The Deep Dark Sleep

I was grateful it wasn’t raining because, as Miss Marple had explained, Dunbar’s cottage was up a lane on the estate and we had to hoof it. At one time, every square yard of Scotland had been covered with an impenetrable blanket of trees: the Great Caledonian Forest. Some time in the distant past, long before Scottish history took a brighter turn and became the Dark Ages, the forest had been chopped, burned and stripped away for firewood, building materials, or simply to allow space for animals to graze. It had taken a couple of millennia, but the ancient Scots had managed to denude the majority of the Scottish landscape and turn it into peaty bog. Now, as Dr Johnson had once quipped, a tree in Scotland was as rare as a horse in Venice. Mind you, comedy had come a long way since the eighteenth century.

Notwithstanding the efforts of the troglodyte preGlaswegians, the estate we walked through was punctuated with dense clumps of mixed trees and a carpet of late afternoon sun-dappled autumn orange and red lay under our feet. It was exactly the kind of Scottish scene that you found on shortbread tins like the one that I had relieved Paul Downey of.

We reached the cottage after about ten minutes. It was small, stone-built, with a neatly laid out garden to the front and a pen with snuffling pigs to the side. A mound of raked-up autumn leaves smouldered and smoked in one corner.

A short, broad-built man in his mid-fifties came out of the cottage just as we neared it. He was dressed in a dark brown jacket of a tweed so rough it looked as if it had been woven from bramble, and a checked tweed flat cap that didn’t quite match the jacket. He had a shotgun broken over his arm. Tess of the d’Urbervilles did not, as I thought she might, come skipping out of the cottage after him.

The short man stopped as he spotted us and watched us suspiciously as we approached.

‘Can I help you?’ Despite the bucolic attire and setting, there was still a dredger bucket full of Glasgow in the accent.

‘Hello, Mr Dunbar,’ I said. ‘We’re here to talk to you about Gentleman Joe Strachan.’

He froze for a moment as the name from another life collided with him. He cast an eye back to the cottage, as if to check there was no one in the doorway behind him.

‘You police?’

‘No.’

‘No …’ he said, eyeing me from top to toe. ‘You dress too expensive for a copper. Your pal, on the other hand …’

‘I got this suit in Paisley’s on the Broomielaw, I’ll have you know …’ Again, Archie’s eyebrows left his expressionless face behind to indicate his hurt indignation as he looked down at his shapeless raincoat and the baggy suit beneath.

‘This is a lovely setting, Mr Dunbar,’ I said as disarmingly as I could. ‘Who’s estate is this?’

‘It’s one of the Duke of Strathlorne’s estates,’ he said irritatedly. ‘If you’re not police …’

‘The Duke of Strathlorne?’ I echoed. I was beginning to wonder if there was any part of Scotland he didn’t own.

‘If you’re not police,’ Dunbar repeated, ‘then what’s the deal? You work for one of the Three Kings?’

‘No, Mr Dunbar,’ I said, maintaining my friendly tone. My conviviality was prompted in part by the way he nestled the still broken-breeched shotgun in his arm. ‘Although I have helped Mr Sneddon on several occasions. You used to know Mr Sneddon, didn’t you?’

‘Aye, I know Willie. Nothing wrong with Willie Sneddon. Doing all right for himself is Willie. Willie got me this job.’

‘Really?’ I said without much interest. But I was interested: Willie Sneddon had claimed not to know anything about Dunbar’s whereabouts.

‘Aye … The last assistant gamekeeper just upped and left. Didn’t even give his notice. Willie found out about it and put me onto this number.’

‘That was good of him, Mr Dunbar. Mr Sneddon likes to take care of people, as I know myself,’ I said. By the way, my name’s Lennox. And this is Archie McClelland. We’re enquiry agents. We just want to ask you a few questions about Joe Strachan.’

‘I know fuck all about Joe Strachan. You’ve come a long way to learn fuck all.’

‘We just want to talk to you, Billy. You were quite an operator in your own way back then. There’s maybe something you know that could help us.’

‘Help you what?’

‘Listen, could we …?’ I nodded towards the cottage.

‘No. My wife’s in. I’ve got fuck all to say about fuck all. So fuck off.’

I decided against correcting his grammar. Pointing out double-negatives to someone with a double-barrelled is never the best idea.

‘Did you know that they found Joe Strachan’s remains?’

Now that, I thought, hit a nerve. Dunbar looked taken aback, then a little confused, then he returned to suspicious hostility. All a little overdone, perhaps. ‘No I didn’t. And I couldn’t care fucking less.’

‘Didn’t you read it in the papers?’ asked Archie.

‘Oh, it fucking talks … Naw. I didn’t read nothing.’

There you go again with the double negatives, I thought. ‘He was dredged up from the bottom of the Clyde,’ I said. ‘They reckon he’s been there since Thirty-eight.’