The Barber Surgeon's Hairshirt (Barney Thomson series) (39 page)

For Steven was not finished with his body.

If the truth be told, Barney Thomson was going a little mad. Not stark raving, never see the sense of day, screaming loony mad, but a gentle slide into insanity which could still be arrested. But soon. It would have to be soon.

He had woken early from the happiest of dreams – there he was again, back behind his chair, his magical fingers creating a magnificent Bill Clinton (Post-Monica), the very latest in millennium proto-chic, with mercurial panache, engaged in idle discussion of the origin of the Turin Shroud –
Experts have now decided that it was first worn by one of the Bay City Rollers on a tour of Italy in 1975
, he was saying – while a queue of placid customers waited upon his golden hands – to crash frighteningly into the world of living nightmare.

More death, more murder, more bloodshed, more stained floors. If he ever got his job back washing the stone, it was going to be Hell. And so finally, all those months after casually handling pound after pound of frozen human meat, he was being toppled over the edge. Not over some vertiginous cliff, where the bottom was a long way away but reached quickly nevertheless. This would be a slow slide down a grassy bank. But there was still manure at the bottom, no mistake.

Barney was mad. He spent the morning in his dismal haunts, looking through holes, watching what was going on. Eyes wide, yet stumbling into pillars and walls in the dark. He hadn’t viewed the full carnival of death, but he’d seen much of it. A bit like the Bible, he’d thought at one point. There was a lot of it, but you didn’t have to read it all to get the picture.

At some other point he’d drifted off into a waking dream. Stood six feet away from a wall, imagined there’d been a customer sitting in front of him facing an imaginary mirror, and his hands had automatically worked the thin air, the pretend scissors clicking in the dark. Giving a Harry Houdini. Smooth yet ruffled, elegant yet rakish.

For ten minutes he’d stood like this, lost in this nether world. Such was the state of his mind after this latest catalogue of death. Murders of biblical proportions. Murders of which the God Formerly Known as Yahweh would have been proud. Barney was mad.

He didn’t know what it was that had dragged him from the trance, but he’d escaped it. Had gone about his business, sometimes focused, sometimes lost.

Until the strange incident of Brother Steven and the Abbot.

He lay on the floor above the great hall. Watched through a hole as Brother Steven stabbed the Abbot, Brother Copernicus, through the stomach. Could not hear what was being said, their voices low and muffled, but he saw everything. The repeated stabbing; and then, as the Abbot lay dead and bloodied on the floor, Steven lifted the Abbot’s sleeve and firmly and swiftly severed his left hand from the wrist and left it lying on the table.

This was new. Barney squinted into the hole, trying to look a little more closely. Until now there had been no mutilation. This reminded him of his mother. And then Brother Steven lifted the right sleeve of the Abbot, and swiftly, precisely, neatly sawed the hand from the wrist, then placed it on the table beside the left. It was a bloody mess, Steven himself covered in it.

He’s not going to be able to pretend now, thought Barney. And as he wondered what Steven’s next move would be, Steven began to drag the body of the Abbot from the hall, bloody stumps and bloody stomach wrapped in the confines of the thick brown cloak, so as not to leave a trail of blood.

Barney looked down in wonder. Two hands removed in under a minute; could his mother have been so efficient? And he didn’t move. Not for a second did he think that Steven might have been aware of his presence – and he was right – and so he looked with awe on these two hands which lay on the table.

Slowly the eyes and mind of Barney Thomson began to work in tandem. The hands began to take shape. The fingers; the hair; the thumbs; the nails; the wrinkles and the moles; the blood and the shredded skin where the knife had brutally cut them apart from the body. Not such a clean cut on closer inspection.

A pair of hands. They lay silent. As hands do. Particularly when they are both left hands. Funny that, thought Barney.

Bloody hell!

He pressed his eyes closer to the floor, a millimetre closer to the hole, looked with greater concentration at the detached appendages. Two left hands! They were two sodding, no questions asked, absolutely thumped in the bollocks left hands. And he’d seen them cut from the arms of the Abbot. No wonder the old man had never shown his right hand in public. It had been the wrong way round. And he’d had everyone thinking he’d lost it at Arnhem.

Barney pulled away. Two left hands. How would you tie your shoelaces? Or undo a bra strap? Or hold a golf club? Or give someone a Jack Lemmon? And Barney had a fleeting glimpse of why the Abbot had found himself at the Holy Order of the Monks of St John. But he was not interested in that, and his thoughts moved swiftly on.

Not so swift, however. This was Barney Thomson, not Sherlock Holmes. And so he waited and watched, knowing that the others would soon return.

A few minutes later he could more clearly hear their voices, as they had no need for the low tones of the conspirator. He heard their footsteps before they were in his line of vision; then the footsteps stopped. He imagined them staring at the table; heard the muted exclamation from the woman. Then Mulholland came into view, and he stood over the table and stared at the severed hands. Stared for a minute or two. Didn’t speak. The other three monks returned and stopped in the doorway. Sensed immediately that something was wrong, although Barney could not see the looks on their faces.

‘Two left hands,’ said Mulholland.

‘Do you think they might still be alive?’ Barney heard the woman ask; could see Mulholland shake his head.

‘No, no I don’t.’

Mulholland turned, took in the presence of the other three, then looked back at the human refuse on the table.

‘Why, then?’ said the woman. ‘Why not just leave the bodies?’

He shook his head again. ‘Don’t know. Christ.’

From where he lay, tense, bemused, slightly odd, Barney could hear the deep breath exhaled.

‘So what are we saying?’ Barney heard Proudfoot say. Almost a minute later, the silence absolute. Although somewhere in the monastery, Brother Steven must have been dragging the body of the Abbot noisily along a stone cold floor.

‘What are we saying, Sergeant? We’re saying that this fuck-up, this Barney Thomson, came in here the second we all left – which means he was watching us, listening to everything we were saying – came in here, killed the Abbot and Brother Steven, and for some reason best known to his own warped head, cut the left hands off each of them and left them as a calling card. That’s what we’re saying, Sergeant. Just the sort of thing his mother, or he himself, did last spring.’

Barney watched. Incredulous. Of course they were going to think it was him, but he still hadn’t been expecting it. His meagre thought processes finally caught up with those of Brother Steven. A brilliant frame-up. He must have known all along about the Abbot’s disability. His weirdness. The Amazing Double Left-Handed Boy, he might have been called at the circus. And somehow Steven had known all about it. And for the frame-up to work, Steven must also be confident that Edward, Martin and Raphael did not know.

It wasn’t me!
he wanted to shout through the hole, but he didn’t. So he lay, surrounded by the dark, unaware of anything going on around him. And if this happened to be the room where Steven decided to hide the body of the Abbot, he would come across Barney and Barney would never be aware; not until the knife sliced into his back. Barney was beginning to take another roll down the hill of temporary madness. He watched Proudfoot come and stand beside Mulholland; they looked at the hands.

‘What about someone else being loose in the monastery?’ she said.

Mulholland continued the head-shaking, which had become a permanent feature.

‘Don’t think so. If it wasn’t Thomson, I thought it might be one of this lot. But this proves it. These two idiots are dead, and those three stuck together.’

‘Maybe it’s all three,’ said Proudfoot, but at last the words were lost to Barney as the voice was lowered; and neither did Mulholland’s negative reply reach up to him.

Anyway, he had lost concentration. He was imagining cutting hair with two left hands. It would be tricky, obviously, but once you’d got used to it, maybe it would be all right. In fact, he thought, sliding deeper into the fantasy, seeing himself behind the chair, two left hands working away, maybe it would make him even better. It would certainly be distinctive. Something else to help draw the crowds to his shop, on top of his awesome abilities.

Barney was lost, oblivious to the dark room around him and to the scene of gruesome murder below. Deep in his fantasy, the contented smile forming around his face. Imagination could never be said to be as good as the real thing, but it might as well be up there. When it felt real, it was real.

That was what the mad Barney thought.

And so wrapped up was he in the phantasmagoria of his delusion that he did not hear the door partially open behind him; he did not see the shaft of light which poked its way into the darkened room; he did not hear the laboured breaths of Brother Steven, nor the faint whooshing sound of Brother Copernicus’s body being dragged along the floor; he saw nothing and he heard nothing, while his mind wandered off and he could smell and feel and breathe the inside of a barber’s shop.

Barney was a little bit mad
.

‘What now?’

Mulholland looked at her. Too shell-shocked by all this death to make a sarcastic comment. What now? Nothing had changed. They were about to leave and get to safety as quickly as possible. However now, for the first time, he felt the spectre of death lurking behind him. He hadn’t come here to die, and no matter how miserable he was, he certainly didn’t want to. But at last the import of what was going on here, all this carnage, was beginning to hit him.

Strange, that; there could be so much death but he hadn’t thought for a second that it had been going to affect him. Suddenly, standing over two left hands on a bloody table, he realised that he and Proudfoot were on the menu, just the same as everyone else. And there were only three of them left. He shivered. Sensed the weight of foreboding which made him want to turn and look behind; not only that, it made him want eyes on every side of his head.

‘What now? Now, to quote no end of movies, we get the fuck out of Dodge, Sergeant. Saddle up the horses, get these three cowboys to get their backsides in gear and let’s get going.’

***

Barney Thomson watched from above, but he was no longer paying attention as Mulholland and Proudfoot moved away from his line of vision and started distributing orders to the three lamentable surviving monks. Instead, his fingers twitched in time with his waking dream.

And all the time, unlike Mulholland, he did not feel the spectre of Death at his shoulder; even though, in his case, Death was right there, in the flesh, manoeuvring the corpse of Brother Copernicus into the little-used store room. Death quietly closed the door, then continued to pull the body farther into the room. He did not light a candle and did not try to open the shutters. Death, as a rule, was not afraid of the dark. Tough bastard, Death, no mistake.

Had Barney just been dreaming, he might have heard by now. But this hallucination went beyond that. He was sliding down that hill; madness beckoned, in all its glorious uncertainty. Everything could be as you wanted it to be in madness. You wanted to spend your life working in a barber’s shop, never killing anyone and never being suspected of mass murder? No problem, you could be there any time you liked, and you could stay forever. And at the end of your day, you didn’t have to go home to your own wife, you could go home to any woman you wanted; and before this fantasy had run its course, Barney would go home to Barbara, the most attractive sister-in-law on the planet; and he wouldn’t have to construct a place for his brother, because in this perfect dream-world his brother wouldn’t exist.