Free The Face Of Death (Barney Thomson) by Douglas Lindsay

1
Barney Strolled Into Town, Booked Himself A Room In The Local Saloon
    ––––––––
    T here are two kinds of people in the world.
    There are those who have never accidentally murdered their work colleagues, discovered their mother is a serial killer, had to dispose of eight bodies, gone on the run from the police, hidden out in a monastery where the monks were murdered one by one, killed the monastery murderer and been allowed to walk free by the two investigating officers at the scene of the crimes.
    And those who have.
    *
    B arney Thomson walked into the small town of Strathpeffer at four o'clock in the afternoon. It was a little over three weeks since he had left the monastery of the Holy Order of the Monks of St. John. He'd done a lot of walking, and a lot of thinking. However, while his legs were turning into those of a honed athlete, his mind was turning into that of one of the lower invertebrates. So he had stopped thinking. From now on it would be his destiny to walk the Earth and get in adventures, meeting whatever came his way with a ready quip, a steely eye and a robust pair of bollocks. Nothing was going to faze him.
    He came into town on the Contin road, with the housing estates on his left. Down the hill past the churches and into the centre of town, where the old pavilion slowly crumbled in sad dilapidation, and every second building was a hotel.
    Strathpeffer reached its peak at the turn of the twentieth century when the Victorians came to bathe in the crystal clear, sub-zero waters. A branch line was added to the railway, hotels sprang up like cactus in the Arizona desert, and the local Highlanders mingled with royalty and the cream of London society in a wondrously eclectic mix. The Strathpeffer Gazette reported on the seventeenth of August 1893, that ' after bathing splendidly in the most glorious of cold waters for a matter of some three hours, Her Majesty Queen Victoria, 70, emerged so invigorated that she robustly fornicated with seven unwieldy but handsome Scotsmen, being rodgered pleasantly between the buttocks, and performing heartily and with the utmost gusto in a variety of the most singular positions, for what could only be described as thirty to forty minutes .'
    As the years had passed, and the majority of people heading north to cure themselves of all manner of aches and pains had failed to be cured, the cream of London society drifted away, the pump room and pavilion drifted to ruin, and only the hotels – some eight or nine hundred of them – remained to cater for the Highland tourist industry.
    Barney booked himself into a room in the Highland Inn. He had little money, but decided to treat himself to a night with a decent roof over his head, a couple of drinks and a proper meal. He exchanged a few words with the desk clerk – dressed in black – carried his small bag up the stairs to the room, let himself in and collapsed onto the bed, where he fell into the sort of troubled sleep which he'd been having for some weeks.
    He would dream of long and strange conversations with serial killers, where he himself would be a murderer, talking frankly of his victims, and how he intended adding to his collection. And he would always wake troubled and tired and wondering if it was to be his destiny to become the man of his nightmares.
    *
    T hat evening, the day that the bodies of the American students had been discovered, Barney walked into the bar of the hotel, plonked himself on a stool and stared glumly up at the vast array of whiskies on offer. He only had money for one or two drinks, and he could have done with a couple of shots. But it would have to be lager, so that he'd have a decent-sized drink to spin out over the course of the evening.
    'What can I get you?' asked the barman, having just served a young couple with a brace of depressingly sterile vodka mixers, the type of drinks that ad men everywhere like to imply are seriously cool to drink.
    'Lager, please,' said Barney.
    'No