‘Cup of tea?’ he asked.
‘Why do you want to see me?’ Rhombus asked. No time for niceties.
‘Why do you always answer a question with a question?’
Rhombus shrugged.
‘You’ve never heard of banter, I suppose?’ he asked.
‘A little bird tells me that you might just have some time on your hands at the moment?’ continued McTartan.
‘Aye. Mebbe. What of it?’ Rhombus said. The jungle drums had done their work once again, he thought.
‘I’ve a little project you might be interested in. Keep you busy. Stop you moping about the place. Stop you Dwelling on your Time in the SAS, if you ken wha’ I mean.’
‘What sort of project?’ asked Rhombus.
Wm Low waved a hand to take in all the boxes that were piled about them on pallets.
‘What do you know about Scottish eggs, Scott?’
‘That they represent Scotland’s past and, to a certain extent, her future?’
Good answer, thought Rhombus, but Wee Wm Low McTartan rolled his eyes. He stubbed out his cigar. A whorl of grey smoke ascended into the rafters. The dog coughed politely.
‘Well, there is that. But as you may have read in the paper, the Food Standards Agency Scotland has banned them. Says they’re too ‘unhealthy’, too ‘disgusting’, too full of E-numbers, salt, fat, pig gristle, duck beak, chicken foot, sugar, whatever. Give you botulism, salmonella, trench foot, bird flu, you name it.’
Rhombus had read something about this ban but had assumed it was a myth, dreamt up by English tabloid journalists in the pay of Peter Mandelson or someone very like him.
‘Thing is, Scott, the French and Italians cannot get enough of them. All they want are Scottish eggs. Petit déjeuner, déjeuner et dîner. More than that, though. The Chinese.’
‘The Chinese? What are they wanting with Scottish eggs?’ asked Rhombus.
‘Aphrodisiacs, y’ken? They think they work as well as snow-leopard foreskins.’
‘And you’ve tried running them down the M1 and the M6 and on to Dover, eh? But you’re always being stopped.’
‘Aye,’ agreed McTartan. ‘We’ve lost three shipments in the past fortnight. The bloody FSAS seem to know our every move.’
He was stroking the dog rapidly now, a gelid gleam in his eye.
‘So you’ve got a mole?’
‘Aye. A mole. I have dealt with him in my own way, of course.’
‘I’ll not ask how you got rid of the body,’ murmured Rhombus, looking at the boxes of Scottish eggs all round him.
McTartan smiled toothlessly.
‘Aye. There was an accident at the production plant.’
‘Christ.’
‘Meanwhile the Italians and the French and the Chinese are getting desperate for their Scottish eggs and if I don’t supply them—’
‘Someone else will, eh?’ interrupted Rhombus. Gangsters adored a vacuum, he thought.
‘Exactly,’ said Wm Low. ‘I need to send a shipment tonight. Three lorries. Six drivers.’
‘How will you get them past the FSAS?’
‘This is where you come in. I have managed to get my hands on three black Marias—’
‘And you are going to fill them with Scottish eggs and then drive them south, through all the road blocks, pretending they’re full of hairy-arsed Scotch prisoners that the English will not even want to look at. And you want me to show them my warrant card if we are pulled over.’
Wm Low smiled.
‘I’m impressed,’ he said.
‘There’s one thing you have forgotten about,’ Rhombus said. ‘Even I can’t drive six lorries.’
‘Ah! But that is all taken care of. I have five other, how shall I put it? ‘Associates’.’
‘The Grey Wolves?’
‘I’ve heard they’re called that, but eh? What do I know? Any wolf is grey in the dark am I no’ right?’
‘Who are these fellas?’ he asked.
‘Oh, just you wait and see,’ cackled Wm Low McTartan. ‘Just you wait and see.’
* * *
7. The term ‘Scotch egg’ has fallen out of fashion after a campaign run by the Scotch Nationalist Party who claimed ‘Scotch’ was offensive, and referred only to tape.
8. Same.
Chapter Three
Inspector Scott Rhombus was drunk. A bottle of whisky, four tins of 80/- and Jefferson Airplane ‘Have you Seen the Saucers’ at top volume on the stereo. He was sitting in bed, duvet pulled up to his chin, trying desperately not to Dwell on his Time in the SAS. He had Dwelt on his Time in the SAS only three times so far that day – an abstinence, as far as he was concerned.
He tried to work out why was there no question mark at the end of Jefferson Airplane’s song title, but had Drawn a Blank. After that, he thought about what he was doing involving himself with McTartan. McTartan had known not to offer Rhombus money, known he would refuse it, insulted. Instead the wee man had filled out a ten pound a month Direct Debit form in favour of DrinkforDrunks, a local charity that delivered tinnies to any Scot, regardless of race, creed, age or gender, who might be too drunk to get to the pub. The charity’s motorbikes, with cooled compartments on the back, criss-crossed the town, delivering urgent alcohol to distressed Scotch folk everywhere.
But still the questions remained. Why was McTartan showing him the Scottish egg operation? Surely he knew Rhombus would go straight to the FSAS? Perhaps he had something on Rhombus? But what? Or was this the first overture from the Grey Wolves? It was something that had been bothering him all day.
After he had left McTartan’s warehouse that afternoon, he had rung DS Shortbread on his mobile and had her read out the autopsy report on poor old Wee Jock ‘Jocky’ McTunnock®. It made depressing reading, right enough, but there was something strange about it and so Rhombus had returned to walk the New Town streets in the thereabouts. Why would an old man like that simply walk into a pond? His blood-alcohol content was high, of course, but not fantastically so for a man of his profession, so it could not have been said that he was literally blind drunk. He did not have much to live for, that was true enough, but still there was something that was bothering about it.
He had later found himself on Abercromby Place. The scene-of-crime guys had moved on, taking their tent with them – which would have pleased His Nibs, thought Rhombus sourly – and leaving the gardens in peace. Rhombus walked around to find the gate he had used to get in that morning locked. He tried another. That too was locked. Then it hit him. An old guy like Wee Jock ‘Jocky’ McTunnock® would not have been able to get into the garden in the first place. The fence was too high for all but the most athletic to scale.
He must have been taken to the pond.
Rhombus would have to wait for the results to come back from the lab, but his guess was that someone had dragged the old man into the pond and held his heid under the water.
As he had made his way back to his flat, he had realised that the only questions that remained unanswered were the Why and the Who.
Which were pretty big questions perhaps, and neither of which he would be very likely to answer as he sat in bed getting stuck in to the cheesy-ringed outside of a carry-out deep-pan pizza and another tinny.
‘Ah, what blessed company,’ he said aloud, referring to his supper. Just then the doorbell rang. It was the first time that night. People were always disturbing him when he was Dwelling on his Time in the SAS. He looked at his watch and realised that it was about time for the second body to turn up.
It was DS Shortbread. Something had happened.
‘The man who looked after Queen Street Gardens East has just been found deid in his sheid.’
Right on time. Rhombus gathered his coat and followed her down the stone stairs to her car.
‘His wife says he’s usually home by six in the evening,’ she explained on the way. ‘Especially when the nights are drawing in, and so, when he didn’t come back, she rang his supervisor. He found the body at 8.05 th
is evening. Hanging in the sheid.’
‘And you’re only telling me now?’
‘Scott, you’re suspended, don’t forget. It’s not your case. I just thought you ought to know, that’s all.’
Rhombus apologised.
‘They’ve called in Shona McOatcake from F troop.’
‘Not Wee Shona McOatcake?’
‘Aye. Wee Shona McOatcake.’
‘To replace me?’
DS Shortbread stayed quiet, concentrating on the road. As an Englishwoman she often thought it was both Rhombus’s masculinity and his nationality that made him so bad-tempered.
When they got to Queen Street Gardens East, Wee Shona McOatcake was standing at the gates. An ambulance was just pulling away, its lights flashing mournfully.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked when she saw Rhombus emerge.
‘Why hello my sweet flower of Scotland,’ he replied only semi-sarcastically, patting her on her wee heid. ‘I could ask the same of you?’
‘I’m here to investigate the murder of—’
‘Oh, tush!’ Rhombus said. ‘You’re here to see me.’
‘Scott, I may be in town, and I may be working from the same police station as you, and I know you are on the rebound from Fiona, but I do not want you to think of me as the diving board, is that okay?’
‘Not even for old times’ sake?’ he asked. He fluttered his eyelashes at her and if DS Shortbread had not known any better she would have said that DI McOatcake melted.
‘Oh, Scott,’ she gushed. ‘How I miss you and your charming ways.’
‘Where’s the body then?’ asked Rhombus, brusque now that he had what he had come for.
‘On its way to the morgue,’ said DS Shortbread.
‘Let’s see the sheid, then. Where the poor bugger was hanged.’
They crossed the lawn to a thick hedge of laurel bushes that kept the working parts of the garden hidden from sight. Typical, thought Rhombus. Behind the hedge was a large double-doored sheid of green metal. The technicians had set up some lights and the same men in masks that he had seen that morning now cast ghostly shadows into the low canopy of trees overheid. The shed was dominated by a large mower. Tools of various descriptions hung from the walls and a coil of rope from a rafter, now slightly bent under the weight that had, until recently, been hanging from it.
‘What are your thoughts?’ he asked DI McOatcake.
‘I think suicide—’
Rhombus whirled on her.
‘But you said you were here to investigate the murder?’ he snapped. ‘Murrrrrrrrder!’
‘I’ll not rule it out,’ McOatcake stammered.
Rhombus nodded and began to saunter through the shed. There did not seem very much left to discover. He was just about to leave when he spotted the corner of something poking from under the seat of the lawnmower. A letter? He slipped it into his pocket before anyone noticed.
‘Inspector Rhombus!’
Rhombus jumped and turned round. It was one of the technical boys.
‘That sample you asked me to take this morning?’
‘Aye, what of it?’
‘Crude oil. A bit strange, ye no ken?’
Rhombus shook his heid and left them to it. He wandered along to the Oxymoron bar. Inside, it was thick with smoke and mumbled conversation and the delicious smell of beer mats, spilled whisky and blood. Heaven. He found a place at a sticky table and took out the letter, which turned out not to be a letter at all, but rather some kind of technical chemical report. Rhombus could make neither heid nor tail of it. He read some of it at a murmur.
‘MB&L Scotland Ltd, in collaboration with its JV Partners (OHL, PGDC, POPLL and GPL) report successful testing of the QSGE-2 well as part of the HR/AP Block. Drill Stem Tests have been concluded for two zones and have produced test volumes of condensate with different flowing capacities from each zone. QSE was tested at around 428bbl/day condensate and AP at 489bbl/day condensate through 32/64’ choke.’
Rhombus supped his pint.
‘Now what do you suppose that’s all about?’ he meant the question rhetorically, but as usual with the Oxymoron bar, someone overheard him, someone who knew rather more than one might suppose.
‘I know MB&L,’ he said. Rhombus looked up. The man who had spoken last was a dark-haired man in his late 40s, vaguely unkempt, with dark eyes and a soft accent that Rhombus placed as being from Fife.
‘They test all over the world,’ he was saying. ‘Looking for oil reserves, don’t-you-know? What ho! Toodle-pip! Howsabout those Hibs, eh? Harharhar.’
‘Wait a second, pal,’ cried Rhombus. ‘Did you say oil?’
‘Oh yes!’ piped up another voice. ‘I once invested £50,000 in good old MB&L. Discovered oil and then they repaid me handsomely and now I am a very rich man indeed and I believe myself to be above the law. I am also secretly English. So there. Hoohoo!’
A chair flew through the air, hitting the man just behind the ear. Before he could spill his pint, it was snatched away to the comparative safety of the gullet of the man standing at the bar next to him but, while this man was concentrating on that pint, someone else drank his pint. Meanwhile someone wearing what looked like a ginger fright wig and a tartan skirt grabbed Rhombus by his shirt front and lifted him to his feet so that they were eyeball to eyeball.
‘Hinka cumfae Kirkcudbri canifeh? Ahl hit yi oar the heid wi a caw taughtie!’
This sort of thing was always getting in the way of an investigation, thought Rhombus as his feet left the ground. He had naturally not relinquished his grip on his pint glass and he carefully drained it in a single snake-like gulp before smashing it on the man’s heid. True enough Rhombus had trained for the SAS, but the heid-butt that he then delivered he had learned at his mother’s knee.
‘Oof!’ the man cried, his legs sagging under him. Rhombus was gently lowered to the ground.
‘Another pint, please, John.’
‘With you in a second.’
John had wrapped his dishcloth round the neck of the punter who had invested something in MB&L and was pulling it tight. Rhombus drained the man’s pint. He would not be needing that in A & E, now, would he?
Rhombus cleared the glass and the blood and three broken teeth from his table and sat down again. When his pint arrived, he turned the paper he had found in the shed over to read the reverse. Something was written in rough pencil on the back. G.F F. G.F-F? It could only be Gordon Farquhar-Farquar, surely? The brother of the Chief Constable, the man in the gardens that morning. What had he to do with an oil company? wondered Rhombus.
He tapped DS Shortbread’s number into his mobile.
‘Mary,’ he said once he had identified himself. ‘Does the company MB&L mean anything to you?’
‘No,’ she replied. Rhombus nodded, his suspicions confirmed.
‘I need you to do me a favour, will you?’
‘I thought you’d never ask,’ she replied, not managing to keep the laugh out of her voice.
‘Get me everything you can on this Gordon Farquhar-Farquar fellow, will you? I have a suspicion there is MORE TO HIM THAN HE IS LETTING ON.’
Rhombus terminated the call and looked at his watch. He was due at McTartan’s to meet the other members of the Scottish egg smuggling team in a quarter of an hour. As he staggered out of the bar with a cigarette stuck in his mouth, he saw two – no, four, no, two – men leaning with their arms folded against his car in the road outside.
‘Ge’off ma feckin car, youse!’ he shouted before realising that the two men were DI Dougal McI’lltaketheHighroad, and his partner DS Douglas Cornrig. There was something that Rhombus did not like about the way they were standing there, arms crossed, like vigilantes. He had been wondering if it was about now that someone would tell him he was a suspect in a murder case.
‘DI McOatcake sent us,’ said McI’lltaketheHighroad. ‘You’re to come to the station with us just now. Says to tell you you’re in the frame for Wee Jock McTunnock®’s murder.’
‘Och, boys, you’re not to listen to wee Shona McOatcake. She’s a gurl, fur fecksake! A wee lass!’
McI’lltaketheHighroad glanced at Cornrig nervously. Cornrig licked his lips.
‘Aye, well. Okay then,’ he said. ‘You’re right.’
Once they had gone Rhombus sat in his car for a few moments, Runrig on the stereo, thinking. He felt comfortable being in the frame for Wee Jock’s death. In a sense he felt responsible for it anyway, even if he had not actually pushed the old man into the pond and then held his heid down. He was Scotch and so was Jocky. They were all in this together. It was them against the world, just as it always had been.
He turned his car engine over. A warning light on the dashboard blinked. Oil. He needed oil. What was it that man had said about MB&L? Could they have discovered oil in the middle of the New Town? And if so, who had given them permission to look for it? It looked as if he would have to pay Gordon Farquhar-Farquar a bit of a visit.
Chapter Four
Detective Inspector Scott Rhombus pulled his SAAB round the corner and into the yard of McTartan’s warehouse. When he pulled up, the lights were blazing and five cars were parked over by the wall: a Maserati, a Lagonda, an Aston Martin, a Ferrari and a Lotus. Rhombus was surprised. It was like the Celtic Football Club training-ground parking lot.
Next to them were three black Marias, engines running. They certainly looked the part. He wondered where McTartan had acquired them.
And then he knew.
Round the corner came five men, all of whom he recognised: DI McTavish, DC McGreyFriarsBobby, DI McTam-o’-Shanter, DC McScottsPorridgeOats and DI McHighlandgames.
‘Well, well, well, the gang’s all here,’ he said.
The policemen shifted from foot to foot, their wrists and fingers jangling with heavy diamond-studded jewellery. Each was smoking an enormous cigar. Who would have thought this lot were the Grey Wolves?
‘Glad you could join us, Inspector Rhombus,’ said McTartan, emerging from the shadow behind one of the vans, light glinting off the sovereign rings on his fingers. He was smoking his cigar and stroking that ginger dog, whose cough was getting worse.
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