The Going Down of the Sun (24 page)

“I reached it all right. It wasn't the foghorn. A quick flick of the windscreen wiper doesn't have the same impact at all.”

“It's the thought that counts,” I assured him; but of course it isn't or we wouldn't have been sitting there in the
Fairy Flag
‘s potting shed like three refugees from an out-patients'department.

Alex touched his fingertips to my face. A nerve leapt. “Put a dressing on that,” he said, “before the salt gets at it.” I had forgotten the cut on my cheek. Lacking a mirror, I got it covered up with a little help from my friends. I'd have let one of them do it but neither had two good hands.

About then I remembered they hadn't actually met, so I introduced them. Duncan knew who Alex was, of course, but Alex had no idea who Duncan might be. He was amazed to learn he had a natural ally against Frazer McAllister.

Soon after that, we heard the latch and Mackey pushed open the door. He crouched in the rectangle of daylight, still pointing the gun. “You: out here.” He was pointing it at me.

I started to say, “Why?” then remembered what we'd agreed and got to my feet. “Coming.”

Short people have a tremendous advantage aboard boats. We're not forever having to duck—under booms, through hatches, under the low coach-house roof which minimises windage and helps a racing boat keep her end up. So there was no necessity for me to pass between my companions bent low, with a hand on each man's knee. It was to remind them, if they needed reminding, that co-operation was the order of the day, and for them that meant sitting there. Regardless of what was coming.

Mackey backed away as I climbed up to him. He had no intention of letting me within grabbing range of his gun. In fact he had nothing to fear from me, but it was rather heartening—if rather dangerous—that he thought he might have.

He jerked his head at the console. It had been bastardised off a U-boat, I think, and a good half of the instruments had no function aboard
Flag.
Those that had were mostly duplicated, for the two big engines. The effect was arcane and intimidating.

“Can you sail this thing?” From the tone of his voice he might have been asking if I could levitate.

I nodded, casually. “Of course.”

“Do you need any help?”

It was tempting but I resisted. “Someone to pull the anchor up, just.”

He looked relieved. “Barry can do that. OK, get us back to Crinan. And see, I don't want any trouble with you.”

I gave him my most reassuring middle-aged-lady voice. “Nobody wants any trouble, William. Everybody wants to get back to Crinan. McAllister and the police can sort out between them where we go from there.”

So I made the speedboat and
Maebh
fast astern, and started
Flag
‘s big noisy engines. Mackey covered me with his gun, and his big friend Barry hauled up the chain and the anchor, hand over hand, covering himself in mud and sweat as he did so. It was sheer malice on my part that I omitted to tell him about the winch.

We had about twenty miles to go. Even towing two boats,
Flag
could have done it in ninety minutes—it was a straight run on a slack tide, and the wind on the beam offered scant resistance. Out of deference to Duncan Galbraith's shaky sea-legs, knowing the effect that being battened under hatches would have on them, I notched the throttles back a few pegs. I couldn't see that another half hour would matter. With the benefit of hindsight, though, it was a bad decision, even from Duncan's point of view.

The afternoon was drawing in by now. There were noticeably fewer boats on the Sound, and most of them appeared to be making for shore. The breeze had firmed up to a delicious Force 4 that made me resent more than ever the stench of petrol and the thunder of the engines. I found the constant vibration more tiring than short tacks.

Actually, though, the smell of petrol was not without compensation. It masked, more effectively than anything else would have done though still not totally, the stench of the mud Barry had transferred from the anchor-chain to his person. He was dabbing at it ineffectually with a handkerchief as he sat too close behind me, where the wheelhouse opened onto the well. The smell was a perpetual reminder of the future I had predicted for Mackey.

I think it reminded Mackey too. Even as the tension between us fell—with a common goal that was drawing nearer with every revolution of the big engines under our feet, it seemed that the drama was over—I could feel his animosity towards me mount. He sat in sulky silence to my right, hardly looking at me as I helmed
Flag
homeward, and while you couldn't say his gun was on me all that time, the restless obsessive way he played with it was a constant threat, not only to me.

His malodorous friend Barry also found it disturbing and twice told him to put it away. The first time Mackey grinned at him, rather too vividly, and drew a bead on an imaginary apple balanced on my head. Quarter of an hour later his response was less good-natured. He just about looked up from his almost indecent caressing of the thing, and his eyes were narrow and blood-dark, an unhealthy gloom vibrant with anger and resentment, and he growled, “Fuck off,” in a low toneless whine.

I don't know what it told the big man he'd roped into this doubtful enterprise, but it told me that young Mackey was losing his grip on reality by the minute. This exploit of his had been ill-conceived but in fact he'd carried it out successfully, gambling that I would find Curragh before anyone else and arranging to take over when I did. I'd even been conscious of that danger, but still he had been more effective in using me than I had been in thwarting him. We had gamed for Alex Curragh and he had beaten me.

It should have gone some way towards restoring the self-esteem that Harry had so casually deflated by knocking him down. But anti-climax was setting in, aggravated by the time he now had for thinking. I don't know what thoughts were going through his little gangster mind, but they didn't seem to be soothing him. Probably he was beginning to suspect that he'd misjudged the situation, gone in like the Green Berets where he should have tip-toed, and that whatever his uncle may have said in grief and rage, he was unlikely to be grateful to have his enemy delivered into his hands in an indivisible package with a newspaper reporter and the wife of a detective superintendent. The smell of the sewage farm became more overpowering with every mile. By the time the little community of Tarbert Bay was sliding down our port side, Mackey's hostility was as present and animate as another person beside me in the wheelhouse.

The bottom line was that he was a seriously unbalanced young man, armed with a big gun and held back from profound violence by natural and social inhibitions worn to the denier of gossamer, and that he blamed me for most or all of his problems. A very small push could take him over the brink into mayhem. Almost nothing at all might do it: an unwise remark, a smart reply, even a look of a kind he didn't like. His tolerances were paper-thin. I swore to myself by all I held most dear—principally Harry and my publisher's next advance—that I would not be the means of unleashing his tiger.

What happened next was an accident.

The heat had gone out of the day now, though the sun was still high. Neither Mackey nor his big friend must have spent much time afloat prior to this because neither of them was dressed for west-coast sailing. Mackey would have looked chic on a cruise liner in the Cyclades; Barry, I think, had his gardening clothes on. Force 4 is a steady wind, and Scottish winds are never warm, and both men were beginning to feel the chill in the three-sided wheelhouse. I saw no advantage in having them more uncomfortable and therefore more irritable than they already were, so I suggested that Duncan make some coffee.

When it was ready he rapped on the door and Barry opened it and took three mugs from him. We had no milk with us so it was black and very hot. I wedged mine in the fiddle designed for the purpose and left it to cool for a minute.

I don't know where the baulk of wood came from. One of the local boat yards possibly, though it was a big lump of timber to have any function in the building or maintenance of pleasure craft. It could have been drifting about since the last big ship was launched on the Clyde, working its way slowly round the Mull of Kintyre, getting more waterlogged with every tide and every mile. From how it lay in the water, practically awash with glassy ripples silvering the square-hewn black surface, it could have been around long enough.

Because so little of it showed above the waves the wind was kicking up, and because
Flag
‘s wheel was a long way back from
Flag
‘s high flared bow, we were almost on it before I sported it. If we'd hit it travelling at that speed, even
Flag
‘s substantial bottom would have suffered a nasty prolapse—I couldn't judge exactly how big it was, or how heavy, but those little waves were breaking glassily over it rather than bearing it with them. I did the only thing I could do: take immediate avoiding action.

The old girl might steer like a cow but her reactions were lightning. The big wheel was spinning in my hands even as I shouted a warning, and before the words were out, the big blades shovelling the water past the rudder had
Flag
digging one shoulder into the sea and throwing the other at the sky in a steep banking turn she might have learnt from a Spitfire. We missed the log, God knows how, and
Flag
crashed through the next three waves sending salt water in a high fan across the potting shed and over and partly into the wheelhouse, where the raked sides gave only partial protection.

Only when I had
Flag
back on an even keel did I realise I'd heard someone yell. With my luck it had to be William Mackey, and William Mackey it was.

The sudden crisis had caught him with his mug to his lips, and the violence of my manoeuvre had sent the scalding liquid slashing into his face and down his front. To add insult to injury, the subsequent inrush of sea had soaked his sailor-suit from collar to turn-ups. He looked like a drowned pierrot.

I knew that laughing could get me killed. I said, “Sorry about that. There was a damn great block of wood in the water. Is everyone all right?”

William wasn't. William was wet through, and his face stung with hot coffee and cold salt spray, and the eyes he lifted slowly burned like pitch, smouldering pits of a hatred so profound it amounted almost if not entirely to madness.

“You did that on purpose,” he said, and his voice was quite without inflection, sexless and thin. Then he screamed it. “You did that on purpose!”

It wasn't true, but if he hadn't seen the wood he couldn't know how much worse than a hot and cold shower I had saved him from. I shook my head. “No.” I turned my attention back to my steering.

He had lost his temper and his dignity, his self-control and arguably his marbles, but of course he still had the gun. He waved it in my face as if trying to shove the barrel up my right nostril. He had his finger on the trigger: if it had gone off it would have blown half my head away. There was no comfort in the knowledge that it would be mostly an accident.

It's never nice to be held at gunpoint, but an incompetent gunman is infinitely more terrifying than a cold-blooded pro. The latter will almost certainly succeed when he decides to kill you while the former may miss, but the chances are the nerd will pull the trigger from panic or by mistake before he has to or even wants to. Also, being killed by a bad shot hurts more, relying as he does on quantity rather than quality of marksmanship.

Improbably, one sliver of my brain remained cool enough to consider all this even while I was sniffing cordite and gun-oil. In that calm oasis I was also aware that if I tackled him now, while he was shaking with fury and his movements barely co-ordinated, I could probably wrest the weapon from him and drop it in the Sound. But I couldn't do it, couldn't bring myself to take the risk. Smothering initiative as the desert smothers the oasis, fear held me paralysed. It was as much as I could do to keep from whimpering.

Behind me Barry, whom I was increasingly coming to think of as my ally rather than Mackey's, said tersely, “For God's sake, put that cannon away before somebody gets hurt.” He sounded deeply uneasy. He hadn't expected things to turn out quite as they were doing. Alex was one thing, but Duncan and me being here changed the nature of the game and he was worried that Mackey didn't seem to accept that.

For a moment longer my face was full of the gun; then, abruptly, Mackey backed off. The heavy muzzle dragged down my lip before it disappeared into his belt. I dared the briefest glance at his face; his eyes were unspeakably vicious. Then he too disappeared, behind my back. I could only have kept him in view by turning away from the wheel, which seemed unwise on two counts: because it would let him know how much he scared me, and because there could be other hazards to navigation floating around.

So I didn't see him reach behind me to take my mug, still almost full, from the fiddle at my left elbow which had held it safe through
Flag
‘s acrobatics. The first I knew was the tap on my right shoulder, and as I turned automatically he threw the half-pint of hot dark liquid into my eyes.

After that a lot happened in quick succession, though I saw none of it. I howled in shock and pain, and staggered back from the wheel clapping my hands over my eyes. The scalding heat burned my face and lanced my eyes like acid burning a track into my brain. Blind, rocking in agony, I lurched around the wheelhouse until big hands that had to be Barry's brought me to a standstill and held me with just a suspicion of concern.

Meanwhile I was dimly aware that the
Fairy Flag
was taking advantage of my absence to do some lurching around of her own. She slid sideways off a wave and pitched her shoulder into a trough before Mackey—it had to be him; Barry was holding me—grabbed the wheel and tried to haul her back on course. She responded to the crudity of his touch by oversteering and sliding off the other way, burying her bows in a welter of sea. He cried, “Leave her—give me a hand here,” and there was mortal terror in his voice.