‘What did you say?’ he demanded.
She had been searching through the pockets of her new jacket. She looked puzzled.
‘I said this one is big enough for a notebook.’
Rhombus put his hand to his heid.
‘Notebook!’ he said. ‘The notebooks!’
All three detectives and the shop assistants stared at him.
‘I had some notebooks. Five of them. Covered in blood. Christ! Each one is a list of the most corrupt policemen in the country.’
‘Where are these notebooks, Rra?’
‘Christ knows. I left them somewhere. They could be anywhere. Oh well, let’s forget about it. They probably don’t matter anyway.’
Colander stepped forward.
‘You cannot mean it. If there are corrupt officers in any police force we must root them out. Get them out so that they can become security guards and make their fortunes running drugs to innocent Swedish children in nightclubs.’
Delicious looked at Colander with that gleam in her eye again and Tom sensed there was more than a desire for justice in his speech. He was challenging Rhombus: whoever finds the notebooks wins the girl.
‘Where did you last see them?’ asked Colander, beginning to see that he was at a serious disadvantage. Rhombus scratched his heid, beginning to see that he was at a serious advantage.
‘Can’t remember,’ he said.
‘Think,’ Colander said.
‘You must try at least, Rra,’ Ontoaste weighed in. ‘Where did you get these notebooks?’
‘Jenners. There was a deal on. Six for the price of two.’
They all agreed that this was good value.
‘But it does not get us much further forward,’ Tom said. ‘When did you write the names in them?’
Rhombus explained how he came by the names.
‘Ingenious, Danny Boy,’ Colander said through gritted teeth. ‘But then what did you do with them?’
‘I drove back into town and stopped at a pub – the Oxymoron on Thistle Street.’
‘And then?’
‘And then I can’t remember a thing.’
It was true. He had no recollection of anything that had happened since. But since when? He could not even remember that.
* * *
9. Is that good or bad? Still too early to say, perhaps. I’ll make this the last footnote. It doesn’t really matter one way or the other.
Chapter Seven
‘Well,’ Mma Ontoaste said with a crowning smile. ‘We had better get to the pub, hadn’t we?’
‘It’s a bit early for me,’ mumbled Rhombus, glancing at his watch.
‘Yes,’ agreed Colander. ‘I like the drink excessively only when it is dark.’
‘For fuck’s sake,’ Mma Ontoaste snapped in a rare show of ill-temper. ‘It’s enough to drive a woman to drink. All right. I’ll go.’
She fastened the leather buttons of her tweed jacket over her substantial bust and looked at Tom.
‘You coming?’
Tom shrugged. He wondered if he could safely leave Rhombus and Colander alone together.
‘Actually, I fancy a drink after all,’ Rhombus said, slightly shrilly.
‘Me too,’ muttered Colander.
‘Right,’ smiled Ontoaste triumphantly. ‘Let’s go.’
They marched out of the Scotch Tartan and Cashmere Emporium and up the hill to Thistle Street. The Oxymoron, normally a hubbub of noise, broken glass and flying teeth, became stony quiet as they pushed open the doors and ordered their drinks. One of the barmen stopped spreading the sawdust they used to soak up the blood and stood up, rolling his eyes as if to wonder why he bothered.
‘Two pints of best with whisky chasers, please, Landlord and two lime and sodas.’
The silence lasted a beat before the spit and insults started to fly. Seconds later, the four detectives were backed into a corner swatting away bar stools and pint mugs with their heidgear. A line of angry Scotsmen was trying to get at them as a pack of dogs might attack a bear.
‘It’s funny how none of us carry guns, don’t you think?’ asked Colander, ducking quickly as an ashtray flew at his face.
‘And yet some of the best detectives do, don’t they?’
‘But, Rra, they only use them to get people to tell the truth towards the end of the case. I think it’s a bit of a cheap shot.’
‘We should get out of here,’ shrieked Rhombus. Glass shattered overheid. A rolling soundwave of unintelligible swearing broke over them.
‘Don’t you want to get the notebooks, Rra?’ asked Mma Ontoaste, right-handing one old codger who was trying to get a sneak up her kilt.
‘Maybe another time?’ whimpered Colander.
‘There is no other time,’ Tom shouted. ‘We’ve got to get to IKEA after this!’
‘But it’s late closing tonight. We can always go later.’
‘I can’t believe you two!’ said Mma Ontoaste. ‘And you call yourselves police officers?’
At that Colander grabbed a man in a wrestler’s hug and bit into his ear. Rhombus ripped the picture of the urinating dogs from the wall and smashed it over the heid of another assailant. Tom Hurst gave another a rabbit punch. Mma Ontaoste had removed her shoe and was brandishing it like a knobkerrie. The tide was definitely turning.
Spotting a gap, Mma Ontoaste dropped her shoe and surged forward, sweeping her assailants before her like a great black-and-tartan tidal wave. She pushed them to the double doors and shunted them out into the street. Five or six men dealt with in a second. She locked the door and returned to the bar, where Rhombus, Colander and Tim Hurst were righting chairs and dusting themselves down. The other regulars were gulping back the vanquished men’s pints.
‘Nice work,’ said the barman as he poured her a pint. ‘Don’t suppose you fancy a job, do you?’
Mma Ontoaste laughed. She would not mind settling down in Edinburgh, she decided. It had a nice familiar feel about it, and a job chucking out in the Oxymoron would keep her in enough money for the foaming mugs of 80/- that she could already see herself enjoying. She would have to think about it.
‘Actually, you know, hen,’ continued the barman. ‘I think I can dig out a carton of Umbongo? If you’d prefer? If you worked for me, we’d get it on draught, of course.’
‘Rra,’ she said, wiping the froth from her upper lip. ‘Umbongo comes from the Congo, as you must know, while I am from Botswana.’
‘Oh, aye, good point.’
‘Now my friend here believes he may have left some notebooks in here the other night. He says there were six of them, covered in blood.’
‘Blood, you say?’
‘Rhesus negative.’
‘Could these be them?’ he asked, digging behind the bar and finding the notebooks, crisp with dried blood.
‘Well, that was simple,’ said Tom.
‘What do you mean, simple?’ chorused the detectives. Mma Ontoaste looked especially pleased with herself at having solved the case.
‘You know we had a case like that in Ynstead once,’ Colander said. ‘A schoolchild left her herring on the bus. We tracked it down, though. Police procedure. Getting the men out there, knocking on doors, asking questions.’
Nobody said anything for a minute.
‘Right,’ said Tom eventually. ‘Shall we have a look at them? Find out who these corrupt officers are?’
They took a book each.
‘I’ve got someone called DI Stony Creek,’ Colander said. ‘Maybe another one of your amusing nicknames?’
‘Shit Creek would be an amusing name,’ Rhombus said. ‘But not Stony. Beside there’s no Creek in the Scotch police We only allow Mcs or, at a push, Macs.’
‘I’ve found a Marion McKenney?’
Rhombus shrugged. He had not heard of her, and he had been out with half the female police officers (and one male, but that was an undercover job) in the force.
‘Dilwyn Dumfries?’
‘Clifton Forge?’
‘Can w
e have another two pints please, Rra?’
None of the names meant anything to Rhombus.
‘A code, then,’ Tom sighed.
‘A what, Rra?’
‘Never mind. We will have to try to break the code. Find out what the names mean.’
He found that, when he spoke to Mma Ontoaste, he slightly raised his voice, as if she were simple or something. He got out his blackberry and began putting the names into Google. First he tried Dilwyn Dumfries. Nothing. He removed the inverted commas. Lots of information about antecedents with the surname, but nothing concrete, nothing immediately obvious. Then he tried Elkton Edinburg. It was an unusual name. Again, nothing certain.
‘Just hotel reservation sites for places in America.’
‘There’s a hotel called Elkton Edinburg over there?’
‘No. It’s two place names – in Virginia.’
He tried another and stared at the results.
‘Cliftonforge.org,’ he said.
‘Who is Clifton Forge?’
He clicked the link.
‘Another place. In Virginia again.’
Tom could feel the hair on his collar stand on end. This was the thing. Virginia. He tapped in another few names. All of them were towns in Virginia, USA. What Tom could not decide was whether this was a clue that would lead him to find out the names of the bad apples in the barrel that was the Edinburgh and Midlothian Police Force, or whether it was a clue that would lead him to find out who killed Claire Morgan.
The latter, he hoped.
Part V
Unnatural Presumption
(a Dr Faye Carpaccia investigation)
1
Dr Faye Carpaccia is mixing a marinade of olive oil and lemon juice and some fresh thyme leaves in a small glass jar and outside it is unseasonably hot. Black thunderheads are beginning to build up like angry fists, masking the heat of the sun and as Dr Carpaccia crosses the room in which she is making the marinade, she decides that a storm will come.
She places the bottle of marinade on the gleaming steel surface, next to the body of the chicken that is stretched out on a gurney, naked and hairless now, ready for the Y-incision that Dr Carpaccia will make with one of the knives that her assistant has already prepared and laid out in a neat row where she can easily reach them.
Dr Carpaccia is a small woman, a very small woman, but she is a powerful woman and an elegant woman in her midnight-blue trouser suit, and she is very very kind, with a heart of gold that means she would do anything for anyone, although, in her own way, she is very reserved and does not like to talk to people she does not know unless they are dead.
Before Carpaccia touches the knives she politely nods to her assistant, a woman of Mexican extraction, with few prospects in life and a mass of dark hair that she is wearing scraped back into a hood. Along with the hood she is also wearing the standard uniform of purple scrubs, gloves, mask and safety goggles. She knows that when Dr Carpaccia gives her that nod, it means that she must turn on the ATMT Lite MP3 digital recorder that stands athwart an oaken shelf off to the left of the suite in which they are about to conduct the operation on the chicken, and this she does. Instantly the blue light that signals that the machine is working blinks on.
Standing by the bank of sinks against one wall is Detective Rambouillet, the investigating officer. He is dressed in black from his Cats the musical baseball cap to the Muji flipflops on his black-socked feet. He is a big man, and his big presence seems even bigger than usual in the cool air, so that Dr Carpaccia does not mind so much any more that he makes her feel even smaller than she used to feel, even in her own suite. He is chewing gum and looking bored and tough at the same time. It is a look that Carpaccia knows he adopts when he wants to hide the fact that his mind is whirring like a hamster in a hamster run, even though she has never owned a hamster or a hamster run or even seen a hamster in a hamster run.
Dr Carpaccia works her hands into a pair of surgical gloves and she begins to recite the words that she knows by heart now, having said these same words every week for almost ten years:
‘The subject is an approximately three and one half pound Caucasian female chicken, exhibiting evidence of a ritualistic beheading.’
Dr Carpaccia looks up and catches the eye of her assistant over the width of the gurney. Behind the super hi-spec PSVU glass of her hybrid goggles, Carpaccia can see that there are traces of tears she is endeavouring to blink away. Dr Carpaccia can also see the admiration in the woman’s eyes and knows that this admiration is aimed at her and her alone.
Dr Carpaccia cannot afford to be distracted by the misplaced sensitivities of her staff and she returns to look down at the chicken on the gurney before her. She nods once again to the assistant and, together on the count of three, they move the bird onto one of the steel examining tables that occupy the centre of the suite in which they are carrying out the operation.
Even through the thin latex of her powdered surgical gloves, Dr Carpaccia can feel the chill of the bird’s cold dead flesh. Rigor mortis has come and gone and the forelimbs of the chicken are responsive to digital manipulation.
Carpaccia estimates the time of death to have been no later than three days ago. This conclusion is backed up by the sell-by date printed on a label found on the material in which the chicken was discovered and which is now sealed into a slim clear plastic evidence envelope that is resting on the gleaming surface of another of the steel examination tables.
‘How was the subject found?’ she asks Detective Rambouillet.
‘Same as the others,’ he replies. ‘Lying on her back, with her wings and legs tied together with the same kind of twine in the same kind of knot.’
‘Was it preserved?’ she angrily asks.
‘Jeez, Doc, I dunno,’ he sarcastically responds. ‘Of course it was preserved. Along with the wrapping which we found all over her body. A kind of plastic. And a weird rectangle of paper – also a bit plasticky – that the body was sitting on, and underneath that there was a cradle of pressed blue cardboard. It’s all in there, tagged, in the fridge.’
He nods to one of the four walk-in fridges in which they keep things at a constantly cold temperature.
‘What about the internal organs?’ she mollifiedly asks.
Rambouillet nods his big head towards a bag on another gurney. Carpaccia crosses to the other gurney and picks up the bag and opens it with a pair of scissors that she takes from a drawer. She up-ends the contents of the bag into a copper bowl with a wooden handle attached and sets aside the empty bag. Inside is a mush of dark bloody material that includes the chicken’s liver and kidneys, as well as a long section of bone covered in flesh upon which the skin is still identifiable. Absent are the feet and the head.
The smell is something that Dr Carpaccia has long since gotten used to. In fact, as she introduces a foot-long wooden-tipped instrument into the bowl, she is happy with what she sees. This is one of the things that has made her the most respected figure in her profession, the sort of figure whom people stop in the corridor to obtain an autograph and to ask advice on such matters as flying helicopters, scuba-diving, vodka sauce and directions to the nearest rest room. She is always polite and she never takes offence when she is stopped in the corridor and asked this sort of question, even when it is abundantly clear that she is not the sort of person who should be stopped in the corridor and asked any sort of question by an elderly person or an ugly person or by a person who simply does not possess very much money.
Dr Carpaccia reaches for a wooden pepper mill that she keeps on a tray along with other condiments and chemicals that she will use during the operation. She takes the top of the pepper mill with her right hand and the bottom with her left hand and she turns them against each other, one counterclockwise, the other clockwise. Instantly from the bottom of the mill flakes of pepper emerge and fall blackly into the bowl. Next she adds a thumb-sized lump of yellow butter, a pinch of sea salt and eight fluid ounces of an ordinary Merlot that she retrieves from
a bottle on the gleaming surface. From one of the eye-line cupboards above her she takes a bay leaf from one jar, and an imported bouquet garni from another. These she also adds to the bowl, which she then sets aside over a low heat while she returns to the body of the chicken.
Still no one has spoken. Dr Carpaccia likes to work in silence and Rambouillet has learned not to break her concentration with any questions. He has complete trust in Dr Carpaccia.
‘So whaddya reckon, Doc? Is it the same man? Same MO?’
He is referring to the modus operandi, the way a compulsive murderer goes about his business.
‘I won’t know until I open her up,’ Carpaccia says, nodding at the chicken body. Only her voice betrays the emotion she feels. She takes a deep breath before gently parting the legs and wings of the bird. Rambouillet has stopped pacing the terracotta-tiled floor in his flipflops and is staring at what she is doing, his breath held, waiting for some signal. Her assistant, the Mexican woman in the pale purple scrubs, is nervous. She has drawn her breath too, and her dark eyes are wide with terror. This is the first time she has worked with Dr Carpaccia.
After a second Carpaccia looks up and nods to Detective Rambouillet. Dr Carpaccia has confirmed what they suspected from the moment Rambouillet had called her on his cell phone from the market to tell her that he had found another body in the chill cabinet.
The chicken has had her internal organs removed.
There is a thick silence in the room.
‘I don’t suppose we gotta name, either, do we?’ asks the detective.
Carpaccia shakes her head. This is what hurts most. The anonymity. It is up to her to make this dead chicken speak to her as she had never spoken to a soul while she was a living chicken. It is up to Carpaccia to get her to tell her story, so that the wrong of her death could be made right and the evildoer could be PUNISHED.
The No. 2 Global Detective Page 15
