The Going Down of the Sun (15 page)

“She said she loved me. She said she'd love me as long as she lived, but she had obligations that she couldn't neglect any longer. She said the time we'd known each other had been the best time she'd known but now it had to end.”

At first he refused to believe her. Then he pleaded with her to change her mind, to bring her baby and come to him, at least not to shut him off from them. Finally, weak with beating against the palisade of her resolution, he had cried long and brokenly, and she had held him in her arms until they reached a kind of peace.

She wanted them to spend these last few days together but he couldn't face that. The thing was tearing him apart. When the dawn came, and she sleeping beside him, he rose carefully and quietly and got ready to leave. He wrote her a note saying she'd find her dinghy in Tayvallich, he would hitch home from there, and wishing her happiness.

So he took his pack and got into the dinghy, and rowed the couple of miles to Tayvallich, where he tied up the dinghy and went ashore. It was still desperately early and no-one was about. He thought he'd walk a long way before he got a chance to hitch.

By the merest chance then he found a group of people not only up and about but preparing to travel his way. He wasn't sure if they were gypsies or hippies or a bit of both, but they'd camped (quite illegally) outside the village and were now breakfasting before packing then belongings into the backs of two Ford Transits and an old school bus and heading north. They offered him a lift gladly.

They made their livelihood primarily by selling handicrafts and other trinkets from stalls which they set up beside the road, which they could strike with lightning haste at the sight of a police-car. They showed him the sort of things they sold, among them a cardboard box full of children's toys.

“When I saw them, I wanted to give something to my son more than I could remember wanting anything. I'd never know him—hold him, talk with him; he'd never know I so much as existed. But I could give him some little toy, and I'd know he had it and that would be a link of a kind. I bought this from the travellers and asked them to wait for me while I rowed back to the
Sun.
I thought I could be there and back in an hour. I hope they're not still waiting for me.”

“They aren't,” said Harry. His expression was rueful. “I got stuck behind them driving over here later in the day.” He'd been as close as one bumper can safely be to another—probably closer, knowing Harry—to Alex Curragh's alibi before we even knew he needed one.

I was thinking that it said more about Alex Curragh, his simple nature and his backwoods upbringing, than almost anything else could have: that he had had his pick of a gypsy hoard of curios, and many would be handmade to secret and arcane designs passed down through generations, full of skill and interest and history, and he had chosen this mass-produced little plastic gew-gaw because of the glittering colours that danced at its heart. He probably thought it was beautiful and special; and who was to say he was wrong?

So he'd returned to the dinghy and rowed back up the loch with the toy and a scribbled explanation on the boards between his feet. He didn't think Alison would have missed him yet and he didn't mean to wake her. But as he pulled between the fringing rocks and past the
Rubber Lion
, glancing round to check his bearing he saw the shadow of movement in the cabin. He was going to have to say goodbye after all. But it was worth it if Alison would pass his gift on to his son.

He pulled up to the
Skara Sun
and shipped the oars, and reached out with the painter to make fast. And then the world turned inside out through its own navel, with a roaring and a screaming and birth pangs like fire and salt, and he fell slowly through air and water watching the disintegration of half the universe like the whirling, glittering, colourful chaos at the heart of his child's toy. That was all he remembered, and all he knew. He didn't know about the bequest until the police told him.

“That's it?” I was angry with him. I couldn't believe he'd risked everything to protect a really rather ordinary little secret like that. “You were willing to stand trial for murder, conceivably be convicted, rather than explain what happened?”

“I promised.” All the obstinacy of the twenty-three-year-old male was grained in the creases round his eyes. I saw something else there too: a certain pride, a dignity, a nobility even. Dear God, he still thought his word to a dead woman incapable of being injured further was more important than his liberty. “Alison: I promised her. It mattered to her that no-one should know Peter wasn't McAllister's son, so I promised no-one would hear it from me. It was almost the last thing I said to her. I couldn't break my word.”

Break his word: as if they were school-kids and he'd told her mum she'd been doing homework when she was out late dancing. He could have spent the rest of his life paying for that promise.

“You didn't have to lie,” I snarled. “You could have told the police you were in the dinghy. You didn't have to tell them something that the sheer physics of the situation prevented them from believing.”

He shrugged. He still didn't think he'd had any option. “They'd have wanted to know why I was in the dinghy. Someone would have asked in Tayvallich, traced the gypsies and found out what I'd bought from them. It would have been the same as telling them about Peter. Nobody rows five miles in a tender to buy a toy for another man's child.” He spread his fingers and looked at the bauble nestling there. “I never even wondered what had happened to this. I thought it was gone.”

“The one you bought is. I bought that one the morning. But I saw the one you had, bobbing round in the water after the explosion, just a moment before we spotted you.” I wondered if I should tell him about the third one, saw no reason not to. He might even find an odd comfort in it. “Actually, Peter has one too. Either his mum or his”—I had to change that quickly—”or McAllister must have given it him. We saw it at the house last night. I couldn't understand it I knew they wouldn't have got him two the same. I never thought of you.”

The glow was back in his face, heightened and intense. His words stumbled. “You've been to Alison's? Did you—?”

I knew what he was asking. I smiled gravely and nodded. “
Yes
, I saw Peter.”

“I saw a picture once,” he said. There was a shy longing in his eyes. “But—what's he like?”

What was he like? He was like every other baby I'd ever seen—well, like the large proportion of them that were white, well-fed and healthy. I couldn't have picked him out of an identity parade of half a dozen such. Babies?—He'd asked the wrong person.

Or maybe not. I lie for a living. I invent whole families, whole towns, out of nothing: what was one more baby? So I made up what I hadn't noticed, and spun him a tale about his child that brought tears to his eyes.

But where the hell did that leave us? Curragh's behaviour had been that of a guilty man and had given some hope that the investigation could soon be brought to a conclusion. The one piece of forensic evidence yet dredged from the bottom of the loch, the gas detector that had been switched off, seemed to point more to Curragh than anyone else.

And now? When the travellers were found and asked, they would remember Alex and what he had bought, and not even Frazer McAllister would believe in his guilt after that.

Or perhaps McAllister never had. Because if Alex didn't murder Alison, the logical alternative was that her husband did. I had that awful wearisome feeling of having been here before.

Alex was taken back to the hospital for his X-rays. Harry and Baker and I were discussing the new state of the union over a pot of cooling coffee and a cellophane packet of Nice biscuits. There are few occasions more intrinsically sordid than morning coffee in a police station.

“Suppose,” said Baker, obviously reluctant even to suppose it but biting the bullet manfully, “that McAllister wanted his wife dead. How would he have done it?”

“Loads of ways,” said Harry. He is not a vague man, particularly where his job is concerned—he meant it literally. “A radio-controlled detonator would be the best way, probably. It's a bit technical, but McAllister could get that kind of help. The receiver would have been planted on the boat before she left Oban, and somebody watching for them on shore with a transmitter.

“It could have been an honest-to-God bomb, but that would leave traces. If he wanted it to look like an accident—and remember, he wanted Curragh dead as well—it would be better if the signal set off the gas cylinder. That way there'd be precious little for the divers to End that would argue against an accident. If Curragh had died too, that's the way we'd have read it.”

I squinted at him. “If he was watching them from the shore, how come he waited until Alex left the
Sun?
”

“I don't suppose he meant to. But he couldn't blow it in the middle of the night—gas explosions happen when people are lighting the gas, mostly. He was waiting till breakfast-time, but Curragh was away at first light. He wouldn't know what to do then—this is McAllister's hired help, remember, not McAllister—so he waited to see if Curragh would come back, and an hour later he did. Our friend on the shore was so bloody relieved to see him that he jumped the gun, rather. He wasn't going to risk him rowing away again, so as soon as Curragh reached the
Sun
he pressed the button.”

“Who turned the gas detector off, and why?”

He scowled at me. “I suppose—when he went on board at Oban, our friend turned it off in case gas leaking while he was working at it triggered the alarm and brought half the boat yard down on him. When he'd finished there could still be gas around, so he left it off and Alison never noticed.”

“She was a careful woman. She was on board two days.”

“She was saying goodbye to her lover. She had other things on her mind.”

It was possible. If it had been done that way, they'd have to strain the bed of the lagoon through a sieve to find the fragments of a radio receiver that would prove it.

Baker was watching me, eyes shrewd over his moustache. “Why, how do you think it was done?”

“I know nothing about radio-controlled bombs,” I said, “but I do know something about boats. One of the biggest mistakes you can make when you're cruising, and people go on making it though they don't often make it twice, is to confuse the containers in which you keep the petrol for the engine and the paraffin for the stove. If you put paraffin in the engine you wreck the engine. If you put petrol in the stove you wreck the boat, the crew and anyone passing along the tow-path at the time. You have to keep them separate, store them in different places in different-coloured cans.

“Alison wouldn't make that mistake. She had no petrol on board—her engines were diesels. She wouldn't think she had anything but cooking gas—butane—in the cylinders. But if someone wanted her dead they could substitute something more volatile, knowing that sooner or later she'd connect the new cylinder, turn it on and put a match to it. It couldn't go off accidentally while they wandered hand-in-hand along a twilight shore. It would probably happen at a mealtime when they would both be on board and at least one of them in the galley.

“As it happened, because of precise circumstances which could hardly have been predicted, only Alison was on board, but she was in the galley. She woke and found Alex gone. She found his note. I doubt if she felt like breakfast then. But a little later she looked out the window and saw him rowing between the rocks, coming back. She did what nine women out of ten would have done at that moment she went to put on the kettle. But the gas wouldn't light, the cylinder was empty. She changed it. As the dinghy reached the
Sun
, she went to light the stove.”

We sat a moment in a silence filled with the echo of the explosion. Then Baker said, “Would there be anything left to show it wasn't butane in the cylinder?”

“I don't know. Ask your forensic people.”

Harry said, “A gas leak would explode in the bowels—”

“Bilges,” I corrected him. God alone knows how I knew what he meant.

“Right, whereas a doctored cylinder would explode at the stove. That might be detectable, if they find enough pieces. There's one problem.”

“Yes?”

“Who turned the gas detector off, and why?”

I glowered at him but his face remained straight. “The same person who turned yours off, and for the same reason—he was handling gas cylinders, he didn't want a minor leak to give him away.” It was plausible, but it wasn't enough. “Maybe he thought it would warn her in time to blow out the match.” It wouldn't have done though. She never turned the gas on until she had a match lit and waiting. Alex told me that.

“All right” said Baker. He slid another biscuit from the pack and nibbled it contemplatively, the crumbs frosting his moustache. “So McAllister could have done it. Why might he have done it?”

The obvious answer was unlikely to be the right one. Infidelity provokes murders enough, but most of them are committed in the shock and fury of the moment. This killing, whoever did it was too cold-blooded for a crime of passion.

Harry said, “Clio has a theory,” as if it was something indelicate and a little humorous, like crabs. Baker looked at me with interest and foreboding; he looked he was ready to duck.

“If McAllister killed her,” I said, “the child was the reason. I doubt he married for love, and I don't think he'd see infidelity as reason enough to risk his liberty. No-one likes feeling betrayed, but I can't see McAllister killing his wife for dirty weekends on her boat with Alex Curragh.

“I think the reason McAllister married, and married a woman twenty years younger than himself, was to get an heir. They were married for three years before anything happened; then Alison announced she was pregnant and in due course young Peter arrived. McAllister's heir. But not McAllister's son. Before she sent Alex away, Alison told him the baby was his. If it wasn't true it was vicious, and I don't think she was a vicious woman. I think Alex made her pregnant after her husband had consistently failed to, and if she was so sure who was the father I dare say McAllister had a good idea too.