'That's funny. The police, we just get shafted by that crap, and consultants. Jesus. Fucking pain in the arse.'
'You're police?' said Barney.
'Can't you tell?'
Barney smiled and nodded. It was written all over the guy.
'So what I was wondering,' said Frankenstein, 'is this. I've been here a few days, and I reckon I've seen you about more than anyone else. You're always mooching round, looking, if you don't mind me being forward, miserable as shite. So my question is this. Who the fuck are you?'
Barney looked him in the eye. Never knew what any police officer was going to think of the revelation of who he was. Perhaps his past would mean nothing to him; perhaps in the past this guy had spent years searching for him. Frankenstein tossed his cigarette to the side and stepped on it. They both looked down at the crushed butt, a minor distraction along the way.
'I'm the barber,' said Barney prosaically. 'I've got the shop next to the incident room. That's why you've seen me so often.'
'I don't think so,' said Frankenstein, 'you're always walking round the town, up and down roads. What is it you're looking for?'
'Is that an interrogative question, or are you just making light-hearted, middle-aged male bonding conversation.?'
Frankenstein smiled again, shook his head and looked back over his shoulder at the work going on behind him. To his right, he could see Headstone Harmison keeping an eye on his officers, unhappy perhaps that someone else was interfering with his graveyard.
'What's your name?' asked Frankenstein, turning back.
'Barney Thomson.'
'Barney Thomson? The barber?'
Barney nodded.
Frankenstein rummaged about in his pockets and produced another cigarette. Stared at Barney throughout. Lit up, took a deep lungful, slipped the lighter back into his pocket.
'Thought you were dead,' he said eventually.
Barney held his hands out to his side. 'Still here.'
'I remember a time when you were a thing. Had your fifteen minutes. Big serial killer on the run. We had fifty guys a week claiming to be you, handing themselves in.'
'I know,' said Barney. 'I tried to hand myself in once and they turned me away because they thought I was just another faker.'
'Really?' Frankenstein laughed. 'Now that, Alanis Morrissette, is irony.'
Another draw on the smoke, another casual look up and down the road. Barney was getting cold. The shivers of the past creeping beneath his skin.
'So how come you're not dead?' he asked.
Barney shrugged. 'I really don't know. But here I am.'
'How do I know you're not one of these insane guys who was trying to hand themselves in nine years ago, and you never got out of your delusion?'
'You don't.'
Another pause. Barney wondered if Frankenstein just smoked to fill the significant silences.
'And why is it that people start getting murdered the second you turn up anywhere? Could it just be that Barney Thomson isn't the innocent fool, continually caught up in extraordinary circumstances, that everyone started thinking he was? That under the serial killer mask, lurks another serial killer?'
Barney was not going to be fazed by the flick of the detective's switch, jokey light-hearted conversation to serious accusation.
'Is that you doing a schizophrenic good cop/bad cop routine yourself?'
'Yeah, it's a great technique, don't you think?'
'If only you had the right guy.'
'Every guy's the right guy,' said Frankenstein, keeping up the snappy, West Wing-type quick-witted one-liners. 'You just have to figure out what it is they're guilty of.'
Having allowed his gaze to drift away, down past the farm and out to sea and the island, the same longing path that Proudfoot had followed an hour or two earlier, Barney now turned back to Frankenstein.
'And what if they're not guilty of anything?'
'We're all guilty of something, Mr Thomson, even if it's just hanging on to our rented DVDs for a few days too long.'
Nothing else to say, and not of a mind to exchange the kind of banter that it would take a team of twenty-two American scriptwriters a couple of brainstorming sessions to arrive at, Barney lifted a subdued hand and then started walking slowly away in the direction of his forlorn gaze. Back down the hill, time to return to the shop.
'Maybe I'll come and speak to you later,' said Frankenstein. 'A more formal chat. Don't be going anywhere until that happens.'
'Spoke to your sergeant already,' Barney threw over his shoulder without turning.
Frankenstein watched him go, letting him walk off back down the road. Another long draw on the cigarette, and then this time he tossed it into the grass and pressed it down with his foot before it was halfway done.
'Crap,' he muttered to himself.
A Row Of Disease
Barney arrived back at the shop to find a queue seven long. He hadn't seen a queue like this since his days back in Partick, when people would queue for hours to get their hair cut by anyone but him. There was a guy under the scissors of Keanu MacPherson, while Igor vigorously swept the floor, something he did accompanied by frequent suspicious glances thrown the way of the packed bench.
As Barney entered and took a swift look along the queue, he realised that three of the men had already obviously had their hair cut, and that none of them were islanders. These people weren't here to be on the receiving end of any barbering services, yet they weren't policemen. It was worse.
Journalists.
'Barney Thomson?' said four of the men at the same time.
Barney glanced at Keanu, who shrugged apologetically.
'Thought they were genuine customers,' he said.
'It's no problem,' said Barney.
Then Keanu approached, holding his scissors at a non-combative angle, and whispered to Barney, 'I'm making them all get a haircut and charging them double.'
Barney clapped him on the shoulder and indicated for him to return to the cut, then he nodded at Igor, who was looking very concerned about the whole thing. Finally he turned and looked at the journalists, wondering as he did so what the collective noun actually was. A pack? A herd? A horde? A scrotum?
'Clearly you're not all here for haircuts,' said Barney.
There was a brief hiatus, as the pack waited to pounce, before finally one of them failed to hold in the full force of his ejaculate.
'You are Barney Thomson, the mysterious and sinister Glasgow barber surgeon from a few years back?' cried one man.
Barney looked into the man's eyes, then slowly lowered himself into the barber's chair opposite the ferment. And with that, the first shot being fired, suddenly the scrotum took full voice, every line intersected and overlapping another, a tumult of raw tabloid journalistic over-enthusiasm.
'My paper will give you twenty thousand for exclusive rights.'
'Thirty thousand!'
'Thirty-five!'
'Did you kill the old woman?'
'What have you done with the two missing fishermen?'
'Does death follow you around, or are you the harbinger of death, or are you the executioner himself?'
'Exclusive interview, on your terms, I'm authorised to offer you seventy-five g's.'
'What does it feel like to plunge a knife into someone's eyeball?'
'Do you prefer murder or sex?'
'Have you ever slept with anyone famous?'
'Or snorted cocaine off women's breasts?'
'Talk to us and we'll take you to a secret hideaway, free food and booze for a week, women too if you want, plus one hundred grand, conditional on you spilling all the celeb hairdressing dirt. Have you ever done Justin Timberlake?'
The questions continued, a great morass of journalistic mince, all munged together. Finally, when he heard through the quagmire of absurdity the question, 'What's with the mute, deaf hunchback? He must be guilty of something, just look at him!' Barney finally snapped, stood up and clapped his hands.
The
torrent stopped. Everyone stared at him, poised, wondering which gargantuan offer he was going to take.
'I'll tell you what we'll do,' he said, thinking of something on the spot, which was bound to fail. 'No money, no exclusives. You've got the wrong guy for that. You get one question each. No follow-up. I'll choose the order, use your question wisely. If we're in agreement, let's start. If we're not in agreement, then it hardly matters. We cool? Good. You, first from the left.'
The guy appeared a little taken aback at being asked, then he regained his composure, re-asserted his id, and said, 'How many deaths have you been directly responsible for in your life?'
Barney looked through the guy, right through his head, right through the wall, through the police incident room next door, and on and on. The gaze never ended, never came to rest on anything.
How many deaths had he been responsible for? Three was the answer. None of them murders, as such, but three all the same. It was a long time since he had felt the blood of any of them on his hands. Now, however, he felt as if he was drowning in the blood. Even in that of the infamous Brother Steven, who had killed over thirty monks before Barney had put an end to his reign of terror as they'd struggled over a gun in a snowy, far north wilderness. The man had been an insane, psychotic, delusional executioner, but as Barney sat looking at the row of journalists before him, he could see the face of Brother Steven in amongst them, smiling and relaxed, in that nonchalant, Jungian way of his. If Jung had been nonchalant.
'Be cool, Barn,' he could hear Brother Steven say, 'we are all one egg, remember?'
'None,' said Barney firmly. 'No murders,' he added, just to give some element of truth to the answer.
The pack hurriedly jotted down their notes, most of which were comments on how obviously Barney was lying, each writer making a guess at what they thought was the true answer. Barney pointed at random to a guy at the end of the line, barely in his twenties, absurd facial hair that was still some years away from manly cultivation.
'Is it true your mother was a serial killer who ate her victims? And is it true that she wrote a cookbook around her human recipes, substituting chicken for human flesh, and that she became quite well known in Scotland as a celebrity chef before the discovery of her true homicidal nature?'
'That was about six questions,' said Barney, the answer to most of which was no. 'Which one is it you want to ask?'
The man with fusty facial fungus hesitated, then said, 'The one about the cookbook.'
'No,' said Barney, 'it's not true.'
He swung round and pointed to the guy getting his haircut. The element of surprise.
'You?'
Right enough, the man hesitated. Didn't really know anything about Barney Thomson, had just followed the crowd.
'Were you involved in the death of Lady Di?'
'Not directly,' said Barney, 'although I did once cut the hair of someone who said he was the MI6 agent responsible for spiking her driver's orange juice with a lethal cocktail of alcohol, drugs and wine gums.'
'You're kidding?'
'That would be a second question,' said Barney.
He spun back round and pointed to another guy.
'The moon landing?' the bloke said, also seemingly caught unawares, 'true or false?'
'The flag was blowing in the wind,' said Barney. 'Next?'
He pointed, curious as to where this was going. With the first two questions had he stumbled across the only two journalists who knew anything about his past? And the second the thought had formulated, he knew it was a thought he was about to rue.
'Regardless of what's true and what isn't,' said a man in the middle, a guy who, like all the best investigative journalists, looked like a policeman, 'isn't it time you stood trial for the various murders of which you've been accused? Isn't it time you had your reckoning?'
Barney stared at him. Something else he hadn't thought about in a long time, not since he'd tried to hand himself over to the police and had been rejected. And he had no answer for it. Sure enough, he was long overdue in facing up to the past, although it seemed like some higher force had decided that now was the time, regardless of the police, regardless of the press.
'I'm not running,' he said eventually. 'The police are next door, they know where to get me.'
'And I thought you were dead?' said the penultimate guy, not waiting to be asked.
'And seriously,' said the last guy, 'what's with the deaf mute hunchback? It's like dredging up the most absurd cliché you can think of. Weird serial killer guy. Deaf mute hunchback. What's with you?' he said, pointing at Keanu. 'Deranged, misplaced weirdo? Seriously, really, this place is like some sort of X-Men scenario, all these weirdoes in one place. It's not a barber shop, it's a freak shop.'
Barney had an Ally McBeal moment, imagined picking up Igor's broom, yielding it like Obi Wan with a light saber, and launching a brutal attack on the row of journalists. The pack. The herd. The disease. The disease of tabloid journalists.
Instead he walked slowly to the door and opened it.
'Time's up,' he said. 'Go and write your stories. I'm sure you'll make most of it up anyway.'
'But my hair's not finished,' wailed the guy in the seat.
Barney glanced at him. Right enough, there was a clear discrepancy between the hair around the right and the left ear.
'Go,' he said. 'Go to Wullie in Largs, he'll finish you off. Though you might want to stick with the look, it distracts from the enormity of your nasal passages.'
Cheap. But Barney enjoyed it. And it had the bloke looking in the mirror.
'Out!' barked Barney.
As the pack rose, they could hear footsteps charging along the road towards them, and they all knew that these were footsteps which were not going to go running by. The barber shop was the hottest place in town. Barney turned, just as another man arrived, out of breath, clutching a notebook and a cardboard cup of decaf machiato, with a clip-on lid.
'Tommy Turner,' he said to Barney, 'the Express. Is this the weirdo freak shop with the psychotic slaughter-junky barbers and the vampire wolfman cleaner?'
The Parting Of The Waves
Later that afternoon, once darkness had fallen, Barney and Igor ended up sneaking out the back door of the shop. The journalists had left the premises, but had not gone far. They had waited outside and nearby, as had a growing collection of the public. Word had got around about all the bizarre characters who worked in the freakshop.
While being concerned for his friends, Keanu was actually quite enjoying it, his main worry being that there was nothing terribly interesting about him that would allow him to live up to the others. He felt too normal. I need, he was thinking, to develop some sort of fake characteristic to keep the punters amused. There's nothing worse than being the normal one. You might as well change your name to Zeppo Marx and retire. Or invent that thing that Zeppo Marx invented, and make lots of money.
Keanu opened the shop door and stood on the step, looking out at the massed collective, creating the diversion that Barney and Igor needed in order to escape the flaming torch mob. He had no idea what he was going to say. Back of the mind thinking about Zeppo and what it was that he'd invented which had earned him his millions.
'Where's the serial killer and his deranged, deformed sidekick?' bellowed a voice from the throng, as they began to close in.
Keanu breathed deeply. This was it. His fifteen minutes. He'd tried the blog and not many people were reading. He'd applied for Big Brother and not got close. He'd auditioned for Pop Idol and been embarrassed. He'd written his screenplay and been ignored by Scottish Screen and quickly rejected by the BBC. But what really mattered more than anything else, more than talent or ability or confidence or balls, was luck. Here he was, in front of the nation's media, a curious public beside them, and it bore no relation to anything that he himself had achieved. A mysterious trawler, a brutal murder.
Luck.
'They'll be out in a minute,' he said. Which was true. If they weren't alread
y out. Just not out front. 'They're prepping,' he added.
'And who are you?' came a voice from the back.
'Like, my name is Keanu MacPherson,' said Keanu, holding the palm of his hand up in the classic alien spaceman greeting. 'Agent MacPherson,' he added suddenly, having just thought of something cool.
The questions quickly rose to a great clamour. Agent? Agent of what? Death? FBI? God? MI5? Serious Crime Squad? Avon?
Keanu spent some time trying to quieten the crowd, as if he was refusing to answer until he was given some space. In fact, he had no idea what to say next. Agent?
The door next to the barbershop opened and DCI Frankenstein appeared, flanked by a couple of officers. A quick glance amongst the throng and he spotted the television cameras. Couldn't be too heavy-handed then. Keep it simple.
He had a commanding presence. Quickly the noise settled down, the tumult was extinguished, as they waited for the leading investigating officer to make a statement. The cars which were backed along the road, due to the fact that the crowd were spilled all over it, stopped beeping their horns. An uneasy silence descended.
Frankenstein suddenly felt very powerful. Maybe I don't have to say anything, he thought. Might be best, given that what comes out will inevitably be expletive-laced, which doesn't make anyone look good on TV. So he lifted his arms and signalled the opposite pavement, in a slow but dramatic movement. He repeated the gesture, and then, as the crowd started to file back he waved to the queue of cars to start moving along the road, which hurried the exodus to the other side of the street. The crowd spread out along the promenade and the public element of it at least, took the hint that the police were here and that nothing much else was going to happen, and started to disperse. It was dark and none of the day trippers really wanted to spend the night in Millport. It was time to get the boat back to the mainland.
The journalists hovered with intent, but they were getting to the stage of needing to write their stories up, and for all the silencing aspect of the police presence, there was still a great story that required little embellishment. Not that embellishment would be a stranger to the following morning's papers.
The Barbershop Seven: A Barney Thomson omnibus Page 150
