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?
He watched as Colander put his hand on Mma Ontoaste’s broad knee. It was a proprietary gesture. Mma Ontoaste removed the hand. Well, well, thought Rhombus.
‘That’s the castle up there,’ he pointed, addressing Mma Ontoaste. ‘Maybe I’ll take you later?’
Mma Ontoaste raised an eyebrow.
‘I should like that—’ she started.
‘After we have been to IKEA,’ snapped Colander, audibly and visibly hurt by Delicious’s rejection.
Rhombus pounced.
‘So what sort of music do you like, Delicious?’ he asked with a slight nod of the heid, as if he were moving to some groovy inner beat. She frowned at him and then looked away out of the window again. Colander gave Rhombus a wintry9 smile.
Tom Hurst was quiet, seemingly lost in thought. He kept chewing his lower lip. Could he have made a mistake, he wondered. Could the clues that the murderer left, from that spear to the IKEA label and now this trip to Scotland, really have been to the three detectives that were in the car, rather than anything else? Was there a personal connection in the game, rather than a geographical one? The news that they had all been in the same year at Cuff was news to him. But surely the Dean should have known? He would have to make a few calls.
The driver negotiated all the mini roundabouts that blocked the way to the massive blue-painted warehouse of IKEA and dropped them as near to the entrance as he was able. The way seemed to be blocked by four or five enormous coaches.
‘Imagine organising a coach trip to IKEA,’ muttered Tom.
All three detectives jumped out of the cab almost before it stopped moving, showing surprising turns of speed, leaving Tom to pay for the ride. Which in this case was only fair. Once again the detectives followed the yellow line through the sections all the way to the bedlinen department and once again they were unable to find what they were looking for. There seemed to be no mysa måne duvets to be found.
‘Perhaps we should have rung first?’ murmured Tom. There was a hiss of indrawn breath. The three detectives were all shaking their heids in disapproval.
‘What do they teach kids these days?’ Rhombus said
‘Tom,’ began Colander. ‘The purpose of the telephone in our business is only to complicate matters, not help clear things up. It would only have been worth ringing ahead if you could have guaranteed that someone with a distinctive speech impediment would have answered the phone and then subsequently lied to you. Then you would have had a lead, and probably a false one—’
‘The best kind,’ interjected Rhombus.
‘—But otherwise don’t use the phone.’
Once again Mma Ontoaste had to ask someone and once again the men clustered around the assistant and bombarded her with extraneous detail. The last mysa måne had been sold that very morning.
‘Och,’ said the girl, ‘I sold it myself. To an American.’
‘An American? What did he look like?’ asked Rhombus.
‘A wee bit crazy to tell you the truth. He was wearing an old parka and he smelled of fish.’
‘Fish?’
As they tried to leave the store with Mma Ontoaste lingering in the Marketplace haggling for a cork noticeboard, a set of fifteen soup bowls and a carpet from somewhere near Turkey, Tom felt glum.
‘Cheer up Tom,’ said Rhombus. ‘Let’s get some clothes for you all and then we can all go and have a drink and a think. Does that sound good, eh big man?’
It was not clear if he was being ironic but as the taxi drew up at the Scotch Cashmere and Tartan Centre on Prince’s Street, he was smiling broadly.
‘This is where most Scots buy their clothes,’ Rhombus said, leading the way down the stairs. Once in the shop Mma Ontoaste and Colander were quickly surrounded by sales staff who took their measurements and returned with kilts in the correct tartan within the minute. Mma Ontoaste was quickly fitted up for a rather modest Harris tweed jacket, a white ruffled shirt, strong tartan waistcoat, kilt and a pair of thick green socks with a little piece of scarlet felt cut in the shape of a snake’s tongue that stuck from the fold at the top. She refused the offer of a dirk, but took the sporran and a heavy pair of black brogues. Colander and Hurst emerged a second later, similarly dressed.
‘Oh Delicious,’ Rhombus said, clearly and unnervingly aroused by the sight of her in tartan. ‘You look wonderful. But what a shame your kilt clashes with his self’s there.’
He nodded to where Colander was looking thunderously at himself in a mirror, trying to make some sort of sense of the Glengarry hat that he had been given.
‘You’ll just have to keep away from one another won’t you?’ Rhombus laughed. Colander tore his Glengarry off and threw it on the ground. Rhombus had bought himself a blue Tam with black and red dicing and an orange pom. He pulled it down over one eye and was giving Delicious a piratical look when something she said stopped him in mid stride.
‘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.