The Going Down of the Sun (23 page)

This one was very big and obviously very heavy, and the rather small hand that held it couldn't cope with the weight well enough to stop it wandering all over the wheelhouse. I froze rigid when it wandered over me. It was no comfort to realise that it was pointing at my navel inadvertently: someone that bad with a gun could quite accidently shoot my guts out, and that was the weapon to do it with. I could only hope that the trigger was as heavy as the rest of it.

When Duncan took another step forward the gun, the hand and the man behind him came up out of the cabin. I sighed. No surprises, not even the blue and white matelot outfit that had replaced the pinstriped suit.

I said, “Billy Mackey. Still playing grown-ups'games?”

And he hit me in the face with the muzzle of the gun.

I didn't lose consciousness, not quite, but I went down, and from the soft elastic collision of my body with the boards a good share of my awareness was taking time out.

I made no effort to rise, just lay there among the feet on the bare wood and let my senses find their way home. Predictably, pain came first. Every tooth in the left side of my head howled in protest, and there was a stinging and a coolness under my eye that suggested he had laid my cheek open. None of it was as serious as it was unpleasant. It would pass.

Much more serious was the fact that Frazer McAllister's gangster nephew was after his uncle's reward, was tooled up in pursuit of it and had already crossed the shadow-line between using a gun as a threat and using it as a weapon. That nobody had been shot yet was almost incidental. The willingness to hurt was all. He'd hit me with the gun because he was confident of his superiority; any time he felt threatened he'd fire it just as easily. Indeed, the first shot could be fired quite casually, and into any body including his own, if he persisted in using the thing as a truncheon.

Confident. He didn't get to feel that confident, even with a gun in his hand, from standing up alone against three people on the deck of a boat he'd just pirated. He had company. Without moving my head I screwed my eyes round, looking for a pair of feet I didn't recognise.

I found them, in elastic-sided suede shoes that he'd never get the salt out of, but not in time to do me any good. Mackey must have got tired of looking at me curled up on the deck. He said irritably, “Get her up,” and a pair of hands like props from a Hammer movie picked me up in one easy movement and restored me to the vertical. He must have thought I was taller than I am, though, because he held me for a moment with my feet dangling off the floor and couldn't seem to work out what the problem was.

The senses I had been carefully shepherding home took advantage of this development to break for the hills, but they didn't get far before I started rounding them up again. I found Alex close beside me and leaned against him for a little extra support, hoping the need for it wasn't too obvious. After a moment he put his arm round me and held me while my muscles and nerves got themselves organised.

I knew then what had happened to Duncan's hand.

There were just the two of them, but Mackey had that big gun and his company was built along the same lines as a Mulberry harbour, so they probably thought it was enough. I thought so too. Besides, the little red speedboat tied up against
Flag
‘s seaward side, out of sight as we approached from the shore, wouldn't have taken any more. It wouldn't have taken the two of them if Mackey hadn't been as slight as his friend was hefty.

I had been about to ask, when I got my head together enough, where they had sprung from. Now there was no need. That little red mosquito had been buzzing round for two days, never out of sight. They'd found Alex by following me. I had thought I could help him in ways no-one else could, and in my arrogance I had led them straight to him.

“There's no need for that,” Alex was saying, his voice tight with anger. “It's me you want. I'll come with you. But leave them alone.”

Mackey shook the gun in his face. I'm not sure he meant to shake it, perhaps he just meant to point. It illustrated graphically the danger of being on the same boat as William Mackey.

He said, “You're coming, all right. We're all going. Mr. McAllister can decide what he wants done with the bunch of you.” There was real malice in his light voice, and a kind of indecent hope. I think he genuinely expected to be asked to gun us down and chuck us into the Clyde with our feet encased in concrete.

Mumbling round the ache in my jaw, I said, “I've seen your uncle since you have, Billy. He's not after blood now—not Curragh's, not mine.” I hoped it was true, but didn't very much care if a lie would serve as well. “Call him up. The reward's been withdrawn.”

He couldn't and I knew he couldn't. His toy boat didn't run to a radio, while
Flag
‘s had long ago been cannibalised to keep something more profitable seaworthy. Mackey must have seen the state it was in when he was waiting below.

He shrugged. “It doesn't matter. I'm not doing this for the money.” He got a surprisingly sharp look out of the broad face of his friend which suggested that this was news to him. But Mackey didn't notice or anyway didn't respond.

“Had enough of the smell of raw whisky? Sonny, if you embarrass him any more he's going to buy a sewage farm solely for the pleasure of having you manage it.”

He drew himself up to his full five-foot-six. He really did look very silly in blue and white stripes. He said with dignity, “I need no advice from you on my dealings with my uncle.”

“You think not? You think attacking me and a representative of the Press with a weapon you've almost certainly got no licence for was a good career move?”

Mackey's big friend was growing visibly uneasy as the conversation progressed. Now he said, “Hell, William, I don't know—if Mr. McAllister's pulled his money out, maybe we shouldn't be going on with this.” So while he may have looked like Godzilla the man was no fool.

Mackey turned on him waspishly. “Listen, Barry”—I couldn't tell if it was his first name or his second, decided Jimmy Cagney would never have addressed a henchman by his Christian name—” I won't tell you how to work a fork-lift if you won't tell me what my uncle wants and doesn't want.” He jerked the gun my way again. “She's all talk, her. She'll say anything that suits her. I'll answer to my uncle. You answer to me.”

Barry was definitely no fool. “What if there's no money?”

“There is money!” shouted Mackey. “He'll pay, all right, when we give him what he wants. But if by any chance he doesn't, I'll pay you. Out of my own pocket. All right?”

“What is the going rate for a sewage-farm manager?” I murmured.

I'd pushed him too far. He was already on edge, too nervous about what he was doing to take baiting in his stride. He swung back to me, his eyes vicious, the gun in his hand swinging quite deliberately. If he'd hit me in the face again he'd have broken my jaw for sure. I shrank against Alex's sleeve, too sick-scared of what he could do to me to care what I looked like, a grown woman turning for protection to a boy hardly yet come to manhood.

I had a split-second in which to despise myself, not long enough to acknowledge that natural imperative for self-preservation which demands we take what help we need where we can find it. Then the hammer-blow landed, with a crack like a breaking spar. I'd screamed a little breathless scream into Alex's shirt before it occurred to me that the blow hadn't landed on me.

His voice low and quiet, his words as near a threat as you'll hear an unarmed man address to a man with a gun in his hand, Alex said, “I told you to leave her alone.” The quiet anger in the depths of his voice rumbled at me through his chest wall.

Not quickly enough for my self-respect I peeled my face off his shirt and looked round. The well of the
Fairy Flag
was littered with little white chips. For a crazy moment I thought there'd been a sudden hailstorm while we were otherwise engaged. But they weren't chunks of ice, they were flakes of plaster. Alex had fended the blow with the plaster setting his fractured arm.

I gazed at him in horror, but there was no reflection in his face of the hurt that must have run through his torn nerves and muscles like an axe tipped with acid. His face was stern, like these Scottish hills that spawned him: stern, enduring and unyielding. There was a strength in him, like the strength of rock under the summer green of this ancient Argyll forest, that he had from his ancient and troublesome Argyll forebears who yielded neither to Rome, nor to the Saxon or the Norman or even the English, though they bled and starved for it.

A boy not yet come to manhood? Alex Curragh had been a man from the age of fifteen, and earlier if called on—up to two thousand years earlier. I still hadn't made allowance enough for the differences between urban and rural breeding. The city makes people hard on the outside, the country makes them tough on the inside, in their bones and sinews and souls. Except that he had Sam Colt in his corner, William Mackey would never be a match for Alex Curragh, and he would never understand why.

Which was perhaps understandable, in view of his age and his background and his sex. But I wondered fleetingly what my excuse was. I had thought, because I had seen him cry, that I had the measure of Alex, knew the depth and breadth of him. I had failed to recognise that all his tears were for Alison. He saved none for himself. You wouldn't wring self-pity out of him if you nailed him to the wall. It was a matter of honour.

Mackey too was shocked by what had happened: partly by what he had done with his swinging weapon, perhaps more by the lack of any obvious consequence beside the brief flurry of plaster snow. He stepped back, off-balance, and a tiny breath whistled between his teeth. For a long moment he couldn't seem to drag his eyes off the plaster, crazed like old china under the gauze, and his gun hung a dead weight at the end of his arm.

Then he pulled himself together, hauled it up and pointed it at Alex's chest. He still couldn't hold it steady; or his voice. “Inside,” he hissed, jerking his head at the cabin door, and when no-one else moved I gently separated myself from Alex and led the way. I'd started enough trouble for one day. After a moment Alex followed me and Duncan Galbraith followed him, and the door slammed and the latch snapped, locking us in.

At least we were alone, free of the ungodly. I steered Alex to a bunk and sat him down. “Let me see.”

As the weight came off his feet he let go, and I saw the colour drain out of his face and the hurt pool in his eyes. I thought he might faint but he didn't; soon he began to rally. “I don't think there's much damage,” he said. His voice was a little thin, that was all. “I didn't feel the bone move.”

If he was right I'd do more harm than good getting the broken plaster off. Even if he was wrong, we'd be back in Crinan by evening, where presumably Mackey would hand him over to the police, and a proper job could be done. In the end I took all the crêpe bandage out of the First Aid kit and strapped it tightly round the jigsaw of plaster pieces. Held together like that, it gave him most of the support and protection of the original.

When I'd finished I rocked back on my heels and looked him in the face. “That was a crazy thing to do.”

“He could have killed you.”

And when I thought about it he was right. If my head had stopped that blow, twelve feet of crêpe bandage would have done me no good at all.

It was a bit sobering; that. Not just my narrow escape, though it was enough to chill the blood, but the implications for an ending to this which, if not exactly happy, we could at least all walk away from. Alex's shattered plaster he could just about get away with—the police might frown on Mackey's behaviour but he could reasonably expect McAllister's gratitude to be adequate compensation. But what if the blow had landed where it was aimed? Facing a charge of murder, even one of GBH, there was the very real possibility that Jimmy Cagney would cut his losses and get out.

Cutting his losses in this case meant not only foregoing the reward but disposing of the witnesses. Another boating accident wouldn't be too hard to arrange, and even if the coincidence was more than a shade suspicious, there would be nothing to point to William Mackey's involvement. In the long expanse of the Sound of Jura it was probable that no-one had noticed the little red speedboat rendezvous with the
Fairy Flag.
It offered, in any event, a better prospect of avoiding prison than sailing into Crinan with one or more of us seriously injured, or worse.

Duncan had been thinking along similar lines. When I had finished with Alex's arm and turned my attentions to his hand—there was nothing broken, only the skin ripped off the knuckles—he caught my eye and said, with the utmost seriousness, “You know, don't you, that we'll all end up dead if we don't do exactly what they want precisely when they want it. However much it goes against the grain, we have to co-operate.”

It was me he was warning, not Alex. Alex might have taken the blow that could have cost us all our lives, but I had provoked it. He thought he could trust Alex to husband his anger against a more suitable time, and he had the strong suspicion that he couldn't trust me. I don't know what kind of an irresponsible idiot he took me for, but now I knew what we were up against I was too damn scared to step out of line again.

I finished binding his hand and gave it back to him, meeting his gaze as I did. “Is that how you got that?” I asked, straight-faced. “Cooperating?”

He grinned his chubby, boyish grin and chuckled down the front of his Fair Isle jumper. “Not exactly. I tried to warn you, after they came on board. We were in the wheelhouse. All the time they were talking I was working out which of the buttons on the dashboard was the foghorn. When they ordered me below I made a dive for it.”

“I take it you didn't reach it.”