The Barbershop Seven (199 page)

Somehow the question found a way in.

'Two fried eggs, bacon,' said Barney.

Andrew nodded. He glanced at the other table to ascertain whether more toast was required, and then turned quietly away and out of the breakfast room.

Barney sat in silence. The three journalists had fallen into tranquillity. A soporific calm, born of the morning and the food and the warmth of the sun. A melancholic calm. A car drove past, but somehow even that seemed muted and lethargic, a fleeting nod in the direction of a life outside the walls of the room.

Barney buttered a piece of toast, the sound of the crunching knife filling the room. One of the reporters heard the crunch, reached for some toast, and discovered a minute after Andrew had gone that more was required.

He caught the eye of one of the others at the table, then the three of them shared a look. But they weren't thinking about toast.

Sometimes they work in packs, sometimes as individuals against the rest. This was a tailor-made pack situation.

'You're not Barney Thomson, are you?' said the guy sitting nearest to Barney.

Barney looked up, having had his head down, immersed in thought and food and a cup of tea.

'Who are you?' he asked brusquely. Already defensive, even though he told himself that defensive was not going to help him in this situation. If anything, it would make matters much worse.

'Evan Blikla,' he said. 'Daily Telegraph. I mean, I'm freelance now, but you know how it is. They laid me off, now they pay me per article, and of course it costs them much more and I earn a lot more. Suits me. These other guys are more or less the same. It's how it works these days.'

'Why did you feel the need to tell me all of that?' asked Barney.

'Background information,' said Evan Blikla. 'Seriously, you're Barney Thomson, the serial killer?'

'I'm Barney Thomson, the bloke,' said Barney. 'I've never killed a cereal in my life.'

'Have you been questioned by the police in relation to the two murders on the island?'

'Two murders?' said Barney. 'Does that include the dead crew member of the trawler?'

There was a moment's hesitation from the three, and then one of them pointed his pen at Barney, a pen which he had produced from nowhere, along with a notebook. In order to write down one word in every three, before rearranging those words into an order of his choosing.

'Smooth, Barney,' he said. 'Almost as if you're not responsible.'

'Were you abused as a child?'

'Do you see yourself as some sort of avenging angel of God?'

'What's your favourite part? The look on their face just before they realise you're going to strike them down, or the first scream of agony, torture and despair, and the realisation of inevitable death?'

'When you disappear for years at a time, do you go to Darfur and the Congo and that kind of place, where you can kill at will, and you just blend in with everyone else?'

'I've been authorised by my newspaper to offer you eighty-five thousand dollars for exclusive rights to your story.'

'Don't even think about it, we can go to ninety-five.'

'Name your price,' said the third.

Footsteps in the doorway. Andrew was there, armed with a rack of toast and a fresh pot of tea. He looked sternly at the window table. The three members of the press corps looked sheepish, little kids standing in front of the headmaster.

'Are they bothering you, Mr Thomson?' he asked, without taking his eyes off them.

'Aye,' said Barney, 'but I can take it.'

Andrew looked harshly at each of the members of the journalists ring.

'I'll not give you your toast,' he said.

'Sorry,' said one of them in a small voice.

'Yeah, me too.'

The third one had been well versed by a succession of editors in never apologising. He nodded his head and stared at the floor. Andrew walked forward and placed the toast and tea on the table, then turned slowly, raising his eyebrows in a gesture of solidarity with Barney. Barney shrugged and smiled his appreciation.

Andrew left, but a word from a strong man was all that had been needed. Barney ate the rest of his breakfast in peace. However, once they had demolished the fresh toast, which didn't take long, the journalists dispersed and scurried away in search of electronic notebooks and laptops and a quiet place to take to their cell phones.

––––––––

B
arney took to the hills behind the Stewart Hotel and cut along to his right, up amongst the gorse bushes, out of sight of the road below. Wearing a coat, the collar pulled up high, and a hat pulled low over his ears. A cold morning, but no harm in at least marginally disguising himself.

In no rush to get to the shop, but he had no intention of not going. It was time to face up to his next fifteen minutes in the sun. Get it over with and let them move on to the next poor sod. He came out up the farm road, just opposite the bowling green, intent on going down along Howard, right down the hill at Church, turn right at the bottom to the shop. A quick route. Knew that he was going to have to talk to the police this morning, and that in fact it might be better just to go straight there and get it over with, but he wanted to go to the shop first. Force his way through the crowds, if he could, speak to Keanu and Igor, sort out a few things, and then hand himself over to the police next door and see what became of him. Assuming the police would take him. Frankenstein did not seem the knee-jerk, jump-to-conclusions type.

He turned the corner onto Stuart Street, striding confidently. Wondering how many people would be waiting outside the shop, and determined to confront his fate head-on.

No one. Stuart Street was as busy, or as deserted, as it usually was at this time on any other morning in November. Barney felt the force of the wind and quickened his stride. He was trying to be cool, trying to be George Clooney, unsurprised by anything, but he seemed to be failing, literally at every turn.

He got to the shop some twenty minutes after opening time. He opened the door to find Igor sweeping up and Keanu cutting the hair of one of the town's old regulars, Ginger Rogers. Another of them, miserable old James McGuire, was waiting on the bench.

Barney closed the door behind him and looked curiously around the assembled company.

'You're here at last,' grumbled McGuire, not one to be short of a complaint. 'You don't think it's murder on my acute vertebral scolorium to be sitting on this bench? If you can call it a bench. It's more like two bits of wood stuck together with broken glass.'

'I'll be right with you, James,' said Barney, taking off his coat and hat. 'Quieter than I expected,' he said to Igor and Keanu.

'Arf!' exclaimed Igor, obviously surprised but pleased to see Barney.

'Spent the night at the Stewart, getting my head together. Not that I even remotely achieved my objective.'

'I got here just before eight,' said Keanu. 'Thought I'd open up before there was too much bedlam. I was too late of course. It was like nineteen eighty-five Madonna fever, you know. It was like the Beatles arriving in America. Except of course, I wasn't the Beatles, I was Gerry and the Pacemakers, and America didn't want to see me. So I got in here, a couple of folk came in feigning interest in getting their hair cut, but you know, mostly folk waited outside. Then, about fifteen minutes ago, word got around that there'd been another murder, and like, you know, like wham, they were gone, man. Totally gone.'

'I heard about that at the hotel,' said Barney. 'Old man Koppen. I don't know, it wasn't like he...'

'No!' said Ginger Rogers, bursting with information. Barney stopped what he'd started, which was gathering his tools together to cut the hair of McGuire.

'Oh, there you go,' said McGuire, 'give the man pause why don't you? As if I haven't been waiting long enough to get my hair cut. At this rate I'll be looking like Alice Cooper before I get anywhere near the barber's chair, and God knows what all that extra weight on my head will do to my neck muscles.'

'Who is it this time?' asked Barney, unconsciously reacting to McGuire by sorting out the comb and scissors and getting the cape ready.

'Ward Bracken,' said Keanu. 'Been dead a couple of days they say. Killed during the storm. Old Thomas Peterson just found the body this morning when he went round to borrow his TV. And you know what Peterson's like. That's him screwed for the rest of his puff.'

Barney let out a long sigh. Ward Bracken. Another of the ancient collective that made up the town, and now another one of them who was dead.

'Come on,' he said to McGuire, 'you're up.'

'I heard Bracken had had his head chopped off and put on top of the TV while he was watching porn,' said Ginger Rogers, with some relish.

'That was Koppen, you eejit!' exclaimed McGuire, as he took his place at the big chair. 'Bracken had had a small explosive device placed inside his ear that literally blew his head off.'

'Come on, fellas,' said Keanu, 'stop making stuff up.'

'Arf!'

'It's bad enough as it is,' said Keanu. 'Three dead, each with a beautiful clean cut of an axe.'

He hesitated and then decided not to say anything else. A gruesome moment, when he realised he was matter-of-factly discussing the grotesque, as if talking about the previous night's television. This was real, it was horrible and it was people they knew.

'Arf,' said Igor quietly, and he went back to sweeping the floor at the rear of the shop, his hunch seeming to drive him a little bit lower than he already was.

Barney started to cut the thin hair on the top of McGuire's head, the gentle click of the scissors now loud in a shop suddenly brought to silence. Barney had seen and heard too much of this in his life. Ginger Rogers felt slightly abashed, even though he had endless stories from the Ardennes in '44 which seemed to him to have some correlation with the horrific events now taking place in Millport. Keanu had sunk into sullen silence, recalling the fact that he had cut the hair of both of the male victims. This kind of strange event held no end of ghosts for Igor.

McGuire, however, was not so perturbed.

'Make sure you do a good job up there now. If you get sent off to prison, this is going to have to last me a long while.'

Barney caught his eye in the mirror. The door opened. He turned slowly, somehow having forgotten his mauling in that morning's press, expecting it to be just another old geezer wanting a Josh Lucas or a Leonardo.

Detective Sergeant Proudfoot closed the door behind her against the cold November wind. She looked at Barney and nodded sympathetically.

'It's time,' she said.

Barney stood back from his cut. Probably for the best, he thought, although he didn't think for a second that it was going to take him away from the weirdness which was now enveloping his every day.

'Typical,' said McGuire. 'Here I am, getting the best haircut I've probably ever had in my life, and along come the polis to completely mess it up. I'm shocked. I don't think I've ever been this amazed. Really, I'm stunned. I cannot believe that I'm sitting here and something bad has happened to me.'

Barney caught his eye in the mirror and silenced the sarcasm.

'Have I got time to finish cutting the miserable remnants of this gentleman's hair?' asked Barney.

McGuire gave him a look, but it was more dumb acceptance and acknowledgement of the remark, than insult.

'Your young friend there can finish him off,' she said. 'You'd better come now.'

Barney hesitated, scissors poised above the crusty old napper of James McGuire, and then he turned and laid down his implements and smiled at Keanu.

'He's all yours, son,' he said.

Barney washed his hands, dried them slowly, and put on his coat. He turned to look at his friends in the shop, realised that they were all watching him. Igor, Keanu, McGuire and Ginger Rogers. Watching him. Viewing the last acts of the condemned man. They had all read the papers that morning, mostly with a large bout of scepticism, but equally aware that a man cannot have that kind of public pillory heaped upon him without the police being seen to be doing something.

And as he got ready to go, not one of them in the shop felt for a second that Barney would ever be back.

Igor approached him, stood before him for a second. Wanted to hug the man, his friend. He had been grudgingly accepted in this town before, but Barney had been the first person to truly treat him as an equal. Not knowing what to do in this unfamiliar, emotional situation, Igor held out his hand. Barney shook it and smiled, and then pulled Igor towards him and embraced him.

'I'll be back soon enough, my friend,' he said. 'I haven't done anything wrong.'

He patted Igor on the back then disengaged. Could sense that there were tears in Igor and didn't want to put the man through that. He walked quickly to Keanu, shook his hand.

'You'll stay on until I get back?' he said.

'Of course.'

'Good. Igor's in charge, though, OK? I want no power struggle in my absence.'

He smiled at the joke. Keanu couldn't raise the smile to join him.

'Of course,' he said again.

Barney clapped him on the shoulder and moved away. He embraced the two customers with a quick look. Ginger Rogers was already thinking of the story he could tell around town, of the day they came to get Barney Thomson, a tale that was quickly becoming more Butch and Sundance than the mundane reality of this non-confrontation.

'See you guys,' he said. 'You're in good hands.'

'Take care,' said Ginger Rogers.

'Aye,' said McGuire. 'And watch you don't get shagged up the arse in prison. And watch they polis, bastards the lot of them.'

Barney clapped the old guy on the shoulder as he walked past him, then held out his hands in a gesture of capitulation to Proudfoot.

'Here,' said McGuire from behind him, determined that sentiment would not intrude into any part of his life, 'watch my collar bone, you know how much gyp it gives me.'

'Right,' said Barney, not hearing the last of the old man's complaints, 'I'm all yours.'