The Face Of Death (Barney Thomson)

I
n Blackmuir Wood, above the Victorian Spa village of Strathpeffer, sixteen miles west of Inverness, in the Highlands of Scotland, four American students are found with their throats slit. Worse, each has been given a chilling new haircut. The FBI arrive, but too late to prevent another terrible murder, and into town strolls everybody's favourite accidental death-junkie barber, Barney Thomson, looking for a short back and sides and a different hair colour.
The Face Of Death
is a 17000-word Barney Thomson novella that takes place after the events of
The Barber Surgeon's Hairshirt
(the second Barney Thomson novel). However, knowledge of the events of the first two Barney novels is not necessary to enjoy
The Face Of Death.

Prologue
The Usual 'Four Guys Go Off Into The Woods And Die' Thing

––––––––

I
t was a cold day in the middle of January when four young men walked into the Blackmuir Wood above the Victorian Spa village of Strathpeffer, sixteen miles west of Inverness, in the Highlands of Scotland. They were from the town of West Warwick, Rhode Island, and were in the middle of their gap year between high school and Boston College. They had travelled four months in Asia, and had only arrived in Europe two days earlier. They intended doing Britain and France, before going on through Switzerland to Italy. If they had the time, they thought they might try to reach North Africa. They were, however, destined never to get beyond the Blackmuir Wood above Strathpeffer.

When, on that Friday afternoon, they failed to emerge from the wood, their disappearance was not noted, as they had informed no one of their plans. Two days later, however, their bodies were discovered by a young couple near the Touchstone Maze in the middle of the forest. The throats of all four men had been slit. The instrument of their deaths, an old pair of barber scissors, had been left beside them, still stained with four different types of blood. And a mixture of those four different types of blood had been used to draw a crude picture on the side of the standing stone nearest to where the bodies had been left. A clumsily etched depiction of an Obi Wan type hood, drawn back from a thin and haunted face. A face with sockets without eyes and a mouth open in howling lament. A face that would wail for all eternity.

The men were fully clothed and, as far as anyone could tell, none of their possessions had been taken. There was no sign of a struggle, no clue whatsoever to the events that had led to their murder.

There was one peculiarity, however, about the four bodies. Each of the men, before he had died, had been given the most frighteningly awful haircut.

1
Barney Strolled Into Town, Booked Himself A Room In The Local Saloon

––––––––

T
here are two kinds of people in the world.

There are those who have never accidentally murdered their work colleagues, discovered their mother is a serial killer, had to dispose of eight bodies, gone on the run from the police, hidden out in a monastery where the monks were murdered one by one, killed the monastery murderer and been allowed to walk free by the two investigating officers at the scene of the crimes.

And those who have.

B
arney Thomson walked into the small town of Strathpeffer at four o'clock in the afternoon. It was a little over three weeks since he had left the monastery of the Holy Order of the Monks of St. John. He'd done a lot of walking, and a lot of thinking. However, while his legs were turning into those of a honed athlete, his mind was turning into that of one of the lower invertebrates. So he had stopped thinking. From now on it would be his destiny to walk the Earth and get in adventures, meeting whatever came his way with a ready quip, a steely eye and a robust pair of bollocks. Nothing was going to faze him.

He came into town on the Contin road, with the housing estates on his left. Down the hill past the churches and into the centre of town, where the old pavilion slowly crumbled in sad dilapidation, and every second building was a hotel.

Strathpeffer reached its peak at the turn of the twentieth century when the Victorians came to bathe in the crystal clear, sub-zero waters. A branch line was added to the railway, hotels sprang up like cactus in the Arizona desert, and the local Highlanders mingled with royalty and the cream of London society in a wondrously eclectic mix. The Strathpeffer Gazette reported on the seventeenth of August 1893, that '
after bathing splendidly in the most glorious of cold waters for a matter of some three hours, Her Majesty Queen Victoria, 70, emerged so invigorated that she robustly fornicated with seven unwieldy but handsome Scotsmen, being rodgered pleasantly between the buttocks, and performing heartily and with the utmost gusto in a variety of the most singular positions, for what could only be described as thirty to forty minutes
.'

As the years had passed, and the majority of people heading north to cure themselves of all manner of aches and pains had failed to be cured, the cream of London society drifted away, the pump room and pavilion drifted to ruin, and only the hotels – some eight or nine hundred of them – remained to cater for the Highland tourist industry.

Barney booked himself into a room in the Highland Inn. He had little money, but decided to treat himself to a night with a decent roof over his head, a couple of drinks and a proper meal. He exchanged a few words with the desk clerk – dressed in black – carried his small bag up the stairs to the room, let himself in and collapsed onto the bed, where he fell into the sort of troubled sleep which he'd been having for some weeks.

He would dream of long and strange conversations with serial killers, where he himself would be a murderer, talking frankly of his victims, and how he intended adding to his collection. And he would always wake troubled and tired and wondering if it was to be his destiny to become the man of his nightmares.

T
hat evening, the day that the bodies of the American students had been discovered, Barney walked into the bar of the hotel, plonked himself on a stool and stared glumly up at the vast array of whiskies on offer. He only had money for one or two drinks, and he could have done with a couple of shots. But it would have to be lager, so that he'd have a decent-sized drink to spin out over the course of the evening.

'What can I get you?' asked the barman, having just served a young couple with a brace of depressingly sterile vodka mixers, the type of drinks that ad men everywhere like to imply are seriously cool to drink.

'Lager, please,' said Barney.

'No bother,' said the barman, a rough-looking chap with a cream cheese face and ears which had been flattened out using a workbench tool constructed of some sturdy metal. He poured the drink; Barney watched as the smooth golden brown fluid filled the glass.

'You're looking a bit miserable there,' said Bobby the barman, as a conversational opener. It was a slow night and he needed the craic.

'Thanks,' said Barney. 'You're looking fine yourself.'

'Oh, thanks,' said Bobby, missing the sarcasm. 'You've noticed my complexion?'

Barney looked across the bar as the pint was handed over. Only in the most virulent cases of psoriasis do men notice the complexion of other men.

'Aye,' said Barney, dourly, not knowing what else to say, and wondering if he was about to be propositioned.

'Aye,' said Bobby, stroking his cheek, 'I've been drinking my own pish. It does wonders for it.'

Barney stared at the light brown liquid from which he was about to take his first sip.

'First thing in the morning,' said Bobby, 'when it's fresh and warm and steaming. Absolutely brilliant for the skin. You should try it.'

Barney didn't answer. He was still staring at his lager.

'Any other time of the day and it's lost all its goodness. Has to be first thing,' said Bobby. 'Course, there's the question of what to do if you need to take a pish in the middle of the night. Opinion is divided in the scientific community.'

'Aye,' said Barney, 'I saw that on the Discovery Channel.'

And finally he delved into his lager and took a long slow drink, his first alcohol in some weeks, and he could feel the cold liquor pour down his throat and through his chest and into his stomach. It tasted smooth and glorious and mellow, and was like taking a first wonderful breath of fresh air.

'Did you know that every one of us has eight pounds of undigested meat in his colon?' said Bobby. 'Apart from veggies, of course. They've got eight pounds of carrots or chocolate or something up there. But, I mean, eight pounds?'

Barney nodded. He took another drink, shorter this time, savouring the taste, trying to ignore Bobby the barman.

'That's like, what, a stone or something?' said Bobby, shaking his head. 'That's why I'm about to go for that colonic irrigation thing, you know. A quick swoosh up the arse with a jet of water, or whatever it is they use. How hard can that be, eh?'

Barney nodded. Might as well go for it. Literally talking pish. What the hell ...

'I've heard they do it with a pink milk shake type fluid,' said Barney.

'No, that's an enema,' said Bobby. 'Or strawberry milk shake, that's a pink milk shake type fluid. No, for colonic irrigation they use lighter fluid or kerosene or something.'

'I don't think they put a match to it or anything, though,' he added as an afterthought.

'That's tremendous,' said Barney. 'I'm really pleased for you.'

'Thanks,' said Bobby. 'I'll be getting the women, no end. There'll be a queue from here to Ullapool.'

'Aye,' said Barney.

'The Age of Bobby The Barman is coming,' said Bobby the barman.

'What's your chat up line going to be?' asked Barney. 'Fancy a shag, love? My back passage has been vacuumed and you should taste my pish ... good length, with hints of citrusy fruits.'

'I might just use that,' said Bobby, smiling.

And they lapsed into silence. Bobby found a couple of glasses to dry, doing that barman thing, while Barney drank long and hard from the lager that was supposed to sustain him half the evening, so that after three and a half minutes it was almost finished.

'You'll have heard about those four tourists they found?' asked Bobby after a while, the silence beginning to bother him.

No reason for it, but the soft voice with the barest trace of a Highland accent, the voice that did not go with the fairly repellent exterior, cut into Barney's feeling of ease. Suddenly he felt a shiver course through his body, an ugly shiver which left a vicious feeling of discomfort. He closed his eyes momentarily, and in the darkness he saw four bodies lying in a forest, their throats slit. And on the standing stone behind, he saw the face drawn in blood, and it stared at him in its perpetual terror.

His eyes shot open again. He looked at Bobby the barman, and it seemed as if he'd had his eyes closed for several minutes. The vision had left him with goosebumps across his body, the small hairs at the back of his neck standing upright, the colour drained from his cheeks.

'You all right?'

'Aye,' said Barney, 'aye. Four tourists?' he asked quickly, thinking that he might as well get it over with.

'Americans,' said Bobby. 'Found them up at the stone circle. There was a young couple dived off into the woods – between you and me, it was Mhairi Henderson, but that's a secret now, 'cause her mother still thinks she's seeing wee David, you know Mrs Jackson's boy. But the thing is, she split with him about three weeks ago after she met Alec Fairburn, and you know what they say about him. Which is why Mrs Henderson wouldn't be too chuffed to hear that he was on the verge of giving her daughter a good seeing to. Not after all that business with Fiona and Beattie at Sophie's wedding, if you know what I mean.'

Other books

The Fever by Megan Abbott

Firefly Run by Milburn, Trish

The Impossible Dead by Ian Rankin

Dallas [Wolfe Brothers 3] (Siren Publishing Classic) by Kaylee Feagans

Time to Murder and Create by Lawrence Block

Lullaby for the Rain Girl by Christopher Conlon

Debris by Jo Anderton

Tricking Tara by Viola Grace

The Grammarian by Annapurna Potluri

Reverend Cash: Let Us Prey by Sa'id Salaam