The Wicker Man: A Novel

by Robin Hardy

  ‘And that she is missing,’ insisted Howie.

  Mrs Morrison looked at him pityingly and sighed.

  ‘Do I look like a mother with a missing daughter? Come now, you’re the policeman,’ she said as politely as she could.

  ‘Well, no, but …’ Howie realized how true her observation was, aware that he must look foolish.

  ‘But what …?’ asked Mrs Morrison.

  ‘I have to investigate,’ said Howie, trying to recover his sense of initiative and control.

  ‘Having come so far you mean?’ The woman’s question was pointed, but without malice.

  ‘Please, Mrs Morrison, it’s only that we have to follow up on information received.’ Howie was embarrassed.

  ‘From who?’ suddenly Mrs Morrison was genuinely curious.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,’ said Howie quickly. ‘It’s probably some crank. After all, if you tell me Myrtle is an only child …’

  ‘Of course she is,’ said her mother impatiently.

  ‘Well, there you are,’ said Howie. ‘Would you have any objection if I talked to her for a moment?’

  ‘Why should I?’ said Mrs Morrison laughing again. ‘You’re not going to eat her, are you?’

  Howie laughed politely and opened the door for her to pass through into the shop. Mrs Morrison smiled encouragingly at her daughter and went through the door. Howie closed it behind her and crossed so as to sit opposite Myrtle at the table. He could now see that the child was doing a drawing of a hare with huge ears and whiskers, which she was copying from a copper mould that had plainly been used to make the chocolate hares. She looked up and handed Howie a dripping paintbrush.

  ‘Here you are,’ said Myrtle kindly, ‘you can fill in the ears in grey.’

  Neat, dapper, Sergeant Howie was slightly put out to find his hand suddenly sticky with paint and quickly took the paint rag to clean himself. Carefully he selected a clean brush and started on the ears.

  ‘Myrtle, do you know Rowan?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course!’ said Myrtle.

  Howie was startled by her answer.

  ‘You do?’ he echoed.

  ‘Of course I do, silly,’ said Myrtle tolerantly, as if to someone deficient of reasoning power.

  ‘Where is she now?’ asked Howie.

  ‘In the fields,’ said Myrtle enviously. ‘She runs and plays all day. She is lucky!’

  ‘Will she be back for tea?’ asked Howie, now sure he was getting to the bottom of whatever mystery there might be.

  Myrtle laughed uproariously.

  ‘Tea?’ she asked incredulously. ‘She doesn’t have tea.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Howie meekly enough. ‘Doesn’t she like it?’

  Myrtle stopped laughing abruptly and stared at Howie, amazed at his question.

  ‘Hares don’t have tea, silly!’ said Myrtle emphatically.

  ‘Hares!’ Howie was totally nonplussed.

  ‘She’s a hare!’ said Myrtle. ‘Rowan’s a hare. She has a lovely time.’

  Howie sat thunderstruck. The door to the shop opened and Mrs Morrison reappeared.

  ‘Did I hear someone mention tea? You will stay, won’t you?’

  ‘Thank you. That’s very kind,’ he said, thinking how hard it was to question children for whom the distinction between fantasy and fact was often so slight.

  ‘Not at all. It must be thirsty work, asking all those questions,’ said Mrs Morrison happily, pleased that he seemed satisfied after his interview with Myrtle.

  Howie was served a Lucullan tea with scones and gingerbread men, clotted cream, and raspberry jam.

  ‘What is that mess of raspberry jam?’ quoted Myrtle, as she ate a huge mouthful of scone topped with cream and jam. She went on with her mouth full, imitating a grownup’s tone of voice:

  ‘Hush, my child, that isn’t raspberry jam.

  That’s old granddad run over by a tram.’

  Her mother laughed and chided her.

  ‘You didn’t get it quite right, Myrtle,’ she said, ‘and you mustn’t speak with your mouth full.’

  ‘I’ve never seen a tram,’ said Myrtle, as if that explained her lack of scansion. ‘Have you, mister?’ she asked Howie.

  ‘Yes, in a museum,’ he answered.

  Then Myrtle was wildly excited and wanted to know all about trams. The sergeant humoured her and wondered about her childish story of the hare. The family clearly had hares on the brain. ‘Mad as a March hare’ was a phrase that flitted through his mind as he talked to the jolly, likable mother and her fey daughter and enjoyed the domestic scene. It crossed his mind to think how much he now looked forward to sharing a home, their own home, with Mary.

  Then he had a second cup of tea and began to think out his next move. If there was an answer to the puzzle of a missing child whose alleged mother didn’t appear to miss her, it must probably lie elsewhere on the island. A good place to start, the sergeant had always found in such investigations, was the local inn, centre of gossip and informal club to the community. He determined to spend the night there.

  CHAPTER III

  Sunday Night –

  the 29th of April

  WHEN HOWIE LEFT MAY MORRISON’S HOUSE HE HESITATED at going straight to the inn. Although the early summer evening was already drawing in, it seemed, from his experience of these things, a little early for the bar crowd to have forgathered. While the light lasted, he preferred to look around the township to get his bearings. An hour’s stroll served him to commit the whole geography of the place to his memory. Few people seemed to be about and some young children, whom he stopped, and to whom he showed Rowan Morrison’s alleged photograph, ran giggling from him before he could get any sense from them.

  He thought he noticed the movement of lace curtains, the creaking and clicking of doors behind him, as if he were being covertly observed. But it was, he realized, hardly surprising in view of the unusual event his presence here must represent. He concentrated on his surroundings.

  In the little terraced yards that faced the setting sun as it sank to its distant mission of awakening North America, he noticed patterns of stones that he, at first, mistook for the rockeries familiar to him, in the little gardens of his neighbours, on the mainland. On closer inspection, however, these stones were clearly the carved heads of figures that seemed buried up to their necks in the island’s rich loam. They gazed all in the same direction, as Muslims face Mecca, their stone blind eyes towards the sunset.

  Howie remembered the tales of Celtic sailors setting out across that ocean even before good Saint Columba had come from Ireland to convert the Scots. Centuries before Christopher Columbus. His orderly, file-indexed mind noted the coincidence of similarity in the name of both saint and explorer as he made his way, in a reverie that was quite unusual for him, towards the Green Man.

  The gloaming had turned to night as he arrived at the inn. It was a whitewashed seventeenth-century building, rather larger than those normally found in the Western islands. The bar was uncurtained and light streamed from it onto the green; laughter and the competitive shouting of bar conversation filtered through the windows. Howie paused and looked up uncertainly at the large inn sign. It bore the face of an earthy man from whose ears, nose, and mouth grew sprays of greenery, which entwined about him to form a screen from which he peeped out at Howie. The refraction of the light, from the bar, caused by the shifting figures within, made the eyes seem to move.

  Inside the inn the scene was, at first sight, reassuringly similar to that in the bars he so carefully monitored in Portlochlie. Howie noted that here, as there, people lost the measure of the loudness of their voices as they drank. Their expressions, loosened into laughter or anger, lewdness or sullenness by the liquor, were different from the faces they wore each morning as they went about their appointed tasks.

  He was not entirely surprised that, when they noticed his presence in the bar, the people were suddenly, all of them, quite quiet. His was clearly an alien spirit of a
uthority and discipline, and he found familiar the feeling that they were constrained by his arrival in their midst. He greeted them courteously and they ‘Evening’d’ him back as they made a pathway for him to reach the bar. A florid man in his mid-fifties with a smiling, puckish face awaited him there expectantly.

  ‘You the landlord here?’ He asked this rather selfconsciously of the puckish man, knowing that this question from a policeman to a landlord was usually the opening to an unpleasant conversation for the latter.

  ‘Aye, I’m Alder MacGregor,’ said the man, with a twinkling smile. ‘And you must be the policeman from the mainland.’

  ‘That’s right,’ acknowledged Howie. ‘Howie’s the name, Sergeant Howie of the West Highland Police. Now it’s late and I’m quite obviously not going to get back to the mainland tonight. D’you think I could have a room for the night and a bite of supper? I mean, d’you think you could manage that?’

  Alder MacGregor clearly welcomed the idea of Howie staying at the inn.

  ‘Of course! Of course!’ he said. ‘My daughter will show you to your room.’ At these words of welcome the faintest murmur was apparent in the previously silent bar. ‘Willow,’ shouted Alder MacGregor, opening a doorway behind him, from which there now came the sound of a girl’s voice singing to the music of a fiddle, a tambourine, a squeeze box, and a drum.

  At the sound of Alder’s voice, this outer room also became silent. An instant later, Howie saw a magnificently built girl emerge. A blonde mane of hair framed a face of quite breathtaking sensuality. But the sergeant noticed her mouth most of all as she uttered the single innocently questioning word:

  ‘Father?’

  The ‘F’ in that word thrust out a quivering lower lip of such delicate succulence that Howie’s body allowed itself to want that lip. Want Willow’s mouth, want Willow’s delectable person. As fast as Howie’s body sensed this awful thought, almost as fast Sergeant Neil Howie, the affianced of Mary Bannock, put it, like Satan, behind him. Not for the first time that day he wondered if his awakened physical passion for Mary had not quite unbalanced the normally even tenor of his emotions. He reminded himself that it was Mary he wanted, not just a woman. And yet, and yet …

  ‘This is Sergeant Howie,’ he heard her father saying, ‘a policeman from the mainland who will be staying with us tonight.’ MacGregor turned with a ceremonious nod to Howie. ‘This,’ he added, rather as if he were presenting Helen of Troy to Paris, ‘is my daughter, Willow!’

  ‘Good evening,’ said Howie with as much evenness as he could muster.

  She smiled at Howie appreciatively as a good judge of horseflesh might size up a stallion for stud. For the first time in his entire life, Neil Howie felt as if a woman were measuring the build of him right through his coarse, blue serge uniform. As if she were weighing his ‘testimonials’ in the palm of her perfect hand. Totally off balance, he heard MacGregor speak again, as Willow, taking a door key from a hook, started to beckon to Howie to follow her through the crowded bar to the stairway.

  ‘She’ll show you to your room,’ said her father.

  But there was a great, sudden roar at this seemingly innocent remark. Howie, who had been about to assure Willow that he needed only to be given directions and had no need, yet, to go to his room, found himself pressed towards the lovely girl by the suddenly surging crowd. The old harbour master had spun her around and lifted one of her arms aloft as one might display a champion and to Howie’s total disbelief, the whole bar started singing at him:

  ‘Much has been said of the strumpets of yore

  Of wenches and bawdy house queens by the score

  But I sing of a baggage that we all adore,

  The Landlord’s Daughter …’

  Although he had edged away from Willow, she and the men in the bar seemed, for the moment, to take no more notice of him. Only the laughing, darting eyes of Alder openly watched Howie’s huge embarrassment with the puckish delight of someone presiding over a monstrously successful practical joke. The sergeant had so reddened that he looked as if he ought to, at the very least, undo his starched collar to facilitate the rush of blood to his face.

  ‘… You’ll never love another

  Although she’s not the kind of girl

  to take home to your mother …’

  By the time the second verse had started, Willow was moving back towards the sergeant, her arms akimbo, her green eyes wide with invitation, her firm, unfettered breasts bouncing to the jig of the music under her thin, muslin blouse. He tried not to look at her but instead to assume a mainlander’s ironical and detached interest at this bunch of wild and woolly islanders making an obscene spectacle of themselves, apparently for his benefit.

  ‘… Her ale it is lively and strong to the taste

  It is brewed with discretion and never with haste

  You can have all you like

  If you swear not to waste

  The Landlord’s Daughter …’

  Well, he was used to people trying to bait the police. He thought of hooligans at soccer games, demonstrators on picket lines, drunks at pub-closing time. He knew how to handle them. Go in and collar the leader. Get him under arrest and into a police cell double quick. But here he knew that tactic could not work. They were too many … and he was much too far from a police station. Plenty of time to get a whole posse of police over here to root out this sort of nonsense some other day, soon. But right now, he knew, like the good cop he was, that his priority was to find the Morrison girl, a task the impeding of which might well be the cause of this whole disgraceful exhibition. He wondered about that and his sense of humour came suddenly to his rescue.

  ‘… And when her name is mentioned

  The parts of every gentleman

  Do stand up at attention …’

  The men all thrust their bent arms in the air and gripped them with their other hands at the elbow. The classic old gesture was done in such unison as to seem quite comical to Howie, who laughed in spite of himself.

  A giggling Willow was standing so close to him now, as the others started to dance about the room, that he could smell the apple-sweet scent of cider on her breath; that and a compelling musky smell that seemed to come from her body. He turned his back on her only to see her mocking face again in the looking glass behind the bar. But his action seemed to have deflected her and she turned to join the others in the dancing. The men fondled her as she passed from one to the other, swinging and stamping and clapping with them in time to the music.

  ‘… Oh nothing can delight so

  As does the part that lies between

  Her left toe

  And her right toe …’

  Howie was disconcerted to find a rage mounting in him as he watched Willow in the looking glass allowing these drunken oafs to squeeze her buttocks and cup her sweet, bouncing dugs in their horny hands. She was offering herself to him and although he was determined to refuse her, his body forced his envy of those who touched her in a way that confused his mind. He tried to summon an image of Mary Bannock to blot Willow’s supple body from his thoughts. But he could not.

  ‘Make you feel jealous, does it, Sergeant?’ her shameless old pander of a father said to him, as he poured a couple of large tots.

  Howie ignored the landlord’s impertinent remark.

  ‘Can I have my dinner now, please?’ he asked.

  ‘It won’t be long, Sergeant,’ said Alder, amused. ‘Oh, don’t let them worry you. Why don’t you have a wee drink?’ he added, offering Howie a tot.

  Howie shook his head and lifted the hatch to put himself behind the bar, with Alder MacGregor, and away from Willow’s ripe body that she kept pressing close to him, each time she swung by with one of the dancers.

  He grabbed an ashtray and started banging it hard upon the bar. His face, meanwhile, glared around at the revellers in a determined bid to impose his will upon them and command their attention. Slowly the music and the singing and the dancing stopped.

  ‘I th
ink you all ought to know that I am here on official business.’ He said it loudly, not shouting. The few remaining people who were catching their breath, giggling or still singing were now quite silent and curiously respectful in their gaze. Pleased at the effect of his words, Howie repeated himself in a normal voice, and as pleasant a tone as he could manage after the events of the last few minutes.

  ‘I think you all ought to know that I am here to investigate the disappearance of this young girl, as the harbour master has probably already told you,’ said Howie with a slight smile, holding up Rowan’s photograph for them all to see. ‘Her name is Rowan Morrison and we have reason to believe she has been missing for several months. I want you to pass this photograph among yourselves, and if you recognize her, or have any clue to her whereabouts, speak out. Is that clear?’

  There were general murmurs of assent. Howie was gratified that Alder MacGregor made it his personal business to see that everyone in the bar examined the photograph. Perhaps, thought Howie, he’s trying to make some amends for allowing that disgraceful scene with his daughter. In order not to seem to be invigilating their examination of the picture, he turned his attention to a rather remarkable group of photographs on the wall. They had the same shape as school-group photographs and each was dated with a different year and signed by the same local photographer–T. H. Lennox. They spanned at least two decades and were remarkably similar in composition. The setting, in each case, was the sanctuary of a church, piled high with luscious and perfectly formed farm produce–vegetables, fruits, and particularly apples. Standing astride the pile in each photograph was a pretty, pubescent girl of around thirteen. Last year’s photograph was missing. The nail on which it had hung was there, and so was its faint outline on the wall, but that was all. As Howie took in these photographs, looking, in vain, for any girl with a likeness to Rowan Morrison, he could hear the murmured exchanges of those who were examining the photograph of Rowan.

  ‘Not one of ours.’

  ‘Never seen her at all.’