The Wicker Man: A Novel

by Robin Hardy

  ‘Why on earth are they doing that?’ asked Howie, who knew that agriculture was not his long suit, but had never been so aware of this deficiency before.

  ‘Because they’re in pod, of course, poor old things!’ laughed the gillie expansively. ‘Must be damned hot carrying all that weight around and having to touch up all those trees. I know I wouldn’t care for it. Still, it’s worth it at harvest time for the rest of us … and, of course, Lord S. absolutely showers those girls with extra beer, milk, and eggs …’

  ‘You mean their touching the trees like that helps the apples grow?’ Howie was incredulous.

  ‘Well, of course it does. Well known. That and plenty of good, fresh, natural manure!’

  Howie was literally speechless in the face of the gillie’s irrational certainty. It reminded him of other familiar ‘certainties’ one heard on the mainland: ‘Of course their brains are smaller than ours, that’s a scientific fact.’ So went the rationale of a fascist organization’s anti-black man crusade. There was a flat-earth society thriving in Britain, a group impervious to the evidence of space photography or any logic. Few competed, in Howie’s view, for sheer nuttiness, with the lunatic convictions of the Seventh-Day Adventists who sent hordes of American missionaries to Scotland each year to explain, door to door, that Christ was due on a certain date (worked out carefully, he’d heard, by a semiliterate in Boston). In a way he would have found all this rather endearing in its eccentricity (and Howie genuinely liked eccentrics) if it weren’t so irrelevant, if it didn’t, in his view, so get in the way of people having full lives in the sure knowledge of Christ’s message.

  The gillie had, up until this conversation, reminded Howie of one of those horsey ladies on the mainland who rented out ponies from livery stables. He’d never thought of them as a notably imaginative group but on Summerisle few of the convenient categories into which he was used to putting people seemed quite adequate.

  They had entered a wood of giant oak trees whose upper branches were festooned with mistletoe. The gillie fell silent as they moved through the wood and every attempt to engage her in conversation received only monosyllables in reply. It was almost as if she was in awe of her surroundings and Howie, who could understand a communicated sense of reverence better than most, responded to her mood. He contented himself with gazing up at the great Gothic arches the trees made above them and imagined himself in some vast cathedral in a golden age, some time before the ‘fall’ from Eden. The thought made him smile. He could hardly think that he and the gillie made an ideal Adam and Eve, standing there by the tree not realizing that they were the only people on earth who would never have navels, and waiting for the serpent. His poor Sorrel–Eve wouldn’t even have an apple, ‘seeing they’d all been exported’. He laughed out loud at his fantasy and she shushed him sharply. It was ironic, he thought, that he, one of the few people hereabout who didn’t sing and carry on half the night, was always being shushed by the islanders.

  As they emerged from the wood into open ground, Howie could see that the trees made a semicircle around a bare hilltop on which stood two structures. The first was a huge circle of giant stones, which reminded Howie of pictures he’d seen of Stonehenge. Some of these rocks were capped by other, equally large, pedimental rocks. The second structure, standing further away, on an isthmus jutting out into the sea, was the castle Howie had seen from the air on his arrival. It became clear, as they got nearer the stones, that some kind of activity was taking place there. A whirling, eddying coil of smoke seemed to indicate a fire at their centre. Figures appeared to be moving in the smoke that drifted towards them on a wind that also bore fragments of music and singing. Gradually, the path led them around the great mound of stones and Howie could see quite plainly what was happening.

  A blonde woman stood under the main pedimental rock in a diaphanous white robe, the sun, behind her, etching the silhouette of her body through the material. Her long hair blew gently in the wind. With a start of surprise Howie recognized Miss Rose. But the surprise was as nothing in comparison to what he felt when he saw her girls, palely, unself-consciously naked, as they stood in a circle, within, and concentric to, the stones. In the very centre of their circle a bonfire blazed and the fire itself seemed the focus of Miss Rose’s and the girls’ attention. Lying languidly on the grass nearby, three musicians played a tune and watched Miss Rose’s pupils sing and dance, in an attempted unison that was endearingly ragged and spontaneous. The tune, oddly enough, was exactly the same as the lone piper had played for the women ‘in pod’, back in the orchards.

  ‘Take the flame inside you, burn and burn belong

  Fire seed and fire feed and make the baby strong.

  Take the flame inside you, burn and burn belie

  Fire seed and fire feed make the baby cry.

  Take the flame inside you, burn and burn begin

  Fire seed and fire feed and make the baby King.’

  The rhythm of their dance was by now frenetic, and each girl, in turn, detached herself and leapt over the bonfire. Howie craned his neck to watch them, for the cart, by now, was past the stones and heading for the castle.

  Howie knew that here was a sight that would have got to the ‘old Adam’ in most men, and he was no exception. The sweet, soft rhythm of the girls’ childish breasts as they danced, the tantalizing glimpses of the little fleecy fruit between their legs as they leaped the fire–these were the most sexually arousing images he’d ever seen. But with the stiffening of his flesh there came out into the open that old toad, fear. It was as if in seeing the girls as he saw them now, he had, at last, seen enough of the Summerisle jigsaw puzzle put together to glimpse the entire picture. Here, he realized, was not simply an island where an unusual number of inbred, dotty Scots were going eccentrically to seed in their own sweet way. Here, if you started to put the disparate experiences he had undergone together–the quasi-religious nonsense in the school, the sexual excesses at the inn and on the green, the ruined church–put all these things together with the scene he now witnessed, and he could sense the cohesive pattern of a totally alien society. The canvas that was emerging showed him a Summerisle as foreign to him as India. ‘The fearful hand or eye’ that could have wrought such a strange community from the familiar blood and bone of his fellow Scots frightened Howie and turned the girls’ wild dance into a strange signal of foreboding. It also occurred to Howie, as he tried to drag his gaze away from the lovely dancing children, that the scene seemed to make one of his theories about Rowan’s disappearance slightly less likely. Why should a people so totally free in things sexual produce a kidnapper with a purely sexual motive? Of course, he realized that there might exist some perverted sex-oriented ceremony beyond his imagining. Almost anything started to seem possible on Summerisle. But he now doubted that this was the cause of her disappearance. The idea that she might have died from some cause the islanders did not wish to be known, such as an epidemic or fruit poisoning, seemed a more tenable theory. Reluctantly he looked to the route ahead of him. He was pleased that his reluctance was due now more to a sadness at leaving the extraordinary beauty and innocence of the scene, than to unrequited lust.

  ‘So you’re another that prefers young lamb to mutton,’ said the gillie salaciously. Noticing Howie’s angry glance, she added, ‘Oh, I don’t blame you. Feel exactly the same way myself. Bless their little, dimpled butts.’

  Howie was anxious to avoid either acrimony or lewd conversation with the gillie but determined to brief himself, as well as he could, for the upcoming interview with Lord Summerisle, which he knew could be vital to the solution of the Rowan Morrison case. He therefore tried to use the time left them, as they approached the impressive Scottish baronial pile ahead, to draw the gillie out in amiable conversation.

  ‘What’s it like working for Lord Summerisle?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, he’s moody, like most men. But a wonderful leader for the community. No detail too small for him to take an interest. Communicates well with eve
ryone, unlike that Rose, the schoolteacher.’ She hesitated. ‘Don’t know if you’ve met her, but she’s a preachy bitch!’

  ‘Oh, but I have. That was exactly my expression!’ laughed Howie guilefully. The gillie seemed pleased to have a fellow critic of Miss Rose.

  ‘Of course it doesn’t do to say so. She and Lord S…. are very close. Or she wouldn’t have got the job she has. I mean I prefer the outdoor life but I’m quite as qualified as Rose.’

  Howie felt at home with this kind of conversation. In talk like this an astute policeman could usually discover far more than in formal interrogation. The trouble was that you needed enough time and the right circumstances, and he’d had little of either since he’d been on the island.

  ‘It’s obvious to me that you’re an educated woman. Where did you “school” on the mainland?’ he asked.

  ‘Funny thing! I’ve no desire to go there. In fact, I’ve never been. But, of course, like Rose, I took a correspondence course with Saint Andrew’s University. Lord Summerisle’s late father paid for everything,’ said Sorrel, not without a certain pride.

  ‘Really, what subjects did you take?’ asked Howie politely.

  ‘Forestry, and I have a veterinary diploma of course. While I’m Lord S.’s official gillie, the stalking on Summerisle has never been very good. Too much agriculture. Not saying, mind you, that Lord S. isn’t keen as mustard on the sport. When he can find time. You’ll see a good few splendid stags he bagged on the walls in the castle.’

  The stalking and killing of stags had, Howie knew, an arcane language all its own.

  ‘What did Miss Rose study?’ asked Howie, digging a little further.

  ‘Comparative theology. And, I believe, pre-medieval music! It’s a bit artsy-craftsy for my taste,’ said the gillie complacently.

  They had passed through an enormous stone gateway with a raised portcullis. Above the pediment was a coat of arms topped by Lord Summerisle’s baronial coronet. A huge courtyard followed, flanked by battlements that looked out to sea. The sun was slowly sinking towards the horizon.

  ‘Well, here you are,’ said the gillie, stopping by a fine studded oak door flanked on either side by two rampant, stone staghounds and set into the clifflike side of the towering castle.

  ‘I have to go back in about forty minutes. How’s that for you?’

  ‘I’ll be ready,’ said Howie quite gratefully, feeling that she, alone of the people he’d met, so far, was genuinely friendly towards him.

  CHAPTER VI

  Evening –

  the 30th of April

  HE ASCENDED THE STONE STAIRS BETWEEN THE RAMPANT beasts and pulled the large, wrought-iron bell ringer. A muffled clanging came to him from faraway inside the castle. While he waited, he braced himself for the encounter with Lord Summerisle. He sorted through the things he knew about the man.

  Symbolic leader of the community by virtue of social class and wealth.

  Owner of the island, which, of course, didn’t mean he, in any sense, owned Her Britannic Majesty’s subjects who lived there under her Scottish law. However, he employed everyone on the island and as far as their land or houses were concerned they held these as his tenants.

  He was Justice of the Peace, an office he held from the Crown, although, in practice, the appointment was made by the office of the Secretary of State for Scotland, in Edinburgh. Although the secretary was a cabinet member of the elected government in London, Lord Summerisle had remained their appointee on the island under alternate socialist and conservative administrations. He must have some solid influence somewhere on the mainland.

  He had had the right to be elected from among the Scottish peers to sit in the House of Lords in the British Parliament but Howie, a convinced socialist, who followed these things, knew that he had never been so elected. Perhaps the giving of his vote to secure some other Scottish peer a seat had ensured his continuing in his post as local magistrate.

  Howie rang the bell again, twice. Not that he was getting impatient, for it was a relief to have time to prepare himself. It was just that, in so huge a pile, he couldn’t be sure anyone had heard him. He wondered if there was a ‘Mistress of the House’.

  Lord Summerisle’s name had been linked with Miss Rose but there was, as far as Howie knew, no Lady Summerisle. The womenfolk spoke of him with a friendly respect tinged with awe. The worst that had been said of him was that he was sometimes moody. Howie was ready for a testing encounter when the door was flung open by a rather breathless, kilted young man.

  ‘I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting, sir,’ he said, ‘but we’ve had mice in the steam organ and the piano tuner and I were down in the boiler room. It’s almost a quarter of a mile away. Lord Summerisle is expecting you.’

  ‘Expecting me?’ Howie was surprised.

  ‘That’s what His Lordship said, sir,’ confirmed the man.

  Interviewing the servants was a frequent necessity in crimes involving the aristocracy, Howie knew. Always get their names right from the start. The Police College had been most specific on the subject.

  ‘I’m Broom, sir. Lord Summerisle’s piper. It’s the butler’s day off,’ said Broom helpfully, as if he read Howie’s thoughts.

  As he followed Broom down a labyrinthine passage, Howie reflected bitterly what an unfair advantage Lord Summerisle had over any ordinary citizen who was due to be interviewed by the police. A man who could only be approached via his personal gillie and his very own bagpiper, living in a castle large enough to rehouse half a Glasgow slum. It was right, he thought, that people like Lord Summerisle should be taxed ‘till the pips squeaked’. Howie didn’t really feel vindictive towards the rich but he had, in his work, seen too much grinding poverty not to resent the social injustice of too much inherited wealth.

  They had now reached the great hall of the castle and Broom left him at this point, quietly closing the doors behind him.

  The hall was hung with the tattered banners of long forgotten regiments, and magnificent stacks of antlers. Its floor was flagged with stone and largely covered with deerskin and sealskin rugs. At one end of the hall stood a huge organ whose silvered pipes climbed some twenty feet, halfway to the vaulted ceiling. Howie presumed it to be that steam organ that was said to be suffering from a plague of mice.

  A carved stone fireplace into which a carthorse could have walked, without bending its head, was surrounded by an assortment of ear-warming armchairs and the back half of an enclosed carriage-sleigh. Across the quarter-acre area of the rest of the room were set a number of tables, a grand piano, and a large gilded harp.

  Howie walked around the silent, empty room, acutely aware that his shoes were squeaking. A merciful clock chimed the quarter hour as he gazed up at the stern, equine features of Lord Summerisle’s ancestors and then, finding himself at a latticed window, saw again in the distance the stones, where the young girls of Miss Rose’s class were still leaping the bonfire and dancing around.

  ‘Good afternoon, Sergeant Howie. I trust the sight of the young people refreshes you,’ said Lord Summerisle’s voice. Howie was happy to be in a position to recognize it and so turned calmly and challengingly to say, ‘No, My Lord, it does not refresh me.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Lord Summerisle, as if genuinely saddened. ‘One should always be open to the regenerative influences.’ He had been sitting concealed in the sleigh and now stood.

  Howie studied Lord Summerisle closely. Here was the ‘hand and eye’ that had shaped the personal fiefdom of Summerisle. He was dressed in a suit so tweedy that it looked as if moss might have taken to growing on it. Howie recalled his handsome, somewhat swarthy features and his shock of carelessly groomed hair. But now, close to the man, he was impressed by his eyes. They were a deep brown and had an adamantine directness of gaze that slightly disconcerted Howie. He looked down at the floor for an instant and found himself staring at Lord Summerisle’s shoes. They were American sneakers of exactly the same make as those worn by the ‘peeping jogger’ back
on the mainland. There was nothing so extraordinary in that, Howie realized, for the shoe shops were full of them.

  ‘Your piper said you were expecting me. How was that?’ asked Howie warily, looking back at Lord Summerisle and measuring his height against the remembered tallness of the jogger in Portlochlie.

  ‘It had to be only a matter of time before you came here,’ answered Lord Summerisle gently. ‘I hear you’re looking for a missing child.’

  ‘I’ve found her!’ said Howie sharply, and he put the sneakers out of his mind as being quite ridiculously irrelevant.

  ‘Good!’ said Lord Summerisle as if that was that.

  ‘In her grave!’ said Howie watching Summerisle’s face carefully. ‘I want your permission, as a Justice of the Peace, to exhume her body and have it removed to the mainland for a pathologist’s report.’

  ‘You suspect “foul play”?’ Lord Summerisle seemed slightly amused.

  ‘Yes. Murder and conspiracy to murder,’ retorted Howie.

  ‘In that case, you must go ahead,’ said His Lordship matter-of-factly.

  ‘Your Lordship doesn’t seem very concerned.’ Howie was both annoyed and curious about this.

  ‘I’m confident your suspicions are wrong,’ said Lord Summerisle. ‘We don’t commit murder here. We’re a deeply religious people.’

  ‘Religious!’ expostulated Howie. ‘With ruined churches and no priests?’

  Lord Summerisle went to the piano and picked out, with two fingers, the air that the girls had been singing.

  ‘They do so enjoy their divinity lessons,’ he said, gazing out the window with an affectionate smile.

  ‘But they’re naked!’ cried Howie.

  ‘Naturally!’ said Lord Summerisle reasonably. ‘It’s much too dangerous to leap through a fire with your clothes on.’

  ‘What kind of religion can they possibly be learning, jumping over bonfires naked?’ demanded Howie.