The Going Down of the Sun by Jo Bannister Page A

heard raised voices, the scuffle of feet and the shatter of glass, and I was through that damn door before common sense had the chance to intervene and find urgent business for me elsewhere.
    The little room was full of people: DCI Baker and another policeman, Neil Burns, Alex Curragh and now me. There was hardly room for the furniture, and indeed the bed had been shoved under the window, the locker into one comer and the chair turned on its side.
    Alex Curragh was in the other corner, between the bed and the wash-stand, crouched defensively in the angle. He was informally dressed, in pyjama trousers but neither jacket nor slippers, and his right arm was bulky in fresh white plaster. In his left hand he held a broken glass, and he held it by the heel with the jagged points ranged outwards.
    His eyes were wild, white-ringed, the irises dark and hollow. His face was white too, the skin drawn tight over prominent bones, stained blue-black under the eyes with livid spots where the burns were. The bruise on his temple had spread all round his eye. He had his back to the wall, metaphorically as well as literally, and a glass claw to fend off a frontal assault. He looked as if he was fighting for his life.
    There was something so deeply atavistic about the scene, so profoundly disturbing about the palpable fear that Curragh cast out as an aura around him, that I was momentarily rooted, shocked to my soul. It was as if I had strayed into some ancient mystic ritual, a rite of passage or of blood. Then I heard myself ask thinly, “What the hell’s going on here?”
    Tersely, without looking at me, Baker said, “Stay out of this.” He edged along the wall. Curragh’s glass dagger followed him. The points reflected the light from the window, twinkling as his hand trembled.
    Neil Burns spared me a glance. “It could be an IR.”
    â€œTo the anaesthetic?” Idiosyncratic responses to modern anaesthetics, particularly at a dosage adequate to set a broken arm, aren’t very common, but there are always a few patients who react badly or oddly to any drug. I’d seen it before, though not this long after administration.
    â€œOr the antibiotics. I don’t know. But something set him off.”
    â€œThe prospect of having to answer my questions set him off,” growled Baker.
    I asked Neil, “What happened?”
    He shrugged, worried and nonplussed. “I don’t know. Baker wanted to talk to him about the explosion. He seemed all right so I brought them in here. Baker introduced himself and said what he’d come about. I don’t think he said anything out of turn, anything to provoke this. But next thing I knew, Curragh was out of bed and smashing his glass in the basin.”
    â€œI know what provoked it.” Baker’s voice was low, his eyes fixed on the boy’s face. “I said he could answer my questions either here or at the police station.”
    It was a routine enough remark. It shouldn’t have precipitated violence in either an innocent or a guilty man. I looked at Curragh’s white face and scared, haunted eyes and saw panic. His reaction had been more hysterical than violent, not rational enough to have any meaning. If it wasn’t an IR it was something equally random, something he had no control over. Even the posture with the broken glass wasn’t a threatening thing. He’d retreated into the furthest corner he could find, and was using what weapons he could improvise to protect himself.
    Far from threatening, he was reacting as a man under threat—not the intellectual threat posed by a policeman investigating a crime but something older, deeper, closer to the level of instinct and survival. Something—the drugs, the questions, possibly delayed shock from yesterday—had triggered a primitive response in him that, for a few moments, he had no more power to control than a sneeze or a yawn.
    In his eyes bewilderment was creeping