by Robin Hardy
Lord Summerisle smiled and then moved over to supervise some men who were heating up a barrel of tar. All around him people milled about eating and drinking and greeting latecomers with most unScottish kisses and hugs.
Lord Summerisle signalled to the band and climbed onto a platform nearby. Above him, mounted on the side of the inn, was a great, smiling, sly rendering of the face of the sun. The drummer was giving a roll on his kettledrum to command silence, and the crowd fell quiet, looking up towards Lord Summerisle.
‘My friends,’ said Lord Summerisle, ‘enough now! We will all reassemble on the green at three o’clock sharp, and proceed through the village and countryside to the beach under the stones by the route that has become sacred to our rite. This year, at the procession’s end, as has been proclaimed, a holy sacrifice will be offered up jointly to Nuada, our most sacred God of the Sun, and to Avellunau, the beloved Goddess of our orchards, in order that we may furnish them with renewed power to quicken the growth of our crops. Hail the Queen of the May!’ he shouted, in conclusion.
‘Hail the Queen of the May!’ everybody echoed.
Sergeant Howie, standing in the shade of the giant rhubarb leaf, wondered if he ought to go straight to the beach. But which beach? Somewhere close to the stones, which were themselves just inland from a peninsula five miles long, so that the area he might have to search would be ten miles or more in length. As he’d seen from the air, there were dozens of beaches and coves below the towering cliffs. With a helicopter, a fast motorboat, or his seaplane such a search might be practical. Alone on foot, even with the motorcycle, there just wouldn’t be time.
The gathering was slowly dispersing. Howie started to make a mental note of anyone he’d met who might be missing and therefore perhaps watching over Rowan, the Queen of the May, poor wee girl, in her last hours. Miss Rose had been there and so had everyone who’d been at the inn on the first night as far as he could remember: the sailors, the shopkeepers, Dr Ewan, Mr Lennox, young Buchanan, Broom, even the old gardener. Some one, obvious person was absent and it was only when Howie realized that no young children under the age of puberty were present that it struck him who was missing.
May Morrison and her daughter Myrtle.
Five minutes later, Sergeant Howie was coming through the door of the sweetshop to find May Morrison placidly carving a slice out of the belly of one of her exquisitely bloated sugar babies and serving it to Myrtle to eat. She seemed genuinely surprised to see the sergeant.
‘Why, Sergeant,’ she said, ‘I thought you’d gone back to the mainland.’
‘Mrs Morrison,’ said Howie panting slightly, ‘whether you know it or not, Rowan’s not dead. They’ve got her hidden somewhere!’
‘They?’ Mrs Morrison was totally disbelieving.
‘The village … the whole island. Everyone’s in on it,’ he told her.
He was expecting some spark of anguish or hope. Yes, shouldn’t she hope that her child, even against the evidence of everything they’d taught her or told her, might still be alive? But there was nothing from May Morrison but a blank, courteous stare. Was it disbelief or complicity?
‘I suppose you’re in on it too. Dear God,’ asked Howie savagely, ‘what kind of a woman are you to stand by and watch them slaughter your own child?’
‘I’ve already told you, Sergeant, this is my child,’ said May cuddling little Myrtle, whose mouth was sticky with marzipan and strawberry jam from her slice of the sugar baby.
‘What about you, Myrtle?’ shouted Howie, hoping to get a quick, honest reaction from the child. ‘Isn’t it time to tell the truth about Rowan? Is she here perhaps? In the house? Upstairs? When did you last see her, child?’
Myrtle gazed at him for thirty seconds in silence and slowly started to cry, burying her head in her mother’s large, cushiony bosom.
‘Now see what you’ve done,’ said Mrs Morrison. ‘If I were you I’d go back to the mainland, Sergeant, and stop meddling in affairs that are no concern of yours.’
‘But they are my concern,’ retorted Howie hotly. ‘I warn you, Mrs Morrison, I’m going to try to search every house in this place and anyone, including you, who stands in my way, I’ll charge as an accomplice to murder.’
He made to go into the back parlour of the shop. Mrs Morrison obligingly opened the door for him.
‘You’ll simply never understand the true nature of sacrifice! Hunt all you like,’ she said. She went back to helping herself to a piece of cake and calming the tearful Myrtle, taking no further notice of the sergeant. Howie, whose sense of frustration became momentarily intolerable, shouted at her as he poked in the cupboards and stamped up the stairs:
‘Heathens. Bloody heathens!’
But by the time he left the house, not having seen a trace of Rowan ever even having lived there, Howie had mastered himself and prepared to carry out a dogged search of every likely place he could think of until the time should come for the islanders’ procession.
The sergeant had determined to leave the township well before three o’clock, the hour of their procession’s departure. His plan was to try to shadow the islanders. Not a conventional tactic for the West Highland Police but something he’d always wanted to try. Moreover, now that nagging fear was his constant companion, action and plans of action kept his adrenaline pumping.
Inspiration for his plan had first come to him from the cowboy films he’d seen as a child in the cinema theatre at Portlochlie. He’d never enjoyed the American cops and gangster films, disapproving of the flashy way the police drove around making a lot of unnecessary noise in their automobiles and nearly always shooting the gangsters instead of bringing them to a proper trial. His hero figure was a character played by an actor called Van Heflin (although there must have been many others), who had retired honourably from the confederate cavalry, married a squaw, and worked part time for the US Army (the none-too-bright ones in dark blue uniforms and braces). It was he who always knew that the sound, at night, of the greater-crested tawny owl was actually a Nez Percé brave sending a warning to his ally, the Sioux. Of course, the US Army colonel never believed him and they were all forced to slaughter hundreds of Indians before Mr Van Heflin could ride off into the sunset. He usually became a widower in the process, since squaw wives appeared to be completely expendable in these motion pictures. What Mr Van Heflin was particularly good at was shadowing Indian war parties. Sometimes the Indian war parties would make him prisoner and, bound and gagged, he’d been taken along while they shadowed the US Cavalry. Howie indulged in this fantasy of how he would keep abreast, but just out of sight of the procession.
He did so as he fruitlessly searched house after house all up and down the High Street with meticulous care.
The owners seemed to half-expect him but they were far too busy getting dressed and putting on their masks to pay much attention. Howie’s only problem with the islanders, as he entered their houses uninvited, was his occasional insistence that some young woman or other take off the mask she had already carefully put on and around which she had already painstakingly arranged her hair. He looked constantly for the unusual colour of Rowan’s hair, knowing it was always possible that it might since have been dyed. The masks were elaborately made of real fur or feathers or painted canvas. They represented birds and animals of all kinds but were restricted to breeds of creatures that actually survived in the West Highlands. Thus there were eagles, gannets, puffins and stoats, foxes and deer and many more of the like, but no exotic fowl like parakeets or emus, no alien mammals like lions or bears.
In the women’s hairdresser’s shop he met a total refusal to remove their masks by a half-dozen women whose hair was being carefully dressed to go with their characters as animals or birds. The hairdressers stood mutinously in front of their customers.
‘I don’t wish to teach a policeman his job,’ said one of the hairdressers whose own peacock mask stood on a stand in the corner of the shop. ‘But if you just want to make sure they’re none of them a w
ee girl of thirteen, however well developed … just look at their hands, why don’t you, Sergeant?’
Sergeant Howie looked and had to agree none could have been Rowan’s hands. But before he left the collection of clearly middle-aged women he decided to make a plea to them.
‘Ladies, I need your help. As you all must know, by now, Rowan Morrison is missing, and I believe she is being held somewhere on this island for a hideous purpose. A purpose you must, by now, know. Whatever your beliefs may be, you must see you cannot, as decent women and mothers, allow yourselves to become accomplices to murder. Tell me where can I find this child?’
The women remained silent, staring at him through their masks.
He wondered for a moment if he and they weren’t separated by a very wall of incomprehension. Did not the word ‘mother’, connoting tenderness, compassion, and gentleness, mean the same thing to them as it did to him? Women, he knew, were the traditional torturers among primitive people, bringing an imaginative flair to their torturing that seemed denied to them in other less visceral arts like painting or musical composition. Perhaps the she-wolf cared only for her very own whelp. But if his theory about Mrs Morrison was true, even that basic instinct might be absent from these extraordinary women. He longed to shout at them about their unnaturalness but knew it would be useless. The ordinariness, the very banality of their responses, maddened him, but continually disarmed him. Their voices were exactly like his own, like the voice of Mary Bannock, and superficially they seemed as like the people of Portlochlie as any near cousins do in a family. Their language was the same too but somewhere along the line the meaning of the most basic words and phrases seemed to have subtly changed for them. Nor had he any dictionary to help him. So that he knew he might as well rave against Hottentots, as against these, his own people.
After a moment he left the hairdresser’s, slamming the door behind him.
Howie started to work outward from the High Street, picking every third house, in a random search that he thought might have more success, because people could not know, for sure, that he was coming.
In one house he found all the doors locked so that he had to break the catch on the back door. Once inside, he heard someone humming on an upper floor in a childlike voice:
‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,
Have you any wool?
Yes, sir, yes, sir,
Three bags full …’
Creeping up the stairs he traced the voice to a room, the door of which was closed. The high little voice continued to croon to itself as Howie flung the door violently open. Seconds later he was retreating as a huge fat lady sitting naked in a hip bath threw a sponge at him, but then seeing the identity of her supposed ravisher, rushed after him like a great, gleaming, white leviathan, sloshing bath water about her as she grabbed at the panic-stricken Howie’s coat-tails.
‘Och, you’re that lovely. I thought you were Old Rue, the rapist, and that’s a fact. Com’n back, man!’ she cried, as if it were the best offer she’d had in a decade.
In another house he was admitted by a man wearing the mask of a codfish and who exuded a breath so infectiously whisky-laden that Howie winced away from it and ran upstairs to search the bedrooms. He was opening a double-doored cupboard only to find nothing in it, except some old overalls and a raincoat, when the door to the other half of the cupboard started to creak inexorably open of its own accord. Startled, Howie stood back to watch, in horror, as the absolutely stiffened body of a fully clothed, young girl fell headlong to the floor. He could see at once that it was not Rowan but another child with curly, chestnut brown hair and freckles. What looked like dried blood seemed to have flowed (and was now congealed) from the corner of her mouth to her chin.
He bent to feel her pulse when she opened a wicked, laughing brown eye and leapt to her feet, to run giggling from the room. Howie could also hear the liquorish laugh of the cod-faced man downstairs, who had obviously been in on the game. In a revenge that made him feel both exhausted and mean-spirited he was determined, by turning this particular home upside down, to make sure that the brown-haired girl’s game was not really a blind to distract him from the actual presence of Rowan somewhere else in the house. Rowan was not there.
The next household was aflutter with three extremely elderly ladies and their cats.
The old lady who admitted Howie treated him exactly like a guest who had been expected, instead of ignoring him as people elsewhere had done.
‘We had so hoped you’d come!’ she said, and introduced the other ladies. ‘This is Swallow and this, Lark. I’m Cuckoo … and you’re not to laugh at my name. We were all wild birds in our youth, you see. We’re Willow MacGregor’s aunts. Have you met Willow yet?’
‘Of course he has, Cuckoo,’ said Swallow. ‘He’s staying at the inn.’
‘I’m sure Willow overdoes it,’ said Lark. ‘That girl’s not strong. I keep telling Alder. Beautifully put together, of course. But a weak chest. Always had, ever since she was a little girl. You will take a little parsnip wine, Sergeant?’
They had pushed Howie gently into the parlour and produced a trolley on which a number of bottles of quite nauseous-looking drinks were assembled. He found a glass put into his hand by lace-mittened fingers and Swallow was pouring a viscous, saffron-coloured liquid into it. He sipped it very cautiously and held the contents in his mouth.
‘I’m looking for a young girl called Rowan,’ said Howie trying to seem stern and businesslike. ‘I have reason to think she is going to be a sacrifice today.’
‘Lucky girl. How well I remember when I first sacrificed myself. It was with the young lord’s grandfather. What a magnificent figure of a man he was,’ said Swallow most nostalgically.
‘He named us all, you know. Lark because she sang so prettily,’ said Cuckoo inconsequentially. ‘Will you try some of my tipsy cake?’
Howie was determined to find out something worth knowing from these old biddies or escape at once, leaving them with their memories.
‘Ladies, has there ever been a human sacrifice on this island “to …” what is the phrase Lord Summerisle uses? “to quicken the growth of your crops”?’
‘What a poetic way of putting it. Such a dear boy he is!’ said Cuckoo. ‘Yes, of course, when we were young we all “came out” together. The Old Lord gave a priapic ball. He used to call it our “mass sacrifice”. He had a great sense of humour. But that, of course, has quite gone out. Heaven knows what the young get up to these days!’
‘No one died of it?’ asked Howie impatiently.
‘Good gracious, no!’ said Cuckoo with a giggle that couldn’t quite help turning into a cackle. ‘I never heard of anyone dying of it.’
‘Lord Summerisle’s father once told us that he thought he might die without it,’ said Swallow. ‘It was when he was getting on a bit. We nicknamed him the “old bee”. He had all the young girls called after delicious honey flavours like Thyme, Heather, Lavender, and so on …’
‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I,’ sang Lark, and Howie could hear that she must have had a very pretty voice in her time.
‘He used to say that an old man who couldn’t learn to like sipping honey would have a very lonely old age,’ added Cuckoo wistfully.
‘I expect you’d like to come up to the bedrooms?’ asked Swallow suddenly quite brisk. ‘I can see, you impetuous boy, that you’re in no mood for drinking! But are anxious to get down to business!’
She took his still almost untouched glass of parsnip wine from him.
Howie was following the three ladies to the staircase, his mind reeling from the preceding conversation. He’d seen the Safeway Supermarket (Cooked Meat and Fats Department) amateur production of Arsenic and Old Lace. Were these old ladies exactly what they seemed and proclaimed themselves to be, or were they purveyors of doctored parsnip wine? Could this be Lord Summerisle’s trap and diversion? That, from the first moment he’d entered the house, and the old women had launched into their effusive welcome, had been
his suspicion. Behind their backs, he spat the small quantity of liquor he’d sipped, and so far held in his mouth, neatly into a potted philodendron, at the foot of the stairs. Then he spoke to them in a firm, loud voice that quite startled them and sent the various roving cats scurrying.
‘I’ll thank you ladies to stay downstairs while I search the premises!’
‘He wants to be masterful,’ said Lark with a tremor of excitement in her voice.
‘Nonsense!’ said Cuckoo. ‘It’s a form of extreme shyness. Anyone can see that!’
But they all stayed downstairs while he rummaged around the bedrooms with what sounded to them like increasing fury.
‘I hope you saw the picture of us as the “three Graces”,’ called Swallow, as he was starting to make his way down the stairs again.
He stood on the landing looking down at them in extreme distaste.
‘Graces?’ he roared at them. ‘You filthy old women. Never in my life have I seen such obscenities as you have up there. But to hell with that. What, may I ask, is this? And how did it get here?’
Howie held up a lock of hair bound with a thin gold cord. It was exactly the shade of Rowan’s hair, as seen in the photograph, which the sergeant now held in his other hand for comparison.
‘The old lord had it as a keepsake!’ said Cuckoo. ‘His son gave it back to me after his father died.’
‘It’s your hair?’ questioned the sergeant disbelievingly, looking at the grey-haired, ravaged old woman’s face with the still-fine bone structure and the violet-blue eyes, in which, to the sergeant’s great discomfort, tears now gathered, spilling down her wrinkled cheeks and making the rather excessive kohl she wore run. He took out his handkerchief and wrapped the hair in it before slipping it into his pocket.
‘Don’t worry. If you’re telling the truth, it’ll be returned to you after analysis. And if I were you, I’d take … that … obscene rocking chair you have up there and burn it. Good day, ladies!’
He spat the last word out sarcastically as he slammed the door behind him.
