The Face Of Death (Barney Thomson) (3 page)

'He's got an assistant, of course,' said McLeod, continuing, 'but Igor's never hurt anyone.'

Crow looked up, a curious smile coming to his lips.

'He's got an assistant called Igor? You're shitting me, right?'

'He's always there if you want to go and talk to him,' said McLeod, shrugging. Garvie and McIntosh smiled. 'Not that he says much.'

Crow looked suspiciously at them then turned away. He hooked the strip of yellow and black tape above his head and walked into the crime scene to study the ground which had been well trodden beneath the trees. Cameron approached them, having read the full story of the stone circle, and having already made the decision that it was unrelated to the investigation.

'Hi,' she said to Garvie and McIntosh. 'Lara Cameron. My family left Scotland in 1643.'

––––––––

B
arney stood outside the barbershop looking up at the sign. McGowan & Son, Hair Emporium. The usual tired red and white pole outside the door, the usual paint slowly peeling off the window frame, the window in need of cleaning, cobwebs in the corner and dust on the sill inside. How did these people expect to attract customers with presentation like this?

He breathed deeply, his mind wandering. For two months now the newspapers had been running the same photograph of him, a photo which must have been given to them by someone at the old shop. Taken eleven years previously when he'd had a ridiculous '70s perm and had been toying with a moustache, so that he'd looked for all the world like some sort of major porn star. Barney the Bonker; Tonguetastic Thommo; Banging Barn the Bare Bum Boogie Man or Mr Sausage. It'd taken him less than a week to realise how much of an idiot he'd looked, and he'd quickly switched to a more subdued, if equally inappropriate, Tom Cruise. However, the photograph had been taken, the damage done. And he'd always been embarrassed by it, until now when the world thought he looked like this idiot with curly hair.

Still, he thought, it could happen that someone would get hold of a more recent picture, it would get splashed everywhere, and his detection would be inevitable. It was time to equalise before they scored, and get a new look; some style or colour he'd never had before, so that there'd be no photographic evidence to follow him around.

He pushed open the door to the shop and walked in. There was a man sitting reading the latest bestseller –
Women Read 'Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus', Men Read The Sports Pages
– slouched back in one of the chairs. Another shorter, younger man, was stopped over a brush so that the curve of the hunch on his back was exaggerated even more.

With the opening of the door, the hunchback glanced round quickly, then resumed his sweeping. The other man jumped up and put the book down, turning in a flash from slouching, disinterested slob, to smooth-talking barber-type bloke, ready with a cape and a smile.

'Haircut?' said Barney, depressed by his surroundings. Standard shop lay-out, only two chairs, one of which was obviously permanently vacant. A general dingy feel to the place, the lighting low, and he immediately assumed that it was in order to cover up the more startling of the barber's inadequate cuts.

Along one wall was a selection of Hollywood photographs, with all the usual suspects. Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, George Clooney, Pierce Brosnan, Russell Crowe, Martin Clunes. None of the photographs were the usual head shots of the barbershop, however. They were all casual photographs, the guys smiling and relaxing, as if they were all friends of McGowan and the pictures had been taken while they'd been hanging out together, sinking a few beers.

'Certainly, sir,' said McGowan, who'd had a slow day, once the news of the freshly shorn murder victims had been in the papers.

Barney took off his jacket, hung it on a peg which looked not long for the world, and slid cautiously into the chair. On the other side of the hirsutological fence, he was feeling the same things as his old customers had been used to. He caught the hunchback looking at him and nodded uncomfortably.

'Hello,' said Barney, and the hunchback sort of grunted in reply, so that it sounded like he'd said
Arf
.

'Here we go again, eh?' said McGowan, not wanting Barney to dwell in attempted conversation with his less than loquacious assistant.

Barney caught his eye quickly in the mirror. Assumed he was talking about the murders.

'The weather, I mean,' said McGowan, sensing Barney's confusion. 'Nightmare. What d'you make of that, eh?'

'Aye,' said Barney, having sudden insight into the lives of all the poor souls whose hair he'd put to the sword over the years, while he droned on about the weather. Not quite a moment of epiphany, because moments of epiphany are made of more than that, but close to it.

McGowan studied his scissors, while he checked out Barney's hair.

'What'll it be?' he decided to ask, because he had a strange feeling that Barney might be a man who'd expect more than the straightforward.

'You got any dye?' asked Barney, his mind already made up.

McGowan shrugged. Had had some in the cupboard for close on twenty years – men didn't get their hair dyed much in Strathpeffer – and he assumed it'd be all right.

'What colour you looking for?'

'A kind of reddy brown would do it,' said Barney, thinking that might not be too far away from his eyebrows and beard. 'A number three at the sides, number six on top,' he added.

Different enough from the way he was, but not too radical as to draw attention to himself.

'Should be no problem,' said McGowan. 'Igor, get the dye from the cupboard.'

'Arf,' grunted Igor, and he laid the broom against the wall and shuffled off to the store room out back.

'You want me to do the cut first?' asked McGowan.

A car drove past outside, its silencer busted, roaring noisily through the cold and dark of late afternoon. Barney caught McGowan's eye in the mirror, thinking that even someone who'd never been to a barber in their life wouldn't need to ask that question.

'Aye,' said Barney, 'cut first, then dye.'

'Excellent,' said McGowan, and he downed his scissors, lifted the electric razor, blew across the top of it – spitting on it at the same time – and studied Barney's head again.

'There's something bugging me,' said McGowan, adopting a chatty, conversational tone, and Barney thought, here we go ... 'Something niggling at the back of my mind. A clawing thought, scraping away at my subconscious, a whore to my spirit, digging like the eager talons of suspicion at the scales of my curiosity, piercing the very skin of my self-assurance, a malignant tumour of discontent, scratching with the astringent unguis of angst at the desert of my aplomb. You know what I mean?'

'Totally,' said Barney.

'I can never work out,' said McGowan, 'what it is that's going on with cows.'

Barney half smiled, but really there was no need for what was about to happen. McGowan could just shut up and get on with the cut. But no, he was a barber, therefore he would feel duty-bound to spout endless amounts of utter tripe. It was part of the whole ethos, after all. What makes a barber a barber, rather than just a guy with a pair of scissors?

'Cows?' asked Barney, playing the game.

'Aye,' said McGowan, still surveying the scene in front of him, still wondering where to start. 'You get fields and fields of cows, right? Thousands of them all over the country. But where are all the bulls? You don't get fields of them, do you? You just get the odd bull here and there, stuck away in a field, like the embarrassing family member you don't want anyone to know about.'

He stopped, waiting for Barney to express interest. When none was forthcoming, he continued anyway.

'So what's the score? Are there really eight million cows born to every bull? Is there some lost Land of the Bulls somewhere, hidden behind a secret doorway?
Indiana Jones and the Land of Bulls
. There's an idea they should make into a film.'

'Aye,' said Barney, without much enthusiasm.

'Or do they have a bovine Slaughter of the Innocents every week, when they round up all the male cattle and strike them down? It's fascinating, don't you think?'

'Aye,' said Barney, wishing that he'd asked for a 'nothing off the top, nothing off the sides and back', and could already have left.

Igor shuffled back into the room and placed the bottle of hair dye, approximately the colour which Barney requested, on the counter beside the inevitable sink.

'Thanks,' said McGowan.

'Arf,' grunted Igor.

Barney looked at the bottle and wondered whether to register a decision to change his mind about the dyeing business. Being British, however, he said nothing.

'The thing I find really odd,' said McGowan, setting the razor going and upping the volume of his voice by an unnecessary margin, 'is when you see two cows shagging, because you do get that sometimes. I mean, do you get male cows? Or is it lesbian cow action? And if they are lesbian cows, what's the point of them humping like that?'

'Maybe,' said Barney, giving into the inevitable and joining the conversation, 'the farmer fits a prosthetic penis to the dominant one.'

Igor, once more bending over his brush, gave Barney a swift glance. McGowan nodded, as he careered wildly with the razor around the back of Barney's head, shearing off great galumphing clumps of hair in an entirely random manner.

'Aye,' he said, 'because there are going to be cows who prefer to dish it out, rather than take it. The whole cow thing fascinates me. It's like a microcosm of human existence in every field.'

Just a couple of minutes and already the man in overdrive. Talking beautiful bollocks, cutting a swathe through interesting conversation, turning the mundane into the criminally dull. Barney stared into the mirror and recognised his past.

'Did you know that in Texas they give cows udder lifts and odour implants?' asked McGowan.

*

F
orty-five minutes later, Barney Thomson walked free from McGowan & Son, Hair Emporium, adorned with a very stiff short back & sides, hair a slightly different colour, and aware as never before of the agonies through which he had put his customers in the golden days. When he'd had customers.

––––––––

T
he person who had killed the four students from West Warwick, Rhode Island, was not by nature a psychopathic, serial-killing, skin-ripping-off, psychotically deranged, sociopathic, fifteen-cards-short-of-the-deck, suck-it-and-see, blood-for-the-sake-of-blood kind of soul. With the exception of the murder of a couple of Jehovah's, which the judge had described as 'no more than anyone else would have done under the circumstances', life had been a laid back affair. As a young boy he had been meek and mild, and his personality had never really changed. However, the American students had stumbled across a little secret. As it happened, the truth was already out there, but that didn't mean it should go any further than it already had. The students had been looking to cause trouble, and so they had to die.

Trouble was, however, that the bittersweet tang of blood had now been tasted, and the thought had occurred that there was no need to let this particular sleeping dog lie. There were plenty more opportunities in the town to sate this new desire. Maybe none of them deserved to die, as such, but what the Hell, puttered playfully away in the killer's head that night, walking out into the bitter cold of a January evening, Death is as Death does, as they used to say in the Middle Ages.

And so, at 2215hrs, there came a knocking at the door of the Reverend Benjamin Wilson, a vicious old bugger who had ministered to ever-dwindling numbers of these people for some thirty years or so.

Wilson looked at the digital clock – a gift from God – which hummed quietly away on his bedside table, and shook his head. He removed his reading glasses and laid down his copy of that month's
Big-Breasted Lesbian Grannies
.

'For God's sake,' he muttered quietly to himself, cursing the fact that Mrs Wilson was no longer here to answer the late night calls, Mrs Wilson having absconded with a party of passing Dutch motorcycle tourists.

Draping his M&S dressing gown around his vigorously blue and white striped pyjamas, he clumped down the stairs, along the corridor – the floorboards of the old manse creaking noisily as ever – and up to the front door. The insistent rapping came again, just as he pulled the door open.

'All right,' said the Rev Wilson tetchily. 'Oh, it's you,' he said with, to be frank, no less irritation, when he saw who was without.

'Reverend,' said his killer-to-be. 'I was wondering if you had a minute?'

'It's after ten o'clock,' said the vicar, trying hard not to let the irritation enter his voice, and failing terribly.

'I know, Reverend,' said the visitor, voice sounding fairly sincere, 'I just, I mean ... I really need ... you know, something's happened, and I really need to talk to someone.'

The vicar stared at his guest. The visitor returned the stare, imploringly.

'Please, Reverend, I don't know where else to turn.'

The Reverend Wilson allowed his face to break out into a concerned smile. His issue of
Big-Breasted Lesbian Grannies
had arrived fresh from Florida that morning, but it could wait. And besides, if he kicked this person out by the backside, as he was disposed to do, it might get back to the church elders, and then he'd have Wee Aggie 4/12, as he liked to call her – because she seemed to be menstruating four weeks a month, twelve months a year – round here like a horde of Mongol warriors on nandrolone.

'Very well,' he said, 'of course my door is always open.' But just don't think that I'm offering you a cup of tea or cracking open the packet of Jaffa Cakes I picked up at the petrol station this morning.

He held the door open and allowed the one who was about to take his life, to walk unhindered into his home. Almost as if Death himself had arrived, black cape drawn Obi Wan-style down over his head, and had been invited in for a late-night snifter.