‘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.’