Curse Of The Clown Read online

  ‘Anything to indicate a fight? Any kind of a struggle?’

  ‘Nothing yet, sir,’ said the same officer. ‘We’ll need to get all the blood back to see if any of it belongs to someone else, but the cuts on all four victims are extremely clean, nothing to suggest there was any effort to stop it happening, or that the perp had to work for his money.’

  ‘The perp?’

  ‘Perpetrator, sorry, sir.’

  ‘So, nothing on the hands, forearms, anything like that?’

  He was looking at the hands as he asked the question.

  ‘Nothing that we’ve found so far, sir.’

  ‘How does he do this?’ said Solomon, the question rhetorical, hopeless. ‘How does one person slit the throat of two people in a car, without either of them fighting back? How does he do it under the watch of another car without them reacting, and then go and do the same thing to them?’

  He asked the questions staring at the corpses, and then lifted his eyes and looked around the others.

  ‘The only obvious answer is that there’s more than one of him,’ said Carew, her voice low and soft and equally devoid of hope, ‘though that just feels wrong. Everything about this whole business says lone killer. Lone wolf.’

  ‘Where’s the calling card?’ asked Solomon. ‘And the penis?’

  The officer hesitated, and Solomon got the first sense of something having gone wrong.

  ‘Out with it,’ he said.

  ‘You haven’t been told about the mishap, sir?’ said the officer, although there was no trepidation about him. Whatever the mishap had been, it likely hadn’t been his own doing.

  ‘Out with it,’ repeated Solomon.

  ‘The officers’ penises were each attached to a separate small balloon. The two from the other vehicle have already been sent back to the lab. One calling card read, Fear the Koiffing Klown, and the other, He’ll always hunt you down.’

  Solomon held his gaze, waiting for the explanation of the mishap.

  ‘This car boot was opened first, and the balloon caught the constable by surprise. It escaped.’

  Some part of Solomon wanted to laugh, but it wouldn’t come. Too much annoyance for laughter to be able to force its way through.

  ‘It escaped?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It floated away?’

  ‘Sir,’ said the SOCO.

  Solomon looked up, imagined looking through the top of the tent, trying to picture the way the wind was blowing outside, then said, ‘South, you think?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Has anyone been sent after it?’

  ‘Appropriate steps have been taken,’ said the SOCO, ‘but as far as I’m aware, the balloon has yet to be located.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Solomon. ‘The fucking thing’ll probably land in the back garden of a fucking politician, or a newspaper editor.’ A second, then he added. ‘Fucking fuck,’ all the words he had.

  The four of them stared mundanely now at the crowded car boot cemetery, contemplating the flight to freedom of a small balloon.

  ‘Anything else useful, unexpected, surprising, whatever...?’ asked Solomon.

  ‘Not yet, sir.’

  ‘Right, thank you. And thanks, Doc. I shall leave you all to your work. Get reports to me as soon as... well, you know. Thanks.’

  And with that, the others nodding at him as he went, he stepped back outside the tent into the light of day, and warmer, less oppressive air.

  ‘Fuck,’ he muttered softly, and this time he did take a deep breath.

  32

  Sad Songs

  Keanu was waiting for Sophia Cane at the ferry slipway, round beyond the National Watersports facility. The sun was low in the sky, heading towards its wintery grave far to the west, out of sight behind the hills of Cumbrae at Keanu’s back, and the afternoon had turned cold and damp.

  Keanu watched the ferry approach land at an unusual angle, before righting itself at the last moment, and clanging onto the hard surface of the slip, as the broad door of the small boat lowered onto the ground.

  The foot passengers were always allowed off first, and befitting a cold, grim November late afternoon, there were few of them, numbering no more than seven or eight. Keanu, nevertheless, noticed only Sophia, who waved as soon as they could see each other over the rim of the lowered door.

  ‘Hey,’ said Keanu, as she walked up the side of the slip, the few cars now driving up past them.

  She didn’t answer, no words immediately coming to mind, and instead just walked into his arms and they embraced tightly.

  This, Keanu had suddenly thought as he stood shivering in the cold, waiting for the ferry to make landing, was real life. He was here to meet a young woman whose boss and friend has just been butchered. She was going to be upset. She would have been crying. She might well be in fear of her own life. It would be tough to think of a situation that was more horrible, depressing and terrifying. For such moments, life in the Millport barbershop – and Keanu’s life was almost entirely the Millport barbershop – had left him ill-prepared.

  ‘How’re you doing?’ he asked eventually, the automatic and straightforward first words, after they’d kissed, hugged some more, and were starting to walk up the slope towards his car.

  ‘Starving,’ she said. ‘God, I could eat a whole pig. D’you have any bacon?’

  Keanu took a second to adjust, his mind having been entirely focussed on saying the right thing, or, at least, not saying the wrong thing.

  ‘Sure, I always have bacon.’

  ‘Nice,’ said Sophia. ‘I think we’re going to get along.’

  She took his hand into hers, squeezed.

  ‘Oh, wait, what kind of bacon? Not streaky bacon, I hope. Not a fan. Unless, you know, sometimes, maybe with pancakes and maple syrup, when the bacon’s super well done.’

  ‘No,’ said Keanu. ‘Medallions.’

  They were in his car, engine started, heater up full, music playing.

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Sophia, indicating the CD player.

  ‘Turin Brakes.’

  ‘I don’t know them. They sound decent.’

  ‘Just stumbled across it on Spotify. Not bad, huh?’

  ‘Sure. Wait, didn’t the sign say Millport that way?’

  ‘We’re taking the scenic route. This is nice. We travel down the west coast of the island, looking across at Bute and Arran. Go down the other side and you’re looking at nuclear power stations and vast industrial complexes that are straight out a Bond movie.’

  ‘So you’re not kidnapping me, intending to drive off into the middle of nowhere, chop me up, and boil my body down to its distilled essence in a giant vat over a roaring fire?’

  Keanu glanced at her, and saw what he hopefully chose to assume was a teasing smile.

  ‘That’s tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘Well, that’s OK, as long as we’ve got that straight. Medallions are the ones with all the fat cut off?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said, ‘not bad. Wait, smoked or unsmoked? This is vital. Don’t shit on my bacon sandwich here, Keanu.’

  A tense moment. Keanu thought about lying, saying he had both, playing the angles, finding out which she preferred, making contingency plans if it wasn’t smoked.

  He rolled his eyes, then he said, ‘Smoked.’

  ‘Wait,’ she said, ‘you rolled your eyes? What internal monologue did you just have?’

  Keanu gave her another glance, then looked back to the road, and continued on round the head of the island, past the monument.

  ‘I was contemplating saying both, and then coming up with a Plan B if you preferred unsmoked.’

  ‘But you decided just to be honest?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I appreciate that, thank you. I’m not saying we’re definitely going to get married, but I think you might be a keeper.’ A beat. ‘If you want me.’

  ‘I’ll let you know after dinner,’ said Keanu, slightly thrown off his game by the
force of nature.

  ‘Ha! Anyway, I like smoked too, so we’re good. I can’t believe anyone likes unsmoked bacon. I mean, it’s like one step from eating raw pig. What was that memorial for back there?’

  ‘A couple of sailors who died at sea when a boat went down a while ago.’

  ‘Oh, that’s sad. Did you know them?’

  ‘It was in 1844.’

  ‘Right.’

  Finally the conversation seemed to have run its course, and Keanu was left to wonder if it had all been a deflection, a way to avoid talking about the thing that needed to be talked about. The unacceptable face of real life. He’d rather talk about bacon too, but given all that had happened, it seemed false.

  ‘How are you?’ he said. ‘I mean, really?’

  ‘You think I should be showing more of a reaction to the fact that my boss and his wife got stiffed, and that the feds who were guarding them got stiffed, and that I, for reasons that even I don’t understand, could be next on the killer’s list?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Keanu. ‘That.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Life is shit, my friend. You know what happened to my dad?’

  ‘No,’ said Keanu.

  ‘Killed in a car accident by a drunk driver when I was three. What happened to the driver? Lost his licence for, I don’t know, five or six minutes, and he got an eighteen month suspended sentence. Turned out... I mean, I’ve learned all this in later years, obviously I didn’t know diddly squat at the time, turned out the driver was a friend of the chief constable of the day. Rumour was they were in the Rotary together, or the Inner Wheel, or I don’t know, one of those groups that secretly wants to be the Masons, but they don’t have the blood of Christ to protect, so they do some other kind of shit... You know what happened to my mum?’

  Keanu stared straight ahead. Approaching Fintry Bay. He hadn’t been prepared for this. It wasn’t the real life he’d been expecting, but here it was, in all its horror nevertheless.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  He had no way of telling if she usually spoke to men like this, if she often told her tale. Nevertheless, he found himself falling in love with her, with every grim word that crossed her lips.

  ‘She’d been drinking since my dad died, just got worse and worse. When I was fourteen she finally started trying to get help. The guy who led the group, well that piece of shit was a drug dealer. How about that? He helped people stay off alcohol, and fed them drugs instead. God, I don’t even know what it was. I never wanted to. She got hooked, ended up this emaciated, horror show of an addict. Killed herself when I was nineteen.’

  One second on to the next. The car continued around the island, the sun was going down behind Bute.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Sophia. ‘I shouldn’t just have thrown all that stuff at you. But that’s the way of it. Life is shit. And sure, every now and again there are good bits, or bits that are passable, or bits that at least don’t knock the absolute living shit out of you, but those bits are just the bits in between the bits that do knock the absolute living shit out of you. So, here we are, another day in shitty paradise, and the living shit has been knocked out the park once a-fuckin-gain. Hallelujah.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Keanu.

  ‘Yeah, shit,’ said Sophia, and then he could feel a softening in the car, as though she was stretching out into the air, picking the tension from it and tossing it away, and she reached over and squeezed his arm. ‘I really shouldn’t have done that, but it’s good you know these things. And I’m sorry, I really am, but that’s where we are. Let’s just get to your place, and we can have a bacon sandwich, and we can have a drink and we can go to bed, and we can fuck maybe, or maybe not, and I can just lie in your arms and we can talk or maybe not, and that’s as close to everything being all right as I can think of.’

  Keanu didn’t have any words, but didn’t need them. He squeezed her hand, he pressed it against her leg, squeezed again, detached to change down gear as he approached Westbourne, and so the late afternoon went.

  33

  The LGBTQI Situation

  Keanu was so distracted when meeting Sophia off the boat, that he failed to notice the arrival on the island of two other passengers. One was the anticipated Charles Walker, who, on receiving Monk’s invitation to the Millport barbershop, had been grateful but polite in his refusal, but had changed his mind by the end of the day, and by the following lunchtime had decided that he really rather liked the idea, and that it was something best followed up as quickly as possible. Give it a day or a week or a month and they might forget him, looking blankly upon his turning up without warning.

  The other new island arrival was the Klown, but since he wasn’t wearing clown makeup, and had the hood of a £13.99 F&F Tesco hoodie pulled down over his face against the cold, it was hardly surprising that his addition to the drama went unnoticed.

  Both Walker and the Klown got on the bus, two of only four passengers. Walker sat near the front, the Klown walked past him without a glance and sat at the back. Behind the others now, and unconcerned whether they’d look round, the Klown lowered his hood, fully revealing the dull, bland face of any old person from anywhereville, leant on the ledge, chin resting in the palm of his hand, and stared out of the window at the restless waters of the firth of Clyde.

  Yes, restless. The sea was restless.

  Charles Walker alighted from the bus at the penultimate stop, fifty yards along the road from the barbershop. The Klown stayed on the bus for the final hundred yards, getting off at the terminus by the pier, and going on his way.

  There would be mayhem before the night was out, but for the moment, the Klown disappeared into the undergrowth of small town life.

  Walker stood by the white promenade wall, hands in his pockets, looking across the road at the barbershop. From where he stood he could see Barney Thomson cutting hair, Igor sweeping up at the back of the shop, and that there was a single customer on the bench. He’d noticed Keanu at the ferry slip, and so knew he wouldn’t be there.

  Being this close to his old battleground had the blood running in his veins once more. He could smell the shop already; the hair gel and the talcum powder, the moose and the spray cans of product whose purpose he’d never really understood, but which he’d always been happy to liberally spray over the head of anyone who asked for it.

  It wasn’t that he hadn’t been anywhere near a barbershop in years. He got a haircut every month, after all. But there was something different today. He had a pair of Bender Strattocutter 4-70s in his pocket, and he could sense that before this working day was out, he’d get to use them in anger, for the first time in over ten years.

  Unconsciously, he flexed the fingers of his right hand.

  ‘You can do this, Charles,’ he said to himself. ‘Come on.’

  No exhortation in the words, rather quiet determination.

  He crossed the road.

  OLD MAN HOSKINS WAS looking curiously at Barney in the mirror.

  ‘Wait, what?’ said Hoskins. ‘What does the ‘Q’ stand for then?’

  ‘Queer,’ said Barney.

  Gender politics wasn’t a favourite topic of his, he had to admit, but Old Man Hoskins had blundered in full-bore, and it was too late to do anything about it. Barney knew that two men with a combined age not kicking the arse off a hundred and fifty, talking about gender and sexual orientation, was potential barbershop car crash material, but then, no one was filming it, the customer on the bench didn’t seem to be paying any attention, and the chances were that Hoskins would have forgotten that he’d even been given a haircut, never mind what was discussed during it, within about an hour of having left the shop.

  ‘But doesn’t that mean gay?’ asked Hoskins.

  ‘No one knows,’ said Barney.

  Hoskins was receiving his regulation Burt Lancaster Field of Dreams, and Barney was nearing the end of the scissor work.

  ‘And you said something about an ‘I’?�
�

  ‘Aye,’ said Barney.

  ‘What’s the ‘I’ stand for?’

  Barney stopped cutting, holding Hoskins’s eye in the mirror, then he slowly shook his head, turned, looked at Igor, Igor shrugged, and then the eyes of the three men fell on the customer on the bench. A sixth sense told him he was now the centre of attention and he lifted his eyes from the book he was reading, an old paperback of A Farewell To Arms he’d picked up for £2.65 in Oxfam.

  Transported suddenly from the sodden battlefield of 1917 northern Italy to the mundane surroundings of twenty-first century Millport, the customer took a moment to adjust, stared vaguely at Barney while he conjured the conversation he’d been ignoring out of the air, as though the words had been hanging there waiting for him, then said, ‘Intersex.’

  The three original men of the conversation stared at the customer who had come late, armed with knowledge that no one else had.

  ‘What does that mean?’ asked Hoskins.

  ‘It means, gentlemen,’ said the customer, closing the book over, setting it on his thigh with his right index finger as a bookmark, ‘that you three are messing with forces you couldn’t possibly hope to understand.’

  ‘So... wait... what?’ said Hoskins, then he looked at Barney. ‘Have you any idea what’s happening?’

  ‘None,’ said Barney, ‘which is why some conversations are best left to the professionals. Or, at least, to those who know what they’re talking about.’

  ‘If only people would follow that advice on the Internet,’ said the man from the bench.

  The door opened, and the four men turned to view the incoming relief, only Barney imagining it might be the LGBT police, come to arrest them for talking shite.

  ‘Well, gentlemen,’ said Charles Walker, ‘looks like you’re in the middle of a fascinating conversation. God, I’ve missed this.’

  He closed the door behind him, and then stood with a look of satisfaction, surveying the scene.

  ‘What does Intersex mean?’ asked Old Man Hoskins, as a way of moving the scene along, as no one else seemed about to say anything.