Curse Of The Clown Page 9

Adams stared bleakly across the table, not even a yes, yes, of course on his lips. He really hadn’t thought it through.

  ‘Now show me the names. And think wisely.’

  14

  The Art Of The Philosophical Barber

  ‘Barney!’

  Keanu approached Barney along the wide corridor of the ground floor, opening out his arms as he got to him.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Barney, alarmed.

  ‘Giving you a hug,’ said Keanu, hesitating, trapped uncomfortably in pre-embrace configuration.

  Barney and Igor exchanged a horrified glance.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We thought you were dead, man.’

  Keanu hung briefly in suspended hug position, and then Barney smiled – hadn’t he too wondered if perhaps Keanu and Igor were the victims – and opened his arms for the embrace, which would necessarily be quick.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Barney, untangling himself.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Keanu, ‘all sorts of rumours doing the rounds. The place is on fire.’

  ‘Arf!’

  ‘Obviously not literally,’ he added. ‘But really, everyone’s just buzzing with all the shit that’s going on. You had breakfast yet?’

  Barney looked at his watch. He’d made it just in time.

  ‘Going to head in now. You going to the first talk, or you want to join me for second breakfast?’

  Both Igor and Keanu’s faces lit up, like a cross between Shaggy, Scooby, and the hobbits on the way to Rivendell. Second breakfast!

  ‘Sure,’ said Keanu. ‘We were thinking of sitting in on Socrates, Diocletian And The Art Of The Philosophical Barber in Ancient History, but we can probably give that a miss, right, Igor?’

  ‘Arf!’

  And off they went, hunter-gatherers about their business, in search of food.

  ‘SO WHAT KIND OF RUMOURS are there?’ asked Barney.

  They were sitting by the window looking out on the hotel gardens, which stretched, white upon green, to a line of trees, marking the rise of the hill behind. Barney had the last of the bacon, the final sausage in the bowl, the last hash brown, and two freshly made fried eggs, which he’d managed to inveigle from one of the waitresses. A pot of coffee and brown toast finished the job. Despite the end of the line quality of the grilled products, it remained a decent breakfast. Igor had a huge bowl of granola and a cup of coffee. Keanu, for reasons that no one could explain, was eating a black pudding sandwich, for all the world like that was a thing people did.

  ‘So it all started with a piercing scream from some distant part of the hotel. Blood curdling.’

  ‘Arf.’

  ‘Yep, like a movie. Turns out the scream came from one of the cleaners, now everyone’s talking about what it was she could have found. Someone suggested there might be like five butchered bodies in a bed, blood on the walls, stomachs slit open. Total carnage.’

  ‘Where’s that information coming from?’

  Keanu and Igor, wide-eyed at the horror, stared at Barney for a moment, before finally they both mentally stepped back from the scene and Keanu said, ‘No idea. Not out of the question someone just made it up.’

  Barney nodded ruefully.

  ‘I mean,’ Keanu continued, ‘she screamed like that was what she’d found, so no one would be surprised.’

  ‘Any possibilities that might actually be grounded in reality?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Keanu. ‘Someone said maybe the victim had been flayed and then strangled with their own skin.’

  ‘Arf!’

  ‘We’re looking for reality,’ said Barney.

  ‘Sophes said she’d heard some guy had been tied up, and his eyes picked out by seagulls. Then the gulls had literally dragged the guy’s brain out through his eye sockets.’

  Barney looked down at his eggs. Took a breath, continued eating. He glanced at Igor, who was looking a little sheepish, a confederate to the fantasist.

  ‘So, I see what you did there,’ said Barney.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You just introduced a new character into the narrative without explanation, covering her part in proceedings with an outlandishly unbelievable tale about seagulls.’

  ‘Ah, Sophes.’

  ‘Sounds like her name is Sophie, Sophia maybe, but if you want to call her Sophes...’

  ‘Who knows what her full name is? Could be Sophus, could be Sophiona, could be Sophiacus. Maybe it’s just Sophes.’

  ‘OK, fair enough,’ said Barney. ‘Who’s Sophes, and is there a reason we should give her outlandish seagull tale any credibility?’

  Keanu avoided immediately answering the question by taking a large bite of his abnormal sandwich, so Barney glanced at Igor who smiled wickedly, and – being in the appropriate position – nudged Keanu with his elbow.

  ‘Sounds like you’ve got a story to tell,’ said Barney.

  ‘Just a barber I met in the bar last night. She’s nice. Works in a shop in Edinburgh. Got some interesting ideas about haircutting and styling.’

  Barney looked deadpan across the table.

  ‘Tell me you didn’t meet a woman in a bar and spend the time talking about haircutting,’ he said, and Keanu laughed.

  ‘Yeah, all right, I’ve no idea what she thinks about haircutting. She’s gorgeous, though.’

  ‘Arf!’

  ‘Good,’ said Barney, ‘I’m glad you’re getting something positive out of this. You saw her this morning as well, obviously.’

  ‘Yeah.’ A beat. ‘Shouldn’t tell tales, but we spent the night. Had first breakfast together.’

  ‘Very nice,’ said Barney. ‘Look at you let loose, free from the confines of Millport. Seeing her later?’

  ‘Yeah. She went off to speak to Danny, her boss. Said he wouldn’t be jealous or anything, but thought she should touch base. I had a drink with him last night. Seemed like an OK lad.’

  ‘He’s jealous,’ said Barney, definitely, and Igor nodded.

  ‘He’s not.’

  ‘I’ll look forward to meeting her later. But you’d better be careful, this has got tragedy written all over it.’

  ‘How’d you mean?’

  ‘You and I, we live in a strange universe where serial killers lurk behind every corner. Or maybe it’s just my universe, and you’re unfortunate enough to find yourself in it. And this story here... you come away, you meet a girl, you hit it off, romance blossoms, you’ve entered a world of opportunity, but then... there’s a killer on the loose in the hotel. As one of the central characters underpinning the existence of this world, it’s inevitable the killer will be drawn to you. That’s what happens.’

  ‘Arf.’

  ‘And Sophes will now be in the firing line.’

  Keanu’s face began to curl into concern, a moment while he looked to see if Barney might be joking, then an acceptance that Barney wouldn’t make a joke about that kind of thing, and then a further acceptance that he was probably right.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Keanu.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Barney. ‘Look, I don’t mean to freak you out. Just, you know, be careful. And watch out for this Danny character.’

  ‘Danny’s fine,’ said Keanu, and that at least seemed to be an easier topic of conversation for him. ‘Danny’s a badger.’

  Barney and Igor glanced at each other, they shared a look at the turn of phrase, and then Barney went back to eating his breakfast. He’d said too much, even if, in some ways, he hadn’t said enough. Like Michael Stipe, losing his religion.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, the word naturally out there without really thinking about it.

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Keanu.

  Barney put the rest of the sausage in his mouth, lifted another piece of toast to butter. He’d started thinking of the Koiffing Klown, and of the Klown’s first victim. A penis attached to a floating balloon. If that was something he intended doing to all his victims, then Sophia wouldn’t need to worry.

  Keanu would though.

  Barney nodded im
perceptibly to himself. They’d better hope that this Danny character was as innocent as Keanu was making him out to be.

  THE BODY OF BILL ROMNEY was discovered in the basement of the hotel, inside a large sack, dumped in the shadows in a far corner, beneath other sacks not containing bodies. To what would be the chagrin of Solomon – and he was feeling a lot of chagrin this weekend – the body wasn’t found by the police, but by a housekeeper collecting clean laundry.

  The discovery began with her wondering why some sheets were stained red. She even got as far as rubbing the red stain between finger and thumb and licking her thumb to check the provenance of the unlikely mark on what was supposed to a fresh duvet cover.

  On realising it was blood, she didn’t scream, she didn’t call out. She checked a little further, found evidence of the body wrapped in previously unblemished white sheets, and then she walked quickly back up to the ground floor and went straight to the office of the hotel corporate service manager, Malcolm.

  She knocked, he called for her to enter, she opened the door to find him staring out the window, a look of hopelessness on his face. So bleak did he look, in fact, that she felt compelled to ask after his well-being before divulging her explosive news.

  ‘Everything OK?’ she asked.

  He stared at her for a few moments, and then his brow furrowed his face into a quizzical expression.

  ‘I’m fucked,’ he said.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I’m fucked, Sandra. You can’t... as a hotel, you can’t have this kind of disaster, you can’t have guests dying on your premises, and then expect to survive. Can you imagine the stories in tomorrow’s papers? Who’s going to be booking with us then? Who, Sandra?’

  ‘We just work here,’ said Sandra. ‘All of us. It’s not like we personally –’

  ‘I have shares. A lot of shares. I’m leveraged up to my neck in debt, and those shares are all I’ve got. If this place collapses as a result of this murder business, I am fucked. Fucked.’

  Sandra had nothing to say. She thought he was being ridiculously melodramatic, but he didn’t look like that was the kind of thing he’d want to hear from a housekeeper. Not that he would want to hear what she was about to tell him.

  ‘I found a body,’ she said, rudely spurting the words out into the silence.

  He held the stare, and then his eyes sank to the floor and he briefly put his head in his right hand, elbow on his desk.

  ‘I am so fucked,’ he said softly.

  ‘Will you inform the police, or would you like me just to get ...’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘I didn’t see the face,’ said Sandra. ‘Just found the body in a sack in amongst the clean laundry down on minus-one. I presume it’s the guy who had his dick cut off.’

  She made a scissor motion with the second and third fingers of her right hand.

  ‘Nobody got their dick cut off, Sandra,’ said Malcolm, who’d been ordered by Solomon to keep everything under wraps.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There are all sorts of rumours flying around,’ said Malcolm, rushing through the words, as he was going to quickly have to get to the point of dealing with the dead body in the basement. ‘We don’t know what to believe, so please don’t go regurgitating stories.’

  ‘Janiça literally told me she’d found some guy’s dick hanging from a balloon, but sure, I won’t spread it. D’you want me to alert the police?’

  ‘I should do it, but stay with me.’

  Malcolm grabbed his suit jacket from the back of his chair, threw his arms dramatically into it – he liked to think he put his jacket on like Martin Sheen used to put his jacket on in The West Wing, but he more resembled a giant, ungainly bird, struggling to take off – and then he and Sandra walked together from his office, out into the gathering storm.

  15

  Head Massages Don’t Mean Shit

  Detective Sergeant Monk parked her car in a spot on a nameless side street off the Parade in Greenock, then she quickly got out and walked down onto the main road. Stopped briefly to look out over the green, to the Clyde. Water high, waves white-tipped and impatient. A cold day, but cloudy down at the coast, with none of the frosty, romantic chill they were enjoying in the current murder capital of Scotland.

  Solomon had called an hour earlier, and she’d been happy to get off the island and head up the coast past Wemyss Bay and Gourock. She and Garrett Carmichael had had a good night of it – food and alcohol and chat – but she had no plans for Saturday other than a few hours’ work, a few chores, a run up to the Glaid Stone perhaps. A slow day in Millport, it had been easy enough to come off the island for an hour or two.

  Solomon hadn’t wanted to involve any more police forces than had already been sucked in to the investigation, and since Monk was familiar with the intricacies of the Scottish barbershop scene, he’d chosen to lean on her a little more. It seemed, more than likely, that it would be a cursory visit. A simple lead checked out and discarded, and he was expecting nothing more.

  The road was busy with cars, but there were not so many pedestrians abroad. She looked along the row of shops that faced the green and the Clyde and the hills on the other side of the water. A café, a florists, Oxfam, a bookies, a café that had closed its doors several months previously, another empty unit, a small hardware store that looked like it might have been in that spot since the 1890s, a second-hand bookshop, a barbershop, a small independent clothes shop. A row of commercial units like you’d find in most towns in the country, with the same rundown, past its sell-by-date appearance. The barbershop was the only one that looked as though it had had any money available for presentation and decoration.

  She walked past the café, deciding she could easily resist it, then the florists and the other units until she came to the barbershop, and she entered, quickly closing the door behind her.

  It was a double unit, a large space, elegantly and modernly furnished, none of the retro-chic to be found in many recently decorated barbershops. Four chairs down one side of the shop, the entire wall a mirror, seating on the other side, and a couple of armchairs beside the pool table at the rear of the shop. On the wall behind the pool table there was a forty-eight inch television, currently showing women’s downhill skiing. The sound was off, Billie Eilish was playing. The wall opposite the mirror was decorated with three large film posters; Jurassic World, Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Moonrise Kingdom. On the sidewall, between the front and rear sections of the shop, there was a drinks station. A unit with a coffee machine on top, a glass-doored fridge beneath. The fridge contained milk, orange juice, Coke Zero, a couple of organic juice drinks the flavor of which was not immediately obvious, and three different types of lager.

  Despite there being four chairs, there was only one barber. There were no customers waiting, but there was one currently submitting to a haircut. He had long, straight hair, which the barber appeared to be tinkering with and which, Monk presumed, would be getting tied back up into a man bun.

  The barber turned, gave Monk little more than a quick glance, then said, ‘Sorry, love, don’t do birds.’

  Monk stared at the back of his head as he continued with the cut. She thought perhaps the power of her derisive vision would be enough to make him turn, but it appeared not to be.

  ‘From the nineteen seventies, are you?’ she asked finally.

  He clicked the scissors another couple of times, and then turned. The customer watched Monk in the mirror.

  ‘I’m looking for Bertram,’ said Monk.

  ‘He’s not here. He doesn’t do birds either.’

  ‘Cute,’ said Monk. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Haven’t seen him in six months.’

  ‘This isn’t his shop?’

  She took another couple of steps closer, and now the barber shared a quick look with the customer.

  ‘I’m working. Bertram’s not here, so, you know, if you wanted to hurry along.’

  Monk produced her ID, holding it forward for h
im to read the details.

  ‘You don’t look like the police,’ he said.

  ‘Really? What were you looking for? A uniform?’

  ‘Not sure. A lesbian, something like that.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Monk. ‘And what does that look like? Don’t answer that. Where’s Bertram?’

  Another glance between the two men, in this one the patriarchy silently acknowledging that the cut was going to have to be suspended, then the barber turned back to Monk without retreating from his position behind the chair.

  ‘It’s his shop. He worked it for a couple of years, but it didn’t really happen. There’re other barbershops just along the way. Bertram was going for the Millennials, you know, all this kind of crap. Green tea, and shitey music, and a cool vibe. Load of bollocks. Used to have a couple of women in here doing head massages. Jesus.’

  ‘I loved that shit, man,’ said the customer.

  ‘Aye, but you’re about the only one. Sure, every bastard loves a head massage, but no’ when they’re sitting in a shop. A head massage is like one step up fi’ a blow job.’

  ‘Get to fuck,’ said the customer.

  ‘Get to fuck? OK, I’ll give you a hypothetical.’

  ‘Go for it.’

  ‘A male barber gives you a head massage. How d’you feel about that?’

  A pause.

  ‘A male barber,’ continued the barber, ‘gives you the kind of sensual head massage you used to get fi’ Brenda.’

  A further pause.

  Finally the customer said, ‘The male barber can fuck off, by the way.’

  ‘Exactly. So why is it you’re happy with a woman doing it, and not a man?’

  The customer lowered his eyes, obviously thinking it through.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said after a few moments. ‘It’s one step from a blow job. Here was me thinking it was foot massages that were the most intimate because of Mia Wallace, but it turns out head massages are more or less the same thing.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Wait, d’you think wee Brenda was feeling the intimacy? You think she was into me, ‘n’ that?’