The Barbershop Seven (54 page)

And so they gathered in the dining room, two fires blazing to keep the cold at bay. What would once have been a gathering of thirty-two, now reduced to twenty-six. Muted conversations, muted humour; they assumed they were to be addressed by Herman or the Abbot. A few eyebrows raised when Herman was not at the Abbot's side, but still they did not suspect. Assumed that Herman was off doing that Sherlock Holmes/Spanish Inquisition amalgam at which he'd become so proficient.

There was an exhaled breath of surprise when the legendary Brother Mince arrived, as the rumour of his demise had already quickly spread; and a few heads nodded in self-reproach at the arrival of Brother Malcolm.

They were all present and seated on benches at the required time, with the Abbot and two of the three police officers standing at the head of the room. It was not the Abbot who spoke, however; he simply passed the authority for the abbey and this situation to Mulholland with a slight nod of the head, then joined the other monks on the benches.

A low murmur. Had the Abbot relinquished control?

Mulholland surveyed the worried faces. What was it they expected him to say? He swallowed, he lowered his eyes, he shut out the sound of the wind and the storm; the blizzard as furious as it had been for days.

'Gentlemen, there's a lot to be covered, and the Abbot thought it best that I speak to you.'

A few eyes narrowed, and he knew they would be wondering if he'd given the Abbot a choice. Everywhere was the same; the basis of any organisation could be religion, it could be sport, it could be drinking, gambling, sex or backgammon, but when it came down to it, it was all about politics and people looking after themselves and trying to dictate to others.

'As some of you might have heard, there have been another two murders in the night.' Silence. Two? And a few eyes were thrown shiftily around the room. 'I'm afraid that one of the victims was Brother Herman.' Silence again, stunned this time, for a few seconds, and then the differing reactions around the room. Tears from Brother Sincerity. Mulholland gave them a while, knowing that the next reported victim would not elicit the same reaction. 'And the other was one of my men, Sergeant MacPherson.'

'The Dipmeister!' came an anguished cry from the back.

Mulholland nodded. 'Aye, I'm afraid so. Both killed by the same knife as far as we can tell.'

He let the news settle in, unaware that many of the monks were even more affected by the news of Sheep Dip's death. For if even the police weren't safe...

'Gentlemen, Sergeant Proudfoot and I are obviously up from Glasgow, but we didn't set out up here to investigate these crimes. We knew nothing of them until Saturday evening. We were in Durness on the trail of a man who is wanted in Glasgow in connection with several deaths last winter and spring. We now have little doubt that by some bizarre coincidence...' No such thing as coincidence in police work, thought Proudfoot; no such thing as coincidence in religion, thought the Abbot; I wonder if I can get Herman's thirteenth-century Italian lithograph collection, thought Adolphus. '...the man we sought was hiding here at this abbey under the name of Brother Jacob.'

Definite gasps this time, coupled with a few cries of 'I knew yon bastard was a serial killer.'

'His name is Barney Thomson and, although we had our doubts that he was the monastery killer even when we discovered he was here, it now looks as though there is little doubt that he is the man we seek. As far as we know there have been no sightings of him in the last thirty-six hours, but clearly he is still at large somewhere within the monastery.' Brother Steven stared at the floor and wondered whether or not to keep his own counsel. 'With the weather the way it is, he's not going to be going anywhere. Therefore, we all need to be extremely vigilant. Already six of your number and one of ours have died, and we have to do everything in our power to make sure those numbers do not rise.'

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.

––––––––

M
ulholland 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.'