Stanley’s Barber Shop was conveniently quiet between the busy morning session and the late afternoon rush to spruce up for a Friday night on the tiles. The proprietor himself was at the shop this afternoon and alone in the parlour, his sole assistant taking a minute off in the back room to brew up a pot of tea. Stan greeted his customer with a grin, allowing him to remove his greatcoat and hang it up on the hat stand himself with the ease of one familiar with the routine.

He settled his customer and made a face at him in the mirror. “And not before time, Your Hairiness! Dickie! Where the hell have you been? Just look at the state of you! I’ve seen less luxuriant quiffs on Highland cattle! You haven’t set foot in a cutting shop since I last had the pleasure sometime last year.”

“I’ve been away, tramping the Yorkshire Moors. Cold, wet and unwelcoming. The people, ditto,” was the smiling response. “Glad to be back where the cash is! And the open pockets! I put on a lunchtime concert in the market square just now. Did well! So—give it your best shot, Stan! I can cover it. And pay what I owe you. I think I’ve got two bob on the slate, but you’re too polite to mention it.”

The tramp settled into his favourite chair, sighing with anticipation as the warm towel was tucked about his shoulders and under his chin. “Hold back on the scent spray, Stan! I’ve just left the baths. I’m neat and sweet and smelling faintly of coal tar soap and I don’t want your eau de hammam Turc spoiling the effect. Only a shearing needed to civilise me. Hair first, then a shave.”

“Right-oh. From haystack to gigolo in twenty minutes. Tell me where to stop. I wouldn’t want to oversteer. Any special requirements?”

“Yes, I do have a special request . . . Just for fun, why don’t you use all your expertise and turn me into Noël Coward? If you know who I mean?”

He looked along a display of current heartthrobs of stage and screen, offered as inspiration to the customers. His eye lit on a signed publicity photograph of a pale, smooth-faced young man whose dark hair gleamed with the sleek perfection of a raven’s wing. The unsmiling subject was wearing a white dinner jacket, a carnation in his buttonhole and he was smoking a cigarette in a short ebony holder.

“There he is! Third from the left between Gilbert Roland and Adolphe Menjou.”

“Gerraway, man! That’d take more than skill—that’d take magic. You’re twenty years too old and far too butch. And, anyway, you’ve just not got the essentials.” He held up a springy lock of salt-and-pepper hair. “This is wire wool, not patent leather I have to work with. How about a Harpo Marx?”