The Going Down of the Sun (30 page)

The panic was gone out of his voice. He sounded obscenely rational. “When they're dead you'll thank me.” Slowly, though probably not as slowly as it felt, the muzzle of his gun started to come up.

“Put the gun down, Willie.” McAllister's voice was grim. “Now. I mean it, son. If you don't drop that gun now, I'm going to blow your head off.”

William thought he was bluffing. He got the pistol up level with his eye and sighted along the brief barrel, drawing a bead on the centre of my chest. My blood turned to water, my muscles to jelly. He wouldn't miss again. He held the gun in both hands to steady it, and took his time getting the aim right.

Just before he was ready to pull the trigger, McAllister blew his head off.

“It was multiple sclerosis,” said Harry. “She knew what it was before her doctor did—at least she suspected. Her brother had it, was diagnosed shortly before the fire on his boat at Stromness. Alison started getting symptoms when she was pregnant, apparently. She couldn't get it confirmed, but obviously in her own mind she was sure. And she was right.”

I was sitting on an examination couch back in the hospital in Glasgow, and Neil Burns was dressing my arm. He'd traded my bullet graze for an interesting osteomalacia so that he could hear the end of the story. But I'd made it too gripping: it had taken him twenty minutes to get this dressing on and he still hadn't bandaged it.

MS. I felt now I should have guessed. Orkney has one of the highest per capita rates of multiple sclerosis in the world. There were other indicators too. Pregnancy is a dangerous time for susceptible women. And patients can appear perfectly normal for a lengthy period after onset, so much so that they can have difficulty persuading even their doctor that something is seriously amiss. If she'd wanted to hide it from her husband, it would have been easy enough.

Later he'd have known, when she started to lose first the strength, then the function of her limbs. But Alison never intended him to see that. After George's experience she must have half expected this—although there appear to be both immunogenetic and infective elements in the transmission of MS, it's not a family problem in the way that, for instance, haemophilia is, but it's only human to fear the worst; and anyway the incidence of the disease in Orkney meant the fear was not wholly irrational. She knew it could happen to her, and she'd decided what to do if it did.

Ready for it as she was, she would have known what the earliest symptoms meant. She didn't have to wait for a formal diagnosis. She knew what was happening to her, and what would happen—increasing disability, reliance, loss of independence. It wasn't a life she wanted, any more than her brother had wanted it, and she took the same way out.

Finally I understood that improbable will. She had never expected to grow old, and her methodical mind had found a kind of comfort in keeping her affairs properly in order. By the time she added Alex to the list of beneficiaries, she already knew, or at least strongly suspected, that she had been touched by her island's curse, and long before that she had decided what to do if she drew a short straw. She never expected Alex to have to wait for his boat.

I couldn't find it in me to blame her. Some people cope better with incurable disease than others, but MS, like most progressive conditions, certainly has the potential to reduce existence to a considerable burden. As a doctor I have to believe that every patient is worth treating. But I'm not qualified to judge whether every life is worth having.

What I did find hard to forgive was the fact that she had left no explanation of what she intended. Perhaps she felt she owed none; perhaps she was afraid McAllister would find it in time to stop her. But if she had only left a note in her diary, so much pain and grief, and three men's deaths, could have been avoided.

With the better weather that saw Duncan and I begin our quest in
Flag
, the divers had resumed their search at the Fairy Isles and later that day they recovered Alison's body. It wasn't intact, of course, but there was more than enough for the autopsy to discover the characteristic nerve-tissue lesions and so confirm the information Harry brought back from Orkney.

Harry had taken the proof straight to Frazer McAllister. Having him call his people in would create enough time and space for Alex to be found and brought home without hazard to anyone. McAllister was convinced—he'd been more than half convinced when I visited his house the day before; perhaps if I'd been less abrasive he'd have admitted it—and issued the necessary instructions, and for twelve hours everyone was under the impression that the crisis was over.

Then news came back that his nephew and a colleague from the distillery were missing and efforts to contact them had proved fruitless. He knew or suspected that Mackey was capable of extreme and fanatical behaviour if he thought it would get him back to Glasgow. Immediately McAllister contacted Harry again.

Towards the end of the day the police located a boat yard which had hired a speedboat to two men, one rather small, one very large, for the unusually long period of three days. Most such hirings would be for an afternoon, or a full day at the outside. They had no reason to be anxious about their boat but they did recognise Mackey's description. Further enquiries established that the boat had spent the previous night in Port Askaig, and the two men had taken rooms there, only a few miles from where Duncan and I slept aboard the
Fairy Flag.

By now, still having had no word from me, Harry was seriously worried about what was happening. He upgraded the scale and urgency of the search, using both road vehicles and boats. He asked for a helicopter but was told there'd be a delay on that. McAllister volunteered his own executive city-hopper, which got in an hour's flying over the southern half of the Sound before fading light sent it back to base. By then, of course,
Fairy Flag
the surface craft was a memory, and her upturned hull a hard target to spot among the broken waters of Corryvreckan.

At first light McAllister went up again with his pilot. They were heading out from Crinan at a thousand feet when the pilot Starrett spotted the long dark bulk among the Corryvreckan rocks. As they closed in on it, recognising it for a wrecked boat, they saw Mackey waving wildly on the Scarba shore.

Mackey, who had spent the night concocting a plausible account for the police, now saw the prospect of not having to explain to the police at all. He told McAllister there were other survivors on Jura, and while the helicopter was hopping over the strait he quietly armed himself from the pilot's emergency kit. He must have believed that McAllister would ultimately be grateful for the removal of witnesses who could implicate them both. Weighted and dropped in deep water, our bodies were unlikely to return and give the lie to an account agreed between them that the helicopter had found the boat and Mackey but no other survivors. We would be assumed to have drowned and washed away.

All the same, Mackey took the precaution of sending his uncle to search another area while he hurried to where he believed he had seen us. Presenting McAllister with a fait accompli must have seemed easier than arguing with him.

McAllister didn't know the boy was armed until he heard the shot that grazed me. Homing in on the sound, he passed close to his helicopter, and by then the pilot had searched for and missed his Beretta. There was a brace of sporting guns in a case in the back—I was never able to establish whether this was a happy oversight after the last day's shooting or if McAllister had brought them because he thought he might need them—and Starrett tossed him one and a box of cartridges. He came over the hill not sure what he would find. The rest I knew.

McAllister's helicopter flew Alex and me to Glasgow. While Neil Burns was applying his ears to my story and the slowest dressing you ever saw to my arm, elsewhere in the building his colleagues were knocking Alex's fracture back into shape. Too much had been done with it and to it for the original reduction to have survived. The ends of the broken bone had parted quite noticeably on the new X-ray, so they knocked him out and did it again.

The remains of William Mackey—an expression I use advisedly, bearing in mind he'd been killed by a shotgun at close range—followed an hour later in the police helicopter Harry had finally got hold of. McAllister stayed on the island with him until it came. When the police machine landed beside McAllister's in front of the hospital, William went down to the morgue while Harry and McAllister came along to Casualty, where we exchanged enough notes to bring all of us, and Neil Burns, up to date. When DCI Baker turned up fifteen minutes later, we went through it all again.

Four days later I picked Alex up from the hospital. The effects of exhaustion and anaesthesia, which had marked his face as intractably as scars for forty-eight hours, were fading now, leaving only a deep hollowness in his eyes. I had seen that emptiness there in the first days after the loss of the
Skara Sun
, but more recently he'd had too much to do and to worry about for the vacuum to persist. Now it was all over; already he was dwelling again on the sins and errors of the past.

He blamed himself for most of it. It was natural enough; in quiet moments I too was sure I could have done more or differently to prevent the casualty list soaring as it had. Nor could I honestly tell him he was in no measure responsible for what had happened. If he hadn't gone walkabout in the middle of the investigation, three men would be alive who were now dead. But he hadn't engineered or sought their deaths; his actions had been innocent, both legally and morally; and others were far more culpable than he. If William Mackey had lived, he not Alex would have stood trial; and Frazer McAllister wasn't out of the wood yet as far as legal repercussions were concerned. What Alex, and I, had done in good faith, and the consequences thereof, were burdens we were going to have to carry, and he might as well get used to it now.

To be fair, though, there was more on his mind today than the extent of his responsibility. The pallor of his cheek was not wholly a reflection of the guilt he felt. It was as much to do with where we were going.

While I drove I acquainted him with the ground rules. “You know you have no rights in this? McAllister calls the play. It was his idea, it's his gesture of atonement. As far as I know, and as far as you're concerned, it's a one-off thing unless and until he says otherwise.”

Alex nodded, nervously. “I understand.”

I glanced sidelong at him, returning my eyes to the road. “It won't be easy, you know. Not for either of you. You should expect to be upset.”

He nodded again and said nothing. He thought he knew what to expect. It didn't matter that he was wrong: he'd been warned, and I'd be there for him afterwards. After that Harry would be there for me.

I parked the car in the shadow of the castle and McAllister came awkwardly, carefully, down his stone steps to greet us. He took my hand with some warmth, which was there too in his powerful, ravaged face. His greeting to Alex was more reserved, more cautious, but neither cool nor arrogant. By its nature the relationship between them was a difficult one. Only great goodwill had got us this far. After a moment, solemnly, they shook hands.

McAllister took us inside. We had to pause in the hall while he got himself up those unsuitable stone steps. He didn't take us into the sitting-room for stilted small-talk first, he took us straight upstairs to the nursery. He bent over the cot and picked up the amiable baby inside.

“Well, here we are,” he said. “This is Alison's Peter. Peter, you remember Dr. Marsh? Of course you do. And this is your ma's friend Alex. Well actually, he's your da.

“What? Aye, another one. I'll explain the details when you're a little older. For the moment, just be glad you're going to inherit his looks and my money, not the other way round.”

I looked covertly at Alex. The emptiness had gone from his eyes. Quite unconsciously he was leaning over the baby, as if by looking closely enough he could find Alison in it. He began to smile.

“Here, you hold him,” said McAllister, proffering the infant. “Oh, you can't, can you? Look, sit you down there and hold him on your knee. Just mind he doesn't roll off—he's awful fat.”

I left them alone then, and went back downstairs and made myself at home in the sitting-room. Since I was driving I couldn't help myself to the stiff slug of whisky I wanted. I settled for a stiff slug of bitter lemon instead.

A few minutes later McAllister joined me. He nodded approval at my glass—he probably thought there was vodka in it—and filled one of his own. Then he emptied it.

I said, “Are they all right?”

“Aye, sure.” McAllister sat down. “Peter's chuckling his silly head off. I think the lad's crying, but that'll not do him any harm.”

“What about you?”

He looked surprised. “Och, I'm all right. I'm a survivor, you mind.” Then, for just a moment, he let the mask slip. “But oh God, I'm going to miss Alison.”

I raised my eyes to the ceiling. “Him too.”

He nodded. “Listen, I'm not making any promises. But we got him into this, Ali and me, and one way or another I'll see him through it.”

I was grateful for that, glad that when I went back home to the Midlands there would still be somebody keeping an eye on Alex Curragh's welfare. Had things turned out differently I might have asked Duncan. “Thanks.”

“Thank you,” he said, and for all I could tell he meant it.

He refilled both our glasses. I had to own up to the bitter lemon.

He said, “There's something you should see.” He went into another room, came back with an envelope. “It only turned up an hour ago. I'll take it to the police, but since you were coming I wanted you to see it first.”

I took it from him and turned it in my hands. It was covered in figures and cyphers, in blue ink on one side, in black pencil on the other. It might have been Exhibit A in a trial for espionage, or a bit of office waste.