worked for Bond sometimes too.

'He was MI6, you moron,' said Bledsoe, 'and it was the CIA who killed him,

not me. It was him who discovered the truth about your PM, the truth which had

remained hidden for two millennia. We needed to get it from him.'

'And Thackeray?' asked Barney.

156

Bledsoe breathed deeply, bringing himself under control. Aware that he was

allowing Barney to play him for a fool.

'If only you'd got to see inside this briefcase before you died, you'd know.'

He straightened the gun, aimed at Barney's forehead.
There was a noise behind him, and he turned quickly. The grey light of dawn

glinted dimly off the PM's dull grey teeth.

'You!' snapped Bledsoe bitterly, as if he hadn't seen enough of that face over

the previous few days.

With Bledsoe's head turned, Barney leapt out his seat across the desk and

dived for him. He turned, just as Barney made contact, and the two men fell to the
ground, grappling with each other, a gun between them. In struggles to the death

such as this, there is always a difference. Sometimes it is that one man is a trained
killer; sometimes it might be that that man wants to win too much, while the other is

colder and more detached. And sometimes it's just plain luck, over which neither
man has the slightest control.

The gun went off. The two bodies slumped to the side. The Prime Minister

looked down on the latest death which had occurred in the offices of Number 10

Downing Street.

'Oh, crap,' he muttered.

Bledsoe's armed moved, and then the rest of his body. But the bullet had

been fired into him, and the movement was coming from Barney Thomson, who was

underneath the Canadian covert operative, pushing him off. Barney struggled out
from beneath and then stood up. He had a spot of blood on his shirt from contact

with Bledsoe's chest, slightly breathless from ten second's exertion.

'Jesus. You all right?' asked the PM.

Barney nodded. He swallowed, looked down at the latest body in the ever-

growing catalogue of death in which he was involved. Then he looked at Bledsoe's

briefcase and glanced back at the Prime Minister. The PM nodded. He knew that of
all the people in the world, he could trust Barney Thomson.

157

Barney lifted the case, which had fallen to the floor in the tumult, placed it on

the desk, flipped the catches. He looked at the small wooden box, then lifted it out
and opened the lid.

He gasped. Even he, Barney Thomson, the emperor of cool, gasped. He

swallowed, he glanced round at the PM, he looked back at the box. He felt a slight,

involuntary shiver in his fingers.

'It's extraordinary,' he said. 'Extraordinary.'

The PM nodded.
'Yes,' he said. 'I know.'

Barney Thomson, barber, went to close the lid of the small box, which until a

few weeks earlier had been unlooked upon by any man for almost two thousand

years, but he could not yet take his eyes off it.

'What are you going to do?' asked Barney.

The PM walked over, stood beside Barney and looked down into the

briefcase.

'I'm going to win this election, and then I'm going to serve another four or

five years as Prime Minister,' he said.

Barney nodded. Good luck with that, he thought.
'Are you going to have to kill me?'

The PM squeezed his shoulder.
'Never,' he said. 'Never.'

Barney nodded. You can always trust the word of the Prime Minister, he

thought.

158

Friday 6th May 2005

0435hrs

Almost twenty-four hours after the Prime Minister had thought he was going to

have to resign from his position at the head of the government, he sat and watched
the BBC as the election results came in. Labour vote down across the board, their

majority vastly reduced, but victory was now assured. He had won an historic third
term as Prime Minister and, even if he didn't see it out, even if Barney Thomson's

prediction of a few days earlier came true and he was forced out by Christmas, his
place in the history books was assured.

As MI6 and the CIA licked their wounds over the Bledsoe fiasco; as DCI

Grogan and DS Eason were told to forget everything they'd learned about the

murders of Ramone and Thackeray – which hadn't been very much in any case – and
to go home and take a week off; as the leader of the opposition crawled into his

coffin, and lay in darkness preparing his resignation speech; as the world returned
to normal, and as the hardworking, decent, honest people of Great Britain slept

soundly in their beds, fully anticipating the result which awaited them the following
morning; the Prime Minister tucked into a deliciously urbane New Zealand

chardonnay, which he shared with Dan Williams, Barney Thomson, and Igor.

'A toast,' said the PM suddenly, breaking a fifteen minute silence, during

which results-fatigue had held sway and three of the four men had been in a state of
near sleep. Barney, Williams and Igor leapt into life, or at least staggered into life.

'Five more years of New Labour!' said Williams.
The PM smiled, the fixed smile that was always there, only slightly

diminished as he'd been intending to make a toast to himself.

'Five more years!' he said.

Barney said nothing, but chinked the nearest glass he could find.

159

'Arf.'

The PM closed his eyes and thought about the tasks ahead. Better health care,

reduced crime, better transport links with the north, blah, blah, I'm only thinking

inside my head, I'm not talking on TV, he had to say to himself. Enough of that.
Broker a peace settlement in the Middle East, ruin it by invading Iran and Syria…

there were so many options open to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of
Great Britain and Northern Ireland, that it seemed so lacking in scope to just

concentrate on the mundane.

Finally the exhaustion which had been gnawing at him for weeks and months

finally came to call, and his mind began to scramble in all directions, as sleep
charged in on its multi-coloured horse and snatched the Prime Minister from the

clutches of imaginary future grandeur.

Williams still watched the TV, not about to be comrades with Barney and

Igor, himself already dreaming of the weekend ahead. Igor too closed his eyes. He'd
had a long chat with Barney that morning. He had faced up to the fact that the

Canadian Secret Service plot to make him Prime Minister wasn't about to happen,
and he had begun to look forward to getting back to the simple pleasures of life in

Millport, away from the pressures of the Big Smoke.

Barney Thomson, barber, had already booked his flight back north for late

that afternoon. His work here was done. There were no more decent haircuts
needing to be given in this campaign. He checked his watch, looked round at the

men who had been his constant companions for the previous couple of weeks, and
then he slowly rose to his feet. It was time to get back to his hotel, put his head on a

pillow and leave it there.

As he left the room and the company of the Prime Minister for the last time,

he glanced down at the small black case which the PM had taken to carrying around
with him that day, and which would be with him very possibly for the rest of his life.

Barney stopped, thought for the last time about the small wooden box which sat

160

inside the black case and about the amazing treasure inside the box, and then he

stepped out the room and closed the door behind him.

At the sound of the door the Prime Minister stirred, the black case shifted

minutely between his feet, before he settled back down into an easy slumber. And
inside the black case, the small wooden box rested, the box which held the secret of

the Prime Minister's true identity. For the Prime Minister was not the man that the
hardworking, decent, honest people of Great Britain had thought him to be. He

wasn't the son of an immigrant Slovak, who had worked down the mines for
tuppence a week from the age of four; who had slaved for twenty hours a day in the

mills as a teenager, before going home to sleep in a cardboard box, with the nearest
toilet a five mile walk away; he wasn't the man who had led union protest marches

against the Thatcher government, and who still wore his working class socialist
credentials proudly on his sleeve, after all.

The Prime Minister was none of those things. The small wooden box, which

had briefly fallen into the hands of the CIA, contained the ancient artefact which told

of the PM's true identity; a small amulet, created in the time of Christ, which had
depicted the third angel of the Lord. As seen on TV. Or as seen by John in his vision

which led to the bestselling biblical epic blockbuster, Revelation. And the face of the
angel, who threw down wormwood on vast areas of the planet, thus committing

mass murder and leaving himself open to a charge of genocide before the
International Court in the Hague, was the face of the Prime Minister, right down to

the black tooth on the lower jaw and the horrific plastic smile.

However, the Prime Minister did not just resemble that angel of the Lord who

had created such mayhem. The Prime Minister was that very angel, who had lived
on earth for almost two thousand years now, an immortal, restless and tortured

soul. And with that longevity, with the endless years of wandering the earth and
getting in adventures, had come the madness which was so evident in the way he

governed the country. Now, however, the secret was safe with him once more, and
the two months of worry which he'd had since the box had been discovered by

161