The Going Down of the Sun (22 page)

On a clear day the Paps of Jura are visible from all over the Sound, the sharply thrusting breasts of that old warrior the Earth Goddess, who held sway in Scotland long before the Kirk cast its grey shadow of sanctimony and disapproval. You could identify with a goddess like that, all rounded contours, breasts and hips carved out of the living land, wearing green for summer and in winter white. You could see her gather the weather about her, clothe herself in storms, press not milk but rain from her erect nipples. It didn't take much faith to believe in a deity like that. The idea of an invisible, intangible, unknowable and male God came later, marking the movement away from the warmhearted, hot-tempered, loving, bloody earth-mother and towards the distant, unapproachable, cool and intellectual sky-father. But a majority of the world's Christians still crave the return of their own little earth-mother as intercessionary.

I was worried that the sound of the engines might send him scurrying for cover. If he'd been ready to give himself up he'd still be sailing towards Crinan. I dropped anchor on the north side of the promentory and rowed ashore, and walked across the spit of land to look over the bay.

For a minute I couldn't see anything out of the ordinary: the little crescent beach, the jumbled rocks to either side, the hills rising steeply beyond. Then I saw it. He hadn't even turned the boat over. He'd pulled her onto the shingle hard by the rocks, and shipped her mast and spread her tan mainsail over her, and from here she looked almost exactly like another rock. I picked my way over the broken ground towards her, at the same time picking over the fragmented emotions in my mind.

I was glad that I'd found him, satisfied to have achieved what I set out to. I was glad that he would soon be safe and the matter capable of a final resolution. But I was sorry to be the means of wresting him—if only temporarily—from this beautiful bleak world where he was at home, master of his own destiny. Born here, he might well mistrust cities and city people. Here the living was as simple as learning to use wind and tide with authority and respect. Causes and effects were clear, above-board. There was no need, and no room, for deviousness. Alex Curragh in Frazer McAllister's Glasgow had been an up-country lamb to the slaughter.

But not here. I had made no sound in approaching: perhaps the odd scuff of deck-shoe on rock, the occasional hiss of breath in the unfit throat. But he had heard or seen, or sensed, me coming. By the time I reached the draped hull and lifted a corner of the tan fabric he was gone. Disbelieving, I tugged back the sail as if I might find him tucked into a corner between the tiller and the transom. He had been there. A blanket lay abandoned on the boards, a rolled-up jersey still bore the imprint of his head. But Alex was gone.

Disappointment stabbed and I stumbled back a step. The rocky cirque slipped out of focus and I blinked a surprising tear away. “Oh shit,” I muttered, and my voice creaked.

A hand lit on my arm. I startled as though I had thought myself alone on the island. I hadn't heard him, had had no sense of his closeness this time. A shade bashfully he took his hand back. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to frighten you.”

I wasn't sure if I was frightened, or angry, or just relieved to see him. “Alex, you've had us all worried sick.”

“Worried?” He was surprised at that. “I'm sorry. I couldn't stick it any longer.”

“So you just walked out? Have you any idea what that looked like?”

That certain stubbornness crept back into his face. His face was dirty. It was two days since he'd washed with soap and hot water, and he hadn't shaved in that time either. The plaster on his right forearm was streaked with mud and salt. I couldn‘t imagine how he'd manhandled that boat around literally single-handed, but the first thing we were going to do back in Glasgow was stick his fracture under the X-ray machine again.

He said, “I suppose if you didn't know better it might have looked I was running away.”

“That's exactly how it looked.”

“Except that you knew better. So did the police.”

“McAllister has a price on your head.”

That shook him. His jaw dropped, his eyes hollowed. He looked round him uncertainly as if bounty-hunters might lurk behind every rock. Finally, his voice strained, he managed, “The police let him do that?”

“As a matter of fact, no. We went and read him the Riot Act, but whether he'll call his people off, or even be able to reach all of them, remains to be seen. Some men called at your father's house—asking directions, but maybe looking round too.”

Through the shock a coal sparked angrily in his eye. “He's all right, is he—my da?”

“He's fine. He didn't know there was anything suspicious about his callers—he gave them their directions and they went away. Maybe they were lost. But the sooner we get you back to Glasgow the better, for all concerned. I've got a car waiting in Crinan. We can be there by tea-time.”

He looked startled. “Not in my boat we can't.”

“In my boat, towing your boat, we can. It's got the engines of a destroyer and the superstructure of a Blackpool tram.”

Recognition dawned. “You've not brought the
Fairy Flag?
Holy God, I thought we'd sold her to the Iranian Navy.”

“I thought you'd bought her from them. She's anchored over the point. I'll give you a hand with your dinghy—well, somebody's dinghy—and we'll pick up my inflatable on the way out to
Flag.
”

He looked at the shrouded hull, made no move towards it. “I'm not sure I'm ready.”

“You were heading for Crinan, weren't you?”

“I suppose so. But—not yet.”

“Listen, Alex,” I said. “We have to get this sorted out. Yes, it'll mean going back to Glasgow, for a day or two. Then, as far as I know, you'll be free to come back here or go anywhere you want. I know you feel lost in the city. A lot of people who feel at home there would feel equally vulnerable out here. McAllister's one. The yard in Oban call him the Supercargo.”

He smiled at that. He was getting used to the idea. He knew he had to go back, the only question was when. He'd expected a little more time to himself first. Healing time.

Another thought came into his eyes and he frowned. “I don't understand. Why's McAllister after me? He knows I didn't kill Alison. Christ almighty, does he want me dead?”

I took a deep breath. I'd hoped to put this off—a bit like Alex delaying his return to Crinan, knowing I had to do it but reluctant to get it done. “Alex, McAllister still blames you for her death. Because he knows he didn't kill her, and the alternative was no easier for him to accept than it's going to be for you.”

I think he guessed what I was going to say. His eyes went deep and unhappy, pleading with me not to say it. But both of us knew I had to, and I did. “Alison fixed the explosion herself. She said goodbye to her husband, she said goodbye to you. She thought you were safely away. Then she turned off the gas detector, turned on the gas and—” I stopped, only just in time. He knew what had happened then. I didn't have to spell it out for him in biological detail.

He didn't deny it. He wasn't used to being lied to, as McAllister probably was. He'd never got in the way of moulding fact to his convenience, as McAllister undoubtedly was. So he believed it for no better reason than that I told him it was true. Very softly, as if to himself, as if his heart was breaking, he murmured, “Alison.” Then, to me, “Why?”

I told him what I believed, beginning with why she had seduced him. That was a rough thing to tell a man, that the woman he loved had wanted not him but the fruit of his loins, but it was necessary to explain the dilemma which I believed led to her death.

“If she hadn't loved McAllister, she'd have left him for you. If she'd cared mostly about his money, she'd have ditched you. If she'd cared only about the child, you'd never have seen her after the day she found she was pregnant. She loved you and McAllister both—perhaps in different ways, but deeply enough that she couldn't choose between you. Post-natal depression may have played a part.

“I think she found it increasingly difficult to contemplate any of the alternatives—life without you, life without McAllister, life alone, or stumbling along from day to day with her emotions torn between you and no clear view to an easier future. Suicide must have seemed the only way out, her only prospect of peace. She'd been under a lot of stress for over a year. She was worn down, worn out. She wasn't altogether rational when she did it.”

“That's not true,” said Alex. We were walking slowly, side by side. It was easier to talk that way than face to face. But now he laid his good hand on my arm again, quite roughly, and stopped and made me face him. “She was completely rational. She was calm—more than me.” He snorted a terse little laugh, remembering. “Much more than me. She was in control.”

Privately I thought that was Alison's tragedy, that she had always been in control. She had controlled every facet and detail of her life, left no room for sentiment or spontaneity. Then when she made demands on herself that even her well-schooled psyche couldn't contain, the power of repressed emotion bursting through had been devastating. She hadn't known how to cope. In the end she had exercised the only control left to her. She'd pressed the self-destruct.

I tried gently to explain. “She didn't want you to know how desperate she was. She couldn't tell you why, and anyway she couldn't see how it would help. You weren't the problem. The problem was how she felt about everything. She couldn't see that changing, whatever you or McAllister did.”

“She told me about Peter.”

“Only that you were his father. Not—” Again I stopped myself just in time.

Alex slowly smiled. He'd done a lot of growing up in the last few days, and most of it he'd done out here, alone with his thoughts and his memories and the sea and the wide canopy of the sky. Horizons were broad out here. It was possible to start seeing even personal tragedies in a global context. He said quietly, “Not that I was picked out of a stud-book. Maybe I should be flattered.”

“At least you shouldn't be bitter. However it started, she came to love you.”

“I know that,” he said, almost indignantly, his jaw lifting. “Do you think I need you to tell me that—you who never even met her? I know how she felt. And I know you're wrong. She wasn't torn, or mixed up or desperate or any of that. I'd have known if she had been. She was calm—sad, aye, because we cared for each other and we were parting, but not distraught, not irrational. She'd thought it through and decided what was best. I don't believe she killed herself because between us we‘d messed up her mind.”

I didn't argue with him. I thought it was just his way of holding it at arm's length until he came to terms with the part he had played, albeit unwittingly, in Alison's death. It never occurred to me that he could be right.

I helped him rig the boat. Her name, he said, was
Maebh.
I wondered how he knew—it wasn't inscribed on her anywhere. By way of explanation he said, “I took her from Mr. Murdoch's cottage at Machrihanish.” From the way he said it, he knew every boat on the Sound.

He didn't need much help with the rigging either. Even one-handed he was surprisingly strong. Of course, he was used to hauling boats about. But also he was bigger than I had realised. Until today, at every meeting we had had, he'd been in a position of disadvantage—unconscious and drowning in the loch, weak with pain, shock and drugs in a hospital bed, under interrogation at the police station. It had all conspired to diminish my perception of him. I knew he was tall; I had hot realised that physical labour had grafted a useful musculature onto those long bones. But he hauled
Maebh
down to the waterline by means of the painter over his shoulder as if he was auditioning for the Paul Robeson part in
Showboat.
I followed with the bundled-up sail, feeling slightly superfluous.

It would have been quicker for me to walk back to where I'd left
Flag
‘s inflatable while Alex sailed round the spit. But I hadn't chased him this far, and spent so many uncomfortable hours aboard a smelly, noisy old scow with the personality of a garbage lighter, to have him change his mind and sail off down the Sound while I was waiting for him to appear round the point. So we went together in the little boat with the tan sails, and put ashore long enough to take the inflatable in tow for the last leg back to the
Fairy Flag.

Beside me at the tiller Alex gave a low chuckle. “The old cow never looks any better.”

I thought Duncan might have been looking out for us but he was below—maybe brewing up, I thought, or catching up on lost sleep, or calling Hughie to tell him about the short choppy motion you tend to get while riding at anchor.

We made
Maebh
fast astern, with her spar and sail down and stowed, then lifted the inflatable over
Flag
‘s transom. When that too was lashed I went through the open wheelhouse to the cabin door to look for Duncan.

As I reached for it he opened it and stepped through. He'd done something to his right hand. His handkerchief was bound round it and blood was seeping down the nails. Something had also happened to his face, which was white and drawn in a way that even sea-sickness would not explain. His eyes were blank and looked right past me.

Suddenly he stumbled forward as if pushed. And indeed, level with the small of his back was a chunk of black iron too big and too ugly to be anything other than what the TV-trained mind said it looked like but couldn't possibly be. A hand-gun.

You can get guns small enough to fit in a woman's clutch-bag, and very useful they are if what you're after is essentially the nasty pop. If you really want to shoot someone you'd need their co-operation—unless they stand still and very close you could be on your third clip before you got near enough to worry them. Real guns, for shooting people with—and I'm drawing here purely on my research as a crime writer—tend to be both bigger and heavier than you expect.