The Wicker Tree (7 page)

Apart from the voice and the orchestra, total silence had fallen on people in all parts of the cathedral. Delia who, not for nothing, lived with a man whose chief aesthetic pleasure was music, was aware that for Handel the impact of the first performance of the oratorio at St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin was the stuff of musical legend. But she found it hard to imagine a greater impact then than the sound of Beth Boothby singing it now in Glasgow Cathedral.

Delia saw Lachlan turn from staring at Beth, to look across the nave at her, to signal to her the importance of the moment. It was rare to see astonishment on his face. But she saw it now. She knew what he would be thinking. Beth was the one they must have. But how?

She wondered, as she walked towards where Steve was seated, whether Lachlan had really registered the young man, so impressed had he been with the young woman.

She sat down quietly beside Steve, briefly touching his hand to make her presence known. She saw peripherally that he turned his head and studied her profile and noted how absorbed he was in Beth's singing.

'A truly wonderful voice,' she whispered.

'Yeah, my pa and me,' he whispered back, 'we always say she sounds like an angel.'

'Of course. That's what she reminds me of. An angel.'

'Hey,' Steve was so delighted that he forgot to whisper. 'You believe in angels?'

'Doesn't everyone?' responded Delia in a surprised tone.

The conductor was rapping with his stick and the orchestra had stopped playing. Beth was waiting patiently while he addressed the string section.

Delia rose now and turned to Steve.

'I hope we'll see you later,' she said.

He half rose for an awkward handshake. As she walked away Steve marvelled that anyone could talk quite like she did. It was one of those Brit accents you heard in movies, usually old historical movies. He'd watched quite a few of those on TV because they often had great horses in them. Stunt riding was one of the things he'd always thought of doing. Delia had reached close to where the tall, exceptionally British dude, her husband, was hanging out with some guys who were all studying some sheet music. Her husband leant towards her to listen to what she had to say over the racket coming from the orchestra. Then they both looked over to where he, Steve, was watching them. They smiled and both gave a small wave before continuing their conversation. He waved back. These people were weird alright, but, in their own way, he thought, they were probably OK.

FOR ORLANDO, TRESSOCK was something of a revelation. The streets lined with trees and white washed houses, with their brick framed windows and porticos, their brightly coloured front doors and decorative skylights, were quite festive in his eyes. Used to the sombre, manse-like Victorian houses in the shabby genteel part of Glasgow where he had been raised, he discovered in this new place a quality he had never seriously considered before, a certain charm.

The little mews house that had long served as the Police Station lay at the end of Main Street where it curved to meet the great gates of Tressock Castle. This vantage point meant that he could, from his bed-sitting room's lace-curtained windows, survey the movements of the townspeople and their comings and goings from the Grove Inn, while, from the big window in his office, by the Police Station's front door, he could see the gates to Sir Lachlan's castle and monitor all who visited it.

He was less pleased with the interior of his new home, which seemed to have been preserved just as Tom Makepiece had left it, like some grungy shrine. The bed-sitting room was spacious enough but so crammed with heavy Victorian furniture and stuffed birds that it made Orlando wonder whether the late Tom's aim was to create a mortuary out of an aviary, or maybe vice versa. A sizeable bathroom adjoined it on one side while, on the other, there was a door that led directly to the Police Station office. This was convenient in its way, but forced him into an unaccustomed tidiness in his living quarters.

His cleaner, old Mrs Menzies, fitted perfectly with Orlando's idea of a crone or witch, and had become his first suspect as a possible member of a cult. She seemed to have a life contract to come in three days a week to redistribute the dust and make sure that everything was still as dear old Tom had left it. Orlando's suggestion that the stuffed birds might find a happier home elsewhere shocked her deeply. He learned from her that apart from Mr Beame, the butler up at the castle, Tom was considered the finest taxidermist in Tressock, a place renowned for this ancient craft. This seemed to make Orlando the fortunate custodian of a precious collection. He tactfully tried to sound impressed, but the truth was that the birds depressed him deeply. Everything from a golden eagle, through barn owls and jackdaws to sea birds, like sand pipers and terns, had given their lives for this, in his view, pointless hobby. If Orlando had been a countryman he would have belonged to the 'if you can't eat it, don't kill it' school of shooting and hunting.

The Police Station office got most of Mrs Menzies' professional attention. She liked to linger with her bucket and mop while Orlando dealt with routine police business on the phone. Tom had obviously indulged her curiosity about every small misdemeanour committed in Tressock, letting her know by whom it was done and with what consequences. On the day that Orlando received a large poster from headquarters, with the faces of some forty missing persons upon it, to be placed on the public notice-board, she gave him the favour of her opinion on all indigent or transient persons, young and old.

'It's a chronic waste of your time looking for the likes of them,' she said. 'Most of yins are cracked, and should be in with the loonies and moonies. But the young yins are away to the sinbins and fleshpots of London, and good luck to them.'

Orlando had arrived in March, while snow flurries were still skittering down Tressock's Main Street, and the folks at the Grove Inn had welcomed him with some hot rum toddy and a game of skittles. Their friendliness seemed real enough, but he guessed it was just cordiality to a foreigner, with maybe a bit of keeping in with the law thrown in. 'Any help we can give you,' said Peter McNeil, the innkeeper, 'just let us know.' The crowd of younger men in the bar chorused their assent and Orlando found himself with yet another drink in his hand. Happily, like him, the Tressock men all followed the game of rugby, both in the papers and on the television, rather than soccer. This meant that however doubly foreign their new cop might be, both Glaswegian and Italian, they all had a strong interest in common. At least this was true for the men.

There were, of course, often women in the bar, who tended to ignore the rugby, but mostly they were the girlfriends or wives of the male drinkers. No new female appeared on Orlando's horizon to diminish his memory of Morag's beautiful face. His e-mail correspondence with her was chatty; police force gossip, some tittle tattle about mutual friends, but very little in the way of personal news.

An officer becomes a regular customer at a particular bar or inn at his peril,
said one of the manuals on Public Contact and Awareness that Orlando remembered from police college
.
He knew this was a sensible warning, so he kept his visits to the Grove occasional and brief. With Peter, the innkeeper, he managed to cultivate a slightly closer relationship than with the others. But that, both of them knew, was part of their professional duty. An inn may at any time have need of the police and it is useful for the latter to have friendly access to a place where so much of the drama of life in a township like Tressock is played out. Or, as another bromide from police college put it:
An officer's effectiveness is only as good as the intelligence he has managed to gather.

He had copious notes, in particular from his interview with Jack, the curly-haired little man who frequented the bar and stared fixedly at people with his unblinking eyes. Orlando was intrigued by this probably aspergist Englishman who was guardian of the ravens, a mysterious job he had been given by the Laird himself. It involved regular feeding of these rare birds, apparently unique to Tressock. He lived a rather precarious existence, tolerated by his neighbours in spite of his nationality and his tendency to make bizarre pronouncements as if he thought of himself as some latter day prophet. When asked by Orlando what he did when not feeding the ravens, he said (and the detective carefully noted):

'Sometimes I seek for haddocks' eyes

Amongst the heather bright

And make them into waistcoat buttons

In the silent night.'

This answer was obviously a silly lie and certainly not a prophecy. But re-reading the notes he had taken of the Englishman's statements (conversation with him was very hard to achieve), there was nothing that really seemed to point to cult-like activity.

One day towards the end of April, soon after his arrival in Tressock, and well before the Morrisons' trip to Glasgow, Orlando was comparing his notes with the possibly relevant articles he had culled from local newspapers, filed at the Tressock public library, when he heard the loud clattering of horses' hooves on the cobbled road outside.

Through the window overlooking the castle gates, he saw a woman galloping towards him on a mount which seemed dangerously out of control, certainly very over-excited and frisky. Not far behind, a man riding a much larger, black horse, seemed to be trying to catch up with her.

Orlando was still at his desk when the riders disappeared from view. They were now too close to the Police Station's front door to be seen from the desk and were creating an ever more alarming amount of noise. As he moved hurriedly towards the window for a better view, a series of terrific staccato bangs shook the door. A man's deep voice was speaking loudly, but reassuringly:

'Dismount Lolly! She'll calm down if I grab the rein.'

Orlando now quickly opened his front door to find a bucking, prancing horse's rear facing him, its lethal hooves coming dangerously close to his face. The rider had slid from the saddle and was holding a rein close to the animal's head, trying to calm it with a caressing hand on its neck. She was murmuring the soft words one might use with a fretful child. The man, tall in the saddle of the huge black horse, held the other rein. Seeing Orlando at the open door, he shouted:

'Watch her hooves, man! Close that bloody door!'

The police are not to be shouted orders by mere civilians
– that might have been Orlando's first reaction. But he could see that, in this case, the man knew this horse. Where horses were concerned this man was to be obeyed. His door was already bearing the marks of a powerful kick which had splintered wood and shattered paint. Orlando closed the door and went to the window. The woman was succeeding in calming the horse. The man had dismounted and was waving reassuringly at him through the window.

'Alright to open the door now, officer,' he shouted finally.

Orlando did so and found himself facing the two deeply apologetic riders. She suppressed a laugh as she said:

'I am so sorry about your door, officer. The Laird and I had planned to call on you soon after you arrived to welcome you to Tressock. But we've been very busy…'

'Needless to say, it wasn't our plan to come and kick down your door. We'll have someone come over and fix it right away…' added the tall, distinguished-looking man who was obviously Sir Lachlan, the Laird.

'I'm PC Furioso, sir. Tom Makepiece's replacement,' said Orlando.

'Welcome to Tressock, officer. We were told you'd be coming by your ACC. I'm Lachlan Morrison,' said the Laird. 'And this is Lolly, who is our head groom, my right hand person and much else besides…'

Throughout this conversation, indeed from the moment when he first saw her just beyond the prancing mare's backside, Orlando had been conscious of a gloriously attractive woman. He remembered his instantaneous reaction long afterwards. Here was a radiant sun of a face that quite eclipsed poor Morag's beautiful but pale moon of a countenance. The suddenly enchanted Orlando's mind was fogged of all else but Lolly. Only she was in sharp focus, particularly her face. It was, he thought, a work of nature formed by what, in geography class at his school, they had called
the agents of denudation
. Sun, wind, rain, frost. Her tousled, tawny hair, her laughing grey-green eyes, creased at the corners from squinting through all sorts of weather, skin that had the russet blush that some apples have when ready to be picked…

'Officer Furioso.' It was Lolly's voice, breaking into his reverie. A little husky, that voice, but it had a bell-like tone.

'As I was saying,' added a smiling Sir Lachlan, 'we're taking the horses back to the stables now. But if you can spare the time, Lolly would like to show you around the estate. Then perhaps Constable Furioso will join us for a glass of sherry, Lolly, in the gun room.'

He gave Orlando the inquiring stare of someone whose suggestions rarely, if ever, meet with refusal.

'That's very kind, sir,' said Orlando. 'It would be useful for me to have a clear idea of the lay of the land, so to speak. I was anyway thinking of coming and asking for such a tour.'

Orlando had been told to handle Sir Lachlan with great care when their paths crossed. His wide net of political connections was given as the reason. Scotland, he knew, might no longer be a nation where people were deferential to class. But deference to power and money remained strong and Sir Lachlan had both. Orlando loathed sherry and guessed, correctly, that on these favoured occasions the help on the estate got a dram of whisky and real guests received champagne or whatever they wanted. Who else got sherry? The local councillors probably (correct again), Sir Lachlan's solicitor (a borderline case). He wondered these things while watching Lolly mount her now calmed little mare. The neat, sweet posterior on Lolly (what a seductive name!) as she swung it deftly into the saddle made him think of an old Kiwi rugby song:
She has freckles on her – butt – she is nice.

Not much hope of ever detecting those particular freckles, if they exist, he thought, rather gloomily. But there he was wrong.