The Face Of Death (Barney Thomson) Read Online Free Page B

creaking noisily as ever – and up to the front door. The insistent rapping came again, just as he pulled the door open.
    'All right,' said the Rev Wilson tetchily. 'Oh, it's you,' he said with, to be frank, no less irritation, when he saw who was without.
    'Reverend,' said his killer-to-be. 'I was wondering if you had a minute?'
    'It's after ten o'clock,' said the vicar, trying hard not to let the irritation enter his voice, and failing terribly.
    'I know, Reverend,' said the visitor, voice sounding fairly sincere, 'I just, I mean ... I really need ... you know, something's happened, and I really need to talk to someone.'
    The vicar stared at his guest. The visitor returned the stare, imploringly.
    'Please, Reverend, I don't know where else to turn.'
    The Reverend Wilson allowed his face to break out into a concerned smile. His issue of Big-Breasted Lesbian Grannies had arrived fresh from Florida that morning, but it could wait. And besides, if he kicked this person out by the backside, as he was disposed to do, it might get back to the church elders, and then he'd have Wee Aggie 4/12, as he liked to call her – because she seemed to be menstruating four weeks a month, twelve months a year – round here like a horde of Mongol warriors on nandrolone.
    'Very well,' he said, 'of course my door is always open.' But just don't think that I'm offering you a cup of tea or cracking open the packet of Jaffa Cakes I picked up at the petrol station this morning.
    He held the door open and allowed the one who was about to take his life, to walk unhindered into his home. Almost as if Death himself had arrived, black cape drawn Obi Wan-style down over his head, and had been invited in for a late-night snifter.
    They sat down on sofas on opposite sides of the coffee table, the Reverend Wilson wincing slightly at the amount of dust which had accumulated in the three and a half years since Mrs Wilson had departed. (He'd told everyone in the village that she'd died, paid MacDuff the Undertaker and McLeod the policeman to keep schtum, and had conducted a very moving funeral service.)
    'What seems to be the trouble?' said Wilson, clasping his hands on his thighs and attempting to convey concern. Really he couldn't have cared less if this person – or anyone else on the planet, for that matter – got knocked down and crushed by a bus.
    The killer swallowed and stared at the floor. Might as well string it out a little bit longer; piss the old man off and distract him from reading that sleazy porn that everyone said he busied himself with at night. Wilson waited patiently, his thoughts drifting back to Hilda Grace Rubenstein, 69, from Cedar Ridge and Greta-Mae Koslovsky, 33, from Big Falls.
    'It's those four tourists,' said the killer. 'I'm really worried.'
    Wilson looked up, and thought for a second he could detect genuine fear in the eyes of this errant parishioner, who had never attended one of his services.
    'There's no need to worry,' said Wilson, leaning forward, curiosity mingling with an almost unfeigned concern. 'It was an isolated case. That it happened in Blackmuir Wood meant nothing. Don't worry for a second that this tragedy will be visited upon any of the residents of the town.'
    The killer also leaned forward, nodding slowly, wiping a finger beneath the left eye, as if taking away a tear.
    'The mind of the perfect man is a mirror,' said the vicar, strangely. 'It does not lean forward or backward in its response to things. It responds to things but conceals nothing of its own. Therefore it is able to deal with things without injury to its reality.'
    The killer stared at the vicar. As a young lad his mother had dragged him incessantly along to church, at least once a week, sometimes twice or more. And it had fostered within him a hearty disrespect for all these men of God.
    'Look, Bishop,' the killer said, waving away Wilson's protestations about the bishop thing, 'you might think you impress people by quoting Chuang Tzu, but to