The Going Down of the Sun by Jo Bannister Page A

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.”
    â€œCould you hear what they were saying?”
    â€œNo. 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.”
    â€œWas 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.”
    â€œSo whatever it was happened between supper and breakfast. Would that fit in with a gas leak?”
    â€œListen, 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.
    â€œThe 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.”
    â€œIf it was working.”
    â€œThey’re pretty reliable. They tend to be too sensitive, not the other way round.”
    â€œCould 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.”
    â€œFor the money?”
    He shrugged. “An awful lot of crimes are committed for it.”
    â€œFifteen thousand pounds? He’s not going to live in luxury for the rest of his life on that.”
    â€œIt’s still probably the biggest sum he’s ever owned.”
    â€œBut 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