Chapter Nine

“Are you serious? I mean, I really will be there on Tuesday: it’s not like you would have to stay that much longer.”

“Look, it’s just that I need someone to collect me so that this damned hospital will actually let me out. I’m beginning to feel like a hostage in here. ”

Jane was struggling to figure out just quite how bad an idea this was, and the four thousand miles between them was proving a serious obstacle. Trying to gauge Sorcha’s physical and mental state on the basis of a few shortish phone conversations was proving next to impossible; and while there was no denying that she sounded an awful lot better than she had done a few days earlier Jane felt she had no idea what was really happening, and that made her fearful. A lot of the fear was probably just the pictures and the blood; but until she actually got there and saw Sorcha again those would be the images to which her mind would keep returning, over and over again. In a dream the previous night Norman had suddenly turned into Macbeth, and it really hadn’t been much fun.

“Oh God, I wish I could get there sooner. I can see that it must seem like the perfect answer, but you don’t know the guy. In your current state I would really rather not let a total stranger take charge of you.”

“Aww. Mother hen. Janey, the guy is currently being followed around by a body guard, and if he in any way did anything to hurt me he knows it would be all over the tabloids in about ten seconds. And although he’s not particularly bright, I’m pretty sure he’s one of the good guys. It’ll be fine.”

Jane wasn’t convinced that the possibility of press interest was quite such a comforting factor, but chose not to pursue the point.

“But if it is just a case of getting someone to sign you out, couldn’t you get sister to do that, or even get Norman to do it?”

She tried to pretend that he wasn’t an after-thought.

“Sweets, neither of them would do it because neither of them would feel happy to signing up to keeping a 24 hour watch. And unfortunately for me neither of them would lie, either: Norman would have an “Officer of the Court” moment and Fi would just bottle it. I did try Pip again earlier, but she still seems to be AWOL. Sadly, Mr McDonald appears to be the only get out of jail on Monday card I have. And I don’t intend to then require him to stay with me before you start fussing on that count: I am pretty sure that I will be fine. They are staying at the hotel down by the marina, so if anything goes wrong I can just call someone.”

“But the hospital want to make sure that there is someone with you for a reason. If you’re out cold after having a fit, you’re not going to be able to call someone, are you?”

“I haven’t had any fits, at all, at any point in this process, or even at any point before all this. I’m fine, so long as there are no strong smells. And so long as Norman doesn’t wind me up.”

“Norman. What the hell has Norman got to do with this?”

Sorcha made a noise like a cat being strangled, only transposed down about an octave, before exhaling loudly.

“Well, I called him earlier. I have been reading every scrap of newsprint I can lay my hands on to try and stay sane, and there was something that I only picked up today from Friday’s FT about one of our clients proposing a share buy-back. I’m pretty sure that they gave covenants not to do that in a deal a year or two back, and my blackberry battery is dead because dearest Pip clearly thought that it ran on hope and hot air and didn’t bring my charger when she brought the rest of my things over. So I called him to make sure that someone was dealing with it.”

“You called him, on a Sunday, about work, about something which had been in the papers on Friday? I bet he loved that.”

Jane had learned not to say what she was thinking when it came to Norman, but it was taking so much restraint she was getting cramp in bits of her shoulders.

“He actually didn’t seem to mind too much, and he still keeps on calling me ‘little one’ which is quite frankly weird. But from what I could gather the girl who was with him didn’t seem very impressed at all.”

“Oh my God. Sorcha…”

“Stop, stop, stop!” She wasn’t sure if Jane was about to offer pity or outrage, but wasn’t really in the mood for either. “I won’t pretend that it’s fine, because it annoyed the hell out of me, although I think I did a fairly good job of hiding it. But he’s never pretended to be a saint, and quite frankly if he was a saint I am sure he would sanctimonious as hell and very, very dull.”

“But what the hell does he think he’s playing at?”

“The far more interesting question is who the hell is he currently playing with? I couldn’t tell from the call earlier, which is actually the thing which is really currently annoying the hell out of me. And I don’t know whether it was the same person he was with when I was looking for him on Tuesday night either.”

A pause at the other end of the phone: Sorcha couldn’t tell whether that meant guilt, or that Jane just couldn’t get her head around what she was saying.

“What? What was he doing on Tuesday night?”

“Well, nobody’s actually said anything to me, but that’s not the biggest of surprises under the circumstances. My secretary sent a heap of press cuttings about what happened over to me on Friday, and thankfully I only got around to looking at them after I tried calling Stormin’ Norman this afternoon. There are several photos of him looking distinctly the worse for wear; and looking at them it doesn’t take a genius to work out that he’d just got dressed in one hell of a hurry. He was wearing a stiff shirt with studs, and it looks as if it’s cross-studded, which is really quite an achievement. It definitely wasn’t like that at dinner.”

“Oh my God…” Higher pitch, this time.

“Are you appalled by what happened, or by the fact that I figured it out so soon?”

“No. Well, I had seen some pictures, and I had wondered – and there’s all sorts of weird speculation about a number of things, Norman included, on various bits of the internet.” Jane chose to ignore the slight screeching sound from the phone at that. “But to be honest I feel all at sea with all this: I have no idea what’s real and what isn’t. I’ll be a hell of a lot happier once I am there with you next week, my dear. I need to give you a hug, because until I’ve done that to be brutally honest I’m going to be in a bit of a state.”

“I’m OK, hun, I really am.” At least, thought Sorcha, I’m probably all right enough, most of the time, but this clearly isn’t the time to go into that. “I clearly have to take Norman in small doses, though, as I nearly passed out after I found the photos.”

“You’re not exactly convincing me, you know.”

Jane was having to fight hard against a surprisingly strong urge to get in her car and drive straight down to JFK, and just hope that her career would still be there waiting for her once she had got Sorcha sorted out again. Only the fact that Sorcha had a pretty good track record of knowing when she was in enough of a mess to need rescuing kept her in the house.

“It’s OK, I stupidly owned up to it and got poked and prodded for a good half hour afterwards. The eventual conclusion was that I had almost certainly held my breath and forgotten to breathe. I don’t think I’ve done that since I was having a tantrum when I was three, but I do have form on it. And they still seem to be happy to release me into Jake’s custody.”

“So, tell me Ms Brompton, did spending time in the company of one of the country’s most eligible bachelors suddenly seem like a good idea before or after you discovered your would-be beau in the arms of a common whore?”

Jane opted for mock-thespian as a cover for asking the question she actually wanted answered, but didn’t feel she had pulled it off particularly well. Her accent, which wandered about mid-Atlantic at the best of times, strayed badly off-course and ended up almost Liverpudlian.

“The HR department aren’t that bad, you know! At least, I am assuming that at least one of them is one of them, if you see what I mean; although I don’t have any evidence as yet. I do know they had rooms at the hotel, though.”

Jane wasn’t going there.

“You haven’t answered the question.”

“No comment.”

Sorcha couldn’t help thinking that she was going to get interrogated further when Jane finally arrived and had got over her jumpiness, but that was fine. Once she was here, everything would be fine. Even the fact that Jane was on record as having described Norman as a rancid old troll would be fine. It had to be. It had been an impossibly horrible, lonely, difficult day. More like the kind of Sunday she remembered from her childhood, when the frustration of having nothing to do and nowhere to go used to bubble up over the course of the afternoon to explode in door-slamming matches early evening. Except that this time the only kind of reaction she could hope for was medics running in to sedate her. Not even her mother had ever resorted to that.

The one bright point had been Jake, on the front pages of a couple of the tabloids. “With a Little Help From My Friends” ran one of the headlines, above a picture of a still bruised but smiling Jake punching the air, with his bandmates applauding behind him. Sorcha knew that wasn’t quite how she had put it, but she still felt a guilty surge of pride as she went to reread the article in the News of the World.