The Going Down of the Sun (11 page)

If Curragh did it, of course, it was the easiest thing in the world, and the only trace would be that gas detector. Plus the fact that he'd been found floating beside the dinghy when he said he'd been leaning over the bows at the other end of the boat. Why would he risk lying about that? It was perfectly natural to row out for a spot of fishing or just a bit of exercise while breakfast was cooking. It might have seemed a lucky move but hardly a suspicious one. The lie was much more suspicious than the truth. If he had planned this—in the anger of rejection, perhaps, but in sufficiently cold blood to work out what needed doing and then to do it—why on earth had he made that particular mistake?

But it really was not my problem. It was a police problem, and the police would undoubtedly sort it out in their own way in their own good time. My efforts on their behalf, however well-intentioned, were surplus to requirements.

I thought I'd go shopping. My holiday packing had included nothing suitable for a night out and I thought I'd treat myself. I finished my meal with improbable Indonesian coffee and left the restaurant, turning back towards the city centre.

Almost at once I was aware that I was being followed.

It's an unbelievably vile sensation, knowing someone is on your trail like a dog. Thirty years of spy fiction had not prepared me for the sheer shock of realisation, followed quickly by a chaos of panic: fear in the heart, fury in the head, nausea in the stomach. I didn't know how to react. Half my mind told me to run, the other half wanted to know what from. I was surrounded by people in the heart of a major British city in the middle of the day: what secret harm could befall me here?

I was reluctant to make a scene, draw attention to myself. If I'd known which of the blank grey faces jostling round me belonged to my pursuer I'd have confronted him, but the feeling—the certainty—of being followed had come from some source other than recognition. The same problem made it difficult for me to seek help. I stood irresolute on the pavement, my back to a butcher's window, scanning the crowd wild-eyed for some clue to his identity, all my insides knotted up in a ganglion of sick anxiety such that I thought an overt threat, even an attack of some kind, would come as a relief.

The thing ended more quickly and more amicably than I could have imagined. One moment the street was a sea of alien northern faces, scurrying by on unknowable errands, remote and hostile and hardly less threatening than the spy hiding himself among them, and the next a rather plump, pleasant-looking man of about my own age, wearing a tweed jacket over a Fair Isle pullover, stepped out of their midst and stood on the pavement before me, smiled and said, “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to alarm you, Mrs. Marsh. I was hoping to have a few words with you.”

His name was Duncan Galbraith and he worked for a Glasgow newspaper. I didn't have to take his word for that, he thumbed me his card. “I thought it was you in the restaurant, but I didn't want to interrupt your meal.”

“How did you recognise me?”

He shrugged, a slightly foppish, elegant little shrug. “When we heard you were involved in the McAllister case we pulled your photo out of the morgue.”

I didn't know whether to be flattered or horrified. “You've got my picture in your”—we doctors are sensitive souls, at least by comparison with reporters—” files?”

“Oh yes.” I couldn't quite place the accent: Scottish but not local, it might have been an Anglified Edinburgh. He smiled again. His pink cheeks crinkled cheerfully round the corners of sea-grey eyes. “Our book reviewer ordered it, but I was in Edinburgh when you were instrumental in the arrest of a fugitive in a high-class nursing home there. I remembered you.”

That was going back a day or two. It was soon after I lost Luke, just after I met Harry. I said, “It isn't deliberate, you know. I don't wake up one morning and think, God it's been a boring week, I think I'll go create some havoc up in Scotland.”

His plump smile turned impish, the grey eyes twinkling. “Lots of our tourists take their main holiday abroad, come here for a second break. I expect you cause most of your havoc in Marbella, do you, only come here when you've a bit left over that you don't know what to do with?”

I started to grin, then to chuckle. I didn't know him from Adam, but he was the only cheerful thing that had happened to me since breakfast yesterday. We fell into step, walking down the broad pavement. “So, Mr. Galbraith, what did you want to talk about?”

It was a fatuous question, there could be only one thing, but he refrained from pointing that out. “I hoped you'd tell me what happened at Loch Sween yesterday.”

“Haven't the police issued a press release?”

“Of course, and they'll issue a fuller one when they know a bit more. But they weren't there and you were. There's nothing like an eyewitness account.”

“Earwitness.”

“The explosion was the first you knew then?” He wasn't slow, my Mr. Galbraith. All the languour was on the surface, creating an impression which he enjoyed or which served him. His mind was quick and agile, and that one word was all the encouragement he needed. Before I knew it I was giving him an interview.

Harry, of course, would be horrified, but why not? If Alison McAllister had been murdered, there would be inevitable public interest in that; and if it turned out to have been an accident, it was very much in the public interest to publicise the dangers that even a familiar situation can hold for even a careful person. Besides, nothing I had seen or heard could be a point of contention; my own thoughts on the matter were and would remain private. With that proviso, I saw no reason to obstruct his efforts to report the incident.

I told him what I had heard and seen, and what Harry and I had done. He already knew who we were, so there was no point in withholding brief personal details. I included in the account the helicopter flight to Glasgow but nothing that had happened or emerged after I handed Curragh over to the hospital's care. For an update I referred him to Neil Burns, who had probably been told to say nothing but on whose list of virtues discretion figured less than prominently.

When I had finished, Galbraith put his notebook away but continued walking beside me, apparently half lost in thought. Finally, intrigued and exasperated in roughly equal proportions, I said, “Whatever's bothering you now?”

He shook his head. He looked troubled. He plainly considered for a moment before deciding to answer. “Off the record?”

That amused me. In my experience of the press, off the record is something that doesn't exist unless you have it in writing on the back of a Press Club wine-list. “Whatever happened to `Publish and be damned'?”

His smile was wry, an uneasy shadow of its former self. “The publishers ended up in the High Court, and their legal bills meant selling their businesses for scrap and supermarket sites. The freedom of the Press is a Christmas-cracker motto these days.”

“All right. Off the record.”

“I would not care,” he said carefully, choosing his words, “to be a young man of no wealth and no position coming up against Frazer McAllister in this city.”

It seemed to be a warning, and if it was not for me it might still bear heeding. For the moment I skirted round it. “You know McAllister then?”

He looked at me in some surprise. Then he remembered he was talking to a foreigner, a tourist. “Oh yes,” he said with a curious inflection. “Not personally, you understand. I mean, he doesn't invite me to his grouse moor, we didn't celebrate the Big Bang together or anything like that. But yes, I know him. He's a steam-roller. He goes over people. He leaves little flattened husks in his wake. He does this to people who stand between him and his profit, him and his plans, him and his self-esteem, him and his importance. I don't know what he'd do to someone who came between him and his wife.” His voice was bleak.

“There's actually no evidence,” I reminded him gently, “that Curragh was aboard in any capacity other than as Mrs. McAllister's crew.”

Galbraith smiled at that. “Indeed; so let the record show. But you and I know that whatever Alison McAllister needed, it wasn't help aboard her boat. I imagine McAllister knows that too. Have you met him?”

“Oh yes.”

“Then you know what I'm saying.”

“A forceful personality,” I said judiciously.

“All of that,” he agreed.

“How much more?”

His glance was both sharp and appreciative. “I came to wheedle an interview out of you, not to have one wheedled out of me.”

I said with dignity, “I never wheedle. But I don't see how you can believe in freedom of information and refuse to answer my questions.”

He grinned. “All right. Off the—er—?”

“Sure.”

“OK. The bottom line is, Frazer McAllister has never been convicted of anything illegal. He's never been formally charged with an offence. He's been investigated several times to my knowledge, and allegations have been made more often than that.”

“What sort of allegations?”

Galbraith shrugged elegantly. “You name it, he's been accused of it. Everything but indecent exposure. All the business offences—income tax, VAT, insider dealing, fraud, corruption. None of it proved. Most of the thuggery ones—blackmail, extortion, assault and malicious damage. None of it proved. Then a couple of specials, like misprision of felony and perverting the course of justice. But you'll never guess …”

“I know, it was never proved. Who made the allegations?”

“Other businessmen mostly, if you use the term widely. Not many of them still around. Oh, I don't mean he disposed of them—what's the current term?—wasted them. But a lot of them ended up with no businesses and moved on.”

“Sour grapes?”

“Undoubtedly a sour grapes element. But all of them, all those allegations? Some fire beneath all that smoke, I think. I don't know if it makes him an evil man, even as evil as some of the men he steamrollered. It makes him a tough man, probably a ruthless one. Most of all, it makes him a powerful man, because neither you nor I—honest and lovable as we are—could sustain a barrage of accusation like that without being made to answer for it. That's what worries me. If he goes after Curragh, he'll hound him until he drags him down—and he'll do it just this side of any crime that can be proved. The lad's going to need friends, and in this city he won't find many. Even McAllister's enemies won't do him any favours.”

“What about you?”

“Me?” He laughed, a sardonic little laugh. “What can I do? Even the truth I can tell is so hedged about with restrictions that it's hardly the truth any more, and that's just what the law says. When McAllister's had his say I'll be lucky if I can refer to the incident at all.”

I didn't smile. If it was so, it wasn't funny. “Why are you telling me this?”

He shrugged, more awkwardly than before, even a little apologetically. “I wanted someone other than me to know.”

“A problem shared is a problem halved? Why me?”

“You're a stranger, not involved in this city's power politics. I think McAllister may find you difficult to intimidate.”

“More difficult than you?”

“Oh yes,” he said with a wan smile, “much more difficult than me. You don't live here. You don't have to work here. Your evidence will be required any time this thing is discussed. This city is full of people who, for one reason or another—because of his money or his power, or because they owe him favours, or because he scares the crap out of them—will turn a blind eye to anything McAllister does that doesn't leave bloodstains on their carpet. If he goes after Alex Curragh, the people whose job it is to stop him will suddenly be busy elsewhere. I shall find myself despatched to Aberdeen to report some Heath Robinson idea for turning disused oil rigs into multi-storey car-parks. But you'll be here, and you'll be at the centre of it. I wanted you to know that nothing Frazer McAllister says can be trusted, unless he says it's raining. Even then you'd be wise to stick your hand outside the window.”

Duncan Galbraith was afraid for Alex Curragh when he had no reason to suspect that Alison McAllister's death was other than an accident highlighting an indiscreet friendship. If he had known that there was a fifty-fifty chance that McAllister was not just a clever thug but a clever murderer, that he had killed his wife and tried to kill Curragh, and that under the guise of the wronged and grieving husband he was again conspiring at the boy's destruction, would he have left me then with a languid wave? Would he have said more? Would he perhaps have said less?

Perhaps I should have said more. I had the gut feeling that I could trust Galbraith: not only trust what he said to be true, but trust him not to turn everything I thought aloud into front-page headlines.

Harry would have been shocked at the very idea. But in Harry's world the police might be slow, might be unimaginative, might occasionally be wrong, but no-one ever accused them of being in somebody's pocket. For one thing, Skipley had no-one as rich as Frazer McAllister living there. Skipley had no three people as rich as Frazer McAllister. I didn't know if McAllister had any influence with his local coppers. Galbraith seemed to suggest he might have. Harry wouldn't believe that until he found a peaked cap on the back seat of McAllister's car.

But if the police investigation was going to be less than thorough, its findings less than reliable, Curragh's best chance of a fair hearing lay in public awareness of what was happening. Galbraith could maybe get him that, if I was frank with him. And if McAllister didn't get him dispatched to Aberdeen first.

I bought nothing. Though the Glasgow shops were tempting, I had suddenly gone off the idea of sampling this city's night-life. It seemed to have dark places enough in the daytime.