Flynn and Gleason came down in the elevator and walked out into the lobby.
The man was standing at the desk, looking through leaflets about guided trails in the Maine woods and ferries to Nova Scotia while the receptionist made a pretence of trying to get through to the room.
He had not seen them yet so they were able to get a good look. He was in his late twenties or thereabouts, wearing jeans and a waterproof jacket that would not do much to keep out the cold. Flynn remembered that the caretaker had said the man in the cemetery had worn a brown wool coat.
Naomi Waitt was at the end of the desk and when she saw them she gave an almost imperceptible nod in his direction. They spread out. Flynn approached from the right, Gleason on the left.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ Flynn said.
The man looked round.
Flynn reached into his pocket and held out his shield. ‘Police officer. Could we have a word with you?’
The stranger spotted Gleason now. He began to look alarmed.
‘You were asking about Meg Winter,’ Flynn said.
‘Yes.’ The man stared at them. ‘Oh God, has something happened to her?’
‘And you are?’
‘My name’s Dan Cochrane. Look, has anything happened to Meg?’
‘Where’re you from, Mr Cochrane?’ Flynn asked.
‘Ireland – Northern Ireland.’
‘Could I possibly see some ID?’
Cochrane put his hand to his pocket. The two policemen stiffened. Gleason’s right hand moved nearer his belt holster.
‘Slowly, if you don’t mind,’ Flynn said.
Cochrane took his passport out and handed it to him.
‘What’s your connection with Miss Winter?’ Gleason said, while Flynn studied it.
‘I’m a friend. I came here to warn her that she’s in danger. The night before last I called the police to tell them.’
‘Excuse me, gentlemen,’ Naomi Waitt said. ‘Is it possible you could have this conversation somewhere else? Somewhere a little more discreet, maybe?’ She pointed over her shoulder. ‘There’s an office back here if you want.’
Flynn paused. Other people in the lobby were looking. ‘Maybe you could come with us to headquarters, Mr Cochrane.’
Cochrane did not respond directly. Instead he said: ‘Do you know where Meg is?’
‘Yes, we do.’
‘I’m not going anywhere until I know where she is.’
Flynn looked at him. ‘She’s in the hospital.’
‘Hospital? What happened? Is she all right?’
‘Somebody attacked her out at the Evergreen Cemetery.’
‘Where? A cemetery? I don’t understand.’
‘And neither do we. But maybe you could help us in that regard,’ Flynn said.
He grasped Cochrane’s arm but felt resistance.
‘Are you arresting me?’ Cochrane said. ‘Do you think it was me? Damn it, I didn’t attack her – I was the one who tried to tell you people something was going to happen. Look, is she all right?’
‘As far as we know,’ Flynn said, ‘but if you come downtown with us maybe we can sort all this out.’
He relaxed his grip. Cochrane nodded. ‘OK,’ he said.
They put him in an interview room and a uniformed officer sat with him for a few minutes while Gleason got a cruiser to bring Mack Perry in and Flynn got an identity parade organised.
Then they went back to him. Flynn asked if he would like anything.
‘Water. I could use a drink of water.’
Gleason got some from the cooler, then they sat down across the little table from him.
‘OK, Mr Cochrane,’ Flynn said. ‘The first thing to tell you is that the Irish police have been in touch with us. Somebody found pictures of this woman Winter in your apartment, pictures apparently taken under kind of strange circumstances, like they were surveillance photos or something. They’ve sent us a copy of your criminal record, too. We know you did a jail term for the fire at the hotel built by Miss Winter’s father’s construction company – so they’ve made a bit of a connection there, you understand. I’m sure you can see it. Like – she flies to the US, you follow her—’
‘Which seems to be a habit of yours,’ Gleason butted in.
‘—and then, hey presto, some guy attacks her in the cemetery. Now us . . .’ he gestured to Gleason and himself, ‘. . . we can’t make head nor tail of any of this so I figure that the best thing is for you to explain it from your point of view. Know what I mean? Tell me how you feel about that.’
Cochrane looked from one to the other. ‘It might take a while.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Gleason told him. ‘We’ve got all night.’
That, Flynn reflected ruefully, was probably true.
Cochrane sighed. ‘Jesus, where do I start?’ Then he plunged straight in. ‘Her father, you see, Sam Winter, he was involved with the bank that took my mother’s farm because she couldn’t pay her debts. Then the bank sold the land to another company he was connected to and he built the hotel. My mother became ill and died. I blamed Winter for everything: ruining my mother’s life, killing her. The night of her funeral I got drunk and tried to set fire to the place.’
Flynn nodded. Apart from what was on record, Detective Inspector Gilmour had given him other parts of the story.
Cochrane went on. ‘I saw Meg being interviewed on television talking about what had happened to her: the coma she’d been in for four years, the accident, the murder of this man Paul Everett.’ He looked at them as if they might not understand and therefore he should explain. ‘I spoke to someone on the phone the other night and tried to tell him all of this.’
‘As a matter of fact, you spoke to me,’ Flynn said.
‘Then you know what I’m talking about.’
‘I think so,’ Flynn told him. Florence Gilmour had gone over that part with him, too, and there had been a lot of stuff about letters and airline tickets.
‘When I got out of prison, I was working in my friend Peter Quinn’s place, his pottery. Meg and her friend came in. I didn’t recognise her at first: her hair was shorter than before, when she’d been on television. But then she ordered something, a present for her mother, and gave me her name and address. The name was on her credit card, too. I knew who she was then.’
He looked at them, confusion in his eyes. ‘I . . . I don’t know what went through my mind at that moment. I was still feeling very bitter, so much hatred about the past and the fact that because I had a prison record my life was ruined now, too. Meg seemed to . . . to be just handed to me, like some kind of opportunity. In a flash I saw this as some way I could get back at Sam Winter. Exactly how – well, I had no idea – but I thought that if I got to know her, then maybe there was a way of finding out something about him, something I could use for my own purposes. I wanted justice, you see. And there was Meg herself, of course, his beloved daughter. He would be vulnerable where she was concerned.’ He shook his head. ‘God, I must have been crazy.’
Flynn stared at him and for a few seconds his mind strayed to the problems in his own painful life.
He saw the face of his wife and the face of the man she had gone to live with in Philadelphia. He thought of how much he had hated that man when he had taken her from him and how he had begun to dream up ways of getting to him, to exact some sort of punishment for what he had done.
At one point, when his grief and anger could plunge no further, he had even thought of killing him.
But then he had come to his senses.
He looked at Cochrane and saw in his pale face the despair he himself had once felt. Crazy, Cochrane had said. Maybe. But maybe it was not the craziness of a psychotic killer or a homicidal maniac; more the anger that came from a desperate loneliness, from a life and a future destroyed.
‘There was a bit of a commotion in the shop,’ Cochrane went on. ‘Her friend’s child nearly broke something. When she wasn’t looking I took her credit card, then I turned up at her house the next day, saying she’d dropped it. I wanted to see where she lived, what her home circumstances were like. After that I decided to follow her and I took pictures. I used my own car, not the pottery van, so she wouldn’t notice. I thought that if I shadowed her I would see what sort of a person she was, maybe find some weakness, something I could use.’
He sipped his water and finished it. ‘Could I have some more?’ Gleason obliged.
‘I followed her to the place where Paul Everett had worked and then I followed her to where the accident happened. When she got there she fell down a bank in the woods. She might have been hurt but I saw that she was OK. I really wanted to help her but I couldn’t. How could I have explained what I was doing there? So instead I just watched, taking pictures. Christ, how creepy is that?’
Neither Flynn nor Gleason commented. They waited for the rest.
‘But then the more I saw of her after that, the more my attitude changed. I could see how lonely she was, how vulnerable. She didn’t seem to have any friends; she was always doing things on her own. And being a bit solitary myself, I began to have an idea of how she must feel and how strange and unwelcoming the world must look to her.’
He paused. They said nothing, letting him take his time, but as Flynn looked at him he knew that whatever Cochrane’s motives had been then, harming Meg Winter wasn’t on his agenda now. He and Gleason were listening to a difficult love affair here, not a murder plot.
‘I was watching her the night she ran away from that guy Noel Kennedy,’ Cochrane continued.
Gleason held up a hand as if stopping the traffic. ‘Now, wait a second. Noel Kennedy? Who’s this?’
‘Meg once had an affair with him. He’s the medical director of Belfast Central Hospital. It turns out he’d been calling her on the phone, then hanging up. He followed her one night when she’d been shopping. She ran away from him. I saw what was going on and stepped in to help.’
Gleason was scribbling on a pad. ‘Noel Kennedy. Central Hospital. Better ask our friends in Ireland to see where he was this afternoon.’
Cochrane looked at them in disbelief. ‘It couldn’t have been him.’
‘How can you be sure?’ Flynn asked.
Cochrane had no answer.
‘So that night,’ Flynn said, ‘what happened?’
‘After that, well, everything changed. After that, all I could do was think about her. I wasn’t concerned about her father any more, or of getting back at him – any of the obsessions of the past. I’d seen her threatened, or so I thought, and I wanted to protect her, to . . . to love her.’
Flynn saw Cochrane’s surprise at what he had just said. ‘Did you tell her that – that you loved her?’
Maybe if he’d told his wife that. Maybe if—
‘No,’ Cochrane said. ‘Tonight – that’s the first time I’ve said that.’
Gleason broke the mood. ‘So then did you – did you, like, get it on with her?’
Cochrane tensed. ‘Our relationship developed, yes.’ He turned to Flynn as a more sympathetic listener. ‘But I knew there were risks, that there was a possibility she might find out who I was. If her father heard my name, well, it would all be over then. I didn’t want it to end like that so I decided to call a halt before that happened. We’d argued. That gave me the chance to back off. I knew she’d be upset but it was nothing to what she’d feel if she discovered who I really was and what I’d done.’
‘So when did this happen? When are we talking about?’ Flynn queried.
‘Just before Christmas. But damn it, I missed her. So a few nights ago I decided to tough it out and tell her the truth. I told mysel that maybe she’d forgive me, that it was worth a try. At any rate, I couldn’t live with this thing any longer. So on Thursday morning I called her. That was when I discovered she was on her way to Boston. She was in a hurry and hadn’t time to talk. I called the airport to check on flight times and drove straight there in the hope that I might be able to catch her but by the time I arrived she’d already checked in and gone to the international departure lounge. It was no good.’
‘So then you flew to Boston yourself?’ Gleason asked.
‘I drove back to Belfast first and went to her house. I had a key. I wanted to see if I could find out where to reach her when she got to Portland because I knew this was where she was going. And that was when I found this. It must have been delivered after she’d gone.’
He put his hand in his pocket and handed a letter to them.
‘The TV company forwarded it to her. It’s from Laurence Everett – the realone.’
Flynn unfolded the flimsy paper. The date was at the top and an address in New Hampshire. He read aloud:
‘Dear Meg Winter
I saw you on TV this morning talking about my son. You disgusting bitch. What gives you the right to go on there and rake it all up again? My son and my wife are dead because of you. Paul’s murder ruined her health and there you are on TV, whining about losing your memory. Why were you spared when he was not? Why did someone kill him and not you? I know what kind of person you are. You’re lying, lying to the world. You’re a doctor and doctors can get hold of drugs. What did you do to him? If he hadn’t got mixed up with you he wouldn’t be dead. I will go to my grave believing that. God won’t forgive you for what you’ve done. You’ll rot in hell.
Yours sincerely
Laurence Everett’
Sincerely, Flynn thought, was an interesting touch. He asked, ‘How do we know this is the real deal?’
‘Because I rang him. I got international inquiries to find his number – his address is on the letter – and I spoke to him. It was early in the morning in New Hampshire and I woke him. He wasn’t too happy about it but from the conversation I had, oh, he’s Laurence Everett all right.’
‘His wife’s buried with her son in Evergreen Cemetery,’ Flynn said.
‘I know. He told me. I don’t quite understand how he managed to see Meg on TV, though. It was an interview on British television so how would he get it here?’
Flynn looked at Gleason. ‘We should check the local affiliates, see how come they were running this item. The date’s on the letter.’
‘Look, I’ve been straight with you,’ Cochrane said. ‘What happened in that cemetery?’
Flynn explained and he included in his brief narrative Mack Perry’s account of his conversation with Meg.
A uniformed officer came in. ‘We’re ready for you now.’
‘Ready for what?’ Cochrane asked.
‘We want you to take part in a line-up,’ Flynn said.
‘What – you still think I did it?’
‘What I think doesn’t matter,’ Flynn said as they led him into another room. ‘It’s evidence that we go on here.’
There were four other men, approximately Cochrane’s height and build. Gleason made him stand second from the right, then they went into an ante-room with a darkened window. Flynn stood beside it with Mack Perry and began to explain the procedure.
Perry interrupted. ‘You know, I did this once before. There were some kids vandalising the cemetery. I had to pick them out.’
Then you know the score. So when I pull up this blind I want you to tell me if you see the man who attacked the woman today.’
Perry looked. ‘Nah,’ he said almost immediately.
‘Now take your time about this.’
‘I don’t need to. The guy’s not there. He was older than these people. Mid-forties, I’d say.’
They went back to the interview room. Cochrane was brought in. ‘Well?’
‘OK,’ Flynn said, ‘you’ll be glad to hear that we don’t consider you a suspect.’
Cochrane sighed. ‘That’s a relief.’
‘But we do need all the help you can give us on this.’
‘Meg got letters,’ he said. ‘Letters that were supposed to be from the Everetts. I saw one of them. It said Paul had been writing to his parents about her before the accident. Then she got a plane ticket. Someone wanted her here so they could kill her. I bet the guy who attacked her today is the guy who killed Paul Everett four years ago. As long as Meg was in a coma, he was OK, but as soon as she recovered she became a risk.’
‘But why lure her over here?’ Gleason said. ‘Why not kill her in Ireland?’
The three of them thought about that, then Cochrane said: ‘Maybe because this is where he lives. Listen, she would have brought the letters with her, wouldn’t she? She didn’t leave them at home – I looked. Did you find them among her belongings?’
Gleason groaned.
‘What’s the problem?’ Cochrane asked.
‘The guy in the cemetery,’ Flynn explained. ‘The caretaker said that when the car crashed he opened the door and seemed to be looking for something. Her things are in a bag in the evidence locker. We’d better check but I would lay odds we won’t find them.’
Gleason left the room on what they knew was a pointless errand and in a few minutes he was back to confirm the fact. ‘I’ll try the hospital,’ he said. ‘We need to find out if we can talk to her yet. You never know, maybe there’s something in her pockets.’
‘There’s another thing,’ Cochrane said. ‘You see, those letters didn’t just arrive out of the blue. They were a reply to a letter Meg sent in the first place. She wrote to Everett’s parents because she wanted to find out more about their son.’
Flynn sat up. ‘Then how did she get an address?’
Before Cochrane could answer, they were interrupted by Gleason on the phone. ‘Now, wait just a minute, say that again – she’s got a visitor?’
‘Jesus,’ Flynn said. ‘Where’s that cop we sent?’
He hit the door running.