The Wicker Man: A Novel

by Robin Hardy

  Lord Summerisle lifted a silver bell from a sofa table, smiling ironically at Howie as he rang for Broom.

  ‘I think it will take stronger powers than yours to stop them, Sergeant,’ said Lord Summerisle of the threat. ‘Over the centuries they have proved very durable.’

  Broom was there in response to the bell, with his bagpipe under his arm.

  ‘Ah, Broom! Will you kindly show the sergeant out? Then we’ll be ready for your pibroch. Miss Rose is in perfect voice this evening!’ said Lord Summerisle.

  Broom smiled and bowed discreetly. He ushered Howie towards the door.

  ‘This way, sir,’ he said.

  Howie hesitated and then marched from the room.

  As he started Dr Ewan’s motorcycle for the return journey to the township, Howie could hear the lively sound of organ and bagpipe and Miss Rose’s rich, clear voice, most unScottish in its gaiety and its earthy promise, soaring into an ‘air’. More a rude old saraband, he thought, than a proper pibroch.

  Howie rode back by the short route, terrifying hundreds of rabbits and a few deer, one of which was so startled that it nearly collided with his borrowed machine. He supposed that, to the population of Summerisle, these creatures must represent transmuted souls as he’d heard the Indians regarded their sacred cows, which were allowed to wander everywhere. What an absurd religion, thought Howie, although privately he had to admit to himself that Miss Rose had been right about the childish imagination finding ‘resurrection’ hard to grasp. Sergeant Howie had been troubled, himself, as a child, at the idea of everybody clambering out of their graves or being reassembled if they’d been blown to bits in a war, so that there could be a vast parade of all the people who’d ever lived, on Judgement Day. Eventually, he’d come to accept, as an article of faith, that God would organize it all in His own miraculous way.

  He stopped the motorcycle on the green and wheeled the machine quickly down the High Street to Dr Ewan’s house. Everybody appeared to be in bed and the doctor’s house was quite dark and still when he replaced the motorcycle in its shed.

  Howie felt a twinge of guilt for what he meant to do next. His plan included an immediate ‘breaking and entering’ of the chemist’s shop and the subsequent ‘searching without a magistrate’s warrant’ of the premises. It was not long past midnight and he hoped to do it all quietly enough not to get caught. His excuse if he were apprehended would be that Lord Summerisle, as Justice of the Peace or local Magistrate, was too implicated in the case of Rowan Morrison to be a proper or reliable person to approach for a search warrant.

  CHAPTER VIII

  The Wee Small Hours –

  of the 1st of May

  THAT EX-POLICEMEN MAKE EXCELLENT CROOKS IS inevitable. They have to make a study of chummy’s methods. They are nearly always summoned to the scene of the crime to see just how chummy got away with it and why. Of course, Sergeant Howie was the last police officer in the whole West Highland force who would have been in the least likely to actually become a criminal of any description. But he had always prided himself on being a thinking cop, whose own moral sense, being so much more highly developed than that of his colleagues, could allow him to bend regulations intended for less worthy police officers.

  As he approached the chemist’s shop, he took the normal precaution of making sure there was no one about. Seeing he was the only person abroad, except for a pair of amorous cats, he slipped, from his pocket, a piece of mica that he always carried. Burglar alarms were forever being set off accidentally behind the doors of locked stores in a town the size of Portlochlie. The only way to quiet them, if the owners were absent, was for the police to be able to gain entry, exactly as a burglar would. It was the work of about twenty seconds for Howie to insert the mica at the right point, next to the Yale lock, and to be inside the shop with the door closed behind him.

  Howie lit a match to get his bearings. The bottles of appalling specifics were in their ordered rows. ‘Fillets of fenny snakes’ were in a jar quite close to him, leading Howie to wonder, with horror, if somewhere there could actually be a bottle of ‘little fingers of babes, ditch-delivered by drabs’. Not for nothing had he helped Mary Bannock and her class stage Scotland’s favourite Shakespeare play, Macbeth.

  His immediate destination was at the very far side of the room, where a heavy black felt curtain indicated Mr Lennox’s darkroom. Just before he had to blow out the match, to avoid burning his fingers, he spotted a staircase behind the end of the counter, which clearly led to the floor above. Having committed all this to memory the sergeant crept to the foot of the stairs and listened. The racking snores of, he presumed, Mr Lennox seemed to almost shake the timbers of the upper storey of the old building. If there were a Mrs Lennox, Howie hoped, for her sake, that Lennox provided adequate earplugs.

  Once inside the darkroom, he struck another match and lit the oil lamp that hung from the ceiling.

  Howie started to search through negatives filed away on shelves in yellow boxes. They were labelled ‘weddings, sports days, portraits, etc.’ Finally, he came to a box marked ‘Harvest Festival’. He opened it and found inside a number of negatives, each marked with its date. The negative for the previous year, which Mr Lennox had claimed he was unable to find, lay at the bottom of the pile. Howie held it up briefly to the light to make sure that there had been an exposure, then quickly prepared the developing trays, measuring in the chemicals, and carefully checking the temperatures. The printing box was an ancient affair but it seemed to work well enough.

  While the photograph was developing, Howie tiptoed back to the foot of the stairs to check on the sleeping, snoring Mr Lennox. Satisfied that all was well, he started to examine other boxes of photographs. He selected one labelled ‘Divination’ and opened it. Inside was a number of photographs in folders. The first was labelled ‘The Blade-Bone of the Black Pig (Slinneineachd)’ and contained a photograph of a crowd of islanders standing in a circle round Lord Summerisle, who was minutely scrutinizing the bone of an animal. The second was labelled ‘Omen Stones (Col Coetn)’ and showed half a dozen people throwing white round stones into the embers of a fire. The third was labelled ‘The Seer in the Bull (Taghairm)’ and had a colourful picture of a man wrapped in the hide of a bull being rocked by others on the bank of a pool. The fourth was labelled ‘The Elucidator (Peithyrnen)’ and contained a number of photographs that showed Lord Summerisle manipulating a machine consisting of several staves on which judicial maxims had been cut. (When turned, the staves apparently spelled out messages of three or four lines.) The fifth was labelled ‘The Living and the Dead Graves’ and showed a woman wrapped in a blanket and lying on the ground between two holes. One had a sign by it reading ‘Living Grave’; the other read ‘Dead Grave’. A small circle of people looked on with concern.

  Sickened, Howie thrust the photographs back into the yellow boxes and returned to the developing bath. A photograph of the familiar scene of the Harvest Festival emerged before his eyes. He took it out and laid it on a table to dry. Searching around, he found a magnifying glass and held it to the picture. In spite of a lot of distortion, due to magnification, he could see that the girl standing among the fruit and vegetables was not Rowan Morrison but Daisy, the girl who had explained about the beetle. Howie’s face showed his perplexity. He applied himself to examining the photograph in detail and noted the surprising fact that there was markedly less produce than usual. A few pears, tomatoes, and cauliflowers … and a number of diminutive apples. Howie was suddenly very excited at his discovery. It was a clue that helped explain a great deal. The crop had failed the previous year, he was sure that was it! The crop had failed … No wonder he got canned soup and vegetables the night before … No wonder there were none of the famous Summerisle apples. The few good ones were, no doubt, those he’d seen in Lord Summerisle’s cold store. The poisoned apple theory remained, for that might have been part of the crop disaster. But it seemed less and less likely.

  He wondered, at once, what the old
religion did about crop failure. And then he remembered something Lord Summerisle had said in the subtropical garden.

  ‘He brought me up the same way–to love the music and drama and rituals of the old pantheism, and to love nature, and to fear it and rely on it and appease it where necessary …’ that or something very like it was what Lord Summerisle had said.

  ‘Appease it where necessary!’

  Appeasing, Howie realized, was the key to all pagan religions. He’d sometimes thought that the Papists’ confession and absolution was a form of pagan appeasement. But these people would feel the need to appease in quite a different way. He found himself staring at a wall calendar with May Day ringed heavily in red. Tomorrow, he thought for a moment, and then glancing at his watch realized it was already today.

  ‘Only make sure you’re ready for tomorrow’s tomorrow!’ Lord Summerisle had said to Willow and she had responded, ‘The day of death and resurrection?’

  ‘Whose death?’

  Of course, he’d half-suspected it then. Now it seemed quite clear, Rowan’s death, which had still to take place. Today on May Day.

  ‘My God! I’ve got to find Rowan!’ he said out loud.

  His exclamation had interrupted the even flow of the snores upstairs. There was a sudden noise.

  Hastily he replaced the negative in the box and, putting the wet photograph as fast as he could through the stop bath and the fixing bath, lifted it out gingerly, and turned out the lamp. He moved through the shop as quietly as he could. There was dead silence for an appreciable time while Howie waited to open the door and leave. Then the snores resumed, at first softly but growing to a crescendo. Howie made his exit and walked fast up the hill towards the Green Man.

  Inside the bar of the inn everything was unusually quiet. Willow stood behind the counter drying some glasses. Howie came in looking and feeling very weary. She turned and smiled with pleasure when she saw him.

  ‘Hullo,’ said Willow. ‘You look tired. Can I get you a drink?’

  ‘I’ll have a pint, please!’ said Howie gratefully.

  Willow turned to draw the beer while Howie contemplated the empty space on the wall where last year’s Harvest Festival photograph was missing. He surreptitiously brought out his own recently developed, and still tacky, small photograph, and made a comparison with the most recent (and enlarged) version of the Festival on the wall. The difference between plenitude and famine was obvious. He put his photograph quickly back in his pocket and walked over to the bar where his beer stood waiting. He lifted it and drank deeply. Slowly he was solving the puzzle. But he was a long way, he realized, from rescuing Rowan, wherever she might be.

  ‘Willow,’ asked Howie, ‘what did you mean by the phrase “the day of death and resurrection”?’

  ‘I don’t remember saying that!’ said Willow.

  ‘You said it last night to Lord Summerisle when he was sending that lad up to you.’

  ‘Oh, so you overheard that, did you, Sergeant Sleuth?’ giggled Willow.

  ‘I’m right next door, you know,’ said Howie.

  ‘I know where you are!’ said Willow. ‘I only hope Ash Buchanan didn’t keep you awake. He’s a lively boy and very anxious to learn–I expect I could teach you a thing or two, Sergeant, love … if you’re not too tired.’

  She did something so sexy with her luscious lower lip that Howie had to frantically reprove his all-too-responsive flesh. He was sitting by now and Willow put her hands gently on his shoulders–massaging them softly. Howie half-flinched but, thinking better of it, let her slowly caress his neck, allowing himself the pain that the illicit pleasure gave him.

  ‘I’m only interested in the meaning of the phrase “the day of death and resurrection”,’ said Howie trying to control his breathing.

  ‘It’s just a saying,’ said Willow softly. ‘It’s something to do with fertility, Sergeant … and May Day, and all that.’

  ‘Willow, what happens here on May Day?’ asked Howie lightly. ‘Does anyone … well, I mean, is anyone specially chosen for a …’

  ‘You must think of it as a day of rebirth, Sergeant. That’s the best way,’ said Willow seriously.

  ‘Do you know where they’re keeping Rowan Morrison?’ asked Howie boldly, waiting for her reaction. He was disgusted to find himself wondering in the long silence that followed, how, if he were alone with her, he might contrive to make her talk. She would be impervious to sexual threats even if he were the sort of man to make them. Then the possibility of inflicting pain on her, to gain the information he so desperately needed, crossed his mind. To his horror he found that the idea excited him. Was almost every male, he wondered, afflicted with this atavistic desire to master a woman–to bend her if need be? It was the ‘received wisdom’ that this was so.

  If he had ever been tempted to succumb to Willow’s repeated invitations (and he had), the fear that he might break his own code of gentleness and honour, once he was alone with her, made him the more determined to resist her. Disturbed at this unsavoury morsel of self-discovery, he wondered whether there was an innate violence in him for any and every woman, even for Mary. But fortunately for his peace of mind, he could not imagine wishing to inflict any hurt on ‘his Mary’. It did not occur to him, in his innocence, that Willow’s rampant, taunting sexuality was the magnet that would draw every basic urge from her lovers, whoever they might be; that to rejoice, with Willow, in walloping Willow would probably be the merest footnote to any night that Howie might conceivably spend with her, and hardly qualified him to be listed as a sadist (which is what he greatly feared).

  ‘You’re so nosy, aren’t you? And anyway who cares about all that?’ asked Willow, breaking her silence. ‘But why don’t you come to my room later tonight? I’m sure I can show you something to your advantage. The door won’t be locked.’

  With which she went off to help her father close the inn for the night. Only the musicians, who appeared to be residents, remained drinking.

  Howie sat for a moment with his beer. What she had said was a clear admission of what he had already deduced: Rowan was, so far, almost certainly not dead.

  Of one thing he had made up his mind. At first light, he would fly off to fetch reinforcements who would probably have to be armed. To radio for them might precipitate Rowan’s death, for Howie couldn’t be quite sure there was no radio receiver/transmitter on the island. The thing to do, he determined, was to get the reinforcements back to Summerisle before the islanders had time to get up to whatever horrible ceremony they planned, and for which, Howie felt sure, Rowan was being made ready.

  Willow had meanwhile gone up the stairs to bed, cheekily pinching the lobe of his ear as she passed him. He followed shortly afterward (leaving his beer unfinished, finding it rather too bitter for his taste). Heading for his own room, across the landing, he was appalled to see Willow standing at her door inviting him in. She was quite bare, and lovelier naked than even Howie’s aroused imagination had allowed him to dream.

  He permitted himself one long glance at her extravagant person. The aureoles around her nipples had the swollen bloomed look of fresh plums ripe for the nibbling. Howie felt his jaw clench and then he allowed himself to look at her tapering, golden fleece. The sight of it made him slow his gait so that he actually almost came to a halt opposite her. The lighting of her body reminded him of a religious postcard that he had always held dear since the day ‘his Mary’ had sent it to him, after their first date. It was called The Education of the Virgin, by a French painter, and it showed the Blessed Virgin Mary as a child, holding her hand close to a candle, to stop it guttering, so that the light of the flame showed through the very flesh of the little girl who would become the Mother of God. In Willow’s room, behind her boldly opened legs, burnt the flame of an oil lamp, set on the floor, by the distant bed. Etched into Howie’s mind and eye was the heart-shaped gap where her long legs met the coral line that split her fleece. Her flanks, her thighs, had the same quality of transparency as the painting,
mocking this sacred image in his mind. Upon the inside of her satined thighs Howie thought he saw the spreading glaze of her desire, and the delicious musky smell of woman was intense.

  Her face he ignored for he did not care to meet her gaze now, when she could see how much the promise of her body moved him. Instead he watched, fascinated, the movement of her fingers. In one hand she held a long corn-dolly. (While Howie knew what it was called, he wondered why, for its phallic shape was all too evident.) The outrageous Willow caressed the oblong, ribbed corndolly with her other hand and sang in a low voice that was hardly more than a whisper.

  ‘I saw a maid milk a bull,

  Well done liar.

  I saw a maid milk a bull

  Every stroke a bucketful

  Isn’t that a comical thing to be true?’

  Oh, how easily he could have whipped this Jezebel, this mocking public whore, thought Howie. The thought itself was desire. He recognized it and saw the new trap. In the instant before he was about to grab her wrist and haul her into her room and flay her with his belt he saw it. She expected to reach him on one level, if she failed on another. She knew men from the weight of their balls in the hand to the most complex trigger mechanisms in their minds. But she had never met the likes of Sergeant Neil Howie before, of that he would be certain. Simulating a coolness he didn’t feel, for his body was soaking with a sudden, heavy sweat, Howie walked determinedly to his door. Entering, he closed the door and turned the key, ostentatiously, in the lock.

  His room had its oil lamp already lit, and freshly cut flowers were arranged in jam jars of various sizes. Muslin bags full of sweet smelling lavender were tucked into his sheets. Beside his washstand was a china jug of steaming hot water, and bottles of oil and unguent, hand labelled, ‘oil of sunflower seed’ and ‘essence of heather’. Why, Howie wondered, was he suddenly being honoured in this extravagant way unless it was merely part of Willow’s plan to seduce him? Or, to put it another, likelier way, part of the wider conspiracy of Lord Summerisle, MacGregor, and others to have Willow seduce him in her role as Aphrodite.