The Going Down of the Sun by Jo Bannister Page B

husband. Have you talked to McAllister?”
    â€œNot yet. I wanted to know what you’d seen first—the only unbiased account I’m likely to get in this—and actually you didn’t see very much, did you?” He sighed. He consulted his notebook. He looked up at the ceiling. “When you got on deck after the explosion, Curragh was floating near the upturned dinghy?”
    â€œYes, just behind it.”
    â€œDoes that sound right to you—that he was on the front deck and the dinghy was tied up behind, but after the Skara Sun was gone they ended up in much the same place?”
    And of course it didn’t, and I had to say so. I could believe that the combination of wind and wave and a massive explosion would have some curious effects, and he’d need a physicist or a marine engineer for an authoritative opinion, but if he cared what I believed then I believed he was right: it hadn’t happened as Curragh had said.
    Not as Curragh had said the second time, after Neil Burns queried his first account. His original version, that he was with Alison McAllister in the cabin when the explosion occurred, was even less credible. Shock and concussion might have confused him, but the other explanation was that he was lying in his teeth and hadn’t told the truth about the episode yet.
    Not sure whether Burns would want to report his patient’s initial account to the police, I did so. If Curragh had deliberately blown up a boat with a woman on board, the fact that I had hauled him back from the jaws of death in no way diminished my desire to see him pay.
    I realised I had underestimated DCI Neville Baker. He might be over-educated, pretentiously accented and know nothing about sailing, but he was good enough at his job. He recognised, of course, the significance of Curragh’s slip, and his lips pursed irritably at Burns’s intervention. But he wasn’t going to build a case of murder round it, at least not yet. It could still prove to have been an honest mistake.
    Yet the evidence, circumstantial as it was, was mounting, and I could have believed that—for the fifteen thousand pounds she had bequeathed him or for some reason we did not so far suspect—Alex Curragh had murdered Alison McAllister, but for one thing. It wasn’t a physical obstacle to his guilt, or an alibi; it wasn’t even a good disincentive. It was nothing a defence lawyer could make capital of without having a prosecutor pull it down around his ears.
    But to me, who had broken the news to him and watched him weep, the sheer scale of his grieving was a difficulty I could see no way round. It had had a depth and a range and a power that I could not believe he had fabricated. It had shaken him to his soul, ripping through the frail fibres of his being like some cosmic disturbance. It was the sort of fierce, consuming grief you could imagine someone dying of.
    I’m a grown woman, I’ve been around a bit, and I’ve seen enough of crime and criminals to know that great feats can be performed by those who want something badly enough. Maybe doctors, whose province is the sick, are more gullible than policemen, whose province is essentially the wicked. But in spite of the lies, in spite of the evidence shifting away from an accidental cause, and while acknowledging the suspect’s vested interest in my sympathy, I could not persuade myself that Alex Curragh’s distress was anything other than genuine and profound. I had seen it in his eyes. I didn’t believe he could lie there.
    But if Curragh hadn’t killed Alison McAllister, why had he lied – why was he lying still? If it wasn’t murder, what had he to hide?
    Their affair? Surely, even in his current shocked and weakened state, he couldn’t believe there was still a secret to protect? When a woman and a young man who is not her husband spend nights alone together on a small boat, there’s really only one