Diary of a Detective Chief, 21st February

A note from The Shopkeeper

Once again, a brown envelope stuffed with hand-written pages has turned up on the doormat of the shop.  As before, no name or return address is indicated, and the author is unknown to me. 

If they read this, I’d urge them to get in touch, as their story is a dramatic one, and, if turned into a TV series, could provide employment for a considerable number of Glaswegian actors.

Meanwhile, read on.  It’s a gruesome tale, and I think its inspiration may be traceable to recent discoveries.  I could be wrong about that, but it’s what my shopkeeper’s intuition tells me.

‘There’s been a murder!’  Sergeant Assistant Roxy’s urgent tones rung urgently down the phone line.

‘Location?’ asked Detective Chief Donnie Sudoku.

‘Location?’ queried Roxy.

‘Location!’ cried Sudoku.

‘That’s a TV programme isn’t it?’ said Roxy.

‘Good observation,’ said Sudoku, ‘But where’s the body?’

‘Oh, I see.  It’s in a hole in a field at the Bay of the Grail.’

‘Holy!  I’ll be right there.’

That is…just as soon as I finish my coffee, thought Sudoku, and poured himself another cup.  It was his favourite, Papawestrayccino, a special brew he got the roastery up at Hatston to make for him.  Damn and blast it, where could he have got in life if it hadn’t been for his coffee addiction!  He’d had the chance of a job exchange with that Inspector Montalbano in Sicily, but what do the Italians know about coffee?  It would have been unbearable.

Half an hour later he was speeding on his way, with all the alacrity Police West Mainland are famed for.

The crime scene was in the corner of a field with the raging waters of the Bay of the Grail raging picturesquely behind it, which would be a perfect location if anyone ever wanted to do a film version of this story.

Sergeant Assistant Roxy came towards him, looking glamourous and slightly anxious as always.  Damn and blast it, thought Sudoku, if only I wasn’t obsessed with my ex-wife and her new partner, Brian Suspiciously-Sensible, I could be a lot happier. 

‘But maybe you’d be less driven to excel as an investigative detective,’ said Sergeant Assistant Roxy.

‘Damn and blast, it’s as if you read my mind,’ said Sudoku.

‘Call it selkie intuition,’ said Roxy, and flexed her slightly webbed fingers.  (But that’s a story for another time.)

‘So what’s your intuition telling you about the murder?’ said Sudoku, getting right to the heart of the matter with the alacrity that brought fear to the whole West Mainland criminal community.

‘Male, badly decomposed body, in fact not much left but bones.  Buried in a shallow grave with a stone over the top.’

‘Time of death?’

‘We’re thinking about 2000 BC.’

Sudoku nodded.  ‘Rigor Mortis?’

Roxy shrugged.  ‘We haven’t run the tests yet.’

‘No, has Rigor Mortis been here yet?  You know, Police Commissioner Mortis, Rigor to his friends.’

Roxy smiled grimly.  ‘I bet his parents regret hiring that drunk registrar to write his birth certificate.  If only she’d written Roger as they asked, his life would’ve been a lot happier.  And no, he hasn’t been here.  There’s only…him.’  She nodded grimly towards a stereotypical unkempt farmer leaning against a tractor by the grave.  ‘That’s Feathery Billy.  He runs the chicken sheds up the road.’

‘Gotcha!’ muttered Sudoku under his breath, and marched with alacrity towards the suspect.

The guilty party nodded as Sudoku approached.  ‘I was putting a new drain in, when I hit stone.  Not unusual around here right enough, but when I looked in the hole…’

‘Anything you say may be taken down!’ cried Sudoku.

‘Fair enough.  Like I said, this field is hellish wet and…’

‘Hold on!  Something smells fishy here.’

‘That’ll be my packed lunch,’ said Billy.  ‘My wife’s given me red herrings.’

Immediately, Roxy was right beside Sudoku.  She’d read his mind again.  She held out an extra-large evidence bag, glamorously if slightly anxiously.

Feathery Billy frowned as he dropped the packet of Hume’s Red Herrings into the bag.  ‘What am I going to eat now?’ he said, ‘They were featured on Saturday Kitchen you know: best red herrings in the world.’

Roxy laughed grimly.  ‘You’ll not get around Detective Chief Sudoku that easily.’

‘Sudoku?  That’s not a very Orcadian name.’

‘My father was the only Japanese prisoner of war with all the Italians on Lamb Holm,’ explained Sudoku with alacrity.  ‘It was an administrative error, but he made the most of it.  It’s a little-known fact that he built a Shinto temple right next to the better-known Italian chapel.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Feathery Billy.

‘Don’t come the innocent with me,’ said Sudoku.  ‘Save it for the judge.  Roxy, get him out of my sight.’

Sergeant Assistant Roxy cast an anxious if slightly glamorous look at her boss.  ‘Will I throw the book at him?’ she said.

‘Yes, but make sure the bruises don’t show.  Then throw him in the cells.  And throw away the key.’

‘Anything else you’d like me to throw?’ she said.

‘Yes, throw me that flask of coffee from the back of my car.  This investigation is going to need some serious caffeine input.’

With the alacrity that had the notorious cattle rustling gangs of Swona trembling in their seaboots just weeks before, Sudoku knelt by the grave and peered in.

‘Damn and blast, the evil that men do, even in a romantically picturesque and peaceful place like Orkney!  Not even I, Detective Chief Donnie Sudoku, can solve this puzzle single-handed.’

He took a long draft of coffee, then reached for his phone, and punched in an all too familiar number. ‘Give me CSI Archaeology Unit,’ he cried.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 25th February. Other diaries continue to appear weekly. I am posting them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.