The Barbershop Seven (193 page)

'Satellite?' said Barney.

Bernard held up a pair of binoculars.

'So, what are you doing?' asked Barney.

Fred turned and looked at the boat which they had tied to the dilapidated jetty. A rowing boat, laden with five barrels.

'We're setting a trap,' said Fred.

Barney almost turned away but decided that he really needed to stand here and find out what was going on. When constantly presenting yourself with the reality of your past, perhaps it was best to break it up with the complete surrealism of the present.

'To catch the killer,' said Deirdre, aware of the sceptical look on Barney's face. 'We haven't decided yet whether to call him the Trawler Fiend or The Incredible Captain Death.'

'The Trawler Fiend?'

'Sure,' said Selma. 'Tonight, after dark, Bernard and the Dog With No Name will pretend to be fishermen. They'll work down here at the boat, until the killer comes along.'

'The Incredible Captain Death,' said Fred.

'Exactly,' said Selma.

'That's insane,' said Barney. 'The guy who killed Nelly Johnson chopped her head off. It was horrible. Why give him this silly nickname? You make him sound like a character out of a kid's TV show. Some mad old fool, goofily searching for his grandfather's treasure. He's a killer'

'Like, that's why he's got Death in his name!' said Bernard.

'Or Fiend,' added Deirdre.

Barney looked quizzically around the gang. Shook his head, shrugged.

'You were telling me your brilliant plan,' he said, deadpan.

'How do we know that you're not The Incredible Captain Death disguised as a mild-mannered barber?' said Deirdre.

The Dog With No Name sat at Barney's feet, looking up, tongue out.

'You do have a bit of a history after all,' said Fred.

'What?' said Barney.

The wind had changed. Colder, coming down from the north, over the island, sneaking up coolly on Millport from behind. The small, barrel-laden boat bobbed against the jetty. The skies had grown darker as Barney had walked, but he had been so absorbed in entangling his mind in knots of remorse and introspection, that he hadn't noticed.

He felt the chill now, however. The wind, the sea, the murky skies.

'Like, we know all about you, friend,' said Bernard. 'The manslaughter, the death, the bodies in your mother's freezer, all those groovy dead monks, Murderer's Anonymous. It's totally whacked, man. Like we're never seen anything like it, have we Dog With No Name?'

The dog barked.

Barney was aware of the beating of his heart, but it didn't crash and thrash and threaten to burst through his chest. He could feel it slow down, settle into a declining rhythm, as if it might be eventually going to stop. And as it slowed down, it seemed to rise in his chest. A slow ascent up his throat. Not leaping into his mouth, just slowly working its way out, so that it would soon lie dead on the floor.

His past wasn't just coming back to haunt him; the past was three hundred thousand orcs at the gates of Helm's Deep, and Barney was alone on the walls.

Fred clapped him on the shoulder.

'Don't be alarmed, Barney old buddy, we're MI6. We know all kinds of shit.'

'Sure we do,' said Bernard. 'What we don't know is, like, where's the best place on this island to get a fried banana burger with mayonnaise and chocolate sauce?'

The dog barked again, wagging its tail with gastronomic excitement.

'There are no secrets,' said Fred, his hand still squeezing Barney's shoulder, 'only certain things that we don't yet know about each other. We were checking you out last night, with our trawler in the mist ruse. That was all a scam. We're full of them. Hey, maybe if you don't get killed on this gig, you might want to think about coming to work for us.'

Barney's heart had begun to speed up again, had begun the slow crawl back into position. There are no secrets, only certain things that we don't yet know about each other... How many times had he heard that one in the shop? Well, essentially, none, but that level of absurd tangential gobbledygook was commonplace.

'I'm going to go,' he said slowly. 'Still got a lot of walking to do. Thinking.'

Fred let go of his shoulder and took a step back.

'Sure, friend,' he said, 'but you don't need to worry. We won't tell anyone, we can keep a secret.'

'Yep'

'Sure.'

'Like, totally.'

Barney looked at them all and then turned slowly and walked back through the long grass, back up onto the path. He still had a long way to go, and the journey would take him much further than the ten and a half mile walk around the island. When he was a few yards away, he stopped and looked back at Bernard.

'Try the Ritz. They might make you your burger.'

'Like, thanks, pal!'

––––––––

P
roudfoot didn't go straight back to the police incident room either, although she didn't go for as long a walk as Barney Thomson. Almost at the door, and then she had a sudden vision of her chat with Frankenstein and having to explain where she'd been and to whom she'd been talking. She didn't need that.

She turned abruptly and walked back along the front and up the hill. Working on something in between a whim and a hunch. A whunch. She thought of the word as she passed the farm. A whunch. Made her smile. She could use it to Frankenstein and it would be something else to cover up her absence. Particularly when her whunch came to nought and she was returning to the station empty handed.

She reached the graveyard and turned in through the gate. Stopped for a second to look back down the hill; the island of Little Cumbrae, the sea and the mainland, Arran and Bute. It was beautiful, the starkest of contrasts to what she had had to endure that morning in Nelly Johnson's front room.

She thought of the photograph she'd seen of Bill Johnson. Bill on a boat, about to cast off from one of the endless small jetties which dotted the coast of the island, and which no one ever used any more. Except MI6. Bill grimacing at the camera. Trying to smile? Annoyed at the photographer for taking the picture? Had there been a story about the late Bill Johnson, that was what she was wondering.

As it happened, the story of Bill was brief and insignificant. A minor part in the diamond smuggling ring, then his place in the operation, such as it was, gratuitously grabbed by Nelly upon his death from heart failure the previous April.

Proudfoot walked along the main path of the cemetery, looking up and down neat rows of headstones, the simple, unadorned remembrances of the dead typical of the people. Nothing elaborate, no one trying to outdo the next grave along. Austere, minimal, honest.

She took her time, glancing along the lines, reading the epitaphs on some of the end-of-the-row headstones. Margaret Patterson, Born 1856, Died 1893. Much missed mother of seven. At the bottom end of the cemetery, near the far fence, there was a man standing by one of the gravestones. From the overalls and heavy yellow coat she knew that it would be the gravekeeper, or a council worker with some similar designation, rather than a family member visiting a Dead Relative.

She wandered slowly over in his direction, past Mary Martin, a dear friend and mother, and David McTaggart, much beloved son and father. She came round the last row of stones and immediately saw what was keeping him standing still, staring.

He was a few feet back from a grave, so as not to be standing over the body. Assuming it was in there. The headstone was a plain granite rectangle. On the ground beside it there were some weathered and beaten flowers, which had been sitting forlornly in the same vase for six months. Stabbed into the ground in front of the grave was a simple wooden cross, on top of which a chicken had been impaled. Whether the chicken had still been alive when it had been skewered onto the top spike of the cross, it was impossible to tell. Either way, the chicken had not died with a smile on its face. Across the engraving on the headstone, words had been splashed in red paint: Reap the Bitter Wind.

Nelly's killer had been intent on doing a thorough job.

Proudfoot approached and stood beside him, looking down at the grave of Bill Johnson. The words, Here lies William Johnson, No Longer Alive, But Never Dead, had not been completely obscured by the paint. The guy didn't seem to have noticed Proudfoot's approach, yet he showed no sign of surprise at her arrival.

'Do you think it's paint or blood?' he asked, his voice deadpan.

'It's not blood,' she said quietly.

'How d'you know?' he asked, finally giving her a glance, and then he made another little noise and nodded. 'The policewoman. You've seen blood before.'

'Too often,' she said. 'You're the gravedigger?'

'Oh, you can't say that. Not allowed to use the word grave.'

'No?'

'It implies that the worker himself might be grave in some way. You know, sombre and unsmiling. Some of us Cemetery Earth Reallocation Employees are quite cheerful. I mean, obviously not me, I'm as miserable as shite, me, but that's what the directive said. The union held out for it, you know. It was a big thing. There was a paragraph in the Herald.'

'Right,' she said. 'What's your name?'

'Headstone Harmison,' he replied. A pause. She gave him a glance. 'Obviously I wasn't Christened Headstone, I mean, my mum and dad would have had to be showing some amount of prescience for that, although of course, if they had Christened me Headstone, then you could never know if I'd drifted into this line of work because they'd pointed me in that direction. My real name's Morris. Everyone knows me as Headstone. You have to accept it in this line of work. And when your second name starts with an H, you're an absolute sitting duck for the alliterative aspect. It's like my mate up in Clarkston, Graveyard Gillingham.'

He paused briefly and Proudfoot made the rookie error of not jumping in when she had the chance.

'Then again, there's the fella over in Largs. Sam Tarrantino. You'd think they'd call him Tombstone, but everyone knows him as Mr Brown. Don't get it myself, but he's not really a friend of mine anyway. When I see him I usually call him Sammy. A bit over familiar, but that's one of my things. Over familiarity. Puts some people off, but I always say that you just have to take people as you get them. I am what I am.'

'When did you find the chicken?' asked Proudfoot, taking a leap at a millisecond of clear air.

'The chicken?' said Headstone, seemingly surprised that she'd want to ask about it. 'About half an hour ago. It wasn't here this morning. I was going to lunch, managed to fit in a half hour break sometime after twelve. Must have been done then. Like, I was just sitting in the shed, but my back was turned, head down in the trough, TV on, the whole distraction thing, it's not like I'm paid to guard this place, you know, and then after that I was working down at the other end, the new section over there, where we put the urns and stuff, nothing specific just general maintenance, then I got a call from Tully Banta down at the Kendall, and he said about Nelly Johnson. Bit of a shock, but it wasn't like there wasn't a queue. So I got to thinking about old Bill, and wondering what kind of state his plot was in, and if there was space beside it for Nelly, you know, how it's going to work. I mean, it's not like I don't know all these graves by heart, and Bill's not been in the ground all that long, but I came up here just to have a look anyway, and as I was walking up I thought to myself, here, is that a chicken? That is, that is a chicken!...'

He talked on. Proudfoot switched off. She had a few more questions to ask, but essentially she knew there was nothing much else that Headstone Harmison would likely be able to tell her. She brought her phone from her pocket and took a few quick photos of the headstone and the chicken, and then she took a photo of Headstone himself as he seemed keen for it to happen.

She turned away from the little scene of demonic indulgence and looked back down the hill and out to sea. Suddenly felt the chill of the graveyard, and the chill of the absurdity of someone who would kill a chicken to leave a warning, and who would scrawl a catchphrase in fake blood on a tombstone. Headstone's voice drifted in and out of her head, a dreary monotone, his conversation a continual polemic never destined to reach any destination or conclusion. '...made out of granite, because that's what most of them did, but of course these days people are stretching the boundaries because that's what they do and last week I heard someone talking about kicking the dead whale up the beach, but to be perfectly honest I had no idea what they were talking about...'

Eventually, although no gap in his conversation ever really appeared, Proudfoot patted Headstone on the arm and began to walk slowly away from the grave. Shook her head at her own forgetfulness, stopped and held a hand up for him to take a breath. He looked at her expectantly, surprised that anyone would want him to stop talking.

'We'll need to get a couple of guys up here, forensics, that kind of thing. They'll be here in a few minutes. Don't touch this thing, don't tidy it up. Close the graveyard, don't let anyone in before the police arrive.'

'Well, that's all very well saying that Detective, but there are some, like you know, Mrs Waverley, who comes up here every single aft—'

'Headstone,' she said firmly, 'I'm telling you, don't let anyone in. That's it. I could call it in and wait, but I feel like walking back down the hill. I'm trusting you here. If it helps, imagine that I'm making you my deputy. Until reinforcements arrive, you're in charge of the crime scene.' She reached forward and gripped his shoulder. 'Deputy Harmison, secure the area.'

Headstone Harmison saluted.

'Yes, ma'am,' he said. The poor lad had been watching a few too many American movies.

'Thank you,' said Proudfoot, then she turned and walked slowly back through the graveyard. Away from the desecrated grave of Bill Johnson. As she walked, she smiled at the thought of Headstone Harmison, but slowly the smile died. Just like all the poor souls who lay beneath the ground in this, the latest crime scene in her career. Couldn't stop herself glancing at the graves as she passed.