The control room at Portland police headquarters was kept locked from the inside.
No one was exactly sure why; someone said it was a precaution against anyone trying to take it over during a civil disturbance, which no one could quite envisage ever happening, but those who worked in the room liked to keep it secure nevertheless.
Half a dozen officers sat around radio consoles, taking calls from the cruisers which patrolled the city.
One had driven over to Evergreen Cemetery after a nine-one-one for police and paramedics and now he was reporting in. The control room logged it as both a ten-fifty-five, which was a car accident, and a PI, which meant a personal injury, then they passed it up to the Crimes Against Persons Unit on the fourth floor where Detective Scott Gleason took it.
Gleason was in his twenties, a recent recruit to the squad. He frowned as he listened to the control room. He took notes, then he called to his partner, Detective Roy Flynn.
‘Hey, Roy, I think maybe we could take a look at this one. Woman attacked by some guy in the Evergreen Cemetery. He chased her round the damn place in a car until she crashed into a statue. They’ve taken her to the Maine Medical Centre.’
Flynn was grumpy and out of sorts. This was supposed to be a rest day after his stretch of overnights but they had called him in to do a middle shift, four to midnight, since somebody had gone down sick.
He looked at Gleason’s notes, remembering that he had once been fresh and eager just like that, then he hauled himself out of the chair and went to the rack in the corner for his coat. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘but you’re driving.’
By the time they got to the cemetery, other police had arrived and had sealed off the area, including a grave site down one of the other avenues where the caretaker said the attack had taken place. The wrecked car, a Plymouth, lay against a statue of the Virgin Mary. Flynn looked up at her cool, impassive face. She had seen everything but she would not make much of a witness.
The caretaker was standing beside his pick-up truck with a uniformed officer who filled them in. Gleason and Flynn introduced themselves.
‘Mack Perry,’ the little man said. ‘I’m in charge of this place.’
‘Pretty big job,’ Flynn said.
‘Two hundred and thirty-nine acres,’ Perry said for the second time today. ‘You bet it’s a big job.’
‘So why don’t you tell us what you saw?’ Gleason said. He wore a wool-lined leather flying jacket and he stamped his feet in the cold.
‘I just told it all to this guy.’ Perry jerked a thumb in the direction of the uniformed officer.
‘I know,’ Flynn acknowledged, ‘but we’d like to hear it for ourselves.’
‘OK,’ he said. ‘This woman comes into the office a while ago and says she’s looking for a place called Elmwood, that some friends of hers have moved there. I tell her I never heard of any place of that name, except the Elmwood here in the cemetery. I showed it to her on the map.’
‘Map?’ Flynn asked.
‘Big map of the whole site. It’s on the wall in the office. I have copies, too. I gave her one.’
‘Then what?’ Gleason asked.
‘Well, then she went kind of quiet, asked me to look up the files and see who was buried in grave number twenty-three. So I did and I told her it was owned by a family called Everett. Right then I thought she was going to faint. I asked her if she was OK but she said it was the heat in the office – I keep it up kind of high, I like it that way – and then she left. I went out and watched where she went – she had acted very strange, you know – so then I got my coat and decided to follow but before that the phone rang and I had to deal with something first. By the time I got down to Elmwood, she was laying in the snow, struggling with this guy who had driven up there in a Dodge. I shouted at him and she managed to get away. I tried to grab hold of him but he knocked me down and then he went after her.’
‘That was pretty noble of you,’ Flynn commented, ‘but a little reckless, Mr Perry, if you don’t mind my saying so. The guy might have had a gun.’
‘The prick,’ Perry said. ‘I don’t like men hurting women. I just wanted to stop him. I got into my truck and followed. They went flying round here like it was a racetrack and the next thing she slams into this statue here.’
‘What about her attacker? Did you see where he went?’ Gleason queried.
‘He got out and pulled the door of her car open. Appeared to me like he was looking for something. Then he drove off out of the cemetery and I didn’t see after that.’
With his gloved hands, Flynn opened the door of the car. A sports bag lay on the back seat. He unzipped it and looked inside. There were clothes, a wash bag. Another officer came and spoke to Gleason who walked over to a patrol car and picked up the radio handset.
Flynn turned back towards the caretaker. ‘Registration?’
Perry shook his head and looked sheepish. ‘I should have got that, shouldn’t I? But in the excitement, you know—’
Flynn squeezed his shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, Mr Perry, we’ll find him. And anyway it looks like you saved this girl’s life.’
Gleason came back. ‘Hope so. Just getting a report on her condition. She seems to have hit her head hard and they’re trying to find out how serious her injuries are. I’ve asked one of the patrolmen who went with her to stay there just in case.’
‘Good thinking. Any idea who she is?’
‘Yep. The car’s a rental. It was picked up at Logan yesterday by a woman called Meg Winter. UK driving licence and an address in Ireland. Says on the form that she’s staying at the Holiday Inn By The Bay.’
‘What was that? What was her name again?’
‘Meg Winter.’
‘Christ!’ Flynn said.
‘What is it?’
‘Shit. I got a weird call the other night from somebody who said he was ringing from Ireland. Said there was this woman called Winter staying at the Holiday Inn and she was in all sorts of danger. I thought it was some nut but I stopped by the Holiday Inn on my way home just in case. She had a reservation there OK but she hadn’t checked in at that stage. I forgot about it after that.’
Another officer interrupted. ‘Detective, we found these.’
He held out two plastic bags. Flynn took them from his hand and saw that one contained a pair of glasses that had been broken, snapped in two pieces right at the bridge. In the other bag there was a small black Nokia mobile phone.
‘What’s all this?’ Flynn said.
‘We found them over at the grave where the struggle happened.’
Flynn turned to Gleason. ‘Let’s go see.’
They got into their car and drove there. They parked and got out, careful not to get in the way of one of the crime scene boys who was moving around gingerly, using snow print wax to take casts of the clearer footprints.
Flynn looked at the dark gravestone. The daylight was going so he shone a torch. Flecks in the green marble glittered in its beam.
‘Paul Everett,’ he read. ‘Marcia Everett. Everett? That name rings a bell.’ He clapped his hands. ‘Christ, I should have remembered when the caretaker said it. Damn, that was another name the guy mentioned on the phone. Something about fake letters and the murder of a guy called Everett.’ He looked at the gravestone again. ‘Jesus, Scott, let’s get back to the office and try to find out what the hell we’re into here.’
As they pulled into the early evening traffic on Stevens Avenue, Gleason radioed to say they were on their way in.
‘Police in Belfast have been in contact with us about this woman who’s in the hospital,’ the voice at the other end told him.
‘Belfast?’ Gleason said. ‘What the hell’s it got to do with them?’
‘That’s where she’s from,’ Flynn said. ‘Belfast?’
‘Belfast, Ireland, dummy. Not Belfast, Maine.’
By the time they got back to Middle Street there were faxes for them to look at, photocopies of the criminal record of one Daniel Cochrane who had got two years for trying to burn down a hotel that had been built by the injured woman’s father. According to the police in that other Belfast, the one across the Atlantic, it looked as if he had been stalking her.
‘Maybe caught up with her, too,’ Gleason said, studying the sheets.
‘Hold on a minute,’ Flynn said. ‘There’s something funny here.’ He went to his computer terminal. ‘Cochrane. Yeah – that’s it. Cochrane. That was the name of the guy who phoned me.’ He looked at Gleason and frowned. ‘Now why in hell would somebody tell us about this woman, warn us about her safety and then attack her himself?’
Gleason threw up his hands. ‘What can I say? He’s Irish.’
Flynn snorted. ‘Yeah. Aren’t we all?’
He looked at his watch. It would be night in Ireland but he was going to have to try to call the contact numbers the Belfast police had left. In turn, they were going to have to tell this woman’s relatives what had happened to her.
He rang and got someone called Detective Inspector Florence Gilmour and as he spoke to her he wondered idly what she looked like. He was on the phone for twenty minutes. When he had finished, he knew a lot more than before.
He sat back for a few moments, thinking.
Gleason said: ‘Maybe we should go over to the Holiday Inn. There might be something in her room.’
Flynn nodded, then got up for their coats. ‘You’re right. And on the way, I’ll fill you in on all of this.’
Assistant Manager Naomi Waitt was on duty.
She recognised Flynn but she frowned as she saw him and Gleason come in. There was a sense of purpose in their demeanour.
‘Looking for your friend?’ she said. ‘I could try her room.’ She checked the computer screen for the number.
‘She’s not in her room,’ Flynn told her with certainty.
She glanced from Flynn to Gleason. ‘I don’t like the look of this.’
‘You think we could have a peep inside the room?’ Gleason asked.
She tensed. ‘Now just a minute. Maybe you’d like to tell me what the problem is and how you know she’s not here.’
‘Because she’s in the hospital,’ Flynn said. ‘Somebody tried to kill her.’
Naomi didn’t bat an eyelid. ‘I thought you told me there’d be no trouble,’ she said, handing him a swipe card from a drawer.
‘Not for you or the hotel,’ he said. ‘Tell me – has anyone been asking for her?’
‘Just you, but I guess that doesn’t count.’
They took the elevator to Meg’s floor and let themselves in. The room was undisturbed, freshly made up.
Gleason opened drawers. ‘Some clothes,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
‘Where was she going with the bag?’
‘Nothing much in here,’ Gleason said from the bathroom. ‘What about phone calls? Let’s talk to that assistant manager again and see if she’s made any.’
The telephone rang, as if on cue.
They looked at each other for a second, then Flynn picked it up but he did not say anything.
Naomi Waitt spoke to him. She was whispering. ‘Hello, hello . . . are you there?’
‘Yeah, we’re here. What is it?’
‘There’s a man down here. He’s asking what room Meg Winter’s in.’