Curse Of The Clown Read online

  ‘Brenda?’

  ‘Aye?’

  ‘Naw! She was doing her job.’

  ‘It was pretty sensual, by the way.’

  ‘She was good.’

  ‘Wait, are you saying wee Brenda was more or less prostituting herself?’

  Monk was watching the two-man show, slightly glazed over, slightly fascinated, perhaps not as committed to stepping in and putting an end to it as she would’ve been had this been one of her own cases.

  ‘Nah, it’s different for birds. I mean, she was just massaging your scalp, like she was a masseuse or, I don’t know, a fucking doctor or something. Some professional doing a job. It’s just different for the man. He’s the one getting all the tiny little orgasms across his body because his head’s getting massaged. He’s the one who’s thinking things he shouldn’t be. Wee Brenda’s just wonderin’ what she’s havin’ for her dinner. Anyway, there weren’t many of youse who felt comfortable with it.’

  ‘Many of who?’

  ‘Youse. Customers. Wee Brenda didn’t have much to do in the end.’

  A pause. The customer seemed to be looking into the mirror of self-awareness.

  No one wants to have to do that.

  ‘Feel a bit embarrassed now,’ he said.

  The barber gave him the space to feel the embarrassment.

  ‘I mean, I loved wee Brenda giving me those head massages. Sometimes I didn’t even need my haircut. I just came in for a trim so I’d get my head massaged.’

  The barber glanced round at Monk, raised his eyebrows to include her in this moment of self-revelation, then turned back.

  ‘You think she noticed?’ asked the customer.

  ‘Brenda?’

  ‘Aye!’

  ‘No idea. Didn’t really talk to her much.’

  ‘God,’ said Monk, finally snapping out of it, ‘of course she noticed. Why don’t you look her up? Get in touch. Take her out of a drink. Maybe she’ll give you a head massage for nothing.’

  The men stared at her, eyes wide, and finally the customer started nodding.

  ‘When you put it like that, a head massage sounds really, really familiar. Oh, fuck. I feel like me and Brenda more or less had sex. What’ll I tell Lizzie?’

  ‘Dear Christ,’ said Monk. ‘Can we get back to Bertram?’

  ‘Bertram never gave anyone a head massage,’ said the barber, glibly.

  A heavy sigh from Monk, but the conversation at least had been reclaimed.

  ‘He still owns the shop but doesn’t work here anymore?’ she asked.

  ‘Aye, that’s about it. The place wasn’t working out, but he’d started it after winning a coupla mill on the lottery, so there was no debt, just no customers. Guess there were about enough to keep one barber on, so he left me in charge and went travelling.’

  He made the take-off motion.

  ‘Where’d he go?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘No idea? None? I mean, he went travelling around Scotland, the UK, Europe, the Far East, South America? You have no clue where he went?’

  ‘Like I said, no idea.’

  ‘Is he on Instagram, Twitter, any of them?’

  ‘Anything he did online was through the shop Facebook page, left that to me after he buggered off. Said he was through with social media. Said it was more or less just feeding your brainwaves straight to the Russians and the Chinese.’

  ‘Not wrong there,’ said Monk. ‘Did he ever mention someone called Brian Adams?’

  They stared at her. A second, then another.

  ‘Robin Hood? That Bryan Adams? The fuck you want to know if he ever mentioned him?’

  ‘A guy in the barbershop business. Thumper Adams, he’s also known as.’

  The barber’s face lit up.

  ‘Ah, that guy. Ha! Yeah, he hated that arsehole.’

  ‘There’s a start,’ said Monk. ‘What was the story?’

  ‘Ach, don’t really know. They used to do some thing together, some bullshit convention type of thing. You know, like Comic-Con for losers. Never went. Bertram was all about it, but then he fell out with this Adams character, and he just kind of walked away. Came here, focused on this, then this wasn’t working out.’

  ‘How’d that affect him? Depression? Bitterness?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Both?’

  ‘Aye. Not a happy bunny.’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it,’ chipped in the customer.

  ‘I mean, he had this vision of a laid back shop, hanging out with the cool kids ‘n’ all that, but it wasn’t him.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘A miserable bastard. Reckon him and that Thumper guy ought to have got along all right. Ha!’

  He looked at the customer as he ejaculated the laugh, the customer joined him, and it was as if that was the cue for the haircutting to recommence.

  ‘Why’re you asking anyway?’ he said, though he was now back looking at the hair before him.

  ‘Does he have family I could speak to?’ asked Monk.

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Any friends?’

  ‘Bertram? Naw.’

  The customer laughed.

  There was a silence in the shop. Billie Eilish, who seemed to have been singing for several hours, suddenly finished, and then the silence ended and the drums and guitar of Gerry Cinnamon’s Sometimes kicked off.

  ‘That’s that,’ said Monk.

  The barber’s lips were moving to the music, the customer seemed to have got over his embarrassment at learning the level of his previous intimacy with wee Brenda, and the world was once again turning as it should.

  16

  Kings Of The Scissors,

  Servants Of None

  The day had remained cold and bright, and inside the hotel the wood fires were burning in the library and the sitting room, the lobby and the main dining hall. The atmosphere in the hotel was warm and cozy and comfortable, as long as you ignored the fact that someone had been murdered and the police were currently in possession of someone else’s penis.

  So far, fifty-nine people had chosen to leave the establishment. All had been questioned prior to departure, a file was being compiled, but no one had particularly stood out to any of the officers. Of those who remained, around half had been interviewed by the police, and though a few follow-up interviews had been arranged, again there was nobody who obviously suggested themselves as the kind of person who’d have a chap’s penis off soon as look at him.

  Despite Thumper Adams’s best efforts, the mood at the conference was downbeat. With attendees leaving, and others choosing to head straight to the bar for bolstering alcohol and gossip, the audiences at the various talks and in the main exhibition hall were low, while a demonstration of the latest Premier League football haircuts involving glitter, fainting and tattoos was watched by no one. The barber, showing off his best moves, went ahead with the demonstration regardless, as it was being filmed. He would then edit in a crowd, with appropriate sounds of appreciation, for his YouTube channel.

  While the corpse of Bill Romney turned out to be missing his penis, the police had DNA confirmation, to accompany Mrs Romney’s less than positive identification, that the one found in the hotel room by Janiça Dukič wasn’t his. No one else, however, proved to be missing, every delegate and every member of staff accounted for.

  While the police presence was enormous, the hotel had also called in its own security, head office deciding that the costs were worth it when offset against the inevitable lawsuits that would follow the weekend. Their best chance would be to countersue the barbershop people for having brought Hell upon the hotel. The influx of extra security, they hoped, would stand them in good stead when it came to being in front of a judge, however far down the line that proved to be.

  So, despite the departures, the hotel was full of people, there were three television crews outside, and the place was buzzing with a peculiar energy. Part excitement, part nervous tension, part psychopathic murder expectati
on syndrome.

  It was going to be a long weekend.

  BARNEY, KEANU AND IGOR had entered the main exhibition space. It wasn’t, truth be told, a very big space, not when compared to the great exhibition halls of the day. The O2, the NECC Shanghai, the Frankfurt Messegelände, the Great Hall of Khazad-dûm. Nevertheless, the size of space was appropriate. There were never that many delegates in the first place, and then when those who had chosen to leave were factored in, even the ballroom of the Comrie Hydro seemed a little too substantial for the exhibiters of the Scottish Barbershop Convention.

  The men were watching a barber with a pair of scissors cutting a wig. Barney wondered if originally he was supposed to have models, but the models had fled the scene. Models, he presumed, would be cheaper than wigs. Maybe he just used old wigs that he found on eBay for a couple of pounds.

  He was talking constantly to his audience, in a manner that implied the audience before him was a great host. Either side of him, in what was quite a small stand, there was a giant pair of scissors of indeterminate material. The branding behind him, written in bold and brassy red, stated Let The Scissors Do The Work! There were several signs for Gleneagles Scissors, and one more large splurge of hype spewed onto the wall stating, Where Quality Meets Excellence!

  Barney found himself staring at this notice – Where Quality Meets Excellence! – so that the words of the barber salesman drifted by him. Where quality meets excellence. Didn’t quality automatically meet excellence? Could you have quality without some degree of excellence? He found himself trying to think of examples of something that could be of poor or average quality, while being excellent at the same time. The phrase where the sea meets the water came into his head.

  He felt an elbow in his side, and looked round at the nudge to find Igor indicating for him to look at the salesman.

  ‘Sir?’

  Barney was brought back from his daydream to find he, Keanu and Igor were the only listeners, the few others who’d been standing there having moved on.

  ‘Would you like to try the scissors, sir? Only by working with the majesty of the Gleneagles Éclat 7000 can you sense the power of its ultra-cobalt, stainless steel blades, augmented by seaborgium, ytterbium and delyrium, with state-of-the-art, all-new material barbershopium, created in Australian laboratories using a new process of bastardisation and carbonisation, which produced the world’s first hairdresser-specific metal.’

  ‘What?’ said Barney.

  The man smiled, a quick eye movement to include Keanu and Igor, then back to Barney.

  ‘Here at Gleneagles Scissors we mix an optimal heat confection with sub-zero quench techniques to ensure long-term blade durability and perfection. The Éclat 7000 is the latest Gleneagles product to push the boundaries of what scissors can achieve, combining ancient Japanese forging traditions with the latest in high-tech, American engineering.’

  ‘Can we go back to the bit about pushing the boundaries of what scissors can achieve?’ asked Barney, interrupting the flow.

  ‘Certainly!’ said the salesman enthusiastically. He’d been here for two hours already, and Barney was the first person to show enough interest to ask a question.

  ‘How exactly do the Éclat 7000 push the boundaries of what scissors can achieve?’

  The salesman held the scissors towards Barney, handle first.

  ‘Give them a go and find out.’

  ‘All you’re doing is cutting hair,’ said Barney. ‘How is that pushing the boundaries?’

  ‘They represent the ultimate in hand-made, bespoke, hirsutological sophistication.’

  Barney held his gaze. The salesman clicked the scissors. There was a bright confidence in his eyes, but slowly under Barney’s stare the confidence began to wither. This wasn’t just anyone looking at him as though all his marketing talk was idiotic drivel. This was a man who’d lived the most extraordinary life of any barber in recorded history. You didn’t talk this kind of hogwash to Barney Thomson and expect to impress him.

  ‘How do the scissors push the boundaries?’ asked Barney coldly.

  A moment. The salesman plundered his knowledge bank for anything he could use.

  ‘Studies show that haircuts using these scissors take an average two minutes less than haircuts performed with other, more pedestrian scissors.’

  ‘Which studies?’

  ‘I don’t have that information to hand,’ said the salesman, his confidence creaking at the edges.

  ‘How much per pair are the Gleneagles Éclat 7000?’

  A beat. This was information the salesman usually only felt comfortable divulging when he knew he had the customer hooked, otherwise he was opening himself up to ridicule. Nevertheless he wilted further beneath Barney’s glare, and the price came reluctantly spilling from his lips.

  ‘Nineteen hundred and ninety-nine pounds.’

  The words hung in the air. Igor’s mouth was open, but he couldn’t even bring himself to say, ‘Arf!’

  ‘The fuck?’ said Keanu, amused.

  ‘And?’ said Barney.

  ‘And?’

  ‘One thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine pounds and...?’

  ‘Ninety-nine pence,’ said the salesman, his voice small.

  ‘And ninety-nine pence,’ said Barney. ‘You’re charging two thousand pounds for a pair of scissors. How does that make you feel?’

  The salesman didn’t answer. He was beginning to look a little haunted. Barney, a deal more empathic than he’d been in years gone by, suddenly felt bad for being the conference delegate who made the salesman look into the mirror of capitalist dissatisfaction. Not so bad he was about to buy the scissors, but bad enough that he knew it was time for them to move on. The salesman could regain his self-assurance with some other poor group of suckers, if he could find any.

  What a shit job, thought Barney.

  ‘We’ll leave you to it,’ he said, voice low.

  The quality scissor salesman’s eyes were hollow as he looked at the three barbers. That was it for him. Barney hadn’t meant to crush him, but the fact was that he’d been standing there spewing marketing drivel into the vacuum of the conference hall, it had been called out, and he would never again have confidence in using phrases such as sub-zero quench techniques.

  The men nodded uncomfortably at him and were on their way.

  THEY CONTINUED THEIR slow progress around the hall. There was a row of stands purely of scissor salesmen, phrases such as The only scissors you’ll ever need, and Forged in the dwarfish mines of Middle Earth, and The scissors that cut hair without cutting hair, and Say Hello to the Hairgasm, tossed around like Floridian yachts in a hurricane.

  The next aisle had further haircutting equipment, and the one after that had customer chairs and other requirements of the modern barbershop.

  On and on, one stand leading to the next, one aisle, one row, each tipping over to the next in line.

  They heard the man at the end of Row Seven before they saw him, as he was tucked around the corner a little, and then they were upon him, and he was standing before a small stand, a book in his hand, reading. The stand itself was simply furnished, was populated with stacks of books, and had a banner across the top that read The Barber Poet.

  Barney and Igor exchanged a mournful glance – as they had been doing repeatedly throughout their depressing walk of doom – while Keanu looked warily upon a fellow writer. He had competition. And he himself had never thought of manning a stand at a convention, while reading out his work to the passing masses.

  ‘These lands, these barbershop lands we inhabit,’ said the poet, back straight, book held before him at eye level, projecting boldly to his audience of three who had just happened upon him. He was clearly, nevertheless, doing his spiel regardless of whether anyone was paying attention. They had noticed it with the eye-wateringly expensive scissor salesman, it was the same with the poet, and had been the case at several stands in between.

  ‘In these badlands we stand, shoulder to shoulder,r />
  Barbers forever, for better, for bolder.

  Kings of the scissors, servants of none,

  We carry the scars from the battles we’ve won.

  I stood with the greats, I travelled the road,

  I followed my sweetheart, wherever she goed,

  The love of a woman, the sound of the sea,

  Some gin for your oyster, and muffins for tea...’

  As he continued, Keanu leaned in towards Barney a little more closely.

  ‘See my books... they’re better than this, right?’

  ‘Everything you do is better than this,’ said Barney. ‘In fact, remember that time a few years back when you accidentally stabbed old Tartington in the back of the head and he had to get taken to hospital to get stitched up, but not before he’d lost three litres of blood and nearly died, and then he sued us, and our insurance had to pay out seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds?’

  Keanu looked sideways at Barney.

  ‘Yes?’ he said, ruefully.

  ‘That, as haircuts go, was better than this is at whatever it’s supposed to be.’

  ‘So it’s total gibberish? I mean, I was worrying I might be missing something.’

  ‘No, you’re good,’ said Barney, his voice low, ‘it is total gibberish. It comes with the territory. There’s no such actual thing as poetry, you know, just people talking shite in iambic pentameter.’

  They watched the poet for another few seconds, in which he matched the words ‘the cost o’ my WAG’ with ‘colostomy bag’, then they turned away and walked around the corner onto the next row.

  ‘You think he could be the Klown? I mean, that guy writes those little verses, right?’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Barney. ‘Suppose the police might look into it, but it’d be pretty stupid of him.’

  ‘Maybe he’s balls out confident,’ said Keanu, mind starting to drift.

  Yet they knew it wasn’t him. There was just something about the Barber Poet. The only thing he’d ever killed was language.

  At the head of the next row, down which they could see a total of three other people walking past desperate stalls of barbershop paraphernalia, they stopped and took a moment.