Read Online The Going Down of the Sun by Jo Bannister - Free Book Online

conclusion to be drawn. It doesn’t take a particularly prurient mind to suppose that they were enjoying a dirty weekend.
    Admittedly, people who knew us well enough to know that Luke and I were not married, but not so well as to know his taste didn’t lean towards women, thought the same about us and were mistaken. But neither of us ended up dead at the bottom of the Fairy Isles lagoon. I could almost regret that it would have been a fitter resting-place for my friend than the one he eventually found.
    Besides, with Alison dead, did it matter? Perhaps, if he had a wife of his own. Yet the lies he had told would not have protected him from the outrage of either Mr. McAllister or a putative Mrs. Curragh. They could only have defended him against the very accusation McAllister had made—that he had left the Skara Sun before the explosion that destroyed her.
    I sighed. “Where do you go from here?”
    Baker shrugged. “What I need is to get Curragh under the full glare of a sixty-watt bulb back at my nick, and pummel him with astute and pertinent questions until he breaks and confesses all. Thanks to Or. Burns that’s going to have to wait There may be another way. If the local constabulary hasn’t already done so, I’ll organise divers. Let’s see what the late Mrs. McAllister and the wreckage of her boat can tell us.”
    There was something else he could do, though it wasn’t my place to suggest it. Fortunately he thought of it for himself. Unfortunately, when he turned his sixty-watt bulb on Frazer McAllister he mentioned that he’d talked to me first.
    Which is how I came to be kidnapped in broad daylight from the public concourse of a major British hospital, en route between the magazine kiosk and the coffee machine.

Chapter Six
    It was now late afternoon, and I was expecting Harry at any time. I’d tried the pub in Tayvallich again and got the message that he’d left. Someone had brought his car down from Ardfern and was returning with the Rubber Lion , while Harry hit the long and winding road for Glasgow. I hoped he’d had the wit to remove our belongings, particularly my clothes, from the boat before handing her over.
    It had been a short holiday but an interesting one.
    So when a rather snazzy young man in a pin-striped suit strolled over and said, “Mrs. Marsh? There’s a man looking for you at reception. I think he went out to the car-park,” I immediately assumed it was Harry and hurried after him, leaving my polystyrene cup and my Yachting World together on my seat. It had been a long day and I was too tired to notice the distinct aroma of rat.
    I couldn’t see Harry’s car from the porch so I moved down into the car-park. I was still scanning the roofs for one that looked familiar when a car that wasn’t Harry’s cruised up beside me, the rear door opened and a hand reached out.
    â€œMrs. Marsh, it was good of you to come.” The gravelly voice was enough; I didn’t need to see what was left of his face to recognize Frazer McAllister.
    As I said, I’ve been around. I know better than to get into cars with strange men. But when I stepped back from the door I sort of bounced off the pin-striped suit which had come up behind me, and the helping hands that came to steady me just sort of guided me into the car as a convenient place to recover my breath. It was slickly done. You couldn’t say that violence was used against me, or intimidation. All the same, I know when I’ve been kidnapped.
    Once I was inside and the door was shut—centralised locking could have been designed by a kidnapper—and the pin-striped suit had slid in cat-like beside the chauffeur, the big dark car moved off. Not at speed, and not very far—through the tinted glass I could see that we were just cruising round the fairways of the car-park. It was reassuring, but not all that much.
    I said with as much asperity as I could