The Going Down of the Sun (20 page)

After a moment Harry nodded. “Yes, all right. Just remember there may be others looking for him, besides you and the police.”

I dropped Harry back at the airport and kept the car. But I didn't go straight to Crinan. I went first to Duncan Galbraith's newspaper.

Their star reporter was hunched over a notebook an inch thick, filled with tightly packed scrawl that made doctors'handwriting look like copperplate. It was shorthand, of course, though that didn't occur to me until I'd spent half a minute trying to decipher it over his shoulder.

Then he looked up with a harrassed grin. “Sorry, I'm with you now. If I'd lost track of what the defence counsel said the prosecution witness had said to the defendant about the defendant's wife, I'd never have made sense of this if I'd lived to be a hundred.” He'd spent the day in court. I gathered it was a way of keeping him out of Frazer McAllister's hair without actually sending him to Aberdeen. “What's happening? What have I missed?”

“Nothing, yet. Do you want a story?”

“Of course.”

“You know Alex Curragh's missing? I'm going to find him. Do you want to come?”

“Yes.”

As quickly as that we fixed it up. He needed an hour to finish his court report. It was already evening, it would be dark before we could reach Crinan anyway, so that was no problem. I went back to the hotel to throw a few things into a case; Galbraith it seemed, like many a hack reporter with pretentions, habitually kept an overnight bag in his office. I picked him up an hour later and we took the Loch Lomond road, and only then did I tell him exactly what we were doing and why.

It was a calculated risk, but not much of one. If he'd leapt out at traffic lights and dashed for the nearest telephone, probably his paper's lawyers would have squashed the story before it ever saw a compositor. It was still nearly all speculation; McAllister had ways of discouraging speculation about him. Galbraith might have had more luck with the London papers, but I couldn't see him doing that while he had an exclusive shot at the full, unexpurgated, inactionable story. And in fact he never so much as tried the door handle when we stopped for petrol. So as we travelled north and west the day ended.

Around Inverary, Duncan Galbraith said thoughtfully, “We know why I wanted to come. Why did you want me to come?”

I said, “I'm after your body,” thinking it was a good job Baker wasn't with us, and we both giggled.

“Seriously,” said Galbraith.

“I want a witness. Oh, I'm glad of your company, and I may very well be glad of your help, but mostly I want a witness. If anybody starts playing silly buggers I want it to be more than his word against mine. And if McAllister is calling the tune, I want him to know he could get famous quite quickly by pushing us around.”

In the faint backwash of light from the instruments he looked doubtful. “If you're planning on threatening him with me, I think you could be disappointed.”

“If you get a story, you'll get it published, one way or another. He knows that.”

“Are you sure you've got the right chap?”

“Why did you leave Edinburgh?”

He blinked. “I got another offer.”

“A better offer?”

“Not exactly.” He grinned. “The guy I'd spent the last six months slagging off bought the paper I was on.”

“He sacked you?”

“No. But I didn't want to work for him.”

“You wanted to go on slagging him off?”

“I wanted to be free to.” There was something odd about how he said it, a hint in his manner and his voice that there was more he wasn't saying.

I said, “I got the right chap.”

“You reckon?” He looked at me sideways, and the green glow put a hungry cast on his ample cheeks. “The man who bought my paper was Frazer McAllister, and when I came to Glasgow he bought a good slice of the one I'm on now.”

While Duncan was taking rooms for us at the hotel I went round and introduced myself to the local constabulary. I told them who I was and what I was doing, and referred them to DCI Baker if they had any problems with that. I can't say they were wildly glad to see me, but nor did they raise any particular difficulties. They had, of course, been watching for Alex Curragh since about midday; they hadn't seen him or found anyone who had, and they didn't think it likely that I'd succeed where they had failed. I didn't think it all that likely myself, but it was something else to try and Alex needed people working on his behalf.

The Crinan police had also been warned about McAllister's bounty, and were watching out for anyone who might be interested in that. But it was the tourist season, strangers in cars and on boats would be drifting through Crinan with no obvious purpose from now until September. The only way a bounty-hunter would be different would be when he started asking questions in the local pub.

Which is where I wanted to start, but the pub was closed now. I dragged the manager of our hotel away from his TV, gave him a potted version of my talk with the police and asked what he knew, but though he was civil enough and willing to help, he actually knew very little. He wasn't a local man, and though when the television news carried a photograph after the explosion he had recognised Alex Curragh, he knew nothing of his haunts and habits.

It wasn't far short of midnight now. I phoned our hotel in Glasgow but Harry wasn't back yet. Duncan Galbraith and I shared a supper of coffee and sandwiches, then went to our beds.

The sun rose early. So did we. We met briefly over breakfast, then Duncan went to see the people at the yard where Alex worked and I drove south into the crowding green of the Knapdale Forest on a narrow little road that brought me at length to the little stone house where his father lived. From the map I judged that the Fairy Isles, where all this started, were only a couple of miles away, but most of that was dense woodland. I couldn't see the loch, let alone the islands.

I had felt guilty about calling at this early hour but I needn't have worried. Sinclair Curragh hadn't slept last night and I doubt if he'd slept the night before. The police had visited him several times since the explosion, including once about three o'clock this morning when they very gently and politely insisted on seeing every room as well as the outbuildings.

More disturbingly, he had also had two callers asking directions. One produced a map, and while Curragh was showing him a route he got the strong impression that the other was looking in at the cottage windows.

“But Alex hasn't been here, has he?” I couldn't imagine it. If he was hiding he'd do it properly. If he came back he'd go to the police.

Sinclair Curragh shook his head. He was a short, stocky man, much shorter than Alex, with grizzled hair and a weather-beaten face. He might have been a shepherd or a trawlerman. He was Frazer McAllister's age but he looked older. It wasn't the weather on his skin that had done that but the fear in his heart.

“I told the sergeant,” he said. “Alex hasn't been home since before …” The explosion. The echo of it was still audible as a tremor in his voice. “I heard it. I didn't know what it was. I didn't think for a minute …”

I said, “Mr. Curragh, we don't think Alex was responsible for that. We don't think he's done anything wrong. But there are those who blame him for what happened, and we have to find him before they do. Can you help, at all?”

I met Duncan back in Crinan, beside the little harbour. He looked he'd been waiting a while. In his tweed jacket and his Fair Isle pullover and his journalist's regulation suede shoes, he looked just a little out of place.

“Any luck?”

He rocked a hand. “Some. Nobody's seen Alex or heard from him. Nobody knows where he is. But the feeling is he's back in the Sound. A sailing boat went missing from Machrihanish last night and the smart money says Alex took it.”

I unfolded the map, found Machrihanish near the end of the Kintyre peninsula. Any boat leaving Glasgow for the north or west would pass within a few miles. It was maybe half a day's chugging from the Clyde, and he could have been landed there any time after nightfall and no-one any the wiser.

It was entirely in character that he would find a boat to continue his escape. He was probably under sail at first light and well into the Sound of Jura by breakfast-time. Right now he could be only a few miles away, cruising easily on the steady breeze, or more likely beached in a cove somewhere with his sails struck and maybe his mast shipped to avoid being seen. If he could live off the land he could stay out of sight for as long as he cared to.

“Do the police know about the missing boat?”

“I got the impression that maybe no-one had got round to telling them yet.”

I wasn't surprised. These were small, close-knit communities—they'd back one of their own against the authorities any day. They couldn't know that closing ranks this time could get their boy killed.

I said, “What about our boat?”

Duncan looked unhappy. “They're getting it ready now. Are you sure you know how to handle it?”

It was a good question. If it had been a sailing boat I'd have had no worries: if it sails I can sail it. But sails wouldn't cover the sea-miles quickly enough to find Alex Curragh before the ungodly did. I'd asked Duncan to hire us something with speed and range, and we went back to the yard now, via the grocer's to take on supplies, to see what he'd come up with.

The
Fairy Flag
was the child of an unnatural union between a drag-racer and a landing-craft. Her cabin may have started life as a potting shed, her hull as an ice-breaker. She looked like a cow, she smelled like a cow, and when I took her out into Crinan Loch it came as no surprise to find that she also steered like a cow. But on behind were two big, strong engines, and tanks filled to capacity would take us halfway round the British Isles. A thing of beauty she was not, but she'd do our job.

Half an hour out, with the sun high in a blue sky and the waters of the Sound gone in laughter-wrinkles from a friendly little breeze, Duncan retired to the potting shed with white knuckles and a pale green complexion. It hadn't occurred to me to wonder if he was a decent sailor. It hadn't occurred to me that he'd need to be to ship as supercargo aboard a big sturdy cruiser in inshore waters in June. I wondered how he'd cope if we had to row ashore in the rubber dinghy.

I left the wheel just long enough to dive below and drag him out. “That's the last place you want to be if you're feeling off-colour. What you need is fresh air and a job to occupy your mind.”

“What I need,” he replied faintly, “is somewhere quiet to die.”

I tried to get him scanning the shore, but using the binoculars made him worse. Studying the map made him worse still. So I put him on the wheel and made him steer. “It's just like a car.” Except that she was longer, pivoted in the water about a third of the way down her length, and you steer from the back rather than the front. On the other hand, there are no pedestrians. “That's the compass. We're running southwest—there.” I showed him. “Keep her head about 220 degrees, that'll keep us parallel to the shore. If any islands get in the way, feel free to deviate; ditto any small boats full of screaming people.”

Actually I didn't intend to abandon him utterly to the erratic mercies of this creature of his nightmares. Beside him in the wheel-house I could keep an eye on his progress without it occupying all my time and attention. These I turned on the shoreline running along our flank and the occasional small island occulting it. The binoculars didn't make me feel sick.

I had assumed Alex could be nearly home by now, but when I thought about it that didn't seem too likely. If he'd taken the missing boat at first light, he might have sailed for four or five hours but then the risk of being spotted would send him under cover. Also, by then he'd be ready to sleep. Five hours of the kindly south wind we'd had all morning might have brought him just north of Gigha, if he'd used every minute and every breath. More probably he was ashore somewhere south of a line drawn through the island to Clachan on the Kintyre peninsula and Ardmore Point on Islay. We wouldn't reach that line for a couple of hours.

Navigation was the saving of Duncan Galbraith. With his attention divided between the wheel, the compass rose and a narrow channel of sea a few points either side of our bow, he hadn't the leisure to feel ill. The roses returned to his cheeks, the sun began to burn his nose and the breeze blew his thinning hair about in an engaging fashion. Before long he looked he was enjoying himself, albeit in a rather daring, dangerous sort of way.

I wasn't enjoying myself. The sun and wind were pleasant, the surroundings as spectacular as ever, the
Fairy Flag
an acceptable if not ideal access to them. But it needed more than the wonders of navigation to take my mind off what was bothering me. I was worried—about Alex, about the men who called at his father's house, about what McAllister was doing now. I wished Harry was nearer than the Orkneys.

As the day warmed up we found ourselves with company on the Sound. Two pocket cruisers, obviously travelling together, passed us northward bound off Loch Killisport. A handful of sailing dinghies wove intricate patterns like bright-winged butterflies up in West Loch Tarbert. Twice we were buzzed by a little red speedboat, and just north of Gigha we crossed the wash of the Islay ferry. I saw nothing that fitted the description of the missing boat, a fifteen-foot day sailer with a clinker hull and tan sails. But then I didn't really expect to. It wouldn't be as easy as that.

Once the long narrow island of Gigha came up on our bows, I began searching in earnest. It was one of Alex's haunts, according to his father. With the engines throttled back and Duncan steering closer inshore than he really considered safe, I ran the binoculars over every foot of every beach and bay, looking for a small boat anchored or hauled up, or signs of a camp on the shore. I had hopes of the little anchorage at the north end of the island where fingers of rock reached into the sea and defined a couple of well-sheltered bays, but we found only a cabin cruiser in one and a tent pitched beside the other.