The Going Down of the Sun (25 page)

Before the words were clear of his throat I heard the crash of wood that was someone kicking open the potting-shed door, and then the clatter of feet on the companionway. Duncan Galbraith cried, “What have you done to her, you bastard?” and his mild voice was thick with uncontainable fury.

I knew what was going to happen. I did all I could to prevent it. I pushed myself out of the big man's grasp, using mostly my elbows, and turned my face towards Duncan by homing on the sound of his voice. By force of will, and it took almost more than I had, I lowered my hands from my flayed eyes and tried to open them. “It's all right, Duncan—I'm all right.” The shaky little whimper was unconvincing.

But I could actually see. Not brilliantly: streaming tears filmed the scalded cornea so that the pictures swam, but there was a picture and it was good enough to suggest that, pain apart, no serious damage had been done.

I could see Duncan coming towards me with his arms out. I could see the flush of anger and the twist of anxiety in his gentle face. Beyond I could see Alex framed in the cabin door, his long legs out of sight down the steps. He was watching Mackey and Mackey him. William was trying to steer
Flag
with one hand and train his gun on the three of us with the other.
Flag
had her nose sometimes on Beinn Sgallinish on Jura and sometimes on the Knapdale coast across the Sound.

I said, very clearly and distinctly, “Please, Duncan, don't start anything. I'll be all right in a minute.”

Mackey said, “You two, get below.”

Alex ignored him. “What happened? We heard you shout.”

I wasn't going to tell him. Barry did it for me. “The Boy Wonder threw coffee in her face.” Contempt dripped thickly from his tongue.

Mackey said again, “Get back inside. And take her with you.” His voice was rising.

Alex regarded him for a long time without expression. Then he said, “All right.” He put his good hand out to guide me, and I picked and stumbled my way through the half-seen doorway onto the steep steps into the cabin. Alex's hand on top of my head kept me clear of the low lintel, and I climbed awkwardly down into the gentle half-light. The tears were already beginning to abate, and I thought the danger was over.

At the bottom of the steps I turned back to the door. “Duncan, come inside now.”

I saw him move towards me. His rather bulky figure in its Fair Isle jumper was stiff with anger. As he drew level with the wheel he paused and his eyes flicked sideways. At the same moment,
Flag
lurched askew off a wave-crest and Mackey turned his mind and both hands to getting her straight again.

It wasn't even half a chance, but I knew a split second before he did that Duncan was going for it, and I shouted at him. But I wasn't quick enough. With an unlikely agility born of desperation, Duncan threw himself at Mackey and pinned him to the wheel, his hands scrabbling between their bodies for the gun.

His greater weight, and the element of surprise—nobody expects to be mugged by someone in a Fair Isle jumper—gave him the advantage, and he would have succeeded in disarming the little thug he had pinned at the console. But when push came to shove, Barry remembered whose team he'd been picked for and—possibly reluctantly but anyway effectively—weighed in on the side of his boss's nephew. One stride took him to the wheel and a seemingly casual swipe of one ham-sized fist knocked Duncan clear across the wheelhouse and tumbled him helpless in a heap under the horseshoe lifebelt. He lay half dazed, all arms and legs, and Barry moved patiently to pick him up.

Mackey moved too. To me he looked quite deranged with anger. His encounter with Duncan had earned him a bloody nose, and it ran red over his mouth and chin as he abandoned the wheel entirely and hurled himself across the wheelhouse, the gun in his hand swinging mightily.

Duncan was halfway to his feet, aided if not actually lifted by Barry's big hands, when the first blow of the heavy weapon smashed across his head from behind. He pitched sideways and Barry, astounded by the attack, reacted instinctively to keep him from falling. And while Duncan hung senseless in the big man's grasp, William Mackey hit him again and again.

The breath hissed through Alex Curragh's teeth and he tried to push me away from the steps, looking at me startled when I wouldn't go. But if he'd got up there in time to do anything for Duncan, the situation as a whole could only have gone from bad to worse. Numerically we had the advantage but in practice—with Alex one-handed, me half blind and Duncan bloody and unconscious on the deck—no intervention by us was as likely to help Duncan as it was to get him and all of us shot and tipped over the side.

I was gambling, and the brief moments before I knew if I'd got it right were among the longest in my life. Then, to my profound relief, and also before either Alex or I could have reached them, Barry put a stop to it, letting Duncan slump bonelessly to the boards and interposing his own big body between the injured man and the crazed one.

All he said was, “That's enough,” and he didn't even shout. But it would have taken a bigger man than William Mackey to elbow him aside. He backed up a step. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, gazing savagely at his own blood. There was blood on the gun too: in a gesture of unbelievable callousness he bent and wiped it on the cuff of Duncan's trouser leg. Then he stuffed the weapon back in his belt and returned to the wheel. It occurred to me that for the last half-minute the
Fairy Flag
had been sailing herself better than Mackey had been sailing her before, and not noticeably worse than I'd been sailing her for the last two days.

Close behind me, his voice low, Alex muttered, “If that had gone on much longer, you'd have had a man's death on your conscience.”

It wouldn't have been the first time, but there was no point telling him that. “Then I'd have had to carry it.” I'd been lucky: I'd been right. Contemplating the cost of being wrong was a chill whisper up my spine. But actually none of us was safe yet and I was just beginning to realise it.

Barry lifted Duncan off the deck, his limbs trailing, and passed him carefully to us through the cabin door. “It's as well you're a doctor,” he said to me. His voice was quiet, his eyes appalled. “Do what you can for him. I'm sorry that happened.”

“Thanks for stopping it.”

We eased him onto a bunk. I mopped my eyes with cold water from the sink before I began, and using my fingertips with more than usual sensitivity to supplement my defective vision, I examined him.

There wasn't much I could do for him—not because he was past help, or needed none, but because the treatment he needed involved facilities I couldn't begin to improvise. I loosened his clothing, got him flexed on his side in the recovery position and covered him with a sleeping bag. It was literally all I could do.

Alex looked at me as I straightened up. “Will he be all right?”

I shook my head and sighed. “No. Not unless he's got to a hospital.”

“For God's sake, woman, you're a doctor—there must be something you can do.”

It was so bloody unfair. If there was anything to be done, didn't he suppose I'd be doing it? “That's right,” I snapped back, “I'm a doctor—not a miracle worker.” Even that was an exaggeration: I
was
a doctor, once, years ago. The only surgery I'd performed in more than ten years was an emergency tracheotomy on my brother-in-law. “He has a depressed fracture of the skull—there's pressure on the brain and probably some bleeding—subdural haematoma. Without X-rays, EEGs, a CAT-scan, I can't judge what the damage is, how urgent it is or how to tackle it without making matters worse. Even if I had those things, I'm not and never was a neuro-surgeon.

“What do you want me to do—operate with a knife and fork on the dining-table, while Barnacle Bill up there throws us from one wave-crest to the next? Well, I may have to do that, if it's his only chance of living long enough to reach a hospital. But since I'm as likely to kill him as save him, and I can't even see what the hell I'm doing, as long as he's anything like stable I'm not touching him with a barge-pole, let alone a knife!”

Alex stared at me a moment longer, anger and incomprehension clouding his eyes. Then he bowed his head and exhaled slowly, letting the air run out of him. With it went the tension and rage that had built in him when he'd had to watch Duncan Galbraith beaten bloody and senseless and I had prevented him from intervening. He had resented that almost more than the attack itself. With the return of a kind of sanity, he saw how unreasonable that was. When he looked up his eyes were clear, the planes of his face still and calm.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I've no right to blame any of this on you. If anyone's responsible—besides that animal at the wheel—it's me. The only thing you did wrong was pulling me out of Loch Sween when it would have been better for all concerned if you'd left me there.” There was neither bitterness nor irony in the way he said it. It was just a statement of opinion.

It wasn't an opinion I shared. I shook my head vehemently. “Nothing that has happened, nothing that might happen now, will make me regret having been close enough to do something useful when the
Skara Sun
blew up.” It was almost true, and anyway worth a small lie for the look on his face. It was as if I'd given him life all over again.

“Thanks,” he said softly. Then he looked down at the bunk. “I doubt he'd agree with you, though.”

I looked too. Duncan Galbraith's slightly thinning brown hair was thick with his blood, and his plump cheek white for the lack of it. His eyes were closed, long lashes dipping onto the cheekbone like a sleeping child's. Under the thick quilt of the sleeping bag he might have been asleep, except for the blood in his hair and the soft rattle of breath in his throat that was nothing as innocuous as a snore. He was on his left side with his right arm crooked in front of his face. I felt for the pulse at his wrist, found it as thin and thready as before, went on holding his hand long after it had told me all it was going to.

Then I looked at Alex and shook my head again. “He'd be with me. It's why he's here. He cares about people, about injustice. It was him warned me about McAllister.” And it was McAllister in the end who had done this to him—in spirit if not in person. The old Roman had crucified kindness again.

“And is he?” asked Alex. “Anything like stable?”

“Not really.” I could have been more specific but not more accurate.

Alex moved away from the bunk, pacing his confinement like some long-limbed animal, his eyes tracking from one little square window to the next along the length of the potting shed. There was nothing out there to warrant such attention so I assumed he was thinking, and maybe avoiding looking at me.

And indeed his gaze was still on the sea when next he spoke, softly to carry no further than the cabin door shut and barred behind me. “You know we have to take this boat back?”

For a moment I didn't understand him. I thought he was anxious about restoring the
Fairy Flag
to her owner, his employer. Then I realised what he meant: take back command of her. I stared at him as if he was mad. “Don't even think about it.”

“We have to. It's his only chance.” He looked at Duncan, then at me. “Ours too, probably.”

He was wrong. He was going to get us all killed. I left the bunk and strode forward, and glared into his face from a range of inches. “Don't you dare start anything. We're on our way to Crinan. Even with Mackey at the helm, we'll be there in an hour. That's Duncan's only chance, and even if you didn't have a broken arm and I wasn't seeing in triplicate, it still wouldn't be worth the risk to get there ten minutes earlier.”

He shook his head and explained it carefully, as if to a backward child. “We're not going to Crinan. Not now. How can they go to the police with a man half dead from a pistol-whipping and two people who saw it happen? They'll do time for what they've done here. If anybody ever finds out.”

I knew what he was saying: that the cost of keeping us alive had just become too high to be worth any reward they might expect from McAllister. With us dead it had been only a couple of wasted days; with us alive, it would be wasted years. I'd worked it out for myself earlier when it didn't matter quite so much. Now it was fundamental to any future we had, I was afraid to face it. I murmured hesitantly, “Barry—?”

“Barry helped Mackey hijack this boat for money. He knocked Galbraith down, and he held him while Mackey hit him. He knows we saw that and no-one else did. If he helps us, he might do less time than Mackey but he'll still do time. If he helps Mackey, he gets to walk away. When it comes to it, he'll do what Mackey wants.”

In my heart and soul I knew that he was right: it was just my head that kept shaking, my lips mumbling, “No, no.” Fear like cotton-wool was clogging the machinery of my brain.

Alex reached out his good hand and took my arm in a grasp of surprising strength. Because he was too tall to stand upright in the cabin, our eyes were on much of a level and his poured urgent determination into mine, willing me the courage to believe and to act. “What do you think they're doing up there? Discussing the weather, where to tie up in Crinan, and whose ten-penny piece they'll use to call the police? They're working out where to scuttle
Flag
, and you, me and Galbraith with her.”

We had a little time to think because they wouldn't want to do it here. It's a big body of water, the Sound of Jura, but sailors sail it and houses overlook it and roads run beside it. On a clear afternoon there was the serious risk that someone would see them drive their little red speedboat away from the sinking
Flag
, maybe even in time to rescue the survivors. No, they'd do it at dusk at the earliest, and preferably somewhere quieter than this.