Chapter Fifty Three

There were so many people in the studio that it felt as if they were all sitting on top of one another. Jeff suspected that quite a lot of them didn’t need to be there and was tempted to try to get rid of them, but decided that it was likely to make things worse if they wound people up before they’d even begun. Mouse had tried to talk to some of the production crew, but didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Despite still being mostly asleep and smelling of brandy, Duncan had taken advantage of the overcrowding to grope the assistant producer, who had been stunned into silence and was just gawping at him from the corner of the room.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I give you,” a passage of crummy organ music, played on something which sounded like a kid’s toy, was topped off by a nasty, tinny fanfare, “BackBeat.”

Then nasty, tinny, canned applause. Mikey grinned very deliberately at them, even though it was radio. Jeff wished that he would just get it out of the way, but something told him that it wouldn’t be that easy.

“Mr Jeffrey Hands, not yet OBE, lovely to see you again sir.”

“Morning all. Nice set up you’ve got here.” Someone tittered, but it was hard to tell who or why, “Nice doughnuts. We love doughnuts, we do, especially at some silly time in the morning.”

“This isn’t silly. This is late this is. I’ve been up since half four.” Mouse was used to operating on toddler time, and it was only just beginning to dawn on him that the others might not be quite so sharp as he was.

“Who asked you?” Mikey winked hard at him, “For anyone listening at home, that was the short one. I’ll come back to him later. But I was having a conversation with Mr Hands…”

Jeff knew that Mikey was deliberately making him squirm. He was good at it.

“Yes.”

“Mr Hands, you and I had a quiet get together in a nice cosy little boozer round the corner from the really posh bit of town where we both just so happen to live the other night.”

Mikey’s eyebrows were dancing around as if they weren’t properly stuck on.

“We did.”

“With your lovely lady wife sitting at the table, gazing on adoringly and sipping a nice glass of white wine.”

“Yes.”

“With a roaring fire in the corner, and a large shaggy dog asleep in front of it, snoring a bit.”

“Yes.”

“And we agreed how we were going to do this. Agreed that we’d start by talking about the new single, and how it was written, and how you hope it sells a squillion by the end of the week. And that once we’d played it we could then have a bit of a chat about the interesting stuff which everyone actually wants to hear.”

Jeff was trying not to laugh. It wasn’t funny, it was just that he was more nervous than he could ever remember being. Especially not before eight in the morning.

“We did.”

Mikey moved closer to the microphone, and forced his face into something which was probably meant to be a glower. He was a short, squat man, and the effect was rather unnerving, especially when he forced his voice down into a low and gravelly growl.

“But I. Can’t. Let. You. Do. That.”

Jeff didn’t move. Mouse wondered whether to have another go, but decided that he was only likely to set himself up for worse than the first time around.

“Mr Hands. I have to ask you this, as I think my producer is already dialling the number for the Samaritans as we speak.” The producer was equally short, squat and male, and was called Trevor. It was true that he was showing signs of nerves, but it was mostly excitement at the thought that he might have a scoop on his hands. Without warning, the assistant who had seemed to be overawed by Duncan started making loud sobbing noises into the second microphone: Mouse grabbed hold of Duncan’s arm to make sure that he didn’t try to do anything about it. “Mr Hands is this the end? Is BackBeat no more, all over again?”

All of the production team suddenly started making wailing noises, which made Duncan jump. Mouse laughed, in the hope that Duncan would do the same, while Jeff waited until the noise levels dropped a bit.

“Hang about a bit. Nobody said anything about us splitting. We just came in to have a chat, and so that you could play the song. It’s a good song, you know.”

Mikey kept his eyebrows low over the microphone.

“Mr Hands, I hate to inform you of this. But one of your bandmates is missing again. We’ve hunted high and low for him. Trevor has even checked the coat cupboard twice, given he’s such a skinny bastard, but all he found was a coat hanger and a bit of an old hoover.”

It was actually reasonably funny, but Jeff also knew that it was his chance to get a sentence in edgeways.

“No, Jake’s not here. He couldn’t come this morning, but he said to say hello to you all, especially.”

Mikey was still low to the desk, and seemed to have stopped blinking. He was focusing on Jeff, and alternating between his normal speaking voice and the growl.

“Do you actually know where he is? Because you’re actually not that good at keeping track of the band members are you? I mean, don’t you think it would be a good idea to get chip thingies put into the others in case they do a runner as well? What do you think?”

Duncan seemed to wake up.

“I’m not going anywhere, me.”

“My God! The hairy one speaks!” Mikey smiled at Duncan, who tried to smile back, and then promptly ignored him. “It’s weird isn’t it. For years we’ve all been trying to figure out what Jake McDonald actually does, when he’s not taking an hour and a half to work out what he wants to say when you ask him the time, and suddenly he’s the really interesting one. He gets beaten up, his Dad’s in jail, and you say that he’s even started writing songs. Don’t think I believe that bit, but it’s a good story. But he finally gets interesting, then he disappears. Don’t you think that’s a bit odd?”

“He got shot, too.”

Something about the way that Duncan said it made Mouse realise that he was nowhere near sober enough, but he then realised that there was little that he could do about it. Much as he might want to, he couldn’t exactly put all six foot of him under his arm and carry him out of the room. But Mikey seemed to cheer up, even though he knew he was running a fairly high risk of being clobbered on air. He ignored Duncan’s contribution to the debate, and appealed to all three of them.

“Come on Guys! It’s me, Mikey. You can tell me. Is it true that at this very moment Jake’s undergoing a sex change in Rio, and he’s going to join you on tour in the autumn as Jacqueline?”

There was a muddle of laughter and protest, which Duncan didn’t quite manage to join.

“That’s bollocks, that is,”

A hooter sounded, and the producer made frantic hand signals. Mikey wagged his finger across the desk.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry to have to inform you that Duncan Woods just used a very naughty word. We’ll do rude things to him after the show’s finished, I promise.”

“Sorry, mate.” Duncan did at least have the grace to look vaguely embarrassed, “It’s just that you were talking…,” The producer suddenly waved furiously behind Mikey’s head “… you were saying stuff about Jake which wasn’t true.”

Mikey lent over the desk towards Duncan, and spoke in something which might have been a full-voiced stage whisper.

“So no sex change then?”

Duncan was looking confused, and Mouse wanted to panic.

“Of course not. He’s gone to find a girl.”

Mikey was having a private chat with Duncan, with six million people listening to it, and Jeff wasn’t quite sure how to stop it.

“Couldn’t he have found one here? I mean, it’s a while since I’ve been out, but I think that there are girls here too.” Duncan was looking confused again, “What do you think?”

Mouse tried to kick Duncan, but got the cross bar of his stool instead and nearly overbalanced. He only just managed to catch hold of the desk before the last leg left the floor. Jeff decided that enough was enough.

“I think that’s none of your business, Mikey mate.”

Mikey pouted, showing large amounts of the inside of his bottom lip.

“But I thought we were friends!” There was a general oohing and ahhing from lots of the random people who didn’t need to be there, “Don’t get narky with me, I’m just trying to get the truth for your loyal public, who were hanging eagerly on Duncan’s every word there.”

Jeff wasn’t letting go.

“It’s all fine. Jake just can’t be here this morning, and I’m sure they all understand that even if you don’t. And you’ve missed the exclusive on the single, you know. Everyone else played it about five minutes ago.”

Mikey looked at Trevor, who shrugged. They were both struggling to keep a straight face, but knew that they hadn’t quite made the most of things.

“So now what do you want us to do? Do you fancy trying to compose something with Trevor, so we can have a new exclusive, like? ”

Jeff had played that game with them before, but this wasn’t the time for it.

“Just play the bloody song, will you!”

Mikey pouted again.

“Tetchy.”

Jeff pouted back, forgetting that it was radio, and wishing that they had cancelled. It was Mouse who saw that Trevor was getting as frustrated as he was, and managed to catch his eye. It looked as if they were trying to stare one another out, until Trevor gave a quick thumbs up. He moved over the cue the track as Mouse dived over the desk to get onto one of the microphones.

“OK everyone, here’s our new song. It’s called Footsteps, and we hope you all like it.”

Mikey beamed at the room as the opening piano chords struck up, and waited until he was sure that they were off-air.

“I reckon we just about got away with that, don’t you?”

Chapter Fifty Two

She hit Jake before she properly saw him. He had put out his arms to stop her crashing straight into him, and just about caught hold of her shoulders as she slid, but then he lost his footing too. He pulled her towards him, and they slipped the rest of the way down the side of the dune together, landing in a heap towards the bottom of it. Sorcha was laying on top of him, with his arms wrapped tightly around her. She could feel his heartbeat, beating against her, and wasn’t sure what to believe. Her body knew exactly how to react, though. She could feel his arms, skin on skin, across her shoulders; and she could feel her pulse thumping as if she was still trying to sprint.

Her mind was a lot less sure of what exactly was going on, although as delusions went, he was first rate. He smelled of grime and sweat and travel; and she felt him hug her closer to him before shifting the position of his leg. She pulled away slightly, his arms only reluctantly letting her move at all. He was watching her, and seemed to be about to say something, so she put her fingers on his lips to stop him. She had sand on her fingertips, and he had sand on his face: she brushed it away as best she could. His stubble was so long that it was almost a beard; soft to the touch until she pushed her fingers back up along his jaw line. His eyes were steady, but she felt him flex his knee again.

“Shit. Are you hurt?”

He was watching her, concentrating on her, and slowly shook his head.

“Not this time.”

She watched his lips as he said it: they started to curve up at the corners, in the beginning of a smile. Her thumb was still on his chin, and she brushed it back along his lower lip, before letting her lips meet his. She felt the tiniest fraction of hesitation before he opened up to her, absolutely, and she responded with an intensity close to fury, pushing herself hard up against him.

It was Sorcha who eventually pulled away. Jake stayed lying on the sand with his eyes shut, feeling his knee throb from the chase across the sand and wondering if it was all really going to be that easy. Then Sorcha disentangled herself from him, slowly and gently, and he was left lying on the sand on his own. He opened his eyes, blinking for a moment or two in the light, and saw her sitting a foot or two away from him hugging her knees to her chest.

“What?”

She seemed a long way away again.

“I was trying to figure out whether this was real or not. I wasn’t sure which one of us I needed to pinch.”

“You could kiss me again if you like.”

She was deathly serious as she leant down to him, and kissed him softly on the lips, before sitting back up. Jake tried to tune into the sea and the sunshine, and waited for her. She sat and watched him for a while. A gull circled briefly overhead, before diving down into a rock pool that was hidden behind the dunes.

“I didn’t expect to see you again.”

She said it slowly, but he did at least know what she meant.

“You said that to me once before.”

Sorcha was watching him intently: she wasn’t sure that she could carry on with the conversation, but it was likely to be the only chance she ever got.

“I’d spent half the night thinking you were dead.”

“And that mattered?”

“Of course it mattered.”

Even that felt like telling him too much; but once she had said it, she felt as if the statement somehow connected them whether she wanted it to or not. Jake sat up and held out his hand to her. She didn’t take it, and he realised that he was still going to have to work to get what he wanted.

“I should have said something, or done something, when you said that before. I knew you needed me to. I just had no idea what to say.” Sorcha was biting her lips together, and trying hard to keep it all together, “It’s like a joke in the band, that it always takes me ages to answer even the simplest question. But that wasn’t a joke. Isn’t a joke.”

She shook her head, and seemed to be staring at him, but it was a while before she spoke.

“Have you figured it out now, then?”

He felt himself wanting to pull away from the intensity of her gaze, but didn’t.

“No, I haven’t. But I kind of feel better knowing that you know that I’m thinking about it.”

She hugged her knees tighter to her chest.

“Is that what you came here to tell me?”

Jake looked across at her. Although she wasn’t suntanned, there were more freckles on her face than he remembered. One of the straps of her top had slid off her shoulder down to her elbow, and there were patches of sand on her arms and legs. She no longer felt the need to hide the scars. As he looked at her, he hoped, hard.

“I came here to take you home. If you want to.”

She exhaled and let her head drop onto her knees. It wasn’t the reaction he had hoped for. When she lifted her head, she looked straight ahead rather than looking at him.

“I’m sorry, Pet. There isn’t a home for me to go back to.” He looked confused, mostly because jetlag was making him feel as if he was fighting his way through treacle, “I sold the flat. I’m sorry.”

Jake hesitated, unsure of how much to tell her. He knew why she had thought of the flat, but she was missing the point.

“I didn’t mean it like that. I meant will you come back with me?”

“And do what?”

“Whatever you want to.” She didn’t react, “I need you to be there, when I finally do figure out what I should have said, you know.”

Sorcha desperately wanted it to be the answer to all of the questions, but somehow it wasn’t. She also wanted to tell him about the 3am phone call, which among other things meant that she probably had the option of returning to the job she had walked out of, even though she was reasonably sure she still didn’t want to. But she had no idea whether it would even make sense to him. She carried on sitting, watching him, and trying to think of a way which didn’t mean that he had to go again. She was almost wishing he hadn’t come.

“How did you find me?”

Jake felt as if she was slipping away from him again. He moved next to her, and she seemed to shiver when he touched her, even though he was sure she didn’t mean to. He tried to focus his whole being on her; but pain, sand and jet lag kept getting in the way.

“With difficulty. I eventually tracked down your old secretary, who gave me Jane’s number and wished me luck. I suppose I kind of assumed that meant that you were in the States. By the time I managed to drum up the courage to call her, I’d kind of decided I was getting on a plane. I just hadn’t quite expected to have to come this far.”

Sorcha wasn’t sure what that told her.

“I bet Jane loved that.”

He could feel that she was trying to find a way to pull away again.

“I think she was just relieved that there was someone else out there worrying about you.” She flinched, “Look, I know that there’s stuff you’re still dealing with. There’s stuff that I’m still dealing with. To start with, I just figured I’d give you as much time as you needed, you know. I’d imagine what you were doing each day, and tell myself that you were OK, and that there would be plenty of time. Time for everything, once we’d got over it all. But then I started to be afraid that you weren’t OK.”

She was staring straight ahead of herself, and didn’t know how to respond.

“You’re not OK, are you?”

She shook her head, so slightly he almost missed it. A few tears started to trickle down her face, and he wrapped his arms back around her, thinking it was something else he should have done much, much sooner. He could feel her tears falling on his skin.

“If you won’t come back, let me stay here then.”

She shook her head some more, although she didn’t try to escape from him. When she spoke, her voice was unsteady.

“The last thing that someone like you needs at the moment is someone like me. Go off and be famous and be happy.”

He sat and looked down at her, and then looked over at the waves on the shore, and started wishing. He wished she would make some kind of allowances for the fact that he’d barely had any sleep at all in the previous seventy-two hours, but most of all wished that he had tried to find her sooner, and that there was still a way to make everything right. There was one last thing he had decided before he had set off.

“I’ll give it up if you want me to, you know. The band, I mean. The others’ll carry on without me.”

Sorcha felt herself freeze, but tried not to let him see her react.

“Wouldn’t that just be running away?”

He couldn’t tell whether it had been the right thing to say or not.

“Not in my book. I’d call it making a choice. I’d miss the guys, but there are other things I wouldn’t miss. You know, sometimes I find myself lying awake wondering if the world is really such a terrible place that people can kind of” he was looking for a word which his brain couldn’t find, “… behave the way they do about pop music. I wouldn’t miss that.”

She shook her head, wistfully.

“It’s not about that, Pet. I reckon all that would do is mean that we were both floating around trying to figure out what to do with ourselves, which really would be a general, all-purpose nightmare. It’s bad enough me doing it on my own. I’d like to think at least one of us was heading for a happy ending.”

Jake was starting to feel afraid for her again. The feeling reminded of her sitting, shaking, on the edge of her bed, close to him but out of reach, which didn’t help. He turned to face her, and took hold of her shoulders, trying to force her to look at him and feel what he felt. He spoke more roughly than he meant to.

“How’s that meant to work, if I know that I’ve left you here like this?”

But still she just kept shaking her head. He let go of her, and gave her the space she seemed to want. Sorcha took a couple of deep breaths. Jake tried to focus his attention outwards, back to the sea and sky, but he was too aware of Sorcha, sitting within touching distance and trying not to let him see how much she was hurting. Her breathing was still uneven, but he could sense it gradually getting calmer.

“Has this got anything to do with your Dad’s trial?” She looked up at him: the question seemed to be both meant as a challenge and begging for reassurance, “I don’t think they want me to give evidence about the Stephen Warren bit, but they still haven’t confirmed it. I’ll come back for that if you want me to.”

Jake stretched his right leg out in front of him. Sorcha realised that he was in pain, and tried not to respond to it: she would only make more of a mess of things.

“It’s not that. I think I’ve more or less got used to the idea of that, although we don’t know everything that’s going to come out. I’m only going to be able to be there when I’m giving evidence anyway, as otherwise it’ll just turn into a freak show. It’s just that I want to be with you, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing. That’s all.”

She wasn’t sure that she could trust him, but knew she didn’t trust herself, which meant that there really wasn’t any way that she could respond. The odd thing was that it didn’t seem to matter. Even saying nothing at all was answer enough.

They both sat, listening to the waves, for a while, until Sorcha checked her watch. By the time they got back to the rendezvous point the driver was likely to be there. When she said as much to Jake he laughed at her and told her that the driver had been sitting there for well over an hour already, since he had dropped him off as well. Suddenly the phone calls earlier in the day made more sense, and felt less like a general conspiracy against her.

Sorcha had to pull Jake up from the sand. He was wearing a white T shirt, khaki combats and his old tennis shoes; as he helped him dust himself off she had to stifle the urge to undress him. They kissed again, and the urgency which the discussion had lost came flooding back to confuse both of them, before they set off back across the beach. Sorcha was intrigued by an odd kind of seriousness in Jake’s expression.

“What are you thinking about?”

He seemed embarrassed, and ran his hand down the side of her back, letting it rest on her waistband, under her top, his index finger on her skin.

“Mostly about what I’m going to do to you once we’ve both had a shower to get rid of all this sand. That’s something else we should have done ages ago, too.”

To start with they went slowly. They were walking in the soft powdery sand which slid away under their feet, and Sorcha was more or less walking sideways so that she didn’t have to lose sight of Jake. She briefly caught hold of his right hand, and traced the scars on both sides of it, bringing them both to a halt before letting it drop back down by his side. It was a distraction she wasn’t yet ready for. Jake felt stiff and tired, but almost weightless too. His instinct was to limp heavily, but he gradually forced himself into a normal walking rhythm, knowing that they had a reasonable distance to walk back to the van and it would be less tiring if he could just block the pain.

“You are the reason that I couldn’t just head back, you know.”

Sorcha was mostly looking ahead of her, as that way she was less likely to fall over her own feet. Jake had no idea what she was talking about, but it sounded like a peace offering.

“Really?”

“Mmmm. I think I was waiting until I’d proved you wrong, and sorted out the answers to absolutely everything before I could even contemplate going back to the UK.” She looked across at him, and stopped in her tracks again before remembering that they needed to get on, “I wasn’t intending to tell you, or anything like that. It was something for just me to know.”

“Good thing I didn’t decide to wait for you to call, then. Duncan’s been asking me whether you have called on a daily basis for over four months.”

She laughed. She knew that she had been missing Jake, but hadn’t realised that she was missing Duncan as well.

“Maybe,” She could feel herself beginning to relax for the first time in a long time, although she wasn’t quite sure why. It wasn’t a huge shift, just a feeling that she could breathe again without having to remind herself to do it, “Aren’t you meant to be doing a heap of interviews this week, somewhere over the other side of the world?”

If she knew that much, she had cared enough to find it out. Jake felt a sense of calm beginning to radiate through him: she was giving him permission to hope.

“Maybe.” It was a crap answer, but it was the first thing that came into his head, “The others are doing them without me. I doubt anyone will miss me much.”

Once they reached the edge of the sand dunes, and went back on to the firmer sand, Jake seemed to hit his stride. Sorcha struggled to keep pace with him, even when she was facing in the right direction and thinking about her feet, and found herself having to break into a jog so as not to be left behind. It made him slow down, albeit with the inevitable string of apologies.

The tide was coming back in, and the sun was beginning to sink down towards the top of the arches. Once the apologies were done they lapsed into silence. For once, Sorcha was happy for the silence just to be a silence. It didn’t need to mean anything, because she could almost believe that the conversation would go on.

As they walked on along the beach, each wrapped in thoughts of the other, they fell into step.

Chapter Fifty One

Nothing was quite how she expected it to be.

Sorcha hadn’t been surprised that she didn’t feel liberated when she had finally closed the door behind her and handed over the keys to the flat: it was too soon. The operation on her shoulder had been meant as a sign of a new beginning, but that hadn’t felt like it either. She had felt guilty that she wanted to have it done at all, scared of the anaesthetic and generally exasperated at her own inability to get into the frame of mind she needed to be in. It hadn’t even made it all go away. The ugly red ridge had been reduced to a tiny, tidy pinkish line, but most of the rest of it had been left. She had become quite good at not even thinking about punching people when they told her that time would heal things: she had concluded that it took more energy than it was worth.

In some ways it didn’t come as a surprise when New Zealand failed to be what she wanted it to be, too. The only surprise was that it failed so quickly. She had been hoping finally to escape, and find a place where she could think without the past blocking her every way forward, but in her head that place was always lit by blazing sunshine. Instead, she had landed in Auckland under leaden skies, and she only just made it to her hotel before the heavens opened. Struggling to stay awake, she had ventured out anyway. It had only taken a few minutes before she was soaked through to the skin, and rainwater seemed to be trying to run between her sandals and her feet as she walked up the hill away from the waterfront. It felt a bit like skating, only messier and with no one to hold her up. She was looking for a city centre which didn’t really exist, and as she peered up at the skyline, in the gloom, the first names which she saw on two of the towers in the business district were those of two of her former clients. She burst into tears, knowing at least that she was so wet already it was likely to be hard to tell.

It had got better: it had mostly stopped raining, and once she had got away from Auckland it had felt more like a place worth visiting. But something about that first day had told her that it was unlikely to lead her to the answers, even if she had been willing to let it do so. One of the biggest problems with travelling alone was that you got stuck with other people who were doing the same thing. They were a weird bunch of misfits – the students who didn’t want to grow up mixed with the heartbroken, the bereaved, the unhinged and the fired. Sorcha quickly got into a routine of avoiding anything which sounded like an offer of companionship, and retreating at the first opportunity to a hotel room to call Jane and tell her how ridiculous everyone was. Jane’s patience was wearing thin, but most of the time she was calling her at work: that, and the fact that Jane was naturally considerate and polite, meant that she was unlikely to let rip.

Sorcha had been travelling around for well over a month when she joined a group spending five days hiking in a forested area near the top of South Island. The exertion of walking was welcome, and she deliberately took detours and went back on herself to try to make herself more tired, but she was becoming increasingly claustrophobic too. It didn’t matter that there were only a dozen people within miles of her: that was a dozen too many, and she constantly felt the need to get away from them. It didn’t help that there were a couple of temporarily unemployed IT strategists from Blackpool in the group, who recognised her as soon as the group had convened at a motel in Nelson. She had told them, very clearly, that there was nothing to tell, but they still kept trying to find new ways of asking questions. As she walked along, their questions started repeating in her head, in time with her feet. She began to wonder whether her only chance was to get completely away: to find somewhere where she didn’t need to interact with anybody at all. The thought scared her, but she was beginning to wonder what other options she had.

The final straw came on the final night. They were back in a hotel, with mains electricity and a hot tub, but it was still a long way from most of the rest of civilisation. Sorcha had been woken by her phone ringing in the middle of the night. She wasn’t sure whether she hoped or expected it to be someone telling her that her mother was dying, but she was angry when it wasn’t. It was one of the old codgers from Sheffield, who had been particularly active in trying to drum up resistance when Norman had put her forward for equity. It didn’t help that it didn’t occur to him that it might be nearly three o’clock in the morning for her: she had to remind herself that it was entirely possible that he didn’t own a passport.

It was when he had started asking her when she was planning on returning to the office that she had discovered that Norman had in effect never processed her resignation: the upper echelons of the firm thought that she was simply taking a period of unpaid leave. She was cross with herself for not being more suspicious that he had given in so easily, even if he had probably only intended to give her time. She would probably never have known, either, if all had gone to plan. It was just that the plan had not included Norman being suspended as a result of an investigation into suspected insider dealing, and everything that he had done being reviewed and re-reviewed by the creaking, procedure-bound old guard.

Although Sorcha knew that she was, once again, little more than collateral damage in someone else’s crisis, she struggled not to take it personally. The voice at the end of the phone had not even believed her when she had explained that she had known nothing about it because she was in the middle of a wilderness about eleven thousand miles away. It took her a while to realise that the individual in question was sufficiently off the pace that he probably still regarded the year-old rumours that she and Norman were a couple as current. The call had ended with her saying that she needed to take legal advice in relation to her return to the firm, which was almost the last thing on the planet that she wanted to do, but that she would co-operate with anything she was legally required to cooperate with. She mentioned that it would probably be better to ensure that her name was not linked with anything in the press more out of a sense of hopelessness than anything else. The tone at the other end of the line had suddenly become concerned and avuncular, before reverting to telling her that they would also consider what they believed to be her obligations under the partnership deed.

She had been left watching dawn break over what the tour guide had described as an ancient beech forest, wondering why Jane wasn’t answering her phone, and wishing that she had access to the files of papers which she had stowed away in her mother’s attic. She needed to be more sure than she was that she had done everything she needed to do: she knew that she had given formal notice in writing, which had been acknowledged, but the arrangement that they had reached was clearly a bit of a fudge and she hadn’t gone through every last comma of the partnership deed to check whether there were other things which some bastard on a mission could claim that she should have done as well. It had been part of not wanting to be a lawyer, and in the process she had somehow mislaid her professional cynicism before it was safe to do so. There seemed to be no reason not to beat herself up about it.

Sorcha had planned to spend the following day hiking with an American woman who had been part of the group hike. She had discovered very little about her in the few days that they had already spent together, which had been one of the reasons why she had been willing to tolerate her for longer. Sorcha wondered if it was a sign that she wasn’t meant to go when she got a message at breakfast saying that the American had a migraine and wouldn’t be joining her, but couldn’t think of anything else to do with the day. Despite her interrupted night, sleep was the last thing that she wanted – and any attempt at sedentary relaxation was likely to be doomed, too. The driver who had been booked to drop them off and pick them up again at the end of the day had seemed unhappy at the idea of her going on her own, too, but he at least had relented once she had confirmed with him the details of her route.

The majority of the trail that she was following was out along a headland, with a long section running along the top of some cliffs. Sorcha let her anger propel her rather faster than she would usually have gone. She was largely oblivious to her surroundings, because her head was bury rerunning the previous night’s conversation and trying to think of a way out of it all. It was like moving the pieces of a puzzle round and round, getting faster and faster, without them ever seeming to fit. She would probably have carried on doing it all day, had she not been thinking about slapping Norman again while right on the cliff edge, and missed her footing in the process. She managed to catch hold of a boulder on the cliff side of the path, and only parts of her left leg got as far as dangling over the edge. There was no damage done, other than some scratches on the back of her leg and a large bruise on her backside which would probably take weeks to develop, but it had been too close a shave. She had perched herself on the boulder for a while, trying to calm down. When she had eventually set off again her surroundings had at least come into focus, but rather than being able to appreciate the solitude and beauty of the place it felt dangerous. The urge to finish the stretch along the cliff as quickly as she could was fighting a battle with a newfound terror of taking risks, and she didn’t much enjoy being their battlefield.

The path along the cliffs lead down to a beach. The driver had called her just as she had finished walking down the steps which were carved into the cliff-side. It was the second time that he had called to check up on her: if she had been really wanting solitude it might have been intrusive, but as it was it just made her realise that she had reached the beach far too early. It was almost deserted, and its size meant that the few people that were there looked like tiny distant ants. It was remote and hard to get to, but it was also late February. The schools had gone back, and the forecast had been for rain. The forecast had been gloriously wrong, and the sunshine beating down on Sorcha’s face and arms and legs had been the only thing which had meant the day had not yet started to feel like an unmitigated disaster, but once she was down on the sand, looking up at the huge rock arches which stood out like islands not far from the shore, she started to feel unnerved by the strangeness and the remoteness of the place. The sand itself was the colour of quicksilver, or of cement: for a moment it made her think of a moonscape; then of the barren, toxic residue from an anonymous, devouring industrial process.

The tide was quite a long way out, and down near the water the sand was firm and easy to walk on. She let the waves lap at her boots, and tried to let some of the gremlins go with them, but all it really achieved was a salt line across her toes. Sorcha had not been aware of it being particularly windy, but a kite surfer skidded past her at great speed, almost lifting off as he turned to avoid crashing into the ocean. She wondered why he had bothered to carry his kit to such a remote location, as he was carried off and into the distance.

When she eventually got there, more cliffs cut off the other end of the beach. Sorcha had found a shady spot in which to sit and eat the lunch that the hotel had given her: she had become more or less inured to all of the odd things that you could do with ham, cheese and bread before wrapping them up in cling-film. When she had spoken to the driver for the second time, he had suggested that she hike up to their intended meeting point, at a car park a mile or so away from this end of the beach, and then hike on to a second beach over the other side of the headland. They had agreed that she would let him know if that was what she was going to do. Although she knew that she was unlikely to ever have the chance to go there again, she decided that she’d seen enough that was new for one day. There were sand dunes and some rock pools over the back of the beach she was on. She decided to spend the time exploring them instead. It meant she could go back to trying to get her thoughts in order, without having to worry about falling off cliffs again.

It was quite a distance from where she had been sitting to the sand dunes, most of it over the sand which had been compacted down by the sea. As she set off, she let the puzzle pieces start moving round in her head again as one foot moved mechanically in front of the other.

Sorcha wasn’t sure when she realised that there was someone following her. Walking on the wet sand didn’t really make a noise, and what sound there was got carried away with the breeze and swallowed up by the waves. The gremlins caught up with her again, and wouldn’t let her turn round. But still she had a sense that there was someone behind her, closing in on her. She started to walk faster, hoping that whoever it was would just decide to go in a different direction and leave her alone, but it still felt as if they were somehow following behind her.

It was only once she started to run that she knew for sure that there was someone there. They started to run too, which she could hear above the sound of the sea, and whoever it was seemed to call out. She couldn’t hear what they said, which was both frustrating and reassuring, but as she tried to run faster to make her escape the sand under her feet became drier and softer. She tried to sprint, but the sand gave way beneath her so that she barely moved forwards at all. She could hear her pursuer gaining on her, and could hear that he was calling to her to wait, which made her try frantically to run faster. The sand turned her terror into a pantomime, as she tried struggled up the foot of the dunes.

Sorcha pushed herself way beyond what she thought were her physical limits, but it was still no time at all before she could feel that he was standing behind her. She could hear his breathing, heavy and irregular as he tried to recover from running. She froze, realising that the geology had ensured that her luck had run out, and waited. An image of her mother as she had been nearly thirty years earlier on a holiday in Dorset floated into her head, and she let it stay there.

And nothing happened.

Sorcha wondered for a moment if she was beginning to suffer from delusions too: if she was, she was glad that there had been nobody watching. Braced with the cheerful thought that she was probably just imagining people following her, in broad daylight having consumed nothing more toxic than a ham and cheese bap, she turned round. Her feet slipped in the sand as she did so, and she slid part of the way back down the side of the dune.

Chapter Fifty

Jane settled into the armchair with a large mug of cocoa. They had spent the morning shovelling snow, but there was nothing more to be done until the evening when they were having dinner with some of her work colleagues. Sorcha let herself flop onto the end of the chaise longue, and watched the fire glowing and flickering in the grate while Jane leafed through the TV listings.

“I hate the way they do it now. You have to wait until four o’clock for It’s a Wonderful Life.”

“You watched it yesterday. You can’t possibly need to see it again today.”

Jane had been having to resist the temptation to jolly Sorcha along for weeks.

“But it’s meant to be on all the time over Christmas. It always used to be, until somebody did something about the copyright.” She closed the magazine and put it on the table next to the chair, and then put the cocoa mug down on top of it, “I’m going to have to get it on DVD, although that feels like cheating.”

Sorcha was talking with her eyes closed.

“This is something I never thought I would say, but hurrah for the copyright guys. Remind me not to buy it for you.”

“But you can’t have Christmas without It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s like a Christmas without Santa or carols or mulled wine.”

“Yes you can. It’s stupid sentimental nonsense, and anyone with half a brain should run a mile the moment it the angels start fiddling around talking about getting dressed.”

It also represented a nostalgia for a past which was Jane’s and not hers, but that would be giving too much away. Sorcha had always thought that she liked white Christmases. She only remembered two or three from her childhood: a couple of inches of snow on the back lawn made the day feel like an event, and meant that they got to build a snowman rather than being dragged out on some long, damp, pointless walk. But that had been nothing like this. The house was set down from the road, and the snow that morning had been up over the window sills. It made her feel claustrophobic. Digging, with watery sunshine somewhere overhead, had come as a release. She had been worried about whether her shoulder would hold up: it was about a month since she’d had surgery to tidy up the scarring, and she was still nervous about it. She had felt it pulling for the first half hour or so, but it was literally only skin-deep and the rhythm and the movement had then taken over. The feeling of utter exhaustion which had set in, once they had dug a way through to the road, was strangely comfortable.

“There’s nothing wrong with angels.”

Sorcha opened her eyes, and propped herself up on her elbows.

“Maybe not. Maybe it’s just me, Pet.” She stretched one leg out in front of her, “You know, for a while I thought the problem was that I should have failed more when I was younger, but the more I think about it the more I think I’ve been failing for years and just not noticing it. I’ve always been particularly crap at Christmas.”

Jane was tempted to agree with her. For the previous twenty years Sorcha had almost always ended up calling her twice on Christmas day: once to wish her a happy Christmas, and then again later in some kind of towering fury which needed to be defused. The causes had varied from presents which had been given to her sister and being forced to eat sprouts, to the discovery that John had been lying to her about his political ambitions.

“Last Christmas wasn’t so bad.”

They had spent five days with Pippa staying in Sorcha’s old flat, and wandered around London pretending to be tourists. Jane cherished the memory of Sorcha being completely unable to stand up on the ice at Somerset House: she and Pippa had taken it in turns to prop her up. Sorcha was deliberately not remembering it at all, and said nothing.

“They let me speak to Pip yesterday. She said hello.”

She’d actually said sorry, at least a dozen times, but Jane didn’t want to go there. Sorcha knew what she was trying to do, and wished that she would stop it.

“I have nothing to say to her. I just can’t imagine even trying to have a conversation with her. Ever.”

“I didn’t speak to her for long. She was slurring a bit, and kept saying she couldn’t concentrate.” Jane seemed to stop and stare at the fire, “I had a much longer chat with her Mum: she says it’s because of the drugs, but I doubt that helps much. I get the impression she’s finding it all hard to cope with, still.”

“I’m not fucking surprised.” Sorcha picked up a glass which was on the floor in front of her, and stood up to go to the kitchen. “Every time I think about Pip, I feel sick. And it’s not so much what she did, even. It’s more that I’m scared about what it means about me. And she was only my friend, not my daughter.”

Jane felt a huge sense of sadness about Pip, but whenever she tried to talk to Sorcha about it she was stonewalled. The ways in which they had been hurt by it were just too different.

“What are you afraid of?”

Jane asked the question tentatively, knowing she was heading into uncharted territory, but Sorcha did at least stay in the room. She perched on the arm of the other chair.

“Fuck knows.” She saw a spot of pancake mixture on her jeans, and started picking at it. Jane sat and watched the sparks in the grate, “For a while I thought it was just having got caught up in the fight, and then the shooting, but it’s not that. It’s like I totally lost track of reality too. Not just Pip, although she was a part of it. Jake too. It’s as if I totally took leave of my senses, and I’ve no idea how to stop it happening again.”

“You’re not being fair on yourself. It was a crazy situation, and I still don’t really know what to think about Pip. And you know damned well that Jake was real.”

“You mean if I cut him I know damned well that he bleeds?” Jane winced slightly, “I just should never have gone anywhere near him in the first place. That’s where I went wrong on that one.”

“Why?”

Sorcha was rightly suspicious of the question.

“What do you mean “why”?” Jane didn’t seem to be about to explain herself. “As you very perceptively pointed out yourself before I’d properly got myself into this mess, the idea of me having anything to do with a scrawny brainless pop singer was always patently ridiculous.”

It was a conversation Jane had often wished she could go back and erase.

“When I said that, I had no idea that you would go and jump into bed with him.” She looked at Sorcha, who looked sadder than she sounded. “He didn’t really seem like that at all, anyway. You know that.”

“I didn’t jump into bed with him. Not the way you mean.” She enjoyed the look of disbelief which Jane wasn’t even attempting to hide, “I think we were probably going to, but then Pip happened. I’m not sure whether it makes him more or less real, but I keep telling myself that it ought to have made it less complicated.”

“But it doesn’t?”

“I don’t know, do I? That’s the problem.”

It was the most that she had said about Jake since he had walked out of the flat on the Sunday afternoon. Jane had kept a watch on the internet for press comment, but apart from the podcast and a statement issued after his father’s rescue and arrest there had been virtually nothing about him which was more than third-hand rumour. Sorcha had sounded off at great length about what a worthless, brainless slimeball Marty King was, and how she couldn’t believe that he was being allowed to get away with it, but Jake had remained absolutely untouchable.

“I’m sorry, my dear. I really am.” Jane hoped that Sorcha would forgive her for not leaving it at that, “You know, of all the men you’ve ever got tangled up with, I think he’s about the only one who has seemed to want to fight for you rather than against you. He was just so angry when he showed up, that their security guys hadn’t got you out of there with him. I just couldn’t believe that he left like that.”

Sorcha looked across at Jane, and was surprised to see her all compassion and seriousness.

“It was better that he did. Can you imagine what would have happened if I had let him stick around? I would have just headed further off into cloud cuckoo land, and made even more of a fool of myself.”

She went through to the kitchen, to get away from the conversation, and opened the fridge to look for something to drink. It took Jane a couple of minutes to realise what she had said and follow her through, although she still seemed to be struggling to believe what she thought she’d just heard. Sorcha didn’t let her ask whatever question was trying to formulate itself, sensing that Jane was not particularly happy with her.

“What did he say, when he showed up? I never let you tell me.”

Jane wondered how long Sorcha was intending to keep talking with her back to her. She also wanted to ask Sorcha why she’d let her spend several months plotting an unwarranted revenge on an innocent man, but was afraid that the conversation would end messily if she did.

“I can’t really remember, to be honest. I had only just got there, and was still trying to figure out what on earth was going on. He was angry that you’d been left, and upset and angry that you weren’t there. The driver guy who was with him kept telling him to calm down, and had to tell him a couple of times that there was no way that he could go to the police station.” None of it was coming back clearly enough, and she knew that Sorcha would be disappointed, “I think it was the driver who suggested that he go and lay down for a bit. It was kind of funny: like he was talking to a small child. Jake came back out and stood and stared at that tree thing on your sitting room wall for a while, but didn’t say much. Then he just fell asleep. God alone knows how.”

Sorcha shut the fridge and lent against the corner of the table.

“Did you know he claims to be an insomniac? Except for some reason he always seemed to fall asleep when I was around. Half the time I think of him, I think of him asleep.” Jane’s sympathy was too painful, and she wasn’t sure that she wanted it, “I was going to send him that hanging, you know. Then I realised I didn’t have an address: even for the Manchester flat, I just knew that it was flat 41 somewhere high up near a canal. I would have had to send it to their record company. It’s all parcelled up in a tube in my Mum’s attic, with a blank address label on it.”

“You could have called him.”

Sorcha knew that she was about to put the final nails in her own coffin.

“Don’t think I haven’t thought about it, Pet. Even though he’s really, really crap on the phone.” Jane didn’t seem to believe her, “I mean crap to a level which is really quite hard to believe even once you’ve experienced it. But I haven’t got a number for him. All I ever had was a mobile number, and one for one of his bandmates from where he used my phone to make a call. They were both in my Goodmans phone, and I was so sure that he was part of what I needed to get away from that I didn’t take a note of them when I gave it back.”

She thought about telling Jane how often she contemplated calling either Maggie or Caroline, to see if anyone had downloaded the data from the SIM before destroying it, but decided that it was unlikely to help her cause. He would probably have changed his number again, anyway.

“And he hasn’t called you?”

Sorcha shook her head, and forced the edges of a smile.

“That’s not how he works. One of the most frustrating things about him was that if you tell him that you don’t want him around, he tends to believe you. I’m sure he’s probably holed up in some swanky hotel with a load of semi-naked dancers, anyway.” Jane noticed the tangle of tenses, and wanted to protest on his behalf, but knew that she had the barest of first impressions to go on. Sorcha seemed to be building up a picture of him to which she could remain immune, “I guess it’s all for the best, although I’ve spent way too long thinking about it. You know, I realised a couple of weeks ago that if he hadn’t been famous, I would never have even given him the time of day. That’s not exactly a sensible basis for anything, is it?”

Jane wasn’t quite sure whether to hug her or slap her, so kept her hands to herself.

“You’ve done worse, you know. Much worse. Being with someone is like a conversation. I don’t think it matters so much about how the conversation begins, just why you want it to continue.” Sorcha seemed to want her to carry on, but there really wasn’t much else to say. “You might have done better to figure that out before you sent him packing, though.”

It wasn’t helpful to hear it.

“Do you want to tell me that I shouldn’t have sold the flat, and that I should spend more time with my mother while you’re at it?”

Sorcha’s tone had changed: the barricades had shot back up and she was being very carefully and deliberately ironic. Jane backed off, even though she didn’t know how much else there was that she didn’t know.

“No, it’s OK. I’ll save those for later. I really don’t get it why you’ve suddenly got it into your head to go off to New Zealand, though. I know it’s supposed to be very pretty, and all that, but it’s a hell of a long way and you’ll be bored out of your mind. Aren’t there about ten times as many sheep as people?”

Chapter Forty Nine

Jane was out that evening. Sorcha wasn’t sure if she had decided that she was out of danger or beyond hope, but she was intending to head back to Connecticut in a day or two, and had wanted to go and visit her godmother before she went.

Once she had calmed down after the phone call, and persuaded herself to go back home, Sorcha’s biggest concern was how Jane was going to react to the fact that she was planning to sell the flat rather than let it. Even a news flash which said that Stephen Warren had been found in a house in Oldham, but helpfully said nothing more, failed properly to distract her. Every way she tried to imagine starting the conversation it turned into a fight.

While she was still trying to think up an alternative way to broach the subject, there was a knock at the door. Not the buzzer, which at least meant that whoever it was had fifteen floors still to travel, but a knock. At any other time the most likely explanation was one of the neighbours, although that only happened once or twice a year at most. Now it could be anyone. If it was right that Stephen Warren had been found, it was possible that the press would be having another go. She tried to ignore it and went into the kitchen: she told herself that she was getting a glass of water, but it wasn’t an accident that it also took her further away from the front door. Whoever it was knocked again. She wondered if she should call down to the concierge. Then another knock, which sounded as if whoever it was wanted to hammer the door down. Sorcha picked up the phone, and was trying to choose between the concierge and the police when the person on the landing realised that just knocking wasn’t going to get them what they wanted. A voice shouted through the keyhole.

“Let us in love. I’m stuck all on my own out here, and I can hear your TV’s on.”

It was muffled, but the voice didn’t sound familiar. She hesitated, and pulled a large knife out of the block in the kitchen, before heading into the hallway.

“Please love. Pretty please. I tried next door, but they’re out you see. I’ll even get down on my knees and beg.” There was a scuffling sound the other side of the door, followed by a series of long and whining pleas. She looked through the spy-hole, but could see nothing at all – presumably because whoever it was had knelt down below the sight line. If she put the door on the catch to open it, she was going to have to do so holding the knife somewhere around her knees.

“Stand up.” She shouted, but wasn’t sure how loud it needed to be. There was more scuffling. When she looked at the spy-hole again she saw a nose, with what looked to be two fish-bowl eyes some way behind it. “Who are you?”

“You don’t need to know that love. I just need somewhere to hang out for a bit.”

She wasn’t sure whether to hang onto the knife for dear life, or drop it in exasperation.

“Tell me who you are, or I’m calling the police.”

“Shit, no.” It was hard to tell whether whoever it was was actually worried, “Don’t call the police. You don’t need to call the police. I live here, I just can’t get into my flat.”

He didn’t say anything else, and it didn’t sound as if he was moving around either. She looked through the spy-hole again, and although he was slightly further away than he had been before she still couldn’t see him properly. She could see that he was wearing a T-shirt, even though it was the wrong time of year, and it looked as if he had tattoos. She didn’t know anyone who had tattoos. She was afraid, and she had been too afraid too recently to be able to get a proper grip on herself.

“Step back from the door so that I can see you properly, and put your hands up.”

“Who the hell trained you? The CIA?” More scuffling, “What happened to ‘love your neighbour’, eh?”

She looked again, and he was standing in the middle of the landing area. As she watched, he switched from looking at her door head on, giving her first a left profile and then a right one. She wasn’t quite sure what she was seeing, and the distortion of the lens really didn’t help. She put the latch across, and opened the door a fraction. He moved forwards, just as she yelled at him to stay where he was. He sprang back to attention, and there was no longer any doubt about who she was dealing with. She opened the door as far as it would go with the chain still across.

“What the hell are you doing here? Last I heard they you were being driven around the States, drugged up in the back of a container lorry.”

When she had opened the door further Marty had taken a step forward again, only to see him spring back again when the knife came into view. He looked almost as afraid as she felt.

“Who the hell told you about the lorry? Nobody’s said anything about that. And why are you waving a fucking knife around. I just wanted somewhere to stay for an hour or two until someone comes to pick me up, but some nutter’s kicked my door in and then nailed it all up. Jesus.”

She left the chain across, and hid as much of herself behind the door as she could. He looked absolutely nothing like any kidnap victim or hostage she’d ever seen. His hair had been cut, not cheaply, the stubble was just the right length and there was at least a suggestion of fake tan. The only sign of any luggage was a black leather holdall, on the floor over by the lift, which had a jacket of some sort thrown on top of it. It didn’t occur to her that her silence was likely to be freaking him out.

“That wasn’t you, bashed my door down, was it?” He started backing away, towards the lift. “Look, I don’t know what you’ve got going on, but you should get help.”

Sorcha shivered, and then felt silly. She shut the door to take the chain off, before opening it again as quickly as she could. He was still standing by the lift. She was still holding the knife.

“I’ve had a bad week.” It didn’t come close to doing justice to the situation, “Well, couple of weeks, at least. What are you here for, and why didn’t you want me to call the police? I’m guessing that they were the ones who knocked your door down, looking for either you or your charming friend.”

He was watching the knife intently as she spoke, in a way which didn’t leave much scope to pay attention to anything else.

“If we’re going to have a conversation, is there any chance you could get rid of the knife?” She shook her head, and kept on shaking it, “That’s a shame. Look, love, I’m actually a really nice guy if you just get to know me. Never had an unsatisfied customer, however much I’ve paid her.” She felt herself tensing more, and clasped the knife tightly in front of her, “OK, look, I’m here because I need to find a mate before he does anything stupid. A car is meant to be coming for me at eight. I just need somewhere to hang out until then.”

“If you mean Stephen Warren, you’re too late. The BBC gave out that he had been captured about an hour ago.”

“You’re shitting me, right?”

The knife blade was still pointing straight at him, but it was something in his reaction which made Sorcha feel calmer. He seemed to be worried, in a normal, human way.

“No, I’m not. I’m sorry. I have no idea who spirited you over here, or where they had been keeping you, but if I were you I’d get them to spirit you straight back again.”

She glanced across at the lift, which had just started moving, and as she did so he seemed to catch sight of something he hadn’t seen before. He put his head to one side and looked as if he was watching her.

“What?”

He grinned at her, slowly.

“You’re Jake’s girl, aren’t you? They showed me a couple of pictures. Bloody hell, you’re not like the meek little things he usually goes for.” He seemed to be holding some kind of celebration inside his head, “Shit. It’ll be weird being neighbours and everything. Maybe I’ll have to start spending some time here again. It’ll be like the old days, except I’m still a fuck of a lot richer than the rest of them. Whatever they say.”

He was still grinning. She was wishing that she didn’t keep having to say it, and didn’t properly listen to the rest of what he said.

“You’re not likely to see Jake around here, Pet. Rumour has it he doesn’t enjoy gunshot wounds much, and I’m selling up anyway. Estate agent’s coming round tomorrow morning to do the measurements.” She thought about what Jake would say if he could see her, standing there, having the conversation. “If your paths ever cross, you can tell Jake I threatened you with a ten inch cook’s knife: I doubt he’ll be surprised.”

She didn’t mean to, or even really notice, but tears started to trickle down her face. Marty seemed to hesitate before moving closer to her. She let him take the knife out of her hand because it seemed pointless to keep hold of it any more. There was a shelf unit just inside the front door, and he set it down on top of it.

“Come here love.” He held out his arms to her, “You have had a shit couple of weeks, haven’t you? Come and have a hug.”

She didn’t fight as much as should have: she wasn’t sure that she actually fought at all, although she definitely thought about it. He was a warm, solid presence, but he smelled strange. Like leather and mouthwash, with cigarettes and a hint of menthol or eucalyptus. Something like Vicks or Olbas Oil. They stayed like that for longer than they should have: long enough for Sorcha to get her act together, and wonder how the hell to get herself out of the situation she had somehow stumbled into. He didn’t seem to be inclined to loosen his hold on her, so she spoke at his chest and upper arm.

“You must have had a pretty shit few months yourself. What did they do to you?”

It worked: he didn’t quite let go, but he shifted so that she was far enough away to be a plausible audience. He didn’t look as subdued by the question as she had hoped he would, though.

“It wasn’t actually that bad. Stupid bugger doing it this time didn’t really want to cause any bother. The first couple of weeks were shit, but he didn’t actually like giving me the drugs and stuff. I reckon he was also a bit lonely. Ended up with us just driving round a bit, and me hiding when there were other people around.”

“You let him drive you around for four months?”

The question wasn’t particularly friendly, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“Mad, innit? We were even going to get matching tattoos, but we couldn’t agree a design. Then the silly bugger just ran away, and left me in a parking lot. Left me all on my ownsome, somewhere in the middle of fucking Kentucky.” He did what had probably once been an approximation of puppy eyes, but puppies didn’t have age spots and wrinkles. “That definitely deserves another hug.”

He grabbed Sorcha close to him again, catching her completely unawares as he did so. She gasped in surprise, and he pushed the door closed behind them with his foot. He kept hold of her as he carried on talking.

“Especially as I’ve come all this way, with a little help from half the fucking unofficial universe, to find that it’s all too late.” He thrust his groin hard up against her, and she yelped in surprise. It didn’t mean what he thought it meant, and he had no idea how lucky he was that she could no longer reach the knife, “That deserves at least another hug, I reckon.”

Before Sorcha had a chance to use either cunning or force to extricate herself, she found his face bearing down on her face, and his tongue shoved unceremoniously in her mouth. She’d had no idea that it was open, but had no time to think about it as one of his hands slid down inside the waistband of her jeans. She stamped hard on one of his feet, and spat his tongue back at him as best she could, making a bid for freedom.

It didn’t quite work, because his hand was still inside her jeans.

“What the fuck was that for? We’ve both had a shit time of it, and we’ve got an hour or so now when we could have a bit of fun.” He was attempting an expression which had probably once been impish, “It’s not often you get a chance to shag a bona fide rock star. You’ll be telling your mates about this for years.”

She was twisting, trying to extricate his hand, which he seemed to want to leave where it was.

“Get your hands off me, and get out of this flat this minute, or I’m definitely calling the police. They’ll want to talk to you about the blackmail if nothing else.”

As she said it, she realised that she shouldn’t have. She felt the usual cold, hollow, falling feeling from screwing up again. The worst of it was that it had happened so often in such a short period of time that she was almost used to it, although it still made the relief when he held his hands up in the air, in carefully faked surprise, quite a lot less comfortable than it should have been. She suddenly, stupidly remembered that she had intended to try to get him to agree to her having gone into his flat, but standing there looking at him it was quite clear that none of it had been worth it, just as none of it could ever be undone.

“Calm down love. I didn’t mean no harm.”

He was trying the puppy eyes again, which was just ridiculous.

“Get. Out.”

An air of wounded astonishment set in as he finally got the message that she didn’t want him around and was unlikely to change her mind.

“It’s OK.” His hands were back in the air. She opened the door for him, so that he could keep them there, “I’m going. And they’ll never get me on that blackmail shit. I told Stevo it was all a load of bollocks from the beginning.”

He winked at her, and then picked up his bag and turned and walked down the stairs. Sorcha was angry with him, more because of what he was than because of anything he had done. More than ever it confirmed her need to get away, and her fury was such that Jane gave up even trying to challenge it. She knew that Sorcha’s reaction to Marty was mostly anger with herself, but could see no way of breaking through it.

It seemed right when the flat sold almost as soon as it went on the market. There were two asking price offers within the first few days, both from cash buyers, and it ended up going on sealed envelope bids. Sorcha never even met the buyer, and decided that she was happier that way. The fewer chances there were for anyone to ask for an explanation, the better. She kept her work handovers as short as possible for the same reason, and ended up packing her life away with the TV playing in the background, with the news bulletins generally on mute as Keith was found shortly after Stephen Warren was arrested, Marty gave more press conferences than he needed to, and speculation about what exactly had happened continued to rumble on. She hated herself for wishing she knew more about it all, but it soon became apparent that less than what she already knew was going to be made public before Keith McDonald and Stephen Warren were brought to trial. That was likely to take at least six months, and she had no intention of waiting around for it to happen.

Chapter Forty Eight

Sorcha knew that Norman was assuming that she would change her mind, but ultimately didn’t care. He could probably slow her down, but he certainly couldn’t stop her. The only problem was that she needed it all to speed up, not slow down. She was struggling to fill a day, let alone a week: even crying, when it happened, didn’t really take long enough. Needing to fill the time was the only thing which even vaguely tempted her back to the work routine, but there were too many things to be afraid of it for it to be much of a temptation.

She had looked at some of the press coverage of what had happened, although she was as repelled by it as she was fascinated. Because she had disappeared from view and said nothing other than the one statement which Norman had issued on her behalf, she had very quickly become little more than a footnote to the story. She would be mentioned from time to time but after one or two lurid fantasies in the tabloids at the beginning of the week, which had been printed before the police had issued a statement saying that they were satisfied that she had known nothing about what Pippa had intended to do, it was clear that the world had decided that she wasn’t the main story. She couldn’t decide whether to be glad or not. If there was something on the TV news, she mostly hit mute and then watched it without sound. She scanned newspaper headlines, but somehow didn’t really read the articles. The only part which she simply couldn’t bear to look at, at all, was the inevitable debate about mental health provision and regulation: it just made her feel sick, and want to hide. Even Jake was easier to deal with than that: a podcast in which he said thank you to fans for their messages of support had been posted on the band’s website, and it felt reassuringly abstract. It helped that it looked as if he had stopped bleeding.

Sorcha had started trying to find out more about Stephen Warren just to make the time pass at something closer to its normal speed. She started randomly googling, but quickly realised that she was both going round in circles and picking up conflicting information, without being able to remember what it was that she had seen where. The first couple of times she had just given up, and tried to distract herself with something else, before finding herself back at the computer doing the same thing all over again and getting even crosser with herself than she had been before. Eventually she went and dug out a notebook and pencil and started making notes, and tried not to think about the fact that it was almost as if she was pretending to be at work.

There was little that was officially available about him, and what there was managed to be both dull and contradictory. It didn’t take Sorcha long to move onto the mass of material in forums and blogs, and she soon hit the forum postings by the girl who had thumped Duncan. Pippa had posted using a screen-name of “Bubbles”: Sorcha didn’t like the idea that she was somehow following in her footsteps, and was almost put off by it, but the truth was that it looked as if she had been trying to do the same thing as she was. Through the forum, and blogs and websites belonging to some of the forum members, she found a mass of photos and other comments about who Stephen Warren knew and how he knew them. Not all of it was true, but at least some of it had to be, and it was better than nothing.

Jane was still there, hovering, forcing her to eat and waiting for her to break down again. They had reached a stand-off in which Sorcha’s plans were acknowledged but not discussed. Jane kept looking for an opening to talk about it without it becoming a confrontation again, but it didn’t seem to come. Instead, Sorcha just spent more and more time on the computer. Jane didn’t think much of it when she asked her to go out and get her a pay-as-you-go mobile which wouldn’t be traceable back to her, so that she still had something once she had given her Goodmans phone and blackberry back. She didn’t realise that Sorcha had gambled, correctly, on her not reading or watching much recent detective fiction: the fact that there were still a couple of very bored looking photographers outside the front of the block some mornings meant that she didn’t need to explain why anonymity mattered.

When Norman called to say that they had agreed that she could take leave for the majority of her notice period, Sorcha had a moment of panic, but there was nobody she felt she could tell. Instead, she told him that she needed to look into how long it would take to sell her flat, and would then confirm her plans.

But it didn’t take long to set up a discussion with an estate agent, either, although she had to force herself to do it. She was gradually getting used to forcing herself to do everyday things, and other things just seemed to become part of the same list. The discussion only increased her sense of inner panic, though. The estate agent had looked as if he was barely old enough to be out of school, but had seemed to think that it was possible that the sale would take weeks rather than months. Although it wasn’t bonus season there were still cash buyers in the market and there were always people interested in flats in her block. He had been excited rather than put off by the security measures which meant it wasn’t that easy to get visitors into the block, and they had arranged for him to come and view it the next day.

She felt as if she was shaking when she walked out of the office and along the King’s Road, but nobody noticed. It was a mild, dry day, and the next thing on her list was to make some phone calls: she wasn’t sure that she wanted to make them, but the deal she had done with herself was that once things were on the list they happened whether she liked it or not. Even with the mobile, she didn’t want to call from the flat. On the way back there was a small park with a children’s play area. There were a two mothers there with toddlers, talking over their heads as they pushed them on the swings. Sorcha settled herself on a bench as far away from them as possible, and tried to focus on her breathing.

In among the hundreds of photos of Stephen Warren with Marty King, and other random celebrities, there had been a handful with what looked to be old school friends. The same three of four faces had popped up in photos taken over a period of about twenty years, and there had been enough snippets of information for Sorcha to track down contact information for two of them. The plan wasn’t a very sophisticated one: she was just going to call and pretend to be a journalist again, and see if there was anything at all that they were willing to tell her. She knew that she was taking a risk, but the alternative was to do nothing at all: if she did that, it felt like she was never going to find a way to move on.

Just before she had left that morning, Sorcha had come across more photos using a link into facebook. One of the men she had the number for had been pictured with his son, in front of a container lorry.

The first call was short and sweet. She had been told to fuck off and never fucking call again before she had even finished explaining who she was. The tone had been more vicious than it needed to be, and she had started shaking again. She had almost chickened out of making the second call, but had forced herself to carry on anyway. What she could never explain, even to herself, was why she said what she did when the call was answered.

A man had answered the phone, just saying “Yes?”.

She was sitting in the open, with traffic noise, children playing and general city hum all around her, and barely even heard him say it. She almost asked him to repeat what he said, but then wondered if that would sound odd. Instead, rather than asking to speak to David Cornwall, which was the name written on the piece of paper which she was holding in front of her, she asked to speak to Stephen Warren.

There was some kind of scuffle at the other end of the line. The man who had answered the phone seemed to be threatening someone else who was in the same room, asking who the fuck they had been talking to, and then the line went dead.

Sorcha’s first thought was to run, although she had nowhere to run either to or from. Then she had to stifle a random spike of elation which suddenly appeared from nowhere and made her want to jump up and down, before taking a moment or two to get the world back the right way up. The card was still in her handbag, in the pocket in which she usually kept her phone. She called the detective leading the hunt for Stephen Warren, using an Irish accent which only her cousins usually heard, and told him where she thought he might find him, telling him that she thought he knew that his cover had been blown. Then she hung up, and walked back along the King’s Road to Peter Jones, on the basis that it was somewhere where nobody was likely to look for her; trying not to hope too much, or think about how badly she might have screwed things up again.

Chapter Forty Seven

Jane and Sorcha got through the evening in an almost surreal sense of calm. They spent most of it just sitting around, talking mostly about Pippa, with Jane checking the internet for news from time to time. Sorcha was cold, and didn’t want to eat, but was otherwise in much better shape than she had looked to be when she had first stumbled back through the door.

When they had gone through to the sitting room, Sorcha had been surprised to see three small bottles of bright orange Lucozade sitting on the coffee table.

“I didn’t think you drunk this stuff.”

“I have absolutely no idea what that stuff is, other than that it is really, really nasty colour.” Jane hesitated, unsure quite how sensitive Sorcha was going to be, “Jake bought it with him. Or rather, the driver guy did. He must have just forgotten about it.”

Tempted as she was to explain who the “driver guy” was, Sorcha really didn’t want to have to talk about him. The idea of Jake drinking anything which was quite so defiantly synthetic was frankly weird, but she didn’t want to talk about him either, so she put them away in one of the kitchen cupboards and let Jane start asking questions about Dan instead.

Jane and Sorcha even went to bed at around midnight, despite Jane’s jet lag and the fact that Sorcha had completely lost track of which day it was and what planet she was on. She had been wrapped in a quilt and a blanket on the sofa, and there seemed little point in swapping them for a duvet and a bed, but still she went along with it. It took an act of will to banish the image of Jake from the bed, but it did at least seem to stay away once she had done so. Jane began to wonder whether whatever Jake had said to Sorcha – which was clearly completely off-limits, and looked likely to stay that way – had actually averted the storm. It seemed unlikely, but she still hoped.

Sorcha had laid quietly in the darkness for a couple of hours, trying to will herself into a peaceful kind of sleep, but she was both too tired and too afraid of what she would see if she was no longer in control of her thoughts. She could only assume that somehow, eventually, she would sleep. Failing that, daylight would return and she could stop trying for a while. She couldn’t manage to think of nothing, but she could just about think of factual things; things that Jake had said, things that Jane had said, and think of them as just things. She let them churn around in her head like cogs, because trying to stop them was all too difficult.

It worked, mostly, until the cogs turned again, and she suddenly saw herself sitting in the taxi, and heard herself saying that she could do anything on lip gloss and Lucozade. There was nothing at all that she could do to put the memory back where it had come from, and the floodgates opened. Jane heard her sobbing so hard that she thought she was going to howl, but it sounded as if she was trying to stifle the sobbing in the pillows. She took that to mean that Sorcha wanted to be alone; but when it continued for well over an hour, she went in to her with a glass of water. Sorcha apologised, drank the water, said that she had remembered what the Lucozade was for, and then started sobbing inconsolably again. It carried on that way for most of the next day, and some of the one after that, and while Sorcha did sleep from time to time it was fitful and fearful, and more than once she woke herself up screaming. Jane fielded phone calls, answered questions, tried to make sure that Sorcha didn’t get too badly dehydrated, and wondered how long it would take.

On the Tuesday evening, Jane was chopping carrots in the kitchen, having decided that she was going to have another go at making Sorcha eat something. Sorcha came and stood in the doorway. She had taken a bath, and Jane expected her to be in a bath robe or pyjamas. Instead, she was wearing jeans and a sweater with a kind of lacy shirt underneath. She looked pale, but in control.

“I’ve been an idiot.”

“It’s OK. I promise not to tell anyone.”

Jane said it without first working out what it was that Sorcha meant, and then found herself holding her breath.

“I mean it. All of this. It’s just hugely out of proportion. You could have told me to get a grip, you know.”

Sorcha was watching closely for Jane’s reaction. Jane went over and hugged her: Sorcha was often prickly, even at the best of times, but she seemed to be trying to connect.

“There isn’t a right way of dealing with this, my dear. Any of it. I think some of it’s still the reaction you didn’t really have to all of the Stephen Warren stuff. It’s just kind of hit you all at once.” Sorcha didn’t immediately reply, “They at least reckon the policeman is going to make it now, which is good.”

“I know.” Jane looked confused, “There’s internet on my blackberry, and radios in the bedroom and the bathroom. I know I’m not going to be able to just avoid it forever.”

Jane looked slightly sheepish, but was worried.

“Maybe not, but I reckon you’re allowed some time in hiding to lick your wounds. These things do just take time, my dear. Months and years, not just a day or two. I know you aren’t going to want to hear this, but it’s going to take months before everything seems even barely OK again, and months or years more before you’re properly over it all and can think about Pip or guns or boy bands without wishing you were somewhere else and none of this had ever happened. You’re just going to have to let it happen to you, as best you can.”

“That sounds a bit like something that someone else once said to me, although they didn’t quite put it like that.” Sorcha looked as if she was swallowing hard, although she was still reasonably composed, “But I can’t see what good time is going to do me. I know I don’t want my job: I don’t want to be around Norman, and I don’t like who it makes me be. I know that I don’t want to be here, with all the memories and Stephen Warren potentially lurking around upstairs. And there isn’t anything else, at all. There never really was.”

Jane didn’t want an argument.

“You don’t have to decide that today. You shouldn’t be deciding it today. Wait until you’ve at least managed to eat something and had a few decent nights’ sleep. Please?”

The worst of it was that she wasn’t sure that Sorcha was particularly interested in what she was saying. She had taken two pieces of carrot, and was chewing one of them slowly while looking at the other one in her hand.

“What have you told Norman?” Jane looked taken aback, “I know that you’ve spoken to him a couple of times, at least. It was kind of helpful to know that someone was talking to him, but I didn’t want to listen to what you said.”

“He was just asking how you were, and checking on some press stuff. You just need to go and see him when you’re ready. He knows that it won’t be this week.” Sorcha looked as if she was going to protest, “I wondered if we ought to get you to see a doctor.”

“They’ll only give me more sleeping pills, and I have a cupboard full of those already from the last time around.” Sorcha expected Jane to argue with her, but she didn’t, “I’m going to try taking Night Nurse tonight, and then reading The Secret Garden: I know it makes me cry, but last time I looked there were no guns and no lunatics in that one. I thought it might at least give me a fighting chance.”

Sorcha seemed clear enough about what she wanted to do, although she still looked fragile. She did at least eat something, even if swallowing it down looked like a conscious effort, and then spent a couple of hours on the computer. She flipped onto the BBC news homepage every time Jane came close enough to see the screen, but she suspected that she was looking at things about either Jake or Stephen Warren. She hadn’t said much about it, but all the time he was still out there, somewhere, it was hard to even pretend it was over.

Jane had work calls to do, and then worked late into the night getting a report out. She checked on Sorcha a couple of times, and found her finally deep asleep. She had left one of the bedside lights on, which looked to be deliberate.

When Jane woke up late the following morning, she thought that the real battle, to get Sorcha to deal with what had happened and not just run away, was about to begin. It was a grey, indeterminate sort of day, and there were a couple of photographers camped outside the block again, but she was determined to get Sorcha out of the building and interacting with the world again even if they just got in a cab and wandered around Richmond Park for a while. She wasn’t sure that Sorcha would react well to places with lots of people in them, and wasn’t sure that she wanted to find out what would happen if someone recognised her, or started asking her questions. The flat was quiet, which made her hope that Sorcha was still sleeping. She went and had a shower before going to wake her. It was only then that she discovered that she had gone. Sorcha had turned back the corner of the duvet, and left a note written on the back of a gas-bill envelope, telling Jane not to call the police and saying that she hoped to be back by one.

Sorcha had left early, having had enough sleep to feel just exhausted rather than broken. She had walked out of the lift on the ground floor without even thinking about it, only to have a startled concierge block her way. His English wasn’t very good, and it took her a minute or two to understand that he was telling her to keep away from the photographers. She shivered when she realised what he meant, and took the route through the basement which cut up through the garage of the hotel. The route which Stephen Warren had taken, back in the beginning. The ironies seemed to be piling up around her, but every step she was taking was confirming that she didn’t want to be there any more.

She’d called Norman’s secretary from the cab. She seemed rather panicked by the idea that Sorcha was on her way into the office, but it did at least mean that she didn’t have to watch Norman trying not to freak out by the time that she got there. As she was ushered into his office, the secretary seemed to be trying to stare at her and avoid looking at her at the same time.

Norman’s office looked just the way it always did. There were no papers out, other than the folder which Norman carried around with him and occasionally jotted notes in. Norman was looking the way he normally did, with a heavy chalk-striped suit and a pale pink shirt. She couldn’t make out the design on his tie: it was pale on pale, although she knew that she had seen it before. It was all exactly the same, except that she wasn’t part of it any more.

The first thing Norman noticed when she walked in was that she wasn’t wearing a suit. The second thing he noticed was that she wasn’t wearing heels. She was wearing dark trousers and a slightly fluffy, fitted powder blue sweater, with a tiny silver charm at her throat and her hair pulled back from her face with an Alice band. It didn’t look as if she had any make-up on either, which made her look ghostly pale. She looked tiny, and a lot younger: he had enough caveman lingering in his DNA to want to spirit her away and protect her, but the supervisory board were unlikely to approve.

“How are you?”

Sorcha realised, slightly too late, that wasn’t one of the questions she was really ready to answer, but she wasn’t going to give up at the first hurdle. She tried to answer without thinking about what she was saying.

“Been better, but I’ll survive. I’m sorry I haven’t been in for the past couple of days.”

“If you’d come in I would have sent you straight back home again. How’s Jake?”

Another one. For some reason she hadn’t expected him to acknowledge Jake’s existence in anything other than very oblique, abstract terms. The smile she conjured up was painfully wonky.

“I don’t know. I gather he didn’t much appreciate being shot.”

Norman was surprised, and felt both smug for himself and sorry for her. He also knew it meant he had to make sure she didn’t go anywhere near the rest of the office, as they would all just keep asking about Jake.

“Jeff Hands has called me a couple of times.” Sorcha looked alarmed, “It’s OK: I agreed with Jane that we would put a statement out on your behalf. He was just checking that what they were doing and saying was consistent with what we were doing. We had a bit of a discussion about setting up a fund for that policeman’s family, but thankfully it doesn’t look like we need to do that now. He seemed like a pretty decent sort of chap.”

Sorcha couldn’t understand why he wasn’t showing signs of anger, but assumed that he was just deferring them until a more convenient time.

“I’ve only met him once, on Saturday. He didn’t seem to know what to do with me, even before...”
She couldn’t work out how to finish the sentence without dissolving, which wasn’t what she had come there to do. Norman also didn’t need to know anything he couldn’t find out from the papers. She decided to put an end to the small talk, “Look, I know I’ve caused a whole heap of trouble. You must have had every last one of the old codgers in Sheffield and Leeds, who never wanted me in the partnership in the first place, calling to bend your ear and tell you to get rid of me. I came in because I wanted to say I’m sorry, and that I’ll go. I’ll go as soon as you’ll let me go.”

Norman sat and looked at her, and wished that he’d insisted on someone else sitting in.

“It’s really not like that, little one,” she flinched for some reason, but didn’t seem to want to say anything. “It’s been an interesting couple of days, but nothing we can’t deal with. Most of the old codgers have called, I’ll grant you that, but it’s been to ask whether there is anything they can do to help. Nobody is saying they want you out.” He thought about trying to explain the slightly odd psychology which seemed to have set in, whereby a lot of them seemed to be thinking of her both as one their gang and one of their daughters, but decided that it was unlikely to be helpful. Only one person had been even attempting to kick up a fuss, and that was the only female partner senior to her, but she didn’t need to know that either. “I’m more than happy for you to take some time off, though, if you want to. We can work out how to get you back into the swing of things once you’re ready for it.”

It was clear from both her expression and her body language that it wasn’t the right answer, and he wondered whether it was because he hadn’t said anything about money. She quickly disabused him.

“Don’t treat me like I’m stupid. I failed to spot that one of my closest friends is a lunatic, because I was too busy nursing a crush on a pop singer who happened to crash into me and break my skull. I wouldn’t trust me to tell the time, let alone do anything which actually mattered. There isn’t any way back, and we both know it. I know that I have to give a year’s notice, but I’m asking if it can be less than that. A lot less. It will be easier for everyone.”

The caveman was becoming ever more of a problem: he was just grateful that she was managing to keep relatively calm and dry-eyed, even if it looked as if it was draining the life out of her to do so.

“I obviously don’t know everything that happened, little one, and there are always things that we might wish we could change, but this wasn’t your fault. It really wasn’t.”

She had no idea why he was wasting his time.

“Bollocks.”

He went the same colour as his shirt, but a shade or two darker, which briefly cheered her up.

“No, it’s not, actually. We all mess things up from time to time.” She wondered if he was listening to what he was saying, “Nobody’s perfect, but this really isn’t anything to do with your work. A few idiots might ask questions, but that’s because they’re idiots. It’ll take a while for this all to blow over, but it will, you know.” She was sitting shaking her head as he hesitated, “You’re not the only one who missed the chance to do something about Pippa you know, little one. She went for me, when I went to see you in the hospital. God alone knows what I’d done to provoke her.”

Sorcha felt sick: Norman looked deathly serious, and he clearly wasn’t joking.

“Shit. I don’t think we’ll ever really know what was happening in her head, but she knew you’d been messing me around. I just hope that wasn’t why.”

She slowed down as she was saying it, struggling with the concept. Norman half-wished he hadn’t told her: he had misjudged what she would take from it.

“I’d figured you didn’t need to know, so I probably shouldn’t have told you now. I’m sorry.” She shrugged, “I even took it upon myself to call her father. Fat lot of good that did, but hindsight is a wonderful thing.”

“At least you tried to do something. I didn’t even do that.”

“It didn’t make any difference, though, did it?”

She stopped and thought about what he was saying. He could see her tense up in exasperation: it did at least make her look less likely to disintegrate at any moment.

“No. But the point is that you’re fine, whereas my career died the moment she pulled the trigger.”

“That’s a bit dramatic, isn’t it?”

She shot forward on her chair.

“Dramatic? You think I’m being dramatic? Oh, just cut the crap. This isn’t something which will just blow over. It won’t blow over because I can’t do this any more. Because I don’t want to do this any more, if nothing else. I want out, as soon as you will let me. It would be better for everyone, including you, if that is sooner rather than later.”

Norman was wondering how to play for time: he wasn’t sure that she was going to let him.

“I can’t just say yes, you know that. I’ll look into it and get back to you.” He could see more bollocks heading his way, and did his best to head them off at the pass, “If you want to go, you can go, although we’ll miss you. We may have to do it so that you’re on leave up until the end of your notice period, but I’m sure that we can sort something out. I’ll get back to you by Monday at the latest: I might not be able to get hold of some of the others until then.”

“Thank you.”

She seemed to think that the discussion was over, but he suddenly realised that he’d missed something out.

“Little one, I know that it isn’t really any of my business, but what are you intending to do with yourself?”

She looked apologetic, even though this was a question she had practised her answer to.

“I don’t actually know. I guess I’ll get on a plane, see some new places and meet some new people, and figure it out as I go along. New Zealand sounds nice. I was thinking of starting there.”

Chapter Forty Six

Sorcha didn’t know how she got to her front door. She didn’t know how she got out of the lift at the right floor, and didn’t know how she got the key in the lock. She just knew that once she was there, and the door was shut behind her, she was safe and nobody could get her. What happened next was an impossible question, but she didn’t need to answer that one yet. She just needed to get home.

When she went to open the door, the deadlock was already open. Dread welled up from deep within her, and she started to cry again, softly, before reminding herself that she could easily have forgotten to lock the door the previous evening. Locking doors hadn’t exactly been the first thing on her mind. And there had to be a limit to how much worse it could get.

But when she opened the door she could hear the television was on. She froze in the doorway, waiting for fate to come and get her, only to be utterly confused when Jane appeared. In everything that had happened since, and everything that she had learned, Sorcha had forgotten that she had sent Jane a text saying just “Pip shot Jake. Get on a plane”. She had done it while the police were taking Pip away, before she got taken away as well. Her hands had been shaking so much that someone else had to take the phone out of the bag for her, and the phone keys had seemed so impossibly small. Sorcha stood, staring at Jane, not knowing what to say, letting tears stream down her face. She muttered some kind of apology, shaking her head, while Jane shut the door behind her.

Sorcha wanted to be left to curl up in a small ball for as long as it took, but Jane stood in front of her, her hands on her shoulders, forcing her to stand up. Sorcha had given up trying to work out what other people were thinking. It clearly wasn’t something that she was very good at. Jane could see that if she just hugged her she was likely to disintegrate. She had no idea how easy it would be to put the pieces back together, so she wasn’t about to try it.

“You have to keep it together a little longer.”

Sorcha shook her head, and tried to let her knees buckle under her. This was her limit, and she had no way of going beyond it.

“It wasn’t a question.” Jane was sharp, wondering if she was going to have to use force, “Your mother called.”

Sorcha felt a tiny flame of anger, despite her sense of exhaustion, which was precisely what Jane had intended. Sorcha was mumbling more than shouting, but at least she got a response.

“Can’t she just leave me fucking alone for one fucking minute! What was it this time? She’s got some stupid new illness that she just couldn’t wait to tell me about, and beg me to come round and see her, and she had to pick today to do it? Or has she decided that she’s dying again, and she has to do that today too? I’ve had it with her. I’ve had it with everyone.”

Sorcha was snide, despite her exhaustion, which made Jane angry. She shook her hard, and had to fight an instinct to slap her.

“Will you just listen? She called because she wanted to know if you were OK, and was worried about you being on your own. She was even going to get Fi to bring her up here, so you didn’t have to come back and face an empty flat, but she didn’t because I was here.” Sorcha briefly looked confused, but then just looked blank, “We’re not all bad, you know.”

Sorcha stayed blank, as if her batteries had run out. Her lips moved without any trace of expression in the rest of her face.

“Was that it?”

Jane shook her head, wondering what to say to her.

“No. You’ve got a visitor.”

“What do they want?”

Sorcha was still blank, and seemed to be trying to slump back down. Her voice was quieter this time. Jane wished that there was another way, but short of frogmarching Sorcha back out of her own home it was hard to figure out what it was.

“It’s Jake.” Sorcha’s eyes got bigger and she seemed to try to shrink further backwards into the door. It wasn’t quite what Jane had hoped for, “I don’t think he’s meant to be here. The TV is still giving out that he’s under observation in the Chelsea & Westminster.” There was no reaction from Sorcha, not even one which indicated that she had heard what had been said, “He’s in your bedroom.”

When Sorcha still didn’t react, Jane pulled her into the bathroom and threatened her with a cold shower. Sorcha shrieked at nearly having her arm pulled out of its socket, but did at least move. She refused the shower and washed her face instead, repeatedly, washing away every last trace of the night before. When she looked in the mirror, she kept hoping to see someone different.

She had to hold her breath just to walk into the room. The bedroom was as she had left it; everything closed up and tidied away, with the blinds down and just one of the bedside lamps on. Jake was lying on the bed asleep. He’d sat up against the mountain of cushions rather than moving them, and still had his shoes and a hoodie on, with a sleeve hanging loose. His right arm was in a sling, with his heavily-bandaged hand in what was probably some kind of splint, held up against his shoulder. She tried to focus on his face, because it was still his face, but found it hard to look at. She had never been good at watching people sleep. They always looked too small and fragile, somehow, and she usually felt the need to break the spell. And he looked too peaceful: she had to keep watching for the slight rise and fall of his chest, which barely seemed to be enough to make a difference. It didn’t help that she knew that she had offered refuge to Pippa as well: Pippa had been sectioned in the early hours of the morning, but it didn’t change what had happened and all she had missed. But she still knew that she couldn’t wake him. She wasn’t sure that she would ever sleep that soundly again.

Sorcha shut the door as gently as she could, hearing each stage of the catch click in, and then walked round to the other side of the bed. She took a cushion in each hand, and settled herself down on the floor in front of the wardrobe. She could still see him breathe from there, and so long as she could win the battle not to think about anything else, watching him was vaguely hypnotic. The waiting felt like part of her penance; one of the easier parts.

She saw him open his eyes long before he saw her. He blinked briefly at the ceiling, but didn’t seem at all surprised or confused. He pulled himself up slightly from the cushions, and his left hand felt across and under his right shoulder for something which he either couldn’t find or couldn’t reach. Probably the knot of the sling, although his hood could have been caught up somehow. He seemed to stop for a moment or two, before deciding to sit up. It was only once he had done so, adjusted the back of the sling, and ruffled his hair back up that he saw her. From the angle he was at, Sorcha was almost hidden under the cushions. When he saw her, he felt tears of relief welling up, and he saw no point in fighting them.

“Thank God you’re back. Have you been there long?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

Her voice was flat , and she stayed on the floor and looked as if she was shaking. She looked tiny and vulnerable, and Jake couldn’t understand why she was keeping her distance.

“Come here.” He held out his hand, but she didn’t move, “Please? I could seriously do with a hug.”

He remembered her holding him in his mother’s attic; kneeling behind him and hugging him tightly into her. He needed to feel her close against him again, and keep her there for a very long time, but she still didn’t come.

“I didn’t expect to see you again.”

Her voice shook as she said it, and she was shaking her head. Jake didn’t want to think about what she meant.

“Come up here, please? It’ll be better than both of us ending up on the floor.”

She was looking at him as if he was afraid of something, but she slowly stood up and perched herself on the edge of the bed.

“You can come closer than that.”

He still waited for her to come to him, but still nothing happened.

“Please come closer. I won’t bite, and I don’t break, much. Please.”

But Sorcha stayed where she was, and put her hands up to her face. It looked as if she was trying to gouge holes with her fingers. She only stopped when he asked her what the matter was, at which point she looked at him very directly, as if he had totally lost his mind. He began to be afraid for her again.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“I know, but they shouldn’t have left you behind last night. Anything could have happened to you, and I was just going nuts not knowing where you were or how you were. Whatever happened, I should have been with you. I had to get Duncan to help dress me and smuggle me out,” Even the mention of Duncan failed to get a proper reaction, “Duncan at least understood what I needed to do, although I’m sure Jeff’s going ape.”

Still nothing, and she was sitting with her arms and legs crossed as if she didn’t want to be touched. It didn’t help that she was mostly looking at her own feet, although her breathing seemed calmer. Then she did at least say something.

“I’d guess it’s probably not just Jeff going ape.”

Her voice was reasonably steady, but Jake had no idea how to keep her talking and stop her slipping back away from him.

“Probably not. At least there isn’t a tour for everyone to panic about this time, though.”

“No, there isn’t.” She looked at the bed, close to where he was sitting, rather than at him, “But that’s not what this is about, though, is it? It’s not about that; it’s not about the hole in your hand or how much blood you’ve lost; or the fact that it was three o’clock in the morning before anyone actually thought to tell me that you were still alive; or the fact that there is some policeman out there who’s already been given the last rites. It’s not about any of that, is it?”

It sounded as if she was rehearsing what she said, and something about how she said it worried him.

“Christ knows what this is all about. I want you to come here and hold me. Please.”

Still she sat wrapped up in herself on the edge of the bed, shaking her head. Jake stood up and walked round the bed to sit next to her: he felt light-headed, his hand throbbed as he moved, but he was afraid that the damage of the previous night ran deeper than that. He sat down next to her and put his good hand on her knee, waiting to see whether there was more to come. She tried to pull back from his touch, but the bedside cabinet was in the way.

“I nearly got you killed, and it might yet turn out that I got that policeman killed. I’d told her she could come here, did you know that?,” Jake shook his head gently, but kept hold of her, “You could have ended up coming here to get away from her, only to find that she had a bloody key. Her boyfriend, who it turns out is also some kind of psychiatric nurse who was paid by her father to keep her out of trouble, tried to get hold of me on Friday to warn me. Except I was too busy playing with dresses and having my hair done, thinking I was sodding Cinderella.”

She was wearing a sweatshirt and jeans which were too big for her, presumably because they belonged to somebody else, and as she said it she plucked at the front of the sweatshirt. Jake was about to say something, but she shook her head again and carried on.

“And it wasn’t just one thing. I missed it over and over again. Turns out that she’s always been like this. I thought that she dropped out of Oxford because she’d fallen out with the college about drinking and missing collections; but actually she had started cracking up again and thought that she was being chased around Broad Street by a load of Greek Gods. Turns out I missed that bit because I shacked up with someone from another college for a couple of terms. Daddy picked her up and had it all hushed up.”

She looked up at him from what felt like a very long way away, and spoke with more bitterness than he could bear.

“It was Pip’s fucking Daddy who told me that you were OK, you know. He came over all jolly, and announced that there was “no harm done”, and you’d just bled a bit. He’d known all along that she was a sodding time bomb, but wanted it hushed up for the sake of his sodding career. The fucking moron even taught her to shoot, because he thinks it’s a nice way of spending Saturday mornings.” For a moment, she seemed to be carried away by a memory of her own anger, before slipping back to a tone of despair, “Doesn’t change the fact that I’d missed it, though. I missed it over and over again. Made a joke of things which weren’t funny, because it was a way of not seeing it. I didn’t want to see it.”

She paused, but Jake wasn’t sure that she had finished. If she had finished, he had no idea what to say to make it right again, although he knew he needed to say something soon. But Sorcha still carried on.

“Did you know that Jane had told me that there was something wrong and to get round to see her, but I just couldn’t be bothered? I’d said I would do it once last night was out of the way, and didn’t even notice when she was making weird associations between things on the phone a couple of days back. If I’d even asked to see that letter which she left you, I reckon I’d have known, or at least known enough that someone could have done something.”

Jake asked her what she meant by it, which made her angry. It was hard to explain it quickly; especially as she didn’t want to explain it at all: it all just sounded so stupid.

“She’d written this long, turgid memoire-type thing a few years back. She had the guy who ferried the souls into the underworld in Greek myths morphing into St Christopher but he couldn’t get rid of his beard. I’m one of only about three people on the entire planet who’d even read the bloody thing. And she’s always quoted Dante, badly, when she gets drunk. She’d must have seen the picture of you carrying me, and had put two and two together and made about fifteen million: she got it into her head that you were carrying me off into hell.” Jake didn’t seem particularly surprised, but she didn’t really notice, “Literally into hell. Even now it’s so fucking stupid it sounds funny, and then I remember that it probably killed some poor sod who was just doing his stupid old job. Because it was you who told me about it, I thought you were talking about tadpoles and was too busy thinking about Stephen Warren. Who, incidentally, I’d asked Pip to look for. I’d kept making sure that she was thinking about you, asking her stuff just because it was stuff that I wanted to know, not knowing what she was doing. To you.”

She was looking at him with an awful hopelessness. He touched her face, but she was a long way out of reach.

“It’s like my Dad. Just because someone you love,” she flinched, and he corrected himself “someone close to you does something bad, it doesn’t make you bad too.”

Sorcha tossed back her head, getting rid of his hand as she did so, and seemed to will herself back together again.

“That’s fine for you. You’re a pop star, and I’m sure pop stars are allowed to make that kind of mistake. I don’t know what the fuck I’ve been thinking I am for the past few weeks, but I used to be a lawyer. That means that people pay me for my judgement. Or at least they used to. Now they’ll all know that one of my best friends has been having dangerous manic interludes for years which I somehow managed not to notice, and that she then tried to kill a pop singer I happened to have a crush on. Having crushes on pop singers isn’t what lawyers are meant to do either. It’s all part of the same problem.”

She could see that Jake had shifted and was supporting his right elbow with his left hand, and felt something close to nostalgia washing through her. She put her hand on his shoulder, careful not to jolt him, and tried to establish eye contact for the first time. He wasn’t sure that he wanted it any more.

“I’m just so, so sorry, Pet. I shouldn’t have done any of this. I was just forgetting who and what I was, and I’ve made a mess a whole lot worse. I know you were kind of trying to undo what Stephen Warren did, by spending time with me, but it doesn’t work like that. It wasn’t your fault in the first place, and you would have done much better to leave well alone.”

He was looking drained, and didn’t seem to want a fight. It looked as if there was a trace of blood beginning to soak through the side of the dressings, which was a fairly clear indication that he needed to be somewhere else, but he was deliberately not acknowledging it.

“It wasn’t like that. You know it wasn’t like that. And this isn’t your fault any more than that was mine.”

“I wish that was true. I wish….” She was staring at him, hard, but chose not to go on, “But there’s no point wishing, is there? I’m glad that I got to spend time with you, more glad than you can know. I hope you get well soon, and it all turns out for the best. That they find your Dad, and that it all goes well with the band. You deserve some good times, soon, Pet.”

She had stood up, and Jake stood up too, knowing that he was being dismissed, and still struggling to find the words to make it right again.

“I don’t have to go, you know. I came here to see you.”

Sorcha just kept on shaking her head.

“It just doesn’t work like that. I wish it did.”

She thought for a moment that she was going to have to call an ambulance. It was something that she had never had to do before, and would have been a new low when it came to ending something that might have been a relationship, but it turned out that Duncan was sitting in a car in the garage and had said that he would stay there all night if he had to. She let Jake hug her to his good side as they said goodbye, and tried not to think about the fact that she would never feel him next to her again.

Jane waited for a few minutes after he had gone before venturing into the hallway. Sorcha was calmer than when she first came back, but seemed to be searching the ceiling for inspiration.

“Well?”

No reply.

“What did he say?”

Sorcha wasn’t sure that she wanted to answer, but she had to say something.

“He’s gone. He isn’t coming back.”

It wasn’t what Jane was expecting, and she waited in vain for Sorcha to add something more.

“Shit.” Sorcha looked surprised at the exclamation, which didn’t help, “ What about you, what are you going to do?”

Sorcha looked straight at her. It felt as if she was looking through her, and she started speaking too quickly.

“I’m getting the hell out of here. Just as soon as I can. I don’t want to have anything to do with any of it any more.”

Jane barely let her finish the sentence before finally slapping her around the face as hard as she could. Sorcha hadn’t seen it coming, and almost fell over into the bathroom door. She stood there, clutching her face, knowing that she definitely wasn’t the one who was hysterical. She wondered whether it would help anyone at all, anywhere in the cosmos, if she slapped Jane back.