The End Of Days

by Douglas Lindsay

  Along with the usual Downing Street travelling entourage of one hundred and seventy-nine essential personnel, the British delegation to Copenhagen included seventeen MPs and all their staff. When you lead the world, you have to be heavy handed or else people won't respect you.

  Unfortunately for the seventeen MPs, the killer Utterson had also made the trip. And in the middle of the night he did the rounds of the three hotels at which they were staying. One by one he picked them off; except in the case of the two closeted female members for the south-east, who he managed to get at the same time in the same bed.

  Finally, at one minute before two in the morning, he arrived at the room of the honourable member for some part of Lanarkshire.

  Utterson let himself into the room and stood still in the dark for a moment, barely breathing, listening to the sound of sex in the night. Utterson smiled and flicked the light switch.

  The MP for some part of Lanarkshire, his secretary currently impaled on top of him, looked over at the figure at the door. The secretary rolled her eyes, being well used to people walking in on her while she had sex with an MP. The honourable member let out a long, tired sigh.

  'What?' he said.

  Assuming that Barney Thomson was the killer, and knowing that Barney was in custody, all the MPs had thought they were safe. None saw the killer Utterson coming, even when he was standing right in front of them.

  'Mr. Muir,' said Utterson, 'I'm from the Prime Minister's office.'

  'Who else would come at this time of the night?' said the MP.

  'Well, you would, Donald,' said the secretary with a wink, and the MP smiled grimly.

  'The PM is concerned about the latest round of expenses claims,' said Utterson. 'He specifically asked that party members didn't make any spurious claims.'

  The MP spread his hands to the side in a referee! gesture, finally removing them from his secretary's breasts.

  'What?' he said again.

  Utterson took a step closer. Now, at last, the happy couple saw something in his eyes, and the secretary self-consciously placed her arm across her breasts.

  'Thirty-seven pence for a packet of crisps,' said Utterson, 'which, in its way, is as bad as the claim of three thousand pounds for a rabbit hutch which you made in July.'

  The MP smiled uneasily. He'd hoped the rabbit hutch thing would slip through unnoticed under the cover of house improvements.

  Utterson took a step closer.

  'It's still nothing to do with the PM,' said the MP boldly, 'so you can sod off.'

  'I don't think so,' said Utterson.

  Then, in one beautifully choreographed movement, he drew the sword from inside his long coat, swished it through the air with the flourish of Aragorn, and sliced off the head of the honourable member for some part of Lanarkshire. Bloody spurted and the decapitated head lopped onto the bed, bounced once and fell heavily on the floor.

  Utterson had stopped the movement of the sword before it had also taken out the secretary, who was now in the uncomfortable position of having sex with the wrong kind of stiff.

  Utterson wiped the blade on the sheets, then slipped the sword back into his coat.

  'Good evening, ma'am,' he said, nodding at the secretary, and with that, his night's work was done.

  Another seventeen MPs in the bag.

  As Utterson left the room, the secretary was aware of being left strangely unfulfilled.

  0613hrs GMT London, England

  Barney Thomson was sitting uncomfortably on a hard chair. His shoulders were hunched, his legs closed together, his arms clasped between them. He was cold, shivering. A long night on a hard bed with one blanket – and a jaggedy-arsed blanket at that – and then summarily dragged out of his cell and stuck in a cold, empty room. A room with nothing but a single hard wooden chair under a solitary light bulb.

  The door opened and crack MI5 interrogator Three Beards entered and stood in front of Barney. Barney stared at her shoes. Couldn't bring himself to look her in the eye. He was miserable.

  'Have you heard the news?' asked Three Beards.

  Barney had had no contact with anyone for over twelve hours. His was solitary confinement extra. Solitary confinement plus. Super-sized solitary confinement. This made Steve McQueen's solitary confinement look like a doddle. Of course, Steve McQueen got to use a motorbike outside when he was doing solitary confinement, so it's a surprise he even wanted to escape.

  'Look at me, Mr. Thomson,' she said. Her voice had lost the cheery camaraderie of the previous day, now dripping with acid.

  Barney finally raised his eyes and looked at her. Three Beards was trained to read deceit, hostility and fear. She could see nothing in Barney. His eyes were dead, and behind those dead eyes Barney had shut down. He no longer thought of home; the people he missed, the views across the water. The sea, the mountains of Arran, the mournful cry of the gulls.

  Perhaps he was due this misery, this final clawing, bitter crushing of the spirit. For years, everywhere he had been, death and slaughter and heartache had followed in his wake. Did he not now deserve this, to be removed from society, the very essence of his id crushed and broken?

  'Between the hours of 11pm last night and 2am this morning, Central European Time, seventeen members of the British parliament were brutally murdered in Copenhagen. Denmark.'

  Barney held her gaze. Her words could not have meant less to him if she had told him the name of the winner of X-Factor or who was getting murdered on Eastenders or who Katie or Pete were going to be sleeping with this Christmas. Barney's face was blank.

  'Some people,' continued Three Beards, expertly hiding the fact that Barney Thomson completely disconcerted her, 'might think that the fact that murders have been committed while you are in custody, actually proves your innocence. Others might suggest that all it proves is that you have an equally accomplished accomplice.'

  Barney looked through her. He felt frozen to the bone. The cold, the pain was not just physical. He was aware of a black cancerous ball in the middle of his brain, sucking the life from him.

  'Which is it, Barney Thomson?' she said, without a flicker, although Three Beards was feeling strangely discombobulated.

  At last Barney found the words for this woman who had cracked the most evil terrorists that had been thrown at Britain in the previous eight years.

  'Fuck you,' said Barney. 'And your dog.'

  0917hrs CET Copenhagen, Denmark

  The Prime Minister was eating breakfast. It was his third breakfast of the day so far, this one featuring pancakes and bacon and maple syrup. The Downing Street collective were holding an emergency war cabinet meeting, to discuss the latest series of murders. In the corner a television was playing, an excitable Danish reporter standing outside the PM's hotel, talking at a hundred miles an hour.

  'What d'you suppose he's saying?' said the PM darkly. They had been watching CNN for the previous half hour in vain, but they hadn't progressed from Tiger Woods; which was obviously still more of a story than the destruction of the UK government.

  'Prime Minister,' said Bleacher, 'what do you think he's saying? The entire government is in the process of being wiped out.'

  Blaine, the Cabinet Secretary, twitched as the faces of some of the dead came on the screen, then he turned to the PM. Lucy the Diary Secretary, sipped coffee and waited to tell the PM how the morning had been reorganised around his new press conferences.

  'You need to get back to London, Sir,' said Blaine. 'As quickly as possible.'

  The PM blustered and humphed, and a piece of pancake flew out of his month and looped across the room in a perfect arc, landing on Lucy's shoulder. There was an awkward moment while everyone in the room waited to see what Lucy would do, but she defused the situation by pretending that the PM hadn't gobbed on her blouse.

  'Never!' barked the PM. 'Aye,' he continued, 'here's the rub. It's the bloody Americans. I'm here, saving the world, and they don't like it, do they? They wanted their man to be the one who saves humanity, they
wanted to be the ones getting all the glory. Well, they're not. I was here first, I was...'

  'Actually, President Obama was here last week, Sir,' said Blaine.

  'I was here first,' continued the PM. 'I'm the ideas man. I'm the one putting my airy Scottish backside on the line to save the world. I am not going to stand aside while those burger-eating invasion monkeys threaten to undermine my government and my masterplan to save all humanity.'

  'You're speaking to the press in twenty-one minutes,' said Lucy, who had used the PM's mini-speech to quickly brush the globule of Prime Ministerial gob from her shoulder.

  The PM glared darkly at her and then switched his look to Bleacher.

  'And what am I supposed to say? I have my vision, and I will not be distracted from that, but the bloody press are only going to want to talk about these murders.'

  'Yes, Prime Minister, they are! And you're going to have to talk to them about it whether you like it or not.'

  'Am not!' yelled the PM. 'I will have my day. I will not be distracted from My Purpose. I did not come to this blighted European capital to leave with my tail between my legs because of a few murders. In the grand design, the great scheme, what are seventeen puny lives set against the destiny of the human race?'

  As it happened, the authorities in the blighted European capital were quite delighted about the dramatic goings-on surrounding the British delegation. It helped detract from the complete disaster of the climate change negotiations, which were going the same way as the Amazonian rainforest, the white tiger and the Antarctic ice shelf.

  'Very well, Prime Minister,' said Bleacher. 'You can counter every question about the killer Utterson with a comment about the future of mankind.'

  'Thank you,' said the PM derisively, 'I appreciate you giving me your permission.'

  Blaine buried his head in a document listing all the MPs who could potentially fill the two cabinet posts which had become available; Lucy, meanwhile, sat and waited to be excused, so that she could wash her hands, as she could still feel the insidious wet of the PM's spit on her finger.

  1014hrs GMT A Plane Over the North Sea

  DCI Frankenstein and DS Hewitt were flying to Copenhagen to speak to the local police about the latest series of fantastical murders. They had bought most of the food available on the plane and were tucking into their second breakfast.

  'Like, so,' said Hewitt, 'where does this leave us with Barney Thomson? You speak to Three Beards?'

  'Yes,' said Frankenstein. 'Insomuch as anyone ever has a conversation with the woman. You're standing there talking to her, and you know that you're the investigating officer, you know that you're not actually guilty of anything yourself, but by God, you just can't help but feel that she's accusing you of something.'

  'Like, wow, I've got to meet this chick,' said Hewitt.

  Frankenstein gave him a sideways glance, then continued talking through a mouthful of some sort of egg. 'Surprise, surprise, she thinks Barney's guilty and has an accomplice.'

  'But Utterson's been fingered in Denmark and at Westminster. Barney obviously isn't Utterson.'

  'She thinks it's too obvious...'

  Hewitt nodded sagely. 'Ah,' he said. 'One of them.'

  'There's one good thing about her, though,' said Frankenstein. 'Apparently they're going to get her onto the panel when Blair goes up in front of the Iraq inquiry. I'd like to see his God protect him then.'

  Hewitt nodded and took a large bite out of something that might, at one time, have been a sausage.

  1312hrs London, England

  Barney Thomson sat huddled in a corner. He'd had no communication with anyone since Three Beards had been in to see him seven hours previously. The light had been turned off; he'd had no food, nothing to drink. He hadn't been allowed to go to the toilet, and so had had to use a corner of the room.

  His human rights were being infringed. What he needed was for some campaigning soul to turn up and speak on his defence, to take his case to the courts, to at least get him held captive in decent conditions. And the fact was that he had now been held for six days without being charged.

  Everyone seemed so convinced about his guilt however, that no one seemed willing to speak on his part.

  Barney huddled in his misery.

  There was a knock at the door but Barney did not even lift his head. Why would anyone be knocking?

  The door opened and a shaft of light scythed into the room. A wee woman poked her face round the door but seemed reluctant to actually enter.

  'Mr. Thomson,' she said, her voice much softer than that of the acerbic and acidic Three Beards. 'There's someone here to see you. Someone from Liberty, to see if you're being treated all right. I do hope you'll have nice things to say about the accommodation today, we do like to pride ourselves.'

  Barney still didn't look up. His fingers had gone white with the cold, he had become used to the smell of his toilet corner, his brain had shut down.

  'Who is it?' he asked.

  The woman at the door, No Beards some called her, coughed gently, and said, 'It's Shami Chakrabarti, Mr. Thomson.'

  Barney disappeared further into his reserve. If only it had been Igor. He remembered Igor.

  'That's all right,' he said. 'I'll pass.'

  2313hrs EST Off The Coast of Maine, USA

  With the now-ended interregnum in murder, death and slaughter, and while Barney had been held captive and the Prime Minister and Bleacher had assumed his guilt, the British invasion force had hovered off the American coast, pretending to be in a state of disrepair, waiting for further orders. The military had used the opportunity to strengthen the force, and now there were seven ships, over a thousand troops, two Polaris submarines and seven attack helicopters in this advanced party.

  All they were waiting for was the order to attack; and as the PM huffed and puffed in Copenhagen, Denmark, and saw an American plot everywhere he looked, his finger hovered over the phone, ready to make the call.

  Friday 18th December 2009

  0717hrs CET Copenhagen, Denmark

  'You will have noticed,' said the PM, 'that all this started to go wrong when Barney Thomson got taken into custody.'

  'Prime Minister?' said Bleacher.

  They were in the back of a car on the way to the last big day of the climate change summit. The PM was armed with his Churchill speech, ready to shake the foundations of the human race and create a brave new world based on his own vision.

  'Me, you know, my image and public profile. I was doing great, everyone was talking about how fantastic I am, I was crushing that Etonian tube in my iron fist, I was closing in the polls... It was one win after another. And you know why? I mean, apart from my natural charisma and the inherent truth behind my every word?'

  'Tell me, Prime Minister,' said Bleacher, who was looking over the PM's speech and cringing at every word.

  'The hair, man, for God's sake, the hair. I have been sweeping all before me like I'm Alexander the bloody Great, and it was thanks to Barney Thomson. Now look at me. Look at me!'

  Bleacher looked at the PM.

  'I look like Simon Cowell's underpants.'

  'Prime Minister?'

  'Whatever,' said the PM. 'Look, how long before I'm up in front of the delegates?'

  Bleacher looked at his watch.

  'Not for another four hours.'

  The PM grumbled into his chin.

  'Good, there's time then. If I'm about to save the planet single-handed, I'll need to do it with quality hair. Get me Barney Thomson.'

  Bleacher looked dully across the car.

  'Yes, Prime Minister,' he said.

  0631hrs GMT London, England

  The door to the small room opened. The body in the corner did not stir. The room was cold and smelled of human waste; like so many rooms in the dark building in the middle of London.

  The small woman who had opened the door did not enter. She stood in the doorway, the light at her back, barely able to make out the prone figure in the corner.r />
  'Mr. Thomson, the Prime Minister needs you in Copenhagen. Bit of a haircutting emergency. You need to be at RAF Brize Norton in forty-five minutes. You have a few minutes to have a shower, then the helicopter will be waiting for you.'

  The body in the corner did not move.

  *

  Twenty minutes later Barney Thomson stood at a small desk signing himself out of the facility. Three Beards, crack MI5 interrogator, had not wanted to let Barney out of her sight, and had volunteered for the assignment to be handcuffed to him on the way to Copenhagen.

  The small woman behind the desk took the clipboard back from Barney and checked his signature.

  'Thank you, Mr. Thomson, that's lovely.'

  Barney barely lifted his head in acknowledgment.

  'One more thing, Mr. Thomson,' she said, as Three Beards was just about to drag him away to his waiting helicopter. 'We hope you've enjoyed your stay with us today, and we were wondering if you could fill in our customer satisfaction survey before you go.'

  The dull, grey sockets of Barney's eyes lifted up towards the small woman.

  'You've got a chance to win a free trip on Eurostar to a European capital of your choice. Although, of course,' she added with a giggle, 'that really only means Paris or Brussels.'

  Barney dropped his eyes, Three Beards tugged on his wrist, and they walked off down the corridor, Barney's muscles crying out at the movement.

  1009hrs CET Copenhagen, Denmark

  Barney Thomson, heretical barbershop superstar, was standing behind the Prime Minister, listening to the full flow of Prime Ministerial rubbish, when the door opened and in walked DCI Frankenstein and DS Hewitt. They hesitated for a second in the doorway, and then closed the door behind them as they surveyed the slightly bizarre scene.