The Going Down of the Sun (18 page)

The seminal point was that a man could get killed, and though it might be I couldn't prevent his death, I could at least prevent myself feeling responsible for it. If Alex Curragh died—or disappeared, and we never knew for sure if he was dead—and I hadn't done everything I or anyone else could think of to stop it, the next several months would take a lot of living through. Harry would be in for some pretty miserable breakfasts.

But it was Harry who made the token protest, which I appreciated. It wasn't much more than a token, designed not so much to obstruct as to put on record the unease that probably all three of us felt. “You're not forgetting that McAllister is a suspect in the killing of his wife? If he did it, he's hunting Curragh not to bring him back but to silence him. If he did it, nothing Clio can say to him will make him less determined, but she could put herself in danger as well.”

Baker nodded. “I am aware of that. I'm not suggesting she goes alone. If she's willing to, I suggest the three of us go together—and immediately afterwards, whatever you decide to do yourself, sir, I think Mrs. Marsh should go home.”

Harry looked at me askance and there was a glint almost of humour in his eyes. “Well, dear, what do you think?”

He wasn't asking whether I'd talk to McAllister for them, but that was the question I chose to answer. “Come on, then, let's get it over with. Which den do we beard the lion in?”

McAllister was at home. A terse phone call from Baker ensured that he would stay there until we arrived.

Most of the way up I was wondering what I was going to say, rehearsing arguments and even emotions before rejecting them as trite and inappropriate, even unworthy. Finally I decided that anything worth saying and worth hearing would come of a dialogue, not a prepared speech, and stopped rehearsing and watched the scenery instead.

Because the best hope seemed to lie in a dialogue, and if all three of us marched in there it would develop into either a committee meeting or a slanging-match, when we drew up on the gravel beneath the front door of McAllister's castle I asked Harry and Baker to stay with the car and went up alone.

I wasn't present when Baker phoned him, but from his surprised expression I gathered McAllister hadn't been led to expect me. He looked past my shoulder to the granite steps. “Where's—er— what's-his-face?”

I didn't believe that, after a number of meetings and one protracted interview, he had forgotten DCI Baker's name. It was part of the game he played, of bolstering his ego by diminishing other people's. It was only a game—no ego ever needed less bolstering than his—but it had become a habit.

I declined to play it with him. “Down below, with the other wee plod. It's me he wanted you to talk to. Well, listen to, actually.”

He had already recovered from the surprise, and acknowledged with a quirk of the lip the failure of his great-man-impressing-thepeasants routine. Now, his eyes warming but still guarded, he stood back and ushered me in. Mrs. Lilley must have been busy with the baby—I doubt if he'd have answered his own door otherwise, not in all the circumstances.

He showed me into the sitting-room, offered me a drink, poured one for himself when I declined. “What did Mr. Baker”—a fractional emphasis on the remembered name—”want me to listen to you saying?”

“Call off your dogs. Alex Curragh didn't kill Alison, but you're going to get him killed if you put a price on his head.” Whatever else it was, it was to the point.

The warmth died out of his eyes. He was used to being the most outspoken member of any company. Also, he didn't much like being seen as a gangster except at his own invitation. “If he didn't kill her, why did he run?” The gravelly voice was harsh, cold.

It was hard to explain. I thought I understood the state of mind which the last few days had induced in him, and which had made him react in that dangerously irrational way, but it was hard to find the words to describe it. But McAllister was waiting, so I tried. I told him about the episode with the glass.

“Why did he hold a broken glass at my throat when he'd no intention of hurting me? Because he's very young and very scared, and because nothing in his life till now prepared him for what has happened to him, physically and emotionally, during the last week. He understands almost nothing of what's going on: not what happened at the Fairy Isles, not the accusation that he killed Alison, not how the police work—not even how the city works, that's home and second nature to you and me.

“He's lost here. He understands the sea, maybe the forest and the moor, but stick him down in Sauchiehall Street and he can't remember which way to watch for traffic. He feels desperately vulnerable here, prey to forces beyond his control. So when the opportunity presented itself, he took it and got out. He isn't going far. In a day or two he'll turn up back home, and by then and in his own surroundings he'll have his head together enough to give the police all the co-operation they need.

“Unless some cowboy out for the bounty you've posted hammers the living daylights out of him, in which case he'll die on some bleak fell for no better reason than that he loved your wife. And if that happens, a lot of people are going to need convincing that wasn't exactly what you had in mind when you offered this reward for him.”

“You seem to be suggesting,” McAllister said softly, “that I should feel some sympathy for my wife's murderer because of his bereavement.”

“I told you, Alex didn't kill Alison. He was returning to the
Skara Sun
when she blew up. He'd bought a toy in Tayvallich. For his son.” I told him the rest of it, all that Alex had told me.

He was watching me very closely, like a dog watching a rabbit. It might have been unnerving but somehow it wasn't. My husband and his colleague were only the thickness of a wall away—a castle wall, admittedly, but at least there was no moat. More than that, McAllister's interest, while acute, wasn't threatening. I felt myself in no greater danger than when Alex Curragh fended me off with his broken glass.

“You think you know, don't you?” he said. “About Peter. About Alison and me, and her affair with Curragh. How?”

“Harry and I flew up to Orkney earlier today.”

“Ah.” The breath ran out of him slowly and there was comprehension in the sigh. “So you were talking to her. The Iron Maiden.”

I didn't quite manage not to smile. “Alison's mother, yes.”

“She reckoned to know about us, did she?”

“Alison kept in touch. She didn't approve of your marriage. I suppose you know that.”

“Oh aye, I knew that. She told you it was a marriage of convenience, I suppose. What else?”

“That she got the impression from Alison's letters that you were both pretty happy anyway.”

McAllister's eyes glimmered with what could almost have been unshed tears. “So she knew that. I'm glad. What else?”

I wouldn't necessarily have told him, but in fact there was nothing else. “That was all.”

He nodded slowly. “Alison mustn't have told her. I don't blame her. But I'm going to tell you. I never meant to. We never meant to tell anyone. For all our sakes—mine, Alison's and Peter's. The world's a narrow-minded place, and anyway it had no business knowing. But if it's made up its mind that Alison betrayed me, and maybe I killed her because of it, I guess I owe it to the three of us to put the record straight.

“Alison took up with Curragh for one reason and one reason only: to give me a child. It wasn't her fault she wasn't getting pregnant, it was mine—the echo of that damn chemical explosion still reverberating round my body. Ending our marriage would have gained me nothing. So she didn't have to do it. She did it for me, for love.”

They could have gone through the normal medical channels, joined an Artificial Insemination by Donor programme. But neither of them was enthusiastic about channels of any sort. Alison objected to the clinicality of it. McAllister disliked the idea that a record might exist into the future showing he was not the father of his child. They talked long and seriously, and decided there would be less trauma, fewer long-term repercussions, if they set up a channel of their own and got Alison pregnant without medical intervention.

They chose Peter's father together and very carefully. From Alison's point of view, it was necessary that he be someone she could like. Both of them wanted to be sure the baby wouldn't inherit any health or character defects, so it seemed best to select someone Alison had known for a little time and got on well with. They opted for a younger man in the belief that the ties between him and Alison would be flimsier. Alison knew why she was doing this; if the man looked on it as the one-night-stand of a rich, bored woman the risk of emotional complications should be minimal.

Crinan was a regular port of call for Alison. She'd had work done on her boat there a couple of times when she'd struck a problem too far from Oban to limp back, and she'd talked boats to the back of a young man's head while he tinkered in the bowels of her engines. McAllister didn't want to meet him, but agreed that he was a good choice.

The next stage was accomplished easily enough. Alison was an intelligent, sophisticated, not insensitive woman who had her heart and mind set on seduction and the confidence to carry it through. Alex was twenty-one, all he knew of the world was Crinan and the boats that passed through it; if he wasn't still a virgin he might as well have been. He was easy prey for the McAllisters, a young man bowled over by the flattering attentions of an attractive older woman.

She said one engine was running rough and asked him to come out in the
Sun
and listen to it. They motored round Danna Island and up Loch Sween, and dropped the hook in the Fairy Isles lagoon. It was the middle of the day and still only April, there was no other vessel there. They made love in the cabin with the reflected brilliance of the water dancing in splashes of light on the coach-house ceiling.

A month later she made another excuse to take him out and the same thing happened. Shortly after that a pregnancy test proved positive.

McAllister was both thrilled and relieved. It was what he wanted, why he'd gritted his teeth while his wife went to another man. But it had been harder on him than he had expected and he was immensely glad it was over.

And Alison? He found it hard to judge how Alison felt. Clearly she was happy to have achieved what she had set out to. She seemed glad she wouldn't have to see Alex again, but more as if she felt badly about using him than about being used. She grew listless and moody, then restless. She said nothing, but gradually McAllister realised what the problem was. Alison had fallen in love with her stud.

He tried to talk to her about it. She denied it. He said it was natural in the circumstances, she mustn't feel guilty about it. She said there was nothing to feel guilty about, it was just her hormones affecting her moods.

He thought that part way through her pregnancy she started seeing Curragh again. He couldn't be sure: he asked, she denied it, he wouldn't interrogate her. He felt to blame.

He was hurt too, but not so terribly surprised. He hoped and believed that it wouldn't last, that the novelty of having a perfect body in bed beside her would wear off and she'd tire of a young labourer who had nothing else to offer her. He watched, patient and anxious, for signs that she was coming back to him—not physically, she had never been away that often or that long, but in spirit and mind. He missed her. From the pain it was giving her, he thought she missed him too.

He blamed neither Alison nor Curragh so much as himself, his own egotistical wants, it had been a calculated risk; they had played with fire and they'd got burned. He still hoped that once the baby came they'd find their way back to an equilibrium, in which case it would all have been worthwhile, even the hurting.

Perhaps they would have had fewer problems if they'd been a bit less careful in selecting a father for Peter. But they didn't want just anybody with rough and ready ways and a dirty-weekend philosophy. They looked for someone kind and caring, and when it came to the point Alex Curragh cared enough to want to make a future with the woman he loved, and was kind enough for Alison to recognise that she would lose something valuable whichever way she chose.

Right up to word of the explosion coming through, McAllister expected to get her back. He knew she was going to Curragh; she'd said goodbye to him as if she meant it. He didn't know until I told him that she had decided to end their affair, but he believed she would, if not soon then sometime.

The news that his wife was dead, rolled by the salt tide with the rest of the debris from the
Skara Sun
, at first struck him to his knees. Then the anger which had served him before surged again to save him from the dissolution of grief. It carried him forward through the days, rein-forced at intervals by the failure of the police to make the man he blamed accountable, finally overflowing in a vicious cateract at the discovery that Curragh had evaded custody and disappeared back up country. His response had been typical of the man: pragmatic, ruthless and fast.

I had no idea how long I had sat there listening to him talk. Only when the low, gravelly voice rumbled into silence and the parade of powerful, disturbing images rolled to a halt did I remember the two men waiting in the car outside, their ears cocked for sounds of mayhem. There wouldn't be any but they couldn't know that; however long we took they'd sit there worrying, but I wasn't going to sacrifice McAllister's confidence in order to put their minds at rest. While he would talk, I would listen.

Except I wasn't here to hear his tragedy but to prevent another, and however much light was being shed by his narrative it wasn't lessening the danger he had whistled up for Alex Curragh.

I said, “Nothing that happened was Curragh's fault. You used him when it suited you, thought you could dump him when you'd finished with him. Now you've put his life in danger. Why? Because he loved Alison? You
wanted
him to love Alison. Or because she loved him? She wasn't an automaton—you can't turn emotions on and off like a light-switch. Neither of them was to blame for what happened.”