The Wicker Man: A Novel Read online

  ‘Please take care!’ she called after him and then started running down the long sloping plateau that led back to the ferry at Taskpool, which linked the barren scenic isle of Saint Ninian’s to the busy fishing port of Portlochlie. Try as she would she could not stop the tears that kept coming to her eyes. She tried to remind herself that no criminal in his right mind risks shooting a policeman in Britain. So universal is public approval of an unarmed police force that the criminal world would nearly always ‘hand over’ a cop killer. The nagging worry in the back of Mary’s mind was that the people who rob rare birds of their precious eggs are not normal criminals. Some, she knew, did not even do it for profit (although a golden eagle’s egg would be very valuable) but out of a collector’s insatiable acquisitiveness. Such a person might not act as would an everyday criminal. This last thought made her run even faster, though her lungs were almost bursting with the effort.

  Howie, meanwhile, was running with a trained athlete’s sense of pacing himself. Although rugby football was his sport, Howie played on the ‘wing’ and was used to a couple of hours, at a stretch, of almost incessant running. He watched the place where the man had disappeared but he kept a careful eye on the terrain around him. If the man had killed the eagle, and it was almost inconceivable that he hadn’t, why, he wondered, hadn’t he reappeared?

  Then he saw that the female eagle had left her nest again and was hovering above the spot where her mate had stooped. Instants later Howie had reached ground high enough for him to be able to see both the man and the male eagle.

  The man had evidently only wounded the bird for he was kneeling on the ground using the butt of the shotgun in a desperate attempt to keep the great, fluttering creature away from him. But the eagle kept attacking again and again, his claws and beak outstretched, only to be warded off with another swingeing blow from the gun. He hasn’t had time to reload, thought Howie, calculating that around four hundred more yards lay between him and the eagle’s attacker.

  Howie was sickened to see that the man had just broken the great bird’s wing. Gamely, the eagle made another attempt to fly at the man’s head but toppled pathetically sideways leaving his enemy a chance, at last, to stand up and fumble hurriedly for cartridges with which to reload his shotgun. He had just broken open the gun and was about to reload, when the female eagle stooped on him. She came so fast that only the sound of her wings made him start to raise his head before she had him by the shoulders, exactly as she might have grasped a hare or a lamb, her talons sinking straight into his flesh. The man shrieked, dropped his gun, and tried to shield his head against the she-eagle’s hammering beak.

  Howie had about two hundred yards more to go and used the distance to check the terrain ahead of him. He could see now that the bed of a stream had been used by the man to approach the eyrie. About a quarter of a mile away the stream disappeared over the hillside. Here, Howie knew, the hill descended steeply for another mile to the coast road that led to the small village of Talleter on the west side of the island.

  The man struggling with the eagle had flung himself to the ground, twisting his body to try to make the bird get off his back. It was the right manoeuvre because, after a savage peck at his face, the she-eagle soared away heading straight for her nest. The man grabbed his gun, which lay still ‘broken’ but with one cartridge in the breech. He snapped it closed and was cocking it when, for the first time, he saw Howie.

  ‘’Ullo there!’ gasped the man in a Londoner’s sharp, nasal whine. ‘That f—g bird f—g near killed me … Hey. What the f—!’

  Howie had never paused for an instant in his run. On the contrary he had increased his pace as if he were coming around the goalposts for a touchdown. The man just had time to bring the gun up and try to ward him off, or perhaps even to shoot at him, when Howie left the ground in a flying rugby tackle that gripped the man’s thighs just above the knees, and brought him to the ground with a bone-jangling crash. Howie had snatched hold of the gun, expelled the cartridge, and hurled the weapon away into the heather before the man could catch his breath. But he had no time to utter a word because Howie at once grabbed one of his wrists with both hands and spun him over onto his face, forcing his arm up his back as far as the shoulder blades. He ignored the man’s shout of pain and looked over at the still fluttering body of the male eagle. The bird was clearly dead and mercifully so, considering the fearful injuries it had suffered.

  ‘I’m a police officer!’ Howie barked the fact in the man’s ear. ‘I’m charging you with killing a golden eagle and I’m cautioning you that anything you say may be taken down and used in evidence. Now get on your feet, man!’

  The last ferry left the small township of Taskpool on Saint Ninian’s Isle an hour before sunset that evening.

  Neil Howie and Mary Bannock stood on the tiny upper deck and watched the seabirds. Below, on the vehicle deck, the eagle killer sat in a police car, his head and shoulders bandaged and his wrists handcuffed.

  ‘What’ll he get, Neil?’ asked Mary, referring to the prisoner.

  ‘Probably just a fine if it’s a first offence. Which I doubt. I’m sure he’s working for some bloody collector down in London. It sounds daft but the firearm offence could be more serious for him if it turns out he hasn’t got a licence. Of course he says he’s lost it but that’s easy to check.’

  ‘What do they give you if you wipe out the last of a species?’ she asked.

  ‘The same!’ answered Howie bitterly. ‘I just thank God that someone in Talleter yesterday tipped us off about that bastard or he might have wiped out the whole nest. Of course, they probably didn’t know he’d got a gun with him.’

  Howie sloughed off his anger as he watched the water birds and went on: ‘Och, don’t let’s think about him, Mary. Look at him. He’s early!’ He pointed to a bird perched on the big wooden posts which, clad with old car tyres, lined the ferry dock.

  ‘I don’t recognize him,’ admitted Mary.

  ‘A great shearwater, I think,’ said Howie. ‘Early for him to be hereabouts.’

  On the trip across the five-mile strait to Portlochlie they enjoyed themselves identifying four different kinds of gull: the common gull, the blackhead, the greater blackbacked, and the herring gull. Although none of these gulls was rare, Howie always recorded the birds he’d seen during the day each evening before he went to bed. He made a point of noting what they’d been doing, whether preening, nest building, feeding, migrating, or whatever. It was a discipline that was not dissimilar to the notes he made each night in connection with his police work. He always categorized people he’d interviewed in a case. He tried to remember first impressions and record them. The eagle killer would be as dispassionately noted as his victim.

  It was while he and Mary were identifying gulls that Constable McTaggart hurried up and put a letter into Sergeant Howie’s hands. Hugh McTaggart was an unambitious officer who, although quite a bit older than Howie, had often been passed over for promotion. Partly, perhaps, because he made no secret of the fact that he preferred flyfishing to police work.

  ‘It’s an anonymous letter for you, Sergeant,’ said Mc-Taggart. ‘Came this morning. Sorry, I forgot it just now. What with all the excitement of getting chummy patched up. D’you know the doc told him he was sorry he could not let him bleed to death after he saw what was left of the eagle.’

  ‘Is it just the usual filth?’ asked the sergeant, wearily taking the letter from McTaggart.

  ‘C’mon, Sergeant. You ken I’d have no bothered you with it if it was not important.’ McTaggart was slightly aggrieved.

  ‘Of course not, Hugh. Sorry,’ said Sergeant Howie who had already started to read the letter attentively.

  Dear Sergeant Howie,

  None of us have seen May Morrison’s daughter, Rowan, since last year. She is only twelve and has been missing from her home for many months.

  She couldn’t have left the island by herself. She’s too young. Her mother won’t say anything about it. Just to mi
nd my own business. Well, I reckon it’s all our business if a kid disappears, that’s why I’m writing you this letter.

  Signed,

  A child lover on Summerisle.

  P.S. I enclose a picture of Rowan Morrison.

  He looked at the snapshot of a pretty auburn-haired twelve-year-old girl standing in front of a blossoming apple tree. It was a sunny, smiling face with the fair Scandinavian cast to the features that is often found in the outer isles where, in the dark ages, the Vikings raped and pillaged, leaving little but their blondness and a few place names behind. The envelope clearly bore the date stamp of Summerisle, the farthest west of the Outer Hebrides group of isles and, although populated, a private island that Sergeant Howie had never previously had reason to visit.

  ‘Can I have a word with you, Sergeant?’ McTaggart seemed not to want to speak what he had on his mind in front of Mary.

  Sergeant Howie nodded and walked with McTaggart to the taffrail overlooking the vehicles in the centre of the vessel.

  ‘Will you be flying there on Monday?’ asked McTaggart, referring to the fact that Sergeant Howie would need to open up an investigation on Summerisle as soon as possible, but that the day he usually flew on his visits to the islands, in the police seaplane, was Monday and not, as the constable feared, on the morrow. Sergeant Howie absent on a Sunday invariably meant that McTaggart, being the senior constable, had to remain in charge of the Portlochlie police station.

  ‘Monday?’ Howie spoke sharply. ‘The child’s already been missing from her home for some time. It’s an urgent case, man, no doubt about it. I’d go tonight if it wasn’t too late already to be flying to the isles before dark. I’m sorry, Hugh, but you’ll have to be on duty again tomorrow. Clock up a little more overtime. Reorganize the roster with the other lads till I get back.’

  ‘Oh, bullshit, Sergeant! Lots of kids wander off. She’s maybe fallen down some cliff. Why don’t we radio them?’ McTaggart was angry that the sergeant’s zealousness was going to cost him a day’s fishing.

  ‘On Summerisle? You know damn well, Hugh, it’s got no radio. No telephone. Just the packet boat calling once a week.’ Howie spoke with a quiet, firm authority that closed the matter.

  ‘What time will you be going?’ asked McTaggart, resigned now.

  ‘After the early service, around eight thirty,’ said Howie, referring to his intention to go to the early Communion service at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church. ‘Have you ever been to Summerisle?’ the sergeant went on, chatty now that he had quelled McTaggart’s small rebellion.

  ‘No. But I’ve tasted the famous Summerisle apples of course,’ answered McTaggart thoughtfully. ‘But it’s strange, isn’t it? All that fruit.’

  ‘The whole place is a bit strange by all accounts. No licensing laws. Dancing on Sunday. Oh, that’d appeal to a heathen like you, McTaggart.’

  Sergeant Howie laughed as he said this for it was a joke between them that Hugh McTaggart resented all the Presbyterian-inspired Scottish laws relating to the Sabbath, mostly for the extra work it involved policing them. Privately, Howie agreed with the older man, but for different reasons. He could not think of the small-minded, mean-spirited horrors of the Scottish Sabbath as God-given. But to him the law was the law, however he felt about it.

  McTaggart returned to the police car to keep his eye on chummy, and Howie rejoined Mary to watch the different birds that marked their approach to the mainland. Many were the birds you would expect to see around a busy fishing harbour, gulls and other scavengers. But Mary pointed to a kittiwake and reported having seen some eider ducks flying across the marshes to the south of the dock at Portlochlie, which they were now approaching. Her Neil politely asked her to describe the colouring of the ducks and then, before she had time to register her indignation at his disbelief, he became quite excited to see a bird he was sure could only be a rare ivory gull. It hovered above the ferry’s wake but they could not easily see the underside of its wings. Howie decided to list it as a ‘reported’ sighting.

  Meanwhile the ferry made its arrival at Portlochlie, distracting the couple’s attention from the birds. The town lay to the north of the dock, a mixture of the whitewashed, terraced houses of the poor and the solid reddish granite buildings of the well-to-do. Howie watched the ferrymen getting the police car off first and saw McTaggart turn on the winking blue light on top of the vehicle and speed away to the local hospital to get chummy some further medical attention before locking him up for the night.

  When all the cars had left the ferry, Neil and Mary noticed two cars waiting to come aboard. One of the deckhands went over to the leading car.

  ‘There’s no more tonight!’ he said to the driver who had wound down his window.

  ‘I told you that was the last one!’ said an American woman’s voice from inside the car.

  While the deckhand went to break the bad news to the second car, Howie paused. He subscribed fully to the motto that a policeman is always on duty, but now he could see that he would have to perform a rather unpleasant duty that he knew the deckhand had shirked. The latter was already hurrying towards the Admiral Cochrane Public House that quenches the thirst of those who take the ferry between Portlochlie and Saint Ninian’s Isle. Except, of course, on the Sabbath when the ferry doesn’t run and all the pubs in Portlochlie are closed in deference to the edict of Scotland’s Presbyterian majority.

  ‘Good evening, sir,’ said Sergeant Howie to the driver of the first car, a greying man of about fifty with a pleasant, tanned face. ‘I’m afraid there’ll be no more ferries till Monday morning!’

  ‘You’re kidding?’ the American voice expressed disbelief. ‘Forgive me, but why the hell not?’ he added, getting out of his car.

  ‘What’s that he said?’ asked the woman from inside the car. ‘I can’t get a word they say with these accents.’

  ‘Zilch till Monday!’ translated her husband patiently. ‘We’re going to have to shlep back into town here and find a hotel.’

  ‘What?’ came the American lady’s voice pitched several semitones above the shrike in full song. ‘Well you tell him we got reservations over on Saint whosit’s island tonight!’

  ‘Yeah, well we missed the last ferry, hon’,’ said the American hopelessly, looking rather appealingly at Neil and Mary as if he hoped they’d be able to produce some answer that would save him from his wife’s wrath. But the lady herself was about to take charge of the situation, getting out of the car and staring across at Neil Howie rather accusingly.

  ‘You in charge here?’ she asked.

  ‘No, madam!’ said Howie civilly. ‘I’m a police officer, off duty. But if I can help in any way?’

  ‘Okay. How come there’s no ferry till Monday?’ she asked.

  ‘Tomorrow’s the Sabbath, madam!’ said Howie. ‘In Scotland we observe the Sabbath.’ He spoke more like a tourist guide than a reproving Scot.

  At the mention of the Sabbath the lady looked momentarily surprised but then fell silent, suddenly getting back into the car, leaving her husband to cope with the problem. A man and a woman from the second car came and joined the American. Both were young and looked English. They had heard the foregoing conversation.

  ‘Know of a nice hotel we might get in?’ asked the English girl of Mary.

  ‘Here in town there’s the Rothsay Arms, but it’s really for “commercials”. It’s not very nice if you’re on holiday,’ said Mary. ‘But there’s the Highland Guest House, that’s ten miles down the coast with a beautiful view of the island. They say the food’s very good too.’

  ‘That I’ll believe when I taste it!’ said the American lady from inside the car.

  ‘D’you think they’ll have room for us, too?’ asked the American of Mary.

  ‘Och, at this time of year I’m sure they will,’ said Mary.

  ‘You turn right at the main road,’ said Howie directing them. ‘Then keep going. It’s almost ten miles. On the right-hand side, there’s a big sign.’

 
The English couple went back to their car without further ado and drove off, but the American hesitated.

  ‘Thank you for your help,’ he said to Neil and Mary. ‘Just one other thing. D’you think we’ll be able to get a drink there? Our own Sabbath just ended and I wouldn’t want to spend the next thirty-six hours without a drink if I can avoid it.’

  ‘You better believe it!’ came his wife’s voice from inside the car. Howie smiled. He rather liked this man and was fascinated to realize that he was probably a Jew. You met very few Jews in the Highlands and they intrigued Howie rather as if they were a rare and precious breed of bird.

  ‘The laws of Scotland,’ he said, ‘are particularly kind to bona fide travellers such as yourselves. The Guest House is fully licensed to sell you drink of any kind all day or night, even on a Sunday if you want. Let me make a call for you and tell them you’re coming so they’ll keep you some supper. What’s the name?’

  ‘Eisenbaum,’ said the American. ‘Jean and Paul Eisenbaum.’

  Later, after Neil had telephoned the Highland Guest House for the Eisenbaums, from the bar of the Admiral Cochrane, and had a drink with them and seen them on their way, they stayed and ate a pub dinner of game pie and pickles, washed down with bitter beer.

  ‘Well, she certainly mellowed a bit after a wee drink,’ said Mary adding, ‘Jewish people fascinate you, don’t they, Neil?’

  ‘Aye. They do,’ he acknowledged. ‘Imagine believing you’re God’s chosen people and there being quite a lot of evidence to support the idea: Abraham, Noah, Moses, Jesus, Saint Paul, Karl Marx, Freud, Einstein to name but a few. Imagine having a book that is like a tribal diary trying to trace your ancestry direct to Adam and Eve …’

  ‘Hey!’ interrupted Mary laughing. ‘Don’t forget I belong to a fundamentalist religion too. You Episcopalians don’t properly believe in the Good Book!’