Curse Of The Clown Page 17

  And so Barney and Keanu found themselves the players in a spectator sport. The bench of queuing customers was full for the first time since Easter weekend, and there was a peculiar silence in the shop, a nervous tension in the air. The customers knew Barney, Keanu and Igor had been at the barbarous weekend, everyone had questions, but they were all too wary to ask.

  Igor wasn’t happy. He’d been persecuted in the past, he’d been driven out of villages by mobs with pitchforks and flaming torches. One time he’d even been driven out of town by a mob yielding pitch-torches and flaming forks. Anything goes when an angry mob meets a hunchback with a target on his back.

  He stayed at the back of the shop, repetitively sweeping, although there was nothing there to be swept. Each time either Barney or Keanu finished a cut, Igor would swoop in while payment was being made, quickly collect the hair from the foot of the chair, and be gone in a blur. Like a tyre change on an F1 car, if you weren’t paying attention, you’d miss it.

  Igor might have been restless and edgy, but he was the supporting cast. Most eyes were on Keanu and Barney, the barbers in the house.

  Barney was annoyed, dully accepting what was happening, but contemptuous of the interest being shown. It was absurd that all these people were here. He had assumed, at first, they were there for him, that Millport barbershop would be the exception, until Keanu had done some checking and had established that barbershops all over the country were now collapsing beneath the weight of a thousand customers.

  Nevertheless, the news made Barney feel little better, and no less scornful. What did they really expect? That they would suddenly find someone’s detached organ in a jar of disinfectant?

  At least the feeling of nervous anticipation that was gripping the customers seemed to be keeping conversation at bay. No one wanted to be the first. No one wanted to be the one to poke the sleeping dragon.

  Keanu had a familiar air of excitement about him. It wasn’t that he enjoyed it when people got murdered, but he nevertheless always perked up when something was happening, even if, on this occasion, it wasn’t necessarily happening on the Isle of Cumbrae. He too was keen to have a conversation about the weekend, but he was as wary of Barney as were the others.

  Barney had the lead in the shop. Once he declared the weekend fair game for conversation, Keanu would be happy to follow suit. Indeed, aware this was the case, it was one of the reasons Barney had been so taciturn.

  Finally, at some time after eleven a.m., with each barber on their eighth cut of the day, Igor rarely having done so much sweeping in all his life, and the waiting area packed to the gunwales, the dam broke. After a succession of incomers and unfamiliar customers, all of whom had been too in awe of the atmosphere that hung over the shop, Barney was cutting the hair of Old Waddington, the Candlemaker of Crichton Street, and unfortunately Old Waddington, the Candlemaker of Crichton Street, was not the type to be cowed by an uneasy atmosphere.

  ‘Tell us everything then,’ he said, by way of a conversation opener.

  Barney did not immediately reply. He caught Keanu’s eye, they shared an eyebrow, and then returned to the cut. Old Waddington, the Candlemaker of Crichton Street, had sat down saying he wanted to look like Andrew Ridgeley from 1985’s Wham Spunk! video, which wasn’t entirely appropriate, but Barney was getting on with it anyway. On the plus side, there wasn’t a huge amount of cutting, and a lot of blow drying, so there wasn’t going to be too much conversation.

  ‘Everything?’ said Barney.

  ‘Aye, everything,’ said Old Waddington, the Candlemaker of Crichton Street.

  ‘Well,’ said Barney, ‘our whole universe was in a hot, dense state, then nearly f –’

  ‘Aye, fuck off son,’ said Old Waddington, the Candlemaker of Crichton Street, ‘you know what I meant.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Barney, voice humourless. ‘It’ll make you wince. It’s literally impossible to hear about someone getting a penectomy, and not tense from your sphincter all the way down your thigh muscles.’

  ‘Ach,’ said Old Waddington, the Candlemaker of Crichton Street, ‘I got so much anal Chinese love ball action in my youth, my sphincter’s completely down the tubes. I doubt there’s anything can make it tense, but go ahead, son, give it a go.’

  ‘You know that was too much information, Andrew, right?’ said Barney.

  A couple of the customers looked as though they were regretting listening in. The one who was surreptitiously recording the conversation had already committed himself to deleting that particular insight.

  ‘Really?’ said Old Waddington, the Candlemaker of Crichton Street, ‘well you probably don’t want to hear about the time I ended up in A&E with a pipe cleaner inserted in my Johnson.’

  ‘No, Andrew, you’re right, we don’t.’

  ‘Aye, hell of a day that was. Then the doc gave us some Viagra, and that did the same job, but a lot less painfully, I’ll tell you that for nothing.’

  ‘Good to know,’ said Barney.

  He ran the comb down the back of the hair, combing it out, where it trailed long down the neck, in its damp state showing the large bald patch which had developed beneath the carefully crafted work of art. Barney wanted to give him a short back and sides, knowing full well he’d look fine with a bald patch and grey bookends either side of his head, but the customer remained, sadly, always right. Even though they were more or less always wrong.

  ‘You were saying?’ asked Old Waddington, the Candlemaker of Crichton Street.

  ‘Was I?’ said Barney.

  ‘About the hotel. The mass slaughter. Tell us everything.’

  The audience in the cheap seats perked up. Keanu, who’d been getting bored of the conversation, looked over again from his textured pompadour fade, wondering if Barney was finally going to open up the conversation to the weekend’s events.

  Barney caught his customer’s eye in the mirror, didn’t immediately answer. A new tension over the shop, Barney at the centre of it, everyone waiting to see if he was going to jump in.

  ‘Look, son,’ said Old Waddington, the Candlemaker of Crichton Street, ‘you can be that guy if you like, but this is your best day’s business in fifteen years. You and your police sergeant will be wintering in Barbados on the back of this, so do the decent thing and spill the beans. And see if you don’t, son, I might have to tell you about the time I tried to loosen my constipation by spraying WD40 up my arse, and got the entire can wedged in between the –’

  ‘Aye, all right,’ said Barney. ‘Enough, Andrew, seriously. What d’you want to know?’

  ‘Did you see any?’

  ‘Did I see any?’

  ‘Aye. Did you see any severed penises?’

  ‘No,’ he lied, thinking of the small, wasted skin flap floating from Charles Walker’s briefcase.

  Silence. His audience was waiting for more than a one-word answer, but Barney was prepared to go full Meg Ryan on Parkinson.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘Did you see the Klown?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you see someone running along a corridor, screaming, with blood on their face?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you see blood splatters up a wall?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was there any blood dripping through ceilings, because there was so much of it on the floor above?’

  ‘No. No blood. At any time.’

  ‘You’re a barber, right?’

  Barney looked at him in the mirror. A pause. Finally, ‘Yes,’ said Barney. ‘Good spot.’

  ‘You must know other barbers.’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘D’you know this Norman guy they’re looking for? There can’t be that many barbers. D’you know Norman?’

  A moment, the mention of Norman stopping the easy rebuttals in their tracks. He caught Keanu’s eye in the mirror, he felt Igor’s gaze on his back.

  ‘Ha!’ said Old Waddington, the Candlemaker of Crichton Street, ‘I saw that. The
look. You do know him. You all do.’

  Now Old Waddington, the Candlemaker of Crichton Street, caught Keanu’s eye in the mirror, and Keanu looked slightly sheepish, and turned back to his textured pompadour fade.

  ‘Son,’ said Barney, getting Keanu to look over, ‘he’s all yours. I’m tuning out.’

  ‘You sure?’ asked Keanu, perking up.

  ‘Fill your boots. But I’m starting the hairdryer in two and a half minutes, so you’d better crack on.’

  ‘Awesome,’ said Keanu.

  Barney glanced round at Igor, an apologetic look, one that said there had been an inevitability about it. There was nothing to be done, and Igor nodded grimly in acceptance.

  ‘Well,’ said Keanu, ‘we do know him as a matter of fact. Came in here. Properly psycho, by the way, you could just tell...’

  His audience was on tenterhooks, the floodgates had been opened, and now, as in barbershops up and down the land, tales of Norman the Penis Slasher, the Koiffing Klown of legend, were told in excited voices.

  27

  Room With A View

  ‘This is troubling me,’ said Monk.

  There were some elements of the case coming together at the Police Koiffing Klown HQ at Comrie Hydro. They’d spoken to people who worked at the shops manned by Eldon Jones and Landon Prentice, and both sets of employees recalled Norman having come in looking for work, and him being rejected. Prentice’s colleagues were open enough to acknowledge that Prentice had been a dick about it. Jones’s fellow barber, a man who Solomon was convinced had been in love with Jones, would hear nothing bad said about him. He could not understand what had happened.

  They had also spoken to Bill Romney’s personal assistant, Clemency Mitford, and she could confirm that Norman had applied to them for a job six months previously. She had been reluctant to admit it, but in the end had confessed that the only reason Romney had invited Norman for an interview was because he was so incredulous he’d applied in the first place. He’d basically interviewed him so he could laugh at him. Since this was, in itself, such a perverse thing to do, it had taken Norman a while to work out what was happening.

  Norman had left the building, head down, confidence shattered, feeling wretched. Clemency Mitford had thought to herself that perhaps Romney had got what was coming to him, but she hadn’t wanted to say that to anyone else in case she was implicated in the murder. That was how guilty she felt about enjoying the fact he was dead.

  ‘Go on,’ said Solomon.

  The three of them – Monk, Solomon and Lane – were back in traditional formation, standing in a line, looking at the whiteboard.

  ‘If the start of Norman’s outrage and hurt, the genesis of his bitterness, all stems from his time working with Danny and Sophia, why not kill them? I get that he might have ended up annoyed at various customers, and possibly every barber currently employed in Scotland, but why not those two first?’

  ‘Maybe he wants to leave them to squirm,’ said Lane. ‘I mean, they’re bricking it, right?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Monk. ‘I wondered about that. Certainly possible. But at the same time, he knows now they’re going to be well guarded. How is he actually going to get access to them?’

  ‘That police watch you’re so confident in?’ said Solomon. ‘It’ll be lucky to see out the week. You know what funds are like. This guy goes to ground, as he clearly has done, he can wait it out and be back crushing the serial killer game next weekend.’

  Monk sighed, a troubled sigh, her eyes continuing to move across the board. She was looking without seeing, however.

  ‘Is it at all possible these could also be Bertram’s victims?’ she said. ‘He would have known Romney, everyone in the business knew that guy. He might well have known the other two, particularly given his connections through the convention.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Solomon, ‘I’ll give you it’s possible. Everything we have points to Norman, though.’

  ‘Maybe they’re in it together,’ said Lane.

  ‘Don’t like it,’ said Solomon. ‘We have classic serial killer shit here. I know it wouldn’t be the first time, but it’s not a team sport.’

  ‘Maybe we should go full bore on Bertram as well, that’s all,’ said Lane.

  ‘We’ve got his name and face out there.’

  ‘Not to the same extent. The police might be looking for him, but the public haven’t cottoned on.’

  Solomon puffed out his cheeks, blew out a long sigh. Monk caught a whiff of coffee.

  ‘I’m going to leave it as it is for now,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean this as a pejorative or anything, but the public are fucking stupid. I mean, aren’t they?’

  ‘Totally,’ said Lane.

  Monk wondered if there might be a microphone or a camera directed at them.

  ‘We go throwing another name into the mix,’ said Solomon, ‘they’ll all be like, what about Norman? We shouldn’t be looking for him anymore? You mean he’s fine? Because, I can see him outside, standing in my back garden like a weirdo, but if you think he’s all right, I’ll just invite him in for fucking chips.’

  Lane laughed, Monk couldn’t stop herself smiling.

  ‘No way they’ll be able to cope with it,’ said Solomon, ‘so we’re not going there. We know we’re looking for Bertram, when we speak to barbershops we can ask, we can show them the photograph. That’ll do for now.’

  ‘What now?’ asked Monk.

  ‘Back into control, speak to the desk, see if there’s anything exceptional come in from barbershop interviews around the country. We need to re-interview the two head honcho characters, the guy named after the rabbit, and the one with the severed dick in his luggage.’

  ‘Happy to do either of them,’ said Monk.

  ‘Let’s speak to central casting and see what we need to follow up, then we’ll split up and get on with it.’

  ‘Central casting,’ said Monk softly.

  ‘Whatever,’ said Solomon, and off they went.

  MONK WAS IN A SMALL sitting room looking out over the Firth of Clyde. Heading home to Millport, last stop, having visited four barbershops along the way.

  In each of the shops she’d more or less heard the same story. Norman, the strange man, coming in and asking for work, being summarily dispatched. Each of the shops had pitched it to the police as though they had something exceptional to report, but in reality, they were all exceptional and so none of them were. Norman had been strange wherever he went.

  At last now, as the sun dipped behind the hills of Arran, she was in a house between Ardrossan and West Kilbride, looking out on the dying of the day, a cup of tea in her hand, Charles Walker beside her.

  ‘Lovely spot,’ said Monk.

  ‘Not so bad,’ said Walker. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Marine Parade, by Kames Bay.’

  ‘Not so bad yourself,’ said Walker, and by the power of Dan Brown if he didn’t chuckle. ‘All this time, the legend that is Barney Thomson was just across the water,’ and he pointed in the direction of Cumbrae, only a few miles away, but out of sight around the headland.

  ‘I think he prefers that no one really knows or cares where he’s been,’ said Monk.

  ‘I can understand that,’ said Walker. ‘He’s had one Hell of a run, he must enjoy the quiet life.’

  ‘When he can find it.’

  ‘Way I understand it,’ said Walker, ‘Millport’s turned into Jersey when Bergerac was there, right?’

  ‘Don’t start,’ she said, and he laughed along with her.

  A moment, they enjoyed the view. A warm silence. In the distance, the ferry from Brodick inched towards them. Monk took another drink, and the warmth of the tea hitting her throat seemed to snap her from the reverie. She needed to get finished, then she could get back to the island, a little paperwork to be done, and she could be standing, looking across at Arran from her own window.

  ‘How are you doing, Charles?’ she asked. ‘Must have been traumatic?’

  He grimaced, but the
re was something comically affected about it. Not an actual grimace. Not an actual revisitation of the horror.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said.

  ‘You haven’t been waking up, seeing floating, severed penises in your sleep?’

  He barked out a laugh, and she couldn’t stop herself smiling with him. The horror, if members of the deceased’s families were to see her laughing about it. Of course, it involved detached penises, so everyone was laughing about it. Couldn’t be helped.

  ‘Well, obviously that’s been happening,’ said Walker, ‘but I’ve been getting that for forty years now,’ and he laughed again.

  ‘Funny,’ said Monk, then she waited for the laugh to go and made sure he caught her eye. ‘You’re a classic man, Charles. Really. Laugh it off. Make a joke. Nothing to see here... You just watched three decades of work get put in jeopardy, quite possibly flushed down the toilet, and at the end of it, you found a severed human organ in your briefcase.’

  ‘Aye, but it was a knob,’ said Walker.

  ‘Come on, Charles.’

  ‘I’m serious. I mean, it’s funny, it just is. Penises, removed from their normal context, are hilarious. No one can help laughing. If it had been a still-beating heart, or someone’s skin, or, I don’t know, an eyeball maybe, then that’s a whole different kettle of fish. But a knob? Come on, Sergeant.’

  ‘You’re forgetting Barney was beside you when you found it,’ said Monk. ‘So, none of your come on, Sergeant. I know you didn’t think it was funny.’ A beat, then she said, ‘I’m not trying to catch you out. Just trying to help, that’s all. We all need it, sometimes.’

  He held her gaze, the good humour which he’d largely displayed since her arrival slowly faded, the pain of the weekend began to show through the defences, and then he looked away again, back out across the water to Arran. Knowing she had him, and that all he needed was a little time, she followed his gaze out to sea.