The Barbershop Seven (58 page)

'A rumour?'

'Yes. Like a curse from the gods.'

'The gods, Brother?' said the Abbot. 'I thought we only had one. Although I have my doubts about Him now, as well.'

'Oh, there are lots of gods, Brother Abbot. Whispering gods. Whispering rumours.'

The Abbot looked into the depths of Steven's eyes, but saw nothing there. He might have done at one time but, like Brother Satan before him, he had lost the ability to see the true hearts of men.

'And what is this rumour of which you speak?'

The smile returned to Steven's face. He lifted a finger, moved it in time with his talk.

'They're saying that all this, all this murder, is about revenge.'

'Revenge? Revenge for what?'

Steven paused. For effect, but it was lost on his audience. Too confused to be impressed.

'Two Tree Hill,' he said. Awaited the response.

The Abbot shook his head. 'Two Tree Hill? What do you mean?'

'Two Tree Hill, Brother Abbot. Where the late Brother Cafferty was disgraced and expelled from the Holy Order of the Monks of St John. Condemned forever to walk the streets of normal men, condemned forever to be apart from the God whom he loved.'

The Abbot was even more confused. Tried desperately to think of Two Tree Hill, and it returned beneath a hazy fudge.

'The small hill at the foot of Ben Hope,' he said.

'Yes,' said Steven.

The Abbot waited for something more, but Steven glared through narrowed eyes.

'I don't understand, Brother,' the Abbot said.

'Not just any hill, Brother Abbot,' said Steven, spitting the name. 'The last hill of all. A very Calvary of the north, where a man might meet his destiny.'

The Abbot stared at him, his eyes widening. Trying to recollect the last time they had been there; but it had been so long ago. Slowly it returned, however, and the memory came back through the mist. An ugly incident, a man alone, cast from their midst. A ruined man.

The Abbot's head still shook; he looked at Steven in wonder and confusion.

'You are saying that Brother Cafferty is back amongst us, and is taking his revenge? That is absurd. Cafferty is dead. He lived an unhappy life in Edinburgh with a woman he never loved and a son who came to noth...'

Realisation dawned. He noticed the eyes at last. The similarities. Because, for all the time that it had been, he could still see Cafferty's face; the anguish and the dismay. And in the eyes of Brother Steven, he saw Brother Cafferty. Steven's father.

The Abbot's mouth dropped. 'But, Brother. You cannot be serious.'

Steven stood up, slowly drawing the knife from within his cloak. Prodded the end of the blade with his finger, drawing blood.

'I can be serious, Brother, and I am. You ruined his life. It is time for my father to be avenged.'

'You killed them all? You, Brother? You killed gentle Saturday and Morgan? Ash and Herman, Adolphus and Ezekiel. Gentle Brother Satan. Brother Festus?'

'Oh, not Festus,' said Steven, glad of the chance to interrupt, impressive though that list sounded to him. 'I had nothing to do with Festus.'

'I don't understand.'

'I can't be sure, but I think God took care of Festus. The man was a pervert, after all. Don't tell me he never regaled you with one of his three-breasted, cocaine-snorting fantasies? God hates that stuff.'

'But, Brother?' said the Abbot, and his voice was filled with wonder and incredulity. Slowly he raised himself from the bench, the better to accept the knife which awaited him. For he knew he was to die.

'This does not make sense, my son,' said the Abbot.

Steven's teeth ground together; he took a step forward.

'Don't you call me that, you bloody bastard. You must have been there. You were part of it. He was unjustly punished by a collective of bigots. His objections were more than merited but as a result of them you expelled him from the abbey. The man was never the same.'

The Abbot spread his hands. Looked like he was appealing to a referee.

'But, Brother, it was nothing. No one cared about it. Your father made a mistake. If he'd accepted it, it would have been forgotten ten seconds later. But instead, he confronted the Abbot Gracelands from Burncleuth Abbey. He punched the man, for goodness' sake. Punched him, Brother. It was an abomination. We had no choice.'

Steven shook his head. Stood poised with the knife. His anger with the Abbot had gone. The speech he'd had prepared for years no longer seemed worthy; or relevant. They were all going to die, and now it was nearly over. They deserved what had come to them, each and every one.

'Choice? White shall not neutralise black, nor good compensate bad in man, absolve him so: life's business being just the terrible choice.'

'Oh, for God's sake, Brother,' snapped the Abbot, 'will you stop quoting all that nonsense! Can you not say something for yourself for once? I simply cannot believe this.'

The handle of the knife twitched in Steven's fingers. Another victim in his sights, but he could not be long about it, for the police would be returning soon; and he had business to take care of with the good Brother Abbot after he had killed him.

'It's just how you see it, Brother, isn't it? It's all just words. It's like the Bible, it's like the Apocrypha; it's like any words that anyone has ever written or said. We think them, we write them, we say them, but they're nothing. It's deeds that matter, Brother Abbot, deeds are the thing. Words aren't cheap, they're nothing. Deeds are where that whole psychic thing pokes its dysfunctional head out of the womb, kicks off the umbilical cord of avarice and jealousy, and starts to breathe the good clean air of truth.'

The Abbot looked from Steven to the knife he held in his hand.

'For God's sake, Brother, there you go again. If you're so full of contempt for words, why do you come out with so much bollocks?' The Abbot had truly lost himself. 'This is the most absurd thing I've ever heard in my life. You've committed nearly thirty murders because of a lie, because that's what your father must have told you. A lie!'

'It was not!'

'Brother, dear Brother, it bloody was. I was there. Right was seen to be done. Your father had no leg to stand on. He lost his temper for nothing. It was a tragic overreaction, and one which merited admonishment.'

'Hah!' barked Steven. He had heard all this before. From his father, Brother Cafferty. 'I know what it was all about. It was the politics of the abbey at the time. There was a power struggle and there were some of you just looking for a way to get rid of Cafferty. I know it to be true!'

Brother Steven was becoming ever more forceful; especially since he was now not so sure. Enough people had said it now; maybe his father had made a mistake after all. Maybe he shouldn't just have killed twenty-six of them. Maybe this great rash of murder and death had just been a pointless waste of time. Great fun, but a waste of time.

However, the Abbot hesitated. It was all coming back. Brother Steven was right. That was exactly why they'd had Cafferty expelled from the abbey. Politics. The man had been too much of a liberal. Hadn't approved of hairshirts; hadn't liked self-flagellation; hadn't approved of sandpapering your testicles to cleanse the mind. Of course, those Caffertyisms had come into vogue over the years, but the time hadn't been right. He'd had to be silenced.

Steven saw the hesitation, saw the look in his eyes. So he did not hesitate. The knife was thrust forward; the Abbot had every intention of receiving it, and within seconds he lay bleeding on the floor, close to the death which would inevitably follow.

Steven stood over the body; the smile came to his face as the adrenaline pumped wildly through his veins and he got the massive rush that came with murder. He watched the eyes of the Abbot close and he knew him to be dead.

But he still held the knife in his hands, and he bent over the Abbot and lifted the sleeve of his cloak out of the way. And then once more his knife pierced the skin; cooling blood was drawn, and the Abbot's tortured soul could do nothing but watch.

For Steven was not finished with his body.

––––––––

I
f 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?'