From where Colander’s had been stolen.
‘Finally!’ he cried aloud. ‘A real crime.’
* * *
6. Hoohoo! Another mention of meteorological conditions. I wonder what this one is supposed to mean.
Part IV
Kernmantle
(an Inspector Scott Rhombus novel)
Chapter One
‘Any idea who he is?’ asked Inspector Scott Rhombus. He crouched by the side of the pool and studied the footprints in the mud. The body of the man lay face down in the black water. It was autumn and all around him the surface of the pond was choked with golden leaves that had fallen from the grand old trees overheid.
‘Nae,’ said the policeman behind him. ‘Some kids found him this morning, ye ken? We dinnae wanna touch him ’til someone from X Division had a wee shufty.’
Rhombus stood up and looked at the policeman. Wee Shug McCormick. Bad skin, bad teeth, ginger hair and a wall eye. Christ, thought Rhombus, however did he ever make it into the force? But that was Scotland all over now, wasn’t it? Always had been. Always would be.
‘You did right, Shug,’ Rhombus said, patting him on the shoulder. ‘You did right.’
Shug looked pleased with the compliment. It was probably the first nice thing anybody had ever said to him, thought Rhombus. Meanwhile the ‘paper suits’ were arriving with all their equipment in steel boxes. Two of the men, wearing their white paper suits so as not to contaminate the site, began erecting a tent over the mud where they supposed the man had entered the pond.
Rhombus stood up and groaned. His back was very bad this morning. He had done something to it the night before, although he could not remember how or what.
‘Ye’ all right sir?’ asked Wee Shug.
‘Aye. It’s just an old wound playing up.’
He was standing in the Queen Street Gardens East, by the old pond with its island, a large expanse of privately owned garden square, surrounded by five-foot-high cast-iron fencing. Edinburgh New Town. It was handsome, right enough, and nowhere more so than here just off Abercromby Place, but while everybody else admired the stone-fronted façades, DI Rhombus saw them as just exactly that: façades. Edinburgh kept its secrets close enough, but Rhombus had a talent for seeing just those shutters and curtains, closed doors, and locked gates.
‘There’s some things here you maybe want to take a look at,’ he said to the lads from the technical team.
‘Wha’s tha’, Inspector?’
‘You see those footprints there? The ones with the dark stuff in them? Take a cast, will you? And find out what the black stuff is.’
‘It looks a wee bit like oil, do ye no ken?’ said one of the technicians, his face masked.
‘Aye,’ Rhombus said. ‘Oil. Or blood. Check it out, will you?’
He left the paper suit looking blank and it was as he was walking away across the grass, dew staining his shoes, on his way to the police station to file his preliminary report, that the gate to Abercromby Place opened with a squeak of heavy iron.
‘I say!’ came a voice; thin, high, aristocratic. Rhombus turned, cursing himself for this instinctive reaction.
‘You there!’ the voice continued. The man walking along the path towards Rhombus was wearing a Jacquard dressing gown over a pair of silk pyjamas and the sort of slippers that Rhombus thought had gone out with the Ottoman Empire.
‘Can I help you?’ asked Rhombus, not quite meaning it.
‘What are you doing here?’ the man asked, inserting a golden-framed monocle into his left eye and patting down his already-smooth hair. Rhombus noticed he was carrying an ebony cane with an ivory knob on top.
‘You there! I say! This is a private garden, you know. Not for riff-raff like you.’
‘Oh, riff-raff now, is it?’ Rhombus said, dangerously quiet now.
‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘Riff-raff. Who are you and what are you doing in this garden, reserved only for la crème de la crème of Edinburgh Society and their dogs, don’t you know?’
‘My name is Detective Inspector Scott Rhombus and I am here to investigate a potential homicide. Can I ask who you are—’
The man cut him off.
‘A homicide? In Queen Street Gardens East? Impossible. We simply do not allow that sort of thing. Just as we do not allow any camping. I insist you remove your tent at once.’
Inspector Rhombus sighed. It was going to be one of those days.
‘There is the body of a man in the pond over there.’
‘There is a man in our pond? What on earth is he doing in our pond? Is he a member of the Committee? I shall call the police if he is not.’
‘We are the police,’ said Inspector Rhombus wryly.
‘Well, let me see him.’
‘Just a second, sir,’ came another voice from behind Rhombus’s shoulder, female and soft and Welsh. At that moment DS Mary Shortbread appeared to intercept the man, who was heiding past Rhombus towards the crime scene.
‘Thank God you came, DS Shortbread. I was about to do that man a serious injury. Find out who he is and then get shot of him, will you? Before he makes me do something I may regret.’
‘Regret something, Scott? Not you. That’s not in your make-up,’ said Shortbread over her shoulder as she followed the man in the dressing gown towards the pond.
Rhombus shook his heid. Regret was something he knew all about. No one regretted more than Detective Inspector Scott Rhombus. You could even say that he wrote the book on it. Regret. And Scotland, of course.
Over at the pond a techie, wearing a pair of green rubber waders that came up to his waist, had entered the dark water and was now guiding the deid man to the side. When they got the body to the bank, they turned him over so that he lay on his back.
‘Good Lord!’ cried the man in his dressing gown, peering over their shoulders. ‘Look at him! He’s a tramp! A vagrant!’
There was something in the outraged voice that made Rhombus turn and walk back up the incline to the pond. Mary Shortbread was standing on the far side of the pond, staring at him as he came. He could see the thoughts crashing through her mind like guitar chords from a Mogwai gig. A homeless man found deid among all this wealth, she would be thinking. Isn’t that just the sort of case that DI Rhombus likes most? And she was right. There was nothing better than when two worlds – the one rich and privileged, the other deprived and ignorant – collided.
But it turned out that he knew the deid man. It was Wee Jock ‘Jocky’ McTunnock®. Wee Jocky had been living on the streets of Edinburgh for as long as Rhombus had been a policeman, surviving one freezing winter after the other, and now here he was, face down in a pond in an ornamental garden in the New Town, deid. Rhombus had bumped into Wee Jock McTunnock® often enough in the past. He had stood him a half-bottle of malt on one occasion after Wee Jock had supplied him with SOME PARTICULARLY VALUABLE INFORMATION.
‘I can’t believe a common tramp could get in here and damage our lovely posh ecosystem! You are the police! You should have stopped him.’
‘What would you suggest, sir?’ asked DS Mary Shortbread reasonably. ‘Should we have taken him somewhere common and let him drown there?’
‘Yes, he would have hardly been out of place in any one of those schemes on the outskirts of the city, but instead here he is, lying there, clogging up our pond. I wish you to charge him with trespass. And I want the book thrown at him, do you understand?’
‘Get him out of here, will you?’ asked Rhombus, nodding towards the Man in the Monocle. ‘I don’t want to see his face again.’
Wee Shug McCormick went to take the man’s shoulder.
‘Unhand me, you swine!’ snapped the man, shaking off the kindly proffered hand and grabbing his cane as if to separate the top from the bottom. A swordstick? Wee Shug stepped back. Not wearing his stab vest, of course.
‘Do you know who I am?’ he asked in a thin cold voice.
‘I don’t care who you are,’ Rhombus said, suddenly unable to contain his
rage against this man. ‘If I were you, I should get out of here fast before it occurs to me that you might be returning to the scene of your crime and arrest you for the murder of Mr McTunnock.’
Instead of being cowed by the veiled threat, the man stepped back, tightened the cord of his dressing gown and regarded DI Rhombus superciliously through his monocle.
‘My name is Farquhar-Farquar,’ he said, pronouncing it Far-Qhar–Farquaw. ‘Does that ring any bells with you, Constable? Gordon Farquhar-Farquar?’
Dougal Farquhar-Farquar was the Chief Constable of Lothian and Highlands Police. He was Rhombus’s boss. This was maybe the brother, then. It was not a battle that Rhombus could win, but that fact did not stop him starting it anyway.
‘Mr Gordon Farquhar-Farquar, I am arresting you for the murder of Wee Jock ‘Jocky’ McTunnock®. You do not have to say anything but anything you do say may be given in evidence.’
Chapter Two
When Rhombus got back to the station, it was a hive of activity. All of it stopped as he walked into the CID room. Every face turned to look at him.
‘Have you no’ enough work to do, lads?’ Rhombus joked wryly, provoking bursts of laughter all round. DS McAranjumper tipped his heid to one side to signal trouble.
‘The Boss wants to see you,’ he said, shooting his eyebrows up and down and pointing upwards to her office on the floor above. ‘As soon as you get in.’
‘Now I wonder what that could be about, eh?’ Rhombus asked rhetorically. He gathered up a few papers from his desk and began the long climb to see the gaffer.
Three hours later and DI Rhombus was at a table in the back room of the Oxymoron bar on Thistle Street. It was decked in flags and scarves in readiness for the forthcoming football World Cup. None of them were Scotch, though, since the national team had been knocked out of the ‘group of death’ after a tense playoff against an injury-depleted Vatican City.
‘Suspended for three weeks, pending internal investigation?’ asked DS Mary Shortbread, sitting next to him nursing a tonic water, aghast. She could not believe it, but Rhombus nodded and inhaled a pint of 80/-, only topping it up with a whisky chaser when the glass was empty.
‘Sounds painful, doesn’t it?’ Rhombus joked, wiping the faint moustache of froth from his upper lip, ‘but, seriously, Mary, how was I to know who he was?’
‘But he looks just like his brothers.’
‘Brothers plural?’
‘Aye. You know the oldest brother Angus, of course. He’s our own Chief Constable, but the middle brother you should recognise from the newspapers. That’s Crawford Farquhar-Farquar. He’s the commissioner for regional development in the European Commission in Strasbourg. A very powerful man. The other brother, Alasdair, is a comparatively humble MSP. Gordon is the underachiever, being just a multimillionaire in his own right from his SINISTER MICRO-PROCESSING factory in Silicon Glen. I think there might be another one in there, too, but I cannot remember what he does.’
‘I see,’ Rhombus said. ‘Well, at least it means I can watch every match of the World Cup, though.’
But DS Shortbread could tell he didn’t mean it.
‘Work is life to you, Scott. You’re a living legend, after all. There’s no way you’ll watch any of the matches.’
He nodded. Mary Shortbread was right. Living legend or not, work was everything to him. The only thing that kept him regular. Without it he would play the Stones all day and Dwell on his Time in the SAS.
Rhombus recalled a few bars of a song that someone had put on the jukebox. It was as haunting as it was elusive.
‘We’re oan the marcch wi’ Ally’s aarmy, We’re goin’ to the Argenteeen, And we’ll really shake ’em up, When we win the worrruld cup, For Scoatland are the greates’ fitba’ team. EASY!’
A scuffle had broken out. Just which Scotch World Cup football team was the worst? 1978? 1982? Each of the successive years had a champion. A chair was broken over the back of the man who suggested 1998 and the man who supported the 2002 team had a glass broken in his face.
‘I might need a favour from you,’ Rhombus asked Shortbread, ducking as a beer glass flew past his ear. This was more like it, thought Shortbread, watching the glass smash on the wall above his heid.
‘Anything,’ she said.
‘I’ve a meeting scheduled with Wee Wm Low McTartan this afternoon and I don’t want it leaking out that I’ve been ‘given time off for good behaviour’.’
Shortbread understood. Or thought she did. Behind her came the sound of a man being choked to death. Someone hit someone else with a pool cue.
‘I’ll make sure no one blabs. Why are you meeting Wee Wm Low?’
It was a good question. Why was he meeting Wee Wm Low? On the immediate level they would probably have a drink together and it was nice, occasionally, to take a drink with someone else. But on the deeper level Rhombus was not sure why he was drawn to the company of Wee Wm Low. What did such a relationship say about him? What did it say about Wee Wm Low and, perhaps most importantly of all, what did it say about Scotland as a nation? Not much perhaps, but there you are.
‘There’s one or two wee questions I need to ask him,’ Rhombus said evasively. He lapped at his pint and was unable to hold Mary Shortbread’s eye. He wondered how much she knew about the possible existence of a sinister police organisation that someone in the grip of Nordic myth-making frenzy had called The Grey Wolves.
The Grey Wolves were criminals in uniform, an organisation begun by those policemen who had spent too long on the fine line between law enforcement and law infringement. The organisation’s tentacles stretched who knew how far. All the way to the top, all the way to the bottom. New recruits were as likely to be members as the Chief Superintendent himself. It was thought they were mixed up in everything from prostitution (some of them were very attractive, joked Rhombus to himself), to gun-running, drugs, booze and of course, the supply of fatty foods to minors. If anything big went down, chances are the Grey Wolves were behind it, and if it wasn’t the Grey Wolves, then someone, somewhere, would have been paid off to turn a blind eye.
But it was difficult to know who they were. Could DS Shortbread be a member? Rhombus doubted it. He watched her now as she walked away, on her way back to the station. Would there ever be anything between them? People asked all the time. He had thought about it too, on those long nights when he sat wide awake, regretting the absence of a proper sidekick, regretting not having anything more memorable than a SAAB to drive around the place and, of course, Dwelling on his Time in the SAS.
He would pace his flat then, trying to resist the lure of the great pile of automotive catalogues that he had built up over the years, trying to resist the siren call of The Best of Top Gear, series 1–9, on video. The next-door neighbours would usually be playing their music. He had got rid of the last lot – a gay man who played Dollar records late at night – by fitting him up for dealing heroin within school grounds and the poor sod was now serving ten to twelve years in Barlinnie Jail. That had certainly learned him. He would have to come up with something new for this new lot, though, thought Rhombus, wistfully downing another pint.
After DS Shortbread had gone back to the cop shop, Rhombus waited in the bar of the Oxymoron quietly supping another couple of pints, giving the jungle drums time to work their magic, before he heided north in his battered SAAB, down Dundas Street, only occasionally wondering if it was dangerous to drive when he was drunk enough to see two steering wheels.
‘Wha’ the hell? No matter. I’ve got four hands.’
The SASA meeting took place in a draughty hall off the Broughton Road. Rhombus let the heavy grey door slam behind him and crossed to one of the battered chairs that the coordinator had arranged in a tight circle in the middle of the planked floor. Five or six men were there already, regulars, faces tight, muscular bodies beginning to get out of condition. Each man wore a black block over his eyes except the coordinator, whose face was pixellated. The coordinator turned to Scott as he
took his chair and nodded. Scott stood up and spoke.
‘My name is Scott and I Dwell on my Time in the SAS.’
There was a deep mumble of sympathy from the men gathered round.
‘This morning I did it five times before I got to work.’
‘I feel for you, pal,’ said the coordinator.
DI Scott ‘Just Now’ Rhombus needed these meetings just to keep himself sane. When it was bad, he attended as many as three a day and, even when it was good, he would make time for at least one a week. He needed to be able to share his problem with men who would not judge him.
He left the meeting feeling more grounded, less confused than when he had arrived. Hearing those old SAS stories reminded him he was not the only one who Dwelt. He got into the SAAB and heided out towards his appointment with Wee Wm Low McTartan in a cavernous chilled warehouse on the Dooneybridge side of Edinburgh. It was piled high with cardboard boxes, all bearing the image of a Highland piper in full regalia, and Rhombus, seeing straight now, was able to read the contents on one of the labels. Huchta-Chuchta Foods. 36 × 18 × 6 Scottish eggs7. Best before 07.09.09. Export only.
‘Scottish eggs is it now, Wm Low?’ he asked. ‘Or is it Scottish Mist8?’
Wee Wm Low burst out laughing.
‘Oh you always were a one, Rhombus. Always making your wee jokes.’
Wm Low McTartan was Rhombus’s worst nightmare. He was wearing a cream linen suit that clashed horribly with his red hair, a dark shirt and tie, and he was smoking a Cuban cigar. On his lap he gripped a small ginger-haired dog that was, even now, coughing. His voice was smoky and rough and his skin was covered in green tattoos. Some men might look ridiculous in such an outfit, but Wm Low exuded naked menace. He really did.
The No. 2 Global Detective Page 11
