The Going Down of the Sun (4 page)

Burns looked surprised. “I didn't know we didn't know.”

I shook my head. “We know who the boat belonged to. We know who the woman was. All we know about him is that he wasn't her husband.”

“There was no ID in his clothes?”

“You saw what he was wearing.” Approximately the same as me, and I was carrying nothing that would identify me either. All his property that wasn't directly about his person had gone up in flames.

“Well, he's pretty much awake now. Ask him.”

He hadn't cried himself out yet, but while we'd been talking quietly at the other end of his bed the violence of his grieving had abated. Now he lay still behind the shelter of his arm, too weak to do anything else. Neil Burns was right: grief takes most out of those who have most to spare for it. This boy would cry again when he was stronger, but for now he had reached a kind of peace.

I took his hand, and his elbow in my other hand, and lifted his arm high enough to peep underneath. “Feeling better?”

His eyes were red. His hair, which had dried from the sea, was wet again at both temples. But crying had at least given him a voice. “I'm all right.” It was a lie, of course. He wasn't all right; he wasn't even feeling better.

I said, “We don't know your name.”

He paused a little longer than made sense. There was no question of amnesia. He remembered what had happened, remembered Alison McAllister clearly enough to break up over her—the chances of his having forgotten his own name were negligible. But something was going through his mind, and only after he had it resolved did he consent to answer. “Alex Curragh.”

It was his name all right, it's such a personal thing that it's quite difficult to give a false name convincingly, but I was sure he had thought about telling us another lie and I wondered why.

But the answer was obvious enough. He had been on a boat with another man's wife when fate stepped in and promoted their discreet duty weekend to front-page news. Her husband was going to know; his wife, if he had one, was going to know. He might have got away with giving a false name to the hospital, but plainly the police were going to be involved as well. So he told us who he was.

“Where do you live, Alex?”

“Crinan. I work on the boats.” So that was how they'd met, the rich man's sailor wife and the boat hand.

“Had you known her long—Alison, Mrs. McAllister?”

Again that brief pause while he thought, a gathering of cloud in his dark eyes, and this time he lied. “A few weeks. She needed some help with her boat. I helped her out.” He avoided looking at me.

I didn't believe him—a young man doesn't cry like that for the death of a casual employer—but I didn't force the issue. The police would do that. “You were crewing for her?”

“Yes.” But the yard in Oban had been unconcerned to see her leave for the thirty-mile passage to Crinan; if she didn't need a crew to get that far, she didn't need a crew. They were lovers, all right. He was thinking of the dead woman's reputation.

“Do you know what caused the explosion?”

His eyes filled up again but the tears didn't spill.

“She was so
careful.
” The accent was Highland, soft and musical. “She never turned the gas on unless she had a match lit. She wouldn't have smoking on board. She wouldn't have so much as the radio on when she was fuelling. She said she saw a boat burn up once, and she didn't want to go that way.” His face twisted and the tears spilt.

I held his hand, for comfort but also to stop him hiding. His hands were brown with weather, hardened by salt and work, but surprisingly slender in design. He was not a big man. If he had been he would likely have died in the lagoon before we could haul him aboard. I said, “She couldn't have known anything about it, Alex. We were right in front of you, and by the time we got on deck the
Skara Sun
was gone. She had no time to be hurt, or afraid.”

He couldn't speak. He nodded, his eyes grateful. His hand was tight in mine.

I said, “Where were you when it happened?”

His eyes flared as if I'd threatened him. “I—I'm not sure. Didn't you see?”

“We were below. We didn't see anything until afterwards.”

“I was in the cabin, I think. Alison was making breakfast.”

It wasn't credible and I knew it too, but I wouldn't have said anything. If there's one thing policemen can't abide it's well-meaning busybodies polishing the stories of people who are going to help them with their enquiries.

But Neil Burns wasn't married to a policeman and so didn't know the taboos. “You can't have been. You'd have gone the same way she did. But you're practically undamaged. Apart from nearly drowning, I mean.”

I winced but it didn't stop me listening for the answer. It took time coming. I saw him look at the broken arm wedged at his side, think about his battered head and other injuries. I saw him consider the plausibility of what he was going to say.

“I must have been on deck. That's right, I went to check the anchor-chain. I had the forward hatch open, so I could get in and out of my cabin without disturbing Mrs. McAllister. Then she said she was making breakfast, and I leaned over to check the fairlead before going aft. She must have lit the gas then. I don't remember anything more.”

Well, he wouldn't. When that boat went up she went like a bomb; he would have had no warning of whatever it was that hit him and threw him senseless into the sea. He could have been up in the bows: that would have put him, and the dinghy on its painter trailing from the stern, about equally as far from the gas stove, which would explain why they escaped the otherwise comprehensive destruction.

That left the third improbable survivor. “Alex, there wasn't a child on board?”

His eyes rounded at me with a peculiar horror. “A child? God almighty, no.”

“I saw a plastic toy floating in the water. Did Mrs. McAllister have a child?”

“Aye, a baby, four months old. But he was never on the boat. She left him at home, with her husband.” He swallowed. “Has he been told yet?”

Burns shrugged. “I've no idea.”

Back home Harry would have been trying to contact the next-of-kin within minutes of the victim's identity being discovered. I presumed it would be the same here. “Yes, probably. Unless he's neither at home nor his office, in which case the police willl be making every effort to find him before it goes out on the news. Yes, I think he'll know by now.”

“There was nothing I could have done,” said Alex Curragh. I wasn't sure if he was telling me or asking me. “Even if I'd been right beside her, there was nothing I could have done to save her?”

The reassurance he craved was also the truth. “Nothing. If it was a gas leak, it was always going to kill everyone in the cabin when the first match was struck. It's a miracle it didn't kill everyone on board.”

For the traditional minute none of us said anything. Then Neil Burns cleared his throat. Interested as he was in the domestic tragedy of Alison McAllister's death, he had work of his own to do. I left them to get on with it. I made my way down to Reception and asked if Harry had phoned, but he hadn't.

What I wanted most of all was some dry clothes, and after a minute chatting with the receptionist I confessed as much. I could have lived with the sweater, once I got round to turning the
V
to the front, but underneath it I had a wet shirt, wet shorts, wet pants and wet shoes. I'd have been uncomfortable in my own living-room. Knocking round the public areas of a large hospital, watched curiously by staff who knew I had been one of them and thought I had gone native, and with some anxiety by civilians who didn't know the background and just thought I was peculiar, I felt singularly disadvantaged. If I'd had my purse with me I could have headed for the nearest department store to regularise the situation, but nobody takes their purse swimming. I'm not even sure that wet notes are legal tender.

The receptionist listened with sympathy and some amusement, then nodded me to a handy chair and turned to her switchboard. “I know who'll sort you out.”

I would have known too if I hadn't been away from hospitals so long. The chief fixer in any infirmary is always the head porter. The hospital secretary, the chief nursing officer, the senior doctor, all these are worthy people whose contribution to running the establishment cannot be overstated. But each of them is responsible for a particular area of hospital management defined by clean-etched lines, and things like the reassembly of battle-scarred Action Men from the children's ward, and caring for budgerigars brought in clutched to the breasts of little old ladies who should be worrying about their broken hips, and dressing visiting physicians who are soaked to the skin and sixty miles from their nearest funds, never quite fit into their parameters. The head porter deals with everything that anybody else can reasonably claim isn't their job. In a very real sense, the hospital buck stops with him.

So less than ten minutes after the receptionist called him, the biggest, blackest head porter you ever saw bustled through the swing-doors bearing a stack of towels, clothes, brush and comb, even cosmetics—we hadn't actually met till now, remember—before him. He saw Little Orphan Annie sitting damply in her corner and beamed. I grinned back. I was relieved to see the succour that he brought, but mostly it was a Pavlovian response to a face that cheerful. I felt warm for the first time in hours.

I retired to the Ladies and got first dry and then decent. I put together a perfectly respectable, if not exactly haut couture, outfit from a nurse's blouse and white lab coat belted round the middle to take up the length—you don't find many lab technicians my height, they'd have trouble reaching the shelves—with a pair of backless mules for shoes. The head porter, bless him, had even scrounged me some underwear. The knickers were a pair of wholly honorable white cellular passion-killers, but the bra would have taken any two people my size. I returned it, with the towels and my thanks. My own damp belongings I stuffed into the carrier-bag provided for the purpose.

Thus warmed, cheered and upholstered in a manner befitting a middle-aged woman with a professional past, I sallied forth to court the approval of my new friends for my new image. Jim Fernie the porter beamed again with proprietorial pride, as if I were his little girl who had just dressed herself for the first time.

“Half the doctors in this hospital will be asking you for a second opinion,” he said. I thought it more likely that someone would press a mop into my hand and tell me to deal with the sago on the canteen floor, but I appreciated his confidence.

I went to pirouette for Ros the receptionist too, but she had a customer. I could see her talking, her face serious, and gesturing past his broad dark-suited back. When he thanked her and limped off in the direction indicated, I went to show her my spring collection.

She was suitably impressed. “What price Bruce Oldfield now?” Personally I couldn't see where a karate film star came into it.

When she had said all there was to say about my costume, she nodded towards the lifts and said, “That was your friend's da come to see him.”

I frowned. “Sorry?”

“Your friend from the boat—Alex Curragh. That was his father.”

“Oh—good.” I was a little surprised: although the police would have contacted Curragh's next-of-kin at the same time as they were breaking the news to Frazer McAllister, there hardly seemed to have been time for him to get here from Crinan. Perhaps he didn't live in Crinan. “He's going to need his family. A thing like that will be with him a lot longer than it takes the broken bone to heal.”

Ros nodded, sympathy pursing her lips. She was a tall, dark woman of about thirty and she'd seen a lot of pain and misery and despair come through those doors in her time. “Maybe his da can help him with that too. What happened to him must have taken some coming to terms with.”

We seemed to be at cross purposes. At any event, I didn't understand what she was saying. “Sorry, what?”

“Didn't you see? No, of course, he had his back to you. He must have been in a fire—not recently, but it did a lot of damage. Half his face is gone.”

I could feel alarm stretching my eyes, saw incomprehension cloud Ros's. But now I understood—as well I might, I'd been told enough to identify him three times over. Even the limp—he had an artificial foot, Harry said. Alison's dread of fire presumably stemmed from her husband's experience.

There was no time to explain. I set off for the lifts at a determined jog, the closest I could manage to a run in mules, shouting back at Ros as I went. “Find a policeman. Get Jim Fernie. That wasn't Alex Curragh's dad you sent up to his room—it was his mistress's husband!”

The lift was too long coming. I kicked off the borrowed mules and took to the stairs. He had a head start on me, but I had the greater sense of urgency. Also I knew where I was going. The upshot was that I skidded round the last corner of the corridor in time to see Frazer McAllister throw open the door, stride limping powerfully into the room and lift Curragh half out of the bed by one big fist twisted in his pyjama front.

In a voice that was not merely Glasgow but Gorbals through and through, he bellowed into the boy's face, “Are you the wee shite that murdered my wife?”

I got there first but Neil Burns was right behind and infinitely more effective. He elbowed past me in the doorway, grabbed McAllister by one shoulder of his expensive suit and bent low enough to shove his young rugby player's face into the older man's rained one. “If you don't put my patient down now, I'm going to stuff your head down the autoclave.”

As a threat it may have lacked subtlety, particularly in view of McAllister's face, but it had the desired effect and I don't think appeals to the man's better nature would have done. He let go of Curragh, who dropped back onto the bed with a thump, and rounded on Burns. “Wee son, you're crumpling my suit.”