Like a guilty secret, the sprawling modern prison was hidden away deep in a part of County Down that was a mesh of tangled country roads, damp fields and bramble hedges, hills and sudden slopes.
Peter Quinn, red-haired and ginger-bearded, with hard, strong, potter’s hands, dry and cracked from bending the wet, spinning clay to his will, sat across the visiting room table from his old friend.
Bail had been out of the question.
Not that Cochrane had any money, although Quinn would have gone surely if it had been necessary. He had a bit of cash and he had assets, like his pottery along the harbour at Ardglass, but it was all academic anyway.
Especially when it was arson and you had damage of three or four hundred thousand pounds, or so the insurance estimate would claim, and there was an assault on a security guard and maybe somebody could have been burned to death.
Not Guilty was out of the question, too, so tomorrow his old friend would be throwing himself on the mercy of Downpatrick Crown Court where his barrister, the one Quinn had organised through legal aid, would try to persuade the judge to go easy, talking about grief and stress and severe psychological problems.
Quinn looked at Cochrane and thought that there might actually be a lot in that. His friend’s face was grey with a shadow of stubble. The dark eyes seemed deeper-set, more of a mystery than ever.
‘I don’t understand you,’ Quinn said.
‘So you’ve told me. More than once.’
‘It will be a jail sentence. You know that, don’t you. You’ve thrown everything away.’
‘Don’t preach, Peter, for God’s sake.’
‘I just wish I could have stopped you.’
‘No one could have stopped me. I didn’t want to be stopped.’
‘Tomorrow – your barrister, Grogan, he’ll spell it all out. It’ll get very personal. He’ll talk about you as if you were – unbalanced.’
Cochrane shrugged. ‘Maybe I am.’
‘Have you thought what you’ll do when you get out of here?’
‘Leave the country, probably. Emigrate.’
‘With a criminal record? Who would have you?’
‘Cheer me up, Peter, why don’t you?’ Cochrane said.
It was worse than Quinn had predicted.
Cochrane hated Kevin Grogan, the barrister, for it. He hated the instructing solicitor, too. Hated himself for agreeing to let them do this.
Grogan had brought a psychiatrist to see him in prison so that a report could be prepared for the court. The man was a patronising old fool who treated him like an idiot and seemed totally unaware that Cochrane was a psychologist himself. Cochrane had held his tongue and his temper and had not enlightened him, just helped give the answers that he knew the man was looking for.
Now he sat in the dock listening to everything that was intensely private and painful to him being discussed by strangers who did not really care.
The courtroom was high and ancient and smelled like old breath. It was crumbling at the edges where the plasterwork was damp. The woodwork was stained with age more than varnish and in the panelling in front of him, someone had carved their initials – J.P.T. ^^76. It could have been 1876, for all he knew.
It might have been easier if Grogan had been a more effective courtroom performer but he was young and he seemed nervous and deferential in the presence of a judge who ate fresh-faced junior advocates for breakfast. Cochrane’s image of courtrooms was coloured by what he saw on television or in the cinema. Grogan was not an actor in a wig. He was a mumbler, talking down at his papers, and several times an increasingly irritable Mr Justice Cunningham had been forced to ask him to speak up.
It angered and embarrassed Cochrane that the judge had to do that. He wanted to shake Grogan and tell him to get on with it, to get the whole charade finished as quickly as possible, but of course he could not do anything at all except wait it out.
He looked at the palms of his hands. When he had been hauled before a magistrates’ court to be remanded, they had been in bandages like footballs. The wounds had healed well but the skin felt taut, as if it had shrunk in the process. He held his hands in front of him and clenched and unclenched his fingers rapidly several times.
The movement attracted attention. He could feel people’s eyes on him, wondering what he was doing, probably thinking it was some sign of madness. He saw the court officials, the police and the young woman from the Down Recorder. They examined him with open fascination and without the slightest concern as to how he might feel about it.
He had forfeited all rights. He was an exhibit, a specimen, no longer a person with the kind of freedom they had. They could get up from where they sat and walk out of the courtroom if they wanted to, have a cup of coffee, a smoke at the front door. No one would stop them. He could not do any of that.
Only Peter, smiling with weak encouragement from time to time when he caught his eye, showed any feeling at all.
They had been friends since school days. After A-levels they had gone their separate ways, Cochrane to university in Belfast and Quinn to study ceramics at art college in England, but they had remained close.
In the past year or so, they had seen more of each other. Backed by an agency which encouraged local business enterprise, Quinn had been able to buy an old property on the quayside at Ardglass, just along the coast from Cochrane’s family farm. He had converted it into the pottery where he worked and lived – there was a small flat above – and a shop where he sold his own and other potters’ work.
He had helped with the funeral arrangements and he had been with him that night but Cochrane had never once betrayed a hint of what he planned to do.
It was in Quinn’s face now, the look Cochrane had seen before. Disbelief that he could have done this thing.
The facts presented to the court left no room for doubt.
Grogan was coming to the end of his plea, trying to sum up everything he had been saying for the past fifteen minutes.
‘Your honour, the defendant is a victim of a rather tragic past, the cumulative effect of which caught up with him on the night in question, and only a matter of hours after he had attended his mother’s funeral. When he was very young, both his father and his sister were the victims of an IRA bomb blast in which they were unfortunately killed. That loss quite clearly, as you’ve heard from the psychologist’s report, had a deep-seated effect. Mr Cochrane is a man who keeps his feelings very much to himself, he is not a very open or gregarious person by nature, and so bottling up all this stress and grief had damaging consequences for his psychological state.’
He shuffled the notes in front of him to find his place. ‘Mr Cochrane is a talented young man, only twenty eight years old. He achieved a good degree in psychology at Queen’s University, he went on to study for a post-graduate certificate of education, and for the past three years he has been an educational psychologist on the staff of the south-eastern education board. So here you see someone with a bright career ahead but one that has undoubtedly been curtailed by these unfortunate events.’
He had a ballpoint pen which he kept clicking. It sounded like there was a cricket in the courtroom. He looked up towards the judge. ‘Your honour, the root cause of what took place, as I have said, goes back far beyond the events of that night. Here is Mr Cochrane, now an only child, with concern for his mother’s well-being very much at heart. So, as you can imagine, it was a very bitter blow to him when his mother got into financial difficulties and the bank was forced to take away the family farm in order to recover the debts which she owed them. Somehow, Mr Cochrane got it into his head that there was some collusion between the bank and the construction company which built the hotel. You’ve heard from the prosecution that Mr Sam Winter already owned most of the land on which it was subsequently established, having inherited it from his own late mother who lived there for a great many years, and when the Cochrane farm became available be bought that too, since it would increase the size of the property and allow the construction of the golf course.’
Grogan turned to look at his client. ‘By that time, Mr Cochrane had developed an unhealthy obsession with Mr Winter and his business activities and the strain of having to look after his mother and find somewhere for her to live began to tell on him. Then, when his mother became ill with a stroke that eventually led to her unfortunate death, something inside him seemed to snap. It all came to a head that night when he had far too much to drink and resolved to exact some kind of revenge on the person he saw as being responsible for what had happened.’
He put the pen down and leaned his knuckles on the bench in front of him. ‘Your honour, Mr Cochrane feels great remorse for what he has done. He recognises the fact that he was indeed ill at the time – I refer you to the medical report again – and I would ask the court also to accept those findings. His behaviour was irrational and paranoid and brought on purely by grief. This episode has simply added to the chain of tragic circumstances which seem to have bedevilled him all his life. I would ask your honour to accept that this was not the behaviour of a criminal or a habitual offender but a desperate act by a distraught and lonely man who was dreadfully misguided by the consequences of a great loss.’
He drew his gown around him and sat down.
Mr Justice Cunningham had a wizened red face, like an apple which had lain too long in the fruit bowl, and the air of someone coping with some internal physical inconvenience. He tapped a pencil on the woodwork in front of him and muttered to himself as he looked at his notes. ‘Yes . . . I see . . . I see . . . yes, Mr Grogan . . . thank you . . . thank you.’
He coughed, a sharp, dry bark that reverberated round the big room. It caught most people by surprise and they stiffened in their seats. He looked over his glasses and settled his eye on Cochrane, then mumbled something that only the court clerk could hear.
‘Would the accused please stand?’ the clerk said. The prison officer sitting beside Cochrane grasped him by the elbow as if it were a lever. Cochrane got to his feet.
‘This, eh, this is a very distressing matter,’ the judge said. ‘Arson is a very serious offence indeed and in this case, in spite of what Mr Grogan has explained, it is difficult for me to accept any mitigating circumstances at all. We all suffer from stress, we all suffer some kind of loss at some time in our lives, yet we don’t go around trying to burn hotels down, nor would we expect understanding or sensitive treatment from the courts if we did so.’
He looked at his papers for a second and scratched the side of his wig with his pencil. ‘Here we have a man who got drunk on the night of his mother’s funeral and deliberately set out to destroy this property. I can’t accept that this was some sort of spur-of-the-moment aberration, some ill-conceived drunken escapade. It was far more premeditated than that. Indeed, Mr Grogan himself tells us that the construction company which built the hotel had been playing on the accused’s mind for some time.’
He looked towards the barrister who did not attempt to meet his gaze but busied himself brushing something off his knee.
He read from the evidence again. ‘He had wire cutters with him, a can of petrol and bottles with which to make petrol bombs. With this equipment, he starts a major fire in the kitchen, the fire takes hold rapidly and spreads through the ground floor, causing damage estimated at three hundred and twenty seven thousand pounds. Damage, incidentally, which will delay the opening of the hotel for several months. And, then, in trying to make his escape, he attacks a member of the security staff as they try to apprehend him. Quite a night he made of it.’
He gave Cochrane a hard stare. ‘Arson is a vile and cowardly crime. Lives could have been lost as a result of your actions. Nevertheless, I’m mindful of some of the things Mr Grogan has had to say and so I sentence you to a total of twelve months on each charge, the sentences to run concurrently.’
The prison officer put his hand on Cochrane’s arm again. Grogan stood quickly to lodge his intention to appeal but when he asked for bail the judge waved the thought away like a bad smell.
The eyes of the curious were on Cochrane but if they were expecting any sign of emotion they did not get it.
Peter Quinn held his head in his hands and tried to rub away a pain behind his brow.
The judge nodded towards his clerk. ‘I think I’ll adjourn briefly before the next case.’
‘All please rise,’ the clerk said and they all stood while the judge made his exit through the side door beside his bench.
The prison officer led Cochrane towards the door that would take them to the rear of the court building where the prison van was waiting.
Grogan stepped in front of them.
‘Thanks for nothing,’ Cochrane said before he could speak.
‘Just a second. Look, it’s not so bad,’ Grogan said. ‘You’ve already been in custody for a month so with remission on top of that I reckon you’ll be out by the end of the summer. Do you want me to appeal? I will if you like but to be honest he went fairly leniently. An appeal judge might make it worse.’
‘I’ll let you know,’ Cochrane said.
‘Time to go,’ the prison officer told them.