Free Fatal Error by Michael Ridpath

drink nervously. In the end, my eyes ran out of other places to look and I met hers. They were blue. There was something odd about them, but I didn’t have time to work out what.
    She moved towards me.
    I let her come. She brushed my lips with hers. Then she put her arms around my neck and pulled me down to her. Her tongue was coarse and she smelled of perfume and tobacco; to me at that moment a heady, adult smell. Eventually, she broke away.
    ‘Come,’ she said.
    She led me up the stairs by the hand, like a child. We passed through her enormous bedroom, dominated by a large unmade bed, and out on to a balcony. The blue of sea and sky surrounded us. My heart beat fast. My throat was dry.
    She kept her eyes on me, those strange eyes. She reached behind her back, undid something and wriggled. Her dress fell to the ground showing her body, naked apart from some tiny panties. I had never seen a real, breathing, three-dimensional woman’s body before, and certainly never one like this. I could scarcely breathe. I stretched out a hand towards her. She placed it on her breast. I felt the nipple spring hard under my fingers.
    ‘Come here, David.’

8
    April 1999, The City, London
    I paused at the top of the steps and glanced at the traditional red-and-white striped pole. I was in a narrow alley behind the Bank of England. In front of me, crammed into a basement, was the barber’s shop I had visited every six weeks or so for the previous three years. Except that it was only a fortnight since I had been there last.
    I took a deep breath, descended the steps and pushed open the door.
    Within five minutes I was in the chair, examining my hair in the mirror. Short. Slightly curly. Not fashionable, but not unfashionable either.
    ‘The usual, sir?’
    ‘No, George. I’ll have a number two all over.’
    I had been mumbling the phrase to myself all morning. I had rejected a number one as just being a little too final.
    The Greek Cypriot barber raised his heavy eyebrows, but said nothing and reached for his electric clippers. He fiddled with attachments and switched it on. The buzz made my heart rate soar. In the mirror I saw him hold the vibrating clippers just above my head. He caught my eye and smiled. Sweat poured from my armpits. Get a grip, I thought. This is only hair. It will regrow. I smiled back.
    He lunged. I closed my eyes. The noise increased. I braced myself for the pain of hair being ripped from my scalp, but the sensation was more like a brief, intense massage. I opened my eyes again. A swathe of stubbled skin bisected my hairwhere my parting used to be. It was like an inverted Mohican. George’s smile widened.
    There was no going back now.
    Wapping High Street wasn’t much of a high street. More a lane between converted warehouses, or modem apartment blocks made to look like converted warehouses. There was little traffic, no pedestrians, but plenty of grinding and chugging from the construction equipment hidden behind hoardings.
    I found Malacca Wharf and took the lift to the second floor.
    ‘Nice haircut,’ Guy said as he opened the door.
    ‘I knew you’d like it.’ I pushed past him into the flat. Half of the small living room was taken up with a pine table, groaning under the weight of computers and piles of paper. Owen’s bulk was hunched over a keyboard, tapping away. He looked little different from when I had last seen him several years before, except that the hair peeking out beneath his baseball cap was dyed an unlikely shade of white-blond.
    ‘Hello, Owen.’
    He glanced up at me for a moment. ‘Hi,’ he responded in his high-pitched voice.
    ‘What do you think?’ Guy said. ‘This is ninetyminutes.com’s global HQ.’
    ‘Impressive. And where’s my office?’
    ‘Just here.’ Guy indicated a chair at the table, opposite a pile of paper.
    ‘Very nice.’
    ‘Good view, though, don’t you think?’
    I walked over to the French windows that opened on to a small balcony. The Thames rushed past