The Going Down of the Sun (9 page)

I was going to leave then, but she had a message that Dr. Burns wanted to see me when I called in. I liked that “when”: my husband and I must have built up some reputation in the few hours we'd been in this city.

Ros directed me to a ward on the same level as Curragh's room. I passed his door at a brisk walk—I had no intention of seeing him again. But Burns wasn't on the ward, and as I walked back to the lift I heard raised voices, the scuffle of feet and the shatter of glass, and I was through that damn door before common sense had the chance to intervene and find urgent business for me elsewhere.

The little room was full of people: DCI Baker and another policeman, Neil Burns, Alex Curragh and now me. There was hardly room for the furniture, and indeed the bed had been shoved under the window, the locker into one comer and the chair turned on its side.

Alex Curragh was in the other corner, between the bed and the wash-stand, crouched defensively in the angle. He was informally dressed, in pyjama trousers but neither jacket nor slippers, and his right arm was bulky in fresh white plaster. In his left hand he held a broken glass, and he held it by the heel with the jagged points ranged outwards.

His eyes were wild, white-ringed, the irises dark and hollow. His face was white too, the skin drawn tight over prominent bones, stained blue-black under the eyes with livid spots where the burns were. The bruise on his temple had spread all round his eye. He had his back to the wall, metaphorically as well as literally, and a glass claw to fend off a frontal assault. He looked as if he was fighting for his life.

There was something so deeply atavistic about the scene, so profoundly disturbing about the palpable fear that Curragh cast out as an aura around him, that I was momentarily rooted, shocked to my soul. It was as if I had strayed into some ancient mystic ritual, a rite of passage or of blood. Then I heard myself ask thinly, “What the hell's going on here?”

Tersely, without looking at me, Baker said, “Stay out of this.” He edged along the wall. Curragh's glass dagger followed him. The points reflected the light from the window, twinkling as his hand trembled.

Neil Burns spared me a glance. “It could be an IR.”

“To the anaesthetic?” Idiosyncratic responses to modern anaesthetics, particularly at a dosage adequate to set a broken arm, aren't very common, but there are always a few patients who react badly or oddly to any drug. I'd seen it before, though not this long after administration.

“Or the antibiotics. I don't know. But something set him off.”

“The prospect of having to answer my questions set him off,” growled Baker.

I asked Neil, “What happened?”

He shrugged, worried and nonplussed. “I don't know. Baker wanted to talk to him about the explosion. He seemed all right so I brought them in here. Baker introduced himself and said what he'd come about. I don't think he said anything out of turn, anything to provoke this. But next thing I knew, Curragh was out of bed and smashing his glass in the basin.”

“I know what provoked it.” Baker's voice was low, his eyes fixed on the boy's face. “I said he could answer my questions either here or at the police station.”

It was a routine enough remark. It shouldn't have precipitated violence in either an innocent or a guilty man. I looked at Curragh's white face and scared, haunted eyes and saw panic. His reaction had been more hysterical than violent, not rational enough to have any meaning. If it wasn't an IR it was something equally random, something he had no control over. Even the posture with the broken glass wasn't a threatening thing. He'd retreated into the furthest corner he could find, and was using what weapons he could improvise to protect himself.

Far from threatening, he was reacting as a man under threat—not the intellectual threat posed by a policeman investigating a crime but something older, deeper, closer to the level of instinct and survival. Something—the drugs, the questions, possibly delayed shock from yesterday—had triggered a primitive response in him that, for a few moments, he had no more power to control than a sneeze or a yawn.

In his eyes bewilderment was creeping in round the edges where the panic was receding. He seemed uncertain where he was, what he was doing, and how he came by the crystal weapon in his hand. It was as if he was waking from a nightmare only to find he had brought the essence of the horror out with him. There was the makings of fresh panic in that, the incomprehensible loss of sense and self and time. I sensed it bubbling up in him, like nitrogen bubbling lethally in a diver's blood. I sensed, like before, the silent cry of desperation from his soul to mine.

He was still crouched in his corner, half naked, his plastered arm braced against the wall, the jagged glass in his hand extended towards my throat. But I knew he was no danger to me, knew how desperately he needed someone to take control of the situation and end the vicious little drama in which, unaccountably, he found himself. It was thus an act of no bravery at all when I stepped quietly, steadily towards him, my hand out, palm up.

“Give me the glass, Alex, before someone gets cut.”

Neil Burns behind me murmured, “Careful,” and Baker hissed, “He'll carve her.”

But Alex Curragh was never going to hurt me, not unless I forced him to. His dark eyes ached for help. Compassion twisted a hard knot behind my breastbone.

His voice came with difficulty and deliberation from somewhere low in his throat. The words came out slow and measured, as if that was the only alternative to screaming them. He got out, “I don't know what I'm doing …”

I said, “It's all right, Alex. It's just the shock. Give me the glass.”

I couldn't take it by the points. My hand touched his as I closed my fingers round the unbroken heel, and he yielded the ugly thing to me not only willingly but with relief. I heard the air sigh out of his lungs. He straightened a little in his corner and his eyes half closed.

There was quick movement behind me. Neil Burns swept me into the protective compass of his long arms, and extracted the broken glass from my fingers as carefully as I had taken it from Curragh. By then Baker and his oppo had the boy pinned to the wall, not violently but with some force: I heard his back thump against it and the rest of the air rush from his lungs, and the sharp crack of plaster on plaster.

I cried, “Don't hurt him!” and Neil shouted, “Mind that arm!”

For a moment he all but disappeared behind the greater bulk of the two policemen. Then, once they had their hands on him, they relaxed a little, their broad shoulders parting, and I saw his eyes, lonely and afraid and crying out for help. He didn ‘t make a sound.

Baker's sergeant was reaching for handcuffs. “Don't you dare,” exclaimed Neil Burns, the tremor of his anger racing through his body into mine. After a moment's thought the sergeant put them back in his pocket.

“Well,” said Baker heavily, “that was some performance. Where do we go from here?”

“He's not leaving this hospital,” Neil said firmly. “And, in my professional opinion, he is not at this moment sufficiently rational to be answering your questions.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Medically? I could sedate him, but if it was an IR it would likely make him worse and he still couldn't answer your questions. I think I'd prescribe a pot of tea, and discussing the weather until he's calmed down enough to start making some sense.”

“He was making sense enough before,” growled the sergeant. “We asked him about the death of Alison McAllister and he went for us with a broken glass.”

It was near enough fair comment. You couldn't blame them for thinking it was cause and effect; maybe it was. I said, “I know what it looks like, but don't read too much into it. It could just be shock: sheer physical and emotional overload. This time yesterday I was trying to start him breathing. By any standards he's still a sick man.”

Baker nodded stiffly. “We'll leave the rubber truncheons till later, then.”

There was nothing more I could do. I had no right to be present: I wasn't Curragh's doctor, his solicitor or even a relative. The Oriental idea that saving someone's life makes you responsible for them has no reflection in British law, and if it turned out that Alex Curragh murdered Alison McAllister for fifteen thousand pounds in her will, I would be grateful for that. I backed towards the door.

Curragh's aching eyes stopped me. “Tell them.” His voice was barely audible. “Tell them I didn't kill Alison.”

I didn't know what to say. “I can't tell them that, Alex. I don't know that.”

“You know,” he insisted. “Tell them.”

I shook my head and left. The hardest thing was, I did know. At least, I believed that he had loved and mourned her. I couldn't tell them that—it wasn't evidence. I had nothing to support my belief beyond intuition born of that intimacy of minds we had established when he was all but dead. But I believed that inner voice telling me he had been trapped by circumstances and didn't know how to get out.

I was halfway down the corridor, wondering why I felt like crying, when I remembered that Neil Burns had wanted to talk to me. I must have been halfway down the corridor when Neil remembered too, because as I broke stride and hesitantly turned, he came out of Curragh's room with a rush, looking round for me. We came together with a smile.

“That was quite something you did in there.”

I shook my head. “He wasn't going to hurt me. He never meant to hurt anyone.”

“Are you sure of that?”

I sighed. “Yes, but not for reasons I can explain. I got a message you wanted to see me.”

It wasn't the smoothest change of subject anyone ever accomplished, and he looked momentarily surprised, but then he went with it. “Yes. I didn't want to tell the police until I'd talked to you. I mean, you know just how meaningless it can be, they say something and it sounds quite sensible but it comes from a dream or something that scares them or something they've seen on the telly—”

“Neil,” I said, “what are you talking about?”

“The anaesthetic, when we set his arm. He came out of it talking.”

There was nothing abnormal about that. Mostly when you come out of an anaesthetic you're surrounded by grinning nurses, but they know nothing you've just said bears any relation to reality. And they know better than to pass it on. I wondered why Neil wanted to share Curragh's ramblings with me.

“So what did he say that you've never heard before?”

He gave me a pained look. He'd come to me with this because he'd expected a more sympathetic, or anyway more understanding, hearing than from the police. I don't know why he didn't go instead to his chief medical officer. Perhaps he was afraid of starting something he couldn't afterwards stop, wanted to try it out for size first on someone with no clout whatever. Well, he'd come to the right place for that.

“He said,” said Neil, “`Your husband will kill us if he ever finds out.”‘

I found a park and wandered round it. I looked in the windows of some shops. I went back to the hotel and hunched in an armchair, drinking coffee. I may have done other things too, I don't remember. Half the time I had no idea where I was or what I was doing, except that my brain was racing.

As Curragh's must have been as he surfaced from the anaesthetic. He'd babbled on as if language had just been invented. A lot of it made no sense, but Neil had understood more than just that one sentence.

It seemed he was eavesdropping on a conversation between Curragh and his mistress. He had no idea of the time scale—whether it was the last conversation they'd had or one of the first. Also, like overhearing a phone call, he'd heard only Curragh's side of the dialogue.

He had said, “Your husband will kill us if he ever finds out.”

He had said, “I don't understand why you let him treat you like that.”

He had said, “You don't need his money. I can look after both of you.”

And, “What about my rights? What about how I feel?”

And Neil wanted to know whether he should break a confidence almost as sacred as that of the confessional to pass on what he had heard—whether I thought the contents significant enough to justify disclosure.

I couldn't judge their significance, except that to me they didn't sound like a young man talking to the woman he meant to murder. But I was sure he should tell the police. I didn't see how it could harm his patient; it might help him; more than that, it might help solve the mystery surrounding a woman's death. That took the highest priority.

Neil nodded. “Aye, OK.” He left me without another word and returned to his patient. I didn't expect him to talk to Baker there and then, but I thought he would soon.

I left too, walking aimlessly while my brain itched. For a couple of hours I worried at the problem like a terrier shaking a rat, but in slow motion; and when that time was up I had thrashed out a kind of explanation for what had befallen Alison McAllister and the
Skara Sun.
Not a definitive view of what had happened at the Fairy Isles, more an examination of what could have happened. When you work out how a magician could have done a trick, you're most of the way to knowing how he did it.

The problem was, I now had not one but two theories about what had happened to the
Sun.
One had Alex Cunagh guilty of Mrs. McAllister's death, the other had him innocent. Both began with their affair.

I couldn't guess how or why it began. It seemed likely that she initiated it—a woman older than him, worldier and wealthier than him, a cripple's wife, her boat giving her a plausible claim on Curragh's time. It was less likely that he began it, simply because she would probably have walked away.

However it began, and however it ended, there seemed to have been some real affection in between. That was where his grief came from, and the memories he had babbled out under the anaesthetic. What mattered was whether the love or the affair died first, because that was where the two narratives split.