Curse Of The Clown Read online

  Curse

  Of The

  Clown

  (Barney Thomson Book 9)

  Douglas Lindsay

  This edition Long Midnight Publishing, 2020

  Copyright © Douglas Lindsay, 2020

  The moral right of Douglas Lindsay to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without either prior permission in writing from the publisher or by licence, permitting restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

  www.douglaslindsay.com

  Cover Design by James, GoOnWrite.com

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  The Chronologically Disadvantaged Prologue

  The Regular Prologue

  1 | Build It, And They Will Come

  2 | The Floating Penis Situation

  3 | The Coen Brothers Proxy

  4 | The Dead Body Situation

  5 | Blue And Pale And Dead

  6 | Götterdämmerung

  7 | Restless Farewell

  8 | The Interchangeable Detective

  9 | The Taipei 101 Situation

  10 | A Good Walk Wasted

  11 | Fear The Koiffing Klown

  12 | The Checkpoint Situation

  13 | Cognitive Methods Of Customer Interaction

  14 | The Art Of The Philosophical Barber

  15 | Head Massages Don’t Mean Shit

  16 | Kings Of The Scissors, | Servants Of None

  17 | Lockdown

  18 | Tales From The Z Room

  19 | Wise As Fuck

  20 | The Bender Strattocutter 4-70

  21 | Six Months Earlier

  22 | One Month Earlier Than The Previous | Six Months Earlier Scene

  23 | Saturday Night, Sunday Morning

  24 | Just Some Visiting Barber

  25 | The Klown Raged

  26 | Rush Hour

  27 | Room With A View

  28 | The Red Herring Situation

  29 | The Horror

  30 | The Sitcom Situation

  31 | The Missing Penis Situation

  32 | Sad Songs

  33 | The LGBTQI Situation

  34 | The Classic Island Crime Novel | Cancelled Ferry Situation

  35 | All Things Must Pass

  36 | There Goes The Moon

  37 | A Deputy Of The Seven Kingdoms

  38 | Readers Should Note This Chapter | Contains Flashing Images

  39 | The Monologuing Situation

  40 | The Alanis Situation

  The Epilogue

  The Chronologically Disadvantaged Prologue

  ‘Is this your husband’s penis?’

  The woman looked down at the withered, bluish chunk of shrivelled man flesh. How small it looked. How insignificant.

  Colour’s about right, she thought, not sure about the size. It was hard to tell.

  Detective Chief Inspector George Solomon stood a pace behind her, giving the woman space to view the severed organ. It had been cleaned up and placed in a small metal dish. The dish reflected the stark fluorescent lights of the room.

  ‘Can I touch it?’ she asked.

  Solomon gave her a raised eyebrow, before rearranging his face when she turned to look at him.

  ‘I don’t think that’ll help, Mrs Romney. Perhaps you could just try to imagine it surrounded by pubic hair, and, eh... dangling.’

  Together they looked back at the penis.

  ‘I don’t think that wee thing ever dangled.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Solomon, ‘I know. It can be difficult to tell. It’s a bit like taking Andy Robertson out the Liverpool team and putting him in a Scotland jersey. Completely unrecognisable.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the woman. ‘Plays for Liverpool, and he’s thrusting and dynamic.’

  ‘Penetrative going forward into a hole,’ tossed in Solomon.

  ‘But when he plays for Scotland...’ then she paused and made a hopeless gesture towards the cleaved, desiccated skin surplus. It looked like a rejected toe. One of the small ones, to the outside of the foot.

  ‘So, what d’you think, Mrs Romney? The DNA test is on-going, so we’ll know definitively either way very soon, this is just to give us a steer for now.’

  A beat. Another. Finally a small shake of the head.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Bill’s no porn star in the pants department, but, to be honest, he’s not that much not a porn star.’

  Solomon stared at the penis. That was the wrong answer. That meant, more than likely, there was another body somewhere in the hotel.

  Fuck.

  ‘Are there any others I can look at?’

  The Regular Prologue

  A barbershop like any other. A bank of large mirrors. Four chairs, three barbers, the chair at the rear of the shop unoccupied. A Friday afternoon, a row of customers against one wall.

  None of the customers were chatting. Two staring at the floor, one reading a dog-eared, end of the day copy of The Sun, four looking at their phones. The shop was not old, but had been retro-fitted. The establishment itself may have physically been in twenty-first century Scotland, but it had been given the 1950s New York feel. Old-time, black and white photographs of boxers and Manhattan streets, taxi cabs and celebrities.

  Sinatra was singing, the music coming from a digital device designed to look like an old record player. It had a built-in feature that added the bumps and scratches of a needle and turntable to the clean sound of streamed music. The owner of the shop, Danny Field, always employed this feature.

  He’d opened the shop two years previously, and called it a barbershop start-up.

  Danny was cutting hair at the window seat. The next chair along was worked by a young woman named Sophia Cane. Her mother had named her after Sophia Loren, which was strange, given that Sophia Cane had been born in 1997, and not many people were being named after Sophia Loren by that point in history. When interviewing to fill the two barber positions available in his new shop, Danny had been impressed with Sophia’s looks (although he told himself that was nothing to do with it), haircutting ability (definitely her haircutting ability, nothing whatsoever to do with her looks), and the fact that she was named after Sophia Loren.

  ‘It’ll fit perfectly with the vibe of the shop,’ he’d said.

  Beside Sophia’s work station there was a black and white photograph of Loren and Brando on the set of Chaplin’s The Countess from Hong Kong.

  Much to Sophia’s mother’s disappointment, everyone knew her as Sophes.

  The third barber, working the third chair from the window, was Norman. Norman liked to tell people his mother had named him after Norman Bates, and then he’d laugh, and they’d awkwardly (or not) laugh along with him, and then he’d wipe the smile off his face and look at them like, I can’t believe you’re laughing at my mum, you will die for this, and then he’d smile, and it was usually all so awkward and strange that people didn’t really know what to make of it. Fortunately he didn’t do it often.

  As it happened, he hadn’t been named after Norman Bates. The truth was stranger, and indeed sadder, though it was a tale of which Norman never spoke.

  Danny had employed Norman to cover the basics. He himself was young, Sophia was young, so he’d wanted an older barber to appeal
to the older customer, and to lend experience to the operation. A bit like signing a veteran World Cup winning centre back who’d played for Lazio, Dortmund and Valencia, for your young Blackburn Rovers team that just got promoted from the Championship.

  Norman was competent. No flair, not a great conversationalist, not entirely sure what to make of a fifteen year-old asking for an Alfredo Morelos cut, but he’d give a short back and sides with his eyes closed, he could blend scissor and trim work with unparalleled majesty, and the conventions of centuries of his predecessors were second nature to him. Solid at the back, dependable in a crisis, Norman was everything you’d want from your thirty-seven year-old centre-back signed on a free transfer from Sporting Lisbon.

  ‘There you go, sir,’ said Norman, removing the white tape from around the customer’s neck, wiping the neck with a paper hankie, and pointlessly handing the hankie to the customer as though he was about to do something with it other than put it in his pocket.

  The customer put the hankie in his pocket, then collected his coat from the rack, reached into his coat, handed over fifteen pounds, took the four in change from Norman, handed him a one pound tip, nodded in response to Norman’s thanks, and left the shop.

  Norman watched the customer go, admiring his work – a solid Paul Newman The Colour of Money – and then turned to the waiting queue.

  By the window seat, Danny and his customer were discussing Brexit in the kind of base, general terms that drove Norman nuts, using phrases such as ‘they just have to get on with it’ and ‘can’t wait until it’s all over’, and ‘it’s the elites who’re the problem,’ and ‘we won two world wars, we can survive without a trade deal,’ and ‘bloody French,’ and ‘why do we give a shit about Latvia, I mean, is it even a country?’ and ‘fucking Krauts, right?’

  Norman knew Danny couldn’t care less about Brexit. If a Remainer started a conversation, he’d go along with it, happy to disparage Farage and denounce Rees-Mogg, but when a Brexiter hoved into view, Danny would spin on a sixpence and cheerfully defend the barricades of island Britain, stopping just short of breaking into a chorus of Rule Britannia. He was generally more circumspect when talking about Scottish independence, but still managed to comfortably navigate both sides.

  Sophia was discussing the stars of Celebrity Ex In A Noose, including an in-depth take on someone called Tiffany, Tiffany’s spat with Rhiannon, and her three-in-a-bed romp with Q-Pac and Six Feet. Norman knew none of these people.

  In his better moments – when he was Sméagol rather than Gollum – he told himself she was young, she was improving, she was popular with the lads, she brought in business, she was an asset to the shop. However, he mostly struggled to deny his bitterness. He couldn’t stand Sophia’s brainless chatter, the political opinions that barely belonged on the side of a box of breakfast cereal, the witless humour, her complete ignorance of the world outside celebrity gossip columns, the lousy haircuts, and the fact she’d only been given the job because Danny, a married man by God, had fancied her. It didn’t matter whether or not she ever gave a quality haircut, Norman would have been incapable of seeing it.

  ‘Who’s next?’ he said, looking along the queue.

  Although the men were not sat in strict next-in-line order, as with all customers in all barbershops, they each innately knew their place in the hierarchy. Norman, too, was on top of his game and, despite having asked the question, his eye fell on the next customer in line.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I’m good, mate, thanks,’ said the customer, looking up from his phone. ‘Just going to wait for Sophes.’

  Sophes.

  Norman particularly hated it when people called her Sophes. He didn’t even waste time with the familiar, ‘No bother,’ or ‘Fair enough,’ instead ignoring him and moving to the next in line. ‘Sir?’

  The guy boldly pretended not hear him for a moment, although he quickly realised, just as Norman was about to say, ‘Sir?’ again a little more insistently, that if he wasn’t being spoken to, it meant he wasn’t next in line, and his place in the queue might be thrown into confusion, and so he looked up, gestured with a head movement towards Danny, then looked back at his phone.

  And so Norman moved on to the next customer. With anger, frustration and despondency rising within him, black, cancerous bile being forced up his gullet, he could foresee the way this queue of the damned was about to play out. A string of denial, each one slightly more awkward than the one before. And he, the spurned barber in question, condemned to go through with the torture, asking each customer in turn.

  ‘Sophes and I are friends,’ said the next bloke, ‘I’ll wait, thanks, mate.’

  You’re not my fucking mate! screamed Norman, behind his bland, impassive face. You are not my fucking mate...

  And so the story continued, a tale as old as time, a fate handed out to barbers since the modern barbershop was invented in Paris during La Belle Époque. The quality of their work denied, tossed on the scrapheap, left to stand impotently on the sidelines while lesser crimpers plodded ponderously through the afternoon’s business, the rejected barber has nowhere positive to go.

  Some will hide behind a newspaper. Some may make themselves a cup of tea. Some will at least try to get past it and accept that it’s just the way things are, realising that another day could deal the same hand to a different barber in the shop. Others, however, will head to the dark side, lurching into bitterness and resentment, retreating to a place where they can foster hatred, while planning their revenge.

  Once, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, that had been the way of Barney Thomson. Now, here in this small shop to the south of Edinburgh, it was also Norman’s way.

  As the trial of denial ended with the seventh of the customers in the queue eschewing Norman and indicating that he too was waiting for one of the others – not even bothering to specify, making it clear he was happy to have anyone other than Norman cut his hair – Norman turned his back on them, walked to the rear of the shop into the small break room, closed the door, put on the kettle, and then leant on the Formica work surface and stared at himself in the mirror.

  Dark, ominous eyes stared back at him. His face was composed, but his eyes were so full of anger and rage he barely recognised them.

  But he liked them. He liked that look. He needed to bottle that. He needed to use that.

  As the kettle slowly rumbled into life, Norman got lost staring into his own eyes. At some point, long after the kettle had finally boiled, the corners of his lips began to curl, and a smile skulked over his face.

  1

  Build It, And They Will Come

  The men of the Millport barbershop were standing at the window looking out upon the earth. Waiting for something to happen.

  So far it had been a day like any other, and that didn’t look likely to change. Late October, the clocks about to go back, the window on the world getting smaller as winter approached. Just after eleven a.m. So far that morning there had been five customers, and none in the previous twenty minutes.

  They had made a pot of PG Tips, gone out for morning pastries, and now they were standing in a line, each with a mug of tea and a Danish. Barney Thomson, executive in charge of hirsutology; Keanu MacPherson, barbershop scribe and future Hair Stylists Hall of Fame nominee; and Igor, deaf, mute, hunchbacked assistant.

  Outside, the day was bright and breezy, as regular a late morning in the west of Scotland as the day had been in the shop. High clouds, wind coming in from the sea, patches of blue in the sky, the waves lively. Away to the south, darker clouds, too early to say if they were heading in their direction, but promising a dull afternoon, with darkness likely to arrive at least an hour ahead of schedule.

  Perhaps it wouldn’t come their way, perhaps the wind would have its say.

  A man pushing a pram passed quickly before them on their side of the road. Across the way, by the white promenade wall, an old woman with a stick passed painfully slowly across their line of vision. Seagulls ci
rcled out over the bay, away to their left a few boats, anchored this side of the small islands, bobbed in the waves, in the far distance the Ardrossan ferry marked its passage across the horizon.

  ‘It’s like a still life,’ said Keanu. A pause. Neither Barney nor Igor spoke. ‘With movement,’ he added after a while.

  Barney popped the last of the Danish into his mouth, and then made a small gesture with his mug.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Keanu.

  ‘Arf,’ said Igor.

  For a deaf mute, Igor said much and appeared to hear everything. However, for all that he spoke, only the strange sound arf ever crossed his lips, and none were there among the medical practitioners of the world who truly understood how it was that he came to hear anything, never mind everything. Igor, it seemed, possessed skills beyond the understanding of men.

  ‘You know,’ said Keanu, the one of the three most likely to address a silence head on, ‘maybe it’s time we changed things up a little around here.’

  Barney and Igor looked stoically out at the view. An old yellow Ford in need of a wash puttered by.

  ‘Go on,’ said Barney.

  ‘Maybe we could offer other services to attract more people.’

  Igor rolled his eyes, Barney looked out upon the near-deserted street.

  ‘What people?’ he said. ‘If old Margaret decided she was going to start walking over here, she wouldn’t arrive until after Christmas.’

  Keanu smiled, took a drink of tea, gestured to the great wide world outside.

  ‘It’s more of a build it and they will come kind of a thing.’

  ‘All right,’ said Barney, ‘I’ll play along. What other services were you thinking?’

  ‘A coffee shop?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Barney, before the third word was even out of Keanu’s mouth.

  ‘Arf!’ said Igor in agreement.

  Keanu laughed.

  ‘I’m kidding,’ he said.

  ‘And neither are we offering head massages,’ said Barney.

  ‘Nothing like that.’