Curse Of The Clown Read online

  ‘Who to?’

  ‘Andy.’

  ‘Andy?’

  ‘Andy.

  ‘Andy doesn’t know I said it. Andy doesn’t know I exist. Andy doesn’t give a flying fuck about me, or you, or Mrs Romney, or the fact that some random copper he’ll never meet, inadvertently compared him to a crumpled penile insignificance.’

  ‘It’s not about that,’ said Lane. ‘It’s about making amends with the universe. Andy might not know he’s been slighted, but the universe does. The universe adjusts and adapts. He’ll feel it one way or another. A disturbance in the force, you might say.’

  ‘Aye, you might. If you were an arsehole.’

  ‘So, you can get in touch with Andy on social media, maybe. I’m not sure what his online presence is.’

  ‘Can we talk about the case now?’

  ‘I’m just looking for justice for Andy.’

  ‘And I’m just looking for you to shut up. Do you write my report?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you write my report?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do I write your report?’

  A beat, and then, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right, I do write your report. So what are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to shut up.’

  ‘Excellent. Have we started the roll call of all the other attendees?’

  ‘It’s underway. That’s the trouble with the morning events not actually having kicked off yet. People are still all over the place. Some of them are still asleep. A lot of hangovers.’

  ‘Aye, it’ll take a while, but it needs to be done. The question is whether this Klown guy brought in another penis to put in Romney’s room...’

  ‘One he’d prepared earlier.’

  ‘Exactly. Or whether there’s another delegate down. And then there’s the question of whether Romney’s actually dead.’

  ‘I was wondering about that,’ said Lane. ‘Maybe he’s the killer and he’s trying to throw us off.’

  ‘Aye, I thought the same thing. But really? He’s going to know we’d get his wife in, and that we’d be able to check the DNA. So why bother?’

  ‘He needs time to get away?’

  ‘Then why telegraph the murder with the detached penis? No, there’s a tonne of weird shit here, but I think the man’s dead. His body’ll turn up somewhere.’

  Solomon took a final draw on his smoke then tossed it positively onto the ground, watched it bounce a couple of feet away, then stepped forward on top of it.

  ‘Let’s find the body, let’s establish whether there’s anyone else missing, let’s speak to some of these barbers. We’ll start with attendees here on their own. There’s a guy I need to speak to, the chairman of the –’

  ‘Thumper Adams,’ said Lane.

  ‘Jesus,’ muttered Solomon. ‘Come on, let’s get on with this. The sooner we get into the bath of shite, the sooner we can pull the plug.’

  Lane looked curiously at Solomon, half-laughing to himself, tossed his cigarette off to the side and followed the boss back towards the hotel.

  12

  The Checkpoint Situation

  Barney Thomson walked for a while, much longer than he’d intended. Ten minutes became twenty, and then half an hour, and suddenly he looked at his watch and realised he’d be struggling to make it back before the hotel stopped serving breakfast.

  He stood on the side of the hill, turned and looked back over the glen. He was above the level of the first hill he’d climbed, and so he could now see the hotel in the distance, grey sandstone against the white surrounds, behind it the town of Comrie. Between here and there, a couple of farms, quiet country roads, fields of sheep, a small loch, and a few figures on the frosty white of the golf course. Maybe the ball was running well on the hard ground.

  He looked back round at the hill he was currently striding up, and then back at the hotel. How nice it would be to just keep on walking. It was Scotland, and he was heading north, little but beautiful hills and forests and mountains and lochs between here and Inverness.

  ‘You’re not equipped for it,’ he said aloud to the cold morning air, his breath still clouding. ‘Six hours from now the rescue services would be getting called, and you’d be getting helicoptered off the side of a mountain. Or you’d break your leg, and have to crawl for hundreds of miles down the side of a precipice like yon Touching The Void guy.’

  He turned a full circle, taking in the magisterial beauty of the landscape.

  ‘Or you’d just go hungry, get cold and need to use the toilet. Suck it up, Barney,’ he muttered to himself, as he started to walk back, ‘you’re not on some magical quest. You’re here to learn about the latest in scissor technique from a sixteen year-old school leaver who’s watched a couple of Korean YouTube stars give lessens on handing out a short back and sides.’

  He laughed to himself, self aware enough to recognise the old curmudgeon, and then he quickened his pace, realised that he was already hungry, and started planning how much of the full Scottish he was going to have.

  BARNEY WAS ALMOST AT the hotel before he saw the police cars, and then he realised how detached he’d been, how shut off in his own world, because there were so many of them, and it was odd he hadn’t noticed them arriving.

  But it wasn’t really a story of him not being present in this world, letting his imagination run wild. (Not that his imagination had, in fact, been running wild. He’d been in more of a Zen-like trance.) It was a story of the police arriving in large numbers at the hotel, which meant, more than likely, that Solomon’s murderer had turned up, just as he’d feared he would. And now, here he was, Barney Thomson, once again plunged into the middle of another crime fiction style serial killer narrative. He thought of Keanu and Igor, and felt the first grip of fear in his stomach.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said softly to himself, head shaking, as he started walking again, or trudging really, heavy footsteps crunching through the lingering frost.

  He reached the side of the hotel grounds, walked around the low wall of the carpark, and then came to the entrance, where there were two police constables on duty. A man and a woman, both of whom seemed to Barney to be of school age.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said the woman, ‘there’s been an incident. No one allowed in or out.’

  She was standing with her hands by her sides, a handgun holstered next to her right hand, which Barney couldn’t help but look at. The other officer was unarmed, although he was carrying a clipboard. There would be those, thought Barney, who could have had someone’s head off with a clipboard. Odd Job for example.

  ‘I’m a guest,’ he said. ‘I’ve got friends in there.’

  ‘Were you here overnight, sir?’ asked the other officer.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Barney Thomson.’

  Now he felt their eyes on him in a way he hadn’t previously, and for the first time in a long while he felt his reputation define him. The officer didn’t look at his clipboard.

  ‘You’re good to enter,’ he said.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ asked the woman, just as Barney started to walk past them.

  He stopped, took a moment to manage the nerves and irritation that had begun to build, then he indicated the great beyond.

  ‘Out on the hills,’ he said.

  ‘It’s cold.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Barney.

  ‘Not too cold to be out?’

  ‘I didn’t think so.’

  ‘When did you leave?’

  ‘About seven-thirty.’

  ‘What were you doing up that early?’ asked the man, tossing a question into the midst of his colleague’s quickfire volley.

  Barney stared at him, finally getting annoyed at the intrusion. He had a second where he imagined sweeping the guy to the ground with some neat judo move, before disarming the woman and turning the gun on them both. Telling them to fuck off.

  ‘I get up at six every morning,’ he said. ‘I’m on hol
iday, so today I slept in.’

  ‘You can go in,’ said the woman, and suddenly she sounded bored, as though Barney had been detaining them, rather than the other way around, and he tried his best not to scowl at them, before walking towards the hotel.

  In front of him there were several other officers milling around, and a woman that Barney instinctively knew to be the police pathologist. Behind him he heard the crackle of radio static, and then the female police officer say, ‘Barney Thomson in the building, repeat, Barney Thomson has been cleared through Checkpoint Yankee.’

  Barney walked quickly out of earshot, eyes rolling.

  13

  Cognitive Methods Of Customer Interaction

  Thumper Adams was standing behind a desk, staring harshly down at DCI Solomon, who was seated on the other side, going through the list of attendees. The list had helpfully been split into shop affiliation, joint and single bookings, details of when the arrangements had been made, notification of how many previous barbershop conventions each delegate had attended, along with this year’s participation level of each.

  For Solomon, of course, it was just a list of names, with Barney Thomson literally the only one standing out. He finished looking through it, and then let the top sheet of five fall back on the others.

  ‘How many of the people here do you personally know?’

  Adams took a deep breath through his nose, so that every cubic inch of air inhaled could be heard passing through the nasal cavity.

  ‘Closely, about five. From repeated or occasional meetings at this and previous conventions, forty to fifty. Not at all, everyone else. There are always new people, there are always people that come every year and are just invisible. That’s the way some folks like it. Keep themselves to themselves, taking in the atmosphere, leaving without causing a ripple. Bread and butter of this kind of place, to be honest.’

  ‘Do you know Bill Romney?’

  ‘I know the name, never talked to the man. Not so that I remember, anyway.’

  ‘So, you’ve no idea why anyone might want to harm him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK, moving on. Of the people you do know, is there anyone you might suspect of having any kind of ulterior motive in coming here?’

  Adams stared blankly back at him.

  ‘Anyone you’re not sure about, maybe you can’t trust, maybe there’s been some sort of unusual incident in the past?’

  ‘I’ve been wracking my brains, of course, Chief Inspector, but sadly, I’ve got nothing. This... what we have here, this does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s Scotland’s premier barbershop convention. We’re small by international standards, but we’re going places. Next year we’re hoping to move to bigger premises, start attracting some of the high priced talent from the continent, maybe add a day to the show. We’re looking to draw in some major sponsor. You know, so we can be the Gillette Scottish Barbershop Convention, or the Brylcreem Scottish Barbershop Convention or... anything really.’

  ‘The Cillit Bang Active Foam Soapscum and Shine Citrus Force Scottish Barbershop Convention?’ said Solomon glibly, and Adams looked at him curiously.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t need the business plan and the commentary, Mr Adams,’ said Solomon. ‘I’m interested in individuals.’

  ‘Very well.

  ‘Are there any individuals who stand out?’

  ‘I said already. No.’

  ‘There have been no grievances over the years, no grudges held, no one shut out who’s going to hold something against you? Often enough, when one is the person causing the slight, one might not realise that someone else has been slighted. I need you to really think about this. You presumably have a committee, you have various levels of input. Is there anyone who you might have dismissed or cast aside, or not given what they would consider the right level of prominence? Something happened, you thought little of it, while they went off to nurse a cancerous sense of injustice...’

  Adams held Solomon’s gaze over the desk. Didn’t immediately respond. Solomon recognised that he’d framed the question the right way. It had Adams thinking, and he wasn’t going to come back with the easy negative this time. He gave him the space, though kept his focus on him to make sure he didn’t drift off, lurching into denial to avoid the self-awareness required of the conversation.

  One second, two seconds, three seconds, four. The clock ticked. The men stared at each other across the table. Solomon could see the internal monologue. The self-confident man facing up to his own failings.

  Fuck’s sake.

  ‘This is obviously a successful and thriving operation,’ said Solomon, deciding he had to resort to flattery to get Adams to open up. ‘You’ve got a lot of interest, you’re a national brand leader, you’ve got media attention.’ Solomon had no idea if there was any attention from the media. ‘People outside the business are talking about it. You don’t get this kind of success without pissing a few people off. I need to know who you pissed off. Is there anyone here who that might apply to, or is there someone who doesn’t come anymore?’

  The flattery penetrated. Jesus, he thought. What kind of person listens to that amount of shite, and doesn’t brush it off?

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ said Adams. ‘Of course you are. I’m not saying... I’m not saying I’ve left a trail of bitter former partners behind me, but of course, of course, when you create something of this magnitude, people are going to be jealous.’

  He stopped. The men continued to stare at each other across the table.

  Fuck me, thought Solomon. I didn’t butter you up, like some baw-licking, Trumpian sycophant, debasing myself in the process, just for you to sit there like a dumb bastard.

  ‘What people?’ he said, keeping the frustration and growing animosity from his voice.

  ‘Ha!’ said Adams, obviously thinking about someone in particular, then finally, ‘Well, there’s Bertram, of course. He was always a pretty little shit, I’ll give him that.’

  ‘Pretty?’

  ‘Yeah, you know, pretty. Fancied himself. One of those slightly camp fellows who makes you wonder, you know what I mean?’ Solomon didn’t respond. ‘But I don’t know. He thought he was part of the new wave. He was all about being trendy. Music blaring in the shop, every inch of the place ergonomically designed to within a Scandinavian inch of its life, head massages and free organic hot drinks, gorgeous bit of skirt on hand to curl hair, caress the customer’s necks, or, I don’t know, do their flippin’ nails or some nonsense. Yes, that was it. The nails and the eyebrows and the whatever. Barbershops should offer the total male grooming experience. That’s what he called it. The total male grooming experience.’

  He looked intently at Solomon, obviously keen to pull him into his sphere of indignation. Solomon wasn’t for being pulled, agree with him though he might.

  ‘What happened with Bertram?’

  ‘The first couple of years after Charles and I decided we needed to add some youth to the board, Bertram was doing these panels, demonstrations and the like. Yes... I admit, there was a bit of a tussle. Not a physical tussle. A battle for the hearts and minds of the conventioneers, you might say. Who do we want to be as barbers? What is it we want to represent?’

  ‘Isn’t it a broad church? Can’t the two types of shops sit side by side?’

  ‘No,’ said Adams. ‘You’re clearly not a barber man. This is as fundamental as it gets. The business is split down the middle. It makes remainers versus leavers look like a Sunday school picnic. This is like Israel versus Palestine multiplied by the Old Firm.’

  ‘Really? When we started talking about this you couldn’t think of any reason why anyone would want to cause trouble, and now you’re saying it’s the Rape of Nan-fucking-jing. Which one is it, Mr Adams?’

  A moment, Solomon saw it on his face, the flash of recognition at having gone too far, and then Adams smiled, waving it away with a movement of a causal hand.

  ‘I’m a blusterer, detective, you must re
cognise that already. You’re an intelligent man. Yes, you’re right, I’m talking it up, but it’s all fluff and bluster, bluster and fluff. It’s more like an episode of Midsomer Murders, if there was never any murder.’

  ‘Except someone’s been murdered,’ said Solomon. ‘Seems salient.’

  ‘Look, Bertram went off, tail between his legs. Said he was going to start an alternative convention. Some sort of New Age barbershop thing, I don’t know. Sounded ridiculous. Doesn’t seem to have happened, unless it’s so underground no one in the barber community has ever heard of it.’

  ‘He doesn’t come here anymore?’

  ‘Haven’t seen him in a couple of years.’

  ‘You can tell me where I can find him?’

  ‘Sure, if he’s at the same shop. Down Greenock way, somewhere around there.’

  ‘Anyone else? He couldn’t have been alone, there must have been others on his side.’

  ‘Sure, sure. Look, hand me the list, I’ll point some people out to you. We try to give a nod in the direction of this stuff, we still acknowledge it. There are one or two who preach, but they know their place. You’ve seen the programme. For example, we have a talk entitled Cognitive Methods of Customer Interaction For A 360° Shop Relaxation Experience. I mean, that’s just nonsensical drivel, but Jamie stays onside, and we let him do his thing.’

  Solomon could feel his enthusiasm for the interview draining.

  ‘Fine, point out some names then,’ he said. ‘We’re talking to everyone anyway, but we need to know where to focus. When we’re done here, I’ll get Sergeant Lane to come in, and he’ll go over logistics with you, in terms of interviews, and people being allowed to leave, should they wish.’

  ‘I don’t want anyone to leave! It’s the biggest weekend of the year.’

  ‘You need to accept how this is, Mr Adams. Very possibly a man’s been murdered. Very possibly there’s a killer on the loose in the hotel. If someone wants to leave, you need to understand that.’