The Long Midnight Of Barney Thomson (3 page)

Barney had little reply, as he was already almost at the cusp of his knowledge; so he lurched into his usual silence. All that waiting for nothing. Feeling spurned, he hurried through the rest of the haircut, managing to stop himself cleaving off several feet of hair emanating from behind the right ear.

Five minutes later, the Sad Man handed over his cash, an extra fifty pence included, and walked out into the light drizzle of morning feeling like Robert Redford.

Barney watched him go, shaking his head with every step. If he ever got to run the shop he would have a sign put in the window.
Customers Must Have Hair
. He sneered and looked at the waiting area. The next customer up, he shuffled his razors and contemplated whether or not to mention the fact that he knew Rangers were five points clear at the top of the league.

*

The day dragged on, following its usual course. Barney only cut about half the amount of hair as the other two, partly because he was a lot slower, partly because few people sought him out in particular ahead of the others. It wasn't until late in the afternoon that he felt able to broach the subject of football again, and with an almost mathematical inevitability he was caught with his pants down.

It was a big bloke, a labourer from a site down by the Clyde. He was wearing a Scotland top, making Barney feel confident in starting a football conversation. Once again he bided his time, then chose his moment with a flourish, foot firmly in mouth, when all else in the shop was quiet.

'What d'you make of those Rangers, eh?' he said, not quite as cocksure as before, but still with a glint in the eye.

'What about them?' growled the Scotland strip.

Displaying the kind of blinkered enthusiasm which allowed Custer to stop for a KFC and a doughnut at the Little Big Horn, Barney failed to spot the warning signs.

'Five points clear at the top of the league. Some team, eh?'

The Scotland strip grunted. 'They're shite. Lost their last three games now. Pile of pish, so they are.'

Barney hesitated, but he bravely determined to battle on, like the German tanks in the Ardennes, until he ran out of fuel.

'Aye, but you know, five points clear at the top of the league. Can't be bad, eh?'

'They're still shite. They're only five points clear at the top of the league because everyone else is even more shite than them.' He looked at Barney. This was a man who ate babies. 'What do you know about football anyway?' he growled.

Barney swallowed, scissors trembling in his hands. Unable to think of an answer, he quickly resumed some gentle snipping, a layer of tension now descended on his little area of the shop. For once he did not dither over a cut and, while ensuring that he did not make a hash of it, sent the Scotland strip packing as quickly as possible. He left with a grunt and all his change in his pocket.

As the door closed behind him, and Barney breathed a sigh of relief, Wullie laughed and spoke to him for the first time since twenty-five minutes past eight that morning.

'If you're going to tell someone how good the Rangers are, try not telling a Celtic fan next time, eh Barney? We don't want a riot in here.'

He laughed again and was joined by everyone else in the shop. Barney, suitably embarrassed, retreated to the hiding place that was his natural reserve, and plotted his usual plans of revenge.

Bastards. They were all bastards.

He looked out the window at the massive figure retreating into the distance, and dreamt of him falling into a manhole, breaking his neck.

The rain thundered down with ever greater intensity. The skies were dark; occasional ferocious streaks of lightning rendered the clouds. The street lights were already on, fighting a losing battle against the gloom. Barney bent low over his brush, sweeping with slow deliberate strokes, and thought of dark deeds. Deeds to match the weather. Deeds which fate would force his hand to commit within the week.

3

The Lure Of The

Flashing Blue Light

It rained all the way home. It always rained all the way home when Barney had to walk back from the shop. A phone call to the garage at four o'clock had produced the usual mutterings about a 'big job', and an estimated time of readiness of sometime the following morning – and so he had stepped out into the raging torrent without even making the effort to cover up. Head bowed, spirit broken, besieged by ill humour.

He lived in a top floor flat in a tenement at the university end of Partick, one of the old houses, with huge rooms, and ceilings higher and more ornate than the Sistine Chapel. The kind of place which years ago had fostered a warm community spirit, but no longer in such times as these. Barney viewed all those around him with varying degrees of contempt and suspicion – his neighbours were no different.

He hung his soaking jacket on the hook behind the door and trudged wearily into the kitchen. Agnes was making an uninteresting dinner, with one eye glued to a prosaic Australian soap on the portable television. As Barney clumped in, Charlene was having a fight with Emma's sister's ex-boyfriend's girlfriend Sheila, who was pregnant by Adam's gay lover Chip.

'Good day at work, dear?' she asked, her eyes never leaving the television.

He grunted, took a glass from a cupboard, went to the fridge and poured himself some wine from a carton. Chilean Sauvignon Blanc, flinty with a hint of apple; good length; full breasted; serve with fish or chicken, or perfect as a light appetiser. He took a long and loud slurp and belched. Put the back of his hand to his mouth in some affectation of manners, then pointed at nothing in particular.

'You know what really pisses me off?' He looked at her expectantly, assuming her interest, although long years of indifference should have told him to expect otherwise.

'What, dear?' she said eventually.

'It pisses me off, all these bastards,' he waved his hand, ''scuse the French, who come in there every day and insist on one of they two wee shitbags cutting their hair.' The voice rose a fraction in agitation. 'I mean, do these people, these bampots, actually think that Wullie or Chris is going to give them a better haircut than I am, eh? Eh?' He stabbed his finger in the air, unintentionally pronging a passing fly.

'Yes, dear,' she said. Troy had finally told Charlene that Cleopatra was pregnant by Julian.

'Exactly. I mean,' he continued, slight bubbles of froth beginning to appear at the side of his mouth, a string of spit suspended between top and bottom lip, 'how long have these two been cutting hair? Five, maybe six years. All right, maybe ten for Wullie. So what? Look at me. Twenty years I've been cutting hair,' he said, scything the air with his hand in time with each syllable, 'and I'm bloody good at it.'

'Yes, dear.'

'Bloody right. And look at those two muppets. They couldn't cut the hair off a…off a…' He searched the air for a suitable analogy, finding it as Charlene slapped Tony in the face and told him that there was no way that she and Beatrice could be half-sisters, '…they couldn't cut the hair off a drugged mammoth. No they couldn't. Bloody useless the pair of them. You know what they do?'

'Yes, dear?' She wasn't listening, but the tone of his voice had wormed its way into her subconscious, so she knew to sound inquisitive.

'I'll tell you. They just bloody talk about football all day. As if it's important. Who gives a shite about football? It's a lot of pish. Or that Wullie just stands there and comes out with all sorts of garbage. Did you know,' he began, attempting an impersonation of Wullie and missing by several miles, 'that Cary bleeding Grant had an affair with Randolph Scott? Big bloody deal! As if anybody's going to believe that shite. I mean,' he said, rising to his subject, while his voice descended to Churchillian depths, 'I mean, look at all that's going on in the world. The country's going down the toilet. There's wars and strikes and death.' He clutched the breast of his shirt with his right hand. 'What's happening to the Health Service? Transport? Eh? What about that stuff? There's some bloody heid-the-ba' running about Glasgow slashing folk and cutting them up. What about that? What's the bloody polis doing about that? And what do they two talk about? Football!'

'Yes, dear.' Charlene was now convinced that Troy and Beatrice were having an affair and that Bethlehem wasn't her brother, while some savoury pancakes which Agnes had magicked from the freezer twenty minutes earlier, quietly burned on the stove.

Shaking his head and grumbling in a low voice, Barney polished off the glass of wine and began pouring himself another.

'Where's my dinner?'

'Programme'll be finished in a couple of minutes, dear.' Had Bill really lost his voice, or was he just doing it so that Charles wouldn't realise that Emma still loved Tom?

Barney grunted loudly and wandered off into the sitting room. He flicked on the television, found the snooker on BBC2 and within five minutes was sound asleep.

*

The rain struck relentlessly against the window of the dingy little office. Detective Chief Inspector Robert Holdall stared gloomily at the water cascading from the gutters outside and wondered what other disasters could befall him. As he had occasion to do most days, he tried to remember what it was that had made him want to be a policeman in the first place. Action, adventure, glamour, women. Obviously it'd been none of that, so what had it been? A vague desire to fight the forces of evil? Something like that. He'd had the thought in the past that it was because of the sixties Batman TV series, and had spent a lot of time since persuading himself that it wasn't that at all. That would be just too sad. Thwack! Biff! Blam! Love your tights...

The lure of the flashing blue light, that was all. Just the lure of the flashing blue light. He could be driving an ambulance.

There was a knock at his door and a young constable walked into his office. Not long removed from school, the dregs of adolescent acne still clinging wildly to his face, barnacles to a boat. He closed the door behind him and stood before Holdall, nervously awaiting the invitation to talk.

'Constable?'

'Sir. The results from the lab are negative, sir.'

Bugger.

Why are you thinking
bugger
, Holdall? Of course the results are negative. You're not dealing with an amateur here. You're dealing with some seasoned killer who knows what he's doing. And who's intent on mocking you every step of the way.

'All right, Montgomery.' He wondered as he said it if this really was Constable Montgomery. 'Will you ask MacPherson to come in here, please?'

The constable nodded and disappeared back through the door, leaving a trace of Clearasil in the air. Holdall leant back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, his feet up on the desk. Where did they stand?

Five murders. No corpses, just body parts mailed through the post to the victims' families. Never anything from the package to help them trace the killer. Always postmarked from a different town in Scotland; always a note sent to the police at the same time, each one more laden with derision than the one before. When he caught the guy, which he was sure he'd do, before going through the formalities of making the arrest, he was going to kick his head in.

The door opened and Detective Sergeant MacPherson walked into the room. He was a big man, who had in his day played full-back for West of Scotland, but after being sent off for the eleventh time had decided to save his brutality for the job.

Holdall watched him as he entered the room. He liked him, enjoyed the Barbarian pleasure of working with him. It made him feel safer, if nothing else. And for all his brawn and thuggery, he was a good man. Intelligent with it.

'Take a seat, Sergeant. Won't keep you long. I presume you'll be wanting to get home.'

MacPherson shrugged his giant shoulders. 'There's some football I wouldn't mind watching. It's not that important.'

'That English Premier league stuff?'

'Aye.'

'Don't know how you can be bothered with it. Seems like a load of shite to me.'

He looked away from MacPherson, took his feet off the desk and swivelled round, so that he was side on to the other man. MacPherson knew what was coming, sat and waited patiently for it. Another examination of the facts. Another run through the salient information. Another drive down the road to nowhere. They were in exactly the same place they had been since the first murder, and all there was for them to do was talk. However, he understood Holdall's need to do it.

'Roberts tell you about the lab report?' said MacPherson.

Roberts! Bugger. That was it. Who was Montgomery? Felt a slight redness in his face as he remembered. WPC Eileen Montgomery.

'Aye, aye he did,' said Holdall, shaking his head. He put his hands down, clasping them on his stomach. Felt like he should be giving some leadership to the investigation, but the tank was empty. He had no ideas.

'Where does it leave us, Sergeant? Where are we at?'

MacPherson considered.

'We're in a pile of shite,' he said.

Holdall smiled. That was just about right.

MacPherson continued his recap of events.

'We're nowhere. We've got some eejit running around Glasgow committing indiscriminate murder, then visiting other parts of Scotland to send back a slice of body. No connection between the victims, other than that they've all been men. Don't know if there's any significance to that. Certainly doesn't appear to be a gay thing, and hard to imagine a woman doing all this stuff. But you never know, can't rule it out. Not these days. Anyway, nothing to link the places the body parts have been getting sent back from…'

'Which have been?'

'Pitlochry, Edinburgh, Kingussie, Largs and Aberdeen. We've checked out hotel guest lists in those places for the nights that the packages were posted, but there hasn't been anyone who stayed in more than one of them. We've spoken to everyone from Glasgow who stayed overnight in these towns on the relevant dates, but they all had their reason for being there, and there was nothing suspicious. There've been a few people that we can't trace, and it could be that he left false names and addresses, but it could also mean nothing. There's no reason why someone couldn't have got the train to any one of they places and back again in the same day.'