The No. 2 Global Detective (18 page)

‘Go on.'

‘Now because of some fiddly little regulations in place to make it look like ‘A Good Thing', one has to dress up one's application for the money as if it were a sensible business proposal, so that all that any pesky lower-class journalists or, heaven forbid, policemen like yourself, might find if they investigated the request for tax-free unearned income is a trail of complicated paperwork that would defeat their frankly inferior sense of enquiry.'

‘I see,' Rhombus said, stifling a yawn.

‘Well, through a company I own I applied for an oil exploration grant and was naturally given trillions of euros in order to find oil in Queen Street Gardens East and stop our reliance on the
dish-dashers
.'

‘And your brother is a European Commissioner?' Rhombus said.

‘It saved on postage, certainly,' continued Gordon. ‘But, if we found any oil, we would have to develop the field and repay the money we had ‘borrowed'. Of course, we never thought we would find any. We chose Queen Street Gardens East precisely because it looked so unpromising—'

‘And it was pretty handy.'

‘True enough. One can see the road sign from one's desk in one's study and so naturally it was the first place that popped into one's mind.'

‘But Wee Jocky McTunnock saw you finding the oil, didn't he?'

‘Yes. Curse him. How he got in there I shall never know, but he walked in some mud and then saw his footprint fill with dark stuff. At first he did not know what it was so he tried to drink it and had to check into A & E to have his stomach pumped. Fool of a doctor enlightened him as to what he had drunk and he went around blabbing.'

‘And then the gardener got his hands on the drilling report and put two and two together and came up with four.'

‘Yes. So I had to have him killed as well. Devil of a job, but my man seemed up to it.'

‘Where is your man, by the way?' asked Rhombus. ‘I might want a wee word with him.'

‘He is downstairs in the kitchen, spit-polishing my rhinoceros-hide whip, I hope.'

He waggled his eyebrows at the cowering naked boys.

‘Mind if I find my own way down?' asked Rhombus.

‘I imagine you will feel much more comfortable below stairs, Inspector,' Farquhar-Farquar said. ‘And while you are there, will you ask him to bring up the Margaux '86? I think we're ready for it now. And you might like to help yourself to a cup of the tepid water we keep for commercial travellers too.'

Rhombus nodded to the boys and closed the door behind him. So it had come to this. Just for the sake of trillions of euros two innocent men had to die. He opened the door and set his foot on the top step. It creaked loudly, but not enough to cover the sound of some music that came swimming up the stairs at him. He had heard it before, but where? He walked down the stairs, trying to place the tune. A radio was playing on an old oak Welsh dresser. It was insistent, haunting music, coming from a radio in the corner. Rhombus stood and looked around for a moment. The room was empty. On the large deal table, one end covered in newspaper, cloths and polish and a whip. Burnished copper pans hung on the wall, porcelain dishes were piled on shelves and an Aga throbbed with heat and good smells. An empty claret bottle stood next to a crystal decanter filled with red wine. An open door to a yard, a warm breeze.

It was as Rhombus was standing in the yard that a heavy brown bottle dropped from a windowsill above and hit him squarely on the heid. Rhombus stumbled and fell to his knees. The bottle bounced and broke into a million shards on the slate floor.

When he got to his feet, he felt light-heided. Blood from the cut in his hairline poured down his foreheid, blinding him until he wiped it away. He glanced at the broken glass.

Just then he heard a bellow of rage from above. A balding, fat, Scotch man in a grubby string vest was leaning out of his window shouting down at the stunned policeman.

‘Wha' the fuck've you done to my bottle, you wee fuck?' he bellowed. ‘You've fuckin' well broken it, a'n't ya!'

Rhombus shuddered and turned and walked back into the kitchen. He knew he ought to ring DS Shortcake and tell her what he had discovered about Gordon Farquhar-Farquar and his manservant, but the strange thing was that he simply could not find it in himself to care so very much.

He let himself out and began walking quickly, as if with a new purpose in life, past pubs that he might have had a slate in, past the hall where he went to his SASA meetings, past the chip shop, the Indian carry-out shop, all the way to the McPoundstretcher on Lothian Road. He emerged five minutes later with a set of wicker cachepots, a mug tree hung with eight amusingly sloganed mugs and a toilet-seat cover with matching floor mat in butterscotch candlewick.

Soon he was back in his own flat, taking the sheets off his chair and making his bed for the first time since he could not recall when. It seemed right somehow. Radio Four played in the background. How he loved those Archers. Afterwards he ate some tinned consommé at the newly scrubbed kitchen table and looked round his flat. Cluttered with his collection of Tennant's Special tins and back issues of
Kerrang!
magazine, he saw that it was not as stylish as he had once thought, but squalid, depressing and filthy. The cachepots and the mug tree helped, of course, but it was more serious than that. He decided he must move. Rhombus turned on his computer and began searching the internet for estate agents in Godalming. He had always fancied living in Surrey, owning a little candle shop, perhaps, with maybe some essential oils on the side and, regardless of what people said about the place, some of the properties were remarkably cheap. He wondered why it was not possible to buy online. He made a donation to the Conservative Party and then went for a walk. He had never been up Arthur's Seat, but now seemed a perfect opportunity. After all, what else did he have to do?

He power-walked his way through the southern stretch of the city, ignoring the persistent drizzle. Once at the top of Arthur's Seat, all of Edinburgh was spread out below him and he sipped his beetroot and goat-hair juice contemplatively. Some people saw only the dark side of Edinburgh: each height something off which to be thrown; each depth somewhere in which to be buried. Rhombus was not like that, but he could see that the city lacked the grace or appeal of Godalming, or Hindheid, Haslemere or even Farnham.

His head was beginning to ache now. He could see stars. He decided he needed to be in bed and began walking back to the New Town. As South Bridge ran into North Bridge Rhombus began to feel nothing but gloom. On each side of the road were disgusting-looking chip shops, baked-potato shops, one-pound shops and porn shops. There was vomit and worse on most of the walls of the soot-black buildings, and the people he passed! So ugly! Ginger, and always trying to get in his way; jeering at him, their faces like fists, their tracksuited bodies simultaneously etiolated and adipose. Blue prison tattoos carved into skin the colour of whey, teeth like gravel chips.

He stopped on the bridge and looked both left and right. Left towards the castle and the north. Right towards the sea and England. No wonder so many people topped themselves here. So near and yet so far. If he stood there much longer, he thought, he would have a go himself.

When he got back to his flat he rang his mother.

‘Are youse alrigh', pet?' she asked. ‘You sound a wee bit strange.'

‘I am fine, Mother. Absolutely fine.'

Then he drew himself a bath and had a long soak. He still felt light-heided from the bottle, but as he scrubbed away the years of accumulated dirt, he began to feel euphoric. He turned in, enjoying the feel of his nice clean pyjamas, did up the top button, happy that for once no one had rung his doorbell or even his mobile. It was a quarter past ten. Soon Rhombus was asleep, dreaming he was flying over pearly-white clouds, chastely holding hands with a young Margaret Thatcher.

In the morning Scott Rhombus woke feeling disgustingly clean and uncomfortable in his bed. He groaned as he did every morning, but this was different. Whatever had happened to him the night before had worn off by now. He looked in horror at all the tidying he had done the night before. He tore his pyjamas from his scrawny body and found some old jeans in the laundry pile, which, along with a rough woollen-mix sweater that smelled of cigarette smoke, beer, vomit and cheap aftershave, he forced on. Much fucking better.

He tried to recall what had happened to him the night before. It was all a terrible blur. A blank. He went into the bathroom, a room he seldom visited except to look at his tongue in the mirror, and shrank back from the horrid material that surrounded the toilet. He closed the door on the room and retreated back into the kitchen.

Sweat seeped from his skin. He needed a proper Scotch breakfast: something sweet, calorific and artificial, something deep-fried in old fat. But he looked at the time. He had to go and meet the Lecturer from Cuff College.

In Waverley Station Rhombus had little problem spotting the arrivals. They were dressed in Scandinavian jumpers, for a start, with ugly leather hats on their heids and clogs on their feet. The younger man seemed to be leading them across the forecourt, heid swivelling, looking for eye contact. This was a dangerous pastime in Britain in general, but in Waverley Station in particular. You could just as easily find that you had commissioned the services of a prostitute for the night as have got yourself into a fight with a terrifying man with a claw hammer in his back pocket.

Still, it was not this that most struck DI Rhombus as he watched the trio as they paused by the news-stands, looking faintly anxious. It was the woman. It was not just that she was strikingly large and strikingly beautiful, drinking from a can of vandal-strength lager now, or that she was black. It was because he recognised her.

Delicious Ontoaste.

My God, thought Rhombus, I've not seen her for 20 years, yet here she is. He recalled her from the Tea Shoppe on the street just outside the Quad, the one in which his aunt worked, with her plastered thumb in the cakes all the time. He had kept that quiet all right. He wondered if she would recognise him. He had changed since then, of course. After all that Dwelling on his Time in the SAS, who would have retained their youthful bloom? He felt suddenly shy even from this distance and approached the group circumspectly.

‘Are you Tom Hurst?' he asked, knowing the answer, peripherally watching Delicious as she finished her beer and crumpled the can in one hand. Tom winced as behind his ear she let out a belch that resounded through the vaulted space of the station.

‘Yes. Inspector Rhombus?'

‘Aye.'

It was Rhombus's turn to wince. How could anyone be so English, he wondered, even when they were dressed like some Baltic fisherman with a leather fetish.

‘Good of you to meet us. Let me introduce Mma Delicious Ontoaste from Botswana—'

‘Oh Rra!' boomed Ontoaste. ‘I remember you! You are a rhombus – not traditionally built, by any means!'

She let out a belly laugh that had the porters staring. Tom Hurst was confused.

‘You know each other?' he asked.

‘Oh yes, Rra. We were at College together. As I remember, this man spent a long time in his room alone. “Brooding” we used to call it.'

Rhombus kept a fixed grin. He held out a hand and saw it engulfed in Mma Ontoaste's, who then pulled him forward into her substantial embrace. She smelled of beer and cocoa butter and those little towels they give you to refresh yourself on aeroplanes.

‘And this is Burt Colander,' said Tom absently, when Rhombus re-emerged. Rhombus did a double take. Colander was staring at him intently.

‘Christ,' muttered Rhombus. ‘A blast from the past.'

‘Don't tell me you two know each other as well?'

‘I'm afraid so, Tom,' Colander said. ‘You see, the detective from Scotland and I shared a Supervisor at Oxford.'

‘You were in the same year?' asked Tom, sensing the rivalry.

‘Yes. Remind me, Colander, what did you get in the end?'

‘Joint honours – Swedish and Empirical Detection. What about you? I recall you going off to join the Salvation Army?'

Rhombus blushed.

‘SAS actually,' he corrected.

‘You joined Scandinavian Airlines?' asked an incredulous Colander.

‘Can we talk about old times somewhere else, do you think? Besides, we ought to get you some proper clothes.'

‘But we have to get to IKEA first,' Tom insisted, looking for some sort of support from Colander or Ontoaste. None was forthcoming, but neither did they object. They seemed not to care so very much.

‘IKEA?' asked Rhombus. He had heard of the shop, of course, since it had opened in a blaze of violent rage a few years ago now, but had never felt the need to visit.

They joined the queue for the taxi and, when they arrived at the heid, asked the driver to take them south towards Penicuik and the Swedish superstore. The driver looked suspicious but they piled in and set off before he could come up with any racist nonsense. Rhombus and Tom on the pull-down seats. Colander sniffed as he settled into the upholstery, thrown close to Mma Ontoaste by her weight.

‘What do you drive?' he asked Rhombus, switching the reading light off and on, off and on.

‘A SAAB,' muttered Rhombus.

‘Ah. A Swedish car. Always the best.'

‘That's not so,' snapped Rhombus.

‘Is!'

‘Isn't!'

‘Oh stop it you two,' interrupted Mma Ontoaste. ‘Anyway, cars are so old-fashioned. You should drive a cow. I drive one and she is lovely and brown.'

Rhombus stared out of the window. He was thinking about where he might get a cow. One of those long-haired Aberdeen Anguses would have been perfect. Then he caught himself. He was not that sort of detective. He investigated the dark side of Edinburgh, the seamy underbelly if you like, and the dark side of the human mind. He could not go around on a cow, however much that might save on road tax. Besides, how would a cow handle the hills? What about cobbles?