Curse Of The Clown Read online

‘Just across, not far from Ardrossan. He came over to see Barney, to get a feel for the old barbershop vibe again. He misses it, that’s all. Nothing sinister, nothing untoward.’

  ‘Really?’ said Solomon. ‘This old comedian is at the heart of the damn thing. He’s as much a suspect as he is the next potential victim.’

  ‘Well, then, it’ll be good to have everyone in the same place.’

  ‘Didn’t work out so well in Comrie,’ said Solomon drily.

  ‘Nope, not so well.’

  ‘You two have the innate confidence of the survivor.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Monk. ‘And maybe we won’t be fine. Who knows? We just need to make sure we’re not taken by surprise.’

  Solomon nodded, took another drink, glanced at Gainsborough, who was also drinking tea, nodding to himself.

  ‘While we’re tossing around clues and suspects and whatever else,’ said Monk, ‘funny how you keep popping up all over the place, Chief.’

  She smiled, Solomon conjured a get-tae-fuck look from the shallows of his facial expression bank.

  ‘You’re in Edinburgh,’ said Monk, running with it, ‘the first murder takes place in Edinburgh. You go to this convention in Comrie, people start getting murdered. You go back to Edinburgh, more murder. You come to Millport and... well, who knows?’

  ‘Thanks, Sergeant, nice to know I inspire such confidence.’

  ‘It’s the kind of thing that would happen in a crime novel,’ said Gainsborough.

  ‘Sure, it is,’ said Solomon, ‘but only if the writer wanted to use some cheap stunt to fool the readers.’

  ‘Or, you could say, a quality plot development in the hands of a master,’ said Monk.

  ‘Yeah, whatever, Sergeant,’ said Solomon, and he downed the remainder of his cup of tea. ‘If I turn out to be the killer, I’ll let you know before I cut your dick off.’

  Monk laughed, sharing the joke with Gainsborough. The gallows humour before the storm.

  ‘We should actually do some work,’ said Solomon. ‘I want to know where everyone’s going to be this evening, I want to look at a map, I want to know what roads people are going to be walking along. I want locations of CCTV cameras, I want any feeds we can check out, I want any other information that might be relevant to this investigation. We good?’

  ‘Thunderbirds are go,’ said Gainsborough, and Monk finally removed her coat.

  BARNEY FELT THE COMING tempest. He’d been here before, he’d done his time, he knew how these things played out.

  Nothing lasts forever. Stock market booms, love, rain, the trans-Siberian to Vladivostok, Tom Brady in New England, the Rolling Stones, civil wars and killing sprees. Everything has to end, sooner or later, and the greater the force, the more explosive the burnout.

  This man, this fool of a clown, he was the brightest killer in the multiverse, and he was going to flame out quickly. He wouldn’t necessarily even make a mistake, it wouldn’t be about that. One of these murders, he would come up against an opponent who would have the better of him. Even the best boxers take a beating, even the best sports teams lose, even the most brutal MMA fighter has a bad day, and that was what was coming. The Koiffing Klown would fall, it was just a question of how soon, and how many people he would take with him.

  ‘You must have been here before?’ said Charles Walker.

  ‘Too many times,’ said Barney, face set hard. ‘It seems the cold hand of death never strays far from my neck, its icy fingers forever long to crush my windpipe, or to sever the jugular with its razor-sharp nails, so that my final breath rarely seems more than a few hours away.’

  Barney slumped a little further into his coat, although the night was not particularly cold, and the wind coming in from the sea was unseasonably mild.

  ‘Jings,’ said Walker, ‘that’s a bit grim. Did you swallow Edgar Allen Poe? I just meant, you must’ve sat on this bench before.’

  Barney laughed, glanced round at Walker to see if he was joking, but recognised he likely wasn’t. He wasn’t the type.

  ‘Nice view out over the islands, and all that,’ Walker added, indicating the dark shapes sitting in the water, the white of the waves playing against the rocks.

  ‘Yes, Charles,’ said Barney, ‘I’ve been here before. More than likely, I’ve sat on every Millport bench at one time or another. Been here a few years now.’

  ‘How long exactly?’

  Barney thought about it, then shook his head.

  ‘Time gets lost,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Walker sadly, after a while, ‘I suppose it does.’

  ‘My favourite bench is round the other side,’ said Barney, ‘on the way to Fintry. You look out over the Firth to Bute and Arran.’

  ‘Lovely,’ said Walker. ‘Maybe I’ll take a walk round there tomorrow morning.’

  Footsteps from behind, and then Keanu and Sophia walked up beside them, and stood and looked out upon the view.

  ‘All right?’ said Keanu.

  ‘Yep,’ said Barney. ‘Just about to go and meet Igor and Garrett. You good to come for dinner?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Keanu, ‘we’re all in.’

  ‘Thanks for the invite,’ said Sophia, turning and smiling at Barney. ‘A bit of distraction won’t go amiss.’

  ‘I thought we should save you from having to talk to Keanu all evening,’ said Barney, then he tapped Walker on the leg and said, ‘Come on, then, enough sitting here like those two old guys in the Muppets. Let’s get some food.’

  And then, to the low hum of conversation, the four of them began walking back along the front towards the Covenanter’s Head.

  All the time that Barney and Walker had been there the Koiffing Klown had been sat, thirty yards along the road, at the next bench, looking out upon the same view. He’d been there before they arrived, so they had no awareness of being followed, and with the wind blowing in just the right direction, coming in from the west, he had heard most of what had been said. The chitter-chatter about the old days and the old ways, the best and the worst of combs and razors and scissors, the way of the modern salon, the rise and fall of various hairstyles, and ultimately the coming end of times, the darkness that hung over everything in these sepulchral days.

  Yet the Klown did not care what either of these men said. One of them would die this evening, while the jury remained out on the other. He would die if the situation demanded it, as had been the case with the four police officers from the evening before.

  The hum of conversation died away, and finally the Koiffing Klown allowed himself a look round at the four figures, as they crossed Shore Road, and headed towards the bar.

  ‘Fuckers,’ said the Klown, his lips curled in a snarl.

  The smell of blood was in his nostrils. The time of revenge was on hand. Not just that one man would die tonight.

  36

  There Goes The Moon

  Outside, the wind was picking up, and the clouds flitted across a dark, moonless sky. No one followed the moon, not here. No one knew if it was supposed to be there, if it would come later, if it had already come and gone. Maybe it hadn’t been there at all. Maybe it was gone for good. The moon itself had finally thought, fuck it, I’m out of here. I’m not hanging around any longer watching these arseholes take a torch to the planet. I’m going to find another planet to hang around, one without people on it. Might be a bit of a squeeze around Saturn, but at least I’ll have other moons for company.

  The streets were quiet in the town, but then it was a Monday evening in November. The streets were always quiet. The streets were dead.

  The tide was out, long gone, a low tide, the shore stretching out across rocks and seaweed and patches of sand. So, there must have been a moon somewhere, performing its magic upon the sea, or else some other force had taken over its duties in relation to the coming and going of the oceans. The waves that arrived at the shoreline had not yet caught the wind, still approaching apologetically, fighting the power that dragged the body of water away from the coast.


  The gulls were down for the night, their ululations put to sleep until the rising of the sun, but the lanyards clanked in the breeze, the wind whistled through deserted streets, and slowly the night came to life. Soon enough the tide would turn, the wind would catch the waves, and the sea would tumble and fall.

  ‘I’ve seen this movie before,’ said Barney. His voice was quiet, the words offered softly to the room, only Igor beside him at the window to hear.

  They were upstairs at the Covenanter’s Head, their small party the only customers in the room. They’d eaten fish and chips, they’d shared a couple of bottles of wine, the evening had passed as evenings such as this did.

  ‘Arf,’ said Igor grimly.

  ‘Here we all are,’ said Barney. ‘You and me, the detective sergeant, the DCI...’ His brow furrowed. ‘The DCI? I mean, what is he even doing here? And there’s old man Walker, and there’s Garrett, and there’s Keanu and his new friend, who also happens to be the old work colleague of the main suspect. So here we are, the players assembled, entirely by accident, yet as if by design.’

  He paused, Igor stood beside him, his face grim.

  ‘This is what happens,’ said Barney. ‘This is how it starts, and this is how it goes. We should be on the look out, my old friend. We have people to protect.’

  They glanced at each other, there was no need for anything else to be said, then they turned away from the window, and looked out across the room. Keanu and Sophia playing pool; Garrett and Monk chatting at a small table, laughing, drinking; old man Walker chatting to Solomon, both of them hunched over a table, a whisky glass each, a look that said they might have been discussing great matters of state. The redrawing of a border, the straight line through the desert, the intricacies of trade deal small print, the quid pro quo of hostage release. They were, in fact, talking of Scottish football, and how it had never quite recovered from the league allowing the slaying of Meadowbank Thistle.

  ‘How you getting on, son?’ asked Barney, Keanu catching his eye as he stood back from the table, and, like Barney and Igor, taking a moment to consider the room.

  ‘Getting my arse handed to me,’ said Keanu.

  ‘That he is,’ said Sophia, without looking up, then she indicated the next ball, the next pocket, before making the shot.

  Keanu walked over beside Barney, and the three men of the shop stood together surveying the land in much the same way as they spent their days standing at the barbershop window. Sophia tossed a smile at Keanu, and then continued around the table, potting balls with élan.

  ‘You’re not much of a pool player,’ said Barney.

  ‘Nope,’ said Keanu. ‘I wasted my youth reading books. Terrible affliction.’

  ‘At least you’ve turned it into a successful writing career,’ said Barney, and Keanu smiled at the dry delivery.

  ‘Why, only today I made five pounds and sixteen pence,’ he said, ‘which paid for one and a half of these drinks Sophes and I are having.’

  ‘Let us pay homage to the transformative power of the great god Amazon,’ said Barney.

  ‘Everything’ll change once Bring Me The Flayed Corpse Of Mountebank Stump is ready to go.’

  ‘It’s the breakthrough, you think?’

  ‘People are going to love it,’ said Keanu. ‘I’ve decided. Police procedural, vampire crossover. With lesbians.’

  ‘Hard to see how that can fail,’ said Barney.

  ‘I know, right?’

  ‘What’s the hook?’

  ‘The main police officer is a vampire lesbian, and she’s in love with the woman she suspects is flooding the small New England town with a hard core drug called Dr Teeth.’

  ‘Dr Teeth?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Named after the Muppet?’

  ‘Yep. You think it’s funny?’

  ‘It’s a winner,’ said Barney. ‘Will it be ready in time for Christmas?’

  ‘It’s a push. I mean, I was doing all right, but, you know...’ and he indicated Sophia.

  ‘Your flow’s been interrupted.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘So it depends how this plays out.’

  ‘Yep.’ A beat, then he shrugged. ‘I mean, on the one hand, one shouldn’t let the distraction of love get in the way of creating art. As soon as that happens,’ and he made a nose-dive hand gesture. ‘One minute you’re recording Strawberry Fields Forever, and the next Cambridge 1969.’

  ‘Don’t know that one,’ said Barney.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Keanu. ‘But, on the other hand, when we stop with the jokes and the dreams and the everything else, what the fuck am I doing, Barney? The market is flooded out of the park with crime novels, and non-crime novels, and books of blogs, and God knows what else, so how am I ever going to get anywhere when I’m competing against eight hundred million other people?’

  ‘You’re good,’ said Barney.

  ‘Thank you, and you’re biased,’ said Keanu. ‘I mean, how do you escape the morass? How does anyone?’

  ‘Some people have,’ said Barney, stating the obvious.

  ‘Just enough to prove the rule that nobody does.’

  ‘I shan’t trouble you with cliché and trite garbage about sticking at it,’ said Barney, ‘and God knows if you’re ever going to make any money, but you’ve always got me as a reader,’ and he squeezed his arm.

  ‘Arf,’ said Igor, from the other side of Barney.

  Keanu glanced at them both, muttered an appreciative thank you, and looked back at the pool table.

  The door at the far end of the room, at the top of the stairs, opened with the kind of portentous feel that had Barney thinking that the match had been lit on the evening, and Constable Gainsborough entered, an air of expectation about him. He spotted Barney, nodded an acknowledgement, as though Barney was the principal player in the room, and then caught the eye of both Monk and Solomon, and in the look indicated there was news to be imparted.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ said Keanu.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Barney.

  ‘Arf...’ said Igor darkly, to Barney and Keanu’s agreement.

  And so it begins...

  ‘WHAT’S THE NEWS?’ ASKED Solomon, now huddled round a small table, at the far end of the room, with Gainsborough and Monk. ‘They’ve got Norman?’

  ‘Much more mundane,’ said Gainsborough. ‘They’ve found Bertram Pool.’

  ‘Dead?’ asked Solomon quickly, before Gainsborough could continue.

  ‘No. Just arrived from South America.’

  Solomon dragged his fingers down the three days of stubble on his chin, mouth beginning to contort into a scowl.

  ‘They picked him up at the airport?’

  ‘Heathrow. Flew in from Santiago.’

  ‘Direct?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Sure he hadn’t changed in, like, Madrid or something?’ asked Monk, ‘and maybe he only flew out to Madrid from here yesterday, and he’s faking it all?’

  ‘What she said,’ said Solomon, looking questioningly at Gainsborough.

  ‘Nah, we went through that, and UK Borders were on to it as well. If he’s playing the system, he’s done it in ways they’ve yet to fathom. But he flew to Chile five months ago, returned today, has stamps in his passport for a sweep through Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. Also has pictures on his phone with dates and times etcetera. It wouldn’t be the most sophisticated operation on earth to fake some of this stuff, but there’s no hint of that here, and since, as far as we’re aware, we’re dealing with an individual psychopath, rather than a high-tech, state-sponsored operation, it would seem likely our guy has just been on holiday, finding himself in the Andes, and on the plains of Argentina, that kind of thing. Like he said.’

  ‘Well, that’s something,’ said Monk, trying to be positive. ‘Eliminates one of the contenders, narrowing the field.’

  ‘Enhancing Norman’s position as the odds-on favourite,’ said Solomon.

  ‘Exactly.’

  Solomon loo
ked at Gainsborough, eyebrows raised. A moment, then Gainsborough understood the question.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘nothing about Norman. I’d probably have led with that.’

  ‘Yeah, fair enough,’ said Solomon, and he leant forward to the side of the table, elbows settling on his knees, and rubbed his hand across his face.

  The relevant information having been passed on, they now all looked around the room. Keanu and Sophia, back side by side at the pool table, setting up another rack of balls, Walker alone at his table, staring down the length of a glass of Bowmore, Igor and Garrett now sitting together, and Barney doing more or less what the three police officers were now doing, surveying the room.

  Barney and Monk looked at each other across the divide. Another one of those looks. Another moment standing at the precipice. Another wall around their time in Millport, the supposed location of their quiet retreat from real life, about to be brought crashing to the ground.

  It was never much of a wall, said Monk telepathically to Barney.

  No, he replied. Now here comes the Klown to bring it down again, for all the world like Boris Johnson driving a fork lift through polystyrene.

  Monk smiled, Barney nodded in response.

  ‘The fuck are you two smiling at?’ asked Solomon, noticing the look being exchanged.

  Monk gave him a quick sideways glance.

  The lights went out.

  Silence for a second. Another. Then, downstairs, someone screamed. There was a loud crash, a strangled shout, the sound of a scuffle, another scream, voices, voices... and then silence.

  Tick tock.

  37

  A Deputy Of The Seven Kingdoms

  The room was pitched in darkness, although there remained the orange of the streetlights outside, and soon enough their eyes began to adjust.

  ‘Get your torches on your phones,’ said Solomon briskly, not willing to wait, and instantly a beam of light came from where he was sitting at the table. And, as other lights started to appear, he shone the torch quickly around the room, making sure everyone was accounted for.