Hollow-eyed, Peter Quinn stood at ten thirty the following morning beside one of the luggage carousels at Belfast International Airport.
He had just got off a shuttle from London but the labels and stickers on the two big, bulging suitcases that he saw coming along the conveyor belt towards him showed that he had travelled from the other side of the world.
He grabbed the cases with strong hands and hauled them with ease onto a trolley. Then he looked around for a telephone and dialled Harry Glover at the bank.
‘Harry, it’s Peter Quinn.’
‘Peter – where are you?’
‘I’m at the airport. About to make some taxi driver’s day by getting him to take me to Ardglass.’
‘It’s not so bad. You’ll be there in about an hour.’
‘It’s not the journey, it’s the cost and I don’t think they take Japanese yen. Listen, is there any chance you could meet me when I get there?’
‘Of course. I think I can get away for half an hour. And I need to talk to you anyway about your friend Cochrane. There’s some news.’
‘He’s turned up?’
‘Just the opposite. I wasn’t here yesterday – I spent the day at another branch – but I’ve now discovered he’s withdrawn three thousand pounds from the account and that he’s changed a lot of it into US dollars.’
‘Dollars? Jesus Christ, what’s he playing at?’ Quinn said. ‘Look, I’ll go and get a cab. I’ll see you at the pottery in about an hour.’
The taxi rank was in a lay-by beside the exit to the terminal building and he found a driver keen enough to take him.
‘But go the quickest way,’ he said. ‘I’m in a bit of a hurry.’ They avoided Belfast and took a route that went down into Lisburn, across to Ballynahinch and then towards Downpatrick. Quinn stared out at countryside that was a colourless wash behind a mist of drizzle.
The day he received Harry Glover’s unexpected e-mail in Kyoto, he had tried to call Cochrane but there had been no reply, just the answering machine with his own voice on it, which had sounded weird. He had left a message, asking Cochrane if everything was all right, although he didn’t say exactly why he was calling. Twenty-four hours later he had phoned again. This time Cochrane was there, sounding fine, assuring him that there were no problems and when Quinn told him about Harry Glover‘s e-mail he said there must have been some mistake. He sometimes had to pop out for things and close up for a little while, that was all.
But Quinn had called several times since then, at times when the shop should definitely have been open, and had received no reply at all, not even the machine. So he had e-mailed Harry Glover and told him he was coming home a little sooner than planned.
And now this. Money being taken out of the account and turned into a bundle of US dollars.
When the taxi got to Ardglass it was raining properly. Gulls circling above a trawler making its way into harbour screamed like fans round a cornered pop star. He got out of the taxi, breathing in the familiar smells of fish and diesel oil that told him he was home, and hurried through the wet to the pottery.
The van was outside, which raised his hopes, but not for long. The place was obviously shut and Cochrane’s own little car was not there.
He unlocked the door and the driver helped him carry his cases in. The fare was forty pounds and he did not have enough cash but he was relieved when he found twenty pounds in the till. Only there was not much else in it, he noticed.
‘Not enough for a tip, I’m afraid,’ he said. The driver muttered his disappointment and left.
When the cab had gone, Quinn put the lights on and looked around.
‘Dan?’ he called, although he knew there was no point.
The place was dusty and smelled damp. There was a pile of letters behind the counter and when he picked them up he saw that they were bills mostly, many of them unopened.
‘God damn,’ he said to himself, going through them. Some were final demands. There was even an overdue VAT bill. Had none of these been paid?
He called out again. ‘Dan? Are you here?’ But it was more in anger than in hope.
He headed upstairs to the flat and found Cochrane’s room in a state, clothes scattered everywhere, drawers pulled open, as if the place had been ransacked.
He began to look for anything that might make sense of it all. What the hell had been going on here? He stood in the centre of the room and gazed around.
A box file was sitting on a chair.
It was the sort kept downstairs for invoices and receipts but what was it doing here in the middle of this mess?
He pulled the covers up on the bed, sat on the edge and opened the file. As he started to go through its contents he felt first a growing unease and then a sense of dread. Slowly and carefully, he took everything out and spread it on the bed.
‘Jesus,’ he whispered, ‘what the hell’s he up to?’
There were newspaper clippings and copies of documents relating to Seasons Construction and Malone Group PLC. Then there were cuttings about the hotel fire and Cochrane’s jail sentence. There was a magazine profile of Sam Winter, copies of annual company reports.
‘God, I thought he had let all this go,’ he said.
And then he saw what else was there.
The headlines hit him first.
He heard a car door slam, then Harry Glover’s voice. ‘Peter?’
‘I’m up here,’ he called without looking away from what he was reading. He could not take his eyes off any of it. There was just about everything that had ever been written about Meg Winter, the daughter of the man Cochrane blamed for the destruction of the farm and the death of his mother.
Christ, it was all still there in his mind.
He found the photographs last, at the bottom. They were all pictures of the same young woman, slim with short hair and glasses, taken at different times and in different locations. All apparently without her knowledge.
She was in a blue suit coming out of a building and getting into a car, she was standing in front of what looked like an old farmhouse, she was walking along a street in the rain carrying shopping, she was in a wood somewhere, she was at the front door of a small terraced house.
Glover came into the room. ‘Christ, what’s all this?’
‘I’m afraid to think,’ Quinn said. He stood and started searching the room. Drawers did not yield anything and so he tried the wardrobe. At the bottom he found a camera bag. Inside it there was a Canon SLR and a clutch of lenses, several of them for long shots.
He pushed past Glover and lifted the phone beside the bed.
‘What are you doing?’ Glover said.
‘Calling the police.’
Her body clock was confused so it woke her at four a.m. She got up for a glass of water and put the TV on for a while, then she dropped off again at seven and slept like a log until she woke with a start at nine, blinking and dry-mouthed, not knowing where the hell she was.
And then she remembered.
She had to let them know she was here. She dug the Everetts’ letters out of her bag, then dialled their number. But there was no one home, just the answering machine. She had their new address, a place on Elmwood, which Larry Everett had told her was out on Stevens Avenue, but she had no idea where that was and she did not want to just turn up at the door without a bit of notice. They had agreed when last they spoke that she should have the morning to herself to recover from the flight and get her bearings and that she would see them in the afternoon.
She left a message on the machine, giving them her room number and saying that she had arrived safely.
It would be about two p.m. in Ireland so she tried Cochrane but he was not there, which she thought was odd. The machine wasn’t even switched on. She let the phone ring for several minutes before she gave up and went to the shower.
While she dressed she turned on the TV again. Channel WGME13 had the latest on the ice storm; more low temperatures and freezing rain on the way. They were giving details of events cancelled this weekend. There would be no St Andrews Society Burns supper, no youth basketball games, no Saturday workshops at the Portland School of Ballet. The list went on.
By ten, no one had called and she felt restless sitting around waiting for the phone to ring, so she decided to go out for breakfast and see the city.
She wrapped up warmly: hat, gloves, scarf and coat. She had brought a small shoulder-bag that she slung securely across her body. In it were essentials like her money and her credit card and she had the two letters from the Everetts in there, too. There was no way she would have left them at home. They were almost the first thing she had packed away. She felt as if they were a kind of accreditation for her.
She did not take the car but headed into the morning on foot. The day was dazzling and she was thankful that her glasses were the sort that darkened when brightness hit them.
She had never been in a place so frozen. Great mounds of snow lay piled up all along the edges of the streets and scrawny, leafless trees coated with ice sparkled as if they were made of sugar. People struggled slowly by, trying to walk on pavements that were like layers of slippery rock. She followed their example by staying close to the sides of buildings, grateful when she came to a patch that had been dug away by a shop owner, and reluctant to go beyond it.
Using her street map, she headed for the district known as the old port. Portland, she concluded quite quickly, was not a very big city; it was about the size of Derry back home. Nor was that the only resemblance to Northern Ireland, she realised. Maine had a Bangor and a Belfast too.
Soon she found herself on a street of brightly painted shop fronts and colourful awnings. There were bookshops and jewellery stores and shops selling arts and crafts that reminded her a bit of the pottery.
Java Joe’s was a coffee shop where everyone looked like a student. They wore outsize sweaters and combat pants with voluminous side pockets and they all seemed to know each other with the result that she felt like an intruder. Bare wooden floors absorbed the wetness from booted feet and the high walls were papered with posters. Old Beatles songs were being played and a thin young man with a black t-shirt and a goatee beard stood behind the counter, singing along.
‘Coffee?’ Meg said, interrupting his version of Things We Said Today.
‘Help yourself.’ He pointed to a platoon of flasks lined up on a shelf, all of them labelled with an individual blend. She went for an organic Colombian.
‘That everything?’ he said.
She spotted bagels on a plate under a transparent cover. ‘I’ll take one of those.’
‘Cinnamon and raisin?’
‘That’ll be fine.’
‘You want me to heat it up for you?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘You want butter or cream cheese with that?’
All these damn decisions. ‘I’ll have cream cheese,’ she said and paid him.
‘You go right ahead,’ he said. ‘I’ll bring this over to you when it’s ready.’
She took her coffee to a table where someone had left a copy of the Boston Globe. There was a picture of the President on the front page and headlines about whatever trouble he had got himself mixed up in.
The waiter brought her bagel. ‘There you go. You all set?’
‘Thanks,’ she said.
Used plates and other debris littered the next table and he started to clear it on to a tray.
‘You got power?’ He said it like powah, his Maine accent almost English.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Have you got power? At home. Power?’
‘Oh, I see. No, I don’t live around here. I’m staying in a hotel.’
‘Then you’re OK. What are you – on vacation or something?’
‘Kind of. I’m from Ireland. I’m just here for a few days.’
‘Ireland, huh? Is that so? I’m third generation Irish myself. Name of O’Brien. My family came from County Mayo originally.’ He looked at her as if all this should mean something.
She nodded. ‘O’Brien’s a very Irish name. Lots of O’Briens. Although, to be honest, I don’t think I actually know anyone called O’Brien myself. And come to think of it, I’m not sure I’ve ever been to Mayo either. Maybe when I was a kid.’
His looked showed his amazement. Someone from Ireland had to know the O’Briens from County Mayo.
‘But then Ireland’s a bigger place than you’d think,’ she said. ‘Anyway I’m from the northern part.’
‘You mean like Belfast? Where all the trouble is?’
‘Not any more. Touch wood.’ She tapped the table. She had placed her street map on it and it gave her a thought. ‘Listen, I’m hoping to visit some people who live in Portland.’
‘Oh, you got friends here?’
‘Sort of. They’re the parents of . . . of someone I was connected with. You don’t happen to know a place called Elmwood, do you? I’m told it’s off Stevens Avenue but I can’t find it on this map.’
He looked at it. ‘Stevens Av. That’s way out.’ He waved a hand towards the street. ‘Stevens Av.,’ he said again, thinking, then shook his head. ‘Nope. The only thing I know out that direction is the cemetery.’
She stayed in the coffee shop for half an hour and when she left, she spent some time exploring the streets, finding that she had this part of the city almost to herself.
There was hardly anyone around. A lot of restaurants and shops were closed and it was as if the place were hibernating. Maine was a summer state where the car number plates bore the legend ‘Vacationland’. Winter was something to be endured.
She was back at the hotel at around one and found that her bed had been made up but that the air conditioning had been set too high. The room was chilly. As she went over to adjust the setting, she saw a red light blinking on her phone.
It was her voice mail. She had two messages.
While she had been asleep, a detective from Downpatrick CID and two uniformed officers had arrived at the pottery. The appearance of police cars all of a sudden was causing a stir in Ardglass. People watched from behind their curtains. Along the harbour, even the trawlermen took an interest.
The CID man was Detective Inspector Donal Murray. ‘What do you think?’ Quinn asked when he and Harry Glover had filled him in.
Murray held one of the photographs of Meg Winter in his hand and studied it. ‘Well, there’s no evidence that a crime has been committed here,’ he looked up at the two men, ‘not unless we turn up evidence of embezzlement or theft and that will take a while. But this . . .’ he tapped the picture,’ . . . this causes me a lot of concern. It looks like he’s been stalking this woman. So we’d better find out where she is first.’
He turned to one of the uniformed officers. ‘Parcel all this stuff up and we’ll take it into Downpatrick.’ He looked at Quinn and Glover. ‘I’d like you both to come, too, to get all this down on paper and try to locate your friend Cochrane.’
As the policemen piled the material into the box file, a cutting escaped their grasp and fell to the floor. Murray lifted it. It was about the unsolved murder of Paul Everett four years ago. ‘And I’ll need to talk to whoever’s still working on this case,’ he said.
Things moved quickly after that.
At shortly after two o’clock that afternoon, Detective Sergeant Hugh Nixon and Detective Inspector Florence Gilmour were shown into a waiting room beside the executive offices on the top floor of the Malone Group building in Belfast.
Nixon was sweating under a heavy coat and he was out of breath, even though they had taken the lift. He whistled softly as he looked out of the window on to the bustling city. ‘Some view, eh?’
Gilmour wasn’t interested in it. She paced the room, a folder under her arm.
The door opened and a trim woman in a smart suit came in. She was in her fifties with short hair and cautious eyes. ‘I’m Brenda Brennan, PA to the chief executive. I understand you’re looking for Mr Winter?’
‘That’s right,’ Nixon said. ‘We need to talk to him about his daughter.’
BB’s eyes widened. ‘Has something happened to her?’
‘Not that we know of,’ Gilmour said, ‘but we need to know where she is.’
‘Mr Winter’s in an important board meeting. It’s just started. It’s being chaired by Sir Brian Malone on a video circuit from New York. Perhaps this is something that can wait?’
‘No,’ Gilmour said, ‘no, I don’t think it is.’
BB saw the determined look in her eyes and acknowledged it with a slight smile. ‘Then I’d better get him out of there, hadn’t I?’
In thirty seconds she was back with an anxious Sam Winter. ‘What is it?’ he said. ‘What’s wrong? Has something happened to Meg?’
‘Let’s all sit down, shall we?’ Gilmour said. ‘Nothing’s happened to your daughter that we’re aware of but we need to know where she is.’
‘She’s in America,’ Winter said, looking at them as if he expected them to be aware of that. ‘She went yesterday. Look, what’s this all about?’
Gilmour and Nixon tried not to look at each other. Now they knew why Cochrane had needed dollars.
‘Why is she in America?’ Gilmour asked.
Winter told them.
‘Damn it,’ Nixon said, ‘she should have told us about this development.’
Gilmour fired a quick look at him and he sat back. ‘Let’s leave that for the moment,’ she said. ‘We’d better explain to Mr Winter what’s been going on.’
As she did, she took from her folder some of the photographs which had been found in the flat.
‘Oh my God,’ Winter said when he looked at them.
‘What time did Meg go yesterday?’ Gilmour wondered. ‘What were her movements?’ He told her.
‘Do you know where she’s staying?’
‘At a Holiday Inn – “the Holiday Inn By The Bay”, I think it’s called. She left me the number.’
‘Do you have it?’
He shook his head. ‘Not here. It’s at home.’
BB had stayed at the back of the room, listening in silence. Now she came forward and picked up the phone. ‘I’ll get it from inquiries for you. It would be a good idea if her father spoke to her, don’t you think?’
‘Yes,’ Gilmour said. ‘If she’s at that hotel, she should check out of it as soon as possible. Cochrane may know that’s where she’s staying. Tell her to find another hotel and then call you with the number. But, Mr Winter . . .’ she sat forward towards him and tried a smile, ‘. . . all this is just a precaution. We may be jumping to entirely the wrong conclusion here, you understand. Cochrane may not be anywhere near her at all. But it’s best to be on the safe side.’
He nodded but she saw that she had not convinced him.
BB finished the call and handed her a yellow sticky with the hotel number on it.
‘Let’s ring her now,’ Gilmour said.
‘Do you have another phone?’ Nixon asked.
‘Of course,’ BB said. ‘My office next door.’
Sam Winter took the number and started punching it in. While he did, Nixon guided Gilmour to one side. ‘Boss, I don’t think we should waste time trying to go through Interpol with this. I’m going to try the Portland police direct, see if they’ll help, and get them to keep a look out for these two. I’ll warn them that Cochrane might try to harm the girl. I can get our people to fax them his record as well. What do you think?’
‘Go ahead,’ she agreed.
He left the room with BB. Gilmour waited for Winter to get through to the hotel.
‘Christ,’ he said eventually, ‘she’s not there. There’s just a voice mail.’
‘But she’s checked in OK?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then leave a message on her phone. Get her to call you.’
When he had done so, he said, ‘My meeting. I’d better tell Sir Brian what’s going on.’
He strode down the corridor towards the boardroom, opening the door abruptly and startling the others sitting around the long table. One of them had been explaining something about exponential growth and profit margins but Winter’s sudden entrance interrupted him.
At the end of the table there was a wide screen that showed Sir Brian Malone behind a desk, writing on a pad. The video link made his movements jerky, like individual frames in a film. On the top left-hand corner of the screen there was a shot of the table and the people round it, which was what Malone would see in New York when he looked at his own monitor. He raised his glance and as he spoke his voice from the speakers had an eerie echo as it travelled across space and time.
‘You’ve stopped talking. Have you become bored with what you were saying? Because I certainly was.’
‘Sir Brian,’ Winter butted in from the back of the room.
‘Who’s that?’ Malone said. ‘I can’t see you.’
Winter took his seat and his image appeared on the screen with the others. ‘It’s Sam Winter,’ he said. ‘Look, I’m sorry about this but I’m going to have to ask you to adjourn this meeting for a few minutes. There’s something I need to say to you privately.’
‘Can’t you speak in front of your fellow board members?’
‘No, it’s personal. Something for your ears only.’
‘Then I’d better hear what it is. Give us five minutes, please.’
The rest lifted their papers and filed out, giving Winter dark, suspicious looks, wondering what he was up to, but no one asked him.
When they had gone, Winter told Malone what had happened.
‘That’s dreadful, Sam,’ Malone said. ‘Your lovely daughter. If there’s anything you need, any help at all, a plane, anything, you only have to call me. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes. That’s very reassuring.’
‘Now go and do whatever you have to do and let’s hope everything turns out for the best.’ Winter got up from his seat. ‘And send that other lot back in again.’