Free The Going Down of the Sun by Jo Bannister Page A

believe it was an accident. Someone else might have made that mistake, she might have made another. But I don’t believe Alison let a gas leak destroy her boat. Yes, I think Curragh killed her.”
    â€œFor fifteen thousand pounds?”
    One grizzled eyebrow climbed higher than the other. “What else?”
    I shuffled uncomfortably under his steady gaze. “I don’t know. It doesn’t seem—” I let the sentence tail off. The feeling I had about it was real enough but difficult to express.
    I paid the price for reticence when McAllister misunderstood. A frostiness appeared in his eyes. “What, enough? You have a fine disdain for the value of other people’s money, wee hen. What do you reckon the going rate for a gigolo is, then?”
    I coloured a little under his scorn. It wasn’t even true; I’ve been sufficiently hard up—twice, both as a young doctor and ten years later as a novice writer—to have a keen appreciation of fiscal values, but I couldn’t blame him for his reaction when I only half understood the thing myself.
    I said, “Well, the police’ll sort out what happened. They’re diving on the wreck now. We’ll have a clearer idea what went wrong and if anyone was to blame when they recover the stove and the gas cylinder, and the gas detector. If anything has been tampered with, young Curragh will have some explaining to do.”
    McAllister looked doubtful. “Will they be able to tell if they’ve been tampered with? There can’t be much left but fragments.”
    â€œYou’d be surprised what forensics can do with a few twisted bits of metal.” It’s amazing how much survives, in one form or another, the most devastating explosion. Think of a mid-air disaster, no survivors, wreckage scattered over miles. You’d think destruction that complete would be irretrievable. But the accident investigators go for long walks with their cardboard boxes, and over a period of days stretching into weeks the pieces they bring back are slotted into the reconstruction taking place in a handy shed, and eventually they can pinpoint not only the cause of the disaster—a bomb, say—but also what sort of bomb it was and even which seat it was under.
    The physical destruction of matter takes immense quantities of energy. Infinitely more matter than is destroyed in an explosion is altered in it—fragmented, twisted, crystalised, charred, burned. But people conversant with those processes can track them back to the moment of cataclysm, and say within narrow tolerances where a thing was and what it was doing immediately prior to becoming a ballistic missile. When the police divers hauled up the remains of the cooker, and forensics finished analysing it, they’d know whether accident was still a plausible explanation.
    McAllister’s driver made another slow sweep in front of the main entrance, and we found ourselves following a grey BMW.
    â€œThere’s Harry now,” I said. He hadn’t seen me: even a detective doesn’t look for his wife in the backs of other men’s limousines. “Listen, you’ll have to let me off now. Tell your driver to drop me at the main door: if he’s still worried about getting a ticket, tell him I’m well in with a policeman.”
    McAllister nodded at his driver and the car rolled to a halt, so smoothly it was hard to know exactly when it had stopped moving. I went for the door handle but the lad in pinstripes beat me to it, held it for me with every appearance of courtesy though I could feel—possibly McAllister could not—an almost electric aura of insolence reaching out to me. I can’t say it bothered me, though I’ve never really liked pinstripes since.
    I saw Harry park the car and come towards me, though he hadn’t spotted me yet. Just before I went to meet him I looked back at McAllister, sunk in his expensive upholstery like the