The Shetland Decapitations: ‘Rubber Johnny Ltd, of Tonbridge, Kent.’

Mary had an old, battered Toyota HiLux truck which she loved like a loyal Labrador. One with mange and respiratory problems. Nervously, she checked that the shotgun rack was empty, and that her trusty Mossberg over-and-under pump-action 20-gauge was safely at home under the sink. The completely illegal North Roe shag hunt had been the previous weekend and there were several lead-spattered members of the cormorant family in her freezer. Plucking would have to commence soon.

She parked next to McKinstry’s standard-issue Aygo; there was a blue ‘Police: Accident’ sign at the entrance to the car park and a hastily hand-drawn placard on the bridge across the boatshed slipway saying only ‘closed today due to spillage’. The strange Teletubby sound generator funnels on the quayside were still operating, though, pumping out their bizarre soundscapes of Shetland voices and scraps of meaningless noise, reproduced with the quality of a hypermarket Tannoy system coupled to an old-fashioned clockwork gramophone. It was an art installation few understood and fewer liked. But its vast cost had been covered by a grant and so far, the weather had not damaged it enough to necessitate its removal. The funnels themselves were made of moulded stone chips and fibreglass, and had built-in lights that wavered more or less brightly depending on the season and the meteorological murk. Strands of what could have been wool lurked within glass compartments. It was all a bit like something a child might make in school project, from melted Lego and old jumpers. Many locals lived in hope that someday the salt and wind would destroy it completely, or that global warming would raise the sea level to such an extent that they would be submerged forever. But as that would also have meant most of Lerwick being under water, it was just a passing fancy, except in the most extreme of morbid minds. Like Mary’s, in her darker moments.

Most of the time, she loved the museum She’d been especially fond of the old Hay’s Dock Café on its first floor, where you could once sip cappuccino and eat scones made by the legendary Burra wife Florrie Edwardson. But the café had closed suddenly just as the tourist season began. A new operator was due to be announced shortly, Florrie’s contract having been terminated after it was found fumes from her reestit mutton soup had irreparably damaged old manuscripts in the adjoining Shetland Archives. Florrie was rumoured to be starting a mobile soup-and-scone operation in an old horsebox.

Mary could have done with a scone. Of all the home-baked scones in Lerwick, Florrie’s had come in a number two to the Olive Tree in the Toll Clock shopping centre, what passed for a mall in Shetland. That muesli bar she’d gobbled at the Knab had barely appeased the demanding sensation in her gut, and facing a decapitation while hypoglycaemic was neither appealing nor wise. Maybe she was suffering from a rare condition and would begin devouring herself. That would be quite an effective diet, she pondered: the ‘let your body eat yourself thin’ regime. Coffee. Good coffee. The best coffee in the isles came from her own home Gaggia, and sometimes she thought her morning flat white using imported Thomson’s beans was sometimes all that stood between her and that application for a post in Edinburgh or Glasgow. Or Wick. Or anywhere but Shetland.

The museum’s electric revolving door still revolved in its unpredictably threatening way and there, in the flagstoned foyer, was Constable Alwyn Jeffries, Welsh would-be Shetlander, lunging determinedly to stop her coming any further, until he saw who it was. Perhaps she should have changed. The trackie bottoms and fleece top were less than official. She snifffed. Inasmuch as she could tell, the Dove-and-Versace perfume combo was still holding up. But a shower was definitely required. Jeffries smelt of Old Spice, which was disgusting. The museum reeked of cleaning products and history.

“Sorry Sergeant,” said Jeffries, his Welsh lilt fragmented by four years of attempted Shetlandisms. Jeffries had come to the isles, been seduced by the local culture, taken up the fiddle and failed to find a local woman prepared to put up with his terrible playing. He was now the only remaining practitioner of Shetlandic native tushker dancing, a variant on Morris Dancing only with bare feet and the rhythmic brandishing of tushkers, the peat-cutting implements that resembled and were reputed to be descended from the flensing tools used in the past to cut up whales. It was so dangerous that Jeffries was now forced to perform tushker dancing solo, following an incident at the Aith Hall when two of his fellow dancers had suffered chest injuries and in one case, a severed finger.“Boy, boyo, dis is a right ramstam an’ no, nae, never no more a mistake, aye aye,”

“Shut up Alwyn” said McKinstry, who was close behind Mary. “Wheesht. Du sounds like an Orcadian on helium. Is everyone through by?”

“Right enough,” replied Jeffries, his voice seesawing madly from the Welsh valleys to the Northern Isles. “Du’ll need tae get dy…your forensic gear, on, though, bach. It’s a crime scene.”

“To hell with that,” said Mary, striding forward into the maze-like main museum exhibition floor, all stone age origins, vikings and interactive displays about whelks. There was a (full-size, if small to start with) lighthouse and models of bodies found in peat bogs. Her trainers squeaked on the polished floor. She stopped for a moment and pulled from a pocket a pair of disposable paper slippers. Now she didn’t squeak. But walking the highly-polished floor was like skating. After getting lost, slitheringly, amid the deliberately corkscrewing arrangement of unreadable ‘interpretive facilities’, as she usually did, she pushed past the barrier marked ‘danger: insecure vessels’ and into the soaring boat hall, where various types of Shetland Model, the double-ended local design of coastal open boat, all virtually identical, dangled at different heights. It was, as ever, impressive, if you liked boats with sharp bits at both ends. It was a pity the Health and Safety authorities had deemed it, in the official parlance “too dangly for punter safety” after the archivist incident. Bollocks to that. Tarquin the archivist had allegedly been swinging on a skiff late at night while listening to Daniel O’Donnel records at ear-melting volume over the museum tannoy, when a cable broke. The full details of that incident had yet to emerge.

McKinstry, by some magical form of Shetlandic navigation, possible involving the stars, or magnetism, or reestit mutton, was already there, his desert-booted feet now wrapped in polythene sandwich bags. He looked like he was walking on cellophaned bakery products. If in doubt, improvise, that was McKinstry’s motto. Probably. Also present was was Chief Inspector Fotheringham-Hyphen-Smith. There was a vacant post in the Shetland Branch of Police Scotland for a Detective Inspector, for which Mary was qualified, but had not as yet advanced to. Partly because she hadn’t applied. It had the whiff of permanence about it, and she still missed the fleshpots of Glasgow. Or indeed, any fleshpot, anywhere on mainland UK. In fact, forget the pots. Plain old flesh would do fine. Inappropriate, she muttered to herself. Get a grip.

Hyphen, in her opinion, did nothing much in terms of police work other than attend charity functions, fly off to expensively drunken training days and conferences south, and mutter about resources. He was clad in full disposable forensic overalls, known as shite whites, with an elasticated sterile bonnet covering his braided police forage cap. The glint of gold could just be seen peeking through the muslin-like mesh. Hyphen was wearing the fashionable blue disposable gloves that had begun appearing in TV crime thrillers with titles set on islands like Mull, Orkney, the Hebrides, Arran, Cumbrae, Rockall, Rum and Eigg, though Eigg never sat well with Mary, who was mildly allergic to hens and every substance produced by them. All these programmes featured doomy, tragic male protagonists with peculiar names. At least two were suffering from terminal illnesses, and all were more or less alcoholics; the Arran cop was named Gonzalez and supposedly descended from a shipwrecked Spanish Armada sailor, though not recently. Thus the blue gloves were now called Gonzos throughout Police Scotland. Mary hated them because they made her hands sweat. She had no idea why no-one had made a crime series in Shetland. Perhaps because nobody would ever believe anything criminal happened here.

“Sergeant,” said Hyphen in his strangled, Merchants-school Edinburgh drawl, “I should have imagined you of all people would have known better. This is a crime scene. You are a detective, but first and foremost you are a policeman…person. As I was just reminding Constable McKinstry. You should know better than…”

“Thank you sir,” said Mary “I am quite aware of my status, as I am sure is Constable McKinstry. As you can see, our feet, the main imposers of outside material capable of sullying any forensic evidence, are carefully covered, mine with forensically-approved paper, the Constable’s with ah, medical plastic. Should we desire to touch anything, We will don Gonzos, or if you prefer to use their correct title, surgical gloves, in the requisite television blue. The very gloves I see producing sweat from your own hands, sir, sweat that is extremely acidic and capable of destroying the most hardy of fingerprints.” She paused. A scraping noise came from within the Industry, which lay like some kind of ancient, raddled beached creature from the underworld, or a beach.

“Sharon! Are you in there?”

A muffled reply came from the depths of the gigantic wooden hull which almost filled the bottom section of the boat hall.

“Aye. Hallo Mary Lou. Goodbye Heart!” Damn. Mary hated that ‘Lou’. Why couldn’t her family name have been something sensible, like Mitchell? Joni. what a nice name. Or Siouxsie. Though Sue was no second name to wish on anyone. “Nearly finished here. Catch!”

A round object wrapped in a tied green plastic bag marked ‘Tesco’, worryingly head-sized and making an unappetising squelching noise, came flying over the gunwale of the boat, which was bare, old wood, remnants of preserving Stockholm Tar adhering to its surface in places. With a sickening wet crunch, the bag fell at the feet of Inspector Fotheringham-Smith, who flinched back, a look of horror on his face. A fine spray of red appeared in his pristine overalls. It was a five-pence recyclable Tesco bag and thus prone to leaks.

Mary folded her arms. She was still wishing Sharon wouldn’t refer to her Everly Brothers inspired name. She hated sounding like some country and western hick.

“A hoax then, Sharon?”

A fully forensically-masked and be-hatted head appeared from the bowels of the boat. A gloved hand ripped both off in one movement, revealing the cropped black hair of local police doctor Dr Sharon Moorhead. She was a Geordie, around 35 and one of the few people in Shetland Mary socialised with on anything more than a cursory fashion. They shared a taste for home-cooked Indian food and the films of Jean Pierre Melville. Alain Delon in Le Samourai was why Mary wore her old Longines watch on her right wrist, face down. Sharon was a GP ‘with special interests’; and had trained in pathology, though she was not qualified, as she put it, to do ‘actual cold butchery’. That had to happen in Inverness or Aberdeen. She was fully qualified forensically, though, and in the absence of Shetland’s one and only SOCO, Scenes of Crime Officer (Glenda Skolosivinski, currently on indefinite sick leave after contracting trench mouth) here she was.

“Indeed, Mary L, a hoax it is. This is Shetland, after all. We don’t have actual murders. Take a look. Put your gloves on and see what Tesco has to offer. A 3D-printed latex mask. Stuffed with memory foam in chunks. Soaked in a some kind of red dye, bottom made to look especially convincing with some animal guts, probably belonging to a rabbit. Smells like rabbit. Bugs Bunny aroma. Dyed orange fake beard, probably made from rabbit fur. Waste not want not. You order them online. The masks not the rabbits, plenty of those about.”

Hyphen had been frozen in horror. Now he was moving, incrementally stretching and swaying, both infuriated but unsure how to react. He, after all, was the one dressed for a germ warfare attack, only with leaky blue gloves.

“Dr Moorhead,” said Fotheringham-Smith “Your behaviour is most unprofessional. I would…”

“Making me miss my flight south, and my connection to Paris, for the sake of a rubber head and some rabbit innards. That’s not just unprofessional, Chief Inspector. It’s bloody unforgivable. Do you know how little I get in the way of holidays?” Sharon’s voice was calm but carried considerable emotional depth. Standing in the prow of the Industry, she looked down on the little party of police officers like a viking warrior, only in white paper overalls.

“You get these masks in any likeness you like, and they’re full slip-on heads, you can actually put them right over your own bonce. You email two or three pictures of the person you presumably wish to take the piss out of. Very popular around Up Helly Aa time when they started being available, a couple of years ago. In this case, the unappetising Fearful Birkadale’s stupid wee goatee made it all too easy to have it adapted. A rubber beard wouldn’t work. The rabbit stuff would’ve been done locally. Air rifle and a pair of scissors would suffice. I believe the mask company is in Tonbridge and called Rubber Johnny’s. Good name, eh? May lead to some confusion, though. Something for the weekend, sir? Madam? Well kent in Kent!”

“Blood? Dye?” The voice was faint and seemed to be coming from Fotheringham-Smith.

“Dye. Theatrical capsules. There’s a note too. I’ve bagged it for you. ‘The Fucking Archies have has lost the head. Birkadale needs to get it screwed back on’. Printed, Times Roman, about 24 point, cheap paper.There’s your killer. One of the anti-windfarm mob, presumably, or someone who wants you to think that’s who’s responsible. Isn’t Louise, who reported this, a bit of blade-hater? Now you can get me to the airport and rearrange my flights to Paris. It’s midsummer, nearly, and a girl’s heart turns to shagging on the Eiffel Tower, or possibly a croissant.”

“Oh God, muttered Fotheringham-Smith, “it’s those SOW characters. Shit On Windfarms.”

“Yon Louise Finlayson,” said McKinstry. “Bit o’ a character, by all accounts.”

“And this is the kind of woman who has charge of our children!” Hyphen sounded as if women being in charge of anything was some kind of offence against the natural order of things. He turned to the hapless Alwyn. “Constable, it was you who instituted this…inquiry at murder status,” he said, his voice wobbling with barely-controlled frustration and rage. “And this is…is this really an inhuman…not a human head?”

“If it were Mr Birkadale’s, or indeed anyone’s, I doubt very much if Dr Moorhead would be throwing it about with such cavalier gusto,” said Mary.

“And I can assure it’s not,” said a quiet English, possibly Devon-tinged voice, lilting with an instantly infuriating sense of position and authority. Mary recognised it from all those radio interviews. It was Feargal Birkadale himself, alive, unmutilated, head still attached to body and as well as could be expected. He was taller than Mary remembered, and wearing a suit that was too tight for him, as was the fashion. Bulging bodies were cool. His hairy belly peeped out from beneath an improperly buttoned shirt). “Myself and Archipelagic Renewables have been attacked, traduced and insulted over the past months, but being dead and decapitated is a new experience for me. I thought I’d pop along to reassure everyone and see for myself which poor soul had been mistaken for…well. for myself. Though I now note that the skull in question is not, in point of fact, human. Is this the object in question?” He reached for the plastic bag, the leering eyes of the rubber moulding inside bulging, wide open – but then they were cast that way – through the red-smeared plastic..

“Best not, uh, sir” said Mary, who had noticed for the first time just how protuberant the real Birkadales eyes were.” We may wish to examine it further. At the very least this is a breach of the peace. And possibly involves cruelty to rabbits.May I asked how you heard about the ah, incident? Sergeant – Detective Sergeant Everly, by the way. Pleased to meet you in the, err….flesh.”

“An email, Sergeant. Some gleeful activist with what passes for a sense of humour hereabouts thought it would be entertaining to have me come and meet myself, face to, if you will, face.”

“What a waste of police time” said Fotheringham-Smith.” Jefferies, you called it in. See me in my office. You should contact Inverness as soon as, try and stop the Serious Crimes people from boarding their aircraft. I hardly think they’ll be too keen to investigate the moulding of a rubber mask and the possible murder of a rabbit.” He was already stripping off gloves and hat, though his white wellies and baggy protective onesie made him look like an albino penguin. For the Chief Inspector was, for a policeman, very short indeed. In height, as McKinstry was sometime heard to mutter, ‘and indeed of all the usual intellectual attributes’. Hyphen glared at Mary. “That teacher” he said , meaningfully. “Ha! Where is she?”

“Here, sir!” The voice was female, mockingly Shetlandic and gravelled by the consumption of rum and cigarettes, probably Trawler Rum and Capstan Full Strength or Samson roll-ups. “Arrest me for the non-murder of this ridiculous excuse for a man. Shame on the despoilers of our beloved rock!”

There was a sigh from McKinstry.

“Ach, Louise. Who’s looking after the bairns?”

“We’re on holiday, Peter, as you should know. It happens every simmer. Well, aren’t you going to handcuff me?”

Mary noticed that McKinstry had flushed beetroot red and was shaking his head at the redoubtable Louise Finlayson, a robust woman in her 30s with close-cropped platinum-dyed hair and a generally intimidating aura.

“That won’t be necessary, Ms Finlayson,” said Mary. “Just meet us at the police station. And you can explain yourself.”

“Ms Finlayson, we meet in the flesh at last,” said Birkadale, in honeyed tones.”

“Spare me your slime, Birkadale,” said Louise. “You haven’t won yet. You and the Archies still have a lot to lose.” She turned to watch as Alwyn Jeffries struggled to prevent a large man with a camera falling over as he slipped on the artificially blooded floor. “Ah, the media have arrived. Good. Trying to get ahead of the story, no doubt.” And she laughed a long smoker’s laugh. Suddenly, Mary was desperate for a fag.

To be continued…