The Going Down of the Sun (12 page)

And waiting outside the hotel, taking up more space than two taxis but impressing the hell out of the guests, was a big dark car with tinted windows and a uniformed chauffeur. As I approached, the front passenger seat opened and the slick little item in the pin-striped suit got out and casually, carefully, barred my way.

“Sonny,” I said heavily, “I am getting a little tired of tripping over you.”

He looked surprised at that and a little put out. I think he thought he was a whole lot more alarming than he actually was. I could almost see him shrug the cloak of menace up under his chin. “Mr. McAllister's unhappy about the company you're keeping,” he said.

The sheer impudence of it so astounded me that I let the moment for tearing his head off and kicking it across the street come and go. For a long time I held him in the baleful light of my What's-this-on-the-sole-of-my-shoe? glare, until he actually started to squirm. He was very young, I saw now, considering him as a person for the first time. It didn't excuse his manners, but perhaps it explained his lack of dimension. He was a bauble, all glittering surface and no substance.

When he was about as withered as he was going to get I said, very quietly, “What did you say? About Mr. McAllister?”

McAllister wasn't in the car. If he had been, this juvenile delinquent would have done a better job, or at least made a better show, of keeping his nerve. As it was, his fancy footwork subsided into a retreat if not a rout, and he glanced anxiously at the chauffeur for support. The studied smoothness of the Tartan Mafia accent gave way under pressure to his native Glasgow.

“He won't be happy you're hanging round with that hack Galbraith.”

So McAllister hadn't sent him, didn't even know. I looked at the chauffeur, who very carefully didn't look at me. The peak of his cap pointing dead ahead through the windscreen, he was pretending he wasn't involved in this. I let my gaze travel back to the lad in the suit. “Sonny, what's your name?”

Half of him wanted to keep it secret, the other half to boast. Finally he said, “William Mackey.” He tacked on a handsome grin that was a little too like a lear. He was about twenty-one.

“All right, William,” I said. “Billy. I know you're doing your best, but you haven't quite got the hang of this game yet. Watch the grownups play a little longer and then have another go. With someone else.” I turned away from him towards the hotel steps.

“Hey, missus,” he hissed, colouring, and he reached for my shoulder.

It was a serious mistake. It would have been a serious mistake even if Harry hadn't been coming up the pavement the other way. He might have gone home with a black eye, even a marked disinclination to walk upright. But he probably wouldn't have ended up sitting on the pavement with blood pouring from his nose all down his pin-striped front.

Harry takes a lot of time about most things he does—at work, at home, even deciding whether to mow the lawn up and down or side to side. He likes to deliberate until the logic of a situation emerges to dictate its own solution. But occasionally, when a more expeditious approach is called for, he acts first and sweeps up the bits later.

Now he regarded William Mackey with a kind of grave concern for a moment, then offered him a clean handkerchief to deal with the consequences of his misadventure. Then he steered me gently past the small knot of staring bystanders and into the hotel lobby.

Back over my shoulder to Mackey as we climbed the steps I murmured, “See what I mean?”

Harry's lunch-hour had been less interesting than mine, though the coffee was probably better. Over it he began to suspect that we were both behaving rather badly, and afterwards he came back to make his peace with me. His arrival could not have been more opportune, but it left me with some explaining to do.

Actually, Mackey's intervention meant that Harry took Duncan Galbraith's warning more seriously than he would otherwise have done. When he heard the story, McAllister would know that. I wasn't sure the pin-striped suit would be worth cleaning after that.

Also, Harry had news of his own. He'd phoned the police station from the Chinese restaurant to say he'd be late back from lunch, and Baker's sergeant had said Baker was tied up at present anyway, talking to Alex Curragh in the interview room.

“Oh Jesus,” I said in disgust. “The kid's sick. He's got a broken arm, his brain's still full of anaesthetic, only a few hours ago he threw a panic attack so bad I don't think he knew where he was. Now he's in a police station trying to justify his actions to a bunch of people who really rather hope he's a murderer. Couldn't it have waited?”

“His doctor must have passed him fit. He might as well get on with it.”

“You think he did it?”

It was the kind of question Harry objected to on principle. He reminded me with a look of gentle reproach. “I think it's necessary to find out who did do it.” It wasn't that he was reluctant to share his theories with me, more that he avoided theorising for fear that a favourite theory might some day obscure a less appealing truth. Harry reckoned that the time for theories was when no further facts could be dragged, kicking and screaming, from their hiding places in the fabric of an incident. It made him a very good policeman. It would have made him a terrible novelist.

He didn't go back to the police station after all, and in the middle of the afternoon the flowers came.

Harry's face was a study when he answered a knock at the door of our room and the porter thrust a bouquet of early roses into his arms.

I knew who they were from, of course, even before we read the card. Frazer McAllister might be many things—he was certainly a bully, he might be worse—but he wasn't crass. The roses were yellow not red, a vaseful not an armful, and the card was simply worded and addressed to Harry and I both.

It said: “I'm sorry about my nephew's behaviour. Thank for putting him straight. I'd like to make amends: dinner at my house, about eight? My car will call.”

No-one had waited for a reply. The card was hand-written and he hadn't appended his phone-number. No doubt we could have got it; equally clearly we weren't intended to. The item wasn't up for discussion; either we accepted his invitation or we rejected it. There was no mean course. That was clever too.

It was too tempting to refuse. Back home it would have been impossible, but Harry had no official function in this enquiry. We would be witnesses at any trial, but not against anyone in particular. There would be raised eyebrows and disapproving sniffs, no doubt, but we could cope with that if there were real gains to be had. Seeing McAllister on his home ground, learning that side of him, would be such a gain. I hoped Duncan Galbraith would understand that and not suppose I had been bought too.

I still hadn't got anything suitable to wear. But that troubled me less than having him think I'd dashed out and bought something special, so I put on my white jeans and my cleanest shirt, and put my hair up, and settled for sandals and no socks, and rather hoped we'd find him in white tie and tails.

But that would have been crass. He knew the circumstances of our presence in Glasgow, that we'd been interrupted in a sailing holiday. Our available wardrobe was necessarily casual. He greeted us on the steps up to his front door in a pale cashmere cardigan over a silk shirt, with a kerchief at his throat. As best I could judge his lopsided expression, he was glad to see us.

The smooth dark car had brought us westward out of the city, along the north shore of the Clyde until the Erskine Bridge faded behind and the signs for Loch Lomond proliferated ahead. Before we reached that over-hyped but still lovely lake, we peeled off the main road and up into the Kilpatrick Hills. McAllister's house was a small castle with the front door at first floor level, approached by a flight of well-worn and narrow stone steps.

The thing appeared to be authentic, though he could have commissioned that look. But if he'd built it the planners would have required a rail to guard those steps, which might have made them easier for a one-legged man to manage but would have ruined the impact of that lofty access.

Limping heavily, neither seeking help nor likely to accept any, Frazer McAllister ushered us to the eyrie that was his home. He sat us down in deep armchairs round a gently glowing log fire and put glasses in our hands. He sent word to his cook that we'd eat in half an hour. Then he set about apologising for the episode outside our hotel.

“My sister Sheila's a grand girl, nicest wee woman you could hope to meet. But she married a blockhead, and their boy William's going to be twice the dolt his father ever was. When he was twelve they took him to the flicks—Edward G. Robinson, George Raft or one of them, and the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. That was it. The wee lad's development stopped there and then. I swear, every time he blows out the candles on his birthday cake he wishes he was Jimmy Cagney.”

I said, “He works for you.”

McAllister shrugged. “Nobody but family would employ him.”

That wasn't my point. “In the short time before he sat down on the pavement, he gave me to understand that you had something to say about who I meet and talk to.”

He nodded. “It's like I told you, the wee lad's thick. Galbraith and I have had words before. When he saw you having lunch together he thought I'd be interested—”

“He thought
you'd
be interested?” Harry murmured softly, and I grinned at him.

“—and instead of coming to tell me about it he used his initiative and tried to talk to you first. I'm sorry you were bothered. It won't happen again.”

“No?”

“I have an interest in a whisky distillery. He's on his way there now. It sounds a grand job but oh Christ, have you ever smelled one of those places?”

“I didn't have lunch with Galbraith.” I'm not sure which of them I was explaining it to. “He introduced himself outside as I left and asked about the accident. I told him what I'd seen.”

“You know,” McAllister said quietly, “I really don't believe it was an accident.”

“So I understand,” said Harry. “Why?—Because she was careful?”

“Partly that. Partly the boy ending up beside the dinghy. Partly because he's told a different story every time he's been asked where he was, what he was doing. But also—” He made an angry, frustrated little gesture with his hand in the air. “Hell, I don't know. Alison—Alison was never going to die like that.”

I don't think Harry knew what he meant. I did, but I'm not sure I can express it any clearer. It's as if destiny is a shopping-list containing a wide range of alternatives, and though you might not know which would be in stock at any given point, you'd know something was wrong if you came home with something that wasn't on the list at all. That was how McAllister felt: that his wife had somehow picked up the wrong shopping-bag.

Maybe it was the shock talking—it was still very soon after the event, too soon for him to have any kind of perspective on it. But there was a subtle difference between how he viewed Alison's death and how he viewed her infidelity which I found persuasive. It would have been easier to dismiss his misgivings if he'd insisted her liaison with Curragh had been other than it appeared. His candour on that score argued that his doubts were reasonable, even if he couldn't explain exactly where they came from.

Of course, he could still be wrong. Or lying.

I said, “How old is your son?” It sounded as if I was changing the subject. I wasn't.

He smiled. Nothing that ravaged face could do was handsome, but there was warmth in his smile. “Four months. He's asleep now, but if he wakes up later would you like to see him?”

Babies and bull terriers, they have to be yours for you to appreciate their charms. I'd never seen one of either that I'd even fleetingly wanted to take home. But you can't tell a fond father that. “I'd love to.”

I waited while he refilled our glasses, then hit him with what I was building up to. “So you reckon this affair with Curragh started when Alison was seven months pregnant.”

The silence gasped. Both men stared at me as if I'd said something unforgivable. I shrugged. “You told me she'd known him about six months.”

His eyes were interesting. They could be frosty with umbrage at one level, blaze with indignation at another and still have enough scope left to register a kind of appreciation for a logic that unyielding. After a moment to marshall his thoughts he said mildly, “I could have been wrong about that, I suppose—the precise timing. There was an element of guesswork.”

I chanced a guess that was a little more than a guess. “Her will predated your son's birth.”

Harry too was looking at me with interest now.

McAllister nodded brusquely. “Yes.”

“So she could have known him longer than six months but not much less. Could she have known him a year?”

He shrugged. “I suppose.”

“Eighteen months?”

“No way!” The lion head came up sharply. “I'd have known.”

I nodded slowly. He was reconciled to the fact that he'd lost Alison long before she and her boat were reduced to debris spiralling through the shallow waters of Loch Sween. But he was not prepared to entertain, even fleetingly, the idea that Alex Curragh might be the father of his son.

And was he? It hardly seemed to matter. He was the child of McAllister's wife, born in wedlock; McAllister wanted him to be his son, was raising him as such, wouldn't consider the alternative; and now Alison was dead the objective truth could be hard to discover. Every way that mattered, the baby was McAllister's.

I thought that was the answer to my question and was content to let the matter rest. But now Harry seemed to have been caught up by the implications. He let his gaze travel calmly round the room—not a big room, the space compressed by the four-foot-thick walls and the beamed ceiling. The walls were raw stone dark with centuries of smoke (or a good synthetic), hung with textiles—probably not priceles Flemish tapestries but giving the same effect. The beams too were smoke-blackened, but between them the high ceiling was plastered and painted in a fantastic bestiary of tiny golden dragons and gryphons and chimeras on a brilliant turquoise ground. That was almost the only brightness in the room. The carpet, like the hangings and the curtains at the two small, high lancet windows, was in brown and rich Turkey red, the three chairs in dark green leather, the two couches in burgundy velvet. The fireplace was made of the same stone as the walls, topped with a plank of the same wood as the beams.