The Wicker Man: A Novel

by Robin Hardy

  The masked figures watched in Howie a stranger, so strange to them, that he alone of the people abroad that May morning on Summerisle nursed no alter ego.

  The rowboat arrived at the seaplane, and Howie scrambled up into the cockpit. The harbour master waved a friendly goodbye.

  ‘Have a good flight, now!’ he called.

  Howie began to start the engine, but found the whole electrical system dead. He tried again and again with similar results. He checked the radio, but it too was quite dead. He looked for the emergency batteries but they had gone. Perhaps, it was just possible, they’d disappeared on the mainland. Howie hadn’t looked for the last few days.

  With a grim face he climbed out onto the wing and tried to swing the propeller. The ignition was on, but no juice seemed to be getting to the starter mechanism. He swung the prop twice, but there was no murmur from the engine.

  That was it. He knew now that the plane was going nowhere that day and he was without any radio. At least McTaggart knew where he was.

  The figures near the fishing net factory had now melted away. Standing on the float, Howie bleakly regarded the retreating harbour master.

  ‘Hey, you! Come back!’ he ordered.

  The harbour master continued rowing. Howie waved. The harbour master waved back and continued rowing. Howie remembered his loud hailer and took it out of the cockpit.

  ‘Come back!’ shouted Howie through the loud hailer. The gift of hearing seemed suddenly to have returned to the harbour master. He turned his rowboat round and headed back to the seaplane.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked the harbour master anxiously. ‘Won’t she go?’

  ‘No. Has anyone been near here?’ He asked this in the almost sure knowledge that someone had. He put from his mind the implication that if someone had deliberately sabotaged the plane, then it was likely that they were desperate enough to risk using violence on him. Their real purpose, he felt sure, was simply to stop him from getting help.

  ‘No one would touch your plane, Sergeant,’ said the harbour master.

  ‘Are you sure? Bit of a coincidence that neither the engine nor the radio is working. Even the emergency power is gone!’

  ‘If any of the kids had been interfering with it I think I’d have seen ’em,’ said the harbour master with apparent certainty.

  ‘I’ll want a boat!’ said Howie. ‘Something fast.’

  ‘It’s not possible, friend!’ said the harbour master. ‘Nothing puts out from here today.’

  ‘This is police business,’ said Howie raising his voice. ‘I’ve got to have a boat.’

  ‘I’ll give it to you straight, Sergeant,’ said the harbour master, suddenly rough and abrasive. ‘No one is going to give up their May Day to take you to the mainland. Now I can either leave you here on this seaplane or take you back to the island. Which is it to be?’

  ‘Don’t think you won’t hear more of this,’ said Howie furiously. ‘Obstructing a police officer …’

  ‘No one’s obstructing you!’ said the harbour master firmly. ‘Use your plane–if you can!’

  Ill-humouredly, Howie stepped into the boat. The harbour master dug in his oars and Howie sprawled on his back. The old salt looked apologetically at Howie as he helped him pull himself out of the swirling bilge. But Howie’s mind had passed on from the affront and the indignity of the situation. He was already trying to solve the huge police problem that faced him. If he really were to be marooned here without help for a whole twenty-four hours without access to a radio, where would he begin? But perhaps he was giving up on getting help too easily?

  For in leaping ashore a glimmer of hope came to Howie as he caught sight of the rows of sailboats and rowboats pulled up on a shingled beach near the quay. They were designed for inshore fishing, not for pleasure sailing, certainly not for speed. None appeared to have engines.

  ‘Have none of the island craft got engines?’ asked Howie.

  ‘What for?’ asked the harbour master. ‘The lads catch all the fish we need under sail, and with the “eye” to ward off any danger.’

  ‘So what about those?’ Howie said to the harbour master, pointing to the sailing boats. ‘Get a lad to help me, and I can sail to Stornoway.’

  He mentioned the nearest island of the Outer Hebrides group.

  ‘Aye, you could do that. Thirty-seven miles. Can you sail at all?’ the harbour master asked doubtingly.

  ‘Damned right I can. Have you a chart? For the Stornoway water, I mean?’ asked Howie.

  ‘Aye, I’ve got a chart. The east side of Stornoway’s a mite dangerous without one,’ mused the harbour master. ‘Specially as you could hardly make it before sunset!’

  ‘Sunset?’ the sergeant was trying to work it out. The man might be right. He was too much of a realist to think he knew more of these waters than the locals. Although he was, he knew, a competent sailor of dragon-class fourteen-footers in the archipelago-sheltered waters off Portlochlie. But only competent, nothing more. Yet with a local seaman he might have a chance.

  ‘If you could only get me a man to take his boat out …’ said Howie.

  ‘Tell me, would a Portlochlie man dare go out on the Sabbath?’ asked the harbour master, trying to get through to the sergeant.

  ‘It’s like that, is it?’ asked Howie fully, genuinely comprehending the problem for the first time.

  ‘On May Day here, it’s like that!’ confirmed the harbour master.

  Howie knew when he was beaten. He’d seen English and American tourists standing baffled and angry on the quayside in Portlochlie, with a fistful of money in their hands, trying in vain to persuade a local fisherman to take them out on the Sabbath. The same fisherman, Howie knew, might sneak out alone and unobserved, to fish, if he thought he could get away with it. Getting away with it meant literally not one of his friends noticing his transgression. These people here might have a different religion but they were of the same blood. His own blood. Stubborn, a bit hypocritical, and very proud. ‘Bloody Scots!’ said Neil Howie, to himself, under his breath.

  Howie turned and looked into the harbour master’s face. It was almost luminously red with the constant stream of malt whisky that must have flown past the yellowing teeth that grinned at him now in a regretful smile. The bloodshot blue eyes laughed their crinkly laugh that seemed uncorrupted by any real guile, only by time and that ocean of liquor.

  ‘Then I’ll have to find Rowan Morrison myself,’ he said to the harbour master, confident that whatever passed for tom-toms on this outrageous island would circulate that news fast enough. Having uttered this announcement, the sergeant started to walk back up the hill into the township. From now on he glanced over his shoulder at regular intervals and made sure at all times who or what was behind him. From now on Sergeant Howie walked warily.

  The High Street was empty save for a few young children making their way down from May Morrison’s sweetshop, sucking and slurping at huge yellow and orange lollipops. An old couple toiled upward on the same side as Howie.

  Then, unnoticed by either children or the old couple, the most extraordinary apparition appeared out of a side road farther up the hill. At first it reminded Howie faintly of a picture he’d seen of a jousting knight. But as it progressed, all alone, straight across the High Street and into another side road, he was able to make out more exactly what it was.

  He saw a single, bearded man of considerable height who was wearing an oblong hooped skirt, from the front of which obtruded a horse-sized head, which had the rolling eyes and flared nostrils of a pantomime dragon. From the back of the skirt trailed a long jointed tail that clattered on the cobblestones in the man’s wake. The skirt itself looked as if it had been made, like a patchwork quilt, from a dozen different spare pieces of material. It was, Howie supposed, the Hobbyhorse that Miss Rose had so recently described: a figure from the dance-drama in which she’d explained Lord Summerisle played the Teaser, or Betsy; ‘Tease’, Miss Rose had nicknamed him at the castle. Howie remembered th
at now. He’d thought it referred to something intimate between them–something personal, even sexy. Now he suspected the meaning might easily be more sinister.

  Even as he was thinking this he had broken into a run so as to discover where the Hobbyhorse had gone. But on reaching the side road it had entered, he could see no sign of it. Once again he was glad he’d studied the geography of the township on his first evening. He knew that the lane he faced eventually led around to the green, emerging near the back courtyard to the inn. He looked up the High Street and could see a crowd of people gathered near the top of the hill, moving in the general direction of the Green Man.

  Howie decided the inn was probably the focus of whatever was going on.

  If there was so general a movement of people, he reasoned, it must be because a meeting, a rally, or a ceremony had been called for a specific hour. He watched some hurried stragglers go up the High Street and decided to wait until he could approach the meeting obliquely and have a chance to eavesdrop.

  He strolled slowly up the street and paused outside a courtyard where some undertakers, stonemasons, carpenters, and coopers had their several signs, advertising their place of business.

  A cart, wreathed with flowers, served as a catafalque for a coffin. It looked like a float for a civic carnival. The phrase ‘May Day parade’ was in Howie’s mind as he watched a number of laughing, excited men hurrying to put a huge Suffolk Punch horse into the cart’s traces. But the atmosphere seemed a far cry from that of the cloth-capped beery worthies who marched raggedly behind their trade union banners on a mainland May Day. Howie had always regarded those parades as simply a sentimental celebration of their ‘right’ to march, by the ‘left’.

  Why these islanders needed such a large animal to pull the small, lugubrious burden of the coffin became plain when Howie saw the now-sweating men roll a couple of twenty-gallon wood barrels up a ramp and wrestle them onto the flat bed of the cart, beside the coffin.

  Howie walked wordlessly into the courtyard just as they were urging the carthorse out into the High Street. The animal had faltered for an instant, his big, white-spatted hooves slipping a bit on the cobblestones. The men stared, without hostility, at Howie as he lifted the lid of the coffin and peered in. It was empty and he waved them on with that economy of gesture that he might have used to speed traffic back in Portlochlie.

  Here, at last, he believed, was Rowan’s real coffin. All it awaited was her death and not, he assumed, by burning.

  As the sergeant followed them up the High Street, he tried to induce in himself a feeling of detachment. Apart from actually finding Rowan he had solved the riddle of her disappearance and the reason for it. A sacrifice of some kind was going to take place and he, Howie, was as irrelevant to what was going on as an animistic aborigine attending the Easter Sunday celebration at Saint Peter’s Square in Rome. The people of Summerisle were about as likely to hand over Rowan Morrison to him as the faithful at Saint Peter’s would be likely to hand over the Pope. But it was certain that if he tried to stop them from doing what they planned he would be in as much danger as Rowan.

  He had faced too many evasions and prevarications in the interviews he had conducted so far–he had been told too many lies to expect that suddenly in answer to the question, ‘Can you tell me where they’re holding Rowan Morrison?’ someone would answer simply ‘Sundial Street, number four, the house with the blue shutters!’ He knew it wasn’t going to happen like that. He would have to exploit all his wit and energy to finding clues as to where they were keeping her. That, in the absence of any help from outside, had to be his priority.

  What, he wondered, would he do to protect her, once he found her? Forming that plan, in any detail, would have to wait for at least an hour or so. But two things might work in his favour. First, even McTaggart would regard his failure to report in, on the radio, as a matter to be communicated, at once, to the Chief Constable. The police officer on Stornoway would probably be telephoned and sent, at the very least, in a coastguard launch, which could be at Summerisle in not too many hours. McTaggart knew that he was still on the island because he would never have taken off in the plane without making a prior radio contact to ‘air control’.

  Secondly, any defiance of the law by the islanders, once he’d found Rowan, might be averted if he were able to explain to them that they were all in danger of being charged with conspiracy to commit murder and that should they carry out their sacrifice, every one of them would be accessories to the capital crime. Conviction on the first count alone would carry a stiff prison sentence for all concerned. If they actually sacrificed the girl they would all be liable to get life imprisonment on conviction. Such was their isolation, under the tutelage of Lord Summerisle, that very few of the islanders probably realized these grim facts. It would be his duty to point out to them that ‘ignorance of the law is no defence’. He would also have to use his persuasive powers to show them that he, Howie, could influence what charges, if any, were brought, provided the girl was, at once, freed and allowed to accompany him to the mainland.

  ‘If’ was the operative word. If they gave him the chance to say any of this.

  Sergeant Howie had reached the edge of the green now and could see the cart, with the barrels, being welcomed into the courtyard of the Green Man by a crowd of people. They stood staring in the direction of the distant orchards, as if waiting. Then a ragged cheer went up for they could all see that Lord Summerisle was arriving in a smart trap, driven by the gillie. The laird was clothed in the kind of ‘uniform’ that Scots gentlemen affect to race meetings and other sporting events. Bareheaded, he wore a tweed jacket and his Morrison workaday kilt of mossy green. In his hand he held his deerstalker hat, which he raised and waved in polite acknowledgement of his tenants’ greetings.

  On his feet he wore his American-style sneakers.

  Watching the distant arrival of the island’s laird, Howie recognized that the game he must play out this day was primarily between himself and Lord Summerisle. If one were to liken the problem to a chess game, then Lord Summerisle was the opposing Queen, who still had all his/her players on the board. Rowan represented the ever-protected King, virtually powerless and symbolic. On Howie’s side there was only himself, who nevertheless had all the power of a Queen who had, however temporarily, been deprived of all his/her other chessmen. Summerisle’s game would be to keep him as far from Rowan as possible. Translated into real terms, that meant to Howie that Lord Summerisle, who would clearly prefer him to be elsewhere while the sacrificial ceremony took place (provided he was not on the mainland summoning police reinforcements), had probably already devised a means of keeping him out of the way. Howie must watch vigilantly for the diversionary move that would surely come. That it was likely to be a diversion rather than any actual physical restraint was, Howie thought, more Lord Summerisle’s style.

  Seeing that, so far, no one was taking the slightest notice of him, the sergeant walked in a semicircle till he reached some woodland on the edge of the green, not far from the inn. He now threaded his way among the scrubby trees until he came to the patch of giant rhubarb that grew behind the inn’s courtyard. From there he could survey the whole gathering and, in the deeply shadowed cover of the leaves, remain unseen.

  If the Merrie Scotland of Auld had ever really existed, and Howie knew enough history to be aware that the plague-ridden poverty of most simple folk in the good auld days was far from merry, then this scene was what the sentimental might have preferred to imagine. A long trestle table bore a feast of cakes and pies, soups and puddings. Not unexpectedly there was no fruit, but glasses of amber beer and golden cider came by the trayload from the back of the inn. The cheerful folk glowed with a pleasant goodwill towards each other, like people at a Christmas party.

  Lord Summerisle was practising a complicated dance step with the band. It seemed like a processional version of a Highland reel. Howie couldn’t help smiling at His Lordship’s garish but serviceable American sneakers, which se
emed incongruously out of place with his otherwise impeccable country-gentleman garb.

  In the centre of everybody stood the Hobbyhorse, and Willow was pouring beer down the man’s throat for him, while the ‘horse’ itself rolled its eyes. Able to study this bizarre figure more closely now, Howie realized that the tall bearded man didn’t have the use of his arms, which were enclosed in the quilted material. It was left to the ‘horse’s head’, whose jaw could snap, to bite playfully at Willow’s charming rump as she moved away with the empty glass.

  ‘Everything seems to be in working order, Oak?’ shouted Lord Summerisle to the Hobbyhorse man over the din of the gathering.

  ‘Aye, My Lord!’ answered Oak, practising little charges at some squealing, excited girls nearby.

  Lord Summerisle turned to Alder MacGregor, who was climbing out of a Punch costume flanked by six kilted men who were practising the making of a knot with their swords. The swords were thrust simultaneously into an interwoven star pattern by the six men. Howie was fascinated to see that the pattern the knot made was exactly like the famous Star of David of the Jews.

  ‘Mr MacGregor, I trust we aren’t going to have to let your costume out again this year?’ asked Lord Summerisle jovially. There was a general burst of laughter around the innkeeper, who scratched his belly with relief at being released from the tight costume.

  ‘I’ll manage, My Lord!’ smiled Alder MacGregor. ‘Thought it does seem to shrink a bit every year!’

  Lord Summerisle crossed to the swordsmen and watched as they locked and withdrew the swords a couple of times.

  ‘Are you men all right?’ asked Lord Summerisle; his tone was that of a benevolent colonel inspecting his troops.

  ‘We will be, My Lord!’ said one of the swordsmen.