The Going Down of the Sun (26 page)

Like, for instance, the Firth of Lorn. On the far side of Islay and Jura lay an even broader expanse of water where Loch Linnhe emptied into the Atlantic. No roads overlooked it. There were no centres of population and few houses. Only the fishing boats offered a realistic prospect of our murder being witnessed, and they weren't so many they would be hard to avoid. Once through the Sound of Luing into the broad Firth, our chances of making a safe landfall would diminish with every mile, and
Flag
could cover a lot of them in a couple of hours. Even if Harry guessed what had happened, in that waste of water even a full-scale search would never find our grave.

I made a positive effort to pull myself together, to husband what nerve remained to me. I nodded. “All right.”

“All right what?” He wanted me to say it, to make the commitment, so there would be no wavering when the going got tough. Well, tougher. Anyway, less wavering.

“All right, let's take our boat back. How do we do it?”

He grinned. It was mostly relief that he didn't have to fight me too, but in the dim of the potting shed it had a radiance that was partly childlike, partly vulpine. It was a revelation, that grin. It told me I had been premature in deciding Alex Curragh was no killer. He was no murderer, but in fact this hard land where his ancestors grew up had bred him hard enough to do whatever was necessary. He'd kill if he had to, if he got or could make the opportunity, if the alternative was submitting to his own destruction. Caught momentarily in the pagan brilliance of that grin, I thought I'd sooner be me, locked below decks in a doomed boat with him on my side, than William Mackey at
Flag
's helm with his big gun and his bigger friend. It wasn't rational, but it wasn't that crazy either.

“God only knows,” said Alex.

While he was staring out over the running sea, grasping for the straws of a solution, I turned back to Duncan. He might have been a little better. His pulse had firmed up, and while he was still a good way off there were signs that he was groping his way back towards consciousness. There was some eye movement, the fingers of his hand made slight, uncoordinated gestures beside his face and tiny regular moans were audible in his breathing.

There were almost no conclusions to be drawn from that. Duncan had a serious head injury, and that was all I could say for sure. It might kill him, or cripple him, or he might make a spectacular recovery. It was impossible to know. But I knew how much better his chances would be in hospital.

Quite a while afterwards Alex said, “Corryvreckan.” He was still at the port-side cabin window, bent under the low roof, his chin resting on his forearm on the sill, his nose against the glass. He must have been standing like that for half an hour.

I thought he was rubbing it in, making sure I knew he'd been right. Because on a passage from Lowlandman's Bay to Crinan, even allowing for Mackey's steering, we should never have seen the narrow strait between Jura and Scarba opening up. The land should have appeared continuous, one blue hill blending with the next. If he could see through the strait to the Firth of Lorn beyond, we were already north of Crinan.

But when he turned to look at me, and I saw the light like fear and wine in his eyes, I knew he wasn't telling me what he could see. He was telling me what he was going to do.

All the same, I must have got it wrong because he couldn't be contemplating what I thought he was contemplating.

But he was. And when he saw the doubt in my face he spelled it out for me, leaving no room for misunderstanding. “We're going to take the
Fairy Flag
through the Corryvreckan whirlpool.”

My first reaction was that he'd get us all killed. My second was that he could get us all killed, but not as certainly as doing nothing. Corryvreckan was gambling with our lives. Doing nothing was the meek walk to the abattoir. So it was worth the gamble because we had nothing to lose. What was less clear was what we stood to gain, and how he intended to get
Flag
into Corryvreckan in the first place.

He took the easier question first. “By the time we're in there and they realise what it's like, it's going to be a question of survival. Neither of them's a sailor—if
Flag
's going to come through they'll need us to do it, you and me. They'll be sick, they'll be scared, half the time they won't know which way is up. And if we still can't get the gun off them I'll wreck the
Flag
and make it every man for himself.”

Desperate needs demand desperate measures, all right, and our need was probably quite desperate enough to warrant it. But I thought he'd overlooked something. “If it comes down to every man for himself, what happens to Duncan?”

He hadn't forgotten, he just didn't have an answer. For a moment the fire in his eyes parted and the spectre was there in the smoke, haunting him. “I don't know. I'll do everything I can to get him out and get him ashore, but I can't guarantee it. If
Flag
goes down we may none of us survive; but any way you look at it, Galbraith's going to be the hardest one to save.”

That was honest, and inarguable. In any conceivable circumstances, even sailing straight back to Crinan, Duncan faced longer odds than the rest of us on making it. It was his misfortune but not Alex's fault. Moreover Duncan would not survive if Alex and I died. We had to save ourselves if we were to have any chance of saving him.

I took a long, deep, steadying breath. “All right. So how do we persuade them to sail into Corryvreckan?”

“We lie a lot,” said Alex.

The one advantage we had was that neither of the ungodly was familiar with boats. That much was clear from the pantomime with the anchor-chain: anyone who knew the first thing about sailing would have known there had to be a winch, even if he had to ask where it was and how it worked. They had managed the speedboat by pretending it was a sports car on a badly drained section of the M8, and so far they were managing
Flag
by confining their attentions to the wheel and the throttles. When they needed something more sophisticated than slow down a bit and turn left, they'd be in trouble.

And if they knew so little about boats there was every chance they knew no more about navigation. A chart is a simple enough thing to read and understand, but relating its flat projection to the vast three-dimensionality of shoreline and sea takes practice. Even seamen make mistakes sometimes, which is why ships go aground. Nearly always the sand-bar is charted but the navigator thought he was approaching some other river.

We discussed—sotto voce, as all our conversations had been—which of us should open the bidding. There were arguments on both sides, but we both inclined to the feeling—with no enthusiasm on my part—that they might be more ready to believe me than Alex. He was the absolute and overt enemy; there was at least a faint whiff of neutrality still attending me. Or so we hoped.

I took a deep breath and rapped, firmly but not aggressively, on the cabin door. The wheel was just to the port side of it: whoever was steering had to be able to hear me, and with luck the other one would too. “I suppose you know you're heading straight for a whirlpool?”

For so long that I thought they weren't going to bite, nothing happened. Then the door opened, framing Mackey and the gun he held before him as a pilgrim might brandish his fragment of the One True Cross. “What?”

He wouldn't come inside to the chart-table so I took the chart up to him. “Can you read one of these things?”

“Sure,” he said off-handedly, confirming our hope that he thought compass roses came in dozens, with long stems.

“Then why the hell are you taking us into Corryvreckan?” It was the note of sheer panic in my voice that sold it. Convincing fear is the trade-mark of the consummate actor, or of course the genuinely afraid. This bit I didn't have to act. “It's a death-trap. There are whirlpools in there that can swallow boats twice the size of this one. There's a tidal overfall like Niagara. The West Coast of Scotland
Pilot
reckons it's never a safe bet, in any boat, at any state of the wind or tide.” I was paraphrasing here but I hadn't actually got to the lying bit yet.

I had him worried. He leaned over the port gunwale, anxiously scanning the chain of islands running away to the north. Mackey's problem was, from where we were they didn't look like islands. The clear water between them would only open up as we got closer, and we were still too far south. Yet the chart plainly showed a series of seaways from the Sound of Jura into the Firth of Lorn. Mackey's brows gathered in puckers like a curtain-heading as he tried to resolve the rising and falling land into its separate components.

“Look,” I said. “Things have got a bit out of hand here. Maybe it's not all your fault. All I want now is to get my friend to hospital. If I pilot you through to the Firth, will you land us somewhere I can call for help? Take the boat, get out of the area before anyone thinks to look for you. What have you to lose?”

In fact they had everything to lose by leaving any of the three of us alive, and I knew it and knew they knew it. I wasn't hoping to persuade them otherwise, only of the wisdom of accepting my pilotage. It didn't matter that once in the Firth all bets would be off and our lives worth nothing. All our plan required was for them to think I trusted them, because if they didn't they'd wonder what I was up to and maybe guess. But if they thought they were duping me, they'd accept my offer and hand me the helm, smug in the belief that once they were safe they could revert to Plan A, which was sinking
Flag
and using the little red speedboat to get away.

Unable to make sense of the coastline he was watching, Mackey turned then and tried his luck with my face. I tried to give nothing away. It didn't matter if I looked scared and resentful, or even relieved: that was to be expected. I supposed calculating was the expression most likely to ring his alarm bells, and concentrated on the sort of open countenance much prized in historical novels but now likely to get you locked up in a pale green cell.

Finally, and without consultation although Barry was following the exchange avidly from the wheel, he made his mind up. Negligently, as if it was of no import, he said, “Aye, all right. You take us through and we'll set you off on the far side. Where is this whirlpool then?”

Now the lying began in earnest. I moved over to the gunwale beside him and pointed at an indentation in the shore half ringed with trees. “Looks like nothing from here, does it? But once you turn the corner you're into a kind of mayhem, with water coming at you from all angles and your keel trying to climb into your top bunk. It's the narrowness that does it—see?” I pointed it out on the chart. “Two practically separate seas coming together through that narrow strait. It's a ships'graveyard.”

Actually once you turned that corner you were safe in Kinuachdrach Harbour, but I didn't think he'd suss that and he didn't. “So where do we go instead?”

“The Sound of Luing.” I showed him on the chart, then pointed off the bow. “Look, that's it you can see opening up now. See how much wider it is?”

And so it was. As we continued north, the island of Scarba, which I'd told Mackey was Luing, began to separate itself from the northern tip of Jura, which I'd told him was Scarba, and we began to see through to the Firth of Lorn. We were far enough away that we couldn't hear the thunder and rumble of it yet, and the evening sunshine was kind. It looked positively inviting. It looked the obvious way to go.

Death-traps don't get to be death-traps by looking dangerous. The real killers are the ones that look OK until you've gone too far to turn back.

“Mind you,” I said, to allay any suspicions before they had the chance to form, “this route is rough enough. They all are. There'll be some broken water, a bit of disturbance. But it's navigable, as long as you know how.”

“And you do?”

“I know the Sound of Luing from Corryvreckan,” I replied acerbically.

I took the helm. I made a show of placing the chart where I could see it, to emphasise the value of proper skill and facilities. I wanted them to feel safer with me steering. The fact that I was steering them into the mouth of hell would hopefully not occur to them until it was too late to do anything about it.

I also pushed the throttles up a couple of notches. If we were going to wreck, the more daylight we had left the better. If Duncan survived the trip, the sooner we could get him ashore the better. Also, the longer this went on the more likely it was that I'd lose my nerve.

I made a big show, too, of altering course, though there was really no need—in so far as
Flag
had been on any course at all, it was a general northing and not within several points of Kinuachdrach. Still I took her round in a broad swing and settled her head on the real, genuine, one-and-only boat-eating Corryvreckan, and forced a smile. “That's better.”

When we'd all settled down again and Mackey had stopped following my every move with both eyes and the muzzle of his gun, I inquired casually, “Which one of you'll take soundings for me as we come through?”

I got Mackey's eyes then, and his friend's as well. “What?”

“It's not difficult. It just means one of you leaning over the bow and calling to me how much water we have under the keel. We draw about three feet. Allowing for waves, we need a minimum of six, which'll look like four due to refraction. It's a bit tricky at first but you'll soon get the hang of it.”

From the look he shot me, William considered I was the trickiest thing he had to deal with. “Is that necessary?”

I elevated both eyebrows. “It's sure as hell advisable. It would be one thing if we had a full tide over the rocks, but we'll be going through at half ebb. If we hit bottom we'll be stuck there till midnight.
Flag
's long and she's deep: I can't judge from back here how much water there is under her bow.”