The Going Down of the Sun (17 page)

But within those limitations it was a comfortable little house. The furniture was good, there was silver and china on the dresser, and a thick-piled carpet soaked up the draughts. It was a modest way of living, but not an impoverished one. Of course, Alison's father had owned land and a fishing-boat; there was no reason his widow should live hand-to-mouth.

She sat us down in the living-room, excused herself for a moment and returned with a silver tea-set on a big silver tray and a plate of substantial scones.

Harry had already introduced us and expressed our condolences. She received them graciously and without obvious distress. It occurred to me that it might have been some time since she saw Alison, so when we were supplied with our tea I asked.

It didn't take her too long to get at it. “She was home for George's funeral. That's six years now.”

“Did you go down for her wedding?”

“No, I did not.” She spoke slowly but without frailty; it was obviously the natural tempo of the islanders. “It was the middle of winter, so that was difficult. And then, it was a very quiet wedding they wanted. The registrar it was, not the minister.”

It didn't take a great detective (much less two) to deduce that Mrs. McKeag had not approved of her daughter's match. That wasn't altogether surprising, in spite of McAllister's wealth: he was a lot older than Alison, and a cripple, and then there was the matter of the registrar. I wondered which had disturbed her most but found it difficult to ask.

Harry didn't. He's had a lot more practice than me. “Did you like Frazer McAllister?”

She pursed her lips. “I never met him. I was not particularly anxious to.”

“Why was that?”

She had Alison's eyes, steady and knowing. “I did not approve of the marriage. I thought neither my daughter nor my prospective son-in-law were behaving either wisely or well.” She stopped there, waiting to be asked to elucidate.

“You didn't think they'd be happy together?”

She sniffed. “Happiness was never an issue. She married him for his money. He married her for her womb. The only thing to be said for either of them was that they were honest about it. They never pretended to be in love.”

I said, “How did they meet?”

Mrs. McKeag looked me straight in the eye. “They didn't meet, exactly. He advertised and she applied.”

It really had been as simple as that. He had put a notice in the “Personal” column of a Scottish daily paper, describing himself as a rich man in need of an heir, and Alison had taken a long cool look at her job as a solicitor's clerk in Stirling and decided that while the wages of sin might be death, the hours were better.

They exchanged two or three letters. With the second, McAllister told her who he was and enclosed a photograph. It was a brave move that paid off, because it gave her time to come to terms with the idea before either of them was committed even to a meeting. With equal frankness she replied that she had seen his advertisement as a commercial proposition and, as long as that was his feeling too, she saw no reason why his misfortune should be a barrier. It would be no obstacle if it was anything else she was offering to sell him.

Plainly he appreciated her businesslike approach. They discussed what each might bring to the partnership and what dividend each might expect, and arranged to meet in Edinburgh, on neutral ground.

McAllister wanted an heir—a son or daughter. If Alison proved infertile she would co-operate in divorce proceedings, in return for a generous settlement to be specified, exactly, in a prenuptial contract.

What Alison wanted was the kind of lifestyle she could enjoy as McAllister's wife, far from the solicitor's office in Stirling and from worrying about the HP payments on her car. She would quite like to be a married woman and a mother; she could settle contentedly for being a rich divorcée if that was how it worked out. She saw no problem about a marriage of convenience, so long as it was convenient to both of them and neither of them expected it to be anything more. She rather hoped they'd get to like one another.

So it was done. The rich, damaged man married the twenty-seven-year-old girl with the broad, child-bearing hips, and it seemed to Mrs. McKeag from her daughter's letters that they had got to like one another quite quickly. Neither of them spoke of passion but they seemed to achieve an easy, comfortable relationship that was friendship or maybe a little more, and after nearly three years of marriage Alison wrote to say she was pregnant.

North of Stromness the road divided, the eastern branch heading back to Kirkwall and the little airport. The signpost for the northern branch numbered among its destinations Skara Brae, and I wondered if anything useful could come of visiting the place Alison had named her boat for. It was only a mile or so, so we followed the sign.

But instead of taking us anywhere it stopped us at the roadside, within sight of the sea but nothing else, and enjoined us to take a walk along a pale sandy footpath down towards the shore. Harry and I exchanged puzzled glances but we were in no particular hurry so we left the car and took the route indicated. While we walked, scuffing up puffs of sand, we talked.

I said, “Do you get the feeling we're missing something?”

“Like what?”

“I don't know. What went wrong? They were two such sensible people—cold-blooded if you like but sensible—they each knew what they wanted and four months ago they both had it. Even if one of them had had enough, they were cool enough to sort it out without bloodshed.”

“McAllister wasn't going to risk losing his heir.”

“It hadn't come to that. In fact it never would have come to that: Alison entered into a contract and she was going to honour it. Another man might have panicked and jumped the gun, but McAllister? It seems out of character—not so much the murder as misjudging the need for it.”

One of Harry's eyebrows climbed. “You're not telling me you think Curragh did it after all?”

“No, I don't think he did. I think probably McAllister did it. I'm not convinced we have the right reason yet. And another thing—”

The other thing died on my lips as we breasted a grassy rise and Skara Brae spread out before us. I had expected a village of low stone houses like those in Stromness, huddled together against the North Atlantic wind; and apart from the fact that no-one lived here now and most of the roofs were gone, that was what we found. The difference was that Skara Brae was built and occupied maybe four thousand years before. It was older than Mycenae, not much younger than the pyramids of Egypt.

We wandered in silence over the turf which had grown over Skara Brae. Beneath us, circular stone-walled homes displayed their square stone furniture—a dresser here, a bed there, something that could have been a sink close by the hearth, a quern, and niches everywhere to take a wealth of Neolithic possessions: knives, fish-hooks, needles, scrapers, maybe a string of beads and a few pots. Between the houses ran little streets, shoulder high and not much more than shoulder broad, with low lintels that even I would have had to crouch under. When the whole thing was roofed over, streets and all, it would have been as impervious to the outside elements as a badger's set or a mole's run.

Or the McAllisters' marriage, I thought then, sitting on a turf-topped wall with my legs dangling in the street. All there was to be seen of Skara Brae, before first a storm and then the excavators breached its age-old integrity, was a low mound of rabbit-cropped turf close above the beach; but underneath the turf was a warren of remarkable and unexpected things, a secret world of deep complexity where lives could be lived and children born, and murders done, quite unsuspected by those dwelling in, and attuned to the customs and parameters of, the open air. Different rules applied down there, because different things were important.

McAllister and his contract bride had grown fond of one another over the space of four years. It wasn't love, but they liked each other: the marriage wouldn't have survived three childless years if they hadn't. By one means or another, then, she had contrived to produce a baby.

Perhaps Alison had loved Alex Curragh, at least for a time. Her life under the turf mound had been warm and comfortable, untouched by the hot and cold winds of passion and disappointment, but it was natural for a young woman to wonder if she had made the right choice, to long sometimes for an uncontrolled blast of fresh air.

But she hadn't left the Stirling solicitor to settle for life as a boatman's wife in Crinan. She was never going to leave Frazer McAllister for an attractive, ardent, impoverished boy any more than McAllister was going to throw her out over one. He was an interruption in the even tenor of their lives, like one of them getting flu: something to put up with and get through, and not talk about too much. It was something they would not allow to dominate their lives to the point where either of them might see it as a serious threat to their future. What they had together suited them both: too well for Alison to throw it away for a late-firing adolescent fling. And too well for McAllister to hit the panic button and assume that she would, when all his experience of her must have told him her head was screwed on as tightly as the fourth wheel-nut on a flat tyre halfway up a motorway on a wet night.

And if Alison wasn't going to leave and take her baby with her, and McAllister wasn't going to jump to unwarranted conclusions, then he had no reason to kill her. So maybe he didn't.

“What was the other thing?” When Harry sat beside me and dangled his legs, his feet almost reached the flagstones.

I cast back, remembered. “That will. It's crazy. I haven't made a will. How many women of thirty-one have?”

“She took a very practical view of money.”

“She had an affair, she ended it, she felt she owed the boy something—so she included him in her will? No way.”

“But that's exactly what she did do.”

“There had to be a reason—a proper reason, something that makes sense. I know what solicitors tell you but nobody under the age of forty makes a will.”

He looked surprised and slightly affronted. “I did.”

“Harry, you're the exception that proves all sorts of rules. The only young people who make wills are hypochondriacs.”

I said it without import, almost as a joke, but as soon as it was out in the salt air and the sunshine between us, we both knew we could have struck pay-dirt. I felt my brain move up a gear. “Harry, could she have thought she was ill?”

After the ancient quiet of Orkney, arriving back in Glasgow was like visiting a madhouse. I thought at first it was the contrast, but actually the city—at least, those parts of it which concerned us—was in uproar. The police station was at the epicentre, and we got an explanation of a kind when DCI Baker stopped rushing round like a decapitated hen long enough to accept a cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit.

“That bastard McAllister,” he gasped then. He was perched on the edge of the table as if sitting in a chair would take up too much time. “He's put a price on Curragh's head.”

“What?” I couldn't believe what I was hearing. We were a long way from home, but not that far.

Harry said, shortly and with uncharacteristic savagery, “Sling the sod inside.”

“It's not that simple.” Baker was beginning to look frayed at the edges. “I put it to him straight and of course he denied it. He said what he'd done was ask that anyone who could help the police find a missing witness should do so, and he'd reimburse any expenses incurred. There's nothing illegal in that. I can't even do him for obstruction.

“But you know and I know, and everyone in his employ knows, and probably by now every cowboy north of the border knows, exactly what the old bastard wants and is willing to pay for. He wants Alex Curragh found and brought back, and he doesn't give a monkey's what state he's in. None of the people that reward is geared to will ask the kid politely more than once. Some of them won't ask him once. If he's dragged in here black and blue, I shall reckon we've got off lightly. It could be worse than that.”

“Surely to God,” I whispered, horrified, “he can't offer a reward for a man dead or alive?”

“He doesn't have to,” said Harry. His lips were tight. “If the reward's there, there'll be people prepared to go to any lengths to get it. If they try too hard and he ends up dead, they're no worse off than if they never found him or they couldn't bring him in. They'll just roll him into the nearest bog and go home, and we'll never know. If he ends up hurt enough to send them to prison they'll do the same thing. Christ almighty, McAllister might as well declare open season on him. If we don't find him first, he's liable to end up dead.”

“Is there no law against it?”

“Oh yes. But he's a bit of an expert, isn't he, at staying just the right side of laws.” He had a thought then. I saw it strike him, saw the ripples of it in his eyes, guessed what it was and wondered if he'd have the nerve to come out with it.

He didn't have to. The same idea had occurred to Baker, and he didn't have to worry about facing me over the breakfast table every morning if it didn't work out. I am not at my sweetest and most generous best in the mornings.

Baker said, “Mrs. Marsh, you and McAllister understand each other pretty well. I think he listens when you talk, and that's more than he does for me. Will you talk to him?—Tell him we'll find Curragh, bring him back while we get this sorted out, but if he doesn't call his dogs off he's apt to be responsible for an innocent man's death. Hell, you know what to say to him. Will you go?”

I had no option. I didn't know if Frazer McAllister was more likely to listen to me than an officer in his city's police force. I didn't know if this understanding Baker spoke of amounted to anything, or if it was just some residue of good manners that prevented McAllister shouting as loudly at women as he did at other men. It would be interesting and possibly useful to talk with him again now I knew more about his marriage than he had volunteered, but even that was a minor consideration.