The Barbershop Seven (53 page)

Sheep Dip dived to the side, stumbling. Brain in confused overload. Fumbling for the gun tucked in his back. Kicking himself. He avoided the first lunge and regained his footing. Hand on the butt of the gun, he swept it forward. The killer knew what was coming, knew he had to make one last effort before the gun was upon him.

His knife swept wildly through the air; the blade, dulled by blood, black-red in the emaciated light of the wretched fire; the killer-monk gasping with effort, his head exploding with the outrageous pleasure of the fight.

––––––––

'I
know guys are weird, 'n all, but surely it doesn't take half an hour to go to the toilet?'

The listing of dream alternatives had long since expired – too painful to think about – and they had been sitting in silence. Mulholland stared into the fire, which had gradually burned lower. Contemplating the thought that he would have to add more fuel, coming along with the realisation that Sheep Dip had been gone a long time; realisation which he had been doing his best to ignore.

'It takes all kinds of lengths of times,' he said. 'Surely you've read that in a
Blitz!
article?
Why Men Take Ages To Shit
. Or
Tell the Length of a Man's Cock from How Long He Spends on the Toilet
. Or
Men and Shit - The Savage Truth
.'

'Very funny. You don't think something might have happened to him?'

'Sheep Dip? The Sheepmeister? Mr Dippidy Fucking Idiot-Face? I doubt it,' Mulholland said, while he presumed that Sheep Dip already lay dead, throat slashed, blood everywhere. Felt guilty about being so callous. 'The amount that guy eats, it might well take him half an hour.'

'We should go and look for him,' Proudfoot said, ignoring the ill-humour which she had quite become used to.

'How do you mean that, exactly?'

'How do you think I mean it? We should go and look for him. Something might have happened.'

'Look, it's freezing out there, down those corridors. It's warm in here. He's probably just gone in search of some more food, and if he hasn't, and he's already dead, it's not as if we're going to be able to do anything for him now, is it? Are you a doctor?'

'Chief Inspector?'

Mulholland rubbed his hand across his face. Looked with yearning once more into the fire.

'God, all right, then. But if we find him sitting on the bog reading a porn mag, I'm going to be pissed off.'

***

M
ulholland appeared from the toilet, clutching a candle in his right hand, the jumping shadows mixing with those from the candle of Proudfoot. Proudfoot shivered.

'Well?' she said.

'Now I know how George Michael feels,' he said. 'Anyway, the cupboard is empty. Not a bare arse to be seen, Sheep Dip's or otherwise.'

'So what do you think, then?'

'I think he was lying when he said he was going to the toilet. I think he had other things to do. Some lead he wanted to follow up and not tell us about; some other business with one of the inmates; who knows?'

'So, do we look for him?'

Mulholland stared through the gloom. Proudfoot was an attractive woman; in this light she was glorious. Delicious, sexy, seductive; all of those things. His ill-humour, his impatience, his rampant apathy, combined to make him want her even more. Right now, in a cold, dark, damp corridor, in a freezing monastery, with a killer on the loose, in the middle of nowhere.

'No,' he said. No matter what he was feeling, he couldn't mask ill-humour this ill.

'We've got to look for him. It doesn't matter what his motives were. If he'd intended to be long about it, he would have given some other excuse. Something must have happened to him.'

'I don't care, Erin,' snapped Mulholland, and he almost spat the name out, and the use of it sent a shiver down her spine, making her take a step back. 'If he wants to be such a bloody fool as to go mincing around the bloody Monastery of Death in the middle of the night, on his own, well, sod him. He deserves to die.'

Mulholland, candle blazing its way in front, began to move off down the corridor. Proudfoot stood her ground. 'Don't be such a selfish arsehole.'

He stopped. His shoulders were hunched against the cold. The candle dully illuminated holes and nooks in the walls where spiders lived and where small insects went to die. And the thrown shadows moved with him as he slowly turned around.

'What did you just say, Sergeant?' he said. Voice on the edge, but she had had enough of it, and was not cowed.

'You're not the only one stuck in this bloody awful place, you know. You're not the first person who's split up with his wife, you're not the first person who hates his job, you're not the first person to spend a freezing night in a place they could not want to be in less. Get a fucking grip of yourself. And cut the
Sergeant
crap 'n all, because I'm not letting you get away with this. There's a fellow officer somewhere in this building and he very likely needs our help. Now, come on!'

Proudfoot marched off in the opposite direction, further into the bowels of the monastery. Towards the chamber where Sheep Dip lay prostrate on the floor; cold stone, briefly warmed by policeman's blood.

Mulholland breathed deeply. Maybe she was right, but the thought didn't even begin to formulate itself. Nevertheless, with the chill bitter and clutching his coat close around him, he began to walk after her, several paces behind and making no effort to catch up.

'If we get back to the room and that big bastard is sitting there, you're dead, Sergeant,' he muttered to the darkness between them. And if she heard him, she did not let on.

***

B
arney Thomson shook. He had moved on from shivering, and now his whole body vibrated wildly with cold and fear. He had seen so much death, more than in a gaggle of Bond movies, and yet this was worse than all of it.

He had seen the killer at work, from no more than five yards away. He had seen him strike repeatedly with a knife, carried away in a crazed frenzy of diabolical delight. He had seen him drink from the cup of evil, and eat the meat from the calf of villainy. This was a man who enjoyed his work, who'd been carried away with a brutal felicity. And this was a man whom he knew, whose hair he had cut, whose skin he had pressed his scissors against.

If only he had let those scissors penetrate that skin.

What now? Barney thought as he shook. The killer-monk had fled the scene, leaving Barney alone with the corpse of Detective Sergeant Sheep MacPherson. Stabbed at least nine or ten times, when once would have sufficed. Blood had sprayed around, although invisible in the non-light. Barney had fled, footfalls silent in the dark, in the opposite direction.

All the way back to his hiding place, however, he'd imagined he was being followed; every time he stopped he thought he could hear the sound of movement behind him. A breath, a softly laden shoe, a cloak brushing against a wall; a laugh. So that now, as he sat in the attic with who knew what creatures for company, he was frightened for the first time since he'd come to this place. For the first time in many, many years.

And he sat against a cold wall, and not a single coherent thought came his way. He could turn himself in in the morning – should he survive until then – and at the same time tell the police who the real killer was. But who was going to believe him? Now that the sergeant lay dead, with a note on his person, inviting him to a meeting with Barney – and threatening death to others if he came accompanied?

Only when he was two corridors closer to the sanctuary of the loft had Barney thought to return and check Sheep Dip's clothes for the note, but nothing on earth could have made him turn around and head back towards the scene of death and towards the demons which trailed his every move.

And now he sat and shook, wondering if he should hand himself over to the police. But the storm continued to rage outside, so he still would not get out of this place. He would be kept prisoner in some small room, and then he would be sitting prey for the killer. Or would the police and the monks just take revenge upon him immediately – a kangaroo court – on the assumption that he was the guilty man?

Barney shook, and went on shaking.

***

T
hey found Sheep Dip's body nearly an hour later. An hour's search, interrupted by a brief return to their room to make sure Sheep Dip wasn't sitting eating chocolate fudge bars, drinking beer and reading the February edition of
Blitz!

Down endless corridors, the storm always evident outside, no matter how deep within the bowels of the monastery they went. When it happened, they became aware that something was wrong before they saw it. As they neared the chamber, Mulholland now in front – irascibility having given way to unease – they slowed down and stared more intently into the gloom. They were about to encounter death; they could feel it. Goose bumps goose-stepped across their bodies, from one to the other.

'You still back there?' asked Mulholland, needing to hear noise shatter this awful silence.

'I was going to stop for coffee, but changed my mind,' answered Proudfoot. 'Couldn't decide between an Americano and a latte.'

'We can get it later. That and some...'

The joke drifted off into silence as he got his first sight of the body; his slow pace became even slower. Proudfoot emitted an audible gasp as she saw the corpse. Big, ugly, crumpled and, as they got nearer, the bloody swirl around it.

Detective Sergeant Gordon MacPherson. Sheep Dip. The Dip. The Dipmeister. Diporama. The Big Dipper. The Dipsmeller Pursuivant. General Dipenhower. The Dipster.

Dead.

'Shit,' said Mulholland, as they came alongside the body and stood over it. Proudfoot's hand reached up to her mouth; she swallowed. Mulholland bent down and touched the blood on the floor, then on Sheep Dip's mutilated body.

'Cold,' he said. 'Mind you, of course it's cold in this place, so I can't say how long he's been dead. Could be ten minutes, could be an hour.'

He stood up and they stared at one another, the shadows jumping a little more vigourously from Proudfoot's trembling hand. Mulholland forgot his anger of an hour earlier; Proudfoot forgot that she'd been intending to be angry with him if something had happened to Sheep Dip.

'Stabbed?' she asked.

'Aye. Quite a few times, by the looks of things.'

'Barney Thomson?'

Mulholland shook his head and looked off into the shadows. It was strange that they should stand over this mutilated body and not fear for their lives; not fear that the killer might still lurk near by. A sixth sense of some sort; a knowledge that this was not their time.

'It just doesn't seem right. This is a guy who's been swanning around the Highlands cutting hair on the cheap. We didn't hear one bad thing about him. And the only bad stuff they had to say back home was that he was boring. Doesn't make him a raving nutter.'

'You want to search him?' said Proudfoot, and Mulholland looked down at the bloody mess.

'Aye, I should. We'll have to tell the Abbot, but no doubt the minute they find out about this they'll want to whisk the body off to be with God, or something like that.'

'He's not one of them. We can stop them.'

Mulholland bent down and started to wade through the cold blood. 'We can try, Sergeant. But we're stuck here for God knows how long. There's no back-up; there's thirty-odd of them and two of us. They can do pretty much what they like at the moment.'

Proudfoot turned away and looked around the small chamber where Sheep Dip had drawn his final breath. Her skin crawled again as shadows tripped in some terpsichorean nightmare; and she saw things in corners and movement in holes in the wall; and maybe, after all, she was afraid. Maybe Death was closer than their instincts would allow her to believe.

Mulholland came up with pieces of paper from the pockets of Sheep Dip's shredded clothes, and carefully he dried them of blood and held them to the light of the candle.

A list of women's phone numbers – mostly strippers from Thurso, although Mulholland was not to know that; a Visa bill for £161.89 from a lingerie shop in Inverness; a recipe for bread-and-butter pudding; a notebook with general notes about the case, which Mulholland slipped into his pocket; a photograph of a sheep, with the words
Mabeline, Spring '96
written on the back; an itemised bill for £21.62 from a grocer in Huntly. All that, and one more thing: a note from Barney Thomson offering to meet Sheep Dip in the chamber in which he now lay dead.
Come at midnight, and come alone, or others will die.

Mulholland stood, still studying it; letting the other pieces of paper fall to the floor. He held his candle close and let Proudfoot read the note.

They both breathed deeply, then stared around the dark chamber which surrounded them. Felt the chill; not just the chill of night.

'Right,' said Mulholland eventually. 'From now on you and I stick together. Not even one second, Sergeant, all right?'

Proudfoot let a silent nod drop into the night.

'We should go and find the Abbot. And Herman 'n all, he's just about the only guy around here who knows what's going on.'

Mulholland placed Barney Thomson's note in his pocket and then, leading the way, picked a corridor and, having no idea if it was in the right direction, set off in search of the Abbot's bedchamber. And as they left Sheep Dip's mutilated body, they didn't notice that his gun was missing, because they'd never known that he'd had one in the first place.

––––––––

T
hey arrived in twos and threes, but none of them on their own. The rumours had spread through the monastery like an infectious disease; a syphilis of the mind. There had been more murders in the night, of that all these monks were certain; and anyone who wasn't at breakfast was assumed to have been a victim. They each had their theories; on who might be dead, who might be next, and who might be carrying out these crimes against God.

Brother Mince missed breakfast on the back of a thumping headache, and there were those who assumed the worst. Brother Malcolm was also missing and again presumptions were made – but only by those who had forgotten that Malcolm always missed breakfast. Strangely, however, despite the absence of Herman, no one thought the worst of that. No one imagined for a minute that something could have happened to Herman. He was a bastard, maybe, but also the rock on which the integrity and strength of the monastery had been maintained. Nothing could have happened to Herman because, if it had, then what did that say of the chances for the rest of them?