The Going Down of the Sun (7 page)

Not sure whether Burns would want to report his patient's initial account to the police, I did so. If Curragh had deliberately blown up a boat with a woman on board, the fact that I had hauled him back from the jaws of death in no way diminished my desire to see him pay.

I realised I had underestimated DCI Neville Baker. He might be over-educated, pretentiously accented and know nothing about sailing, but he was good enough at his job. He recognised, of course, the significance of Curragh's slip, and his lips pursed irritably at Burns's intervention. But he wasn't going to build a case of murder round it, at least not yet. It could still prove to have been an honest mistake.

Yet the evidence, circumstantial as it was, was mounting, and I could have believed that—for the fifteen thousand pounds she had bequeathed him or for some reason we did not so far suspect—Alex Curragh had murdered Alison McAllister, but for one thing. It wasn't a physical obstacle to his guilt, or an alibi; it wasn't even a good disincentive. It was nothing a defence lawyer could make capital of without having a prosecutor pull it down around his ears.

But to me, who had broken the news to him and watched him weep, the sheer scale of his grieving was a difficulty I could see no way round. It had had a depth and a range and a power that I could not believe he had fabricated. It had shaken him to his soul, ripping through the frail fibres of his being like some cosmic disturbance. It was the sort of fierce, consuming grief you could imagine someone dying of.

I'm a grown woman, I've been around a bit, and I've seen enough of crime and criminals to know that great feats can be performed by those who want something badly enough. Maybe doctors, whose province is the sick, are more gullible than policemen, whose province is essentially the wicked. But in spite of the lies, in spite of the evidence shifting away from an accidental cause, and while acknowledging the suspect's vested interest in my sympathy, I could not persuade myself that Alex Curragh's distress was anything other than genuine and profound. I had seen it in his eyes. I didn't believe he could lie there.

But if Curragh hadn't killed Alison McAllister, why had he lied – why was he lying still? If it wasn't murder, what had he to hide?

Their affair? Surely, even in his current shocked and weakened state, he couldn't believe there was still a secret to protect? When a woman and a young man who is not her husband spend nights alone together on a small boat, there's really only one conclusion to be drawn. It doesn't take a particularly prurient mind to suppose that they were enjoying a dirty weekend.

Admittedly, people who knew us well enough to know that Luke and I were not married, but not so well as to know his taste didn't lean towards women, thought the same about us and were mistaken. But neither of us ended up dead at the bottom of the Fairy Isles lagoon. I could almost regret that it would have been a fitter resting-place for my friend than the one he eventually found.

Besides, with Alison dead, did it matter? Perhaps, if he had a wife of his own. Yet the lies he had told would not have protected him from the outrage of either Mr. McAllister or a putative Mrs. Curragh. They could only have defended him against the very accusation McAllister had made—that he had left the
Skara Sun
before the explosion that destroyed her.

I sighed. “Where do you go from here?”

Baker shrugged. “What I need is to get Curragh under the full glare of a sixty-watt bulb back at my nick, and pummel him with astute and pertinent questions until he breaks and confesses all. Thanks to Or. Burns that's going to have to wait There may be another way. If the local constabulary hasn't already done so, I'll organise divers. Let's see what the late Mrs. McAllister and the wreckage of her boat can tell us.”

There was something else he could do, though it wasn't my place to suggest it. Fortunately he thought of it for himself. Unfortunately, when he turned his sixty-watt bulb on Frazer McAllister he mentioned that he'd talked to me first.

Which is how I came to be kidnapped in broad daylight from the public concourse of a major British hospital, en route between the magazine kiosk and the coffee machine.

It was now late afternoon, and I was expecting Harry at any time. I'd tried the pub in Tayvallich again and got the message that he'd left. Someone had brought his car down from Ardfern and was returning with the
Rubber Lion
, while Harry hit the long and winding road for Glasgow. I hoped he'd had the wit to remove our belongings, particularly my clothes, from the boat before handing her over.

It had been a short holiday but an interesting one.

So when a rather
snazzy
young man in a pin-striped suit strolled over and said, “Mrs. Marsh? There's a man looking for you at reception. I think he went out to the car-park,” I immediately assumed it was Harry and hurried after him, leaving my polystyrene cup and my
Yachting World
together on my seat. It had been a long day and I was too tired to notice the distinct aroma of rat.

I couldn't see Harry's car from the porch so I moved down into the car-park. I was still scanning the roofs for one that looked familiar when a car that wasn't Harry's cruised up beside me, the rear door opened and a hand reached out.

“Mrs. Marsh, it was good of you to come.” The gravelly voice was enough; I didn't need to see what was left of his face to recognize Frazer McAllister.

As I said, I've been around. I know better than to get into cars with strange men. But when I stepped back from the door I sort of bounced off the pin-striped suit which had come up behind me, and the helping hands that came to steady me just sort of guided me into the car as a convenient place to recover my breath. It was slickly done. You couldn't say that violence was used against me, or intimidation. All the same, I know when I've been kidnapped.

Once I was inside and the door was shut—centralised locking could have been designed by a kidnapper—and the pin-striped suit had slid in cat-like beside the chauffeur, the big dark car moved off. Not at speed, and not very far—through the tinted glass I could see that we were just cruising round the fairways of the car-park. It was reassuring, but not all that much.

I said with as much asperity as I could muster, “Stop this car immediately.”

McAllister, lounging back against his plush upholstery, passed on the message. “MacLeod, you heard the lady.” I was in no way deceived by the faintly satiric note of indignation, and I don't suppose MacLeod was either.

“Yes, sir,” said the chauffeur, unperturbed. “I'll find somewhere now, sir.” The big dark car went on cruising the parking lot at a steady fifteen miles per hour.

But the clock ticking wasn't the loudest sound in this limousine. Me getting cross took that honour, by several decibels. “Mr. McAllister, I don't know what you hope to achieve by this pantomime, but when Chief Inspector Baker hears about it he'll—” What, change his bulb for a hundred-watter? There was probably nothing he could do: McAllister wouldn't make the mistake of crossing any line he was obliged to defend. But I knew this meeting was neither accidental nor social. “And when he‘s finished, my husband will want a go at the pieces.”

McAllister looked at me as if I'd threatened him with my mother. “Why, what's your husband—an all-in wrestler?”

So Baker hadn't passed on everything I'd told him. It was a pity, really, that he'd stopped short of that. I fired the information back like a salvo of big guns. “No, he's a detective superintendent.”

McAllister looked disappointed. “What, another wee plod?” He managed to make Britain's finest sound like a family of mice behind the skirting board, a slight but tedious irritation he would tolerate only so long before going to the chemist for something to deal with them.

I have heard Harry called some things in the pursuit of his duty. I have called him some of them myself. But I had never heard an epithet at once so mild and derogatory as “another wee plod” applied to him before. There's more than six feet of Harry, and not much less from side to side, and though he actually has a most impressive intellect he makes a good job of hiding it. There are those who would consider the words described him perfectly. Mind you, most of them are in jail and still wondering why.

Thinking this, I began to chuckle. It wasn't very nice to be chuckling, in the presence of a man who had just lost his wife, and on the back seat of his own car, but McAllister had brought it on himself.

Also, if I hadn't seen the funny side of it, I might have been getting violent by now. Us short people aren't the push-overs we are commonly supposed. Hard bits of our bodies, like knees and elbows and skulls, come at unexpected and strategic levels. If I bend at the waist and run like hell, I can sort out a six-foot mugger armed with anything less than a flick-knife and protected by anything less than an interior-sprung codpiece.

“Listen, McAllister,” I said. “You can tell your driver to stop looking so feverishly for somewhere to park. I don't mind if he drives us round while you tell me what it was you were so anxious to ask me that you had to hijack me off the hospital doorstep. I've nothing to hide: as far as I know there's nothing that I know that you shouldn't know too. It'll all be said at the inquest anyway, but if you want to hear it now, ask.”

I think he found it disconcerting, being offered the co-operation he had been prepared to wring out of me. But even if I disapproved of his methods, I didn't begrudge him what scant information I had about his wife's last hours. Actually I doubted there was anything he hadn't already heard, but I didn't mind repeating myself if it would give him any comfort. He hadn't had much so far today, and he could go a lot longer yet.

He looked taken aback, but only for a moment. Then his natural aggression reasserted itself, his scarred jaw jutting, his eyes glittering steel-blue. “Aw'right, wee hen, tell me this. Tell me why you told thon first wee plod that I murdered Alison.”

I couldn't have been more surprised if he'd accused me of blowing the boat up. My mind did that split-second back-flip that your stomach does on the first fast bend of a big dipper. For just a moment the normal parameters were gone, the accustomed dimensions of up and down and two sides tumbled over one another and there seemed to be nothing familiar and solid enough for me to grab and steady the inverting universe.

Then the moment of vertigo passed, bringing in its wake anger and a kind of understanding. I hit McAllister in the eyes with my own and felt him recoil. He had thought he had me off-balance, had not expected me to recover quickly enough to strike back.

In a quiet barbed voice that seemed the only alternative to shouting at him, I observed, “Mr. McAllister, you're either a fool or a liar. I think you may be both.”

If I'd been a man, he'd have struck me. He might have done so anyway, except that it was fair comment and he knew it. He pushed himself back into the bosom of his upholstery as if putting distance between his hands and my throat, and said stiffly, “I do not understand you.”

“Oh yes you do.” I knew he did, but I spelled it out anyway. “DCI Baker neither said nor suggested any such thing. If you think he was doing, you're a fool. If you don't, you're a liar. And if you're kite-flying, you're both.”

His expression was arctic, but he seemed just fractionally unsure of himself. I think the echo of that uncertainty in his voice shocked him more than anything I had said. “He gave me to understand—”

I raised one eyebrow in silent but overt scepticism. Even that toned-down version wasn't accurate: I'd seen enough policemen in my time to know how reluctantly they convey information. What they do is ask questions. Baker had asked him a question that had put him on the defensive, and he blamed me.

As it happened he was right. Surly, he said, “He wanted to know about Alison's will—how I knew what was in it so soon after—”

For the first time I saw in his ruined face an emotional reaction to what had happened. For just a moment the clouds of anger parted and I glimpsed his grief. It was not a little thing. He had buried it so deeply, walled it up so carefully, precisely because the size and might of it frightened him. In the scant moment that I was aware of it, it frightened me too.

And it changed the way I felt towards him. He was a man whose attitudes would always provoke resentment, and by and large he could be relied upon to deal with that to his own satisfaction. But this was different. He was no less vulnerable than Alex Curragh because he showed his feelings less, no less weakened by his hurts because the wounds were internal and did not show. However things had been between them, he had just lost his wife. If his reactions were aberrant, it was because he was—in many senses, perhaps in every sense—an extraordinary man.

He was rich and powerful, and he had got there despite a background of privation that was still, almost defiantly, audible in his voice; and he had stayed there despite the accident that had robbed him of part of his body and must have threatened his life. All this had made him a survivor, a man who would not easily submit to public scrutiny the private places where he felt fragile, open to attack. He was a man who could see love as a weakness to be exploited, something that could be used against him. Understanding this changed fundamentally the way I saw him.

And I was a little ashamed of how I had treated him. The fact that he had asked for it did not absolve me. I said, more gently, “It struck me as a little curious, that's all. It really is none of my business, you know.”

He seemed to find kindness harder to cope with than antagonism. Lack of practice, perhaps. His eyes dimmed, remembering. “She told me. Alison. She told me about the will.”

I was startled. “You knew about Curragh then?”

“Oh aye,” he said; wearily, not even with much bitterness. “I knew she had a wee laddie for a friend. How old is he, do you know?”