The Barber Surgeon's Hairshirt (Barney Thomson series) (20 page)

Mulholland sat down, passed her lunch across the table. Three o’clock in the afternoon. A few hours spent in Caithness, persuading themselves that Barney Thomson had not remained in the area. The man had headed west. They had come as far as Thurso, where the snow had driven them off the road. They were spending all their time eating.

‘So what have we got this time?’ said Mulholland through a mouthful of sandwich. Turkey, brie, tomato and cranberry sauce.

‘It’s a special sex issue,’ she said.

‘
This
one’s a special sex issue?’

‘Aye. Just the usual stuff, you know, but more so.’

‘Sex?’ said Sheep Dip, joining them, his plate brimming with food.

Proudfoot smiled at him, enjoying the belief that Mulholland would be jealous. She swallowed a spoonful of soup, felt the warmth slide down inside her like a satin glove; if you were to eat a satin glove. She let the magazine close and Mulholland took it off her and span it around on the table. Read the cover headlines, printed over the picture of an anorexic foetus with eye-shadow.

Mel Gibson or Bruce Willis - Who’s Got the Bigger Cock; Collagen Implants - Why They’re Not All They’re Blown Up to Be; Why I’ve Had It With Breasts - Meryl Streep Tells All; Extra-Large Mars Bar v. Cucumber - You Decide; Alien Sex - It’s Not As Out Of This World As You Think; Why Isabelle Adjani Is Through with Sex; Ninety Great Ways to the Five Second Orgasm; Gretchen Schumacher on Why She’s Shagged Her Last Horse; Lose Weight Through Instant Sex; Why You Might Not Be Getting All The Sex You Should; Forty-Eight Great New Ways To Have Sex; Cybersex - Coming to a Computer Near You; Why Male Models Have Huge Cocks; Trapped between the Thighs of a Cosmic Prostitute. And much, much more..
.

Mulholland shook his head, pushed the magazine away from him, turning it over so as not to look at the cover. Back page: a wafer-thin wee lassie, in the pouring rain, naked but for wellies. A tampon advert, the subject of which looked as though she wouldn’t start menstruating for another three to four years.

‘We need to talk,’ he said, getting stuck into the soup.

‘Why?’ said Proudfoot. ‘I’ll read what I want.’

‘Not about that,’ he said, brusquely, ‘I’m ignoring that. About Barney Thomson.’

‘Oh.’

‘We need to get inside the man. Try and work out what his next move might have been. We’re on the right road and closing on him, but he’s still a week and a half in front of us.’

‘We’re not going on any road in this weather,’ said Sheep Dip, nodding at the blizzard outside. Unrelenting, sweeping in from the west. No sign of a let-up. ‘It’s biblical out there, so it is. Biblical,’ he added, displaying his local knowledge to its fullest.

‘Aye, well, if it doesn’t look like easing today, we find somewhere to stay tonight. Hope it’s eased by tomorrow. We might go along to the local plods and see if we can commandeer a decent vehicle for the weather. They might have a Land Rover they’ll let us have.’

‘And back on Planet Earth,’ said Proudfoot.

‘All right, they might have a Land Rover that we can take after a few calls have been made. Whatever. We head west, but it would help if we had some idea what he was doing. So we have to think about everything we’ve got, come to some sort of conclusion. See if we can get to somewhere that Thomson might have visited in the past few days, not a week and a half ago. And hopefully somewhere where there’s not some bloody woman who thinks he’s a lovely lad and insists on filling us up with the entire contents of Safeway’s cake shelves.’

Proudfoot mixed soup and sandwich, began to feel life returning to the freezing extremities of her body.

‘It does seem strange, though, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘Everyone we’ve spoken to who’s had anything to do with him, they all think he’s a nice enough man. There’s none of the usual stuff that comes with serial loopos. I can’t equate the Barney Thomson that we’re supposed to be looking for, with the Barney Thomson that everyone who’s met him describes.’

‘She’s got a point,’ said Sheep Dip. ‘They’ve been talking about him up here for a couple of weeks now. The lad’s no killer. Unless he’s one of these, what d’you call them, schizohaulics, or whatever.’

Mulholland shrugged. ‘Who knows? Nothing he does displays the slightest cunning or criminal intuition. He decides to run, but waits until he gets to where he’s going before he takes money out of the bank. If he’d done it in Glasgow we’d have no idea where he’d gone. He quite openly stays in B&Bs. Calls himself Barnabus Thompson and thinks he’ll pull the wool over someone’s eyes.’

‘He did,’ said the Dip.

‘All right, but somewhere out there, there’s got to be a landlady who can see past a man’s capacity to eat breakfast.’

‘Don’t count on it. How many phone calls have we had?’ said Proudfoot.

Mulholland shook his head. If only they didn’t have to deal with the public. If it was just them and the criminals, with no one else in the way, it would be so much easier.

He took a huge bite from his sandwich and mushed it up with soup. How could it be so difficult to catch a man who was such an idiot?

‘There is an alternative,’ said Proudfoot. Mulholland raised his eyebrows, speech being lost to him at that moment. ‘He could be taking the piss. Intentionally leaving the trail, so we’ll know where to find him. Either wants to get caught, or else he’s confident he’ll stay one step ahead of us. Laughing at our expense.’

Mulholland swallowed. ‘Could be. If that’s the case, I’m going to kick the shit out of him.’

‘Me too.’

‘Barney Thomson?’ said Sheep Dip. ‘Ach, away with you. The lad’s taking the pish out of no one.’

‘Anyway,’ said Mulholland. ‘Ignoring his motives. Let’s say by the time he buys his one-way ticket to Inverness he’s not got much cash left. Lifts two hundred pounds when he gets there, so that’s all he’s got in the world. So far we’ve got him down for four nights’ B&B. How much?’

‘Fifteen a night in the first place, twenty-two in the second. So that’s seventy-four,’ said Proudfoot.

‘Right. And we know he bought some clothes in Tain. He must have had to get the bus or the train around. Eaten something for lunch and dinner. Must have spent well over a hundred. Maybe a hundred and fifty almost. And that was twelve days ago. The man has got to be running out of cash.’

‘Remember he’s been working,’ said Sheep Dip.

Mulholland shook his head. ‘Of course, I keep forgetting. There’s this huge queue of Highland eejits waiting for the most notorious psycho in Scottish history to start probing around their heads with a pair of scissors. Still, by the sound of it he’s not making that much cash. Can’t have cut too much hair, for goodness’ sake. Not everyone up here can think the guy’s all right, surely?’

Sheep Dip shovelled food remorselessly into his mouth.

‘That I wouldn’t count on. The lad’s no more of a hard man than Wullie Miller, and he used to get all sorts of folk speaking to him.’

‘Could be he’s robbing banks or something like that,’ said Proudfoot, not believing it for a second. Was instantly annoyed at herself for this pathetic sucking up.

‘Think we’d have heard,’ said Mulholland. ‘All the crimes that have been reported to us as possible Barney Thomson vehicles, they’re just a load of pish. You know that. We obviously don’t know much about the guy, but he’s just not a petty criminal. He did his crimes eight months ago, he thought he’d got away with it, and now he’s having to do a runner. That’s it.’

‘Could be desperate,’ she said.

‘I don’t think so. He doesn’t have the brains for it, or the guts, or the inclination. No, there’s something that first woman said. The one in Tain.’

‘What?’

‘She said that Thomson had told her he was going somewhere that no one would have heard of him,’ said Sheep Dip.

Proudfoot tried to remember her saying that, but she’d been too busy trying not to laugh. Now it was her who suddenly felt in competition with Sheep Dip; a ridiculous notion. She rhythmically spooned her soup, blowing over the top of the spoon, lips round and full and moist. Mulholland tried not to stare. Hoped he wasn’t going to get carried away, ignore Sergeant Dip, and say something cheesy like,
I really love the way you eat your soup
.

‘Abroad?’ said Proudfoot, looking up and catching him staring.

He nodded. ‘All right, abroad fits the bill. But why come to Sutherland and Caithness? It may be out of the way, but it isn’t abroad. They still get the BBC and the Daily Record.’

‘Iceland?’

He shrugged. ‘Same again. You don’t travel to Iceland from here. He might go to Orkney or Shetland, but they’re still going to know who he is. There must be somewhere up here that he thought would have no outside contact.’

‘A remote village, then,’ she said. He watched her lips. Shook his head. ‘Suppose you’re right,’ she went on. ‘It’s not like it’s the Amazon or something.’

‘Exactly,’ said Mulholland. ‘There’re back-of-beyond places, but everywhere still gets the morning paper, even if it isn’t until three in the afternoon. There might be places that are a little behind, but not weeks behind liked he’d need. Has to be something cut off from the world. A commune, maybe.’

‘Do you still get them?’

He shrugged again. Wondered if she was staring at his lips the way he was staring at hers.

‘Sergeant Dip? Is there some tribe of hippies out there like those Japanese that came out of the jungle forty years after the war? They’re still smoking dope and doing all that Krishna stuff, thinking the Vietnam War’s still on and Wilson’s Prime Minister.’

Sheep Dip chewed ruminatively on some springy mince. Proudfoot laughed. Mulholland thought,
I could shag that laugh
; then wondered what was getting into him. He had to keep talking about Barney Thomson; and try not to say something stupid like,
I love the way your nose does that little thing when you smile
.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Sheep Dip. ‘There are still communes and the like, monasteries and that kind of thingy, but for all their shite, these people are even more up with the modern world than the rest of us, you know? They’ve all got their own websites and all that. There’s no one backward any more, not in this day and age.’

‘Suppose you’re right,’ said Mulholland. ‘The minute you get above Inverness, you still tend to think of them all as a bunch of retro sheep shaggers. But it just isn’t like that any more.’

‘Oh,’ said Sheep Dip, shovelling bread and potatoes into his mouth, ‘they still shag plenty of sheep.’

‘Right.’ And Mulholland wondered for the first time about the exact origins of Sergeant MacPherson’s nickname. ‘We can ask the local plods when we go along and take one of their cars off their hands. See what’s in the vicinity that might make a good hideout for the most famous person in Britain. Might be a commune or a monastery after all. Who knows?’

‘You still get them? Monasteries?’ asked Proudfoot.

‘Don’t know,’ said Mulholland. ‘They’re not like normal people up here, are they, Sergeant Dip? Who knows what we’ll encounter?’

‘Life, but not as we know it,’ said Proudfoot.

‘Aye,’ said Mulholland. ‘Better set your phaser on stun, and be prepared to re-calibrate your anophasic quantum confinement capacitor.’

‘Only if you remember to bring your protoplasmic photon iridium deflector array.’

Sheep Dip munched slowly on his third slice of bread.

‘You don’t half get some fancy-sounding equipment down in Glasgow,’ he said

***

‘Chief Inspector Mulholland, you say? From Glasgow?’