A Shred of Evidence (25 page)

Cochrane stared at her. “Christ,” he said.

“I take it that that name hasn’t been given in reply to my question,” Judy said.

Judy didn’t joke with people she thought might have murdered fifteen-year-old girls. Not even barbed jokes.

“Jesus Christ,” Cochrane said, putting his head in his hands. “I didn’t want a bloody alibi,” he said, his muffled voice tortured. “What’s happening? What’s happening to me?”

“Well,” said Judy. “What might have happened is that you
have been having a relationship with the writer of these letters, that you were with her on Tuesday evening, and that you didn’t want to tell us that because you are a married man, and she is quite obviously a pupil at your school.”

Cochrane didn’t look up, didn’t react.

“Or perhaps you didn’t want to tell us because your meeting on the Green with the writer did indeed take place, and Natalie saw you. Perhaps threatened to tell someone.”

He looked up slowly, fearfully.

“Perhaps you killed her to keep her quiet, Mr. Cochrane,” said Judy. “And this is your girlfriend’s attempt to keep you out of prison.”

He shook his head, his eyes wide with fatigue and worry.

“There are any number of theories that I could trot out, Mr. Cochrane,” she said. “But I won’t. Because I think it’s time you told us exactly what you were doing in the twenty minutes so far unaccounted for in your run.”

Judy believed he was innocent of Natalia’s murder. Lloyd knew she did. But she had to keep going until they had no reasons left to disbelieve him, purely because of the letter that lay between them on the table.

An obviously trumped-up alibi was, as Cochrane had realized when it had been pointed out to him, the very last thing he wanted.

“You still think I killed Natalie,” he said, his voice weak.

“I don’t,” said Judy.

It took Cochrane’s tortured mind a moment or two to understand the words. “What?” he said.

“I think this alibi is false,” she said. “But not because you killed Natalie. I think whoever wrote this letter knows you didn’t kill Natalie, because she was on the Green, waiting for you. And she knows that you were never there.”

For the first time Lloyd saw hope dawn in Cochrane’s eyes. In his opinion, it was a little premature; he knew Judy.

“But if you have been having an affair with the writer of these letters, you must tell us, Mr. Cochrane,” she said. “Whether you were with her or not. You must tell us.”

“I haven’t,” said Cochrane, helplessly. “I swear to you. It’s fantasy!… It’s all fantasy. She’s imagining it all.”

“Who is? Who wrote this letter?”

“I don’t
know
who wrote it. It’s not signed. I’m not meant to know.” He sighed. “But if Erica doesn’t believe me, why should you?”

“Mr. Cochrane,” Lloyd said immediately. “In your previous interview you said that you had never shown your wife the letters.”

He sighed heavily. “No,” he said. “But she used to open my mail for me, and she found the first one. It was just like that,” he said, pushing away the latest and most damning of all. “Describing things … She never really believed me that I knew nothing about it.”

“But according to Sergeant Finch, you get all manner of letters from female fans,” Judy said. “So why did your wife think that this one was for real?”

“She just did.” Cochrane sighed again. “It came in the internal mail—that was the main reason, I suppose, because that meant it was from someone who actually knew me, and she was making it sound as though we’d been together.”

“But you do get letters of this nature?” she persisted.

“All sorts,” Cochrane said. “Some of them are a lot … well, even more explicit than that.”

“And the first letter was in March, didn’t you say?”

He nodded again.

“But you had only just got married,” Judy said. “It seems a very harsh conclusion for your wife to come to unless she had a lot more to go on than that.”

He looked at Judy, and relaxed a little. “Erica and I hadn’t long been married, but we had had a relationship for a long time before that,” he said. “We didn’t live together, but … well, you know what I mean.”

Lloyd rather fancied that she did.

“So though we were, on paper, newly-weds, we had been together a long time, and … well, the way things were, it wasn’t too difficult for Erica to imagine that something really was going on.”

“And she was imagining it, was she?” Judy asked, sounding a little like a nanny with a slightly wayward charge.

“Yes,” he said firmly. “She was. But … well, things hadn’t been going very well between us, and she thought that there might be someone else before she ever saw the letter.” He gave a sour little laugh. “Before we even got married,” he said.

“Why would she marry you, if she thought that?” asked Lloyd.

Cochrane shrugged a little. “When I sold my flat and bought the house, we decided she should move in with me,” he said, trying to explain. “Keeping up the house and her flat seemed even more wasteful than before. It was more for convenience than anything else. It wasn’t an earth-shattering decision.” He looked at Judy. “But the head made it clear that he would rather we were married, especially with my being in the public eye. So …” He shrugged again. “We got married.”

Lloyd couldn’t resist sneaking a look at Judy, to find that she was glancing at him. The result of the Cochranes’ change of domestic set-up had probably set his campaign back two years, he thought.

“I spent last summer at various athletics meetings,” Cochrane said. “Big meetings. But I was in the studio, not running. I wasn’t running, because I wasn’t good enough.” He sighed. “I was never top-flight. Britain’s number two at my peak, which didn’t last. But I had always been good enough to compete before.”

Judy frowned a little.

“There is a point to this,” he assured her, before he went on. “Because of how it affected me. I knew I couldn’t be a miler any more, but I thought I could move up to the longer distances. I didn’t want to retire—I like athletics. I like the atmosphere, I like the life.” He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t like it. I live it. It means … meant … everything to me.”

Judy didn’t speak now. She had got him talking, and that was what she wanted.

“But I failed in the trials. I broke down on the track.”

Lloyd sat down, interested.

“That was the first time I had ever failed to make the
England squad for an international meeting since the Juniors, do you know that?” Cochrane asked him.

“No,” admitted Lloyd, with surprise.

“Not a lot of people do,” said Cochrane. “Because I never had world records or Olympic medals. I got knocked out in the first heat more often than not. But I was always there, because even at that I was better than most. When I was dropped, my world fell in. And Erica didn’t know what was wrong. I couldn’t very well explain to her that athletics meant more to me than she did, could I?”

“Perhaps not,” said Lloyd.

“I bought the house at the end of the season, because I was going to retire, and I needed to put down roots and all that,” he said. “But I couldn’t let it go, not just like that. We got married this March, and Erica moved in, but we … well, things weren’t working out, because I was hell to live with. She suspected that it was another woman, and when she came across that letter she thought that it was proof. The atmosphere got unbearable—I went to every meeting I could during this summer, just to get away, whether I was commentating or not.”

“But you must have known you couldn’t run for ever,” said Lloyd. “You must have known it would happen one day.”

“I must have,” said Cochrane. “But it’s like knowing you’re going to die. You don’t really believe it.”

“And at least you had another career,” said Lloyd. “Two careers,” he added.

“That’s what they said,” Cochrane agreed. “And some people are natural teachers, but I’m not one of them. Patrick Murray is—he gets a buzz out of teaching. I don’t. And being a so-called celebrity is no job for a grown man. I just felt lost.”

Lloyd nodded. His gloomy thoughts on his own career hadn’t been all that different.

“And the running?” asked Judy, getting back to the point, which, as usual, Lloyd had allowed to get lost.

“I started this suicidal running programme last winter, to prove them wrong. But I failed in the trials again. I tried to give it up, but I couldn’t. I … I knew it was getting me nowhere, but—”

“What happened on Tuesday night?” Judy asked.

“On Tuesday night I was simply too scared to go across the Green,” he said. “I feel awful about that now, but I didn’t know how to handle a rabid teenage fan who had sex fantasies about me, and I just wanted to avoid her.”

“I can understand that,” said Judy. “But what about the twenty minutes?”

“I hadn’t allowed for not running across the Green,” he said.

“But that part of the run didn’t take you very far out of your way,” she said. “Certainly not twenty minutes out of your way.”

Cochrane flushed. “No,” he said. “But I’d said that I would be home by ten. I’m … er … I’m a bit obsessive about time,” he muttered, then blushed. “I’m obsessive about everything,” he said in a low voice. “To make it from Byford Road to the school in time to get home for ten. I would have had to run a four-minute mile.” He was blushing deeply, painfully now. “And that’s what I actually attempted, at the end of a three-hour run. I don’t know how long it took me, because I collapsed in Beech Street. I was vomiting, I was shaking. I was a complete mess. In all meanings of the word.”

“You were sick on your tracksuit?”

He nodded. “I had to sit on a wall outside some office until I could even walk again, and it was quarter past ten before I got to the car.”

“Did anyone see you?” asked Judy, coolly behaving as though Cochrane was not acutely embarrassed by his irrational behaviour.

“Someone might have seen me cross Ash Road,” he said. “But I doubt it. And no one saw me in Beech Street. There’s no one there at that time of the evening.”

The high colour had left his face; he had admitted how far his obsession with time had got, and Judy’s total non-reaction was putting him at ease. Lloyd congratulated himself on not letting Finch loose on the man—they would never have got this far.

“I was relieved, at the time,” Cochrane said. “Now, I wish I’d had an audience. I didn’t know I would need one. Because none of this clears me, does it?”

“And when you got home?” said Lloyd, not answering his question.

“I did think Erica was in bed. I didn’t want her to see me in that state, so I just stuffed the things in the machine and took a shower. Then all this happened.” He looked at Judy again. “I didn’t even want my wife to know what a fool I had made of myself,” he said. “Never mind your Sergeant Finch. I hadn’t had anything to do with Natalie—I didn’t see what business it was of his, that’s all. I never thought I’d get myself into this hole.”

Judy closed her notebook and regarded him for a moment. “Maybe you should try explaining to your wife how you feel about having to retire,” she said. “She might be a lot more understanding than you think.”

“That’s what Patrick said, in a way.” Cochrane sighed, and looked from her to the Chief Inspector. “This is a long way from police work,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

Lloyd shook his head. “We had to be sure that these letters are what you say they are,” he said. “That you really were telling the truth when you said you didn’t know who’d been sending them. Because we have to find whoever it is—and if you have even a vague idea who it might be, it would make our job a great deal simpler.”

Cochrane shook his head. “I honestly believed it was best to ignore them,” he said. “I never tried to find out.” He smiled at Judy. “I’m sorry if I’ve wasted a lot of your time,” he said.

She didn’t react to his apology. “We will need to take your fingerprints, Mr. Cochrane,” she said briskly, standing up. “And we need a sample of scalp hair.”

Cochrane sighed. “A sample of blood. Now my fingerprints, my hair. Spending half my time in the police station, being cautioned, being taped. I had nothing to do with this! Any of it! When’s it going to stop?”

“If they aren’t your prints,” said Judy, “and it isn’t your hair, then you’ll be one step further out of this hole, won’t you?”

Cochrane got up slowly, wearily. “Is this nightmare nearly over?” he asked.

Neither Lloyd nor Judy answered him, because the plain fact was that they didn’t know.

Colin wasn’t surprised by the silence that had followed his question. They couldn’t make promises, he knew that.

The inspector terminated the interview, then looked thoughtful. “Mr. Cochrane,” she asked. “When did you join the drama group?”

“Two years ago,” he said.

He had joined the drama group because it gave him a little bit of confidence before his first television appearance, and had continued to go along to it for the same reason. A couple of other teachers were in it—why weren’t they being questioned over and over again?

Because they hadn’t had a letter arranging a meeting on the Green that night, he told himself as they left the interview room. They hadn’t behaved suspiciously with regard to personal cleanliness. It hadn’t apparently taken them twenty minutes to run about half a mile. It was his own fault.

He was taken to have his fingerprints done, and to let them take samples of his hair, in what he hoped would be his final appearance in this drama. He was told that his fingerprints would be destroyed within five days if they had no bearing on the investigation, and he left, still absently wiping ink from his fingers as he walked away.

At last someone seemed to believe him that he hadn’t killed Natalie, and once they had analysed his blood surely then even Erica would believe him that he hadn’t been on the Green with her either, and he would be free of all this?

There was no point in going back to school now; he walked
back to the hotel, wondering if he should try to speak to Erica. But Patrick had advised him to wait until he had the proof that he hadn’t been with Natalie, and he thought that that was perhaps good advice, even if it had been offered as adulterer to adulterer. Patrick knew a lot more about women than he did.