The following evening, she came out of the big supermarket half a mile from where she lived and within a few minutes wished she had brought the car instead of deciding to walk.
The first problem was two heavy bags of groceries. She had not planned on buying so much but as she went up and down the aisles she remembered there was such a lot she did not have in the house.
Then there was the weather. She turned into the Lisburn Road, heading for home. Behind her, out in the country, was the last of the day’s sunlight but ahead, towards the city, the sky was glowering, almost black. A rainstorm was not far off.
On top of all that, she had the feeling she was being watched.
On the way to the supermarket, a car had passed, a black Mercedes. She thought for a second that it had slowed down but when she had glanced its way, it had speeded up and driven on before she had glimpsed the driver or thought of getting its number.
She looked up and down the road but she did not see it now.
Yet she still felt as if there were eyes on her. It was a sensation on her skin, like electricity, and she could not shake it.
She wished she had been able to reach Florence Gilmour.
She had tried her this morning only to be told that she was on leave. Then she had rung the policewoman’s mobile number and got a recorded voice that told her the thing was switched off.
She had not wanted to talk to anyone else. Maybe that was a mistake.
She walked quickly, feeling unprotected, weighed down with the shopping. Carrying the bags made her feel as if her hands were tied. People hurried past, anxious to get indoors before the storm arrived, paying no attention to a woman alone.
Thunder rumbled. A collision in the sky. The first raindrops hit the dry pavement and spread like ink on a blotter.
She wondered if she should stand in somewhere, maybe nip into one of the coffee shops or a pub and wait for it to blow over, but this rain could last for hours. Home was just a couple of streets away.
There were more drops. The blots were joining, forming bigger shapes. And suddenly it was a deluge.
She had no coat, just a cotton jacket over a t-shirt and jeans. She began to hurry faster. She half ran, her trainers slapping the wet street, the shopping bags giving her an awkward, ungainly rhythm. Within moments she was soaked, her hair plastered to her head and rain dripping from her nose and chin. It formed a film on the lenses of her glasses and made it impossible to see properly.
But she consoled herself with the fact that she was nearly there. Only two streets to go. She would be home in a minute, out of these things, warm and dry.
Cars swished past and she had to dodge and weave as waves of water arced on to the footpath.
Ahead of her a car pulled up.
She could see its brake lights, a distorted red glow through her wet glasses. She couldn’t be certain but it looked like a black Mercedes. And it had stopped at the end of her street.
Someone got out. A man. She could not see him clearly, just that he was in a dark coat with a hood pulled up. He began to walk quickly towards her.
She was at a corner. She made a decision and turned down it suddenly then hurried along, away from him. After a few yards she looked back. He was still behind her. This was not her imagination.
She started to walk faster, wishing she did not have the damned shopping. She cut into an alleyway between two streets, looked back again and knew what she would see. He had come into the alley with her.
There was only one thing to do. She dropped the shopping and began to run. The bags fell open. Tins spilled out, a bottle cracked. Oranges, liberated, bounced along the ground and rolled ahead of her.
Out of the alley, she turned left into another street, ran to the bottom of it and headed right. Fear drove her on but now she saw that what she was doing might be a mistake because she was taking herself further away from the main thoroughfare and from her own home.
These streets were empty. There was just the rain and the thunder and a sky that was biblically overcast.
He was still behind her, gaining all the time, and she was beginning to tire.
She heard his voice call something. But she did not stop.
She ran past a car body shop that was closed and shuttered, then a terrace of little houses with lace curtains. There were lights in a front room, a geranium in the window, an elderly woman looking out. She thought of hammering on the door for help but he would have reached her first.
And then the night erupted.
It did so in an enormous, deep-throated roar that almost stopped her in her tracks.
‘Oooooooooh!’
The sound soared in the air over the rooftops and as she heard it her heart soared with it because she realised what it was. She was in a street that was on the other side of the railway track from Windsor Park football ground.
There was a match. There were people. Thousands of them. Just a short distance away.
The singing began. ‘Stand uupp – for the Ulstermen! Stand uupp – for the Ulstermen!’ Some part of her brain noted that the tune was the old Village People anthem, Go West.
It changed to a chant. ‘Northern Ire-land!’ With it was a rhythmic hand-clapping and she felt it spurring her on.
She reached a set of steep steps that she figured would lead to the railway bridge. Once across, she would be safe, alone no longer.
Whoever was behind, he would not try to attack her in front of a crowd.
She ran. Up and up. Her legs were weakening but she had to keep going. The open sides and top of the bridge were covered with a network of safety netting but it did not keep the rain out. It lashed at her as she ran across, her feet pounding the wooden floor.
At the end of the bridge was a wall decorated with a confusion of spray-paint graffiti. She recognised some of it – UVF, LVF, the initials of the old terrorist gangs – and it did not make her feel any safer.
There were steps leading left or right. She chose left. Her foot kicked a beer can and it clattered down the steps in front of her.
‘You sad bastard! You sad bastard!’
The roar of the crowd enveloped her and there before her was the ground.
Towering above the pitch, floodlight pylons trained their steady glare as she tried to work out where she was. She was at the side. Fifty yards away, across a tarmac no-man’s land, was the west stand, grey brick walls that were as high and solid as those of a prison. Water streamed down them.
And then she saw something else. Just in front of where she stood there was high metal fencing, topped with razor wire, and iron gates that were shut. There was not a soul in sight.
Her heart sank. Here, in this open space, she was as vulnerable as she had been in the woods. There was no one to see her, no one to hear, no one to help. They were all inside those forbidding walls, hordes of them under the shelter of the grandstands, watching two football teams battling in the rain.
She reached the bottom of the steps, exhausted and beaten. Fear held her as she turned to face her pursuer.
Someone scored.
The cheer was instant, deafening. There were horns and sirens. Heavy feet stamping on the floor of the stands. He stepped towards her.
The hood fell back from his head and her heart shuddered when she saw who it was. ‘Meg.’
She saw her name on his lips but with the noise of the crowd she could not hear it.
He took another step forward and as he did, someone appeared on the steps behind him.
She gasped and stepped back.
He turned as Dan Cochrane leaped at him.
The two of them hit the tarmac hard but Cochrane got up quickly and pulled the other man to his feet. He held him by the lapels of his coat and punched him hard in the stomach. The man doubled up with a grunt and Cochrane swung his right fist back to hit him in the face.
‘Don’t!’ Meg shouted. ‘Don’t hit him again! It’s all right. I know him.’
She pushed Cochrane out of the way as Noel Kennedy got up, gasping for breath and staggering. He reached forward and leaned on the wall before lowering himself down on to a step. He put his hand behind his neck and when he took it away again, there was blood.
He coughed hard and painfully. ‘Jesus, I’m bleeding.’ He looked up at Cochrane. ‘That crazy bastard might have killed me.’
Cochrane stepped towards him but Meg waved him back. She bent over Kennedy and looked at the injury. He had hit his head and there was a cut but the blood was mixed with the rain and she figured that it looked worse than it was.
‘Let me see,’ she said. ‘Do you know who you are?’
He nodded but did not say.
‘Who? Who are you?’ she insisted.
‘Noel. Noel Kennedy.’
‘Who’s Noel Kennedy?’ Cochrane asked.
‘You keep out of this for a minute?’ Meg said without turning round. ‘And who am I?’
‘Meg.’ Kennedy said. ‘You’re Meg.’
The response satisfied her. She crouched in front of him and put her hand under his chin, lifting his face to her. Then she pulled back one of his eyelids gently. She did not have a light to shine to see how the pupils would respond but they seemed normal. There was no bruising around the eyes that might indicate a fracture at the base of the skull. That was good. She checked next for bruising behind the ear that might mean a leakage of blood – ‘Battle’s sign’, as it was known. She found nothing, although she knew something like that might take longer to develop.
‘Have you got a handkerchief?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’ He fumbled in his pocket and gave it to her. It was white, a perfectly folded square, unused.
‘Hold that behind your head,’ she said. ‘As far as I can see, you’ll have a nasty bump and a cut but nothing more serious.’
She straightened up and stood back, then looked at each of the men in turn. ‘What the hell were you doing? Have you been following me around? Watching me?’
The questions were for both of them but Kennedy had one of his own. He stared at Cochrane. ‘Who the hell is he?’
Cochrane turned towards Meg. ‘I was driving around, looking for somewhere to park, when I saw you running down the street with this guy coming behind you. By the time I got rid of the van, you’d disappeared. Then I saw the railway bridge and tried it. It was the only place you could have gone. He looked as if he was going to attack you. I had to do something.’
‘But what are you doing here?’ Meg asked.
‘I was in Belfast collecting an order. Yours was part of it. I’d had something to eat in town and I decided to come by and drop the stuff off if you were home. It’s lucky I did.’
She looked at him, wondering. It seemed a fortunate coincidence. For a stand-in shopkeeper he was being very attentive and she felt certain there was more to this than customer relations. But she was glad of his presence, whatever the reason.
She looked at Kennedy. ‘This is Dan. He’s a friend,’ she found herself saying. ‘Which you are not. Why were you chasing me?’
‘Meg, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I had to talk to you after the last time but I didn’t know what to say. I rang you a couple of times but I just froze. I couldn’t speak.’
‘You rang me?’ She glared. ‘Those phone calls? That was you?’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. It was the wrong thing to do but I couldn’t stop myself. I had to hear your voice.’
‘And that was you I saw in my garden last night, too, I suppose.
And the woods, out where the accident happened – were you there, by any chance? Did you follow me there, too?’
He looked confused. ‘I don’t know what you mean. I wasn’t in your garden. Why would I do that? I haven’t seen you since you came to my office and I haven’t been anywhere near you until tonight. After I made that call last night, I decided I had to come and talk to you, to explain how I felt. I love you, Meg. I’ve never stopped.’
‘Oh don’t give me that.’ She turned her face from him, not wanting to hear.
Behind the walls of the ground there was a cheer, then a groan and howls of protest.
‘I drove here and saw you leaving your house,’ Kennedy said. ‘I followed you to the supermarket and then decided to wait for you to come back. I drove around a bit, watching you – God it sounds terrible but I didn’t know what I was going to say or do – and men it rained and I stopped for you and you saw me and started to run and I . . .’ He looked at Cochrane staring at him through the rain. He was wearing a waterproof jacket that was wet and glistening. His fists were clenched by his side and in the shadows cast by the floodlights there were dark hollows in his cheeks.
Meg looked at Kennedy and knew she should report this. But he looked pathetic sitting there, a beaten man in every way, so instead she told him, ‘Why don’t you get the hell out of here and leave me alone. And if I get any more funny phone calls or see you anywhere near my house, I’m calling the police.’
He picked himself up gingerly. ‘Meg, I’m sorry. Can’t we talk about this?’
‘Just get out of here in case I change my mind.’
He looked at her for a second and she was not sure whether it was rain on his face or tears, then he stood and hurried back up the steps. At the top he turned the corner and was gone.
‘You’re soaked,’ Cochrane said. ‘You’ll get pneumonia.’
She smiled at him. ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘for what you did. I don’t think he was going to hurt me but thank you anyway.’
‘Do you . . .’ He hesitated. ‘Do you want to tell me about him?’ Behind them in the stadium, voices were baying for blood. She looked towards where the other drama of the night was being played out.
‘He’s a long story,’ she said, ‘that’s what he is.’
When they got back to the other side of the railway bridge, Kennedy had vanished without trace.
Cochrane’s van was on a double yellow line at a corner, untroubled by the likelihood of a parking ticket in such weather. They got in and he drove back towards Truesdale Street, retracing Meg’s steps.
First they found where she had dumped her shopping, then salvaged what they could of it. The tins and bottles she had bought were fine, an exception being a jar of beetroot which had smashed and stained the wet ground purple. They even managed to locate some of the runaway oranges. What was beyond redemption, they left in someone’s wheelie bin.
When they got to the house, he carried a cardboard box from the back of the van. ‘Your order,’ he explained.
She found him a towel for his hair and he hung his jacket on a peg behind the kitchen door. The rain dripped from it on to the tiled floor and when he had finished with the towel, he put it down to soak up the drops.
She looked at him. He was in a baggy sweater, jeans and old trainers which were wringing. His hair was dishevelled and all of a sudden she wanted to reach out and tidy it into shape with her fingers.
It was cold in the room. ‘I think I’ll turn the heat on,’ she told him. ‘Why don’t you take your shoes off and stick them on top of a radiator. It won’t take long warming up.’
‘That would be good,’ he said, and sat to undo the laces.
‘We could probably do with a drink but I’m afraid I don’t have anything alcoholic.’
‘There’s coffee,’ he said. ‘I know that.’ They had rescued a jar of decaffeinated.
‘Then you could make us some while I go and change. I’ll only be a moment.’
She showed him where the cups were kept, then ran upstairs, got another towel from the bathroom and peeled off her sodden things. Even her underwear was wet.
She dried herself vigorously and felt her skin glowing as she padded around the bedroom, getting fresh clothes. She could hear him moving around in the kitchen below, opening cupboards. She shivered and it was not from the cold but from a kind of excitement that came with the realisation that he was here, in her house, and she was naked, just a short distance from him.
She dressed in a shirt and a warm jumper and pulled on a pair of sweatpants. She could smell the coffee as she ran back downstairs in bare feet.
‘Milk?’ He had got some from the fridge.
‘Thanks. No sugar.’
They sat at the kitchen table. He sipped his coffee silently. She knew he wanted to ask her more but he did not do so.
‘I think I owe you some sort of an explanation,’ she said at last.
‘I said it was a long story. It is.’
Without making a conscious decision to do it, she told him everything: the accident, the murder, her coma, the amnesia, her discovery of the affair with Kennedy. Everything.
It felt like a kind of release, laying it all out like that, her life and what had happened to it. He listened silently. He was the first person to whom she had had to explain who she was and she found it peculiar that he did not know already. She had assumed everyone knew but perhaps she was not the big sideshow attraction she thought she was. People had their own problems, their own lives to lead. Headlines came and went. Other nine-day wonders had replaced her by now.
She was curious, though. ‘You haven’t heard about the case?’
‘I’m not sure. Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t read papers much or watch TV a lot.’ He finished his coffee.
Meg considered something. ‘You know, this business tonight, maybe I really should report it.’ She looked at him for an opinion.
He shrugged. ‘It’s up to you but if you ask me I don’t think much will come of it if you do. No crime has been committed as such, has it, and you don’t think he was going to harm you. You said that yourself. He’s had a pretty bad night, I’d say. He’ll go off and lick his wounds and I doubt if you’ll be hearing from him again.’ He put his hand to his chest. ‘But that’s just my opinion.’ He smiled. ‘Who knows – what if you report it and the police go to see him and he has me done for assault?’
She thought. ‘Maybe you’re right.’
‘But will you talk about this to anyone else?’
She shook her head. ‘My friend Elizabeth, that’s all. She knows about him. She was the woman with me in your shop that day.’ She looked at him to see if he remembered and he nodded. ‘But that’s it. I certainly won’t mention it to my parents. That would mean having to tell them about me and him. They’d be upset about that. An affair with a married man. They’ve had enough anxiety.’ She smiled at him. ‘So here I am pouring my heart out to a complete stranger.’
He looked at her from under shy brows. ‘You don’t believe that.’
‘What?’
‘You don’t feel that I’m a stranger.’
‘No,’ she said and met his eyes. ‘No, I don’t suppose I do.’ And she knew then that he had turned up tonight simply because he had wanted to see her.
In the silent seconds that followed it seemed that something almost tangible passed between them. Then he pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘I’d better go,’ he said quietly.
She knew it would not be the last she would see of him. Without speaking a word, they had agreed that.
He tested his shoes. ‘They’re still damp but they’ll do.’ When he had put them on, he said, ‘You’ll be all right?’
She nodded. ‘I’ll be fine.’
He got his coat. ‘I’ll call you. To make sure.’
‘That would be nice.’
She opened the front door. It was still raining heavily. The water ran in rivulets along the slope of the street and it poured down the drainpipes at the side of the house, gurgling into the gratings.
‘You’ve got a bit of a journey,’ she said.
‘I’ll manage. I’m used to it.’
She held out a hand to him. She did not know what else to do.
‘Thank you. For being there.’
He took her hand and held it for a long moment. It was the first time they had touched. His grasp was strong and warm and comforting.
‘I don’t know anything about you,’ she said.
‘That’s for another day,’ he said. ‘I’ll call.’
And then he was off, running, splashing down the street towards the van, his coat pulled up over his head.
She was in the shower the next morning when the phone rang.
She wrapped herself in a towel and ran to it, thinking it might be him. It was a man’s voice but not one she knew. He was an American.
‘Am I speaking to Dr Meg Winter?’
‘Yes?’
As she heard the word Doctor, she remembered with sudden satisfaction how instinctively she had reacted last night to Kennedy’s injury. But in a flash, too, she saw Cochrane hitting him, a punishment as much as an act of protection, and she wondered for an instant how badly he would have hurt him if she had not stopped it.
‘This is Vectra Pharmaceuticals,’ the man said. ‘I’ve been asked to give you a call. You were looking for an address.’