Brendan was standing and moving towards the door.

‘I finish at five. What say we meet over some pizza and a beer and we’ll see if we can’t put a strategy together that’ll help us find the person you’re looking for?’

By 11 p.m., Cormac was sitting in the living room with a fuzzy head and a plan. His new friend was fast asleep in one of the bedrooms off the hall. He looked out of the window, which was now clear of snow. He opened it and the sounds of the city tumbled in. Amid the sirens and the car engines, he could make out the sound of a guitar floating up from the front of the building. He lay back in the chair and was content. He was in the same city as her. No matter how long it would take, he would find her. He felt he was finally where he should be. He drifted off to sleep on his first night in New York listening to the sounds of a Japanese John Lennon calling to him from the street below.

‘There are places I’ll remember

All my life, though some have changed

Some forever not for better

Some are gone and some remain

All these places have their moments

Of lovers and friends I still can recall

Some are dead and some are living

In my life I’ve loved them all….’

44

The iPod Annie bought him for Christmas carried him around his hour long jog through Central Park. He smiled to himself at the thought of her sitting in the little flat in Edinburgh selecting and deselecting his ‘old man’s music’ as she called it. She had chosen very well. He’d been jogging every day for the past two months and was forced to buy himself some new jeans before he left England, after his only other pair would no longer stay above his shrinking hips. Today was the best he’d felt in all that time. He was convinced he could run all day. Van Morrison eased his journey around the tree-lined path. He enjoyed watching his breath blow freezing fog around his face. Through it, he could still marvel at Manhattan rising proudly into the clear blue sky draped all around it. All that remained of the snow were the dozen or more decomposing corpses of yesterday’s snowmen lying lifeless and melting by the side of the lake. He left Van and Madame George ‘down on Cyprus Avenue’ as he reached the entrance to the building, which he could now appreciate for the first time in all its Gothic splendour. The Japanese pilgrims were no longer at the front door, but had decamped to the tranquillity of Strawberry Fields behind him. He could hear a faint guitar emanating from beneath a swaying elm. He saw Brendan scouring the newspaper at his desk as he entered the building. By the time their conversation finished last night, fuelled by too many beers but thankfully only one slice of pizza on Cormac’s part, they convinced each other finding Bernadette was not going to be too difficult at all. In fact, if anything, it was going to be pretty straightforward. There were only thirty-nine theatres currently in operation on Broadway. If he was efficient, with Brendan’s help and contacts, he could probably have them all covered in a day. It was that thought more than Van that whisked him through Central Park as New York was still waking, if it actually managed to get any sleep in the first place. He was still buoyed by the prospect when he approached Brendan, who didn’t look up until Cormac was standing over the paper and blocking the light from the door.