'Arf,' he hissed quietly, indicating for them to fall in behind him.
'Like, sure, pal,' said Bernard, and he and the Dog With No Name filed in next to Igor against the wall of the shed and began to inch their way along.
'Like, Igor old buddy,' said Bernard a few seconds later, 'you didn't bring any food with you on this expedition, did you? We're starved!'
***
Barney, Frankenstein and Proudfoot came into town down the back road, coming onto the road at Kames Bay. Walking quickly, Frankenstein in the front, Proudfoot behind him, Barney at the back. They passed The Deadman's Café, saw the dim lights inside, realised it was still open. Frankenstein stopped, turned to the others.
'Anyone use a coffee?' he said. 'Myself, I need intravenous caffeine.'
Barney didn't wait for Proudfoot's answer, opened the door and ushered the other two inside. They walked quickly in from the cold, closing the door behind them. They stood inside and surveyed the surroundings. Deserted. Lights on, door unlocked, but the heating was off, the premises not much warmer than the cold, dark night outside. No customers, no one behind the counter.
'Alice?' said Barney.
Nothing.
He looked at the other two, their faces both showing the resignation and acknowledgement that here was another potential grim finding. The feeling of doom hung in the air, an air of portentous death that no sixth sense could miss.
'Alice?' Barney called, a little louder this time.
'You still need that coffee?' he said.
Frankenstein exhaled a pent-up breath, followed by a low curse.
'Fuck,' he said. 'This is all we need. Alice!' he called more loudly, then added, 'Who the fuck is Alice, anyway? The owner or the woman who does nights?'
'Both,' said Barney.
Frankenstein placed his hand firmly on the counter top and vaulted over it, landing awkwardly on the other side. Barney, more familiar with the place and now fully possessing the old nonchalance that had so deserted him the previous few days, lifted the counter top to the right and walked behind. Frankenstein gave him a look, then they both pushed through to the back of the shop.
Barney, in front, stopped suddenly, Frankenstein having to step quickly to the side to avoid walking into him. They saw the words written on the kitchen wall in blood before they saw the decapitated body.
Barney stepped back, two steps, hit the wall, couldn't go any further, although he did not leave the kitchen.
A soul for a soul, Barney Thomson!
The words were written in fresh dripping blood, each word beneath the other, Thomson written along the wall just above the work surface. Next to it, on the kitchen top beside the chopping board and an opened box of raw chopped onion, was the head of Alice Witherington, perfectly sliced at the neck. Placed so as to be the full stop in the giant exclamation mark
Her body lay on the floor. A pool of blood. Alice Witherington, who had spent so many happy nights in the den of thieves above the Incidental Mermaid, who had spent the last few days living in justifiable fear.
Frankenstein had moved on from his own personal fears. It was time for anger and determination. He walked forward, ran a finger rudely through the blood on the wall. Still fresh, still damp. Rubbed his forefinger and thumb together.
'Recent,' he said. 'The last ten minutes.'
'Should I come in there?' said Proudfoot from the café.
'No,' said Barney quickly. 'We'll be out in a second.'
'Shout out if you see anyone with an axe,' said Frankenstein acerbically, and could hear Proudfoot's exasperated groan from outside.
'So, Barney Thomson,' said Frankenstein, voice low, 'is this all about you? Murder follows you around?'
Barney said nothing. Murder did follow him around, but he didn't want to think for a second that all this blood was on his hands. He couldn't live with that.
Maybe that was the intention.
'Couldn't you go and live in England and have some of that lot murdered?'
Barney laughed, an ugly grunt of a laugh, in keeping with the ugly bloody scene in which they were standing.
'Deputy Thomson, consultant to the police service, this is as if they knew you were coming this way. It's done for your benefit. Where are we heading now? The boatyard maybe? Does that make sense? The whole town is between us and there. Are we going to find a murder in every establishment we pass? What d'you think, Deputy? What is your Dostoevsky up to?'
Barney had no answer. He had heard a rumour of the clandestine Incidental Mermaid club, but had no idea of why it existed and was completely unaware of what connection there might be between it and him.
'The faster we get there, the better,' he said, and turned quickly from the kitchen. Proudfoot was sitting at a table on the other side of the counter, her head in her hand, pale, beautiful, wondering how she had managed to walk into such a situation again. Why her? Why her, every time? Except that she kept on running into Barney Thomson.
Barney walked to the door, opened it once more back out to the mist and the lonely, desolate evening.
'We need to go,' he said to Proudfoot. 'I'm sorry, I know you need a break. We need to, and we can't leave you here.'
She gazed into his eyes, believed him, wanted to believe that he meant her no harm and that none of this was truly his fault.
'Who wants your soul, Barney?' said Frankenstein. 'You make a pact with Satan?'
Barney looked at him, stopped still in the doorway.
'Not that I know,' he said. 'But maybe we all have.'
He walked quickly out into the night, Proudfoot and Frankenstein behind him. Proudfoot at the back, trailing in the others' angry wake. She looked down and saw, in the dim light of the shop, the marks from Frankenstein's shoe, where he had stepped in the trail of blood that had been left from the decapitation of Alice Witherington.
Closing Time
Fred, Selma and Deirdre, crack MI6 agents, on the trail of a killer and a gang of international diamond smugglers, left the small seafront apartment which they had rented for the duration of the investigation, having just had another bout of pretty spectacular three-in-a-bed sex. Although, on this occasion it had been three-in-a-bath sex. A lot of water had ended up on the floor.
'That sure was fun, girls,' said Fred, as they stepped out into the cold night.
'It certainly was,' said Deirdre. 'I especially liked what you did with the empty shower gel bottle and that three litres of lighter fluid.'
Selma shivered.
'Jeepers,' she said, trying to switch her mind back on to the investigation, 'it sure is misty out here. I hope Bernard and The Dog With No Name are OK.'
'We said we'd meet them at the boatyard,' said Fred, stating a fact that everyone already knew, which was something which he did on a regular basis, and which the others generally found rather annoying. 'It wasn't so misty a while back, but I guess we were in that bath for a lot longer than expected.'
'Like, I'll say,' said Deirdre.
'I think we need to get to the boatyard as quickly as possible,' said Selma, always the first to get back to the business at hand.
They stopped on the street and looked around, assessing the fact that they couldn't see further than a few yards. They were just along from the crocodile rock, the other end of the front stretch from where they wanted to be, only a couple of hundred yards ahead of Barney Thomson, Frankenstein and Proudfoot.
'We need to stick close together,' said Fred. 'Girls, stay on either side of me and hold my hand. If you get detached, scream really loudly or something.'
Suddenly they felt it, rather than saw anything. A whooshing in the dense fog, something brushing past them in the night, a few yards away. They tensed, Fred pushing the girls behind him, staring intently into the fog. They could just make it out, the shape of the figure in black, as it seamlessly moved past them along the road, either oblivious to them or ignoring them.
'Like, shit, did you see that?' said Fred. 'That was a man in black. He must be like a b
ad guy. Let's get out of here!'
He turned and started to move off in the opposite direction, but Selma pulled his hand, making sure he wasn't going anywhere.
'That guy is going in the same direction as we want to, which means he might be going to the boatyard! We need to get there before he gets to Bernard and The Dog With No Name.'
Fred hesitated, then reluctantly nodded.
'OK,' he said, 'here's what we're going to do. We're going to stick together and run to the boatyard as quickly as possible. My guess is that the Man in Black knew we were here and just decided to completely ignore us.'
'But why?'
'I don't know, Deirdre. But someone's been misleading us on this case all along. There is no Trawler Fiend or Incredible Captain Death, just an evil guy dressed in black. I don't know who it is, but I mean to find out. Come on!'
And so, Fred, Selma and Deirdre headed off into the night, along Glasgow Street, only a few paces ahead of the unseen Barney Thomson and the two police officers for whom Barney was doing, so far, unpaid consultancy work.
***
There was a reason that the mysterious diamond smuggling cabal had met in a private room above the Incidental Mermaid pub, half way up Cardiff Street. The bar manager and occasional barman, Kent Carrington, was one of the ten. He was not, however, the particular one of the ten who was currently running amok through the town dressed in black and a Fyodor Dostoevsky mask. And so Kent Carrington had been living in fear for the past few days, a fear that would have been even greater had he known that Alice Witherington, his close confidante amongst the group, had recently lost contact with her head.
Dr Trio Semester turned away from the television screen and placed the empty pint glass down on the bar. It had been a long, slow night, watching Celebrity Get Me To The Toilet In Time!, Top 50 Celebrity Nose Job Botch Jobs, Most Amazing Celebrity Police Videos 7 and Celebrity I Hate My Clitoris! He had come back down to Millport to speak to Frankenstein about the case. He could easily have spoken to Frankenstein over the phone, but something about his wife made him want to spend as much time away from the house as possible, so he had engineered another away trip. That he had since become stranded on the island seemed an added bonus.
However, the town was completely dead, and he had found that everyone wanted to head indoors, put up the barricades and wait for the dawn. Not that he did not sense the danger himself, for he felt it with every fibre, but his way of dealing with it had been to get out and find company.
And so he had sat in the Incidental Mermaid for two hours, hoping that someone else would join him there. No one had. Two hours with only Kent Carrington for company.
Carrington, filled with dread, had chattered incessantly at first. Semester, however, was not one to put up with incessant chatter for an entire evening. So, after an hour of listening to Carrington burble randomly, badly articulating every single thought he had in his head, Semester had taken a bite out of the social bullet and told Carrington that he was going to have to shut up, because Semester was trying to concentrate on the celebrity rhinoplasties. Which he hadn't been.
The fact that he'd sat there for another hour was testimony really to his own desperation and unhappiness, and testimony perhaps to the even more uncomfortable truth that he was scared to walk back along to the hotel. The Stewart. He should have followed his instinct, ignored his years-old edict, and just drunk in the hotel bar.
Carrington had watched the TV, unable to concentrate, just grateful that there was someone else there with him. Believed, wrongly, that there might be some safety in numbers.
Finally, as the theme music to I'm A Celebrity, Pluck My Nasal Hair! finally faded into the adverts, Semester glanced round at Carrington, and Carrington waited fearfully to see if his customer was going to add to the three pints and four packets of crisps he'd already consumed, or whether this was him about to leave.
'Think I'll head on back to the hotel,' said Semester. 'Let you get on home.'
'No!' said Carrington, in a strange, high-pitched cry.
Semester looked curiously at him, then lifted his hand in a gesture of closure. And, at that moment, the door to the outside swung open. The men turned, Carrington buoyed at the thought that here was someone he could talk to. Someone to stop him being stuck in this wretched bar alone.
No one. The door swung on its hinges, creaked halfway back, and then stayed there. Open, letting in the cold of the night, the fog. The men stared at each other, then looked back at the door.
'Oh shit,' said Carrington.
Along with the dread cold evening, they could feel the malevolence sweep in, a tangible presence.
'We should close the door,' said Semester.
Neither man moved. They stood where they were, propped against either side of the bar, waiting. Semester found himself nervously drumming his fingers, mind in an instant battle. He saw death every day. Literally every day. Sometimes murder, sometimes heart attack, sometimes accident, but it always came his way. Why should he be afraid of it or anything that might cause it?
'I should go and let you close up,' he forced himself to say.
'Not yet,' said Carrington desperately. 'Just let me lock things up and I'll come with you. It'll be a bit Butch and Sundance. But not in any homoerotic way.'
Semester gave him a glance.
'I'm babbling,' said Carrington.
'Butch and Sundance weren't gay,' said Semester.
The words were barely out of his mouth when the door was suddenly thrown back, crashing into the wall behind.
The two men turned quickly, gaping at the sight of the masked man dressed in black.
'Fuck!' shouted Semester. 'Dostoevsky! That's not normal. Have you got a gun back there?'
Carrington shook his head.
'I've got lots of skooshers,' he said.
'You think we can spray the guy with tonic?'
'You never know what's going to defeat people,' wailed Carrington.
Dostoevsky raised the axe above his head, his left arm across his chest, in the same pose that had heralded the end of Sgt Kratzenburg, then began to walk slowly towards them. From behind the rubber they could hear a low, ominous laugh. Mocking, threatening.
'Give me a bottle!' shouted Semester.
'What of?' said Carrington, nervously.
'Anything, for God's sake, just give me a bottle!'
Carrington lifted the first bottle that came to hand. Fifteen year-old Glenlivet. Passed it over. Semester grabbed it from him then smashed it on the side of the bar. Glass and whisky sprayed. Carrington gasped, taking time out of his terror to be shocked at the appalling waste of a decent whisky.
Semester pointed the jagged edge of the broken bottle. He'd never used a bottle in anger before but at least had seen, on many occasions, the devastating effect to which they could be used.
'Come on then, you old Russian bastard,' he said loudly. Dostoevsky came upon him, but he was not here to murder the police pathologist. He had his list of suspects to take care of, Kratzenburg having been an added bit of fun, for the continuing benefit of Barney Thomson. Adrenalin pumping, Semester hoisted himself quickly up onto the bar. Carrington had backed off, nowhere to run, pressed against the glasses and bottles which fell around him.
Semester, suddenly full of brio and derring-do, leapt dramatically at the old man, but he did not even get close. Swinging the axe like a baseball bat, axehead turned down, Dostoevsky caught Semester full on the side and sent him flying away to his right, off the bar and crumpling into a heap on the floor, head cracking loudly off a heavy wooden table. He lay dazed and battered and bruised on the floor. He tried to lift his head, then the effort proved too great for him, and his face hit the floor once more and he passed into unconsciousness.
The killer looked across the bar at Kent Carrington.
'You must have known I was coming,' said Dostoevsky. 'I'm disappointed you didn't lay on more of a reception.'
'Well, can I get you a drink?' said Carrington. 'On t
he house?' he added, voice thin and nervous.
'In despair there are the most intense enjoyments,' said Dostoevsky, and he laughed again, malicious and low. Then he lifted the axe once more grandly above his head. Carrington's mouth dropped open. Nothing came at first, but as the axe hovered in the air with the expectation of the final, cutting blow, he cringed and cowered and found the strength to scream, a high, desperate wail.
The Temperature Of The Night
They heard it. The six people out in the street, in two groups of three, heading towards the boatyard. This scream, this cry of terror and fear, this wail that told of impending bloody and gory death, had travelled through the town, in every direction, almost as if the fog, rather than muffling the scream, conducted it, propelled it on its way.
And the people of the town of Millport, who had all sensed the terror in this awful night, crawled further under their blankets, and turned out any lights that were still on, and prayed that whoever it was who screamed such a terrible scream, was not someone they knew and loved.
'Come on, girls,' said Fred. 'Sounds like someone's in trouble.'
'It sure does,' said Deirdre.
They started to run faster into the mist, passing store fronts that they barely recognised in the gloomy, misty darkness.
'Stop!' hissed Selma, and she tugged at Fred's hand to slow him.
The three crack MI6 agents stopped dead, just by the closed doors of the amusement arcade.
'What's up, Selma?' said Fred.
'Listen!' she said.
They craned their necks into the mist, and sure enough, now that they had stopped moving, they could all hear it, the sound from behind. Footsteps, coming their way, following them.
'We're being followed!' whispered Fred, insomuch as he could manage a whisper.
'Oh my gosh!' said Deirdre. 'Do you think it's the Man in Black?'
The Barbershop Seven: A Barney Thomson omnibus Page 159
