'I'm lost,' said McLeod.
'The princess here,' said Crow, 'is more of a prince, you know what I'm saying?'
He smiled. McLeod swallowed and looked at her. It wasn't like he was some provincial clown who didn't know such things happened, he'd just never thought. Soo Yin was pretty damn hot after all.
Luke McGowan, however, was about to be sick.
'What?' he croaked.
Strachcaln was silent, having discovered the truth a few weeks previously.
'I've had the operation!' squealed Soo Yin, threatening to throw a tantrum.
'Your girlfriend here,' said Crow to McGowan, 'is a katoey. She was born a man, and at some stage she's had the old snipperoo, you get me? We went down to the Thai consulate today, checked out a few things about her. Bit of a past as well, eh, princess?'
The breath caught in McGowan's throat. Things like this didn't happen in Strathpeffer. He was going to be the laughing stock of the entire town. Already, Theodore Wolf was laughing.
'Very good, Agent Crow,' said Strathcaln, 'but it doesn't make her a murderer.'
'Come on,' said Crow, 'one of the students picked her for what she was. They'd been in Bangkok recently, they knew the score. She was scared they'd let her secret out. Hell, maybe they threatened to blackmail her. So she killed 'em. You want to take her in, Sergeant, get the samples. You know they're going to match.'
'Soo Yin?' said Strathcaln, turning to his wife.
Discovering that your wife is a prostitute and a murderer at the same time is always going to be something of a shock. Good thing he already knew she'd been a man.
'It's preposterous,' she said, looking around for some implement or other that she could use to murder everyone in the room.
'What about the vicar?' said McLeod.
'Hell, who knows?' said Crow. 'Catalogue Girl here probably had some reason or other for wanting rid of him.'
'Stop calling me that!' she snapped at Crow. 'He refused to pay me. Twice! He deserved everything he got.'
'Soo!' said Strathcaln, beginning to be a bit devastated, to be honest.
Soo Yin had already checked out the door, and the impediment of Agent Cameron. Acting quickly, she grabbed the nearest implement to hand – a large brass sculpture of Sandy Lyle winning the '88 Masters, and very handy for bashing people over the head – and swung viciously before her as she headed for the door.
Cameron ducked and expertly caught Soo Yin with a punch to the guts, a brutal blow which brought her to her knees, and she collapsed on the floor with a grunting eruption of breath, dropping Sandy Lyle in the process. Cameron stood over her, while the rest of the audience looked on in horror/amusement/revulsion/curiosity, dependent on their point of view.
'I'm finished in this town,' said McGowan wretchedly.
Strathcaln stared down at his wife. Today he'd hoped to clear his conscience about the sex change with the Reverend Wilson. No wonder Soo Yin had been so against coming to see him.
'There's more to it, James,' she said desperately, looking up at him. 'Much more.'
Such as how a wee woman like her had managed to murder four strapping students, and how she'd got hold of Igor's scissors.
He hesitated, but he did not care to know what the rest of the story might be. His was the real disgrace, not McGowan, not anyone else who might have slept with his wife. He reached inside his pocket where he kept the, until now, pointless little handgun that he carried everywhere with him. Crow and Cameron both saw the movement, but they hadn't been expecting it. Not here. With one smooth movement, as if he had been waiting all his life for this moment, he brought out the gun, shot Soo Yin with one perfectly aimed bullet in the forehead, then turned it on himself and blasted off the back of his head before anyone could make a move to stop him.
The blood from Strathcaln's head exploded over the room, catching the jackets of both Igor and Theodore Wolf, then his body collapsed in a great thudding heap against the sofa.
Soo Yin lay dead on the floor, face upturned, dead eyes open; the eyes that had once looked upon the world as a man.
The others had all taken a step back at the explosive end to this little drama of revelation, and immediately Crow felt regret at creating the artificial scene which had allowed Strathcaln to murder his wife before they'd had the chance to gather all the facts.
'Arf,' said Igor, a fitting epitaph.
And man, that's all she wrote.
Epilogue
The police arrived in force almost immediately afterwards, thirty strong, but the drama was over. Barney hung around in the throng of people for a while, one of many, waiting for his chance to get out of Dodge. He was briefly interviewed by a constable from Dingwall, and then he was released to the masses.
As he was walking slowly from the house he came across Legal Attaché Lara Cameron, standing by the door. One last chat, one last aimless dance around the issue of vague attraction.
'You off?' she said, as he was walking by.
'Aye,' said Barney, stopping.
'Where to?'
Barney looked up at the cold, grey afternoon.
'Don't know,' he said. 'Inverness probably.'
'What'll you do?'
'Not sure,' he replied. 'But sometimes you just have to bite the antelope on the arse.'
'Right,' she said.
They looked at each other one last time until Barney nodded and walked on down the garden path, feeling her eyes on the back of his head. Then he was into the small crowd of spectators, policemen and vehicles out on the road and was lost from view.
And off he walked along the road, his bag slung over his shoulder. As itinerant as Theodore Wolf, but with a lot less money.
*
Later that afternoon, Damien Crow returned to the Touchstone Maze. The dark had long arrived, and he was moving from stone to stone with a large torch when he finally came across what he was looking for.
In the thirteenth stone starting from the centre of the circle, a folded granite gneiss, there was a hole, a few inches across, which ran through the side of the rock. And deep inside the hole, pushed up against the stone so that only the most exacting of searches could have uncovered it, he found a small piece of paper, folded into a tight ball.
He had great trouble dislodging it, even after he had discovered its existence, in the end having to carefully use a small branch collected from the forest.
Once retrieved, he straightened out the note and shone the torch upon it. It was square, a few inches across, the paper yellowed and worn by time. There was one line, handwritten in a tiny scrawl:
And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slaughtered for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held.
'Shit,' he muttered. 'These damned people have always got to bring religion into it.'
Then he pulled a small plastic bag from his pocket and carefully placed the paper inside. He switched off the torch, looked around at the cold forest in the dark of an early evening in the Highlands in Scotland in winter, then turned and began the walk back down into the town.
###
The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson
If you enjoyed The Face Of Death, you may also enjoy The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson, book one in the Barney Thomson series; also available in The Barbershop Seven, a bargain-priced omnibus edition of all seven full-length Barney Thomson novels
Barney Thomson — awkward, diffident, Glasgow barber — lives a life of desperate mediocrity. Shunned at work and at home, unable to break out of a twenty-year rut, each dull day blends seamlessly into the next. However, there is no life so tedious that it cannot be spiced up by inadvertent murder, a deranged psychopath, and a freezer full of neatly packaged meat. Barney Thomson's uninteresting life is about to go from 0 to 60 in five seconds, as he enters the grotesque and comically absurd world of the serial killer...
The Barney Thomson novels
#1 The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson
#
2 The Barber Surgeon's Hairshirt
#3 Murderers Anonymous
#4 The Resurrection Of Barney Thomson
#5 The Last Fish Supper
#6 The Haunting of Barney Thomson
#7 The Final Cut
Also by Douglas Lindsay
Novels
Lost in Juarez
The Unburied Dead (DS Thomas Hutton #1)
A Plague Of Crows (DS Thomas Hutton #2)
We Are The Hanged Man (DCI Jericho #1)
Barney Thomson Novellas
The End of Days
The Face Of Death
Barney Thomson, Zombie Killer
Short stories
The Case Of The Glass Stained Widow (DCI Jericho)
Santa's Christmas Eve Blues
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The Face Of Death (Barney Thomson) Page 6
