The Wicker Tree (5 page)

Steve thought his room, across the passage from hers, was like something out of an old European movie and just terrific. She had been given the Royal Suite, usually reserved for star football players, what you call soccer players in America, they'd told her. She had never seen so much chintz all in one place in her life but the TV was huge and the bed imperial-sized. Beth had considered it very cute of Steve to point out to the folks on the reception desk downstairs: 'That's my fiancée in that poster over there,' in case they didn't recognise her in the huge picture of the Redeemers Choir under the headline: 'This Year's Christian Choral Concert. Country Star BETH BOOTHBY Leads The Famous Redeemers Choir.' Steve was sometimes naïve, that was for sure. But she preferred to think of his occasional naïveté as purity of heart and plain old faith in the Lord and the God-given things.

In the morning, they decided to walk to the church where the Glasgow Festival of Christian Choral Music was being held. The Organisers had telephoned to urge them to travel by the limo they were sending, but Steve had persuaded her that it would be fun to walk. He had seen, from his bedroom window, that some kind of street festival was going on.

'If we're goin' to preach the Word of God to these folks, we best get to know somethin' about them,' he said.

That made sense to Beth. So she told the Organisers they had 'made private arrangements.' The Organisers would think some local celeb or 'high net worth' person was taking them in their own limo. That way they wouldn't send over the security folks. Beth was a veteran of what she called 'the organiser wars'. 'Keep 'em guessin'.' That was her motto.

So that was how, on a chilly spring morning, Beth and Steve were set to leave the Grand Hotel to walk the half mile to the church the local folks called the Cathedral, armed with a map provided by the kilted concierge. This guy did not look gay to Beth. He certainly looked at Beth in the way she was accustomed to guys looking at her, registering the fact that she was a beautiful woman. A gay guy could register that too, but there would be a subtle difference in his look. The Bible was full of great truths. Beth had been raised on the King James Bible and believed every word of it. But she was smart enough to know that lust was what those horny old Elders were feeling when they watched Suzanna taking her bath. The way the doorman looked at her was simply what the Bible meant when it said 'and she was good in his sight.'

Of course, the Rev. Pat Robertson was unlikely to be wrong on the subject of these Scottish guys in kilts mostly being gay. She'd watched his TV show and it was clear that he actually talked to the Lord every day like they were on cell phones, maybe more often than that, just like Beth spoke to Steve and he spoke back to her. When she'd asked the guy at the reception desk with the crossed keys on his lapels about kilts and why she hadn't seen many since she had arrived, he had said, 'Up north, madam. More men wear them up north.'

'Is it true what they say about guys that wear them?' she couldn't help asking him.

He had looked genuinely surprised at this question.

'Do you mean that they wear no underpants? Probably depends on the weather. Anything else I can help you with, madam?' he had asked.

So you couldn't fault the Reverend Pat! But she was relieved to be saved from a response, for at that moment Steve tugged at her arm, anxious to go out and see what was going on in the street fair outside. She left the puzzled concierge with a flash of her best, for fans only, dazzling smile, which she knew was a tad excessive for everyday but which looked great in photographs. Where were those paparazzi?

They'd been right there in the lobby a little earlier.

Then she and Steve were out in the street, walking in the midst of that horde of people. Some beating drums or playing bagpipes, others carrying street-wide banners that read AMERICA'S WAR, NOT OURS. Still others carried placards with messages for politicians in far away London and Washington DC, saying NOT IN OUR NAME or NO THANKS YANKS, KEEP YOUR TANKS, WE WANT PEACE. It made both Steve's and Beth's minds reel, and now they knew where the paparazzi had gone. They were all around them like little old mice round a piece of cheese, darting in and out with their cameras, shouting things like:

'How d'you like our demo, Beth?'

'Are you marching for peace, Beth?'

'Who's the cowboy, Beth?'

She could tell that the reporters were going to let the photographers tell most of this story. They could see Beth was in shock. Her face told it all. Far from the state where almost every lapel carried a little enamel American flag and almost every stoop and car radio mast had Old Glory fluttering away, where somehow everyone believed that Saddam Hussein had personally ordered the 9/11 atrocities, Beth wondered what possible objection any sane person could have to going to war. How could these dear people (Beth was determined to go on thinking of them that way) be so misguided? They seemed to be of all ages and both sexes and there were quite a few, well, ethnics; not Mexican but dark brown or Chinese. Some looked richer and some poorer, but no one looked real under-privileged. All seemed cheerful, like on a kind of company outing. How could they look so normal and think these terrible things about America?

Steve, for whom politics and politicians were a 'pool of shit,' was less shocked. His old man was a Democrat who thought old George Bush's boy was a couple of dozen steers short of a herd. Still Steve liked to think of himself as a patriot and certainly didn't care for the anti-American tone of the placards and the chanting. It was starting to make him real angry. He was wearing his usual hat, the hat he had worn since he was fifteen. It was a stained and a tad crushed looking cowboy hat, with a hole in it where his Daddy had shot at it. Now he used the hat to try and brush the paparazzi away from Beth like they were a bunch of pesky flies. He wasn't goin' to hit nobody. There was no occasion for that. But he was struggling real hard to contain his anger.

Suddenly, the photographers were all pointing at a nearby placard and asking Beth to look at it. It read:

RICH MEN'S FRIEND

OIL MEN'S WHORE

BUSH HAS SENT

HIS LIES TO WAR

She grimaced and two dozen cameras clicked and popped.But Steve had grabbed the placard and was about to break the shaft of wood over his knee.

'No Steve, please don't!' Beth grabbed his arm.

He looked over his shoulder at her. She was pleading with him. She was right. Vile though the insult to the President certainly was, it would be a lousy start to their ministry. The nerdy guy whose placard he was about to trash looked kind of scared, and the rest of the crowd seemed just curious – hoping perhaps for some drama to unfold. He gave the placard back and, taking Beth's arm, hurried her through the crowds towards the cathedral.

THE GLASGOW POLICE force is a constabulary that serves a community with sharp sectarian and ethnic divisions. These rivalries are an acknowledged fact, but they are hardly unique to Glasgow. They are no greater than in New York and Chicago or other British cities like Manchester and Liverpool. They are nevertheless institutionalised rivalries that all Glasgow's politicians lament but no one seems able to completely cure. The regular football matches between Glasgow's nominally Catholic team, Celtic, and their rivals, the supposedly Protestant Rangers, are often the more bitterly contested because of these tribal divides between their fans and supporters.

But Glasgow is a melting pot, with many minority communities. Fortunately for them, the quasi religious rivals who together form the majority reserve nearly all their hostility for each other. For the West Indians and Asians, the Scots have an easy tolerance, having taken to curry as virtually their national dish. There is a certain respect for the Jews, as a race the Scots consider nearly as canny as themselves. For the English, there is the same kind of resentment that exists in a marriage where divorce is contemplated but has had to be indefinitely postponed. This leaves others, but principally the Italians. Around this small but prosperous minority a mythology has grown up that accords these ice-cream manufacturers, restaurateurs, lawyers, civil servants, teachers and merchants a touch of the romance and glamour that clings to all things Italian.

Detective Constable Orlando Furioso had known from the start that he had a bright future in the Glasgow Constabulary. The chief constable, who belonged to the same Masonic lodge as Orlando's father, had welcomed him into the force and eased his way from the very beginning. Being an effective fly half in the force's rugby team had done him no harm. His promotion from the uniformed branch to the rank of detective constable had happened, Orlando knew, rather faster than he really deserved. Detective Inspector Rory McFadden and Detective Sergeant Murdo Campbell, to whose section he had been assigned, were already in the middle of an extremely complex investigation involving alleged corruption and embezzlement at the headquarters of one of Scotland's leading investment agencies, Caledonian Inward Investment. They needed an inside informant and their young recruit faced his first test. Orlando was always to remember with pride how easily he had been able to talk his way into a job at Caledonian's cost control department, passing himself off as a trainee accountant working to pay for his after-hours tuition.

His real after-hours work started when the cleaners arrived and Caledonian Inward Investment's overstaffed offices were otherwise empty. Hidden deep in senior executives' computers he found details of secret transactions involving millions of pounds – the final step on a paper trail DI McFadden and DS Campbell had begun following through off-shore accounts and trusts. When the indictments were finally being prepared he was told that he was likely to get a commendation if and when the case came to court.

The Caledonian inquiry had played to Orlando's strengths. He was fairly well educated, highly computer literate and blessed with a certain boyish charm. Coupled with the physique of an effective rugby player, these assets made him popular with men and attractive to women.

Years later, Orlando remembered his work on the Caledonian Inward Investment case as a watershed in his early career. His success as an undercover detective had led his superiors to choose him for an assignment that really required a far more experienced and certainly older police officer than Orlando. But, for him, the success or failure of that assignment soon dimmed in importance beside the fact that it led him to fall hopelessly, almost fatally, in love for the first time in his life. Indeed, it led him to the love of his life.

This new case was, from the start, known officially and confidentially as the Tressock Inquiry, but unofficially it was codenamed Operation Borders Cult. A series of troubling anonymous letters to the Secretary of State for Scotland (by-passing the Scottish Executive in Edinburgh) had complained that a heathen cult existed in the Tressock area of Roxburghshire that ought to be investigated. Tom Makepiece, the local police constable, had been asked to conduct an investigation that revealed nothing more serious than a perfectly legal pagan ceremony that had taken place in celebration of the sun at the summer solstice. The report recorded that Tom had never actually seen people worshipping the sun and didn't believe it was likely that anything illegal had occurred. He recorded that a man with a speaking disorder had talked of the ritual quite eloquently, indeed in verse, but firmly refused to make a formal statement to the police. Had he written the accusing letters, which certainly weren't in verse? Tom doubted he was the letter writer. He could read poetry of every description, but there was no record of his ever having written even a brief note. The letters had been typed on a computer and he did not possess one. Worshipping the sun is not a crime in Scotland although it is certainly unusual, not least because the life-giving deity (if that is what it is) is more often than not shrouded in mist or just hidden by clouds. So, at first, no official action was taken.

Then the tabloid newspapers started running a completely unconnected story about Devil worship in the Orkney Islands. Lurid accounts of Satanic rites by a group of middle-aged housewives and two Presbyterian ministers were attested to by a woman who later turned out to have absconded from a psychiatric hospital at Cork. But by the time her accusations had been proved totally false the Secretary of State's department had already asked the Borders Constabulary to investigate the Tressock rumours and make a confidential report. This had coincided with the sudden illness and subsequent death of Constable Makepiece; people said from cirrhosis of the liver. Since he had no close relations and was a bachelor this was never confirmed, but was easy to believe for those in Tressock who had drunk with him over the years.

The Borders Police, robbed of their local informant, appealed for one of Scotland's big city forces to send them a detective from an experienced crime squad. It fell to the Glasgow Constabulary.

The McFadden/Campbell team, riding high in the authorities' esteem, was assigned the case while still in the laborious process of handing over all the Caledonian Inward Investment evidence to the Procurator Fiscal. To gain time, therefore, DI McFadden recommended that Orlando be sent to Tressock as Tom Makepiece's replacement. Tom had never risen above the rank of a uniformed police constable. He was one of the very few PCs left as a small town or village policeman when the force was centralised on the larger towns. Rapid response to calls for help in outlying areas would bring police in small Ford and Vauxhall cars, whimsically known as Pandas, to the scene of the crime. McFadden was given to understand that Tom had stayed at his post only at the request of a local landowner, Sir Lachlan Morrison, who also happened to be the chairman of the nearby Nuada Nuclear Power Company.

So it was agreed that Orlando don once more a PC's uniform and take Tom Makepiece's place, although in the eyes of his colleagues and employers he would secretly remain and be paid as a detective constable. Orlando's mission was to gather information while posing as the new friendly neighbourhood cop. If his reports suggested some urgent action was required, DI McFadden and his superiors would decide on an appropriate strategy for effective and immediate action. The assistant chief constable of the Borders informed his good friend Sir Lachlan of these arrangements, making light of the anonymous letters as being almost certainly the work of some crank. Lachlan expressed his appreciation.