The No. 2 Global Detective (16 page)

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 this 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.

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.

Rhombus was to share a cab with McScottsPorridgeOats, the second van of the convoy. They would set out along the M8 towards Glasgow and then take the M74 south, where they would be met just beyond Carlisle at a service station on the M6, where McTartan had left a people carrier to bring them back in time for duty the next morning.

DC McScottsPorridgeOats took the first shift behind the wheel. He was a heavy-set man with ginger hair and skin with the texture and smell of a cheese-and-onion crisp. His friends called him Quaker, but Rhombus didn't. Instead he turned his face to the window and watched the lights pass as McScottsPorridgeOats ground through the gears, trailing the van in front of them, heiding westwards along the motorway.

The first that Rhombus was aware that it was a trap was when a line of dark blue Ford Mondeos moved into the outside lane and began travelling at the same speed as the vans. Each car was filled with burly-looking men. Then a ‘jam sandwich' in the slow lane aheid began to slow down just as the three trucks were climbing up a hill by Harthill. Then the lights started flashing. There was nothing the drivers of the black Marias could do. No way out the front of the convoy, especially at the low speed they were travelling, and not enough room either side to do anything fancy.

But if the FSAS boys sprang their trap perfectly in order to check the vans, they were clueless when it came to apprehending the drivers. Rhombus jumped from his cab, tearing the shoulder of his jacket in the process, and shoved his way past one of the food inspectors. He sprinted across the run-off and up the embankment leaving the man trailing in his wake.

At the top was a wooden fence. He rolled over it, in accordance with the SAS stylebook, and ducked into a dark ditch. He had to move. Aheid was a ploughed field that stretched down to a cluster of lights. A village. He knew if he could make the lights he would be safe. He set off, skirting the field, heid kept low, sticking to cover, his training kicking in. When he made it to the line of bushes that marked the track from the field to the road, he paused to get his breath back. He scanned the field behind him.

Christ. He could make out some figures running bent double. But who were they? The FSAS boys or the police drivers?

He squatted in the bushes as the figures approached. What a disaster! Christ. And yet he could not help but smile.

‘Hello, boys,' he said, standing up suddenly. ‘Nice night for a walk.'

‘Christ, sir, you frightened the life out of me,' muttered one of the hunched figures, hand pressed across his chest.

Ten minutes later all six of them were sitting round the circular table in the back room of The Wild Deer bar, in Hartshill, each with a pint of 80/- in his hand and a story to tell. Wee Wm Low McTartan was on his way. God knows who he would be bringing with him. Muscle of some sort, guessed Rhombus as he paced the floor in front of the fire, feeling like a child waiting to be picked up by an angry parent.

He could kick himself, he thought, for getting himself mixed up with these bloody amateurs. Wm Low would have every right to be angry. But angry with whom? Surely the mole came from within his own organisation?

A helicopter clattered overheid.

Then heidlights swept across the ceiling of the back room as a car parked in the car park. There was a thump of car doors. Rhombus counted eight of them. He raised his eyebrows.

‘We've got company,' he said.

Wm Low McTartan was a dangerous man when roused. He was apoplectic now. He had just lost three lorry-loads of prime Scottish eggs.