The Going Down of the Sun (10 page)

In the first, the affair grew cool long before the
Skara Sun
dropped anchor at the Fairy Isles. Alison McAllister had enjoyed her Highland fling, and the untutored urgency of Curragh's strong young body, but was beginning to tire—of the complications, of the time it was taking up, perhaps of the very lack of sophistication that had attracted her to him in the first place. The thing was become wearisome by contrast with the comfort and interest of her life in Glasgow. Perhaps Curragh himself, apart from his unflawed body, didn't measure up to Frazer McAllister as a companion. For whatever reason, Alison had had enough, and she told him.

I still found it difficult to accommodate the notion of a bequest rather than a gift, but that was what had happened so there had to be a reason. It may have started as a joke—” I'll leave you something in my will, darling!”—and seemed funnier to her to fulfil her promise than break it.

Indeed, she was so pleased with the joke that she told both Curragh and her husband, but probably neither of them laughed. Perhaps McAllister had seen enough of the world to shrug off her infidelity with something approaching philosophy, but Curragh—who came from a small, remote village, was twenty-three years old and had seen very little of it—was consumed by anger and jealousy and a sense of having been used. At that point (in the first scenario) he decided that if money was what it was all about, he'd make sure of getting what he'd earned.

One of them had suggested a final weekend together. The Fairy Isles was a good place to say goodbye. When they saw the
Rubber Lion
already there, perhaps Alison wanted to push on and find somewhere they could be alone. But it would have suited Curragh to have a witness to the incident, someone to testify to the quiet companionship of the night before the cataclysm. So they anchored, made supper, maybe made love: the bunks on the
Sun
were undoubtedly more roomy than those on the
Lion.

In the early morning, while Alison slept, Curragh returned to the galley. He deactivated the gas detector, then turned on either the stove or the cylinder so that the gas would build up in the nooks and crannies of the cabin, ready for Alison to strike a match and start breakfast. The smell wouldn't be very noticeable: some people can smell it better than others, but lying undisturbed around the floor-boats it would be hardly more obtrusive than the general fug you get from sleeping in a confined space. Waking blearily with the previous night's hangover, Alison was unlikely to realise anything was amiss in the minute or so before she lit the stove under the coffee-pot.

By then Curragh was on deck and ready to leave. A glance our way confirmed that no-one on the
Rubber Lion
was sufficiently awake to observe his activities, so there was no need to pretend an interest in the anchor-chain or the fishing when he climbed into the dinghy. All he had to do was rouse Alison, ask her for some coffee, and row away.

He miscalculated the extent of her hangover. She was out of her bunk quicker than he expected, and he was too close when the
Skara Sun
blew up. But for the proximity of the
Rubber Lion
, he would not have lived to claim his inheritance.

Fifteen thousand pounds. To a twenty-three-year-old on a boat repairer's wages, it must have seemed a fortune. I supposed it was pin-money to Alison McAllister, but it had cost her her life. If this first scenario was how it had happened.

The alternative had its appeal, too. In this one the affair was not petering out but still in full swing. “Your husband will kill us if he ever finds out,” Curragh had said. McAllister had, and he had.

This time the bequest had been not so much a whim, a rich woman's joke, as an earnest of intent. She was committing herself to Alex Curragh. Her husband found out, and the man who was accustomed to being denied nothing that money could buy was overwhelmed by his fury.

For McAllister to take his revenge on his wife and the boy she had betrayed him with, he must have had an agent. Even if he could have got aboard unaided while the
Sun
lay at Oban, he would have been too noticeable a trespasser. Whoever doctored the stove had to be un-memorable and preferably both swift and agile. It would be best if the boat yard never knew there had been a visitor; failing that, he had to be someone they could not describe and would not recognise again. Yards attract hangers-on: boat fanatics, the innocently curious and day-dreamers as well as prospective thieves—there's a lucrative market in marine equipment. Because of this most yards are security-conscious and can protect their clients from casual theft and vandalism. But if McAllister hired a fixer there would be nothing casual about him, and probably the shore patrols at Holy Loch wouldn't have kept him out.

There were different ways he could have fixed it. He could have fixed the stove to leak, or one of the cylinders to leak. He could have planted a bomb. If I'd been writing it, I'd have had him substitute petrol or possibly oxygen for butane in one of the tanks, in which case events would have taken their course when the previous cylinder ran out, whenever and wherever that might be.

So he'd left his little surprise, and left the boat yard either unnoticed or unremarked, and collected his wages and vanished back into the underworld whence he came. And Alison motored the
Skara Sun
down to Crinan to meet her lover, and on their second morning together the bomb went off or the seal leaked or the doctored cylinder was connected and Alison struck the fatal match.

However the explosion was triggered, there was clearly a delay mechanism, to ensure they were both aboard before it happened. McAllister wanted them both dead. But sheer luck had put Curragh on deck at the critical moment, and another mammoth slice of fortune had put Harry and I close enough to help when the sea would otherwise have finished what the explosion began.

McAllister must have been furious to learn Curragh had escaped. But he thought quickly—all the indications were that he was a quick-thinking man—and found another way of exacting payment for the wrong he had suffered. Next best thing to having his wife and his wife's lover dead together at the bottom of Loch Sween was seeing Curragh rot his life away in Barlinnie Prison for a murder he didn't commit.

So as soon as the news came through he was at the hospital with his tale of Alison's bequest and his accusation, knowing that however wild it sounded, the police would have to investigate. The man who'd fixed the boat, or another like him, could fix him up with enough evidence to see the boy condemned. He'd still have achieved what he set out to, revenged on and rid of the wife who had cheated and the man who had cuckolded him, free to enjoy his wealth and his power and his son without—

Without, I thought then with the sudden grasp of a revelation, the risk of losing the child. That's why he needed Alison dead. Cutting her off without a penny wouldn't suffice: if she wanted to take the baby, custody was unlikely to be awarded to McAllister. “I can look after both of you,” Curragh had said. He certainly wasn't referring to the sturdy Glaswegian. He wanted Alison to leave her husband and bring her baby and come to him.

McAllister was a man in his fifties, a rich man but a cripple. It had taken him until now to produce an heir. He must be aware that this baby might be the only one he'd ever have. A man like McAllister would not lie down while the courts took his son and heir from him. A man like McAllister would do what he had to in order to preserve his succession. He could even have done it still loving his wife.

Harry said, in the patient voice of a man repeating himself for the third time, “I said, Are you ready for lunch yet?”

My mind returned to the hotel room by degrees. For a few moments my eyes actually saw him blurred, standing in the doorway like a faintly woolly column of grey and white, rather than a middle-aged policeman in flannels and an Aran sweater wishing his wife had let him bring his suit on holiday.

I blinked and the woolliness dispersed. “What?—Sorry?”

He frowned. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “Or rather, no. I've been thinking.”

“Oh God,” he groaned, “not again?” There was real pain in his eyes, as if I'd confessed to some dreadful vice he'd thought me cured of. “What have you come up with this time?”

So I told him, in a certain amount of detail—I seem to remember a glazed expression creeping over his face and halfway through he sat down on the bed to take the weight off his feet. But he listened without interruption until I had finished, which was as much as I had a right and more than I had reason to expect.

Then he looked down one side of his unshapely nose at me, a look in which I recognised affection and amusement and a tolerant disbelief at what he was married to. “That's it?”

I was a shade taken aback. “Well—yes.”

“I see. You've spoken to both parties, and analysed both what they said and what they didn't, and you've come to the conclusion that Alison McAllister's death was probably murder and the culprit probably either her husband or her lover.”

“Er—yes.” Stripped of the detail, succinct and to the point, that was it.

Harry said, “CID came to the same conclusion yesterday.”

It may have been no more than the truth but his manner stung and, rising abruptly from the chair and stalking to the window, I made no effort to disguise it. Perhaps I was dwelling needlessly on my fringe involvement in the matter. Perhaps I was presuming a role for myself that didn't actually exist. Perhaps there was an unattractive vanity in the assumption that I could think through motives and actions in a way that the professionals in the business couldn't.

But I'd had a difficult couple of days, trying in ways both physical and emotional, and if I had reacted oddly—an idiosyncratic response—I surely deserved better than sarcasm. I was forgetting that Harry too had had a difficult few days.

“Well, I'm very sorry,” I said snidely. “Just for a moment I thought those posters they pin up in libraries between the literary reviews and the address of the VD clinic—you know, the ones that say the police force is
our
police force and only as good as the help it gets—actually meant something. I'd forgotten that the policing of my country is none of my damn business. Like its governance, except every five years when there's an election, and its judicial system, except that once in a blue moon I might have to lie my way out of doing jury service.

“Well, I have news for you, Harry Marsh. I don't operate that way. I happen to believe that government, and justice, and law and order are as much my business, and that of every other citizen of this state, as they are the business of those employed in our name to execute them. If I think the government is wrong I will say so, as loudly and persuasively as I can. If I see a miscarriage of justice I will denounce it and do all in my power to have it rectified.

“And if by chance I bump into the sort of bastard who thinks that other people's lives can be manipulated and ultimately terminated to suit his ego, his convenience, his ambitions or his mood, I will not abdicate—to you, or DCI Baker, or anyone else who keeps his sense of outrage tucked away in his warrant card and secretly feels that violent crime isn't wholly antisocial while it provides policemen with a decent living—either my right or my responsibility to do what I can to stop him.”

“And you think you can do something about stopping this one, do you?” Harry's voice was rough; he was as incensed by my attitude as I was by his. He resented being lectured no less than I resented being patronised. “Make a citizen's arrest, why don't you? I'm sure you know the law gives you that right. Only you'd better decide which one of them did it—courts aren't much impressed by charge-sheets with the defendant's name a multiple-option question. Chinese?”

I stared at him, angry and without comprehension. Then I realised it was an invitation to lunch. I responded with about as much grace. “Indonesian.”

We compromised. Harry had Chinese, I had Indonesian. In separate restaurants.

Of course he was right. I knew that even while I was shouting at him. I was right too, but Harry had practicality on his side. The police would always be in the best position to discover the truth. It wasn't the hundred-watt bulbs and rubber truncheons that made the difference, it was the access to facilities no well-meaning amateur could call on: the divers sitting out the storm at Loch Sween, the forensic scientists poring over the bits of twisted metal, perhaps most significant of all the infinite records held by officialdom on each one of us. If Frazer McAllister had ever been suspected of torching an unprofitable business, they would know. If Alex Curragh had been unwise enough to put down a small deposit on a large car in anticipation of good fortune, they would find out. I couldn't match that.

I didn't even want to. It wasn't my job and I didn't covet it; if I had left Harry with that impression it was because he'd rattled my cage until I squawked at him.

I didn't know whether McAllister or Curragh had brought about Alison's death, and I wasn't sure I wanted to. I had met both men. In so far as you can tell from a brief encounter, I had rather liked them both: McAllister for his strength, and Alex for that gentleness of spirit I had glimpsed through his suffering, which even the episode with the glass had not convincingly refuted. I liked them. I didn't want either of them to have deactivated the gas detector.

That detector, I found as I thought more about it, was more persuasive evidence against the lover than the husband. It would have offered no warning, on or off, against a bomb or a cylinder full of petrol. It presupposed a gas leak, which would have been very much harder to arrange from a distance. Curragh had only to turn off the detector, turn on the stove and go for a row before breakfast. McAllister, through his agent, would have had to rig some kind of remote control, because his last chance was probably at Oban before Alison went on board. If he wanted the woman and the boy both, an explosion the first time the stove was lit was unlikely to serve. In the event the thing didn't happen until the
Skara Sun
was forty-eight hours out of Oban. It wasn't impossible for a skilled technician to effect a time-delayed gas leak, but there had to have been an easier way. If McAllister was responsible.