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

morning.
    Barney sat alone at breakfast, head down in a corner, thinking. He was hoping that Theodore Wolf would not feel obliged to join him. Hoping and dreading at the same time the possibility of Lara Cameron sitting next to him. Not to know that Cameron and Crow were already up and out for the day, a crucial part of the investigation to be undertaken.
    He tucked into the full Highland breakfast for the second morning in a row. Eggs, bacon, haggis, mushrooms, fried bread, tomatoes and three hundred and fourteen different types of sausage. More toast than you could shake a stick at and enough tea to drown a herd of bulls.
    Towards the end of this marathon face-cramming-fest, his place cleared of all the essential coronary-inducing ingredients and only twenty-seven slices of toast still to be disposed of, he was considering the possibility of doing a grand dine and dash, leaving the hotel by a back door, not paying for any of it and heading onto the next hotel down the road. If he could spend weeks and months on the run for murder, how difficult would it be to spend his life moving from hotel to hotel without every paying the bill?
    Anyway, he would never be able to tell what it was that brought a new thought into his head; maybe the colour of the marmalade, maybe the consistency of the tea, maybe the music that drifted down from the PA system, maybe the waitress who flirted by, asking if he'd like some more toast, but something suddenly struck him about the night before, a bizarre little moment of epiphany – this was a real moment of epiphany among so many fakes – about one of his eight confederates in the bar, something that seemed obvious now that it was in his head, but which hadn't been obvious the previous evening.
    And once the thought was there it wouldn't go away, and suddenly he'd eaten enough. The toast tasted dry, the marmalade bitter. He took one last slurp of tea and laid the white cup down in its saucer. He looked around the small restaurant. Nothing had changed; no one else there had had the same thought as he. On the other side of the room, Theodore Wolf was eating his fifteenth kipper, and was himself looking around the assembled company, wondering how many people he could persuade to buy the new chocolate covered meatballs for which he'd won the contract.
    Barney avoided his eye and looked down at the table. His sudden insight did not necessarily mean anything in itself, did not necessarily point to the perpetrator of the murders. However, it might be worth following up. So, he could point the authorities in the direction of his suspicions, he could do a bit of investigating himself, or he could turn his back and walk away, because this had nothing whatsoever to do with him, despite what the raft of that morning's newspaper headlines suggested. The London Times – Thomson Continues Cull Of Planet ; The Sun – Barber Surgeon Eats Testicles of Live Goat ; The New York Times – No Truth In Thomson Marriage Rumours, Claims Ex-Dallas Star ; The Washington Post – Demon Barber In Bizarre Late-Night West Wing Visits ; The Daily Mirror – Barcelona Sign Ace Crimper for £150m ; Astronaut Weekly – Thomson In Shock NASA 'Serial Killer In Space' Tests ; The National Enquirer – Thomson To Be Part Of Pammy Anderson's New Breasts ; The Ross-shire Journal – Nightmare For Mrs McKay As Chicken Not Defrosted In Time For Dinner – Microwave 'Not Working' Claims Pensioner .
    Barney stood up and began to walk through the restaurant. In the past he might have been filling himself with steely determination, buckling down to the task at hand, gathering up great handfuls of the spunk of resolve in order to wade head first into this sordid business with all guns blazing. Now, however, he couldn't even decide if he wanted to think about the business, never mind ask it to dance. And so he trudged out of the restaurant, through the bar, took the usual walk under the miserable looking dear-departed stag, and pounded the