Flynn and Gleason looked at the woman called Alice Harte. ‘You’re allowed a phone call,’ Flynn said. ‘You might want to contact a lawyer.’
She sobbed and dried her eyes. She had been crying ever since they brought her back to headquarters. ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘I just want to talk to someone about this. All of it.’
‘Who was the man in the cemetery?’ Gleason asked.
‘He forced me to go to the hospital. He threatened me that if—’ There was a knock on the door. Another detective peeped in.
‘Roy, can I have a word?’ ‘Jesus, can’t it wait?’ ‘No.’
Flynn stepped outside. ‘What is it?’
‘You’re not going to believe this. That phone we found in the cemetery – we traced it. Its bills are paid out of an account run by Senator Aiden Ross’s election campaign.’
Flynn stared at him. ‘I think maybe it’s about time I talked to the Chief.’
They moved Meg to a private room where a uniformed officer sat outside.
Cochrane wanted to see her. Flynn agreed so a car took him over to the hospital.
She listened as he told her everything he had told the police. She watched his lips as he spoke. She felt separated from him, wondering what kind of mind lay in the depths behind his eyes, thinking how much she did not know him and never would.
She felt weary and beaten and incredibly sad.
She had regained her memory but she was depressed and burdened by it, not elated.
She knew why the man in the cemetery was familiar. He had had a beard the first time, that night she was taken to his house.
Alice Harte, too, had changed so much in appearance. Meg had gone to the woman’s office and not realised a thing.
She thought of the man called Chris, who had tried to rape her. Where was he in all of this?
Paul Everett had protected her and had died because of it.
They had tried to kill her, those people she had met on that awful, sordid, murderous mistake of a night that she wished she could not remember at all.
A nurse gave her something to make her sleep.
Cochrane was still by her bedside when she woke an hour later. With him was a man who introduced himself as Detective Roy Flynn.
‘My memory,’ she struggled to say through stiff and painful lips. ‘I know what happened that night. The man in the cemetery. He was there. He had a beard before. He was the US Consul in Belfast.’ ‘Ross. Matt Ross,’ Flynn said. ‘He’s the brother of Senator Aiden Ross, the Presidential candidate. Damn, it’s warm in here.’ He took
off the overcoat and laid it over the back of a chair.
She nodded. ‘Ross. That’s right. Yes. I remember.’ It seemed strange to be saying that.
‘This woman Alice Harte,’ Flynn said, ‘she’s been giving us her version of events, starting with what happened to you four years ago. She says she met you in some bar when you were drunk and she took you back to Ross’s house for a party. She and Ross were having a thing at the time. She’d met him through this guy Everett who was actually her boss at the pharmaceuticals company. She says they were friends as well as colleagues. Also there was another friend, a guy called Chris Malone. They liked to do coke every now and then.’
He loosened his tie. ‘That night the three men had been at a dinnerwhereaspeechwasbeinggivenbyRoss’sbrother, the
Senator. The Senator told Ross he was going to run for President and offered him a job.’
He took a pad out of his pocket and checked the notes he had written a short time before.
‘She says the party was just a spur-of-the-moment thing. Matt Ross called her and happened to mention that Malone was looking for female company. She was with you at the time and thought you might fit the bill. Everett was gay, apparently. He was just their friendly neighbourhood occasional cocaine provider. Anyhow, when you got there you wouldn’t play ball with this Malone so he tried to rape you. At which point Everett smacks him and takes you away in his car. How does that tally so far?’
She nodded. ‘It’s what I remember. I found them doing cocaine in the dining room when I was looking for a phone.’ She frowned. ‘Then this other man came upstairs after me when I went to the bathroom. All I remember was that he was called Chris. I didn’t know his name was Malone. But that name . . . a company called Malone Group bought my father’s building firm.’
‘I’m coming to that,’ Flynn said. ‘According to Alice, Malone and Matt Ross followed you and Everett, leaving her at the house. She’s very careful to emphasise that, that she had nothing to do with what happened later, so I probably don’t believe her. She says they went after you to talk to you, to try to get the whole thing hushed up. They figured that if any of it got out it would ruin them. It would have put paid to the Senator’s election campaign before it got off the ground – a brother mixed up in drags, using the safety of the US Consul’s house to do it, an attempted rape. Quite a scandal. But it got worse when the car crashed. She says Everett survived but there was a struggle and Ross bashed his head in with a flashlight, or so they told her afterwards. In the end, you were in a coma, Everett was dead, and nobody was going to be talking about anything. Or so they hoped. Anyway for the time being, things didn’t turn out so bad. Ross went to work for his brother, Alice got Everett’s job and life went on. Except for Chris Malone who cracked up not long after you regained consciousness.’ ‘He killed himself,’ Cochrane said suddenly, as it came to him.
‘He killed himself,’ Flynn agreed.
‘I remember that now,’ Cochrane said. ‘It was big news.’
Flynn looked at Meg. ‘He went to pieces after you came out of the coma, according to Alice. Guilt, the fear of being discovered – it all got to him so he strung himself up in his backyard.’
Meg stared at them. She felt strange. ‘So now . . . now two people are dead because of me. That’s what this means.’
‘Hold on a minute,’ Cochrane said. ‘Let’s get this into some kind of perspective. You almost died in that crash and four years later they’re still trying to kill you. Don’t forget that. You can’t hold yourself responsible. You’re the victim here.‘
Flynn said, ‘The way Alice explains it, remorse and guilt were the real reason Chris Malone bought your father’s company and aid a price above the odds. You were in an expensive private ospital. Making sure your father had plenty of money and could afford it was his way of compensating, of making amends.’
‘Thoughtful of him,’ Cochrane said in a voice that was sour. Meg did not know what to feel any more. Anger, guilt, regret,
they were like tides, each drawing her out in its current then washing her ashore again.
Flynn told her, ‘It seems that before he hung himself he made a tape but Alice says he lied in it and implicated her, saying she did the actual killing, which, of course, she totally denies.’
‘Where’s the tape now?’ Meg said.
‘He left it for his father, Sir Brian Malone. I’m sure you’re well aware who he is. Her friend Ross think’s he’s planning to use it to gain some sort of influence over the Senator.’ He paused and looked at Meg. ‘As for you, well, you scared the hell out of them. As long as you couldn’t remember, everything was fine but if you regained your memory, then the game was up. Alice says that when you came to see her looking for the Everetts’ address, she realised it was only a matter of time. What Ross did was take out a short lease on an apartment here on theEasternPromsothatyou’d have somewhere to write to. He paid for it out of some kind of phony bank account. Alice herself picked up the letters on visits
to her company headquarters in New Hampshire and Ross wrote the replies.’
‘They must have been mad,’ Cochrane said.
‘If you mean desperate and scared shitless, then I figure they were,’ Flynn said.
Meg tried to sit up but it hurt. Cochrane helped her with the pillows. ‘But I spoke to someone,’ she said. ‘And there was an answering machine.’
‘He was able to pick up the messages via his mobile,’ the detective explained. ‘That’s what he used when he called you, I guess. If Alice is to be believed, it was Ross who concocted this whole scheme, at Sir Brian Malone’s insistence, once you started asking about Everett’s family. Ross went to Everett’s funeral four years ago and he remembered that the grave was in a very secluded part of the cemetery, well off the beaten track. She says he came up with the idea of killing you there. The plan was to slit your wrists, which would make it look like you’d committed suicide. You’d have either bled or frozen to death before anyone found you. The general conclusion would be that there was some sort of connection between you and Everett which you’d either not admitted or had just discovered and that you killed yourself out of grief or despair because your mind was unhinged. But not for the first time, things didn’t go right for them. Ross was waiting at the hotel to pick you up, pretending to be Everett’s brother, gambling that you wouldn’t recognise him, when he saw you coming out. He followed you to the cemetery and when you saw Everett’s grave he knew he had to kill you there and then.’
‘But there were letters,’ Cochrane said. ‘A plane ticket. How would they explain that?’
‘You brought the letters with you, didn’t you?’ Flynn asked. Meg nodded.
‘You write these people, you go see them, you’re going to bring their letters, wouldn’t you say? You’re not going to leave them at home. You’ll keep them with you as a kind of proof, like a passport. Even if you didn’t, well then, sure, OK, it wouldn’t be as neat and tidy, but by the time they were discovered, in your home or wherever,
you’d be dead and the secrets of four years ago would all be buried again.’
‘But I saw one of the letters,’ Cochrane said.
‘I showed them to my parents, too,’ Meg added.
‘But where are they now? Taken from your bag by Ross. And if the letters can’t be found, who’s to say you didn’t just write them yourself as part of some elaborate suicide plot conjured up by your poor sick mind?’
He smiled softly at her to make sure she knew he did not mean it. ‘Like the ticket,’ he said.
‘What about the ticket?’ Meg asked him.
‘Alice bought it at the Aer Lingus office in Belfast. Paid cash but they issued a receipt to her in the name of Meg Winter, which is what she was calling herself that day.’ He sat back.
Cochrane wondered, ‘If someone as powerful as Sir Brian Malone is involved, why didn’t he just hire a hit man? You hear of people being able to do this kind of thing.’
‘It had to be Ross,’ Flynn said. ‘He had to be personally involved. It would ensure that the future President was in Malone’s pocket, just in case there was any doubt. That much I can figure out for myself.’
‘But Ross could have refused.’
‘With a tape likely to go into circulation implicating him in the first murder? No, I don’t think so.’
His mobile phone rang and he answered it.
‘How do you spell that?’ He wrote something on his notepad, then he said: ‘Thanks, that was quick work. I’m much obliged.’
He rang off. ‘That was the medical examiner’s office. We found some stuff in a bottle in Alice Harte’s purse. There was a syringe with it, too. Turns out it’s a kind of . . .’ he looked at what he had written,’ . . .benzodiazepine anxiolytic,if I’ve got that right,a sedative, a tranquilliser, which, no doubt, Alice hadn’t any trouble getting her hands on. It’s stuff that’s used for treating anxiety and insomnia but she had enough in the bottle to cure insomnia forever. No doubt that was how they were going to subdue you so that they could finish the job without your putting up much of a fight.’
He gave a little smile and shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think our friend Alice is quite the innocent party in all this that she’d like us to think.’
‘Ross,’ Meg said. ‘Where is he now?’