The Going Down of the Sun (14 page)

“Of course not. I don't know what I'm suggesting. Actually I'm not suggesting anything. But I saw that toy in the lagoon at the Fairy Isles, and it was under McAllister's couch this evening.”

“It couldn't have been the same one.”

“It was exactly the same. I was leaning over to pick it up when you spotted Curragh. I was closer to it than I am to you now. It was exactly the same.”

“What happened to it?”

“I don't know! About then I had more urgent things to see to, yes? I let it go and I never saw it again. Until tonight.”

Harry shrugged. “There must have been two. I don't suppose it was a unique work of art. There must be hundreds or thousands of the things round the country. The McAllisters ended up with two of them, one at home and one on the boat.”

“Whoever buys two identical toys for their baby?”

“Maybe somebody gave them one.”

“Then what was it doing on the boat? Wasn't this the first time she'd had it out this year?”

“That's what the boat yard said.”

“She didn't bring the baby, and at the end of last season she didn't have the baby. How did one of its toys get on board? And how come it was still bobbing round after the explosion sent the boat to the bottom? The heat of the blast should have melted it, or so deformed the plastic that you wouldn't know what it was.”

Almost against his will Harry was getting interested in this. “Then what do you think happened?”

“Harry, I don't know! I can't think of a single explanation—for any part of it, let alone for all of it at once. But I know what I saw.”

He thought about it for quite a long time. His mind is more disciplined than mine, used to doing serious work at improbable hours when mine is turning to jelly. I left him to it and went to brush my teeth.

When I came back he said slowly. “Three things seem to have survived the explosion relatively unscathed: the boy, the dinghy and that toy. Suppose they were all together.”

The image that conjured was even more unlikely than McAllister lurking behind a tree: Alex Curragh rowing like hell away from the doomed boat with his girlfriend's baby's toy on the boards between his feet. It made no more sense if it was his baby. Where had the toy come from? Why was he taking it? And how did it get back to McAllister's castle only thirty-six hours later?

“I suppose the likeliest place to get some answers is from Curragh,” I said doubtfully. I wasn't confident that any answers he would give would be true ones.

“I'll talk to Baker in the morning, fix up an interview. Um—” Harry looked at me rather like a cat regarding a goldfish. “If I can square it, do you want to come too?”

“Me? You'll be doing well if Baker lets you see him. I don't think he'll extend visiting privileges to all your relatives.”

“Probably not,” agreed Harry. As we retired to bed I was aware that he was still regarding me as a cat regards a goldfish when he's just heard the front door close on the departing family.

It turned out to be easier than I had expected. The Glasgow police seemed to have accepted at face value Harry's contention that he was indispensable to their investigation, and hardly blinked when he requested an interview between himself, me and Alex Curragh. The fact that they hadn't been getting much sense out of Curragh themselves may have had something to do with it.

I was shocked at the sight of him. For a moment I thought someone had run out of patience and tried beating the answers out of him. But it wasn't that, it was the combined effects of his injuries from the Fairy Isles—reaching their glorious Technicolor peak after two days—and twenty hours of helping police with their enquiries. He would have had too much coffee and too little sleep, like the officers questioning him. His mind would be numb with the percussive effect of their voices.

The anaesthetic still circulating in his system would be contributing to the erosion of reality, as would this narrow, airless little room with no windows and only one door. The boy from Crinan must have craved blue sky and fresh air as if his life depended on them, must have been desperate enough by now to say anything that would bring them closer. But not yet ready, it seemed, to say what had actually happened.

For four hours, said DCI Baker, he had stuck to his story of checking the anchor-chain and being thrown clear by the blast. After that he accepted that no-one believed him and he stopped answering questions altogether. The only questions he had answered in the last sixteen hours, and answered consistently, were
a
, “Were you in love with Alison McAllister?” to which (after he gave up trying to persuade the police that he was no more than her hired crew with his own cabin and no claim on her but his wages) he consistently answered, “Yes”; and
b
, “Did you kill her?” to which he consistently answered “No.” All that ground had been covered before Harry and I had sat down to our dinner with McAllister last night. None had been covered since.

“Visitors for you, Curragh,” Baker said briskly, as he showed us in.

Curragh looked up from the table without enthusiasm, expecting more of the same. But his face changed when he saw me, his dull eyes brightening, life seeping back into his cardboard expression, animation into his slumped body. It struck me with a pang almost like guilt that I was the closest thing he had in this city to a friend and ally, and even I was half inclined to believe him a murderer.

I took the chair opposite him, another hard little kitchen chair designed for other purposes than comfort, and looked at him across the table. Every time I saw him I thought how young he was. Not so much in years, perhaps—twenty-three is a respectable tally, most of us have learned a bit of something by our mid-twenties—as in experience. There was a kind of innocence about him, as if he was unused, untried. It left him ill-equipped to cope with the events he had become involved in. He had no reserves, no philosophy, no fortitude. He was about as deep sunk in misery as a human being can get. But still obstinate. Obstinacy is one of the tools young men acquire early.

And now a tiny glow was creeping back into his cheeks because he thought I was here somehow to rescue him—a diminutive and middle-aged knight-errant assaulting the walls that held him. I wished I could. If I'd had the power to free him from the nightmare, whether it was of his own making or another's and whatever the form of release that might be appropriate, I'd have done it, confident that no act of mine could make him more unhappy than he was at this moment. But I didn't think I had that power. All I could do was ask the same questions he'd already refused to answer, and when I did the glow would die back out of his cheeks and he'd clam up on me too.

I thought I'd start with something uncontentious. I nodded at his plaster. “How's the arm?”

He looked surprised, as if he'd forgotten it. “Fine.”

“Good. You're entitled to have it looked after, you know, whether you're here or at the hospital.”

“They're taking me for another X-ray later today.”

“Fine. How's your head?”

He touched his fingers lightly to his temple. He sounded puzzled. “My head's fine.”

“I'm glad to hear it. It wasn't working the best last time I saw you.”

He had enough colour now to blush with. “That's right. I'm sorry, I don't know what happened—I seemed to wake up in the middle of it with a broken glass in my hand. I didn't frighten you?”

I had to smile. “No.” Would it reassure or offend him to learn how far from frightening he had been, even with an ugly weapon in his hand? I passed over it. “Alex, don't you want to get out of here and go home?”

His eyes kindled for a moment, fear and anger twisting in their depths like brown fire. “Of course I do.”

“Then get it over with. Tell them what they have to know. Nothing can move forward until you do.”

A weary indignation stiffened him, his long slender body coming almost erect in the chair so that he was looking down his nose at me. “They don't believe anything I say.”

I sighed. “That's because you keep telling them lies. You lied to me, too—remember? At some point the truth will have to be told—it might just as well be now, before any more harm is done.”

“I didn't kill her,” he said. “I loved her.”

“Actually, Alex, I believe that.” At least I half believed it. “So what are you hiding? Why won't you tell us what happened?”

“I told them. I told you. I said—”

“You spun some cock-and-bull story about leaning over the bows when all the evidence points to you being in the dinghy when the explosion occurred. Where were you going? Why was it necessary to be?”

“I wasn't going anywhere,” he growled. All his young man's stubbornness glowered in his face, but so far as it went I thought it was the truth.

I pressed the tiny advantage that gave me. “All right, so you weren't going anywhere. But you were in the dinghy.”

“I was—I wanted—” For a long moment he was so close to telling me that I could feel the words gathering in his mouth, straggling to free themselves. A kind of anguish joined the turmoil in his eyes. He hated the deception, ached to be done with it, was ready to take the consequences.

But then a shutter fell between his mind and his eyes, shutting him in with the secret he seemed somehow pledged to protect, shutting him off from me and Harry and the little room where we sat, and the hours that could run into days and weeks, and then possibly years before he would have his freedom again if he couldn't satisfactorily explain how he survived the going down of the
Skara Sun.
I felt him close, close enough to reach and touch, and then I felt him draw back behind this iron curtain of a shutter, and I thought he might never come within hailing distance again.

So I played the joker because it was the only face card I had. I lifted onto the table the paper bag I had brought in with me. “What do you know about this?” When I saw that I had his attention I up-ended the bag and let the thing inside roll glittering into his hand.

Harry had been right: the country was full of them. The second toyshop I went in sold me one for just a few pounds.

I watched his face. His eyes widened, his jaw dropped, his lips paled and parted and a whisper of air came between them. He stared, unmoving, unblinking, as the bauble rolled towards him. Then a sudden spastic movement of his hand on the table-top captured it, his long fingers spreading round it protectively. He held it against his chest, his body curved round it, as if it might otherwise escape.

Finally he dragged his eyes away from it and looked up, and his voice when it came was thin and frail and half broken by emotion. “How—? Where—?”

Harry said quietly. “No need to ask if you recognise it, then.”

The boy's eyes stayed on me. There was a shining there as of tears, as if after all the hours of dull and hopeless misery, this cheap toy had moved him, stirred the brew of emotions he had carefully battened down. But what I saw was not more pain, or grief or anger or fear. It might have been relief. His voice still thin but under some kind of control now, he said, “You know, don't you?”

“Some of it. Maybe most.”

It wasn't true; it wasn't even necessary for him to believe that it was. It was the password he needed to let himself out of this prison he had built for himself. A permit, like the one McAllister had required of me. I didn't understand their need for the approval of someone neither of them knew. But then, my understanding was also unnecessary. The job of a catalyst is to facilitate a chemical reaction, not to understand the periodic table.

“Including Peter?”

It was a gamble. If I was wrong I'd lose him, and I'd never get him back again, and I believed absolutely that whatever he knew about the going down of the
Sun
—however much or little—he'd keep as a secret to himself probably for the rest of his life. But if I didn't take the risk I'd lose him too. I had to justify his trust in me, prove that he wasn't actually breaking the confidence placed in him.

I said, “Yes, Alex, I know about your son.”

He sighed. The burden on him lightened visibly. “I promised I'd never tell anyone. I promised her that. It mattered more than anything to her.”

“You didn't have to tell me. That much I knew.”

He nodded slowly. He was ready to let go—let go of his secret, let go of Alison. “Then you might as well know, it all. I've nothing to hide. We had nothing to be ashamed of. I loved Alison McAllister and she cared for me, but she was going back to her husband. He didn't have to kill her. She was going back to him, and nobody would ever have known he wasn't Peter's father. Not from her, and not from me.”

And so it began to come, the story he'd pawned all his future to keep secret. And as it came I could see the tension and the weariness leaching out of him, the relief buoying him up.

“So you were in the dinghy when it happened. Where were you going?”

“I wasn't going anywhere. I was coming back.”

He'd looked forward to the trip for weeks. Alison had promised that as soon as she had her boat in the water she'd sail down to Crinan to pick him up and they'd have a holiday together. Only when they were alone on the boat, lying at anchor that night at the Fairy Isles, did Alex learn it was to be their last time together. Even without the explosion. The trip was in the nature of a farewell present to him.

She had another parting gift. She confirmed what he had dared to suspect but never found the courage to ask: that he was the father of her child. He was like a child himself, stunned and excited at the news, and while he was celebrating with wine and song and a making of plans—making, too, the happy noise that had drifted over the still water to the
Rubber Lion
—Alison broke the rest of her news, that she was finishing with him.