Read Online The Wicker Tree by Robin Hardy - Free Book Online

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