The Going Down of the Sun (13 page)

On top of the plank were leather-bound books and silver-framed photographs. That was where Harry's slow gaze came to rest. “May I?”

I suppose it was hard for him to refuse, but McAllister looked as if he'd have liked to. “Help yourself.”

Harry put his glass down and went over to the mantelpiece. For a moment I was afraid he was going to commit some terrible faux pas—”Look, darling, that's what the boat looked like before it blew up.” But I misjudged him. He hasn't a lot of natural tact, my husband, but neither is he a thoughtless man. He smiled gravely at McAllister. “Is that your son?”

Our host squinted past him at the picture and nodded. “Aye, that's the two of them—Alison and the wean. I took that the weekend they came home from the hospital.”

I looked too, craning to see. The woman's long fair hair was unmistakable, though here it was held confined by a scarf and the time-warp of photography, not streaming in the wind off Shuna Point. Her face we had not seen closely enough to recognise.

I looked at her now and saw a strong, firmly planed face, broad across the eyes and high in the brow. The eyes were cornflower blue, wide open and steady. Their clarity was a shortcut to her soul. Her mouth was wide and bent in the gentle curve of a smile: not the ecstatic, idiot grin of a new mum with her baby but the satisfied, knowing, slightly weary smile of someone who has completed a difficult labour. McAllister at the other side of the lens might have been beside himself with the joy of fatherhood, but Alison was just glad to have completed her pregnancy.

And I thought then that she had already decided to leave him. She was posing for his camera not so that she could flip back through the family album in years to come, but so that he'd have something of the child after she had gone. Gone to Alex Curragh, who wanted to take care of them both. Maybe the child was his, or at least he thought it was.

Or maybe it was Alison he wanted. I could see it, picture them together: the strong, knowing woman with her self-confidence born partly of money but also from living in a wider world than the boy from Crinan could imagine; and Alex, younger than she, at once urgent and innocent, with his strong young body and his yet untroubled soul. Each had offered the other things they needed and could have no other way.

Harry looked along the row of frames. “No wedding snaps?”

McAllister grinned fiercely. “Come on. I look in a mirror once a day to shave, I don't need any pictures round the place to remind me how I look. I've got one of Alison in her wedding dress somewhere.” He looked at the fireplace as if it had been there once but it was gone now.

“When were you married?”

If he was finding this all a little personal, McAllister showed no signs of resentment, yet. “Four years ago. Man, she was bonny that day.”

But he was already as I saw him now; those scars had to be many years old. I had assumed—for the moment I couldn't remember why—that Alison had been there when he met his accident.

A thin wail like a wet kitten's came from half the house away. McAllister had left the sitting-room door a little ajar when he sat us down, and now he was out of his chair before I had identified the sound as a baby. He grinned his gargoyle grin at me. “I might have known we'd hear from his lordship before this evening was much older. Come on up and say hello.”

At some point the original staircase, which was probably stone and narrow like the one outside, had been replaced by something broader, in gothic-carved timber. The handrail was dark and glossy with use. McAllister led the way upstairs and I saw why: he hauled himself up, using the big muscles in his arm and shoulder to compensate for the lost muscles of his leg. It wasn't an elegant movement but there was nothing pitiable about it either. There was vigour and a great competence about everything he did.

As we gained the landing I said, “Will you get a nurse for him?”

“No, I don't think so. Alison was never that keen on the idea, and there's always either me or Mrs. Lilley here. I haven't had much practice, but she's raised four of her own. I think we can manage.”

I thought so too. I also suspected that if the child required the experienced Mrs. Lilley's attentions at a critical moment, McAllister would take over cooking our dinner with no loss of dignity or flavour. Without really doubting what Duncan Galbraith had told me, I was finding it increasingly difficult not to admire Frazer McAllister.

The door of the little nursery was also ajar. He stepped inside and turned up the light, and bent over the high-sided cot, lifting the red-faced infant in his arms. I was sure it would redecorate his cashmere cardigan but he seemed unconcerned. He grinned daftly at it and jiggled it until it stopped whining. Then he grinned at me. “Dr. Clio Marsh,” he said, “may I present Mr. Peter McAllister?”

Halfway through the turbot I remembered why it was I'd thought Alison was there when McAllister met his accident. It was what Curragh had said: “She saw a boat burn up once, she didn't want to go that way.” I had assumed that was how McAllister was burned, but perhaps I had assumed too much. I wanted to ask but couldn't imagine how to steer the conversation that way without being inexcusably rude.

Perhaps McAllister sensed my interest and decided, for his own amusement, to humour it. It may have been luck, or maybe he made a habit of dispelling the inevitable speculation at an early opportunity. I had just about persuaded myself that I couldn't broach the subject without causing horrible embarrassment all round, when McAllister broached it for me.

“There's not much comfort in all this,” he said, his eyes distant, “but there's this: at least it's all over for her. I can't see Alison hanging round while they put what bits of her they could find together again. She's better out of it.”

I couldn't accept that. It went against the grain of all I had been taught and had done, to think that some patients might be better off without medical intervention. Well, perhaps the very old and used up, perhaps the very young and unviable, perhaps the severely brain-damaged: these were issues you could argue about. But medical intervention, and infinite patience and skill on the part of my late profession, had brought Frazer McAllister back from the valley of the shadow of death, and he seemed to be suggesting that it hadn't been worth the trouble. I said, “Surely you don't believe you'd have been better out of it?”

He cast me again that sharp, appraising look. I think he enjoyed a good argument, and surrounded as he was by employees he didn't get many of them. “Not now, certainly. But the last time I nearly died of my injuries was eight months after the fire. All right, I came through it and I'm glad now that I did. But eight months is too much time and too much pain to invest if you're then going to lose. I wouldn't do it again, and I'm glad they haven't got Alison on a ventilator in the bowels of a big white hospital. If this had to happen, and she couldn't get away with a few broken bones or that, I'm glad it took her clean. When your number comes up, unless you can be pretty damn sure of fighting them off you're better going when they call. There's no dignity in struggling till you're worn out and then being dragged away by your heels.”

For a space none of us spoke. The turbot was gone and McAllister rang for the next course. When Mrs. Lilley had gone back to her kitchen I said quietly, “A fire, you said. What happened?”

He looked at me straight, his eyes not merely unflinching but holding a challenge. “I owned a chemical plant. I hired the latest thing in boffins. They devised the last word in new processes and brought me up to show me. They blew the place to smithereens. Long before I knew whether I'd live or die, I sacked all the survivors and sold the site for a rubbish tip.”

It had the ring of a story he'd told many times before, and honed and polished with each retelling until now it had the edge, the cut, the sardonic humour of a flint skipping across waves. The pain was gone from it, even the memory of pain. That dwelt elsewhere, and he had buried it deep enough to think it lost until what happened to Alison dug it up again.

“When was this?”

“Twelve years ago. I wouldn't have been much older than you.” Actually he'd have been younger than me, but there seemed no need to say so. I caught Harry smiling secretly at me and glared back.

But if it was not her husband's accident which inspired Alison's fear of fire, what was it? I thought that probably I would never know, and that anyway it wasn't important. In all the circumstances it was difficult to pump McAllister for any light he could shed on the matter.

With the woman only thirty-six hours dead and the remains of her body and her boat settling into the thick silt on the bed of Loch Sween, it seemed more natural to be talking about Alison and her sailing than carefully avoiding the subject. I said,
“Skara Sun
—was your wife from Orkney?”

“Aye, she was. Her family had a farm above Stromness.”

“That would be where she got interested in boats, then.”

He nodded. “Her old man kept a little fishing boat in the harbour there. He taught her and her brother both. The family were practically self-sufficient. Mutton and herring: she used to say she'd hardly tasted anything else until she went to university in Stirling.”

We made small-talk then until, when we were sampling the cheese, McAllister suddenly stabbed the knife into a wedge of Stilton that was about ready to up and leave of its own accord, and looked up from it first to me and then to Harry, and said quietly, “Listen, I want to thank you people for coming here tonight. You probably thought it a strange request, even after—perhaps particularly after—the behaviour of the thuglet, my nephew. I'm awful glad you didn't do the sensible thing and ignore it.”

He went on almost without pausing, pouring words like a tapped keg—not under great pressure but steadily. “It's been a weird couple of days, you know? I've hardly got speaking to anybody—the police, you, that cretin William, Mrs. Lilley who‘s been too upset to talk back and my son who's too young to. The people I employ have been going round with lowered eyes, and the people I call my friends have been so damn reluctant to intrude they've backed out of my life entirely.

“What do they expect?—that I'm going to start bawling into my whisky and embarrass them? They know me better than that. Any grieving I need privacy for I can do at night, in my own bed. Life goes on—but somehow they don't seem to want mine to. They'd be happier if I went into retreat for a month and needed expensive sessions with a trick-cyclist. That they could understand. They can't understand a grief worthy of the name not tearing a man apart. Damn it, if I let grief do that to me there'd be even less of me left than there is at present!”

I said gently, “Grief is what you feel, not what you do. Different people have different ways of handling it—none of them are either right or wrong. It's your grief, handle it how you handle it best.”

He looked at me as if I'd given him permission for something he needed to do. “How come you understand what none of my friends can?”

I shrugged. “I'm bloody-minded too.”

He grinned at that. But it wasn't actually a joke. There was something in me, and I recognised it in him too, that wasn't content to disregard public opinion but must confound and preferably scandalise it as well. From the outside such independence looked like strength; as an insider I knew it for a weakness, because letting your feelings and actions be dictated by other people's prejudices, even in order to outrage them, isn't independence at all, it's just another kind of conformity. True freedom is doing what you think is right, even if that sometimes means doing what's expected of you.

We returned to the sitting-room for coffee, and soon after that but still not much before midnight we started making moves towards leaving.

Harry has big feet. I'm not sure I've mentioned this before, but being as he is a large person generally, it will not come as a surprise. So as he turned on the Turkey rag, the long toe of one shoe went under the corner of one of the couches, and a shimmering little rainbow skittered across the carpet and turned my world upside down.

I don't know how I got outside but I did, somehow. I even managed a fairly civil thank-you to our host. Then the smooth dark car took us from the foot of the stone steps back to Glasgow, and still I couldn't tell Harry what it was that had struck me like a fist below the heart. But back at the hotel, while he threw himself on the bed with weary abandon and a slightly peevish expression, I sat carefully in the armchair with my knees pressed together to still their trembling, and told him where I had seen that child's toy before.

Bobbing on the afrighted sea at the Fairy Isles, a clear plastic globe filled with coloured fancies that danced within it as it spun.

When I had finished he was sitting bolt upright on the bed, staring at me with shock, alarm and that soul-raking disappointment, as if he'd come home and found me swimming in a gin bottle. And I felt sorry for him, because it was as embarrassing for a policeman to have a wife who got involved in crime as it would be for a vicar whose wife tended to manifest ectoplasm during the Benediction.

But it wasn't my fault. I did nothing to invite these revelations, and I wasn't going to turn a blind eye to what I considered a material piece of evidence however inconvenient it was for him. If the police could make nothing of it, fair enough; but I couldn't just kick the glitter-ball back under the couch and forget it.

To be fair, I don't think Harry would have wanted me to. Only sometimes I'm sure he wished I wrote historical romances and only thought I saw dangerous liaisons and aristocratic by-blows everywhere.

“What is it you're suggesting?” he asked. “That McAllister was lurking behind a pine-tree all the time, detonator in hand, and after we'd pulled Curragh out and motored off to Tayvallich he waded into the water, picked up his kid's toy and came home?”