The Barbershop Seven (55 page)

'So what, we just sit and wait?' asked Proudfoot.

He shrugged, leading the way to the door. 'I know it's crap, but if you've got a better idea I'll take it. If we stick together as much as possible, I think we should be all right. I don't doubt the guy could take out more than one of these guys at once, but so far he hasn't. No one goes alone. And hopefully, this weather will clear in the next day or so and we can head west. Get back to some sort of civilisation.'

'And what if it doesn't clear?' she said, as they headed back down a cold, dark corridor towards the main hall. 'What then?'

Mulholland walked in front, his candle lit. We're done for, he thought, and Barney Thomson will find a way to pick us off one by one.

'It'll clear, Sergeant,' was all he said. 'That's what weather does.'

***

T
he evil Barney Thomson sat in the attic. He had ventured out briefly during the day and had pilfered a few more blankets, so that he was now almost warm for the first time since he'd effected his disappearance. He'd been aware at one point of someone coming up into the attic, searching for him presumably, but he knew where to hide, and knew that unless ten men with searchlights came up, he could easily avoid detection. Two of them, it sounded like, with nothing but candles. The police probably. His heart had raced, but he'd been in these situations before had Barney Thomson. Getting to be an old hand.

And so he'd sat quite comfortably most of the day, nothing to think about except his hunger and how he could possibly turn in the monk-killer while at the same time exonerating himself. Had realised the mistake he'd made with the threat to Sheep Dip. It had seemed a good idea at the time, but he'd expected to be able to convince Sheep Dip of his innocence. He hadn't considered the possibility of the big guy getting murdered, leaving the note to be found; which he presumed it had.

And so, through his own stupidity, there was now evidence linking him with the murders. If he'd been vilified before, it was nothing to what would happen now.

As usual, Barney was wrong, but he was not to know of that morning's newspaper headlines. The Sun:
Barber-Surgeon Innocent, Claims Blair
. The Guardian:
Thomson A 'Dumb-Ass' But No Killer, Says Clinton
. The Times:
Barney Thomson, the Alibis Stack Up
. The Independent:
Thomson 'Asleep' While Murders Took Place
. The Express:
Thomson Framed by Porn King in Camilla Scandal.
The Daily Record:
It Was The English!
The Mirror:
That Guy Couldn't Lace My Boots, Claims Saddam
. The Press & Journal:
Dons In Nil-Nil Thriller with Forfar: 'We Need Thomson On The Wing,' Says Boss
.

The eddies and currents of public opinion, as dictated by a fevered press ever on the lookout for a new angle.

Barney knew nothing of this and, indeed, it mattered not at all. The outside world might have been twenty yards away through a thick stone wall; the nearest town might have been only twenty miles across a snowfield; Glasgow might only have been three hundred miles as the crow flew; but none of it mattered. He was trapped in a monastery with twenty-five monks and two police officers who thought him guilty of seven murders; and one other monk who himself was guilty of those murders, and who would presumably be more than willing to take care of Barney if the opportunity arose.

He listened to the angry noises from his stomach and thought of his fate. It was impossible to imagine an outcome from this that he would welcome. Already he had accepted much. He would never again see Agnes; he would never again see his brother Allan and his delicious wife Barbara; he would never again work in a Glasgow barbershop, cutting hair and talking nonsense; he would never mix with his own folk and simply be one of the crowd.

But what else? Would he ever walk free from this prison? Would he survive to see another summer and feel warmth on his back? Would he ever again sit in a quiet pub over a game of dominoes and drink a freshly pulled pint of lager?

If he was to do any of that, if he was to taste anything good, from beer to freedom, he would have to be as determined as he had determined he would be only two nights previously. And here he sat, hungry, scared and broken. The man Mulholland believed could take on four monks and win. How many more murders would there be? How many more crimes would he be falsely accused of, how many more crimes would he have to prove himself innocent of?

And so he slid unhappily into a world of dreams, and when he awoke he would discover the answer to those questions. And many more. Many, many more.

––––––––

A
s far as you knew you had eleven people to take care of. Forget the euphemism. You had eleven people to kill. Eleven monks. And so far you've taken out four of them. The four whose identity you were sure of before you started. Which leaves seven more. The only problem being that you don't know who they are. There are twenty-six monks remaining in the monastery, of whom fifteen could have been at Two Tree Hill twenty-seven years ago. But there are no records of that day in the library, as you had assumed there would be. You know that, because you've checked – and had to kill two librarians because of it. One of them was on your list anyway.

So, quick quiz question. What do you do?

Answer: You take them all out.

That modus operandi which had been working so well has already been thrown out of the window, carried away as you are by the euphoria of murder. Anyway, you have to grow and adapt to situations if you're going to be a serial killer in the modern world. Can't live in the past. It would take an age to gradually work your way round the monastery, knifing all these monks in the throat; and the chances are that eventually your work is going to get the better of you, and you're going to come up against a monk who is not so easily overcome. Or a policeman. It had been a close-run thing the night before with Sergeant Dip. Someone might fight back; and you, the hunter, become the hunted. All that stuff.

So, it is time to adopt a long-distance scatter policy; yet something prevents you from putting poison in that evening's dinner, and potentially wiping out the entire complement in one go. A need to feel more blood on your hands. So you opt instead for poison in a single carafe of wine; something which you know will be passed around maybe four or five of the brothers. A fair little cache of victims, almost doubling your tally. You can sit it out at the side, take note of who will die in the night from the slow-acting poison, and then deal with the others as you see fit. You might not get to watch the poisoned actually die, but it gives you a thrill just to think about it.

Curciceam perdicium
– a strange-shaped insect of the Bornean rainforest, the blood of which decays into a deadly, slow-acting toxin. Seven to eight hours after ingestion, there begins the hideous seven-stage consequence of the body's reaction. a) The victim breaks into a cold sweat. Nothing too hideous or worrying, but uncomfortable. b) From this gentle opening, the body leaps into convulsions and erratic spasms, lasting for nearly three minutes. c) There follows a period of intense pain, likened to that endured during childbirth, but concentrated in one small area just above the kidneys. d) Then there is the shortness of breath, manifesting itself in a dryness of the lungs and an intense craving to swim naked underwater. e) As the body temperature rises, the mind is besieged by hallucinations of the 'large insects and spiders crawling over your face while your hands are tied' variety. f) The victim has an unstoppable desire to break into the second verse of
Fernando
, as strange liquids begin to ooze from the head. g) Then finally, as the body convulses, pain shoots through every cell, the victim froths at the mouth and the demons of Hell are unleashed with venomous panache on every sensory perception in his possession. He will see strange visions in the darkness, and there will come a dramatic easing of the pain so that in a moment of epiphany he might imagine that he has found salvation. Then he will die and be deposited in his own private Gehenna.

Or worse...

You are not sure how many you can dispose of in one glorious night of hell-bent revenge, but the first will have to be your idiotic partner, then after that as many as possible so that the police, if you don't manage to take care of them, don't become suspicious about your partner being dead.

It will all start slowly at dinner, as they come in their twos for evening repast, and you can have the fun of seeing who drinks the poisoned wine. Those monks will die slowly, and as they lie in tortured agony, you will do the rounds of the monastery and take care of as many of the rest as you can.

A simple plan, but why not? All the best plans are simple.

***

'I
t's a big bunch of stones.'

'Stones? It's more than that, Brother.'

'Get out of my face. All these stone circles are the same. They may have been built without the aid of heavy engineering equipment, they may be precisely aligned with the sun, they may be a conduit to some mystical higher force, they may indeed be the Westminster Abbey or Parkhead of their day, but when push comes to shove, they're just a big bunch of stones.'

'And I suppose you think the pyramids are just a big bunch of rocks on a polygonal base, and that the Amazon rainforest is just a big bunch of flowers? You are wrong, Brother, terribly wrong. Perhaps Stonehenge was built to some pagan god with whom we have no business, or perhaps not. Either way, there is no denying the beauty and the complexity of those stones. They are a wonder of invention; a glimpse at the grand delirium of the dreams of prehistoric priests; a portentous apocalypse of maniacal conglomeration; a majestic colossus of ethereal inspiration, glorying in the reverie of divine light and the eternal battle with the incubus of destiny; they transcend the thoughts of men, they exalt in the gemmiferous presumption of the whims of fate; they grasp the effulgence of assiduity, yet mould it with the miasmatic corruption of opprobrious indolence.'

Brother Pondlife walked slowly down the final flight of stairs towards the dining hall; Brother Jerusalem came close behind, head shaking.

'You don't half talk some amount of shite sometimes, Brother,' he said. 'They're just a big bunch of stones. And you know the incredible thing? They charge a fiver or something to get in. You go by that place and there's all these people standing there pointing at them, having paid their fiver, don't forget, and saying things like, "There's a big stone." "Aye, right enough, there's another one." Load of shite.'

Brothers Pondlife and Jerusalem walked into the dining room and fatefully took their seats at the table with Brothers Sledge, Brunswick and Columbane; the latter two of whom had already tasted the wine and declared it exceptional.

The killer was fascinated, even though he knew that nothing was going to happen as he sat and watched. He was going to miss the good part, but he had other fish to fry. And as Brothers Jerusalem and Pondlife took their first sip of the wine that would kill them, the serial monk drank water and thought of the night to come. For the Night of the Long Knives had begun...

***

B
rother Joseph first. The killer's partner. Simply and easily strangled where he lay sleeping. The killer took much pleasure in it, for he had never liked Joseph; had always found it tedious the way he brought every conversation around to the subject of why televisions didn't have wheels. An old man screaming towards senility with blundering haste, and someone whom he felt certain must have been at Two Tree Hill.

And so he prolonged the death; allowed him to wake, allowed him to know his killer, allowed him to breathe desperately through the strangulation, for an extended five minutes, his arms wafting ineffectually at his side. And then, cruelly, he finished him off with ten seconds of biting hatred, the rope cutting Joseph's frail old neck, and he died with no knowledge of why. Discovered that in heaven televisions could have wheels if you wanted them to.

Brother Solomon and Brother Ezekiel. Prone to nipping down to the cellars after dinner and sharing another bottle or two of the monastery wine between them. They knew fine well that they shouldn't, not with the notorious Barney Thomson on the loose –
Thomson Innocent Of Everything Except Boyd Own Goal
, said that day's Evening Times – but they liked their wine and there was a good red down there that Brother Luke just never seemed to bring to dinner. Either they were fatalistic, thinking that they would die anyway so they might as well die drunk, or they were thinking that it wouldn't happen to them.

The great door to the cellar closed over them, and on a night such as this it locked them into their doom. The door was closed, the walls were thick; no one could hear their screams. In this intense cold that was all that it took and, notwithstanding their attempts at shared bodily warmth, they would not see the break of day.

Brother Mince and Brother Joshua. Walking with trepidation down a long, dark stairwell; wall on one side, vertiginous drop on the other. Constantly in fear of an encounter with Barney Thomson, cloven hoofs and jaggedy-arsed tail and all. And so, when the real killer approached them, they did not recognise him for who he was. They bid a pleasant evening greeting and, for their pains, were both sent tumbling to their deaths. Despite the efforts of his flailing arms, Mince's head smacked into the stone floor. Brother Joshua landed on top of Mince, and his fall was broken. Along with his neck.

The library was set on fire, the door was locked, and again the natural soundproofing of the rooms would mask the screams of Brothers Adolphus, David and James. Men who would die believing they were being punished by God, as shortly before their deaths they would be gathered around the library's illicit collection of nineteenth-century Vatican retro-porn; the pages of which were well fingered and, indeed, stained in one particular case, the result of an embarrassing incident involving Brother Edward after a particularly hard day of repentance and three carafes of wine.