The Barber Surgeon's Hairshirt (Barney Thomson series) (34 page)

He paused and looked around the small pond of worried faces. Poor bastards, he thought, then the thought was gone. If they were going to be so stupid as to live in a place like this, shit was going to happen. But then, the shit that was happening here was a product of the outside world.

‘So, from now on, gentlemen, we go everywhere in twos. You pair off before you leave this room and, after that, you never let your partner out of your sight until this weather clears and we get some relief. And I don’t care if there are some things which you’d prefer to do in private. You don’t let your partner out of your sight until we have been evacuated from this place and the threat of Barney Thomson has been removed.’

He looked around the room again, from face to face. Trying to convince them. Not even sure that twos would be enough. Maybe they would have to stick together in twenty-sixes.

‘Hey, it’s that whole murder thing,’ said Brother Steven from within the midst of the monks. ‘
The Cat and the Canary
,
And Then There Were None
, all that jazz. Picked off one by one. Kinda freaky, but exciting in a strange way. But you know, about all this stick-together stuff. What are we supposed to do once darkness comes and sleep takes us, Chief Inspector? Methought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep,” the innocent sleep, sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care, the death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, blame of hurt minds, great nature’s second course.’

‘Aye, what he said,’ said Brother Edward, nodding vigorously.

Mulholland took a deep breath. Fixed Brother Steven with his best
shut up and stop talking pish
look. ‘Very good, Brother, keep talking like that and you might bore the guy out of hiding.’

Steven smiled ruefully, then retreated behind the cloak.

‘I reiterate,’ said Mulholland, wondering if anyone in the Highlands had words of their own, ‘we do nothing alone. Not pray, not eat, not shit, not change clothes, not jerk off, if that’s what you lot do to relieve tension. None of that stuff alone. Limpets, gentlemen, be limpets to each other. And if we can cut down the number of rooms we visit and places we go in the monastery, we do it. Those of you who sleep in rooms at the other end from this hall, when we’re done, go and get your things and move them to a room within the vicinity. We don’t stray, gentlemen, and it’s very important that you all obey this rule. Furthermore, if any of you have had any contact with Barney Thomson or Brother Jacob or whatever you want to call him, then please come forward. No matter how trivial, no matter any of it, if you’ve got something to say, please say it. Co-operation is the only way we’re going to protect ourselves and hopefully catch the bloke in a place like this.’

He stopped and looked around the room once more. He wondered how many more of them would die before the blizzard relented. Did not doubt that he would survive himself, however. A life this miserable was bound to continue for a long time.

‘That’s it. You can go now, but not too far. I don’t want to order everyone to spend most of the day in here, but that might be for the best. So, can I suggest that if there’s something you want, go and get it now and then spend the rest of the day in this room. Now, are there any questions?’

‘Why is he doing it?’ edged a voice from the front. Brother Martin. A man who had had words with Brother Jacob, but had not seen him in two days.

‘To be honest, we don’t know,’ said Mulholland. ‘And frankly, I don’t think it matters. There doesn’t appear to be any pattern to his victims, and so we can only surmise that he’s after everyone. No one is safe. No one can afford to be complacent. I know that’s not an answer, but until we’ve made further investigations, that’s all there is. We’ll be speaking to all of you during the day, just in case there’s something that one of you might know which you don’t realise is relevant. Anything else?’

They all had questions, but none of them asked. Maybe it was God whom they should be asking questions of at this time. It was He who appeared to have deserted them all.

Mulholland removed himself from the firing line and sat at a lone table, where he was joined by Proudfoot. Slowly a murmur grew among the thrall, and quickly rose to its low zenith; and so the monks began the jealous practice of pairing themselves off and deciding how best to spend their time until the blizzard cleared or Barney Thomson was caught. And many of them searched their souls and wondered if they would ever be able to sleep safe there again, even if the monster was caught; and whether they would ever be able to trust in God again, and whether this would be the end of the abbey as they knew it.

And in the midst of them all, one man knew all the answers. He had made many decisions in the night; he knew that none would walk free from this place, and that this house of God would be left as a graveyard of Hell. A necropolis to his revenge; a mausoleum to the injustices of the self-righteous against the honour of a simple man; a cemetery to all that was bad in this House of God and the perfidious nature of this band of Judas men.

Mulholland and Proudfoot stood at a first-floor window and looked out across the glen, as far as they could see. About twenty yards. The snow had temporarily given in to the day, but the air was still thick with low cloud and the promise of more. The landscape was white, the shapes of trees evident but hazy, and the sky merged with the ground with nothing defined against anything else. The wind screamed past the walls of the abbey, but in the direction they were facing, so that all that came in through the open shutters was the cold of day.

‘Maybe one of us should have made a break for it this morning,’ said Proudfoot. ‘Taken Brother David and tried to get to Durness.’

Mulholland considered the wind and the snow, the landscape before them. Not a chance. He had already given it much thought, but they had barely made it to the abbey in the first place; even Sheep Dip, for all the Northern hard-man stuff, had been suffering at the end. There had now been a much heavier snowfall, the winds were heavier, the blizzard more violent, and if this temporary respite was to become more than that, how were they to know?

‘No point. And what if one of us had made it to Durness? It’s hard to imagine that the roads west or south are open.’

‘We could have come back from Durness with some of the townsfolk.’

‘What, you mean like in a Frankenstein movie? An angry horde of villagers charging towards the castle, torches in hand?’

‘Something like that.’

‘The torches would have blown out in this weather,’ he said and Proudfoot smiled.

The sound of the wind died for a second and they saw their first movement for ten minutes as a snowflake danced down past them. The herald of much to come; and though they didn’t know it, and although it made little difference, the snowstorm which now beckoned was worse than the one which had moved on across Sutherland to Caithness.

‘It’s beautiful,’ said Proudfoot, into the hush. ‘I’ve seen pictures of snow like this, but not in real life. It’s wonderful. If you take away the seven murders and the serial killer, this could almost be romantic.’

‘Seen pictures? So you read something other than
Blitz!
, then? National Geographic or a Thomson’s Winter Sun catalogue?’

Proudfoot laughed. ‘Right the first time, actually.
How To Stop Your Man’s Cock Shrinking in the Snow
, I think the article was called.’

‘Right. I think I read that one. Load of mince. There were much better snow scenes in
Why Gretchen Schumacher Loves To Do It With Strudel In A Ski Lift
.’

Proudfoot laughed again. For a moment she could forget where she was and what was happening. This was indeed romantic, looking at this obscured landscape, the latest object of her affections beside her and in a good humour for the first time since they’d got drunk in Durness.

‘I preferred the one where she was demonstrating how to achieve fifty orgasms a second with a choc-ice on your nipples in Lake Tahoe in January.’

‘You see, I don’t know if you’re joking now.’

‘Well, I am, but so are they. They’re just taking the piss.’

‘Oh.’

Leaning on the window, out into the cold, their arms touched; although neither of them gave in to it or leaned closer to the other.

They had had a long day of pointless questioning. Wherever Barney Thomson was hiding within the old building, he was doing it well. Not one of the twenty-six had had anything to say that could have helped them. Plenty of them had suggestions about places he could have been, but there were so many of them that they were hardly worth knowing about. Another idea – to launch a search party, to spread out through the monastery in groups of four until they’d flushed him out – had been rejected by Mulholland. These were not twenty-six policemen he had, they were twenty-six frightened monks, and for all that he had thought Barney Thomson weak and insipid, the way he’d been going through the angelic horde, Mulholland would have put his money on Thomson against four of the monks any day.

The two of them had had a look around the monastery, but it was so large, the halls and corridors so labyrinthine, that there was hardly a chance of stumbling across him. It needed more than the two of them, but a search party was not an option. Sending a messenger out into the cold was not an option. Calling in the army was not an option. He had a mobile phone with him, but it couldn’t reach from one side of the kitchen to the other in this weather. They were stranded, there was no way they could get help, and they were sitting ducks to the most notorious killer in Scottish history; they could do nothing but wait.

These thoughts once more intruded upon him, and the moment was snapped. That first flake of snow was belatedly joined by another, and then they started to come with greater frequency. The noise of the wind returned, and Proudfoot felt the chill and became aware of Mulholland’s distance once more. The walls going up, as they ever did with the man.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘we should get back downstairs. Find out how many more of them he’s got in the last half-hour.’

‘So what, we just sit and wait?’ asked Proudfoot.

He shrugged, leading the way to the door. ‘I know it’s crap, but if you’ve got a better idea I’ll take it. If we stick together as much as possible, I think we should be all right. I don’t doubt the guy could take out more than one of these guys at once, but so far he hasn’t. No one goes alone. And hopefully, this weather will clear in the next day or so and we can head west. Get back to some sort of civilisation.’

‘And what if it doesn’t clear?’ she said, as they headed back down a cold, dark corridor towards the main hall. ‘What then?’

Mulholland walked in front, his candle lit. We’re done for, he thought, and Barney Thomson will find a way to pick us off one by one.

‘It’ll clear, Sergeant,’ was all he said. ‘That’s what weather does.’

***

The evil Barney Thomson sat in the attic. He had ventured out briefly during the day and had pilfered a few more blankets, so that he was now almost warm for the first time since he’d effected his disappearance. He’d been aware at one point of someone coming up into the attic, searching for him presumably, but he knew where to hide, and knew that unless ten men with searchlights came up, he could easily avoid detection. Two of them, it sounded like, with nothing but candles. The police probably. His heart had raced, but he’d been in these situations before had Barney Thomson. Getting to be an old hand.

And so he’d sat quite comfortably most of the day, nothing to think about except his hunger and how he could possibly turn in the monk-killer while at the same time exonerating himself. Had realised the mistake he’d made with the threat to Sheep Dip. It had seemed a good idea at the time, but he’d expected to be able to convince Sheep Dip of his innocence. He hadn’t considered the possibility of the big guy getting murdered, leaving the note to be found; which he presumed it had.

And so, through his own stupidity, there was now evidence linking him with the murders. If he’d been vilified before, it was nothing to what would happen now.