The Barber Surgeon's Hairshirt (Barney Thomson series) (40 page)

Barney closed his eyes, but sleep was a long way off. Why sleep, when you could have everything you wanted? And all the while Death went about his business behind, opening a cupboard door and moving the leaden, de-handed body of the Abbot inside. He closed the door; there was a quiet murmur of a hinge, but no more. Barney would have heard it in other circumstances.

Brother Steven made sure the door was closed properly, although it would be some time before anyone would go looking there. The adrenaline rush had slowed, and now he had that wonderful post-stabbing afterglow to which he’d become addicted.

His eyes had become accustomed to the light.

He noticed Barney.

A body on the floor, and not of my doing, he thought. And he looked at it with some curiosity. Too dark to see who it was, and so he took a tentative few steps towards it, bending low to better identify the suspect.

‘Well, help m’boab!’ he said upon realisation; for it was inevitable. If you are going to spend your life reciting the words of others, eventually you will quote Paw Broon. ‘Barney Thomson; the great killer himself.’

The words were spoken quietly, but not so quietly that Barney should not have heard. But Barney was mad – for the moment. And so Death approached, then knelt down and looked at the face of Barney Thomson from no more than a few inches. The eyes were shut, the breathing even and regular.

Brother Steven fingered the knife which had once more been stashed inside the confines of his great cloak. This could be the easiest of the lot. One sweep of the arm and the knife would be embedded in Barney’s back.

He was fascinated. Brother Jacob. Seemingly mild-mannered and innocent. And yet, the talk had been about nothing else between the monks since they’d learned of his true identity. The Great Glasgow Serial Killer, they were calling him. Brother Jacob; couldn’t hurt a fly.

Brother Steven had sometimes wondered if his own exploits would be remembered. Once all this became known, would people talk about it for generations? Sometimes these things captured the imagination of the press and public and sometimes they didn’t. Jack the Ripper, the great example. Five victims. Good medical work, stacks of blood, a city held in the grip of terror, a whole bunch of movies and an episode of
Star Trek
; but small potatoes in the serial killer game. There had been others who had done much more for their art, but who’d only received a tenth of the infamy. There had just been something about Jack the Ripper.

So how would it be with him? Would he get the kind of acclaim now being enjoyed by Barney Thomson? What had they said? Seven or eight deaths? He had now done that fourfold. Of the two, he was much the greater headcase. Of these two princes of the serial killer game, he was the man who should be king.

He hadn’t started out thinking like this. He had initially, of course, intended to frame Brother Jacob. But that had been back then, when his plans had been small. Somewhere along the way, when the blood and the excitement had begun to infest his mind, he’d become consumed with the immensity of the whole. Of what he was achieving. And now he thought of something for the first time; only now, when Barney Thomson lay in front of him, did all the threads come together to make a Balaclava of unease.

When this was out, when all these great events at the Abbey of the Holy Order of the Monks of St John became known, when the magnificent revenge for Two Tree Hill had been revealed and popularised and turned into a Hollywood movie with Anthony Hopkins and Sean Connery, would they not all think that Barney Thomson was the killer? How, in fact, would Two Tree Hill become known at all? The press and public, those ravenous fools, feasting on mistrust and misconception, would think it a continuation of Thomson’s Glasgow rampage. Would the truth ever come out?

Barney’s eyes remained closed; his face lay still above the hole to the world beneath. He had moved on to a Madonna ‘
Like a Prayer
‘, just a really weird haircut to give to a bloke, but in his mind his hands wove their magic and the drier blew hot air like breath from a sun-kissed Mediterranean island.

Bastard, thought Brother Steven. He will steal my thunder, my name, my infamy. This bastard will steal my place in history.

Steven breathed deeply; an angry sneer invaded his face, his lips curled. Suddenly he hated Barney Thomson as much as he had hated all those morons who’d driven his father from the true path of his life. It was bad enough to steal a man’s possessions or to steal his wife, perhaps even bad to take his life, but it was nothing to match that of taking his name and his reputation, of stealing the honour of having committed the deeds for which he should be known. From Alexander the Great pretending that it was he who’d conquered the known world, and not his half-brother Maurice, to Milli Vanilli achieving fame on the back of Pavarotti’s early studio work, history was replete with those living off the deeds of others.

He, Steven Cafferty, could not allow this to happen. Before he was done, the world would know who he was and what he had achieved. Men would bow before him; presidents would drink from the poisoned chalice of his vision; kings and queens would bow in honour of his accomplishments; God himself would pay homage to him in celebration of his munificence. But, most of all, before he did anything else, before he walked down any other road, before he continued his extraordinary peregrination around the world of revenge, before he sank his teeth into the apple of retribution, Barney Thomson must die.

The knife hovered in the air above Barney’s back. Steven’s grip was light but steady; he could feel the blood meandering limply through Barney’s veins, he could smell and taste it. This death would be sweeter than the murder of Herman, sweeter than the murder of the Abbot.

He could smell it, while Barney did not move. And so the knife began its pungent plunge towards the waiting spine of Barney Thomson.

They set out on the walk from the Abbey of the Holy Order of the Monks of St John to Durness. Twenty miles across fields and glens and hills of the deepest snow. They had to wade through it at some points; at others they had to plough through drifts nearly five feet high; everywhere the snow was at least two feet deep and the going was painfully slow. Proudfoot was at the back, walking in the cleared paths of the others. This was indeed an incredible journey; of the octopus, lion and snake variety.

Mulholland, Proudfoot, Brother Martin, Brother Raphael and Brother Edward. The monks had discarded their robes, so that this looked like any normal collection of seriously deranged hikers prepared to go out in all weathers. The sort of people who would be best booking mountain rescue in advance.

They would do well to get a third of the way through their journey before nightfall, Brother Raphael having delayed departure further by insisting on praying; in the end, he had only reluctantly left the abbey, being more than prepared to die and meet his maker.
God will take care of us
, he had said.
He’s not done much of a job so far
, Mulholland had thought.

Martin led the way. He had sat and prayed along with Raphael, not wishing to upset his brother, but that had been for the last time. When he got to civilisation, if he ever reached it, he intended throwing off the shackles of the cloak forever. If he lived through this, the first thing he was going to do was get in touch with one of the tabloids, sell his story –
‘I Was Too Cool to Die,’ Says Brave Monk Hunk Hero
– then go on a world tour, taking large quantities of drugs and alcohol and whatever else there was on the planet to dull, remove or pervert your sensibilities; while at the same time sleeping with everything – woman, man, animal, inflatable or cardboard – he could get his hands on. Strange that only one week earlier he’d had it in mind himself to murder Brother Herman, for the man had been a bully who’d deserved all he’d received. He had thought of using Barney Thomson’s scissors, little knowing that that was exactly what Barney had had in mind himself. Stupid that he’d gone to see Barney to threaten him to keep his mouth shut. Ironic.

Funny how life pans out, thought Martin, as he led the way through the snowfields.

Raphael slotted in behind. A man with an unshakeable belief in God. When it had become apparent that the killer’s agenda included everyone in the monastery, he had been the only one not afraid. The test of true faith. When Death was near, or an inevitability, were you afraid of what came next, for if you truly believed in the Lord, then you need not be afraid. That was the ultimate test, and one which all of the brothers had failed, even Copernicus, as this demon had laid waste to the complement of the monastery. All except Brother Raphael. The man’s faith was unyielding. He faced the prospect of Death with certainty and he knew that should he survive this fantastic ordeal, one day he would return to the abbey to start afresh.

All this, of course, did not mean that he hadn’t decided to sell his story to the papers. Any one of them would do;
Life and Work
if necessary. He could use the money to get the monastery restarted. And as he walked, he made his plans for the future – not knowing that his future consisted of little more than five hours’ ploughing through snow. A refurbished monastery, Spartan but comfortable. They would attract tourists, who could come and see life as it had been in simpler times. People fell for that stuff all the time, he thought. A brilliant idea. They’d get all sorts of tourists wanting to go for it. Prince Charles for a start, and then the Americans would come in droves. Women too – they could accept them. They would get all sorts of Scandinavian Uberchicks, like the lassies in Abba, only with sensible hair. They could have mixed saunas, with Gregorian chant playing over the Tannoy; massages; all kinds of things. The investment opportunities were endless; for why couldn’t money and religion mix? The Vatican had been doing it for centuries. They could get production companies in to make movies and stuff. They could steal Cadfael from whomsoever had it at that time; they could get
The Name of the Rose
follow-up; maybe some entirely new monk detective scenario; then, of course, there’d be the Barney Thomson biopic with Billy Connolly; or, if the worst came to the worst, they could always fall back on the Nordic connection and get sleazy low-budget Scandianavian porn flics, with names like
Swedish Nympho Nuns Go Sex!
and
Lesbian Monastery Bitches Get Ugly
. And so, the longer he walked, the more Brother Raphael was lured by Mammon, the further he got away from the abbey – in more ways than one.

Brother Edward faced the inevitability of the future. This business had merely confirmed what he’d already known – that the life of a monk was not for him. He would have to return to the real world and deal with the demons which awaited him. If it meant that he had to sleep with hundreds of women, casting them aside like so much chaff to the winds of fate, then so be it. If his life was to be one long inferno of endless sex and bitter retribution from long-distance telephone boxes, then that was how it must be. Perhaps he would even be able to do it for a living. Gigolo Ed, working the holiday resorts in the south of France, escorting the old and infirm to casinos and restaurants, then slipping from their beds while the night remained young and they lay snoring; making off with their jewellery, maybe – although that was another game altogether – then ending up with some young Mediterranean floozy at two o’clock in the morning, knee deep in sangria and pubic hair. It was a black future and it lay heavily upon his shoulders; he knew, however, that there would be no escape.

Mulholland was still in some sort of daze. He would have liked to have been consumed by determination to get them all to safety and to bring Barney Thomson to justice, but he was sapped of enthusiasm to the point of capitulation. He wanted Proudfoot to escape, but no longer cared about the other three. A sense of duty would drive him to protect them, but what did he care now? For, as he walked, he surveyed the battlefield of his future, and it was barren and laid waste. His life was Flanders Fields.

Melanie was gone, who knew for how long. Possibly forever, and in his heart he couldn’t have cared less whether she returned or not. He tried picturing her in the arms of some bloke from Devon, but the image induced nothing in him. No anger, no jealousy, no pain. And what of the job? What was his future to be in the police after it was revealed that approximately three hundred monks had been murdered under his nose? Dispatched to catch Barney Thomson, and instead the man had gone on a mass murder spree while Mulholland had slept.

And so his thoughts turned to what else he could have done to ensure the safety of this pathetic band. Should he have kept them all together in the main hall from the minute he’d arrived? Made sure they’d gone to the toilet in sixes and sevens? What else could have kept them safe? Not the twos he had suggested. Even then, he’d repeated his folly that morning with the Abbot and Brother Steven.