The Face Of Death (Barney Thomson) Read Online Free Page A

colour which Barney requested, on the counter beside the inevitable sink.
    'Thanks,' said McGowan.
    'Arf,' grunted Igor.
    Barney looked at the bottle and wondered whether to register a decision to change his mind about the dyeing business. Being British, however, he said nothing.
    'The thing I find really odd,' said McGowan, setting the razor going and upping the volume of his voice by an unnecessary margin, 'is when you see two cows shagging, because you do get that sometimes. I mean, do you get male cows? Or is it lesbian cow action? And if they are lesbian cows, what's the point of them humping like that?'
    'Maybe,' said Barney, giving into the inevitable and joining the conversation, 'the farmer fits a prosthetic penis to the dominant one.'
    Igor, once more bending over his brush, gave Barney a swift glance. McGowan nodded, as he careered wildly with the razor around the back of Barney's head, shearing off great galumphing clumps of hair in an entirely random manner.
    'Aye,' he said, 'because there are going to be cows who prefer to dish it out, rather than take it. The whole cow thing fascinates me. It's like a microcosm of human existence in every field.'
    Just a couple of minutes and already the man in overdrive. Talking beautiful bollocks, cutting a swathe through interesting conversation, turning the mundane into the criminally dull. Barney stared into the mirror and recognised his past.
    'Did you know that in Texas they give cows udder lifts and odour implants?' asked McGowan.
    *
    F orty-five minutes later, Barney Thomson walked free from McGowan & Son, Hair Emporium, adorned with a very stiff short back & sides, hair a slightly different colour, and aware as never before of the agonies through which he had put his customers in the golden days. When he'd had customers.

4
There Came A Knock At The Door, And It Was Death
    ––––––––
    T he person who had killed the four students from West Warwick, Rhode Island, was not by nature a psychopathic, serial-killing, skin-ripping-off, psychotically deranged, sociopathic, fifteen-cards-short-of-the-deck, suck-it-and-see, blood-for-the-sake-of-blood kind of soul. With the exception of the murder of a couple of Jehovah's, which the judge had described as 'no more than anyone else would have done under the circumstances', life had been a laid back affair. As a young boy he had been meek and mild, and his personality had never really changed. However, the American students had stumbled across a little secret. As it happened, the truth was already out there, but that didn't mean it should go any further than it already had. The students had been looking to cause trouble, and so they had to die.
    Trouble was, however, that the bittersweet tang of blood had now been tasted, and the thought had occurred that there was no need to let this particular sleeping dog lie. There were plenty more opportunities in the town to sate this new desire. Maybe none of them deserved to die, as such, but what the Hell, puttered playfully away in the killer's head that night, walking out into the bitter cold of a January evening, Death is as Death does, as they used to say in the Middle Ages.
    And so, at 2215hrs, there came a knocking at the door of the Reverend Benjamin Wilson, a vicious old bugger who had ministered to ever-dwindling numbers of these people for some thirty years or so.
    Wilson looked at the digital clock – a gift from God – which hummed quietly away on his bedside table, and shook his head. He removed his reading glasses and laid down his copy of that month's Big-Breasted Lesbian Grannies .
    'For God's sake,' he muttered quietly to himself, cursing the fact that Mrs Wilson was no longer here to answer the late night calls, Mrs Wilson having absconded with a party of passing Dutch motorcycle tourists.
    Draping his M&S dressing gown around his vigorously blue and white striped pyjamas, he clumped down the stairs, along the corridor – the floorboards of the old manse