The Killing Club

by Paul Finch

  The front door was another slab of timber, this one studded with iron nail-heads. Over the top there was a heavy granite lintel with the words 1705 AD engraved into it. Somewhat anachronistically, there was no actual key-hole; this door too could only be opened by the electronic fob.

  Inside, the porch was floored with stone and walled with hand-painted tiles depicting eighteenth-century hunting scenes. The downstairs rooms beyond were low-beamed and furnished in the style of a bygone age, though there were newish fixtures too: a modern central heating system; a large, flat-screen television in the lounge, with a satellite receiver box and Blu-Ray player; desktop computers in several rooms; full Wi-Fi, and of course security cameras mounted on the ceiling in almost every room. The kitchen, which was enormous, was pristine. There was scarcely a mark on its parquet floor or pine worktops; the large kitchen table, which could have seated twelve, was of polished teak – again there wasn’t a mark on it. It was a similar story upstairs, where the oak-panelled bedroom he’d been allocated, aside from its sumptuous four-poster bed and rich, hanging tapestries, boasted a granite hearth without a smear of soot. The bathroom attached to this was particularly elegant: done out in painted ceramic tiles, the bathtub sunken, the electric power-shower combining a steam-room facility.

  Heck wandered back downstairs, fascinated but bemused.

  He peeked into the security booth, which was located in a triangular cubby-hole that had once been the under-stair closet. It consisted of a central swivel chair, a bank of intercom/radio controls and wall-to-wall VDU screens, on which black and white images flickered back and forth. Gribbins was already installed there, stripped to his shirtsleeves and checking electrical systems. His holstered Glock hung from a hook on the wall behind him.

  ‘Everything you could want,’ Fowler said, approaching. ‘You’ll find the fridge-freezer in the kitchen fully stocked. Same for the kitchen cabinets. If you want some fresh air, feel free to mosey about the grounds.’

  ‘There are grounds?’ Heck asked.

  ‘Extensive at the rear. We’ve got a croquet lawn, tennis court, an orchard, lots of shady walks. They’re walled off from the front and side of the house, just for security. But there’s plenty of room back there. Even a swimming pool … though I guess you won’t want to be using that with autumn coming.’

  ‘I’m not planning to be here that long,’ Heck replied.

  ‘Well, if you do want to use it, you’ll be the one who has to scoop the leaves out,’ Gribbins said. ‘We may be your bodyguards, but we’re not your servants.’

  Heck mused. ‘I notice there’s no phone?’

  ‘You’ve got your mobile,’ Fowler said.

  ‘Yeah, but why’s there no landline?’

  ‘Landlines are easy to tap or trace. If any of us, for any reason …’

  ‘Mobile phones can be traced too,’ Heck said.

  ‘The people who’ll normally be held here won’t have mobile phones,’ Gribbins answered. ‘The internet link will be cut on those occasions too.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ Heck said, ‘super-grasses?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Fowler said.

  ‘You guys have turned a few players in your time?’ Heck asked, thinking that he hadn’t heard about a single incident of SOCAR managing this.

  ‘Come on,’ she replied. ‘You know we’re not going to talk about that.’

  Heck shrugged. ‘It’s just that this place looks new to me.’

  ‘Look on the lintel over the front …’

  ‘Yeah, I saw that. 1705. Pretty impressive. But I meant the refurbishments. New kitchen, new bathroom. The desktop in the study’s still got a shipping tag attached. What are the odds I boot it up and find it’s never been used?’

  ‘What difference does it make whether the place is new or not?’ Fowler said.

  Heck shrugged. ‘None, I suppose. I guess I should be grateful I’m one of the first to sample such comforts.’

  Gribbins sniggered. ‘Don’t get too cosy. Soon as we catch Mike Silver, you’ll be out of here and back on Shit Street.’

  ‘I hope you do catch him,’ Heck said.

  ‘We will.’

  ‘I mean catch him … as opposed to slotting him.’

  ‘We’re not animals, Heckenburg.’ Fowler moved off along the hall. ‘Whatever you may think … whatever provocation he’s thrown at us, we don’t do stuff like that.’

  Gribbins smirked. ‘You really don’t want him blown away?’

  ‘I said I don’t want you to blow him away,’ Heck replied. ‘That pleasure should be mine.’

  Chapter 21

  ‘This brings the murder spree in central and southern England to an astonishing thirty-three in the last week,’ the BBC Scotland anchorman said. ‘Speculation is rife as to whether this is the result of terrorist activity, or whether a gangland war has erupted in consequence of the escape from prison last week of syndicate organiser, Peter Rochester, better known as Mad Mike Silver, who was serving a life sentence for multiple counts of kidnap and murder. Meanwhile, the British Home Secretary has assured Parliament that all necessary resources and personnel are being placed at the disposal of the police unit charged with halting the carnage. The Prime Minister himself commented while en route to chair a meeting of COBRA, offering his personal assurance that those responsible for the crimes will be brought to justice …’

  The Most Reverend Desmond Docherty, Bishop Emeritus of the Diocese of Fife, stood up, walked across his small, neat apartment and switched off the portable television. He gazed from his window. The monastery’s vegetable garden was directly below. The sounds of the brothers working down there had often been a source of relaxation to him; the soft thump of the hoe, the gentle scrape of trowels as they turned the peaty Highland earth. It was all quiet now at mid-evening. The sky over Sàil Ghorm was streaked in salmon-pink. The sun would soon be down.

  Docherty’s gaze roved along the whole of the Quinag range with their jagged, granite peaks, their hints of mist. He’d been living here like a hermit for two years, and only now did it strike him how picturesque the world could be. All these simple things – the rocks, the heather, the sweeping purple uplands – they cost nothing; any man could enjoy their innocent splendour. Yet their constant availability was their undoing; only those shortly to be denied such things would appreciate their worth.

  He opened the slide door on his walk-in wardrobe. There was a washbasin in its right-hand corner and above that a mirror, in which he assessed himself. For a man in his late fifties, he was well-kept: tall, broad-shouldered, and still with a head of naturally black hair, cut short and parted on the left. With his clear grey eyes and cleft jaw, he’d always been a handsome chap.

  Though he’d been dismissed from his post two years ago, he still affected a neatly ironed black shirt and white clerical collar. And why not? Earthly titles might be rescinded, but one never ceased to be a servant of Christ. The rest of his attire comprised neatly pressed black slacks and a pair of black leather shoes. As he glanced down at the toes of those shoes, an amusing thought struck him.

  All these decades later, it still made him smile.

  While still a young seminarian – a good few years ago now, 1973, perhaps earlier – a question had been raised in class about temptations of the flesh.

  ‘But how do we resist these feelings, Father?’ one boy had asked their venerable old tutor. ‘It’s not as if they’re unnatural. They’re programmed into us as male animals. The rest of one’s life is a long time to remain chaste.’

  ‘You are right of course,’ the tutor had replied. ‘These are natural feelings, but they are feelings bequeathed to us as part of God’s great gift … so that procreation, which is essential for our species, may be a pleasurable experience. However, we few are special. We have taken a vow to forgo that pleasure … to stand aloof from it and serve God in other ways.’

  ‘But Father …’

  ‘I understand. These feelings will come to you. They come to all of
us. It is an easy thing to say, but we must deny them.’

  ‘How do we do that?’

  ‘There is no easy answer. What works for some fails for others. I can only recommend that when these feelings tempt you, put your mind to something else. Some ordinary thing, which nevertheless will distract you. Perform a mundane task … something simple and routine, but which will occupy your thoughts. Polishing one’s shoes for example. An easy thing, but it requires care and attention.’

  As though some hidden signal had been given, young Docherty and the rest of his colleagues had instinctively glanced down at their tutor’s shoes, and found them, without doubt, the most fastidiously polished pair they had ever seen.

  Docherty smiled again, but it was easy to mock these things now.

  The reality of life as a celibate clergyman was impossibly challenging. Had he known the trials to come he might have left the classroom there and then. He took a waterproof coat from its hanger, folded it over his arm, closed the wardrobe, checked his apartment was smart and tidy, and left. He walked along the passage and down the rear exit stairs to the monastery car park. His rickety orange Volkswagen Beetle was waiting there. The engine coughed and sputtered, but somehow Docherty knew there’d be sufficient life in the old vehicle to take him where he wanted to go.

  The scenic vistas of the Stoer peninsula flowed past as he drove west: rolling, boulder-strewn glens, deep tracts of pinewood.

  So beautiful, so unspoiled, so virginal.

  Virginal.

  Not a good choice of phrase really, though in some ways, despite feeling it perverse of himself, Docherty was starting to resent the well of guilt-ridden despondency he’d dwelt in for so long now. The Roman Catholic Church hadn’t just been his home; it had been his strength, his courage, his innermost being. He loved her deeply, believed in her absolutely – and yet now felt far removed from her, and even though he had undoubtedly disgraced her and had rightly been punished for that, he blamed the Church herself, at least partly.

  How could she ask so much of her children? How could she expect strict adherence to impossible rules and not understand that attempts to observe this law in public would only lead to private defiance, which, owing to its hidden nature, would run without limit? How could the Church be so blind to the errors she herself had made?

  But for all this, he did love her. It infuriated Docherty to hear her defamed, drove him to the vilest anger the way every unthinking, atheistic pipsqueak in Britain would heap calumnies on her without knowing any of the true facts, without having experienced the love or care she’d extended to millions.

  None of that counted, it seemed, thanks to the follies of a few sexually misguided wretches; weak, confused creatures who should never have been ordained in the first place, who had only come to the Church to find sanctuary from the hardships of life. Docherty had to blink back tears, his vision of the narrow road dimming as the last vestige of sunlight retreated west. All because of this handful of undisciplined fools; these hateful, boorish oafs who’d lost control of their primitive urges!

  Not that any of this excused his own deviations, of course – he couldn’t just write himself off as a fool; that would be way too easy. And it certainly didn’t forgive them. Only God forgave. And sometimes even that ultimate judge might respond with vengeance rather than sympathy.

  There was only one recourse, Docherty had decided that morning – and now he affirmed it again as he drew into the small car park. Direct and determined action.

  He climbed from the Volkswagen and pulled on his waterproof coat. The car park was otherwise deserted, which was understandable. The nearest town was Culkein, actually only a fishing village, and that was five miles away; beyond that, the next nearest ‘real’ town was Ullapool, which was closer to thirty-five miles away. As such, this spot was normally reserved for visitors: climbers, hikers and the like, and there were fewer and fewer of these as the year waned.

  A gust of icy sea wind moaned down a gully leading away through piny crags. It set Docherty’s waterproof rippling, and he was glad he’d thought to bring it. He crossed the car park to the foot of the gully, where there was a stile. He still had great affection for this place, he thought as he climbed over and ascended the zigzagging path. Though a Kirkcaldy man by origin, in Scotland’s east lowlands, he had visited the far northwest numerous times as a boy, and spent many happy holidays here before the bitterness and frustrations of adulthood had pervaded his life.

  Docherty’s footfalls echoed on the stony footway as he strode uphill. He thought about other pilgrims, in harsher days and harsher climes, ascending towards forgiveness on their hands and knees, their blood smearing the rugged ground. Folly, in his opinion – to damage themselves in that way, when they had a duty to exist and ensure the existence of others. Not that the shoes he’d consciously opted to wear for this occasion were guaranteed to prevent him suffering injury. In his days as a young priest, when he’d brought school parties to the Highlands, he’d been as well-equipped as the next man – in his boots and his hardwearing canvas trousers, and his plaid shirt and his waxed jacket with the big hood that he could draw against the worst of the Atlantic gales. But it was important that none of that was on show now. Today it was the black shirt of office, the clerical collar, the thoroughly polished shoes.

  When he reached the top, he threw off the waterproof coat. In front of him stood a waist-high railing, with a coin-operated telescope on a concrete pivot in its centre. Beyond that lay the vast, barren seascape of the northern Minch, rolling and exploding in the fading, reddish light, the sun a dying spark on its distant horizon.

  With dull creaks in his knees and hips, Docherty clambered over the railing and walked the five feet to the edge of the cliff top, the wind tugging at his body. He stood there rocking, toes protruding over the brink. Below, by nearly three hundred feet, mountains of spume erupted from heaps of jagged, seaweed-covered rocks. Only vaguely visible far to the north stood the thumb-shaped Old Man of Stoer, the teetering sea-stack around which the ocean literally boiled. To the south, the arrow-thin beam of the Stoer lighthouse crossed and re-crossed the desolate wastes of water, and beyond that, lost in haze, lay the rugged headland of Rubha Mor.

  It was a good thing visibility was failing, Docherty decided. No more distractions. No more happy memories with which to hamper himself. Of more importance now was the future – and what might lie in store. Self-destruction with sound mind was a terrible sin, and would incur severe punishment. But then severe punishment would be the order of the day anyway. And maybe … just maybe, he could negate some of it by punishing himself first. He wasn’t certain of that, but who knew how the Lord thought?

  Anyway, the time for such rumination was over.

  As he’d told himself on first arriving here, there was nothing for it now but direct, determined action.

  At which point, electric light flooded over him from closer at hand.

  For a crazy, near-hallucinogenic moment, Docherty imagined the distant eye of the lighthouse had sought him out, spearing its life-saving glow across acres of foam, as though to reassure him, to advise him he wasn’t alone in his pain. But just as quickly, he understood otherwise. He swivelled around.

  Three men, indistinguishable behind the light, had emerged onto the cliff top to his rear and had climbed the safety rail, against which they now casually leaned.

  ‘Ready to make peace with God, your grace?’ the man in the middle asked. He was the one holding the light. When he spoke it was in fluent English, though his accent was foreign – vaguely Germanic, or Scandinavian. Danish possibly.

  ‘Not … not possible, I’m afraid,’ Docherty replied confusedly. ‘I’ve never even made peace with myself.’

  ‘And which particular memory prevents this? Your casual abuse of holy women? Your gross misappropriation of diocese funds? Or that most heinous thing of all … that filthy service you purchased with those funds?’

  ‘All … all these,’ Docherty replied, dazed. Af
ter brief, absurd notions that in his moment of horror and agony he might be experiencing something transcendental, he now had no doubt who these men actually were.

  ‘Repentance is the first step to forgiveness,’ the man added. ‘But I wonder how repentant you’d be had we not caught up with you?’

  ‘I … I already told you … I’ve suffered every day.’

  ‘But not sufficiently to hand yourself in?’

  ‘What good would that have done?’ Docherty wasn’t sure why he was trying to explain this when he didn’t believe it himself, but the words were so rehearsed they fell from his lips. ‘It wasn’t an offence I would ever commit again. I could atone for it better out here, among my people … to whom I had a duty.’

  The man chuckled. ‘There are certain things one must always rationalise to make them bearable.’

  ‘It’s not like that. I knew you would come … or someone like you.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘You had to come. First they suspended me from office, then they dismissed me … I was mocked, scorned, publicly reviled. But that was never going to be enough. In my heart of hearts, I knew … my conscience told me. One can’t commit offences so grievous, even secret ones, and expect to walk away unscathed.’

  ‘You’re a wise man, your grace, but I think your conscience may have driven you mad.’

  Docherty glanced back over the cliff. Nothing down there was visible. It was a void, a maelstrom. ‘When I heard about the violence in England, the shooting and killing connected to that fellow from the prison … I knew chaos had entered our world through the rent I and others like me opened. It could only be a matter of time …’

  ‘Well …’ The man spoke with an air of finality. ‘The fact that you’re ready to take your punishment can only be a good thing.’ He strode forward.

  Docherty wanted to clench his eyes shut, but inner guilt prevented him.

  With his clean looks and blond windblown hair, the man did indeed possess the face of an angel. If not for that hideous scar. And that demonic smile. And that glinting blade in his gloved right hand.