The Wicker Tree Read online

  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.

  Seduction in a wet climate has a long tradition of inspired improvisation. One has only to think of bundling, a Scots innovation where two young lovers were placed together in an open box but, to preserve their virtue, a wooden plank divided them from the chin down. This had given way in recent years to a custom imported from America, which was lending them the keys to dad's car. Virtue was no longer the aim. Stopping them mooning around the parental home while staying out of the ubiquitous rain, that was the point.

  In the case of Orlando and Lolly, things moved at a pace he could hardly have imagined possible were it not for the fact that, later that day, she gave him an eloquent guide to Sir Lachlan's topiary. As they were proceeding up what the locals called the Willies Walk, she recalled for Orlando the genesis of this wildly erotic avenue: a whim of Sir Hamish Morrison (third of Tressock), the trees represented just some of the infinite variety of male organs that the French writer Rabelais had thought worth mentioning in his satirical fantasy, Gargantua. The topiary trees, she explained, were exceedingly ancient but greatly cherished by the Laird and his gardeners. In the wide variety of their shapes and attitudes each phallus had its own unique character.

  'Reflecting a universal truth,' said Lolly. 'One never sees even a really similar one twice, does one? Well of course you wouldn't know. You're fairly obviously a hearty. But almost any girl would agree with me,' she concluded, as if quoting Germaine Greer rather than an old French satirist.

  'Really?' said Orlando. Not a question. Playing for time. Feeling a sudden shiver of Scots Puritanism at the sound of the words issuing from Lolly's lovely unpainted mouth, that too-big humorous mouth quoting Rabelais. This talk, that mouth, this fabulous woman, that feeling Orlando had never felt before. If, impossible if, she will have me, let me make love to her, nothing, he thought, will ever be the same again. He decided he must, in spite of the turmoil going on in his mind, somehow keep up his end of the conversation. 'Odd though that they should all be more or less erect, don't you think?' he was slightly surprised to hear himself saying, then adding: 'I like the notion that they only assume these positions when you, Lolly, walk up this drive.'

  Lolly stopped in her tracks and faced him, taking both his hands in hers.

  'Oh PC Furioso, I know I'm going to like you. A lot. What a delectable thing to say. But there are some quite flaccid, pathetic ones halfway up the drive. You'll see. I'm afraid my presence leaves them quite unmoved.'

  Direct though she could be, most of the time, Lolly possessed at least one of the ancient wiles of born coquettes – a talent to fashion useful surprises; to make the male caught in her web flounder a little.

  'If I was a dress designer,' she was saying, 'I would bring back the cod-piece. It would make the fashion houses' fortunes. Think of all the precious materials and jewels a man would be prepared to have lavished on his
cod-piece. There would be pin-striped ones with discrete silver clasps for businessmen. Imagine a pop star's, all glittery jewels and maybe a line of little tinkly bells which would sound like a tiny carillion when he got excited. Now this is the west wing. The body of water over there looks like a river, but is not. It is actually a reflecting pool and is only about two feet deep.'

  Never having heard of cod-pieces before, it had taken a moment or so for Orlando to realise that she had not suddenly switched to Scotland's favourite North Sea fish but was still on the subject of the male member, though the context seemed obscure to say the least. They had emerged from the topiary, somewhat to Orlando's relief, and Lolly had started to describe those parts of the estate through which they were now passing. He noted that the castle would be very hard to burgle except by a really agile cat burglar, for all the great Georgian windows seemed to be on the upper floors whereas, at ground level, there were only heavily barred apertures dating from the castle's past role as a fortress. One exception to this lay on the south side of the building where a series of tall French windows opened out onto a flag-stoned terrace strewn with terracotta pots planted with herbs. One of these rooms was heavily shuttered from within, but, as it was dusk, Orlando noticed a rosy pink glow peeping through cracks in the shutters.

  'What happens in there?' he asked Lolly.

  For the first time, Lolly – who had expounded on the usefulness of the ha ha in keeping the deer away from the roses, on the rarity of the five pine trees ringing the lawn, each imported from a different continent, and on the hideousness of the Henry Moore sculpture of a disembowelled mother and her headless child – was suddenly perceptibly silent for a whole long moment.

  'Mm?' she murmured, as if she hadn't quite heard his question.

  'What happens in there?' he repeated, pointing to the windows.

  'Nothing really. It's a ballroom that is almost never used.'

  'Someone's left the lights on,' he said, just as he felt her arm slip through his.

  'Guess so,' she murmured, steering him back towards the front of the castle. Her sudden closeness banished the room with the eerie pink light completely from his mind.

  Sherry in the gun room was not what Orlando would have expected if he had had any grounds or previous experiences to lead him to expect anything in particular – except of course sherry. This was as nauseatingly sweet and sticky as he remembered it from the time when he had, as a child, secretly sipped the dregs from some left-over glasses after one of his mother's whist parties.

  Lachlan dominated the conversation from the start with a series of penetrating questions about Orlando's opinion on the rules of rugby.

  'Drop kick goals, Orlando – and I hope I may call you that?' said

  Lachlan, assuming that anything he hoped was instantly fulfilled and getting a smiling nod from his guest. 'Don't you find it absurd that they should be worth three whole points? I'm referring of course to our match against Italy. Or was it Iceland?' He looked to Lolly for the answer:

  'Close. The Faroe Islands.'

  Orlando knew they were both wrong but saw no point in saying so. Lachlan went on as if rugby was almost as important to him as nuclear power or choral singing. Orlando, who guessed that Lachlan had not been above doing a little research into his background, was nevertheless flattered. More so, when the Laird reported that he knew, thanks to the ACC, of Orlando's key role in the Caledonian Inward Investment affair.

  'No one in Tressock knows that you are not an ordinary Police Constable,' Lachlan informed him, rising after about half an hour to indicate that Sherry in the Gun Room was over. 'And of course no one will hear it from Lolly or me,' he added. 'I just wanted to assure you of that.'

  Having made a polite but rather formal farewell to his host, Orlando walked part of the way home with Lolly. He left her making her way to the stable block above which she evidently had a flat. The shock of learning that someone, presumably quite high-up in the force, had told the Laird of his real mission at Tressock had been eclipsed by what had happened after, that magical moment when Lolly kissed him boldly on the mouth before leaving him.

  Poetry was not a part of Orlando's life. He had never bought a book of poetry, but at school he had been subjected to a certain amount of verse and a few snatches of it, here and there, had stuck. Now, closing his battered front door behind him, shutting out the suddenly less than cruel world, verse came to his lips. He found himself almost singing it aloud to his stuffed aviary.

  'To see her is to love her

  And love but her for ever

  For nature made her what she is

  And never made another.'

  He even knew that Rabbie Burns wrote that and that the poet was thinking of a unique girl. God knows Lolly was as unique a girl as he was ever likely to meet. She had promised to come out with him. When she gave him that memorable kiss on the mouth she had said: 'See you soon sweet constable.'

  Going to bed that night, he thought only of her. What else was there to think about?

  Shaving, the next morning, he found himself re-reading several times the elegant little embossed card she had slipped into his pocket. He had stuck it into the frame of his shaving mirror:

  Loelia (Lolly) Morrison, BA

  PO Box 521, The Stables

  Tressock Castle

  Roxburghshire

  it read, before providing telephone, fax and e-mail details.

  He had to admit that he found the Bachelor of Arts slightly intimidating. His own two A levels had got him into the police college, from which he had graduated very creditably. But a BA labelled her, in his book, an intellectual. Someone must shag intellectual women, he assumed, but he hadn't imagined himself doing so. It was a slight set-back. While it no way made her any less gorgeously desirable physically, there were bound to be gaps in between their lovemaking when conversation was inevitable and one thing he really couldn't talk to her about was his undercover work. But then again, perhaps that was the advantage of the ACC having told Sir Lachlan what he was doing in Tressock, and Sir Lachlan having informed her of it.

  Starting his day in the Police Station, checking out the new missing persons lists, filling in the voluminous report forms required for almost every misdemeanour he had encountered in Tressock, and fortunately there weren't that many, his mind returned to Lolly and planning his first date with her. There was a cinema at Kelso. He checked what was showing and what the reviewers in the Sunday paper had said about the films. During his lunchtime break he went up to the Grove and consulted Peter, the publican, who provided a list of local restaurants in what the credit card leaflet blurbs call the 'fine dining' category.

  He telephoned her as soon as he got back to the station. She was out but he left a message with a giggling girl – one of Lolly's under grooms, he supposed. Lolly called back almost at once.

  'Is it a police matter?' she asked.

  'No. I just wanted to ask you out to dinner. Go to the cinema perhaps. If you're free sometime. One evening. Whenever you can make it.'

  'Oh Orlando. I'd love to. But not this week.'

  'Not this week?' It was Tuesday. Did she mean Saturday? Did she mean next Monday?

  'The blacksmith's here all week. Lachlan and Delia are away. They'll be back on Monday. Next Monday?'

  Think of all the hours we'll be sleeping apart till then, Orlando wanted to yell down the phone. How can you bear it Lolly? But he said:

  'Monday then. About six o'clock? Great!' he hung up, fondly believing he had sounded like Mr Cool, with five other girls to call now she had said 'wait'. But in Tressock, where everyone seemed to know everything about everybody else, he realised that she probably knew the truth. Five – six days to go. Meanwhile there was always the bloody cult to investigate.

  At the Grand Hotel

  WHEN THE LIMO finally returned them to their hotel after the concert, Beth and Steve were both in a state of elation, the high that comes after performing or witnessing a hit show. 'The Redeemers' Messiah and th
eir lead singer Beth Boothby's sublime voice blew the capacity audience in the cathedral away,' reported the BBC radio news programme. Steve would never forget the excitement of that colossal standing ovation at the end. Beth was still feeding upon it, that power to move people so much. She only worried slightly that her plain black dress was not quite adequate for the occasion. Steve just couldn't wait to get out of his formal suit and tie.

  Terry Buckhauser, the Redeemers' co-ordinator, over from Texas just for the concert, had talked to them both in their limo as it was taking them to the Dome, the Grand Hotel's real fancy restaurant where Lachlan and Delia were giving a reception for Beth. Terry told them how terrific the concert had been and how good for America's image it was to have something other than war to export right now. 'Not that I am suggesting it is anything but a just war,' he said hurriedly, adding: 'God certainly wants us to punish those evil-doers out there. But right here in Scotland you'll be facing, when you start going door to door, preaching God's word, probably a very different reaction. You mustn't think you're going to get quite the reception you got in that cathedral. But I know you're brave people. You'll find some hostility, no doubt. But these Scottish, they're basically kind, decent folks. You'll find that too. I'm sure of it.'

  When she entered the small lobby of her suite, Beth found banks of flowers, in baskets, pots and wrapped in fancy paper; all tributes for her performance. Steve was waiting for her, watching the television coverage of the reception from which she had just come, which was still going on down below. Breathlessly excited, she ran towards him, and he, equally excited, caught her in his arms, swinging her off her feet.

  'Steve, I just cannot believe how those folks can talk,' babbled Beth. 'I mean they're just so kind and enthusiastic but like so totally polite… it's awesome… in that amazing accent of theirs.'