Curse Of The Clown

by Douglas Lindsay

  Barney Thomson walked around the island, and up to the Glaid Stone in the middle. He did his best to empty his mind, but couldn’t escape the notion that there was no way this matter was finished, and that the Klown, whoever he or she was, was coming for him.

  It was just what happened, sure as night followed day, democracy begat dictatorship, and society collapsed in on itself until complete cataclysm brought about a new world order.

  There was a serial killer amok amongst the barber community, and Barney had walked headlong into it. There was something else there, though, something beyond the crushing inevitability of it. Something from Barney’s past, just out of reach, a look, an incident, an accident, a person, a comment; he couldn’t fathom it, couldn’t begin to pin it down, he just knew there was some thing. It was buried so deep, however, the incident or accident was such a vague memory, there was no way for him to force it out into the open. He just had to hope it appeared in his head before it caught up with him. The armour of forewarning.

  At the Glaid Stone he met old Mr McGuire, the town harrumpher, who had walked slowly up the hill ahead of him, and was sitting on a bench at the top looking west out over the golf course, to Bute and Arran, Kintyre beyond. High, sparse, fast moving clouds, the western hills and islands bathed in beautiful light.

  Barney sat down beside old McGuire, set the backpack at his feet, and took out a flask, for all the world like the two of them had arranged to meet there.

  ‘Morning, Frank,’ said Barney.

  ‘Barney,’ said McGuire.

  ‘Lovely day.’

  McGuire pursed his lips. He was searching for a rejection, some way to piss on the fireworks of a bright, chill late autumn day with a beautiful view, but he couldn’t think of anything.

  ‘Aye,’ he said grudgingly, after a few moments.

  ‘Cup of coffee?’

  Barney unscrewed the lid of the flask, could smell the coffee, took a passing pleasure in the steam rising into the cold morning air.

  ‘Prefer tea,’ said McGuire.

  ‘Frank, I don’t have tea. Tea from a flask... you know how it is. It always loses something. Coffee has that stronger flavour, better able to withstand the wasting effects of a couple of hours trapped in a flask. So... coffee?’

  ‘Is there sugar?’

  ‘You don’t take sugar in your coffee, Frank,’ said Barney, and McGuire grumbled an acknowledgement.

  ‘Aye, please,’ he said, reluctantly. ‘Won’t do me any harm.’

  Barney poured two cups of coffee, handed old McGuire the white cup from the top of the flask, took the smaller handle-less inner cup for himself.

  They drank coffee, they sat in silence. Out on the firth there was one small cargo vessel heading north, towards the narrowing of the firth, and in the middle of the channel, heading south out to sea, there was a single submarine, Vanguard class, on its way to patrol the oceans of the world, to possibly unleash hell and damnation, slaughtering millions of people. Unlikely, had never happened before, but that was what it was there for after all, so there was always the risk. There was also a small yacht just coming out of Kilchattan Bay, which might actually have been quite a big yacht, but it looked small from up there.

  McGuire made a gesture with the mug, indicating its quality. Heating the milk, and pre-heating the cafetière and the flask, had all played their part in the coffee emerging a couple of hours later at a perfect temperature.

  ‘Sounds like you had a tough weekend,’ said McGuire, the coffee cup gesture opening the sluicegate of conversation. Unfamiliar compassion in his voice.

  ‘Aye,’ said Barney, the word spoken through a heavy sigh, ‘but much worse for others. At least we got to come home.’

  ‘Aye, well, if you think that’s a positive.’

  And he was back. Barney smiled.

  ‘I hear young Keanu got himself a girlfriend.’

  Barney looked curiously at him.

  ‘How’d you hear that? I mean, really?’

  ‘Word travels around this island like amphetamines pumping through the veins of a cheetah,’ said McGuire.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘It’ll be good for him. Maybe it’ll get him off the island at last. ‘Bout time he got on with his life. Standing all day at that window, watching the world pass him by...’

  Barney looked out on the submarine as it eased its way slowly up the channel towards deep water freedom, the huge wake apparent around it.

  McGuire wasn’t wrong, of course. It was fine, an adequate existence for Barney and Igor. They’d lived their lives, and for both of them a few quiet years getting by, and not getting in adventures, was warranted, desired even. But Keanu was racing through his twenties, watching life happen to other people. Always hoping it was going to come his way, rather than going out and grabbing hold of it himself.

  ‘He’s constantly on the verge of travelling,’ said Barney.

  ‘On the verge? Aye, right. Just like I’m constantly on the verge of shacking up with yon Charlize Theron. Just waiting for her to give us the go-ahead.’

  He barked out a laugh.

  ‘Suppose you’re right,’ said Barney. ‘He writes books, trying to make the breakthrough, determined he’ll make his money then go on a grand trip. Except, that’s how life passes you by, isn’t it? Instead of just doing something, you wait for the perfect moment, and then it never comes.’

  ‘Certainly why I’m still here,’ said McGuire. ‘Knew it would happen as soon as I bailed on that flight to Rio in 1965. Of course, that plane crashed and every cunt died, so there’s that.’

  Barney gave him a sideways glance, half a smile – he’d never heard that story before, but then McGuire had a way of making up anecdotes on the spot, whatever was required for the conversation.

  ‘I read that last crime novel of his,’ said McGuire. ‘What was it called again?’

  ‘The Fatal Beauty of Magdalena DeLouche.’

  ‘Aye, that was it.’

  ‘What d’you think?’

  McGuire took a drink of coffee, then indicated the scenery as though it was representative of Keanu’s last crime novel.

  ‘Thought it was all right,’ he said. ‘Like some weird, bastard cross of Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie.’

  ‘That’s what he was going for.’

  ‘Surprised he introduced the dinosaur,’ said McGuire. ‘Not sure that helped the narrative.’

  ‘Aye, I tried to talk him out of that, but he likes dinosaurs. What can you do?’

  ‘Humph,’ said McGuire. ‘Did he sell many?’

  ‘Might have made it to fifty, but that was about it. He’s more hopeful for the next one.’

  ‘Oh, aye, what’s that called?’

  ‘Bring Me The Flayed Corpse Of Mountebank Stump.’

  McGuire gave Barney a quick look, then turned away again to the view.

  ‘Sounds like a winner. Any dinosaurs?’

  ‘Haven’t read it yet,’ said Barney.

  ‘He’ll do something to ruin it, more than likely.’ He grumped some more, then added, ‘That’ll be it. He’s self-sabotaging because he doesn’t actually want a hit book. Too wedded to spending his time with you and Igor. If he suddenly became one of they high-priced, bestselling writers, with his own jet and hunners of women, he could hardly come and stand at yon window of yours drinking tea every day, could he?’

  ‘He’d always be welcome when he felt like it, as he knows. He just writes what he writes. He’ll be fine. He’ll get there.’

  ‘Maybe getting a shag’ll inspire him to write one of they Fifty Shades type of things.’ A beat. ‘I’d read that ‘n’ all.’

  ‘He tried that already,’ said Barney. ‘Didn’t sell much. Very crowded market.’

  ‘Really? What was it called? I’ll need to give it a look. Jesus, nobody tells me nuthin’.’

  ‘The Euphoria of Emily K,’ said Barney. ‘It was kind of a pornographic, surrealist nightmare.’

  ‘Sounds like it’s got my name on it,
’ said McGuire, and for possibly the first time in his eighty-seven years he smiled. ‘No dinosaurs in that one?’

  ‘Not so I remember,’ said Barney. ‘But like I said, it didn’t sell anyway... What he really wants is to write literary novels, but there’s no money in it unless you’ve got the right connections. Unfortunately for him, he’s only connected to Igor and me, and we can’t do anything for him. Well, I can give him a haircut, and Igor can sweep it up and make him a cup of tea, but it doesn’t really help sell a literary novel.’

  ‘What actually is that anyway? A literary novel?’

  ‘You don’t have to have a plot,’ said Barney. ‘Any old shit can happen, but you sound as erudite as possible, and everyone thinks you’re a genius. Something like that.’

  ‘Sounds like a load of shite.’.

  ‘I’m sure he’ll nail it when he gives it a go,’ said Barney, and he took another drink.

  ‘Humph,’ said McGuire.

  And with that the conversation died away, not suddenly with the exasperated curmudgeonly grumbling of McGuire, but gradually over the next couple of minutes, as though the fresh air and the wind and the view and the coffee were washing over them, gradually obscuring speech, a mist rolling in from the sea, until they had retreated into a natural and comfortable silence, enjoying the morning as it was, not ruining it with words.

  24

  Just Some Visiting Barber

  Monk drove into the car park of the Comrie Hydro hotel. The police presence was much smaller than the previous day, but then all the guests and most of the staff had been moved out. The entire hotel was a crime scene, and it was now a matter of protecting access to the site, rather than protecting a few hundred people.

  She showed her ID again at the hotel entrance, then walked through the main doors, across the lobby, past reception, and into the large office the police had commandeered as an operations room.

  There were five officers present, with Solomon and Lane standing by a whiteboard. The board was covered in a miasma of lines and information, and photographs of all the bodies and penises that had so far been uncovered in the investigation.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ she said, coming up alongside, at the same time looking around for the source of the coffee.

  ‘Sergeant,’ said Solomon, ‘thanks for coming. The coffee’s in that thing,’ he added, indicating a large silver dispenser on the table just behind him. ‘It’s a pain in the arse. You’ve got to press a button...’ and he waved away the rest of the sentence, possibly because there was nothing else to say.

  ‘Sounds complicated,’ said Monk, ‘I’ll call for aid if I get into trouble. You guys all right?’

  Lane was smiling as he and Solomon made the we’re good gesture with their cups, Monk got herself a cup of coffee – grateful for the button advice, without which she’d have been standing there for several minutes – and then returned to the whiteboard.

  ‘What have we got?’ she asked, unable to stop the cliché.

  Together they stood and looked at the clusterfuck of information. One drink of coffee, then another, moments and possibly minutes passed, then finally Solomon said, ‘This. Make of it what you will.’

  ‘Have you made anything of it?’ asked Monk.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘You identified the washing machine guy yet?’

  ‘Sure. Didn’t anyone tell you?’

  ‘Who’d’ve told me?’

  ‘I don’t know. A guy.’

  ‘No one said.’

  ‘It doesn’t really help us. Just some visiting barber. He hadn’t registered with the convention, lived in Perth, decided to turn up on Friday evening for the meal. Last minute decision, according to his wife. Didn’t live to regret it.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Monk. ‘What was his story?’

  She had a moment, a flash, of crushing sadness. Just some visiting barber. A life reduced to nothing, the walk on, drop dead, bit part in a movie. What of those who cared about his passing? What about the lives left behind?

  ‘Wife said he was an asshole. Had it coming to him, were her exact words. When he didn’t come home on Friday, she just assumed he’d got a shag, and was quite happy about it. A couple of plods went round to see her, and she was literally checking her insurance policy while they were there.’

  Monk briefly closed her eyes, the flash of crushing sadness a sudden, distant memory.

  ‘She didn’t have the insurance policy waiting on the mantelshelf because she’d been expecting him to get murdered, did she?’

  ‘She’s the least subtle conspirator in history, if that’s the case. Anyway, her movements are accounted for all weekend, and she just sounds like someone who really, really hated her husband. No kids, he cut hair, she stayed at home and resented the fact he brought customers’ hair into the house every night. I mean, on his clothes, rather than he brought home bags of customers’ hair because he had some weird fetish. Anyway, Eldon Jones need not trouble us further, I don’t think.’

  ‘OK, so how about this Norman guy the girl told us about?’

  ‘Looks promising,’ said Solomon. He snapped his fingers. ‘Firstly, he’s gone. We went round to his place, been over it with a full team of SOCOs and dogs and whatever, and there’s nothing. The guy has fled. He lived in a small apartment in Musselburgh. Neighbours have neither seen nor heard him in a couple of weeks, milk’s gone off in the fridge, junk mail’s been collecting behind the door.’

  ‘Any chance he’s been dead all this time?’ asked Monk.

  ‘There’s a chance of anything. But this is a weird guy we’re talking, and his place looks like he sorted it out before he went away. If someone took him out, why would he have had all his shit cleared up beforehand?’

  ‘What about the milk? He didn’t tidy up the milk.’

  ‘Whatever. He’d turned off all the plugs, and straightened the cushions.’

  ‘Maybe he just lived a tidy life,’ said Monk.

  ‘Yeah, maybe,’ said Solomon. ‘But we’ve started looking into him, and he’s got resentful, bitter revenge-monkey written all over him. We’ve so far spoken to seven different shops in the area. They all remember him calling, asking for work. The guy was desperate, and everyone said ‘no’.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Seems maybe he just gave off such a rotten vibe of decay,’ threw in Lane, finally joining the discussion, having finished his coffee. ‘You know, he was yesterday’s news. He was from the nineteen thirties, or something like that.’

  ‘What age is he?’

  ‘Forty-nine,’ said Solomon, ‘but Tom’s right. Age doesn’t matter. He was from a bygone era, but not in a good way. Not in that retro-way people like now for some reason. People always like retro-shit, right? But this guy, he was a cross between a Victorian schoolmaster and an enema. He worked at his shop in Edinburgh for several years, and by the end of it barely any customers would touch him. They’d have days when they’d be queued out the door, and men would rather wait an hour and a half for a haircut than go to him.’

  ‘That’s a bad fucking barber, by the way,’ Lane threw in from the sidelines.

  ‘He’s not wrong,’ said Solomon. ‘By the time Norman leaves the shop, he’s resentful as fuck, and it’s heads or tails on whether it’s customers or barbers he hates more.’

  Monk was staring at the photograph of Norman, right in the middle of the board. She’d wondered who it was when she arrived, and now Solomon had indicated it as he’d started talking.

  And that story of the barber Norman had once been: she’d heard it before, but it hadn’t been about Norman. Barney had been there, and she knew the hurt of it, and the resentment that could flourish as a result.

  ‘Then there’s the killer blow,’ said Lane.

  ‘We’ve got a connection to the first murder already,’ said Solomon, nipping in. ‘Turns out the victim, Tomasz Wojciechowski, used to live on the same street as the shop where Norman worked. We ran Wojciechowski’s picture by Sophia, and she remembers him. Said
he was hard to forget. Our guy, Norman, had a stand up row with him. Ugly scene, all got a bit mental. It was a while ago, a few years, but still.’

  ‘She hadn’t seen the picture in the news in the last week?’

  ‘Apparently not. So, it seems Wojciechowski never went back to the shop. As for Norman, in the end he was spending his days sitting in his barber’s chair, looking up with big moon eyes every time the door opened, then retreating back into his shell with a scowl when he got rebuffed.’

  ‘Why’d it take so long to get rid of him?’ asked Monk.

  ‘The boss was a pussy,’ said Solomon. ‘Wanted shot of the guy for about three years before he actually did it. No man management skills.’

  ‘What tipped him over the edge?’

  ‘One day he arrived at work still drunk from the night before.’

  Monk looked at Norman’s picture.

  ‘Weird. I mean, that doesn’t sound like Norman, at all.’

  ‘Not Norman,’ said Solomon, ‘the boss. He gets to work, he’s still hammered, he’s in full don’t-give-a-shit mode. Norman gets into an argument with a customer, and then boom! The boss tells Norman it’s time he got to fuck. Big argument, all sorts of things start getting said, and finally, even though he’s sobering up pretty rapidly, he manages to get it all out. All of it. The girl said it was brutal A couple of customers there to hear it as well. By the end, there was no argument. Norman wasn’t saying anything. Guy got totally crushed, like an elephant stood on his balls. Complete obliteration.’

  ‘Jeez.’

  ‘Yeah. Anyway, we’re at the early stages, but we’re assuming for now that this is our guy. Establishing his location has become a priority task. We just issued his photo. And can you get that man of yours to take a look at it, you never know.’

  ‘Norman was on the other side of the country,’ said Monk.

  ‘Sergeant, we live in Scotland, not Canada. I don’t know how long you two have been together, or what kind of pillow talk you have, but Barney Thomson has seen and been involved in no end of shit. So, please, send him the damn picture and find out if he knows anything about him.’