The Going Down of the Sun (5 page)

I doubt Neil Burns had been addressed thus since he passed the six-foot mark, somewhere around his fifteenth birthday, and certainly not by a man he could look squarely in the bald patch, but if there was anything intrinsically silly about the big young man being warned off by the shorter, older, damaged one, neither of them acknowledged it. Burns took his hand back and straightened up. “You have no business here.”

Frazer McAllister broadened visibly, like a ruffled fighting-cock. He was a strong, substantial man, a big man every way but up. Wide, heavy shoulders and broad arms filled his jacket as his thick neck filled the collar of his white shirt. His big heavy head jutted forward, like an old boxer used to taking everything on the chin. I was still behind him, still couldn't see his face, but his big skull was fringed copiously by a lion's mane of greying hair which burst out like an expression of the man's energy, slightly long and slightly frizzy. He might have had one artificial toe stuck in the wall socket.

His voice rumbled up from his deep barrel of a chest. “Sonny, I'm Frazer McAllister. There's more of my money in this hospital than you're likely to see in your lifetime. There's almost no part of this city where I don't have business.”

But Neil Burns in his jeans and trainers was invulnerable to the intimidation of sheer money. I saw his lip wrinkle. “Mr. McAllister, I don't doubt your taxes run three wings of Barlinnie Prison as well. That's where people who assault my patients end up.”

McAllister snorted at him, but I got the strong impression that he was not displeased. He was a man who radiated emotions, all of them powerful, like a pharos sheds light. Radiating from him now, as well as and somehow distinct from the violence of his anger, was a compound of surprise and amusement and respect for someone who was prepared to stand up to him. But then, he'd have looked the same way at a dog walking on its hind legs.

The imminent prospect of a punch-up seemed to have retreated. I sidled along the wall to where I could see what was going to happen instead. McAllister's big body swivelled like an executive's revolving chair. “Who the hell are you?”

Burns gave me no time to answer. “Dr. Marsh saved Curragh's life. If it had happened differently—if Mrs. McAllister had been on deck while Curragh cooked breakfast—you'd be standing here thanking her.”

McAllister growled, “Aye,” low in his throat. It was true, but it was asking a lot of him to accept the purely medical view that one life has much the same value as another, that his wife's lover was as much worth saving as his wife.

Yet he was not distraught in his grief. Mostly what he felt thus far was anger—a legitimate reaction in the circumstances—and even that was something that he possessed rather than possessed him. There was no loss of control. What he had done and said was no more or other than he had intended. He hadn't been suddenly overwhelmed by an access of unbearable passion when he hauled Alex Curragh from his bed, sending the pain beating through his battered skull and leaving his arm to trail useless as a bird's broken wing. What he had said could not be dismissed as the ravings of someone temporarily out of his mind with shock. Frazer McAllister gave a powerful impression of a man totally in command of himself and his destiny.

It was an impression which his big scarred face did nothing to contradict; though to refer to his scars is misleading. Almost half his face, from his left ear to his nose and from his eyebrow over the granite bluff of his jaw and down his throat, was nothing but scar tissue, dark and pitted and granular, as if he'd been stitched together from very small pieces—which is what grafting is. Usually it works better than this, but then I didn't know how deep the damage had gone or what complications had arisen. Also, this wasn't recent. The healing was long done. This was the best he was going to look.

And then, as quickly as that, with the man still staring at me with his eyes, including the puckered one, steady and arrogant, and his mouth, including the undamaged side, twisted into a sneer of austere interest, I felt the miracle begin—that special miracle wrought by, or on, the grossly deformed. At first sight the spoiled face, the crooked limb or the hunched back seems totally to dominate the victim, or at least the way you relate to him. You're embarrassed by your inability to see past it. You might suppose that doctors, inured by familiarity, might be better at seeing the essential human being locked up in the burlesque, but in fact we're often rather worse. It's a constant battle to remember you've been consulted by a person rather than a duodenal ulcer, at the best of times.

Then the miracle begins. The divine human gift is adaptability, and once the surprise is past the horror fades, then the pity, and before much longer even the acute awareness of difference. By the time you've known this mutilated, devastated creature long enough to know his wife's name and have seen his children's photographs, he's an individual with a background, with problems and hopes that go back further and reach out beyond the ones that brought him to you, and it's a little jolt to remember at intervals just how distorted his appearance is, and then how little it affects the quintessential humanity resident in his soul. The important things, like strength and courage and kindness, and whether you like someone or not, don't so much transcend the deformity as come from somewhere else in the first place. No-one ever liked someone less because he was ugly than they would have done had he been fair.

So, almost before I had fully mapped out the extent of his disfigurement, I was aware that what had happened to make Frazer McAllister look like that mattered much less, to him and to the world on which he imposed his authority, than what had happened to make him the kind of man he was. The face was fancy wrapping-paper, no reflection of and no guide to the contents.

The other thing you learn early about pain and suffering is that, contrary to popular opinion, they have no ennobling qualities whatever. Nice people suffer dreadful accidents and diseases, but so do absolute bastards, and the man who was an absolute bastard in his glorious entirety is unlikely to be significantly nicer if fate deprives him of one or more extremities.

It was too early in our acquaintance for me to categorise McAllister as an absolute bastard. What I was sure of, from that powerful, magnetic aura surrounding the man like a force-field, from the arrogance of his eyes and the pugnacity of his broad, square, expensively upholstered shoulders, was that he had the capacity to be one.

All this took less time to happen than to describe, so that before he'd finished his sentence I had got my attention off both his face and his personality and onto what he was saying, which was: “You saw my wife's boat burn up?”

I shook my head. “It didn't burn up, it blew up. It was gone before we could get on deck. She couldn't have known a thing about it.” It felt almost stranger than anything that had happened, to be making the same reassuring noises to the woman's husband as only minutes before I had been making to her lover.

“That's something to be grateful for, anyway,” said McAllister gruffly.

I said, “If you've finished threatening Dr. Burns's patient, at least for the moment, I think we should go and explain to the policeman who's on his way here that his presence is no longer required.”

“Policeman?” He said it the Glasgow way, the emphasis on the first syllable, and there was something like injured innocence in his ravaged face.

“You shouldn't have told the receptionist you were Curragh's father.”

“I didnae. I asked her was he here. She asked was I a relative. I said I was. She didnae ask me whose.” He sounded like a schoolboy who'd got away with cheeking his Latin teacher by quoting from Catullus.

We seemed to be losing sight of the reason for his presence here, the fact that his wife had just died. I touched his sleeve. “If you'll come with me, Mr. McAllister, I'll tell you what I know of what happened.”

He followed me towards the door. But there he stopped and turned back, and his voice rasped like slow machine-gun fire. “Curragh, I know what you are. I know what you've done. Take it from me, you're not going to get away with it.”

Then McAllister turned towards me again and for a moment, past the bulk of his shoulder, I saw Alex Curragh's face. And what I saw there I couldn't understand. Of course there was fear—he wasn't a fool, he recognised a threat when one was snarled at him, and he had better reason than I to know the stamp and nature of the man snarling it. Fear was the appropriate response of a nobody threatened by the likes of Frazer McAllister. The shock was a hangover from what had happened to him this morning, compounded by what had happened to him just now—they'd have to do that arm again, broken limbs shouldn't be treated like that.

But beside the fear and the shock stretching his eyes was the thing that I couldn't describe, even to myself, couldn't begin to understand. Momentarily it looked almost like pride—a frightened, defiant pride. Then Neil Burns leaned over to see to his arm and came between us.

I found some seats for McAllister and myself in a quiet corner of a corridor, grouped round a plastic palm, and shortly afterwards Jim Fernie and the policeman found us. Jim looked surprised, if not actually disappointed, at the lack of blood. “Is everything all right, Dr. Marsh?”

It still sounded funny to me. I'd hardly been addressed as “Doctor” since my marriage. I nodded. “I think so. At least for now.”

McAllister squinted sideways at me, a bleak humour in his eyes, which were the colour of blued steel and held the same kind of edge. “For now.”

I ignored him. “You'd better have a word with Dr. Burns. Curragh is his patient.”

“And then come back here, Constable,” said McAllister, in the tone of a man used to command, “because I may have something to tell you.”

Plainly the policeman knew McAllister, or anyway knew who he was. He raised no questions, no objection. “Yes, sir.” He trotted away tamely on Jim Fernie's heels.

McAllister turned back to me with a satisfied expression. How that ruined face could express feelings was part of the miracle, but in fact it did so quite clearly. Everything he did was precise, deliberate. He left no room for misunderstanding. “OK, lassie, what was it you were going to tell me?”

I have never much cared for diminutives, but you have to make allowances for the recently bereaved. I tried not to bristle visibly. “I was going to tell you how the accident happened—how your wife died.”

His jaw came up like a naval gun. “I know how she died, and it wasn't an accident. He murdered her—Curragh, the wee shite.”

I frowned but also I was curious. “That's a serious accusation, you know, and now you've made it twice. I know how you must be feeling, but have you any reason to blame Curragh? For what happened to the boat, I mean.”

He gave me what I can only describe as a canny look. Even the anger seemed to have gone now—gone, or gone to ground. “Your tale first, lassie.”

So I told him what had happened—what Harry and I had heard and seen, and what we had done. He listened without interruption, although his face clouded as I described the efforts necessary to save young Curragh's life. I couldn't altogether blame him for feeling that way. I went on without comment and finished my account.

While I was still talking, the policeman came back and stood near us, a respectful distance behind McAllister's shoulder.

When I finished I looked at McAllister, seeking some sign of grief in him. I hadn't seen one yet. Unless he had done all his crying at home, in the few minutes between receiving the news of his wife's death and coming here to confront her lover, he hadn't shed a tear for Alison. You couldn't count the anger. It was passion enough, certainly, but not for Alison. I thought he was angry about what had been done to him.

And still that blue steel eye was undimmed by any token of his bereavement. He might have been robbed of some valuable possession, in a theft that had left him seething with indignation rather than aching with loss. Two possibilities occurred to me: that he really hadn't cared for his wife very much, or that he cared so much he didn't dare let loose the grieving for fear that it would consume him. Anger is a useful tool in many ways. If you're angry enough you hardly feel hurt at all.

“So the boat was gone, and Alison was gone, and that wee shite was floating round with nothing but a few cuts and bruises to show for it?” There was a light like wine or fire in his eye. “You didn't think that was a bit odd?”

And of course I had, but not inexplicably so. “He says he was on deck, in the bows, when the explosion occurred. The shock-wave must have knocked him into the water before much else reached him.”

“Did you see him?”

“I told you, we saw nothing until after the explosion.”

“Aye, well,” said McAllister heavily. He looked round for the police-man, beckoned him to a seat. “You see, my wife was very careful aboard that boat of hers. Very careful. You might think she took risks heading out alone, sailing in big seas and bad weather, but actually she did nothing without she had a big safety margin. She picked that boat because it was about the toughest on the market. Not the biggest, or the flashiest, or the fastest or even the most expensive—she reckoned it was the most seaworthy. She wanted diesel engines rather than petrol. She had the radio installed handy to the wheel—she always planned to sail mostly alone. I'd go with her on a nice day but I never had that much time or affection for it.

“And she put in one of those gas detectors. It was that bloody sensitive it went off if we had baked beans on toast. I don't believe there was any gas leak. She wouldn't have fitted the canister wrong, and she wouldn't have left the tap on, and most of all that damn detector would have woken half the Western Highlands long before there was enough gas to explode. You didn't hear it, I bet.”