The Going Down of the Sun (6 page)

“No. Would we have done?—we were anchored a hundred yards away from the
Skara Sun.
”

“You'd have heard it half a mile a way, maybe more, if it had gone off.”

“Could it have failed?”

He shrugged his big shoulders. “Anything's possible. But she'd have checked it before she left Oban. She left nothing to chance.”

He paused then, waiting to be prompted. I resisted the temptation, knowing he'd go on anyway, but the constable was made of less stem stuff. “So what are you suggesting happened, sir?”

McAllister waited a moment longer. For some reason he was looking at me. There was a kind of suppressed excitement within him, as inappropriate an emotion as I could imagine. One shaggy eyebrow went up, the other down. Finally he said, “I'm suggesting that if the gas leaked it was meant to leak. I'm suggesting that if the alarm didn't sound it was fixed not to.”

He looked at me, waiting for my response. Again I said nothing.

The constable, both excited and uneasy at having one of the biggest men in the city making wild allegations in his presence, said carefully, “You seem to be implying there was some foul play here, Mr. McAllister.”

McAllister went off in a small explosion of his own. “I'm implying nothing, sonny. I'm saying that my wife's death was not an accident. I'm saying someone fixed the stove to blow her sky-high the moment she put a match under the bacon.

“I'm saying that he made damn sure he was on deck before breakfast, and when she moved towards the stove he got into the dinghy and rowed like hell. It was just bad luck he couldn't get out of range before the explosion. Or maybe it wasn't; maybe the fact that he needed hauling out and pumping out will be the mainstay of his defence. Granted he cut it a bit fine, but the principle was sound.”

There was a stretched minute's silence. I had a sense of something irrevocable having been done, something that would alter lives in ways that could never afterwards be repaired. I knew what he was saying, of course, and all that would inevitably flow from it—well, not all, no-one could have foreseen it all. But somehow I felt that it was the imminent accusation, rather than anything that had happened aboard the
Skara Sun
, which was the fulcrum. I didn't want him to say it. I seemed to think that if he didn't actually say it, everything would somehow work out. I glued my eyes to my knees under the white overall and said nothing and tried to think nothing. Like an atomic clock making good the hour's extra second, time fractionally expanded.

Then the constable stammered, “Whose defence against what?” and McAllister took the irreversable step.

“Alex Curragh's defence against a charge of murdering my wife. For the sake of a fifteen-thousand-pound bequest in her will.”

I was never afterwards sure whether what Neil Burns did then was calculated, or ingenuous, or just a doctor getting on with his job. While the Glasgow air was buzzing with urgency and phone calls, and police-men from our young lad to (for all I know) the Chief Constable of Strathclyde were blowing dust off their notebooks and stealing themselves for a good old-fashioned Celebrated Case, and Harry was desperately trying to get himself from Tayvallich to Glasgow while his car was in Ardfern, and I was mostly sitting in a corner over a cup of cold tea, Neil Burns was prepping Alex Curragh for surgery on his broken arm. Once the pre-med was circulating in his system he wouldn't be fit to be questioned for hours, probably not for the rest of the day.

Not that he was going anywhere. If McAllister was serious, and he appeared to be absolutely serious—he might be shocked and grieving and outraged as well, but he hadn't been ranting out of that, he had been quite lucid and seemed to have facts to support him—Curragh would find himself at the sharp end of a long and pointed interrogation. But not today, when he had nearly died. He'd still be here tomorrow, and tomorrow was time enough for justice. Dr. Burns was right: medicine took precedence.

You wouldn't have thought he was right. Ascending ranks of policemen came and tried to lean on him. He was as untroubled by that as by the power-politics of McAllister's fortune. When you're six-foot-four and in your mid-twenties, in your own hospital and anyway probably right, the only way even a big policeman can lean on you is by standing on a stool, a position in which it is difficult to maintain either dignity or balance.

Finding they couldn't subject Curragh to the third degree, or browbeat his doctor, the police switched their attention to me. A medium-sized policeman in a pigskin jacket and matching shoes came over with fresh tea and an extra cup on a tin tray, and introduced himself as Detective Chief Inspector Baker. He had a small, immaculately trimmed moustache and spoke with the Scottish equivalent of a Winchester accent. He asked me what I had seen and heard, and I told him. As I had told it to Frazer McAllister.

I won't say he leapt to the same conclusions, but clearly he was struck by the same significances. I saw them register in his face, and he went over them again in his questions.

“You saw the
Skara Sun
before she anchored by you in Loch Sween, then.”

“About five o'clock on Saturday. She passed us heading south from the Seil Sound while we were anchored at Shuna.”

The names that were second nature to me after years of cruising round there meant nothing to him. But he had brought an Ordnance Survey map of the west coast and had me point out the relevant places. He pored over it now. “That's on a direct route from Oban to Crinan?”

“With a motorboat, yes. She'd have no trouble getting through the Clachan Bridge.”

“How long would it have taken her from Oban?”

“Depends how fast she was going. That isn't exactly open sea—tootling along at ten knots, say, she'd have made Shuna in two hours, which fits with the time she left the yard.”

The impeccable moustache bristled, the neat (and matching) eyebrows climbed. “Does it? How do you know?”

I despise women who can't have their say without backing it up with their husband's authority. “John always says …” “Martin doesn't believe …” It's pathetic. I said, “My husband told me.” It was true and unavoidable, but I still winced.

I think DCI Baker may have despised women like that too. He regarded me down his nose. “And what does your husband know about it?”

I nettled. He wasn't offensive enough to challenge, but only because he knew how not to be. “What he was told, I presume. The local police called the yard in Oban.”

Baker smiled, like a fish on a slab. “Yes, well, Mr. Marsh would be better leaving the business to the professionals.”

I had him, and I took a moment to enjoy it. “Detective Superintendent Marsh is a professional. Anyway, the time the
Skara Sun
left Oban won't be covered by the Official Secrets Act.” Of course, you couldn't be sure of that.

Surprise jolted through him like a small amount of electricity. He'd thought it a coincidence that Curragh was fished out of the water by an erstwhile doctor. He didn't know what to make of the fact that there was a detective involved as well. Finally he remembered official police policy towards inconvenient facts—ignore them—and moved on. “And you reckon Mrs. McAllister was alone on the boat then.”

“The yard in Oban”—I couldn't resist reminding him—“said she left alone. I didn't see anyone else on board, and she could certainly have managed on her own.”

“When would she have reached Crinan?”

I glanced at the map to confirm my recollection. “Shuna's about halfway, but she could do the second half faster. She might have made Crinan about six-thirty.”

“Where she collected Curragh.”

“I don't know that, of course, but it seems likely. I do know they were both on board when the
Sun
anchored behind us at the Fairy Isles last night.”

“That was the next you saw of her?”

“Yes.”

Baker unfolded his map to display all the islets and inlets of the glacial west coast. “So there was a day—from Saturday evening until Sunday evening—when you saw nothing of them. How far could they have got in that time?”

I remembered the big flared bow of the
Skara Sun
, and the big twin diesels shoving her along, and tried to imagine the range of the big tanks feeding them. “She could have got to Ireland and back if she'd wanted to.”

Baker worried about that for a minute before moving on again. “So the next you saw of them was at the Fairy Isles.”

“We didn't actually see him. We saw the woman and heard a man's voice.”

“Were you talking to them at all?”

“No.” That must have seemed odd to a landsman, that you could anchor a hundred yards apart, your two crews maybe the only living souls for miles, and still make no gesture towards neighbourliness, not so much as a shouted greeting, let alone rowing across for cocktails. It is a bit odd, but it's how it's done: you need to have met someone regularly before you even exchange weather reports. Perhaps it's because more people sail to get away from other people than do so to meet them. The ideal anchorage is one with nobody else there, and if you do have to share, by a kind of unspoken agreement you ignore one another. A bit like DCI Baker and inconvenient facts. “No, but voices carry clearly over water. They'd know there were two of us on our boat too.”

“Could you hear what they were saying?”

“No. There was no shouting, if that's what you're wondering. They had the radio on, not very loud. A couple of times I heard them laughing, later on they quieted down.”

“Was it a warm night?”

I blinked at the change of direction but answered anyway. “It was pleasant, but you couldn't really say it was warm. It's always much colder afloat than ashore.”

They'd have wanted a hot meal then.”

Now I saw what he was getting at. He was more astute than he looked. “The stove. Yes, I'd be surprised if she didn't cook supper. I did for Harry and me, and our galley was primitive compared with what they'd have.”

“So whatever it was happened between supper and breakfast. Would that fit in with a gas leak?”

“Listen, I'm no expert,” I said, “I've never actually blown a boat up. But it's not that rare an accident, and you listen to all the stories to avoid making the same mistakes yourself. Yes, I think it could happen. Cooking gas is heavy; if you get a slow leak it collects in the bilges and maybe you wouldn't know until you got a spark down there. Except that McAllister says his wife fitted a gas detector, and that would warn her long before there was a dangerous build-up.

“The other possibility is that she finished one cylinder cooking supper and fitted another one to cook breakfast. It shouldn't be a problem, but if you've got a bad seal you could get a sudden release of gas. But she'd have had to be very quick off the mark to light the stove before the detector smelled it.”

“If it was working.”

“They're pretty reliable. They tend to be too sensitive, not the other way round.”

“Could it be disconnected?”

It was a leading question, but it was his job to ask it and mine to answer. “Yes, it could.”

We ended up, neither antagonists nor allies except in the search for what had happened, facing one another over the monstrous shadow that was McAllister's allegation. Baker said, quietly and a little sadly, “Then the old man could be right. It might not have been an accident. Curragh could have contrived her death.”

“For the money?”

He shrugged. “An awful lot of crimes are committed for it.”

“Fifteen thousand pounds? He's not going to live in luxury for the rest of his life on that.”

“It's still probably the biggest sum he's ever owned.”

“But peanuts to her.” The figure worried me. It was too much and too little: too much for a casual gift, even from a rich woman to a young man whose company she had enjoyed, but too little for the crazy, passionate gesture of a rich woman towards the young man she adored. It was a middling sum, a calculated sum. Where on earth had she got the figure from?

Also, her will was the wrong place for it. She was about thirty years old. If she'd wanted to give Curragh some money, she wouldn't have wrapped it up where he might not see it for fifty years, by which time he too would be past enjoying it.

I don't know if precisely these questions were going through Baker's mind as well, but I could see he was as troubled by the scenario as I was. Whether Mrs. McAllister was murdered or died in an accident was only the last of the mysteries gathered about her.

Something else occurred to me. “How did McAllister know about the bequest? She's only been dead six hours, he can't have had the will read already. And if it was a bequest to her lover, she's hardly likely to have told her husband. Have you talked to McAllister?”

“Not yet. I wanted to know what you'd seen first—the only unbiased account I'm likely to get in this—and actually you didn't see very much, did you?” He sighed. He consulted his notebook. He looked up at the ceiling. “When you got on deck after the explosion, Curragh was floating near the upturned dinghy?”

“Yes, just behind it.”

“Does that sound right to you—that he was on the front deck and the dinghy was tied up behind, but after the
Skara Sun
was gone they ended up in much the same place?”

And of course it didn't, and I had to say so. I could believe that the combination of wind and wave and a massive explosion would have some curious effects, and he'd need a physicist or a marine engineer for an authoritative opinion, but if he cared what I believed then I believed he was right: it hadn't happened as Curragh had said.

Not as Curragh had said the second time, after Neil Burns queried his first account. His original version, that he was with Alison McAllister in the cabin when the explosion occurred, was even less credible. Shock and concussion might have confused him, but the other explanation was that he was lying in his teeth and hadn't told the truth about the episode yet.