The Going Down of the Sun, page 5
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.
Not sure whether Burns would want to report his patient’s initial account to the police, I did so. If Curragh had deliberately blown up a boat with a woman on board, the fact that I had hauled him back from the jaws of death in no way diminished my desire to see him pay.
I realised I had underestimated DCI Neville Baker. He might be over-educated, pretentiously accented and know nothing about sailing, but he was good enough at his job. He recognised, of course, the significance of Curragh’s slip, and his lips pursed irritably at Burns’s intervention. But he wasn’t going to build a case of murder round it, at least not yet. It could still prove to have been an honest mistake.
Yet the evidence, circumstantial as it was, was mounting, and I could have believed that—for the fifteen thousand pounds she had bequeathed him or for some reason we did not so far suspect—Alex Curragh had murdered Alison McAllister, but for one thing. It wasn’t a physical obstacle to his guilt, or an alibi; it wasn’t even a good disincentive. It was nothing a defence lawyer could make capital of without having a prosecutor pull it down around his ears.
But to me, who had broken the news to him and watched him weep, the sheer scale of his grieving was a difficulty I could see no way round. It had had a depth and a range and a power that I could not believe he had fabricated. It had shaken him to his soul, ripping through the frail fibres of his being like some cosmic disturbance. It was the sort of fierce, consuming grief you could imagine someone dying of.
I’m a grown woman, I’ve been around a bit, and I’ve seen enough of crime and criminals to know that great feats can be performed by those who want something badly enough. Maybe doctors, whose province is the sick, are more gullible than policemen, whose province is essentially the wicked. But in spite of the lies, in spite of the evidence shifting away from an accidental cause, and while acknowledging the suspect’s vested interest in my sympathy, I could not persuade myself that Alex Curragh’s distress was anything other than genuine and profound. I had seen it in his eyes. I didn’t believe he could lie there.
But if Curragh hadn’t killed Alison McAllister, why had he lied – why was he lying still? If it wasn’t murder, what had he to hide?
Their affair? Surely, even in his current shocked and weakened state, he couldn’t believe there was still a secret to protect? When a woman and a young man who is not her husband spend nights alone together on a small boat, there’s really only one conclusion to be drawn. It doesn’t take a particularly prurient mind to suppose that they were enjoying a dirty weekend.
Admittedly, people who knew us well enough to know that Luke and I were not married, but not so well as to know his taste didn’t lean towards women, thought the same about us and were mistaken. But neither of us ended up dead at the bottom of the Fairy Isles lagoon. I could almost regret that it would have been a fitter resting-place for my friend than the one he eventually found.
Besides, with Alison dead, did it matter? Perhaps, if he had a wife of his own. Yet the lies he had told would not have protected him from the outrage of either Mr. McAllister or a putative Mrs. Curragh. They could only have defended him against the very accusation McAllister had made—that he had left the Skara Sun before the explosion that destroyed her.
I sighed. “Where do you go from here?”
Baker shrugged. “What I need is to get Curragh under the full glare of a sixty-watt bulb back at my nick, and pummel him with astute and pertinent questions until he breaks and confesses all. Thanks to Or. Burns that’s going to have to wait There may be another way. If the local constabulary hasn’t already done so, I’ll organise divers. Let’s see what the late Mrs. McAllister and the wreckage of her boat can tell us.”
There was something else he could do, though it wasn’t my place to suggest it. Fortunately he thought of it for himself. Unfortunately, when he turned his sixty-watt bulb on Frazer McAllister he mentioned that he’d talked to me first.
Which is how I came to be kidnapped in broad daylight from the public concourse of a major British hospital, en route between the magazine kiosk and the coffee machine.
Chapter Six
It was now late afternoon, and I was expecting Harry at any time. I’d tried the pub in Tayvallich again and got the message that he’d left. Someone had brought his car down from Ardfern and was returning with the Rubber Lion, while Harry hit the long and winding road for Glasgow. I hoped he’d had the wit to remove our belongings, particularly my clothes, from the boat before handing her over.
It had been a short holiday but an interesting one.
So when a rather snazzy young man in a pin-striped suit strolled over and said, “Mrs. Marsh? There’s a man looking for you at reception. I think he went out to the car-park,” I immediately assumed it was Harry and hurried after him, leaving my polystyrene cup and my Yachting World together on my seat. It had been a long day and I was too tired to notice the distinct aroma of rat.
I couldn’t see Harry’s car from the porch so I moved down into the car-park. I was still scanning the roofs for one that looked familiar when a car that wasn’t Harry’s cruised up beside me, the rear door opened and a hand reached out.
“Mrs. Marsh, it was good of you to come.” The gravelly voice was enough; I didn’t need to see what was left of his face to recognize Frazer McAllister.
As I said, I’ve been around. I know better than to get into cars with strange men. But when I stepped back from the door I sort of bounced off the pin-striped suit which had come up behind me, and the helping hands that came to steady me just sort of guided me into the car as a convenient place to recover my breath. It was slickly done. You couldn’t say that violence was used against me, or intimidation. All the same, I know when I’ve been kidnapped.
Once I was inside and the door was shut—centralised locking could have been designed by a kidnapper—and the pin-striped suit had slid in cat-like beside the chauffeur, the big dark car moved off. Not at speed, and not very far—through the tinted glass I could see that we were just cruising round the fairways of the car-park. It was reassuring, but not all that much.
I said with as much asperity as I could muster, “Stop this car immediately.”
McAllister, lounging back against his plush upholstery, passed on the message. “MacLeod, you heard the lady.” I was in no way deceived by the faintly satiric note of indignation, and I don’t suppose MacLeod was either.
“Yes, sir,” said the chauffeur, unperturbed. “I’ll find somewhere now, sir.” The big dark car went on cruising the parking lot at a steady fifteen miles per hour.
But the clock ticking wasn’t the loudest sound in this limousine. Me getting cross took that honour, by several decibels. “Mr. McAllister, I don’t know what you hope to achieve by this pantomime, but when Chief Inspector Baker hears about it he’ll—” What, change his bulb for a hundred-watter? There was probably nothing he could do: McAllister wouldn’t make the mistake of crossing any line he was obliged to defend. But I knew this meeting was neither accidental nor social. “And when he‘s finished, my husband will want a go at the pieces.”
McAllister looked at me as if I’d threatened him with my mother. “Why, what’s your husband—an all-in wrestler?”
So Baker hadn’t passed on everything I’d told him. It was a pity, really, that he’d stopped short of that. I fired the information back like a salvo of big guns. “No, he’s a detective superintendent.”
McAllister looked disappointed. “What, another wee plod?” He managed to make Britain’s finest sound like a family of mice behind the skirting board, a slight but tedious irritation he would tolerate only so long before going to the chemist for something to deal with them.
I have heard Harry called some things in the pursuit of his duty. I have called him some of them myself. But I had never heard an epithet at once so mild and derogatory as “another wee plod” applied to him before. There’s more than six feet of Harry, and not much less from side to side, and though he actually has a most impressive intellect he makes a good job of hiding it. There are those who would consider the words described him perfectly. Mind you, most of them are in jail and still wondering why.
Thinking this, I began to chuckle. It wasn’t very nice to be chuckling, in the presence of a man who had just lost his wife, and on the back seat of his own car, but McAllister had brought it on himself.
Also, if I hadn’t seen the funny side of it, I might have been getting violent by now. Us short people aren’t the push-overs we are commonly supposed. Hard bits of our bodies, like knees and elbows and skulls, come at unexpected and strategic levels. If I bend at the waist and run like hell, I can sort out a six-foot mugger armed with anything less than a flick-knife and protected by anything less than an interior-sprung codpiece.
“Listen, McAllister,” I said. “You can tell your driver to stop looking so feverishly for somewhere to park. I don’t mind if he drives us round while you tell me what it was you were so anxious to ask me that you had to hijack me off the hospital doorstep. I’ve nothing to hide: as far as I know there’s nothing that I know that you shouldn’t know too. It’ll all be said at the inquest anyway, but if you want to hear it now, ask.”
I think he found it disconcerting, being offered the co-operation he had been prepared to wring out of me. But even if I disapproved of his methods, I didn’t begrudge him what scant information I had about his wife’s last hours. Actually I doubted there was anything he hadn’t already heard, but I didn’t mind repeating myself if it would give him any comfort. He hadn’t had much so far today, and he could go a lot longer yet.
