The Wicker Man: A Novel

by Robin Hardy

  But in his everyday policeman’s mind the everyday questions kept posing themselves, and he asked them with as much nonchalance as he could muster, disallowing and qualifying much of what he heard in the answers.

  ‘Lord Summerisle and the rest of you don’t believe that there is anything for Beech to guard, is that right? Maypoles are in and sacred groves, as it were, are out?’

  Howie realized that this had come out as a flippant question but the gillie took it at its face value.

  ‘Well, of course there are always Protestants …’ she said. ‘That’s what we call people here who don’t understand the truth. They protest that the sacred grove is at the heart of our religion. Lord Summerisle is very patient with them. He uses reasoned argument and logic and they always see the light. But, of course, Beech has been very strange since he was a little boy. Mother was a bit odd too. Convinced she’d conceived Beech bathing in the Source. For a time, Beech thought he was the rightful Lord Summerisle. It was so sad and embarrassing for the rest of us in the family …’

  The poor gillie was close to tears again.

  ‘Of course, I should have taken him his food at midday but I was having a little booze-up with Alder MacGregor instead. Then the pleasure of meeting you quite put it out of my mind till late this afternoon. Lord Summerisle wouldn’t be at all pleased to hear I’d taken you there, so you won’t tell him, will you?’ Her voice was genuinely anxious.

  Howie felt he could promise what she asked with a clear conscience. Someone from the County Department of Health would have to be told about Beech as soon as he got back to the mainland. But to discuss him with Lord Summerisle was quite pointless, might even be dangerous.

  ‘I promise I won’t mention it to His Lordship,’ he said, noticing they were on the outskirts of the village, not far from the church and the green.

  ‘Where does the old gravedigger live?’

  ‘Old Loam?’ she asked. ‘Why d’you want to see him? Grouchy old thing he is. I was hoping we could go straight to the Green Man. There’ll be a great “knees-up” there tonight. You wouldn’t want to miss that surely?’

  ‘I don’t care for dancing,’ said Howie firmly. ‘I’m afraid I have to find Loam right away. But perhaps he’ll be at the inn too?’

  ‘Not he,’ said the gillie. ‘Drinks alone in his cottage. People are afraid of him because of his job. It’s a shame really, but he’s not very welcome at the inn. Particularly at this season of the year, of course.’

  The gillie obligingly left Howie off at Old Loam’s cottage and hurried on to the ‘knees-up’ at the inn. The music from it could be heard wafting its way across the green. She promised Howie, before she left him, that he only had to walk across the green to fetch her, and she would be glad to be of service to him in providing her cart.

  Howie expected Old Loam would be sour and angry at being asked to come out and dig up a grave, on such short notice, at night. On the contrary, he could hardly have been more pleased at the request. His first question, after the sergeant had aroused him from a semi-stupor at his fireside and explained the need to exhume Rowan, was: ‘Did Lord S. say I could keep the earth what was over the grave?’

  ‘We didn’t discuss it, I’m afraid,’ said Howie, puzzled and impatient. ‘But I can’t imagine why you shouldn’t. What’ll you do with it?’

  ‘Sell it, of course,’ said Old Loam. ‘Lord Summerisle strictly forbids taking the earth off the top of graves. Course he’s right. We’d have the place plundered right and left if it was allowed. But at an “exhuming”, as you call it, I reckon the earth off the top of the coffin’d be mine by rights.’

  Loam was collecting his spade and some rope from the tiny hallway of his cottage as he chattered. He also took a wooden box from a cupboard. It was marked ‘finest grave dirt’, under which was written, in smaller letters, ‘for deeper sleep’.

  Howie patiently watched the old man light a hurricane lamp and put on a pair of rubber waders, babbling with excitement about the ‘grave dirt’.

  ‘There are that many people who sleep poorly these days. Always going to Dr Ewan or Mr Lennox for rubbishy specifics made from poppies and the like. When grave dirt on the floor of the room above your bed makes you sleep like a baby and no after-effects in the morning … and not a great long sleep like the Hand of Glory, y’understand. You can’t beat grave dirt for giving you a lovely, deep, deep, sleep …’

  Their arrival in the graveyard was heralded for all the living creatures, in the dark yew trees and on the ruined walls of the church, by a loquacious owl. It hooted incessantly, unnerving even the bats that had been happily hunting somnolent fruit flies that lurked in the meadows of the adjacent orchards. Howie wondered if the animal kindgom shared man’s instinctive taboo and dread about digging up the dead.

  The digging process was not quite as lengthy as Howie had feared because Rowan appeared to have been buried at the normal six feet level and not at Loam’s precautionary nine.

  Howie saw, in the lantern light, a sprinkling of soft pellets beside the grave. He picked them up and examined them in the palm of his hand.

  ‘Spoor,’ said the old man glancing at the pellets, wiping the sweat out of his eyes.

  ‘No,’ said Howie. ‘Are there rabbits around here?’

  ‘That’s never rabbit spoor,’ said the old man scornfully.

  ‘I know that,’ said Howie impatiently. ‘It’s the regurgitated bone and fur from an owl’s dinner! The dinner could have been a rabbit by the look of it.’

  The gravedigger looked at Howie with a glimmer of respect.

  ‘So he’s quite the detective,’ he said, adding, ‘that’s right. But no owl could eat a rabbit, ‘fore makin’ that pellet of its bones and fur. Mouse or rat maybe. Plenty of rats hereabouts. Wait till we open the coffin!’

  ‘These are the pellets of a snowy owl. I heard its voice when we came into the graveyard. It could eat a rabbit I should think,’ said Howie.

  ‘Aye, I’ve heard of snowy owls taking hares at night right out of their ’forms. Like a bairn being taken out of its cradle by a wolf in the old days,’ said the old man, addressing himself again to his task. ‘But I’ve never seen one here myself,’ he went on. ‘I’m too busy guarding this graveyard from humans to worry much about birds.’

  Howie warded off Loam’s further whispered discussion of the dangers of people robbing graves of the corpse’s hands or arms for the Hand of Glory. The old man was just drunk enough to be repetitious and Howie had already determined to recommend a guard for the graveyard, while police and priest or minister would go about their urgent work of cleansing the whole island of its insistent heresies. Meanwhile, he held the hurricane lamp and helped get the ropes around the coffin when it was finally reached and the clinging clay was scraped away from it by Old Loam’s spade.

  When the coffin had been hauled out and placed on the grass in the graveyard, Howie ordered Old Loam to lever open the top of the coffin with his spade. In the event the wood splintered, they both would have to heave the several separate planks that formed the lid away from the coffin. Howie had, in the course of his police duties, seen a good many stomach-turning sights, mostly as the result of road accidents. Here, he was prepared for the corpse of a girl who had been burned or poisoned and who might already have suffered six months’ decomposition.

  Instead, he found only the rather smelly remains of a hare!

  Not a ‘silly old rabbit’, he felt sure, but a ‘lovely March hare’, remembering Rowan’s mother’s words.

  Staggered by this discovery, Sergeant Howie stared and stared at the dead animal while Old Loam first broke into giggles, then laughed out loud. It was a very unpleasant sound.

  But a nastier sound by far interrupted Loam’s laugh so that he strangled it with a kind of screech. Coming at them from the ruined belfry of the church was a white shape that seemed to hoot and howl as it came. Howie looked up at its yellow eyes in the lamplight and threw himself down across the open coffin. Loam did not
look twice at the creature that descended upon them like a blast of cold wind moving through the night. He just turned and ran, tripping and tumbling and screaming, from the graveyard. The snowy owl Howie had heard was after the little dead hare in the coffin, but faced with the protecting figure in thick blue serge, it flapped its great white wings furiously and wheeled up into the air, striking out over the orchards in search of voles or moles or any other succulent little rodent that might be abroad that night.

  Howie watched the snowy owl depart and then grabbed the little hare by its ears and walked away from the graveyard without a further word to Old Loam, who cowered trembling at the lych-gate. As he strode across the green and was still thirty or forty yards away from the inn, he saw the gillie driving her cart around from the courtyard and onto the road that led back to the castle. She was whipping up her horse into a fast trot, and when Howie shouted at her, asking her to take him with her, she didn’t appear to hear him.

  That Lord Summerisle was at the bottom of almost everything that happened on the island was clear enough to Howie. The sergeant knew that he couldn’t sleep until he’d confronted the laird with the sacrilegious evidence of the desecrated graveyard. For it was plain that either Rowan’s body had been burned so that nothing but ashes remained, or her person, alive or dead, was still being kept elsewhere on Summerisle.

  Searching his mind desperately for some form of transport that he could commandeer, Howie was forced to dismiss horses and carts, for he couldn’t drive them himself. Some people had a way with horses. Howie knew he hadn’t!

  Now that even the friendly gillie had obviously been avoiding him, what chance of real cooperation would he have from any of those drunken jokers in the inn whose carts and traps or carriages and broughams were parked in the courtyard? He went on to thinking of where he could find a bicycle when he remembered the single piece of mechanized locomotion he’d seen on the island: Dr Ewan’s motorcycle.

  Thanks to his careful, early reconnaissance of the township on the day he’d landed (how long ago that now seemed), Howie was easily able to find his way back to the doctor’s house. He rang the bell, but there was no answer. Howie went around to a wooden gate that stood between the Ewan house and the Lennox chemist shop next door. He unlatched this gate and went through to a small yard behind. To his relief the sergeant found the doctor had not taken the motorcycle with him, wherever he’d gone, but left it in a little shed. Howie wheeled the machine out into the street and wrote a note to Dr Ewan explaining that he’d commandeered his property temporarily, in the name of the law. As he put the dead hare in one of the copious saddlebags, he worried about taking a doctor’s transport, although, strictly speaking, he was within his rights in an emergency. An apparent murder case was certainly that, he reassured himself, as he kicked the aging B.S.A. motor into life.

  Unlike horses, motorcycles were very familiar to Howie, who’d excelled in riding and maintaining the machines while at the police college. He roared through the empty streets of the township, skidding slightly on the cobbles that had recently received their daily ration of fine, warm rain from the Atlantic. Avoiding the environs of the crowded inn, he rode straight across the green, scattering the evening’s complement of lovers as he went, and found the road past the schoolhouse that he’d taken with the gillie that morning. He was surprised not to overtake the gillie’s cart, but supposed she’d taken the other route, perhaps again to visit the poor, deranged Beech.

  The great castle, fringed by its moonlit, silvery palm trees, was almost entirely dark when Howie arrived in the courtyard outside the front door, except for some light peeping through chinks in the curtains at the huge window of the great hall. He could hear singing from inside, distant but distinct, coming from the great hall and accompanied on an organ. The singing was not disturbed by his ringing of the bell and he listened while he waited, sure that it was Lord Summerisle’s voice he could hear, accompanied by that of a woman.

  ‘A maiden did this tinker meet and to him boldly say

  Oh sure my kettle hath much need, if you will pass my way

  She took the tinker by the hand and led him to her door.

  Says she, my kettle I will show and you can clout it sure.’

  The refrain was at least as strange and lewd as any of the songs he’d already heard on the island.

  ‘For patching and plugging is his delight

  He hammers away both by day and by night.’

  When Broom opened the door the sound that greeted Howie from the great hall boomed louder still.

  ‘I hope you’re not going to tell me Lord Summerisle is expecting me again, with this?’ said the sergeant angrily, before Broom could speak, waving the dead hare in his face. The piper only smiled and led the way, once again, to the great hall, whose door was open. He left Howie to enter, unannounced.

  The sergeant stamped into the huge room and then stopped breathlessly to take in the new scene. Lord Summerisle sat, in his dress kilt, at the vast steam organ, playing it with virtuoso skill, and singing in his basso profundo. He had just pulled the stop marked ‘flute d’amour, 4 feet’, adding a most mellifluous sound to the song. It took Howie fifteen seconds more to find the owner of the female voice, who was, as he had expected, Miss Rose.

  The schoolmistress lay stretched upon the skins, by the roaring fire, leaning against a huge deerhound and dressed in something clinging that looked like gossamer cheesecloth. She sang with Lord Summerisle, keeping time with a great silver goblet, that looked as if it had been left behind on Summerisle after the last bout of Norse rapine. Their salacious glee at the words of the song nauseated Howie, but he was a singer himself and listened for a moment or so and marvelled at the beauty of their voices and the rich tones of the steam organ. Lord Summerisle’s bass voice was alone with the flute d’amour as he sang:

  ‘Fair maid says he, your kettle’s cracked.

  The cause is plainly told.

  There hath so many nails been drove,

  That mine own could not take hold.’

  Listening to them and watching them, resentment and fury mounted in the sergeant so that he could feel the bile rising in his throat. A child, a child was at stake. Murdered or missing. Lost and unhappy, in pain or, thanks to God’s mercy, perhaps in heaven. Whatever had happened to little Rowan–whether by a sin of this dreadful couple’s omission, or of their truly frightful commission–they quite clearly didn’t care a damn.

  He marched noisily into the great hall and hurled the hare across the room so that it landed on the flat stones between Lord Summerisle and Miss Rose. They both looked up at Howie, startled and bewildered. The organ’s sound died away with a great hissing groan.

  ‘I found this,’ shouted Howie, ‘in Rowan Morrison’s grave.’

  ‘Little Rowan loved the March hares,’ murmured Lord Summerisle wistfully.

  ‘It’s sacrilege. A crime still, My Lord, on the statute book of the kingdom of Scotland,’ shouted Howie.

  Miss Rose, who looked at the dead hare with a blandness and complacency that astonished Howie, now explained the matter in her maddeningly assiduous way.

  ‘T’would only be sacrilege if the graveyard were consecrated to the Christian belief. Personally I think it’s a very lovely transmutation. I’m sure Rowan is most happy with it, aren’t you, Tease?’ she said, calling Lord Summerisle by this odd nickname. But the sergeant was standing for no more of this.

  ‘Look here, miss,’ he said furiously. ‘I hope you don’t think that I can be made a fool of indefinitely.’ Whereupon he shouted at them both. ‘Where is Rowan Morrison?’

  ‘Why there she is,’ said Miss Rose, quite unruffled, ‘what remains of her physically. Her soul, of course, may even now be …’

  The sergeant interrupted her by standing with his back to her and addressing Lord Summerisle.

  ‘Lord Summerisle, for the last time, where is Rowan Morrison?’ he asked in a thunderous voice.

  Lord Summerisle rose to his full six and a half
feet and stood looking grimly down at the sergeant.

  ‘I believe, Sergeant Howie, that you are supposed to be the detective here,’ he said coldly.

  ‘My Lord, a child is reported missing on your island,’ Howie explained with a kind of desperate patience. ‘I come here and, at first, I’m told there is no such child. I find there is and that she is dead. Has succumbed to a metamorphosis, according to Dr Ewan! I subsequently discover there is no death certificate, and now I find that though there is a grave, there is no body.’

  ‘Very perplexing for you,’ said Lord Summerisle not unsympathetically. ‘What do you think could have happened?’

  ‘Though I have absolutely no hard evidence for this, yet, it is my theory that Rowan Morrison may have been murdered under circumstances of pagan barbarity, which I can scarcely bring myself to believe as taking place in the twentieth century. It is my intention to return to the mainland tomorrow and report my suspicions to the Chief Constable of the West Highland Constabulary, and demand a full investigation into all the affairs of this heathen island!’ Howie spoke grimly, curtly.

  ‘You must, of course, do as you see fit, Sergeant!’ said Lord Summerisle, apparently unconcerned by the threat. ‘It is perhaps just as well that you won’t be here tomorrow to be offended by the sight of our May Day celebrations.’

  On the word ‘tomorrow’, something came back to the sergeant from the card index of the case he had organized in his mind.

  ‘Tomorrow’s tomorrow,’ he repeated aloud. ‘Of course. My Lord, I may even return from the mainland in time to prevent your celebrations taking place!’