The Barbershop Seven (165 page)

'How are you getting on?' she asked.

'Struggling to find a specialist,' answered Barney.

She slurped noisily at her tea. Igor gave her a scything look.

Maybe, thought Barney, they'll have done that thing where they put the words ghost and busters into a thesaurus and come up with something completely different, yet the same.

He started thinking of names and flicking through the book.
Spectrerupturers
.
Spookbursters
.
Spiritbreakers
. (There was indeed an entry under
Spiritbreakers
but it turned out just to be an advert for the Labour government.)
Phantomthrashers
.
Phantasmsmashers
.
Apparitionbashers
.

He closed the book and looked at Ruth and Igor, who were both staring at him. She's depending on you, Barney, he thought, you need to come up with the goods. Of course, all the woman needed to do was go along to one of the local ministers on the island. But they were all men.

'Arf!' said Igor suddenly, eyes wide.

Barney stared at him and for some reason that neither of them could explain, immediately understood what he had just said.

Wraithwreckers
!

Barney turned quickly through the pages to the W's, and there, as if by some sort of divine intervention, was the small advert, the only listing in the section headed Wraithwreckers.

www.wraithwreckers.com

Lose all those annoying

ghosts today!

Call the Reverend Merlot Tolstoy!

Tel.: 09988 888 8888

'Merlot?' said Barney, looking up. 'That sound like a woman's name?'

'Arf!' replied Igor in the affirmative.

'I think so,' said Ruth Harrison, suddenly looking a bit more positive.

'Okay,' said Barney, 'I'll give it a try.'

He reached over to the phone and dialled. Igor watched him intently, Ruth stared at him, her mouth slightly open, letting in flies. Barney felt bizarrely like a presenter at the Eurovision Song Contest, dialling up Moldova or Serbia & Montenegro to find out how their judges had voted, while the audience waited with breaths stalled.

A couple of rings.

'You're through to
Wraithwreckers.com
, this is Merlot Tolstoy speaking.'

'Hello,' said Barney, 'my name's Barney Thomson.'

'Mr Thomson,' said Merlot Tolstoy, 'how can we be of help to you today?'

The words spoke of American customer service values, the accent was very soft west of Scotland.

'Can I take from your advert,' said Barney, 'that you're in the business of getting rid of ghosts?'

'You certainly can,' said Merlot Tolstoy. 'We originally called ourselves
Ghostbusters
but we got sued for $17billion dollars by Columbia Tristar. So we've been through a few names since then, but we kind of like this one. Course, you're our first call in five months.'

'How many of there are you?' asked Barney.

'Only me,' she replied, no hint of embarrassment. 'I like to refer to myself in the plural to suggest a level of conglomeraticy.'

'That doesn't really fit with telling me I'm your first call in five months and that you work alone,' said Barney.

'We're still trying to get me on my customer service course.'

'To teach you how to lie convincingly?'

'Absolutely,' she replied.

'Isn't that a bit of a thing for a minister?' asked Barney.

Merlot Tolstoy giggled.

'You sound like my parishioners in Shettleston, but we always say, well the church has been lying for centuries about all sorts of things, so what are a few wee fibs over the phone?'

'Fair enough,' said Barney.

'So, how can we be of assistance to you today?'

Barney paused, thought of how this was going to sound.

'My friend's husband died on his way to the toilet two days ago. It seems he's trapped for eternity needing to pee and keeps padding back and forth to the bathroom.'

As he spoke, Tolstoy punctuated his words with
uh-uh's
and
yes's
and
mmm's
, and an '
oh yes, urino-poltergeistation.
'

'Then yesterday evening my friend inadvertently had sex with another friend of ours who had gone round to comfort her,' continued Barney, and both Igor and Ruth gave him a serious amount of eyebrow.

'Common,' said Tolstoy. 'Very common.'

'So now her husband's spirit isn't just dying to take a piss, he's also super pissed off and seriously haunting her, you know?'

'Yes, we understand,' said Tolstoy. 'We've read about cases like this in
Sport on Sunday
.' A slight pause, which Barney did not fill as he sensed there was more coming.

'We just have a few questions,' said the Reverend Tolstoy.

'Fire away,' said Barney.

'Has she sold the film rights?'

Barney smiled. It is the new millennium after all.

'Not as far as I'm aware,' he replied.

'Good,' said Tolstoy. 'We need a stipulation in our contract that in the event of a film being made with due regard to the story of the haunting or demonic house possession, that my character can only be played by Uma Thurman, Angelina Jolie or Kate Beckinsale. Any other actress being considered for the part has to be approved by me before the script can be shown to the said actress.'

Barney didn't immediately reply to that one.

'Do we have your friend's agreement?' asked Tolstoy sharply.

'I think you can make that assumption,' said Barney.

'It'll have to be firmer than an assumption,' she said.

'We'll sign the contract.'

'Good. Now, are you the friend?' she asked.

Barney looked at the phone again, shared his slight confusion with the other two.

'I said I was,' he replied.

'Aye, but are you the actual friend who slept with your friend?'

'Ah. No, there are an actual three of us, sitting here right now.'

'Does the house have a history of demonic possession?'

'Not as far as we are aware.'

'Have any brutal acts of malevolence ever taken place in the house?'

'Not that I know of.'

'Was the deceased interested in any way in the occult or any supernatural phenomenon of any description?'

'He was pretty straight, as far as I can tell.'

'Where are you?'

'Millport.'

Slight pause as Merlot Tolstoy checked her watch.

'We can be there in about an hour and a half, depending on the ferry crossings. Give me your number and we'll call when we arrive. You can direct me to the appropriate site of operations.'

Barney gave the number, the Rev Tolstoy
mmm
ing constantly.

'We'll need the widow plus four others,' she said crisply.

'Why?' asked Barney, wondering who he was going to rope in for this. Did Ruth Harrison have any real friends?

'We use a 5th century Aramaic exorcism ceremony, which itself evolved from an earlier Babylonian model. Of course, we've adapted it to comply with modern Christian theology but the point is that we require a circle of six. Is that a can-do?'

'No problem,' said Barney, on the basis that if the worst came to the worst, he'd always be able to rope in a couple of the old fellas from the shop, who could come along and stand drooling in the circle with no idea whatsoever about what was happening.

'Cool,' she said. 'We'll see you in around ninety minutes.'

'Cool,' said Barney, as usual going with the flow.

She hung up. Barney turned to the others and shrugged.

'She'll be here in an hour or two, depending on the ferry.'

Ruth dissolved in a pile of relieved mush and reached out to hold Barney's hand.

'Thank you,' she gasped.

'Right,' said Barney, 'we'll need to get you cleaned up and into a change of clothes.'

'I'm not going back to the house,' she said quickly.

'It's all right,' said Barney, keeping hold of her hand and settling her down. 'We'll go round to Igor's place, won't we Igor?'

'Arf,' muttered Igor, frowning.

'You can have a shower and we'll get you some clean clothes.'

He paused to think about whether he wanted to visit Ruth's house and face the spirit of her dead husband on his own, or whether he could just nip along the front and buy her a new outfit from the shop on the corner of Shore and Newton.

'We'll get you a new set of clothes,' he repeated, deferring the decision. 'Finish your tea and we'll get going. Igor, is your place all right or do you need to go home and clean it up before you have a female guest.'

'Arf!' barked Igor.

Barney held up his hand in apology.

'Sorry, my hunchbacked friend,' he said.

'Arf.'

Barney nodded a further apology for casting aspersions on Igor's cleanliness, looked at Ruth, then walked through to the front of the shop to do some thinking about who they were going to get to assist in the exorcising of Jonah Harrison.

––––––––

T
wo minutes back in the shop and Barney had two customers. James Randolph, no less, come to have his hair sorted out in the strange hope that it would also help him think more clearly, and another one in the endless line of old fellas who had retired to Millport some time in the previous thirty years.

After an initial wariness between the barber and customer, following their meeting the previous day at the house of Ruth Harrison, Randolph was now just struggling to stay awake. You know that thing which comes with getting your hair cut? The warmth of the shop, the murmur of low noise, the gentle hum of the razor, all on top of a late night and a glass or two too much wine. He didn't stand a chance. Still, he was preoccupied with murder and killing and death and had begun to wonder if there was some way that was used to kill animals which could be applied in some novel way to humans.

'Lambs,' he said suddenly, even though he was struggling to keep his eyes open, following on from a brief discussion on the fate of calves. 'How do they kill them?'

'Do they kill lambs?' asked the customer from the bench, a look of concern on his face.

Barney looked at him, then turned back to Randolph.

'Had a customer once,' said Barney, continuing to engage Randolph in conversation, 'a farmer. Here's what they did.'

Randolph caught his eye in the mirror. Barney could tell he was on the verge of falling asleep.

'You know those things you get in DIY stores to dispense Polyfilla and grout and stuff? A long tube, you push a plunger down from the top. It's a spring-loaded one of them. Metal. Pull it back, stick it at the back of the lamb's napper, let it go. The next thing the lamb knows it's snuggling up to some mint sauce.'

Randolph closed his eyes.

'That's why they call them spring lambs,' added Barney.

'They don't do that to lambs, do they?' said the voice from the back. 'They don't kill lambs? Not really?'

Barney and Igor glanced at each other.

'How do you think they get the lamb from the field onto the plate?' asked Barney.

'But lamb,' he said. 'I mean, I never really equated the two.'

'What did you think lamb was? Some sort of processed meat extract, which they just called lamb to give it a name?'

'But lamb! They don't call pig, pig. They don't call cow, cow. So why do they call lamb, lamb? I always thought, well I don't know, that it was something totally different.'

'Some other less cute animal?' suggested Barney.

'Yes.'

Barney stared at Thomas Petersen, gave a look to Igor and then turned back to James Randolph.

'Well,' he said, 'does that answer your questi....' and he stopped when he saw that Randolph's eyes were closed and the man had drifted off to sleep. Barney smiled to himself and lapsed into silence. The customer asleep, he could go about his business without prejudice or interruption. The ideal situation. So he snipped quietly away at an area behind the left ear and wondered why the man had bothered to bring up the subject in the first place.

***

T
en minutes later, James Randolph awoke with a start. He straightened up and looked in the mirror, established his bearings, realised that he'd fallen asleep in the middle of a haircut, then got his head around the fact that the very vivid dream from which he'd just emerged was exactly that. A dream. A dream in which someone had just been murdered.

Barney dabbed at the back of Randolph's jumper with a brush. Randolph rubbed his hands roughly over his face as he hurried through the dream, committing it to memory before it faded.

He started to smile. He had been an observer in the dream, standing outside a lone house on the side of a hill. Dusk, the sea below, the last gulls of the day crying to the departed sun, the sound of the wind bustling around his head. He had looked in through the sitting room window into a house he did not recognise. And there he had watched a killer and his victim, and he had watched the victim die a most singular death.

The smile broadened. Was it a new kind of murder which he had just witnessed? Probably not, but it was interesting and it was different. Different enough, he felt sure, to impress Bartholomew Ephesian for the first time in his life.

Still, he would have to do a little research, and where better to start than the barbershop?

'Everything all right for you, sir?' asked Barney, administering the final brush down.

'What d'you know about stomach acids?' said Randolph suddenly, looking at Barney in the mirror.

Barney recognised that the wheels were turning, that here was a man with a plan. He himself had developed a nose for murderous intent and this was what he was seeing in James Randolph.

'Nothing,' said Barney. 'Nothing at all.'

'There are acids in your stomach?' wittered the concerned customer from the back.

Randolph took in Barney's gaze for another couple of seconds, and then turned away and stared into the mirror. A fine haircut, the hair of a man who was about to mean business for the first time in his life. Get home, a cup of tea, and then he could spend a short while on-line as he established exactly what he needed in order to commit the crime which he had just witnessed in his dream. And then he would be set to execute the murder as laid down by Bartholomew Ephesian.