The Barber Surgeon's Hairshirt (Barney Thomson series) (37 page)

No time to stand around – they had to grab this opportunity while they had it.

‘Hey, Proudfoot,’ he said, turning round, and there was a moan and mild stirring from the bed. ‘Proudfoot, wake up!’

There was the Standard Morning Delay of about ten seconds, and then her head was lifted from the pillow and she squinted into the sunlight, which had worked its way around to where she lay.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘The weather’s cleared. We should get going.’

‘What?’ was all she could manage.

‘The weather. It’s cleared. We should be getting a move on.’

She turned over, dropped her forehead to the pillow; shook her head to try to clear the gunge. Woken from some elaborate dream of Freudian construction, involving shoes, cornflakes, Mulholland and her mother.

‘Right,’ she said eventually. ‘Right. Can I wash first?’

‘Good idea. You look like the Borg Queen.’

‘Thanks.’

He turned and looked back out of the window. Breathed in the air, like drinking ice, and felt his nightmare attacked and the torture of the last few days taken from him. Everything was clean and white and fresh. A new start. A blank page on which to write a new, and maybe final, chapter in the search for Barney Thomson; and maybe a new chapter in this bloodied life of his.

He began to think abstractly about snow; the good and the bad of it. Terrible while you were closed in and you never knew when it would stop; glorious when the worst was over. Nowhere in the world looked bad with a covering of snow.

Proudfoot stood at his side and looked over the white-out scene. They were transfixed for several minutes, while their bodies edged closer together. Snow and silence. The long summer of a cold winter’s day.

‘We shouldn’t stand here too long,’ said Mulholland eventually, making no effort to move.

‘Aye,’ she said.

‘Must get these guys out of here and back to Durness or Tongue. We can sort the mess out from there. How many are there again?’

‘About twenty-six or so. Twenty-seven if we count Barney Thomson.’

‘Oh aye, right. We’ll just see him safely back to civilisation, then give him, say, ten minutes’ start, then we can chase him again.’

‘Aye, that’s what I was thinking. Maybe give him a car as well.’

‘A car? I thought a helicopter.’

The aimless conversation drifted into silence, and they were once more consumed by the landscape. Proudfoot was not long consumed, however.

‘Do you think they’ll continue here? Come back after all this is over and go on as if nothing has happened?’

Mulholland felt the cold again; this time the stiff blast of reality. The snow-covered landscape had just been an illusion, and soon it would be obscured by another blizzard or removed altogether by some minute rising of the temperature. Nothing ever lasts. Not in this life. And he thought of Sheep Dip and wondered what kind of family the man had left behind.

‘Who knows? I wouldn’t think so, but twenty-six of the sorry band is probably enough if they wanted to carry on. And the amount of publicity they’re going to get when all this gets out, they’ll probably have a queue of strange no-lifes waiting to join up.’

There was a sudden, frantic rapping at the door; a desperate man outside, that much they could tell from the knock alone. They both felt it immediately; this was what they had been thankful not to have had when they’d woken to find it already morning. Now it had arrived, like a shot bolt in the chest; and they were each bludgeoned by dread.

‘Fuck,’ was all Mulholland said, and he walked to the door. Almost didn’t want to open it, to unleash the demons which waited behind; although his imagination could not have begun to conjure up the things he was about to discover.

The door opened. Brother Steven stood in the hall. Unshaven, hand red from knocking, but otherwise in the manner of a monk.

‘Brother?’ said Mulholland.

‘There’s some bad stuff going down,’ said Brother Steven. ‘Really, really bad stuff.’

There was a pause. Mulholland raised an eyebrow.

‘That’s it? Not some bad stuff like Aristotle talked about?’

‘Come with me,’ said Steven. ‘Aristotle didn’t know anything about bad stuff compared to this.’

***

Try to describe the feeling and you couldn’t. Like getting your guts ripped out, that was as close as you could get. But that didn’t really cover it. Getting your guts ripped out was just going to be bloody sore and then you’d die. This was something else.

They had left the bodies where they were; everyone was now accounted for. Took a while to find Brother Solomon and Brother Ezekiel, but all the others were where they should have been. Not too far from the dining room. Not too far from the dining room, but still dead. The monks in the library had been hard to identify, but they had got there by a process of elimination.

Somewhere during their monastery tour of murder and death, Proudfoot had been sick. The charred, tortured library bodies had been grotesque, but it hadn’t been that in particular. It had been the overall effect; the realisation of what had happened. Murder upon murder. One bloody death after another, so that every corner they’d turned and every door they’d opened had heralded a new corpse. All this death, while they had slept. The police. Supposedly protectors of these people. The Abbot had been delighted when they had arrived; had called them as if from God. And what had they done while this had been taking place? That was what she thought, and as a result the whole became even worse than the sum of the parts, bad enough though that was.

Mulholland had gagged in the library, had felt everything he had eaten the previous day display an interest in coming back to the surface. None of it appeared, as if his stomach had nothing to offer in reply to this massacre.

They had found the odd live monk along the way, cowering in rooms. Alone, afraid, wondering what had happened to their partners. The men who had been supposed to stay by their sides until the cavalry arrived.

There were five left. The Abbot, Brother Steven, Brother Edward, Brother Martin and Brother Raphael. One of them had defied orders and slept alone; three of them had woken to find their partners in terrible pain, victims-to-be of the poisoned carafe; and one of them had had Brother Joseph as his room-mate.

They had all received regulation
Brother Cadfael
,
Name of the Rose
or
Robin Hood
haircuts from Barney Thomson. All men who still felt the cold steel of those scissors at their neck, who wondered why they had been spared, who looked into the pit of Hell which undoubtedly awaited them, and faced the desperate fact that their time was fast approaching. All except one. One who knew that Barney Thomson was no man to be feared.

Edward and Steven were busy packing provisions. Food from the kitchen randomly placed into rucksacks, to be carried on the journey to safety; for there was no option now but to make the break across the desert of snow. Any food would do, and they gave it little thought.

Mulholland stared from the window of the hall, some three hours now since he’d first looked out. It was almost eleven o’clock and they would have to leave soon. Already it was too late for them to reach civilisation by nightfall. Not a chance at this time of year, and in this weather. So they would take equipment for sleeping out, and hope the blizzard did not return in the night.

And, of course, they could expect to be trailed all the way, and picked off one by one if they were not careful. For surely Barney Thomson would not rest where he was. He would have to keep going until everyone was dead, and only then would he escape blame.

If, indeed, Barney Thomson was the man behind it all.

‘This is stupid,’ Mulholland said to Proudfoot.

‘What?’

‘This. Running from Barney Thomson.’

‘So, what’s the alternative? We stay here and wait to die?’

He shook his head, watched some of the snow fall from the branches of a tree.

‘It’s just Barney Thomson, for goodness sake. Barney Bloody Thomson. I could have sworn before we got here that the bloke had nothing to do with it. I still can’t believe that it’s him.’

‘Mild-mannered and boring and he killed at least one of his work colleagues, possibly two, and either chopped up six other bodies or at the very least happily disposed of them. Mild-mannered, maybe, but weird as fuck all the same. Even if he was normal before all that, and he was covering up for his mother, it’s got to do something to his head.’

‘Aye, but why come here and start killing all these monks? If he’d arrived, kept his head and his mouth shut, and got on with praying and self-flagellation and all that other monk stuff, we might never have found him.’

Proudfoot glanced over her shoulder. Felt the shiver down her back. ‘But the note?’

‘Aye, the note,’ said Mulholland. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? The note. Written in Barney Thomson’s handwriting, found on Sheep Dip, and as incriminating as you can get. It points right to the guy. It makes him centrefold, cop-killer of the month. But it just doesn’t feel right.’

‘So, what are we saying? That there’s someone else hiding in the rafters? Or do you think that one of these clowns is the killer? I wouldn’t have thought any of this lot could kill a bug.’

Mulholland shook his head again, stared into the trees.

‘You never know, though, do you? What brings a man to a place like this? It’s bloody awful at the moment, but do you think it ever gets any warmer within these walls in the middle of summer? What kind of life must you have had in the past to want to come to a place like this? This lot have got to be the weirdest-fuck bunch of weirdoes I’ve ever met.’

Proudfoot took another furtive glance over her shoulder. Edward and Steven prepared the food; Martin and Raphael were in low conversation; the Abbot sat alone. A broken man, a man who had now lost everything, for where had God been when they’d needed him most?

‘Which one, then?’

Mulholland shook his head. Doing a lot of that.

‘That’s what I’ve been standing here thinking about. Which one? Absolutely no idea. Having said what I just said, this lot seem like a normal bunch of sad people with no lives. They’re all pissing in their pants. I know we can’t expect our serial killers to all wear hockey masks, but there’s nothing about any of this crowd to make them stand out. If it’s one of them, I’d only be guessing. We really need to sit them down and talk to them for a couple of hours, but we haven’t got the time for that.’

‘So, you think there might be someone else loose in the asylum?’

‘Very possibly, Sergeant. Very possibly. Or maybe Barney’s our man after all.’

‘If we can’t come up with any other explanation for the note he left Sheep Dip, then we have to assume it’s him, don’t we?’

‘Aye. Aye, I suppose you’re right.’ He turned round and looked at the band of unhappy thieves who minced around the great hall. ‘You see, Sergeant, this is where we could do with a decent, relevant
Blitz!
article.
How to Tell a Serial Killer by the Length of His Cock
.’

‘I know where I can lay my hands on the issue with Gretchen Schumacher on
Why She’s Shagged Her Last Detective
.’

‘Gretchen Schumacher’s shagged her last detective?’ said Mulholland, beginning the short walk back into the midst of human sadness. ‘And there was me thinking I still had a chance.’

‘She’s too thin,’ said Proudfoot.

Their eyes met; they knew what the other was thinking. Nothing said, for this was not the time.