The Face Of Death (Barney Thomson)

by Douglas Lindsay

  'Kierkegaard was a wank,' he said solemnly, and he looked at the small clock behind the bar. Almost twelve-thirty. He'd sat in this company long enough.

  'Humph,' said McGowan, staring at his beer. As it happened he also considered Kierkegaard to be a bit of a wank, but then he usually liked to arrive at that conclusion after several hours of considered argument.

  'Arf,' said Igor. Had he been able to say something other than arf, he would have articulated the opinion that Kierkegaard had been right to proclaim the perspicuity of God and man, and the unaccountability of the correlation between the two. He would also have pointed out that, as Heidegger stated, man is an evanescent being, aware, through the opalescence of his animus, of the certitude of his own death, and therefore, the only way to get up in the morning and face your breakfast cereal with added vitamins and low fat milk, is in full cognisance of le néant, until you've worked the whole thing out for yourself. Still, ever the mute hunchback's place to be considered an idiot.

  Barney drained his glass, looked around the table – Strathcaln had no opinion on Kierkegaard, other than to wonder if he was the bloke who won the men's downhill at the Lake Placid Olympics in 1984; Soo Yin had studied all the great Danish philosophers, Kierkegaard, Schmeichel, Maersk Line, Holsten Pils, but knew better than to open her mouth in public – nodded at the assembled company, and slowly rose from his seat.

  As Barney stood up, he once again caught the eye of Lara Cameron, currently side-tracked into a discussion on whether Marino would've won a Superbowl ring had he been with anyone but the Dolphins. They stared at each other for a few seconds, and then once again it was Barney who broke eye contact, and quickly turned and walked away through the bar, into the reception area, under the dead stag, and on up the stairs. And he wondered with every step, why it was that he was drawn to this woman who would surely suspect him of the murder of the four tourists if she were to find out his true identity.

  *

  Early morning in Strathpeffer, still bitterly cold and consumed by darkness. 0430hrs, the town, for the most part, still sleeping an untroubled sleep. Not until the following afternoon would the brutalised body of the Reverend Wilson be discovered.

  Barney Thomson slept a very troubled sleep, because that's what he did these days. This night he dreamed a strange dream involving an enormous spider, three tonnes of West African-style cement, a bottle of Miller Lite and a prostitute called Epiphany with fifty-six inch hips and no breasts, who continually announced, 'Hi, I'm Epiphany, my family left Scotland in a boat.' And so he tossed and turned, his eyes roaming continuously, pushing against the lids, his mouth open, his breath uneven.

  At this time Damien Crow finally returned to the hotel, let himself in, passed beneath the dead stag – who was a little put out at being woken in the middle of the night – and walked up to the room. Lara Cameron, who was wide awake, staring at the ceiling, her room illuminated by the light from the streets, heard him enter his room next door. She looked at the clock, made a mental note of the time, then turned over and closed her eyes.

  Luke McGowan was fast asleep. Igor slept in the room next to his, in the small flat above the shop. He lay awake, as usual – Igor never slept – staring at the large map of the world above his bed. And he imagined all the places he was going to go when he was finally able to leave Strathpeffer, and of all the strange and exotic countries in the world where people would accept him for who he was, rather than for the hump on his back, and for the fact that no matter what he tried to say in life, it always only ever came out as arf.

  Theodore Wolf slept the sleep of the marketing consultant. Easy and confident, in the knowledge that tomorrow would bring even more money than today. Bastard.

  Strathcaln lay on his side, back turned to Soo Yin, trying to sleep. His mind was troubled, however, and sleep would not come to ease him. Soo Yin had long since given in to her subconscious, and was breathing heavily beside him. A change from the early days of the marriage, when she had lain awake at night, feeling the cold and missing her friends and the bustle and excitement of Bangkok.

  Detective Sergeant McLeod dreamt about the feet of Lara Cameron, whose family had left Scotland in 1643.

  Bobby the Barman slept deeply, and dreamt of nothing.

  6

  Sausages

  The morning dawned cold and frosty, the sky unusually blue. The town had come to life during the hours of darkness, as is the way of the Highlands during the winter, what with it not getting light until well into the morning.

  Barney sat alone at breakfast, head down in a corner, thinking. He was hoping that Theodore Wolf would not feel obliged to join him. Hoping and dreading at the same time the possibility of Lara Cameron sitting next to him. Not to know that Cameron and Crow were already up and out for the day, a crucial part of the investigation to be undertaken.

  He tucked into the full Highland breakfast for the second morning in a row. Eggs, bacon, haggis, mushrooms, fried bread, tomatoes and three hundred and fourteen different types of sausage. More toast than you could shake a stick at and enough tea to drown a herd of bulls.

  Towards the end of this marathon face-cramming-fest, his place cleared of all the essential coronary-inducing ingredients and only twenty-seven slices of toast still to be disposed of, he was considering the possibility of doing a grand dine and dash, leaving the hotel by a back door, not paying for any of it and heading onto the next hotel down the road. If he could spend weeks and months on the run for murder, how difficult would it be to spend his life moving from hotel to hotel without every paying the bill?

  Anyway, he would never be able to tell what it was that brought a new thought into his head; maybe the colour of the marmalade, maybe the consistency of the tea, maybe the music that drifted down from the PA system, maybe the waitress who flirted by, asking if he'd like some more toast, but something suddenly struck him about the night before, a bizarre little moment of epiphany – this was a real moment of epiphany among so many fakes – about one of his eight confederates in the bar, something that seemed obvious now that it was in his head, but which hadn't been obvious the previous evening.

  And once the thought was there it wouldn't go away, and suddenly he'd eaten enough. The toast tasted dry, the marmalade bitter. He took one last slurp of tea and laid the white cup down in its saucer. He looked around the small restaurant. Nothing had changed; no one else there had had the same thought as he. On the other side of the room, Theodore Wolf was eating his fifteenth kipper, and was himself looking around the assembled company, wondering how many people he could persuade to buy the new chocolate covered meatballs for which he'd won the contract.

  Barney avoided his eye and looked down at the table. His sudden insight did not necessarily mean anything in itself, did not necessarily point to the perpetrator of the murders. However, it might be worth following up. So, he could point the authorities in the direction of his suspicions, he could do a bit of investigating himself, or he could turn his back and walk away, because this had nothing whatsoever to do with him, despite what the raft of that morning's newspaper headlines suggested. The London Times – Thomson Continues Cull Of Planet; The Sun – Barber Surgeon Eats Testicles of Live Goat; The New York Times – No Truth In Thomson Marriage Rumours, Claims Ex-Dallas Star; The Washington Post – Demon Barber In Bizarre Late-Night West Wing Visits; The Daily Mirror – Barcelona Sign Ace Crimper for £150m; Astronaut Weekly – Thomson In Shock NASA 'Serial Killer In Space' Tests; The National Enquirer – Thomson To Be Part Of Pammy Anderson's New Breasts; The Ross-shire Journal – Nightmare For Mrs McKay As Chicken Not Defrosted In Time For Dinner – Microwave 'Not Working' Claims Pensioner.

  Barney stood up and began to walk through the restaurant. In the past he might have been filling himself with steely determination, buckling down to the task at hand, gathering up great handfuls of the spunk of resolve in order to wade head first into this sordid business with all guns blazing. Now, however, he couldn't even decide if he wanted to think
about the business, never mind ask it to dance. And so he trudged out of the restaurant, through the bar, took the usual walk under the miserable looking dear-departed stag, and pounded the stairway beat back up to his room.

  *

  It had not taken Legal Attaché Crow long to come to the same conclusion as Barney Thomson. It had only been a passing thing, a chance encounter during the first day of their investigation, but it had been enough to make him ask the question. And while anyone of immediate interest to him sat in the bar the previous evening, he had let himself into three homes in the Strathpeffer area. He had found nothing conclusive to the murder investigation, although he had confirmed the suspicion that both he and Barney had come to.

  He found a few interesting things in the flat above the barbershop; the Strathcaln's house revealed everything that he thought it would; and Detective Sergeant McLeod's house gave up no end of secrets.

  Now he and Cameron were on their way down to Edinburgh, a task that did not require both of them. But Crow thought that he had all the time in the world, not realising that the Reverend Wilson had already been murdered, and that the slaughter would continue if unchecked.

  'You going to tell me where we're going?' said Cameron, looking up from another story in the local rag: Rosemarkie Lads In Football Stramash.

  'Edinburgh,' said Crow, who had hauled her out of bed, thrust a cup of coffee in her face, tossed her into the shower and waited for her in the car.

  They were already nearly at Perth, having been sat on the A9 for a little under an hour and a half. They had been stopped by an unmarked police car while doing 130mph through the Drumochter pass; Crow had flashed his FBI credentials and Police Constable Storie had told him 'not to be so bloody stupid' and booked him anyway. That aside, things had been fairly uneventful. Cameron had waited for Crow to tell her what they were doing, and finally cracked when no explanation was forthcoming.

  'It's about twenty miles from Falkirk, before you ask,' he added.

  'What's in Edinburgh?' she asked, ignoring the Falkirk remark.

  'Lots of things.'

  'You going to tell me any of them?' she asked, not in the least irritated. She was well used to Crow, the fact that he pretty much kept everything in life to himself, and also safe in the knowledge that when she really needed to know something, he'd tell her.

  'Nope,' said Crow. 'Not unless you can work some of it out for yourself.'

  Cameron smiled.

  'You realise everyone else in the Bureau thinks you're an arrogant prick?'

  Crow smiled as he began an horrendously extravagant overtaking manoeuvre past a slow-moving old man in a slow-moving old car.

  'Yeah,' he said, 'that's why they sent me to London. What's your excuse? They want you to be closer to your family?'

  She shook her head and stared out of the window at the cold fields and rolling hills that line the road as you approach Perth. She decided to play the game, and tried to think of who and what they had seen since their arrival in the Highlands. It had been a little under a day, and so far it seemed to her that they had skirted around the investigation with no real inroads made, no salient – as Deputy Assistant Director Helmar back in Washington was fond of saying – to exploit.

  The crime scene had yielded little. The local SOCOs had already sent several items back to a laboratory for investigation, and whoever had done the work had been thorough. Crow had gone in with his usual lack of respect for anyone else's investigative methods, presuming that he would unearth several items that the others had been unable to find. This time, however, the cupboard had been bare.

  They had set about tracing everyone that the four students had been in contact with since their arrival in the area. The victims had stayed at the Strathpeffer youth hostel, but the police had already been over it, and all the others staying there – which wasn't too many given the time of year – and discovered everything that was there to be found.

  It wasn't much. The American students had been in the country for less than two days, having arrived in the Highlands by train from London. They hitchhiked from Inverness to Strathpeffer, one of them having read about it in a book, and having decided it was a good place to start a brief walking tour of the area. They spent their first night in the bar of the Highland Inn, which was where they first came across their murderer. They talked to anyone who was interested; one of them got into a lengthy discussion with Bobby the Barman on waste products; another discussed land reform and the proliferation of farm animals suffering psychological difficulties related to lack of parental affection with Strathcaln and his wife, not that Soo Yin had had much to say on the matter; one of them spent nearly an hour discussing the marketing of Nike with Theodore Wolf; the same guy had also chatted long into the evening with Igor about the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram and the evolution of stars from blue-bright to red-dim, although the conversation had been a little one-way; and in general they'd mixed and chatted and made moves on anything that was female. A typical 'guys on a world tour with not much money to spend' type of evening. More talk than drink, and those who were present had very little to say about the four students, other than that they had seemed very personable and that they'd all been in need of a good stiff haircut.

  After leaving the hostel at nine-thirty the following morning, a foggy day when they were advised to stay off the hills and confine themselves to walking in the woods which encircled the town, they were never seen alive again. Or, at least, not so that anyone was saying.

  Cameron slowly emerged from her ruminations on the investigation and looked at Crow. They were now past Perth and heading towards Edinburgh on the M90. The sun that had followed them all the way so far was beginning to be covered by thin cloud, the little warmth that it was bringing to the day being slowly dissipated.

  'Don't get it,' she said.

  Crow nodded but didn't say anything.

  'You going to tell me?'

  'Nah,' he said, without turning to look at her. 'Watch and learn.'

  Cameron breathed deeply and closed her eyes. She was tired, and maybe that was why she couldn't think as clearly as she'd like. Or maybe it was just because Crow was being totally obscure and there was no way she was going to be able to work it out.

  'You know all those folk in the Bureau who think you're an arrogant prick?' she said. 'They're right.'

  Crow smiled, moved into the outside lane, cutting up a sales rep in that month's 406, and accelerated smoothly up to and on past the hundred mark.

  7

  Mike Yarwood

  A few hours later, and cold morning had already turned to cold afternoon. Barney looked in the mirror. He was sitting in the room which he was due to vacate some time in the next hour or so – the housemaid had already been round once and would be back soon, badgering to get the sheets changed and the toilet paper recharged – studying his hair.

  It was a competent job, nothing more than that. Adequate. No imagination had been invested in the cut, and little skill, but still, it was not in any way a shocker. It wasn't the work of a complete ham-fisted balloon with a pair of scissors, as he had first suspected he might receive when he'd walked into McGowan & Son. So, although it was within the wit of any barber to cut beneath their ability, the idea that it might have been Luke McGowan who visited the Heaven's Gate cuts on the four students seemed unlikely. It needn't necessarily be the case that the man who had cut the students' hair was the same man who had committed the murders, but it seemed likely. So, Barney was prepared to strike McGowan from the picture. Which left approximately five million other people in Scotland as suspects.

  Barney wasn't really cut out to be a detective.

  He had still to make up his mind if he was going to follow the hunch that had come to him like an angel before the shepherds at breakfast. He had made up his mind about one thing, however. The brown dye that had been put in his hair, and had slowly turned orange so that he looked like, well, an idiot, had to go. He had two choices. He either bought some dyeing agent
from the local store and went about the business himself, or he went back to see McGowan, and this time accepted no less than the best.

  He should have done it himself, but something was dragging him back to that shop. Either a weird kind of cosmic thing or, more likely, just the fact that it was any old barber shop and he hankered for the old days of only a few months previously, when he would have spent eight hours of his life at the chair, every working day of the year. While suddenly being presented with freedom and no responsibility, the things that so many might crave in this complicated world, he was finding himself unnerved and alone, in need of comfort and a rock to cling to. The local barber shop was the only rock he could think of.

  So he finally walked downstairs to check out of the hotel, paying the bill in cash, thereby leaving himself barely enough money to see him through the rest of the week. He had made the decision to head for Inverness, get a small job wherever he could, keep his head down, get a room and live an anonymous existence until he could think of where he wanted to be in life.

  He crossed the road and walked the few hundred yards to the barbershop, and this time he did not hesitate at the door. He intended getting his hair sorted, then he would walk out of Strathpeffer the way he had arrived, back down to the A835 and he would start walking the sixteen miles to Inverness. Maybe he would thumb a lift, and maybe he wouldn't bother.

  He pushed the door open. The usual suspects turned and looked at him as he entered. This time, however, there was a man in the chair, the ubiquitous Detective Sergeant McLeod. Barney hesitated when he saw him, but the best way to guarantee suspicion at this stage would've been for him to turn his back. So he did his best to continue smoothly into the shop and took his place on the small row of seats opposite the barber chairs.