The Barbershop Seven (204 page)

At the third table were the people he had come in here to see. Three men in the thick dark blue sweaters of Caledonian MacBrayne, the shipping company. The captain amongst them was evident by the fact that he was older and possessed a carefully quaffed Captain Birdseye white beard.

'Evening,' said the man behind the counter. 'Not many people out tonight.'

Frankenstein looked around the shop, aware that everyone except the speed-writing journalist, was eyeing him suspiciously.

'Why is that?' asked Frankenstein. 'Must normally be busier than this at this time?'

'Well,' said the guy, 'it's the fog. Thick as soup, that's what they're saying. Thick as the fog the other night, when the crew of that trawler vanished, that's what they're thinking. There's a lot of people scared around here. Scared.'

There was a noise from the kitchen. The quick-fingered tap-tap from the computer. Some strange piece of kitchenware gurgled and rumbled somewhere out back. One of the crewmen slurped noisily at a still too-hot cup of tea. The woman smacked her lips noisily over her bacon sandwich.

'Watch yer falsers, Mabel,' said the man, self-consciously.

'It's just a fog,' said Frankenstein.

'Aye, it's a fog all right!' said the captain, suddenly from the table. 'And there's a killer out there waiting to get anyone stupid enough to go out in it. The Incredible Captain Death, the Trawler Fiend, call him what you will.'

Frankenstein stared deadpan through the café. Deadpan. Inside he was completely gobsmacked, but generally he didn't do gobsmacked. He did deadpan. He was Bob Newhart, not Jim Carrey.

'You think there's a Trawler Fiend out there?' he said, because he couldn't think of anything else to say. There was a rustle to his right and the counter guy produced a copy of that day's Evening Times and laid it out for Frankenstein and Proudfoot to see.

Beside the gargantuan headline, written in small print to squeeze it all in, Trawler Fiend: First Pictures! Evil Green Monster Of The Deep in Cahoots With Barber Surgeon! Exclusive! was a picture of a giant lizard/dinosaur type of thing, about eight feet tall, walking on its hind legs, through a foggy, seaweedy sea shore.

Frankenstein was still gobsmacked, although he remained resolutely in Bob Newhart mode. He glanced round at Proudfoot who was staring at the picture. She caught his eye and shrugged.

'That's the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my life,' said Frankenstein.

'You may think it's stupid,' said Captain Birdseye, 'but that thing there chopped a man's head clean off with its bare claws.'

'And chopped another man's head off with an axe,' said one of the crewmen.

'And chopped a woman's head off with an axe 'n' all,' said the third.

'And,' chipped in the woman from behind her bacon roll, 'Mrs Clafferty says she reckoned it stole her underwear off her washing line last Tuesday.'

There was general murmuring of agreement around the café. The Trawler Fiend was capturing the imagination of the public, in an even more dramatic way than Barney Thomson had ever managed. These were dark days. The nation was slipping into hysteria.

'I know that these murders have been committed,' said Frankenstein. 'I've seen the bodies, I'm not denying anything. But this, this picture,' and he held it up so that they could better see it, noticing as he did so that everyone else in the café – except the hardworking journalist, who hadn't even noticed that Frankenstein was in the room – recoiled at the sight of the evil beast, 'is a man in a suit. What lizard walks on its hind legs like that?'

'It's not a lizard,' said the guy behind the counter. 'It's a Trawler Fiend. It's its own species, there are no rules. That's what it says in the article inside by an actual scientist.'

Frankenstein stared at him, still flabbergasted. Looked round at Proudfoot, who was at least finding the whole thing pretty funny. She took the smile off her face to nod seriously at him.

'Don't you start,' he muttered.

He turned, walked quickly up to the table with the three crewmen.

'Right you, I'm ordering you to start operating that ferry. We need to get back over there, right now.'

The captain bit meatily into a hearty sandwich.

'You don't control me,' he said, spitting food onto the table. 'I don't take any orders from the police. You can speak to HQ, if you want, if there's anyone there this time of night, but you know what? Even then, I'm still not taking the ferry out. Not in this fog, not with that...thing, out there. The union'll back me, I know they will. To the hilt. They did it before when the Jetty Monster was at large.'

And there was another low grumble of discontent around the café at the mention of the Jetty Monster.

'Fuck me,' muttered Frankenstein. 'Fuck me.'

He turned, held his hands out in exasperation at Proudfoot.

'Right, Sergeant, can I ask you to put a call through to our HQ. Let's not even waste time trying to sort out this shower of heid the ba's, just get a boat of some description down here as quickly as possible.'

Proudfoot nodded, took her phone from her pocket and turned to go outside to make the call.

'Coffee?' asked Frankenstein.

Proudfoot stopped, surprised.

'Sure,' she said, 'that'd be lovely. Cappuccino would be nice.'

Frankenstein grumped. Suddenly, behind them, the journalist rose in triumph, having written his two thousand words in under fifteen minutes.

'Finished!' he cried. 'Listen to this. Incompetent Police Stumped As Trawler Fiend/Barber Combo Cut Bloody Swathe Through Children's Holiday Resort.'

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B
arney looked at the old man who was sitting in the front passenger seat. The captain of the old trawler, Albatross. He had pulled down the visor and was inspecting his hair in the small mirror, flicking casually at the sides.

'Nice job,' he said. 'Been a while since I had a cut this good. Might have a chance with the ladies now, what d'you think?'

He winked at Barney in the mirror. Barney was pale, trying to be cool. How many ghosts did he have to encounter before he felt comfortable in their presence? If this was a ghost. Just a guy in a mask, he told himself. A guy in a mask. Why did he even have to be wearing a mask? Get a grip, Barney! It was just a guy.

'I still owe you money,' the old man said, then he tapped his pockets and shrugged. 'Sorry. Maybe next time.'

Finally he turned and looked Barney in the eye. The smile remained, but now there was an edge. The harmless, quiet, bordering on genteel buffoonery was gone. It was all in the eyes.

'To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible punishment so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.' He paused. The smile never wavered. 'Still cutting hair, Barney?'

Barney shook his head. Trying to retain the cool which had been his for a few years now. Yet he was aware that it had been an accidental nonchalance. Had he strived to achieve it, it would never have happened. You can't force unflappable serenity. And now he was aware that he was turning back into the man who had once dully haunted the window end of the small barbershop in Partick. Unsure of himself, lacking in confidence. Nervous. He wanted the old new Barney back.

The old man reached out to tap Barney on the knee. His hand passed right through Barney's leg. Barney pressed back against the car seat. The old man laughed, a light, airy giggle.

'Only messing with you, Barney,' he said, and this time he tapped Barney's knee firmly with his hand and sat back. 'Life is full of choices. But you don't make them without consequences, that's all. Every junction you come to there's a right and a left. But it doesn't matter which one you choose, you have to live up to your decision. Ain't too often you can go back.'

The old man seemed to eat Barney up with his stare. His eyes didn't just burrow into Barney's head, didn't just read his thoughts. They consumed him, condemned him with every unblinking second. They reached into him and grabbed his soul, dragged it out, screaming, from the pits of his body.

Barney closed his eyes, a long, deep breath escaped from him, his body expelling everything that it could. It was no use, eyes closed, eyes open, the old man's gaze tore into him, ripped him open, laid him bare.

'You made a pact with the Devil, Barney Thomson, and it's time for you to pay your share!'

The car door opened. Barney opened his eyes, the words wrapping around his head like barbed wire.

'Barney, come on,' said Proudfoot. 'I'll get you a coffee.'

Barney stared back at her. Dry mouth, nerves shredded, heart thumping.

Cool? Was there any vestige of cool left within him? The unruffled imperturbability which had come so naturally for the previous few years, which had defined his personality for so long, had now been torn apart, every ounce and inch of it ripped piece by piece and thrown in the gutter.

'You're looking terrible, Barney, you all right? Come and get a coffee, come on.'

Barney opened the car door, soul shredded, on auto-pilot. Started walking across the road to the café. She fell in beside him.

'Thought I saw someone in the car beside you,' she said.

He didn't answer. Having heard the story of his last few days, she felt a shiver down her back. She held Barney's arm just before he opened the door to the café.

'Ghosts?' she said.

Barney stared at her feet. He had told her everything up until now, but this? Had he made a pact with the Devil? Was that how he had managed to escape from justice for so long? He'd had genuine evil on his side, a dark angel at his shoulder.

Is that how pacts with the Devil are made? Unconsciously? In your sleep, in your dreams? In your nightmares? He thought back to the time when his life had first made the acquaintance of Hell. Two accidental murders on his hands, a host of brutal, calculated murders on the hands of his mother, which had left him with a freezer full of human flesh. How had he got through all that?

By accident, he'd always thought. By fortune smiling on him at the right time, by stumbling across the occasional cogent thought to help him through awkward moments. But maybe it hadn't been fortune which had smiled upon him. He remembered his dark half, the sensible, switched-on side of his brain, which had appeared from nowhere to ease him through the moments when he would have succumbed to the authorities. Had that been it? By listening to that voice, had that been the end for him? When he first sat back and let his darker half take over, let his darker half wrap Wullie Henderson's body up in black, plastic bin liners, had that been the moment when he had sold his soul to Satan for all eternity?

'Barney,' said Proudfoot, waving her hand in front of him.

He looked at her, the fear still in his eyes. He was being played with, and whoever was doing it, was succeeding magnificently. A life, a soul, sliced into slivers.

'You all right?'

'Not really,' said Barney, finally regaining some sort of capacity to communicate. 'My id has been completely fucked.'

'Your id?'

He nodded.

'You need coffee. Come on.'

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T
he fog was all consuming. Dense, dark, claustrophobic. Total. A brutal fog, nightmarish. The small police launch inched away from the pier at Largs. It had come from Ardrossan, just ten miles along the coast, but it had taken a long time to get there. Long enough that the café had cleared of people and then closed. Long enough for Frankenstein to be frustrated, and then angry, then incandescent with rage, then resigned, then worried that something had happened, worried that the driver of the launch had been taken by the killer. A fear he did not share with the others, as he sat in the car with Barney and Proudfoot, engine running to combat the cold.

When Sergeant Clifford Kratzenburg had knocked on the window of the car, the fog had become so thick that none of them had seen him approach. Stepping out into the mist, they realised that it had descended with much greater gloom even than when they had last been outside the car, and Frankenstein suddenly doubted the sense in trying to get to the island at this time. However, he now felt, as did Barney, that the fog was all part of this strange circumstance. There would be something happening in Millport that night, and there was little point in them being across the water.

And so now they edged quietly out into the firth of Clyde, inch by inch, the motor barely running. Making the direct run across the firth to the slipway.

Kratzenburg increased speed a little, keeping a close eye on the small radar system in the corner of the cockpit. Frankenstein sat beside him at the front of the boat, Barney Thomson and Proudfoot behind, close together, some solidarity in fear and unease.

They weren't necessarily scared of the actual killer. They weren't scared of being on the open sea in a dense fog. Had they discussed it, perhaps they couldn't have explained why they were so uneasy.

'Can you trust that thing?' asked Frankenstein, pointing at the radar. Felt some comfort himself in conversation.

'You want me to be honest, sir?' said Kratzenburg.

Frankenstein smiled. Who ever answered that question by saying 'no, make some shit up, I don't mind'?

'Yes, Sergeant,' he said, 'you can be honest.'

'It's a piece of crap. The whole boat is a piece of crap. Every bit of equipment in the police service is a piece of crap. But then, every bit of equipment is provided by the lowest bidder, so go figure.'

Frankenstein nodded. Kratzenburg applied a little more speed, although they were still slow. The boat eased through the calm waters, heading into total darkness, a blank wall of fog.

Behind them Barney felt Proudfoot's hand in his. He squeezed tightly.

'You all right?' she said.

'No,' he replied. 'You?'

'Have a horrible feeling of fear, right down to the pit of my stomach.'

'Me too.'

They squeezed hands again.

'Who was in the car, Barney?' she asked. 'I saw someone.'