The Going Down of the Sun (8 page)

I shrugged and guessed. “About twenty-three?”

“Jesus wept.” There was a kind of despair in his voice. “Twenty-three years old, sound in wind and limb, with the next half-century at his disposal, and all he can think to do with his life is murder older women for a few thousand quid. Hell, I'd have given him the money to leave her be.”

The difference in ages hadn't struck me, although I suppose I knew she'd been older than Curragh. She must also have been considerably younger than her husband, to leave him with a new baby. “How old was Alison?”

“Thirty-one,” he said. He looked at me then, his eyes shrewd. “Twenty years younger than me. Go on, flatter me—tell me you can't imagine why the bitch would jump over the wall.”

“Maybe to escape the monotony of unfailing courtesy and inexorable good manners?”

Immediately I regretted the jibe and started to apologise, but McAllister gave an improbable grin and nodded. “Aye, I think the humility got up her nose too, eventually.”

We grinned together, the atmosphere easing all the time. McAllister went on. “No, she was still a young woman, I suppose she got to wondering if there was more to life than looking after a rich cripple. She was right, there was, but he didn't leave her long to enjoy it.”

“Do you know how long she knew him?” It was impertinent to be questioning him like this, but somehow it seemed to follow naturally from this unlikely conversation.

“No,” he said sharply, as if he too considered it impertinent. But after another moment's thought he answered more fully. “No, not exactly. It might have been six months. It was February she told me about the will.”

“Curragh said he'd only known her a few weeks.”

McAllister shrugged. “The will will be dated.”

And would prove that the boy had lied once again. I wondered if anything he had said had been the truth. But the violence of his grief said he loved her.

I ventured, “Why did your wife tell you about her bequest to another man?”

He stared at me. This interview was not going the way he'd expected. Then he sighed. “We were arguing. Something I said hurt her. She threw that back at me.”

“Did it work—were you hurt?”

Again he shrugged. “Not hurt so much; maybe a little disappointed. I wasn't surprised that she had a lover. I thought she might have been more discreet about it.”

I'd have thought so too. He might have been the most indulgent husband in the world—it seemed out of character but it was possible—but he was still a rich and powerful man. Hurling that at him in the middle of an argument suggested Alison feared neither his power nor the loss of his wealth.

I said, “Do you really believe he killed her?”

The first time he said it, storming into Alex Curragh's hospital room, full of shock and rage at the news, it could have been the fury talking. He needed someone to blame and, whatever else Curragh had done, he had put himself in line by being on Mrs. McAllister's boat.

But that fury had mostly leached out of McAllister's eyes by now. A good bit of it seemed to have gone in the few minutes we had been talking while his chauffeur drove us round the hospital car-park. There was more sorrow than anger there now, and I thought that if his outburst had been born of that anger he would tell me.

He met my eyes without any shadows. At peace, his ravaged face had a kind of dignity. “I don't believe it was an accident. Someone else might have made that mistake, she might have made another. But I don't believe Alison let a gas leak destroy her boat. Yes, I think Curragh killed her.”

“For fifteen thousand pounds?”

One grizzled eyebrow climbed higher than the other. “What else?”

I shuffled uncomfortably under his steady gaze. “I don't know. It doesn't seem—” I let the sentence tail off. The feeling I had about it was real enough but difficult to express.

I paid the price for reticence when McAllister misunderstood. A frostiness appeared in his eyes. “What, enough? You have a fine disdain for the value of other people's money, wee hen. What do you reckon the going rate for a gigolo is, then?”

I coloured a little under his scorn. It wasn't even true; I've been sufficiently hard up—twice, both as a young doctor and ten years later as a novice writer—to have a keen appreciation of fiscal values, but I couldn't blame him for his reaction when I only half understood the thing myself.

I said, “Well, the police'll sort out what happened. They're diving on the wreck now. We'll have a clearer idea what went wrong and if anyone was to blame when they recover the stove and the gas cylinder, and the gas detector. If anything has been tampered with, young Curragh will have some explaining to do.”

McAllister looked doubtful. “Will they be able to tell if they've been tampered with? There can't be much left but fragments.”

“You'd be surprised what forensics can do with a few twisted bits of metal.” It's amazing how much survives, in one form or another, the most devastating explosion. Think of a mid-air disaster, no survivors, wreckage scattered over miles. You'd think destruction that complete would be irretrievable. But the accident investigators go for long walks with their cardboard boxes, and over a period of days stretching into weeks the pieces they bring back are slotted into the reconstruction taking place in a handy shed, and eventually they can pinpoint not only the cause of the disaster—a bomb, say—but also what sort of bomb it was and even which seat it was under.

The physical destruction of matter takes immense quantities of energy. Infinitely more matter than is destroyed in an explosion is altered in it—fragmented, twisted, crystalised, charred, burned. But people conversant with those processes can track them back to the moment of cataclysm, and say within narrow tolerances where a thing was and what it was doing immediately prior to becoming a ballistic missile. When the police divers hauled up the remains of the cooker, and forensics finished analysing it, they'd know whether accident was still a plausible explanation.

McAllister's driver made another slow sweep in front of the main entrance, and we found ourselves following a grey BMW.

“There's Harry now,” I said. He hadn't seen me: even a detective doesn't look for his wife in the backs of other men's limousines. “Listen, you'll have to let me off now. Tell your driver to drop me at the main door: if he's still worried about getting a ticket, tell him I'm well in with a policeman.”

McAllister nodded at his driver and the car rolled to a halt, so smoothly it was hard to know exactly when it had stopped moving. I went for the door handle but the lad in pinstripes beat me to it, held it for me with every appearance of courtesy though I could feel—possibly McAllister could not—an almost electric aura of insolence reaching out to me. I can't say it bothered me, though I've never really liked pinstripes since.

I saw Harry park the car and come towards me, though he hadn't spotted me yet. Just before I went to meet him I looked back at McAllister, sunk in his expensive upholstery like the Sultan of Sauchiehall Street. I watched him sitting there watching me, and somehow it seemed he was moving away from me, growing smaller and more remote, the damaged face setting in a basilisk mask, the unwinking regard of an ill-forged bronze idol.

I leaned towards him in the open door. “Look, if you want to talk again, Baker'll know where to find me.”

He almost smiled. “If I want to talk to you, I'll know where to find you.”

Probably. He probably owned half the hotels in Glasgow. I nodded. “Will you be all right?”

I think he was surprised at that. Perhaps rich men aren't used to people feeling anxious about them. His jaw came up arrogantly. Then a little of the proud disdain in his eyes melted and a small warmth kindled there, enough to show the sadness again. He said, “Aye, I shall be all right. I have my son to care for.”

I nodded and turned away, and the long car drove past me down the service road as I walked, waving, towards Harry.

The sensible thing would have been to go home. I had told Baker everything I knew, and a lot I could only guess. Harry had stayed at Tayvallich until a senior detective arrived on the scene to take over. Neither of us had anything more to contribute. The sensible thing was to tell Baker where we could be contacted and get away home, and write it off as just another holiday gone wrong.

So we booked into an hotel—McAllister didn't own it; I checked—changed our clothes, had a meal, got a night's sleep and awaited developments.

The first development was nothing less than an act of God. One of those late spring storms that make the prudent Scot delay his summer holidays blew in from the Atlantic, a ripping south-westerly that still smelled of shamrocks when it tore up the moorings of the police launch at Loch Sween and sent the entire task force racing for cover in the Tayvallich pub.

Judging by the weather forecast, it would be forty-eight hours before the divers would go down again—before then the bed of the loch would be so stirred up they wouldn't be able to see well enough to work. The bottom there is a deep silty mud that sticks like treacle to an anchor-chain and smells like a sewage-farm.

Harry and I had breakfast in our room and listened to the shipping forecasts on the radio. The report for Malin told us what was happening at Loch Sween; Rockall and Shannon told us what would be happening there soon. None of the news was good. The last time I was caught out by a storm like this I spent four days of a six-day holiday at anchor in some little back-of-beyond bay, watching the spume-lashed rocks circling the boat with each tide, listening to the wind shriek in the rigging, wondering if I dare risk a half-mile dash up the coast to the next little bay just for the change of scenery. If this storm had come forty-eight hours earlier it would have ended not only this holiday but any prospect of future holidays with my husband, and quite possibly our marriage as well.

We had already exchanged notes on the previous day. If the highlight of mine was that rather benign kidnapping, the most memorable feature of Harry's—at least the one he kept harking back to—was getting hemmed in behind a wagon-train of travelling tinkers on the single-track road through the Knapdale Forest. The map shows about five miles of it between Tayvallich and the B-road flanking the Crinan Canal, but to hear him tell it he drove for hours, eating the tinkers' dust and fuming, through a forest of Tolstoy proportions. The third time he told it I expected him to add in wolves for colour.

As soon as he felt he decently could—i. e. about a quarter of an hour later than he'd have been at his desk in his own nick—Harry wandered nonchalantly into DCI Baker's office to see how the investigation was progressing. Actually, nonchalance is not something Harry does well—he's no more built for it, physically or psychologically, than a bull-buffalo.

While he was strolling round a Glasgow police station like a laid-back buffalo, and trying not to tell the local men how to do their job, I was planning a similar sortie to the hospital. I may not be much better at nonchalance than Harry is, but I'm easier to overlook. I doubted Neil Burns would resent my presence, as long as I refrained from telling him how to tie sutures, and anyway I wanted to return the clothes Jim Fernie had borrowed for me, which the hotel had laundered overnight.

But if I'm less obtrusive than Harry, I'm a lot slower off the mark in the morning. I was still stumbling round the room in one shoe when the phone went and it was Harry, already well into his day's work. He sounded at once content—to be free of this holiday nonsense, at least for now—and grim. Clearly something had come up.

“Before the storm struck last night they recovered some of the wreckage from the lagoon.”

“What—the stove, the cylinder?”

“No, they'll have to go back for those when the weather improves. But they found the gas detector and the bit of bulkhead it was attached to. It appears to have been switched off.”

I felt my heart sink. Even after I'd accepted his sincerity, I hadn't wanted McAllister to be right. “Shit.”

“Well, it's not conclusive,” said Harry, but from his tone there wasn't much room for doubt. “Forensics will have to establish that the switch couldn't have been tripped in the explosion. Or they may find it corroded up, in which case it's been like that for months and has nothing to do with what happened. But …”

“But Mrs. McAllister was a careful sailor. She wouldn't have had it fitted and then left it switched off.”

“That's what I thought,” he admitted. “But I'll talk to the boat yard, see if they know whether it was working. If it was off all winter while the boat was rested up—”

“Laid up,” I said.

“—maybe she hadn't noticed, or hadn't got round to fixing it. She had other things on her mind when she left Oban.”

But how much mental energy did it take to check she was safe? She'd check she had enough fuel; that her radio was working, that she had what provisions she needed and the gas to cook them. A careful sailor would also check the seals on her cylinders and her gas detector. It was possible that she had forgotten, and that the yard fitting out the
Skara Sun
for her had also forgotten, and that following those two bits of forgetfulness she'd been unlucky enough to get a gas leak. But there was a simpler explanation.

“Damn,” I said. “I wanted him to be wrong—an accident, just an accident—” I sniffed and pulled myself together. “Oh well, at least now we know. Listen, thanks for calling. I'll take this stuff back to the hospital but I won't hang round. Meet me for lunch?”

“I'll try to get away,” he promised, for all the world as if he was at his own desk and the Mafia was moving in on Skipley.

The hospital was no great distance, so I walked, my brown paper parcel under my arm. I greeted Ros in reception, showed her how I looked when respectably clad in dry clothes of my own, and asked if the head porter was about. But he was off duty, so I left my parcel with her to be passed on along with my thanks.