The Wicker Tree (26 page)

'That's quite enough, Mr Beame. We don't want to hear the gory details, do we Mary?'

But at that very instant, Mary Hillier, who had been staring curiously at Beth, wondering if she had really loved Steve and thinking, if she had, what a perfect ending this was for both of them, suddenly exclaimed: 'Oh no! It looks just as if she's breathing!'

'Oh yes,' said Daisy. 'She's just sedated. Mr Beame likes a Queen to be absolutely fresh when he starts to work on her.'

While Mary was digesting this arresting revelation and deciding she had learnt all, and perhaps more, than she really wanted to know, Mr Beame was hunting frantically through the kitchen drawers.

'What on earth are you looking for, Mr Beame?' asked Daisy.

He had at last found a box in one of the cupboards and from it taken a single glass eye. 'Just one of these eyes, and not at all the right colour!' he said accusingly to Daisy. 'Where's my bowl of eyes? It was over there on the dresser, I could swear.'

Daisy was about to deliver an indignant rebuttal when she suddenly remembered what had actually happened to the Queens' eyes.

'That Dougie!' she exclaimed. 'Dear gods, he forgot to give them back. He was trying to match an eye for poor Glencora, who had that awful car accident and was half blinded. It was over a month ago. He promised faithfully to return them at once – and I mean at once.'

'Are you mad, woman?' shouted Beame. 'You lent the Queens' eyes, which are absolutely sacred and irreplaceable, to the idiot Douglas McCree?'

Daisy has gone over to Beth and, with Mary Hillier peering over her shoulder, raised one of the Queen's eyelids.

'As I thought,' said Daisy. 'Hazel green, a wonderful colour. Mr Beame, I am so, so sorry. What can we do?'

'Go get them. Douglas's shop. We'll have to break in if necessary. Is your car outside, Mary?'

Mary nodded and they started to leave. But Daisy protested:

'You can't be leaving the Queen in my kitchen.'

'You're right. We'll put her in the Queen's own room,' said Beame to Daisy. 'You do the doors.'

Beame hurried down the passage with Beth unconscious on the trestle. Mary followed with the dress. Daisy opened the doors for the trolley. They left Beth in a huge curtained room, bathed in pink light, locking the door behind them.

BREAKING INTO DOUGLAS McCree's opticians was easy enough. The shop had a glass door in a wood frame. While the glass was presumably triplex, there was not, as far as either Mary Hillier or Beame knew, anyone else except Jack in the village to hear them. Jack's house was three blocks away on the other side of Main Street and anyway, as Beame put it:

'He'll be too frightened, that loopy little turd, to breathe a word just now. I broke his gramophone. One more peep out of him, I'll break his bird.'

Mary Hillier didn't doubt he meant it. She gave a shudder and followed him through the doorway he had just shattered with his boots. Once inside, she tried to be as systematic as possible in searching for the eyes, opening drawers, cupboards and closets, looking in boxes and closing and shutting as she went.

Beame, on the other hand, emptied every drawer and box he opened either on to the floor or a table, replacing nothing. But it was he who found the Queens' eyes first. They had been on a high shelf that even Beame, with his considerable height, could barely reach. The box toppled, burst open, and showered glass eyes all over the floor.

Beame could not have known that his wanton destruction of Jack's beloved gramophone would lead to such swift retribution. Yet within seconds of his discovery of the Queens' eyes, Scotland's ever vigilant guardians of the peace were upon him. If he had been able to see the report that Sergeant Pringle of the Kelso police dictated to Woman Police Constable Judy Laurie later that evening all would have been clear:

Following a complaint call from a Mr Jack Summers of 159 Main Street, Tressock, I called at his address, accompanied by WPC Judy Laurie. Complainant had suffered an assault on his property, namely an antique gramophone which had been totally destroyed. Complainant was distressed but could not describe assailant as he appears to be suffering from some infirmity, speaking only in verse. Some problem with an albatross, and stopping one in three, was all we could make out. WPC Laurie will be contacting social services to see if they can assist this individual…

I was just about to remark to WPC Laurie that the town seemed quite remarkably empty when we noticed a single Ford Escort car outside an optician's shop. The shop's door was completely shattered and two people were inside.

Just as we left our car, moving fast towards the optician's shop, a large man in a kilt emerged holding, cradled in his hands, what, at first, looked like small eggs, but later were revealed to be glass eyes. The man was a Mr Colin Beame, butler to Sir Lachlan Morrison of Tressock Castle. Because of his obvious fear of dropping or losing the eyes, he was quite easily apprehended.

The woman, who followed him out of the shop, claimed to have seen the break-in, which she alleged was to retrieve some of Mr Beame's own property, and to have attempted to restrain him from making a violent entry. We thought there might turn out to be a connection here with the assault on Mr Jack Summers' property, but saved this line of enquiry for later. Clearly the woman, a Miss Mary Hillier, was a material witness in the case of the china eyes, which both she and Mr Beame claimed were his property and had been somehow purloined by the absent optometrist. We took both Beame and Hillier to Kelso for statements and, in the case of the butler, held him on suspicion of breaking and entering.

WPC Judy confided to Sergeant Pringle that Tressock 'gives me the creeps. Did you notice all those black birds hovering around that Jack Summers when he came to see us off?'

'He probably feeds those birds,' said the sergeant. 'Are you afraid of birds?'

'A bit. But he isn't,' said Judy. 'He was talking to one of them. In verse. How creepy is that?'

'Allegedly stealing three dozen glass eyes comes close, I'd say,' said Sergeant Pringle. 'But the longer I spend on the Borders, the less anything surprises me. Starting long before the Romans came here, they've faced hundreds of invasions. Some have left innovations and improvements behind, others have left little pockets of sheer insanity. But one thing I'll say for them, they don't go in for graffiti. Very discreet they are. Some would say secretive.'

The Sergeant expected to release them on bail. It was fishy, there was no doubt about that. A break-in and burglary in broad daylight for china eyes. He couldn't recall anything like it. Yet the Morrisons of Tressock had wide influence. The Sergeant thought it was an excellent opportunity to play it by the book but, at the same time, to be seen to be flexible.

DAISY HAD COOKED and stored in refrigerators or freezers enormous quantities of food for the May Day feasts. But she had a terrible sense of things having gone wrong. Mr Beame and Mary Hillier should have been back over an hour ago.

She had long ago succumbed to the temptation of the port wine decanter. Two thirds of the bottle that had been poured into it by Mr Beame the previous day had already gone. She had sipped it at first, then regularly imbibed it during the hour of waiting, and now that the telephone call from the police had come she had fairly gulped it down.

'Tressock Hall, here,' she had managed to say quite formally, if a little breathlessly, when the phone rang. The instrument was at the other side of the kitchen and she had steadied herself on several chairs while making the journey.

'Who is this?' she asked. The man had said 'Sergeant Pringle' clearly enough, but she was playing for time. He repeated his name and asked if Sir Lachlan or Lady Morrison was at home.

'Sergeant? Police. Yes. No they're out riding… no, not riding. Driving. I'm just the cook here. I don't know nothing.'

'Yes, he's the butler here. Drives them too. Sometimes,' she replied, in answer to a question about Mr Beame.

'No good coming here. I'm off home. They're – I don't know where. They don't tell me – do they?' To Daisy's even greater alarm, the sergeant, this policeman, had hung up. Said he was coming to Tressock and for Daisy to wait. And then hung up. He was on his way. That was when she took the large gulp of the port that almost emptied the decanter.

Back in her bedroom, Delia had stripped off and taken a hot bath, scrubbed her body with a soft brush and added various oils and unguents reputed to keep the skin well toned, repel wherever possible the sags and wrinkles of oncoming old age. But most of all she bathed to cleanse herself of the experience she loved and loathed, an ambivalence which could never be admitted to Lachlan. It was not, in hunting terms, the quarry gone to earth, the glimpse of terror that facing certain death showed in animal or human that she hated. It was the sight of maddened frenzy in the hunters' faces, lost to all dignity or restraint, and the knowledge that her face too looked just like that before the orgy of tearing, biting and clawing at flesh, the cracking of bones, the sucking of marrow and the slurping of blood. She saw herself in the all too familiar countenances, distorted almost beyond recognition. It appalled her. She felt as she might had she just experienced enormous sexual pleasure with a filthy, drunken monster picked up off the street.

But introspection was a rarity with Delia. Regret was rarer still. Crisp, clean underclothes, a shirt of cool shantung, a suit of good Scottish tweed, some smart Ferragamo shoes and she was ready once more for the play that must go on. And, as if on cue, the front door bell had rung.

Delia peered out of the window; the winking blue lights proclaimed that the car she saw by the front door was the police. She wished Lachlan was there to deal with this, whatever it was. Why, she wondered, wasn't Beame answering the door – or, given that he was occupied with the Queen, why did Daisy not answer it? She walked onto the landing and looked over the stair-rail into the great hall below.

Daisy was there. Sitting, of all things, on one of the huge uncomfortable Jacobean chairs that lined the walls, staring balefully at the door as if trying to will the bell not to ring again. It did ring again. And the length of the ring spoke of some policeman's growing impatience.

'Daisy,' shouted Delia. 'What the hell are you doing?'

'It's the police, my lady. Can you no see the blue lights?'

'So it's the police. Go and answer the door at once. Tell them I'm coming right down.'

Delia went back into her bedroom and anointed her wrists, the cleft between her breasts and the backs of her ears with just a discrete whiff of Arpege scent. Then she went back to the landing and walked unhurriedly down the stairs, seemingly unaware that she was being watched every step of the way by a sergeant of the police.

Pringle stood in the open doorway. Behind him, WPC Laurie sat at the driving wheel of the Panda car. Daisy came, swaying slightly, to see if Mr Beame was in the police car. Delia noticed, on the hall table, Steve's passport, with his suitcase nearby. Peter must have dropped them in before following the hunt.

'Back to the kitchen, Daisy,' said Delia. 'I'll be down in a minute to see how far you've got with the feast… Sergeant, what can we do for you?'

'Is Sir Lachlan here, ma'am?'

'Afraid not. It's the power plant's annual picnic today. I'm Lady

Morrison. Where is Constable Orlando?'

'In hospital,' said the sergeant. 'He had an accident. Nothing serious. It's about Mr Beame, your butler. He was apprehended breaking and entering and, I must add, vandalising the optician's shop in Main Street. He says he was reclaiming his property. A Miss Hillier, who was with him, supports his story but says she discouraged him from breaking the door down. She has signed a statement and gone home.'

'Goodness gracious,' said Delia. 'I am deeply shocked. Beame, of all people. How can I help? What about bail? I'm sure we can arrange that.'

'Very well, Lady Morrison. After that, we'd appreciate it if you'd bring him back here. He gave the castle as his address. I should warn you, though – he can obviously be violent sometimes.'

'Not with me sergeant, I assure you. He has these funny spells sometimes. Occasional hallucinations. But we know how to deal with them. He may have forgotten to take his pills.'

Ten minutes later, Delia was following the Panda back to the Police HQ in Kelso. She was thinking not about bailing Beame; rather her thoughts, jogged by Steve's passport, were on who should be the fortunate couple to take both Steve and Beth's luggage and passports on a free trip to – where? Last year, Tad and Lucy Mae's passports and baggage had gone to Istanbul. The fact that these things had been left at a hotel, while their owners had disappeared, should have been fully reported to the US consulate by the local police, and the next-ofkin back in America informed. One could never be quite sure if that part of the plan had worked. The young Tressock couple they'd sent were highly reliable and had reported no problems. They'd checked into a hotel, leaving their own things in another hotel. They'd handed over the young Americans' passports to the reception for return in the morning, a system followed all over Europe. They'd disturbed the bed in their room and left the Americans' luggage there. Then they'd gone out, ostensibly to dinner, and never returned. Next morning they flew back to Britain using their own passports.

Delia wondered which young Tressock couple would make good look-alikes for Beth and Steve. Young Deirdre had a look of Beth, the colouring was right…

They had arrived at the Kelso Police headquarters. Delia became suddenly the Good Samaritan come to rescue, care for and cherish her slightly demented butler. Formalities followed. She was very good at formalities. Sergeant Pringle, who was dying to get home to watch Match of the Day, was grateful to her. Beame, who received nothing but loving kindness from her, at least until they got into the Rolls, was grateful too.