The End Of Days Read online

  The Leader Of the Opposition leant over to the Shadow Foreign Secretary, while the PM answered an absurdly obsequious question from his own benches.

  'There's something different about him,' he said. 'What is it?'

  'Not sure,' replied his colleague. 'Suddenly he's like a cross between Churchill, Obama and... I don't know...'

  'Bob Dylan and Alan Hansen?'

  'Yes, absolutely.'

  'The Right Honourable, Leader Of the Opposition,' announced the Speaker from the chair, and the LOO looked slightly startled and rose to his feet.

  For a few moments he stared at the PM, still hypnotised by the change in the man. As the murmurs grew around the chamber, he finally found his voice.

  'As a previous Home Secretary in this Labour government once famously remarked, his department was not fit to pish in. Is it not time that the Prime Minister admitted that his entire government is not fit to pish in?'

  He sat down again to robust cheers from his side, and boos and raspberries and a flying egg from the government benches.

  The Prime Minister rose to his feet, looking imperious, feeling fantastic, with the hair of the Gods on his head, great words of state on his lips, ready to crush the LOO with his astonishing rhetoric.

  'I think the Leader Of the Opposition knows,' he said, turning to take in the adoring looks of his own party, 'that the only pish around here is his pish!'

  Doesn't take much to raise a cheer in the House of Commons.

  *

  The PM slapped Barney Thomson robustly on the back, then clapped his hands together and rubbed them heartily. Turned and faced the room. He didn't quite stand with his hands on his hips to address the crowd, but he wasn't far off. He had been followed in by Bleacher, the cabinet secretary and his diary secretary.

  'Did you see that?' he said. 'Did you see that? I crushed him. In my iron fist. He was like Plasticine and I was, I don't know, God or something. Ball-breakingly good, and it's all thanks to this man.'

  He gestured emphatically towards Barney, while Barney looked at the others with a degree of scepticism.

  'You could just see them all looking, see it in their eyes. What is it about him, they were asking. But they felt it, they felt the ruddy Force.'

  'Prime Minister,' said Bleacher, when he was finally able to interject.

  'What?'

  'We need to talk about Copenhagen.'

  The air seeped out of the PM's puffed up chest. He breathed a long sigh, which sounded heavy and unattractive.

  'God, all right. But look, I'm going to have a wee something to celebrate. Tell you what. Lucy, can you get that thing I was given in Port of Spain last week. Rum, I think. I think it was rum. Should be a bit different. Join me Barney Thomson?'

  Barney lowered himself into a seat and shook his head.

  'Suit yourself. Bleacher, give me the one-page and I'll have a quick look, then we can talk.'

  The room settled down. Barney wondered what his position was going to be. Would he just be attending to the PM's hair, or would he be advising on government policy? If it was the latter, he had a thing or two to say about Afghanistan.

  Lucy returned with the rather plain bottle of rum and poured the Prime Minister a glass. The PM raised it to the room, and smiled broadly. 'This is going to be magnificent,' he said, and no one was quite sure whether he was talking about the drink, his hair, the forthcoming election, or the prospect of the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica melting and everybody drowning.

  1843hrs London, England

  It was almost time to do the deed. Sir Leon Worthington-Worthington had no qualms, indeed had barely given the matter a second thought. The afternoon in the Commons had only cemented his desire. More grumbling about expenses, more hollow words from hollow people too quick to bow down to the media. As if they owed the tax-dodging newspaper owners and expenses-grabbing journalists any apology.

  The natural order of things was being turned on its head; and while even Sir Leon expected that eventually everything would return to money-grabbing normal – if not quite with the alacrity with which the banks had managed to pull it off – when it happened it would be too late for him.

  He had briefly contemplated taking some of his fellow MPs down with him in the expenses scandal, but a decent lawyer here and a helpful bribe there, an old school network in the right position, and they'd get away with it.

  However, none of these escape routes were for him. He was the poster child of the expenses abomination, and the system had already decided that he was the one who was going to be buried up to his neck in the desert with his eyelids sliced off, food for the ants and the camel spiders.

  So he had decided that newspaper headlines weren't going to be good enough for the rest of them. Blood had to be spilled.

  There was a knock at the door. Sir Leon looked up sharply, quickly placing a file over the knife with the eight-inch blade, which had been lying quite openly on his desk. The knife with which he intended going about his dastardly and murderous business.

  'Yes?' he said. The door opened and a man he did not recognise entered, closing the door behind him.

  'Sir Leon,' said the man. 'I'm glad you're still here. My name's Utterson, I'm with the PM's office.'

  'Haven't heard your name before,' said Worthington-Worthington warily.

  'I'm new. We're setting up a new climate change task force.'

  'Not another one. Bloody hell.'

  Utterson smiled. 'Yes, I know what you mean. What are you hiding under the file?' he added abruptly.

  Worthington-Worthington's back stiffened. He hadn't fought in India and Burma, and served his country for over seventy years so that some young over-paid idiot from Number 10's office could come in and ruin his plan even before it had started.

  'You're not fiddling your expenses again, are you, you old goat?' said Utterson, a wicked smile on his face.

  Worthington-Worthington spluttered in indignation, some spit dribbled from his aging lips and came to rest on his chin.

  'Look here!' he barked.

  'I am looking here,' said Utterson. 'And I'm curious what it is you're hiding under that there folder.'

  Worthington-Worthington hauled himself unsteadily to his feet.

  'This is extraordinary,' he said, using the favourite adjective of the well-heeled.

  'No,' said Utterson glibly, pointing out the window, 'that's extraordinary.'

  Worthington-Worthington, falling for the oldest trick in the book, turned and looked out at the featureless, dark night sky. Utterson quickly moved forward, lifted the folder and, with his eyes lighting up, picked up the knife.

  His smile broadened.

  'This is an outrage!' barked Worthington-Worthington. 'I'm calling Margaret.'

  Utterson took a step back and laid the knife on the desk, although he kept his fingers resting lightly upon it.

  'Go on, then, Sir Leon, pick up the phone.'

  The old man stared at the phone. They both knew he wasn't going to do it. Suddenly, and desperately, Worthington-Worthington saw his life collapsing even more quickly than he'd imagined. Ruin and shame were to come much more precipitously than he'd ever thought.

  'What do you want?' he said quietly, slumping back down into his chair.

  It seemed obvious what Number 10's office would want. He had to be out of there, office and everything else vacated by the end of the day, more than likely. It had been coming to this, and now he had failed in his extraordinary plan to equalize before they'd scored.

  'Nothing,' said Utterson.

  Worthington-Worthington looked up in surprise.

  'What?' he said.

  As last words go it was pretty poor.

  Utterson grabbed the knife, and with one athletic movement had jumped up onto the desk. Worthington-Worthington looked up in horror, but had neither the time nor the wit to shout anything. Then Utterson brought the knife sweeping down and with one swishing movement sliced Worthington-Worthington's neck. Blood shot out from the s
evered artery.

  Utterson leapt out of the way of the pulsing blood and hopped gently down onto the floor. He looked down at the slumped head of the dead Sir Leon Worthington-Worthington, and then casually dropped the knife on the carpet and turned and walked slowly from his office.

  Worthington-Worthington had planned a grand massacre of MPs, and that massacre had begun. Sadly, for the pusillanimous and corrupt knight, he had become the first victim, rather than the perpetrator...

  Thursday 3rd December 2009

  0713hrs London, England

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  'I'm fine,' she replied.

  'Can you talk for a moment?' asked Frankenstein.

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

  Margaret nodded.

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

  'Of course.'

  'How long had you worked for Sir Leon?'

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

  'Sixty-three years,' she said.

  'Holy fuck,' said Frankenstein, then quickly held up his hand in apology. She didn't seem to mind. 'That's a long time.'

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

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

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

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

  'Indeed,' said Frankenstein, nodding, 'thank you. We appreciate you not allowing us to reduce the suspect list by even one.'

  0812hrs London, England

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

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

  Barney looked down at the hair before him.

  'What would you like?' asked Barney.

  'Yesterday went well...' began the PM.

  'With the Churchill, Obama, Dylan, Hansen mix,' said Barney.

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

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

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

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

  'Second thing is,' he continued, 'climate change. What d'you think?'

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

  The door behind opened and Bleacher walked in.

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

  'There's been a thing, Sir,' said Bleacher.

  'Make it fifteen,' said the PM, and he barked.

  'We need to talk now, Sir,' said Bleacher. 'In private.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

  'Leon Worthington-Worthington,' said Bleacher.

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

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

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

  'Courtesy call, that's all. You are Prime Minister, Prime Minister.'

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

  'Yes, Prime Minister.'

  Bleacher left the office, leaving the door open.

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

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

  'You've got to be kidding me,' said Frankenstein.

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

  'What? What?' barked the PM.

  'We have history,' said Frankenstein.

  'I warned you about Th
omson,' said Bleacher, his voice low in the background.

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

  'Funny,' said Frankenstein. 'I said it before, Barney, you're a biblical fucking plague.'

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

  'No,' said Barney, his voice flat.

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

  Just After Lunch, Houses of Parliament London, England

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

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

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

  1934hrs Number 10 Downing Street London, England

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