by Robin Hardy
‘Dr Ewan?’ asked Howie.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m from the West Highland Police, and I’d like a word with you.’
‘Before lunch?’ Dr Ewan was incredulous.
‘Yes!’ insisted Howie. ‘Now, if you don’t mind.’
‘But I do. Come back at two thirty.’
He put his latchkey into his front door. Howie clutched the door knocker, keeping the door closed.
‘Dr Ewan, did you sign Rowan Morrison’s death certificate?’
The doctor stopped in his tracks, fidgeting nervously with his black doctor’s bag, which was partly open. He took two snakes out of it and allowed the creatures to curl restlessly around his wrist. Howie noted, with horror, that they were rare (in Britain) vipers.
‘They get so tetchy if they’re not fed regularly,’ explained Dr Ewan.
‘Rowan Morrison’s death certificate!’ repeated Howie, impatiently, keeping his distance from the apparently irritable vipers.
‘Rowan Morrison?’ repeated Dr Ewan. ‘Yes, I did … Why?’
‘Can I see it?’ asked Howie.
‘You, of all people, should know that death certificates are kept in the public records office. Now, if you’ll excuse me.’
The doctor opened his front door and half-disappeared inside it.
‘One more thing, Doctor. How did Rowan die?’ asked Howie.
‘Quite painlessly, I’m glad to say! A simple metamorphosis.’ Having said which, the doctor entered and slammed the door of his house. Mr Lennox emerged from the chemist’s shop almost at once to find a furious Sergeant Howie trying to collect himself.
‘I told you he was particular about mealtimes,’ said Mr Lennox.
‘And I am particular about truth, Mr Lennox,’ said Howie with a vehemence that made him shout, realize that he was shouting, and hope that the doctor would overhear him from inside his house. He went on, ‘Not half-truth or evaded truth, but insofar as it can be achieved, unadulterated truth. Metamorphosis, indeed!’
Mr Lennox managed to look sympathetic. He was used to having to calm or soothe Dr Ewan’s patients when they came to order their ‘specifics’.
‘I just came out,’ he said, ‘to tell you that I’d managed to have a quick look for the negative of that Harvest Festival picture you wanted, but I couldn’t seem to find it. I’ll have another look, of course, after lunch.’
Mr Lennox gave Howie a guileless stare and, skipping into his shop, closed the door and pulled down the blind. Howie turned angrily away and started to walk down the High Street. It was true, he realized, that the public records office on the mainland was an obvious source to check, but the doctor’s patronizing, uncaring attitude had infuriated him.
He made his way down to the harbour to use the radio on his aircraft to call Portlochlie. A few minutes later he stood on the small quay, where he had landed the day before, clutching his bag of sweets and waiting for the harbour master to find someone to row him out to his plane.
He watched a group of children running beside a stream where it emptied into the harbour nearby. The stream was carried on its last twenty-yard journey to the ocean by a shallow, stone-paved conduit. Howie noticed that the children were following something that was being carried upon the fast flowing water towards the harbour. It looked like a doll wrapped in tattered, trailing swaddling clothes.
‘We carry death out of the village!’ chanted the children. ‘We carry death out of the village!’
As Howie was being rowed to his plane, he could see the little doll-like figure floating in the lapping tide. Its face had been crudely painted white, obliterating the features.
The boatman waited for him by the plane while he made his radio call. The harbour master had apologized to Howie that Old Sedge, for that was the boatman’s name, was stone deaf. But once his uncomplicated mission had been explained to him, he smiled a perpetual toothless, but ingratiating, smile at the sergeant. All Howie’s attempts to get the old doddard to go back to the quay and return when summoned were quite fruitless. He simply cackled as if Howie were relating racy anecdotes to him, so that finally the sergeant gave up, feeling secure in his privacy.
It took the usual minute or two to get the Portlochlie police station to answer his call. Eventually, having Mc-Taggart on the line, he came straight to the point. Howie spoke slowly and distinctly.
‘Check at once with the Public Records Office for the Islands, Record of Deaths department. Anyone by the name of Morrison. Christian or first name, Rowan. Age about thirteen. Female. While you’re about it have the last two years checked. Put it on an “Emergency Priority”.’
‘Wilco!’ acknowledged McTaggart. ‘Will you wait?’
‘Affirmative!’ barked Howie crisply, looking at the gaping face of Old Sedge, sitting at his oars, and wondering if by any conceivable chance he was not actually deaf. The sputtering sound of ham radio operators came through the ether onto Howie’s receiver as he sat munching his sweets. Had it not been for the fact that the air was so very insecure, Howie might have been tempted to gossip about Summerisle when, a few minutes later, McTaggart came back on the air.
‘The answer is negative. No record of Morrison, Rowan, dying for the last three years. We still have her listed in “missing persons”. D’you want me to report “possible homicide” to the Chief Constable?’
Howie was looking at Old Sedge as the answer came back and, it seemed to him, although Heaven knew, Summerisle was enough to make any policeman paranoid, that Sedge was showing a glimmer of interest in Mc-Taggart’s news.
‘Thanks, Hugh, but no!’ said Howie suddenly informal. ‘On account of you never can tell if chummy is listening in, this is a brief report. Investigation has produced so far inconclusive evidence of Rowan’s death but have yet to interview local Justice of the Peace. This just could be …’
Howie was about to say ‘an elaborate practical joke’, but checked himself. If that was the case, he wanted to discover the fact for himself as soon as possible, and a strange notion had just occurred to him.
‘Hugh, get onto the Public Records Office again. Ask them to check between eleven to fourteen years back for the birth of Morrison, Rowan, et cetera …’
A surprised ‘Wilco!’ came back from McTaggart. ‘You’ll wait?’ he asked.
‘Affirmative,’ answered Howie, now beaming at the deaf old fisherman and offering him one of his sweets. The poor old fellow had to refuse, pointing to the two well separated fangs, which were the only teeth in his head.
‘Affirmative!’ came McTaggart’s voice a few moments later. ‘She’s just over thirteen, born on April the first.’
‘Thank you, Hugh,’ said Howie thoughtfully. ‘I will probably stay over till tomorrow. Leave Rowan in the “missing persons” category on the record. Over and out.’
It was only after he was back on the quay that the sergeant realized that he’d quite forgotten to get a report from Hugh McTaggart of the minutiae of the state of crime in Portlochlie or to send his usual ‘word’ to Mary. Then it was borne in on him that he was investigating a perhaps quite extraordinary crime and that he’d chosen to handle it all by himself. Quite apart from the deplorable state of the moral law on the island, which could wait, he, Sergeant Neil Howie, had gotten all to himself the kind of case for which Scotland Yard was normally asked to come up from London and ‘take over’. If he had been forced, by the evidence, to announce her death, under mysterious circumstances, a report to the Chief Constable would have been inevitable. As it was, she could reasonably be left as a ‘missing person’ since no sane person on the mainland would accept the ‘word’, unsubstantiated by the death certificate of a doctor who carried live vipers around in his little black bag.
However, before he went to see Lord Summerisle to confront him, as local Justice of the Peace, with all the facts and demand an autopsy of the remains interred under the little rowan tree in the graveyard … before that, he must just check the medical meaning of the word ‘metamorphos
is’ in the dictionary, if indeed there was a medical meaning. Dr Ewan was high on the list Howie was forming in his mind of those who would be accused of ‘attempting to obstruct a police officer in the course of his duties’ when he should have discovered exactly what had happened to Rowan Morrison.
He was ascending the High Street, looking for someone to ask the way to the public library, when around the corner came the same children whom he had seen following the little dead doll down to the sea.
‘We carried death out of the village. We carry summer into the village,’ they all chanted.
Their leader, who was a little girl of about seven, held aloft a young tree from which was suspended a similar doll to the one Howie had seen in the harbour. But this one’s face was pink and new. Its china blue eyes were unblinkingly open and its little body was clothed in a clean white robe.
Howie stopped the children by the simple expedient of grabbing the little tree from which the doll was suspended. The children were shrill with indignation and almost clawed at him to get it back.
‘Where’s the public library?’ he asked, surprised at their hysterical protests.
Feeling curiously as if he had done something sacrilegious, he hastily returned them their little effigy and they continued their procession without attempting to speak to him further. But by this time, a young man, whom Howie recognized from the bar, where he remembered him as one of the lewdest of the willing Willow’s manhandlers, came out of a fishmonger’s shop and directed him to the public library, which turned out to be quite close to the inn itself.
The library was deserted except for an old man reading at one of the tables. Howie hauled a huge dictionary from one of the shelves to a study desk in a corner and leafed through until he found:
Met’a-mor’pho-sis (met’a-mor’fo-sis;-mor.fo’sis) n; pl, -phoses (sez) L., fr Gr. metamorphrōsis, fr. metamorphoun to transform, fr meta beyond, over + morphe form. 1. change of form, structure, or substance, esp. by witch craft or magic; also, the form resulting from such a change. 2. A striking alteration in appearance, character, or circumstance. 3. Med. A form of degeneration marked by conversion of certain tissue or structures into other material.
Med. obviously meant the medical definition. It wasn’t particularly helpful and he searched around for a medical dictionary for further enlightenment but could find none. If he could have found it, he assumed it would have listed the diseases that could have caused such ‘a form of degeneration’. He was slightly reassured to find that metamorphosis had a medical definition but the missing death certificate remained the single most disquieting aspect of the case at this time.
He sat there at the table in the library for a moment, gazing out of the window at the back of the inn, where a small, smart little cart was being unloaded of some barrels by a figure in knee breeches and a tweed hat.
Believing Dr Ewan might have perhaps deliberately misled him, Howie made the momentous decision to leave the facts he had just gleaned out of the ordinary card index in his mind but, thinking metaphorically, to open a new file, which he tentatively headed ‘Disease’. Suppose that Rowan had died of a disease, the nature of which everyone wished to conceal? Something so unpleasant that it would affect the sale of the famous apples and so ruin the prosperous little community. Howie knew that some grain could be affected in such a way that people had been sent mad by eating the bread made from it, although he was vague as to the details. Could that happen with apples? It didn’t seem at all likely. But then who would have thought, in the Scotland of his youth, that grass could be smoked or mushrooms chewed to induce hallucinations? Now these things were commonplace.
He saw that the man unloading the barrels had noticed him staring into space, and was glancing at him curiously. Howie looked away.
While he was in the library, there was one other subject on which he hoped to find enlightenment. Those Harvest Festival Thanksgiving photographs worried him; there was something out of the ordinary about them. He looked up Thanksgiving first and found that while it was listed as a kind of Harvest Festival it seemed to be principally a North American celebration dating from the first harvest vouchsafed the Puritan settlers. But on Harvest Festival, as such, there was a great deal more information. Of course, even at Saint Andrew’s, back in Portlochlie, they had a service every autumn, when thanks were given by the congregation for the blessings of the harvest. Produce was displayed, in baskets, on the sanctuary steps. Unlike Summerisle, no young girl in a white dress was involved, nor could Howie think what her role might be in the island service unless it was to sing a hymn. On this point, as on others, the encyclopedia soon disabused him.
In societies as disparate as ancient Egypt and pre-Columbian Incan, the Harvest Festival was strangely enough celebrated in much the same way.
A young virgin was chosen to personify the Goddess of Fertility. She was made much of by the whole community and was dressed in the clothes and adornments sacred to the deity. The whole community attended the feast in the temple where the fruit and vegetables and grain were piled high. On a platform, above the heaped produce, the child stood, worshipped by the multitude. At a predetermined point in the ceremony, the priests would seize her, fling her down, and cut her throat, allowing the blood to saturate the produce and mark the walls of the temple. The chief priest then skinned the child and, wearing the still warm skin like a mantle, led the rejoicing crowd through the streets. The priest thus represented the Goddess reborn and guaranteed another successful harvest next year.
Sergeant Howie was so sickened by the thought, however fleeting, that such a thing might have happened to Rowan, that he exclaimed out loud, ‘Dear God! Even these people can’t be that mad!’
The old man who had been reading at his table looked up and said, ‘Sh!’
Howie was irritated to recognize him as one of those who, like the fishmonger, had danced obscenely with Willow the night before. He was incensed at the man having the nerve to shush him, a police sergeant who, in the course of his duty, was boggling out loud and justifiably so! Howie gave him a sour look and returned to his reading.
In Europe, on the other hand, the young virgin was usually burned, together with the abundant produce, in a huge sacrificial bonfire.
‘Burned!’ exclaimed Howie, remembering vividly May Morrison’s momentary pain as she recalled her daughter’s death ‘so hot, burning … poor love!’ Howie’d thought she was talking of a fever, and so perhaps she was, but a great deal suggested otherwise. Few things Howie could imagine would degenerate tissue faster than being burned to death. The old man had shushed him again and this time Howie banged his encyclopedia shut, but then tiptoed out, feeling a little ashamed of his gesture.
In the yard behind the Green Man, he found Alder MacGregor sharing a drink, in the sunshine, with the person Howie had watched unloading the cart.
‘Afternoon, Sergeant!’ twinkled Alder. ‘You’ve had a busy day by all accounts. This is Sorrel MacKenzie, Lord Summerisle’s gillie.’
The sergeant nodded politely to the gillie whom he could see, close to, was a muscular-looking female.
‘Aye,’ he said, ‘it’s been a busy day. I’d like to make an appointment to see Lord Summerisle as soon as possible …’ He looked questioningly at the two islanders.
‘The best thing,’ said the gillie, ‘is to just go to the castle. If he’s not “mating the strains”, and this is the season for that, I’m afraid, he’ll see you at once!’
‘Och, he’s ver’approachable,’ said Alder MacGregor. ‘Not a bit the feudal tyrant some folks from the mainland imagine. Sorrel can take you, I’m sure. She’s just been delivering the week’s grog.’
‘Thank you,’ said Howie pleasantly. ‘Was it cider in those barrels?’
‘Bless you! Not just cider. His Lordship makes the best malt whisky in the islands. His sloe gin, we call it “Sorrel’s Ruin”’–the gillie laughed heartily in this teasing–‘is as smooth as a lassie’s thigh!’
‘An illicit s
till, eh?’ Howie couldn’t help exclaiming, although he’d promised himself to let all these matters pass until the Rowan Morrison case should have been concluded.
‘Did you see any money change hands last night at the bar?’ asked Alder gently.
‘No, why?’ Howie was perplexed.
‘A private still making whisky is illicit only if you sell the drink. We never do. Lord S. calls it “our rations”! Not that they’ve ever run out, mind you!’ explained Alder.
The gillie had readied the cart for departure. Howie got up on the cushioned box beside her, shaking his head in a genial way, determined not to make any unnecessary enemies among these people.
Then she cracked the whip, and the smart grey cob in the harness took them on their way at a high-stepping trot.
‘How long will it take us?’ asked Howie, as they skirted the green.
‘It’s just up through the Mistletoe Woods. It won’t take half an hour.’
But before they reached the woods they passed through miles of orchards whose different coloured blossoms denoted a variety of apples and other fruit. Howie noticed a piper wandering along the side of the road playing a tune and then, above the sound of the iron-trimmed wheels of the cart on the gravel road and the rhythm of the hooves, he could hear the mature voices of a number of women singing:
‘Take the flame inside you, burn and burn below
Fire seed and fire feed and make a baby grow.
Take the flame inside you, burn and burn belay
Fire seed and fire feed make the baby stay.’
Howie strained to see the singers.
‘Can’t you see them?’ asked the gillie, amused. ‘They’re big enough in all conscience.’
And then he could see them. Five of them, walking steadily between the rows of trees, touching every tree in their allotted row. All of them pregnant.
