The Barber Surgeon's Hairshirt (Barney Thomson series) (30 page)

‘What were their jobs?’ said Proudfoot. Sheep Dip stood silent, attempting to work some bread from between his teeth.

‘Brother Babel was one of the gardeners; Brother Festus worked in the kitchen; Brother Ash…’ Herman hesitated. ‘Brother Ash was the gatekeeper. No connection at all, and they were not together in any other way within the monastery.’

‘How long’d they been here?’ asked Proudfoot.

‘A long time,’ said the Abbot, head dropping again. ‘A very long time.’

‘How long exactly?’ said Mulholland. ‘Did they all arrive together? Might there have been something between them before they got here?’

The Abbot shook his head. The eyes were vacant. Here was a man whose faith was being tested to the limit; beyond the limit. The Abbot had always said that you could see, in every man’s eye, a little of God’s light. And here he sat, disproving the theory. Or being the exception to the rule.

‘I cannot believe that, Chief Inspector. It was so long ago.’

‘You can never tell.’

‘That may be the case, but sadly they are not here for us to ask them. Certainly, I can tell you that they did not all arrive at the same time. They’d all been here for very many years; indeed, over thirty-five in the case of Brother Ash.’

Christ, thought Mulholland. Thirty-five years in this place. This Godforsaken place, then wondered if you could use that word about a monastery. Maybe this one you could.

‘A long time,’ he said. ‘Strange that they’d all been here such a long time.’

‘Not really,’ said Herman. ‘Most of our monks have been with us for a considerable number of years. It has always been a happy place.’

Not in the winter of ‘38 it wasn’t, thought Mulholland, but he could leave that one for later. Didn’t know that he would never get around to it, for it would become an irrelevance.

‘And how many of you are there exactly?’ he asked, mind thumping headlong into a wall of incredulity. What kind of man would come to a place like this? Cold, barren, remote, desolate. And it wasn’t as if you escaped life and got away from it, because you still had to spend your time with the rest of the unfortunates. Who knew the reasons that brought a man to a place like this? What secrets they hid, what dark skeletons hung in every cupboard.

‘There were thirty-two,’ said Herman. ‘Twenty-seven remain. That is not counting Brother Jacob, of course. We cannot call him one of us.’

Thirty-two. Bloody hell. Thirty-two. Thirty-two sad men stuck away in the remotest part of Scotland, where even the Dutch tourists didn’t go.

‘And Brother Jacob?’ said Sheep Dip from the back, finally joining in the investigation. ‘What can you tell us of him?’

‘The man’s a total bastard!’ said Herman forcefully.

‘Brother!’

Herman bristled with ill-concealed hatred and loathing; had suspected Brother Jacob from the first, even before a murder had been committed. Had long said there should be greater screening of the sad cases who requested to join them. At that moment there was nothing. Anyone who came among them was greeted with open arms. They should have introduced a vetting procedure, such was the nature of these troubled times, and now they had been caught out.

‘The man was obviously here for some dubious reason. It was quite apparent. He was not a man of God, and there was nothing about him to suggest that he was willing to learn the teachings of Jesus.’

Don’t blame him, thought Mulholland, but said instead, ‘Had he made any friends in his time here? Anyone who might know where he’s hiding, anyone who might know his reasons for murder, if that’s what he’s done?’

‘Oh, there’s no question but that this man is a killer, Chief Inspector. And you might want to talk to Brother Steven. It is obvious that there is some connection there, although I concede that it might only be because they shared a room.’

Mulholland nodded. Brother this; Brother that. Insane; the whole thing was insane.

‘Have any of you lot ever thought of getting a life?’ he asked. Almost. Stopped himself and said, ‘Where might we find Brother Steven now?’

‘He should be at prayers,’ said the Abbot. ‘As we all should be.’

‘I don’t know that prayers are going to do you any good, Brother,’ said Mulholland.

The Abbot smiled for the first time. The eyes crinkled, his face looked gentle and old and wonderful; and then the look was gone. ‘They brought you to us, Chief Inspector,’ he said.

Mulholland laughed and shook his head. Weirdest-fuck gift from God you’re ever going to get, he thought. Felt the weight of the responsibility and automatically said, ‘Ah, Brother, I think you might be in for a disappointment there.’

‘I’m sure you won’t let us down.’

Proudfoot caught the eye of Brother Herman, and the look of spite died at that moment. The eyes relaxed, the tension forcibly ebbed from the face; he welcomed the glance of Proudfoot.

‘We should get on,’ said Mulholland. ‘I know you’ve got a large monastery here, but there are three of us, and Brother Jacob can’t have gone very far. Not in this weather. Now, if there’s anything else you can tell us about him it would be helpful.’

The Abbot shook his head. ‘I’m afraid he appeared a very private man. I had him in here a couple of times, but he gave nothing away about what brought him to this place. He was obviously running from something, but then aren’t we all?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Mulholland. Running from something. His brain kicked in at last. He had the same thought that Sheep Dip had had the night before when Brother David had first appeared at the hotel, and that Proudfoot had had twenty minutes earlier. Could it be Barney Thomson? Could he be a killer after all? They’d begun to think he had merely been caught up in his mother’s business before. He was no killer himself. A man of comforts, Barney Thomson; even someone on the run wouldn’t have come to this place.

‘Well,’ said the Abbot, ‘perhaps Brother Steven will be able to shed a little more illumination on the man for you. We have our problems with Steven as well; nevertheless, he is a man of some insight and erudition. He sees things to which others are blind.’

Mulholland nodded. Turned his head and raised his eyebrows at Proudfoot and Sheep Dip.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘We should get cracking.’

‘Brother Herman will show you around,’ said the Abbot. ‘Oh yes, there is one more thing which might be of interest to you.’ He subconsciously felt the back of his neck. Those scissors, that razor; they had been so close to his own cold skin. ‘He is the most wonderful barber, Brother Jacob.’

‘A barber?’

‘Indeed. The man could cut the hair of the Lord.
’

Somewhere between death and dawn; somewhere between hell and heaven; somewhere between pain and the bittersweet gratification of pleasure; somewhere between the cold, clammy hand of denial and the exuberant exploding can of Guinness that is freedom; somewhere between fourteen years at a drive-in movie theatre showing
Ishtar
on continuous loop and an eternity of chocolate-enrobed naked women playing blow football with your testicles; somewhere between a glutinous mountain of charred bodies collapsing on your table during breakfast and the exiguous indulgence of four rounds of toast and marmalade; somewhere between bad and good, wrong and right, Yin and Yang, Queen of the South and Juventus; somewhere between them all, between the great effervescence of miasma that colludes with the protozoa of fate, and the munificence of time and space, the very enemies of delirium; somewhere between them all, there lay a man. And that man was Barney Thomson.

And he was freezing.

His teeth chattered, tapping out some strange, almost Caribbean, rhythm. Involuntary shivers racked his body. Goose bumps and upstanding hairs careered across his body like some deranged Mongolian horde sweeping across the Asian plains, doing their best to combat the cold, but to no avail. All the body’s natural defence systems were at work and failing miserably. The storm raged outside, and at every conceivable weakness in the structure of the building the cold seemed to creep in.

Barney had spent the day on the move, constantly in search of warmth. But every time he’d become settled or seemed on the point of finding what he was looking for, another monk had come along and he’d been forced, once again, to skulk off into the shadows. He had heard through the walls faint rumours of the winter of ‘38 and the need to preserve as many provisions as possible. And so the fuel was being saved to heat the bare minimum of rooms and Barney could find nowhere to banish the chill from his bones.

His movement around the monastery, his lurking in the shadows, had told him many things; he had learned some of those dark secrets which all the monks kept so close to their chests. Not the identity of the killer; but he now knew why Brother Sincerity and Brother Goodfellow were so friendly, and why Adolphus spent so much time in the library. He also knew that the police had arrived, and that they were searching for him. He was not sure whether they were searching for Brother Jacob or for Barney Thomson, or whether they had already worked out that they were one and the same. However, he was being forced in from the cold, and all the determined bravado which he’d had about finding the killer and handing him in to the authorities had vanished through a day of unremitting freezing temperatures. He’d realised that it could take him days, perhaps even weeks to establish the killer’s identity when he had only a couple of nights before this frozen Hell got the better of him.

So much for Barney Thomson, the Great Detective. He was going to have to be Barney Thomson, the Great Guy Who Gave Himself Up So That He Didn’t Freeze His Arse Off.

However, he’d decided to test the water first of all. A tentative toe, before he went leaping into the cold loch of confession. A couple of hours previously, from one of his hideouts above the toilet, he’d shoved a note through a small hole, inviting Sheep Dip to a meeting. Had decided he could more easily trust the Highland police than the ones from Glasgow. He’d learned not to trust Glasgow police officers.

In the note he’d requested that Sheep Dip come alone, threatening that he wouldn’t show himself and that many more monks would die if the Dipmeister were accompanied. Not that Barney Thomson was going to kill anyone, and maybe the note had been injudicious should his case ever come to trial, but he was not a man known for his fast or accurate thinking.

And so Barney Thomson sat and froze, still an hour short of the time appointed for his meeting with the police, and he wondered, as his teeth clattered noisily together, what lay ahead.

***

They huddled around the fire in the corner of a large dark room. Shadows cavorted randomly behind them, and every so often they felt compelled to stare over their shoulders, expecting to see the ghost in the darkness, the very real ghost that was murdering the monks.

Mulholland and Proudfoot sat beneath great swathes of blanket, grasping warm mugs of tea between trembling fingers. Given a pen and a piece of paper, they could have made lists of some three or four hundred million other places they’d have rather been, and they ran through some of those places as they shivered and shook and their enthusiasm waned and died. From the Maldives to Ibrox Stadium, from the Bahamas to the Maracana.

And all the while Sheep Dip sat slightly detached, well wrapped against the cold, keeping the fire going, an entirely different set of dreams playing in his head. Every now and again he fingered the note in his jacket pocket, the note which had dropped into his lap as he’d sat on the cold toilet. The note from Barney Thomson. He knew he should tell Mulholland, but he’d convinced himself that he was doing the right thing. Didn’t want any more of the monks getting murdered. But really it was all because he had seen his chance of glory; his name in lights. The chance to get on the front page of the Press & Journal. Have his pick of all the two-bit women in the seedy underground dope joints in Peterhead and Fraserburgh. A bit of celebrity, and he’d be eating dinner off a different woman’s stomach every night for a decade. Add to that the promotion that would inevitably follow the capture of Barney Thomson, a bit of extra cash – maybe some TV work and the odd modelling assignment – and he’d be made. He could pinch a kilo or two of coke from the lock-up in Inverness, and he could dash off to Bermuda and lie on some sun-drenched beach surrounded by hundreds of women, all paying close attention to his naked body.