He stops cutting, and straightens up. ‘I trained as a barber, years ago, out of school. Came back to it late.’
‘Wow.’
The brush is applied to the back of my neck, sweeping away loose strands to the linoleum floor. ‘You’re done,’ he says.
‘Thanks.’
This is a quiet town, barely map-worthy in the depths of Bedfordshire. Shefford has a small supermarket and one cafe, from what I can see. The barber shop actually has competition; there’s another one, three doors down. Why do hairdressers flock together? One turns up on a street and chances are there’ll be two more on the same stretch in no time at all.
Give me a city any day. Give me anything but little communities with their big mouths. The locals were smiley and pleasant, but keen enough to give the papers a scoop, back when the six of us lived in Cambridgeshire. Not far from here, actually.
I should have come here with a question in mind, or a way into the conversation I want to have. Instead, I end up standing at the reception desk, credit card in hand once the transaction has been completed, hesitating. I must look like an idiot.
This man was scary, once. He had things done to people. He was in charge.
He points a finger at me. ‘You’re Mickey Stuck, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I thought I recognised you.’ He doesn’t say more.
It’s now or never. ‘Actually, we have a mutual friend.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Gwen Taylor. She used to work for you. Starguard.’
‘So she did.’ He reappraises me, straightens up. Hardens. ‘It was a long time ago since she disappeared off. Still, water under the bridge. Max Black, that’s the link, right? I haven’t thought about him in years. You met her through Max?’
‘That’s right.’
‘So how is she doing? Is she finally going to pay me back what she owes me? All that bodyguard training, setting her up in a job, it wasn’t cheap.’
‘I’ll pay you back. Whatever, name it.’ I shouldn’t react, I know; he’s just trying to get a rise out of me. Play who’s got the biggest wad.
‘Just the eight quid for the trim was enough from you, thanks. We’re done.’
Now he’s got my back up. ‘Did you get your pound of flesh from most of your girls one way or another, then?’
His eyes snap to mine. ‘I had a business, they were employees. That was it.’
‘So was Rose Allington one of your employees?’
He walks past me to the door, turns the top lock, and lowers the venetian blind with a swish. How come that action makes the shop feel so much smaller?
He leans back against the door. ‘How old are you?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Because right now you look really young. Really young. So what is it? Taylor wants to track down Rose? She wants to finish what she started?’
‘She’s dying. Skin disease. She wants to see Rose. That’s all I know.’
‘And you said you’d find her?’
‘I promised.’ Surely even somebody who was once Phineas Spice can understand that.
He smiles at me. ‘Really young,’ he says. ‘Come on, come in the back, I’ll put the kettle on.’
He’s not threatening at all, here, in this small back room; in fact, he’s welcoming to me amidst the shelves of shampoo, conditioner and dye. There’s a plastic chair and I sit, my leg pressed up against a trolley, the top tray of which contains so many pink plastic clips, while he makes tea. The smell of wet hair, dried hair, is strong. I suppose you get used to it.
‘That’s really disappointing,’ he says, when he asks how easy he was to track down. ‘But I only went back to my roots, really, didn’t I? Roots. I wouldn’t mind some of those again.’ He touches his bald head, runs a hand down its slick curve, then hands me a mug of tea. ‘I used to shave it to look hard, down in London. Get taken seriously. Then I stopped, moved back here, and it wouldn’t grow back. Look at you, you’ve got no worries yet, have you? Does baldness run in your family? My dad was bald at thirty.’
I think of my father’s thick hair, still curling around his ears and temples – or it was when I last saw him, a year or so ago. ‘No.’
He nods. ‘You’re really going to go through with this? For Taylor’s sake?’
‘She needs my help.’ One of the few things about me that I like is the fact that I always help Gwen when she needs it.
‘Sounds like she got lucky when she met you.’
‘We’re not together,’ I tell him, although I’m not sure why.
He digests this information. ‘What was it like? Being with five people at the same time?’
Does he mean love or sex? It’s not one of those uncomfortable male moments, jokey yet sweaty, that I’m not keen on. I’ve had those before, after a few drinks, where men get drunk enough to ask me what went where or if I was a giver or a taker, all that crap. I answer as if love is all there is. ‘Confusing, but good. Happy, for a while.’
‘Sounds like all love stories. You were, what? Nineteen, twenty, when it happened to you? You were the youngest, the last to join, right? The good looking one.’
‘You seem to know a lot about it already,’ I tell him.
‘I read the book. The oldest one wrote it. Howard, was it?’
‘Well, see the film. It’s in cinemas now.’
‘Max Black’s film.’
‘Yeah.’
‘No,’ says Alexander, or Phineas, or whatever. ‘I won’t be going to see that. I don’t want his thoughts in my head.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve seen and heard about a lot of shit, but I don’t want to own the oil paintings.’
‘I don’t understand. You knew him? You didn’t like him?’
‘Wow,’ he says. ‘Listen, forget all about this stuff. Forget about Taylor. Go your own way.’
‘I’m looking for Rose Allington. Gwen wants to apologise to her while she still can. That’s it. That’s all I know. I don’t care what you think you know, or what it matters. I’m just doing a friend a favour.’
He wets his lips with his tongue, then puts his own mug down in the small sink, beneath a wall-mounted boiler that looks older than I am. He’s a snake; I read his file, I know what he is. He makes money from other people’s suffering. He’s playing me, there’s some angle in this, there has to be. But he’s squeezing past my knees, past the tray with the pink clips. He leaves the room, and I still have no idea what he wants from me.
I sit there for a while before I feel certain he’s not coming back.
Eventually I put my mug down next to his, quietly, and walk back into the main part of the shop.
He’s at the door, hand on the top lock, looking out over the lazy travels of those on the main street. The afternoon sun has moved round to bathe half the room in its light; I have to squint when he swivels around, to see his expression. But I can’t guess how he’s feeling.
‘You get started on a path,’ he says. ‘You never start down it yourself. It’s only later you realise – that was the person who pushed me down it. Later, if you’re lucky, someone else – a better person – sets you on a better road. One that leads to a good place.’
‘That’s what you’re trying to do for me, is it? Is that what you did in London? In your nightclub? With all the employees of Starguard?’
‘It’s what I’ve always tried to do.’
‘So who set you on the wrong path, then?’
‘That doesn’t concern you,’ he says, and I glimpse the man in the file. ‘I don’t know where Rose is. She fell off my radar not long after Max died. If you’re serious about finding her, you should go look for Petra Cross.’
It’s a name that’s not unfamiliar to me. I wonder if Gwen has mentioned her before. ‘Where can I find her?’