Chapter Six

Sorcha wandered out of the back of the function room towards the lobby area, glass in hand. She had been remarkably restrained with the wine over dinner, but had felt in need of something more once the speeches were done. “Something” for these purposes was a Singapore Sling with extra gin and no umbrellas, which had been rapidly followed by a second one.

Norman had been good. Actually, he had been more than good: he had been really quite funny and much, much quicker than the previous managing partner. The fact that he hadn’t taken very long and hadn’t mentioned billings at all was actually all most of them were going to remember, if they even remembered that much. Norman had even seemed blithely oblivious to the streamers, bubbles and whizzing balloons which had been flying around the room as he spoke, which had made it all even funnier. His formality had been part of the joke, and he had had the grace to allow it to be so. If she came across the HR girls who had organised the evening, Sorcha was still going to ask whether he had known that it was going to be themed as a children’s party. He’d done a fabulous job, but it would have been ever so slightly less fabulous if the joke had in part been on him, and he had just been managing to scrape through by pretending that the rest of it hadn’t been happening.

She had caught up with him briefly in the bar area before they had sat down to dinner. It was clear that the previous hour or two had not gone at all as he had wanted them to and that he was struggling to keep his frustration contained, but she had watched him enough times to know that a bottle or two of wine would do the trick. His bow tie had been caught up at the back, and he had let her straighten it for him; in a public place, with people they both knew watching them as she did it. And then he had smiled, briefly, before stepping out to take a call.

That hadn’t come as a surprise. The fact that he seemed to have disappeared into thin air immediately after the speeches was a bit more mystifying. Sorcha first assumed that he would be hanging around by the fire escape with the rest of the smokers. The smell of Camel Lites – or maybe Gitanes, if he had just come back from a trip to France – was as much a part of him as that honey-and-rocks voice that she was still marginally too sober to describe. It was a beautiful evening, with the sky just turning the blue of medieval stained glass: the kind which nobody knows how they made any more. The lights were reflecting in the little marina basin, and there were a couple of dozen smokers wandering around, but Norman wasn’t one of them.

He wasn’t in the bar area, either, and she was fairly sure that he wasn’t part of the utterly chaotic game of musical chairs which was being played out on the dance floor. Increasingly perplexed, she had wandered out towards the hotel reception, thinking that he might have gone there to take yet another call simply because there didn’t seem to be many other places that he could have gone. The cocktails were beginning to go to her head, but still her man was nowhere to be seen.

As she came to the end of the corridor, she saw some kind of commotion going on over the opposite side of the lobby area; then a hail of camera flashes, and a man hurrying away from the doors. It wasn’t that she had forgotten the security problems. Several of the secretaries and at least one of the associates had got over-excited about seeing Duncan Woods in the bar as they arrived, and Sorcha had been relieved that she had at least known who they were talking about. It was more that she hadn’t actually seen what the press scrum looked like yet: her flat was a part of the same development as the hotel, so she had naturally approached it from the back entrance that they had been instructed to use in order to avoid what were being referred to in a very British was as “the difficulties with the venue”. It looked more interesting than she thought it would, truth be told, even if it was all for the sake of some tuneless morons who thought they could dance a bit. There were really quite a lot of people out there, and as she wandered over to get a better view she could see that it looked as if there was quite a lot of pushing and shoving going on.

She therefore didn’t see a second man come running into the lobby, because he ran in behind her. She did, however, hear someone yelling. As she turned round, she could see him threatening the man by the lifts: the newcomer was standing right in the face of the lift guy, barely giving him space to breathe, positively screaming about where Marty was, and something about somebody’s father. Then he pushed him, followed up immediately with a punch. The lift guy looked utterly petrified, and made little attempt to fight back. Sorcha moved back towards the closed doors, as another volley of camera flashes went of through the glass behind her and the scuffle carried on in front of her. The lift guy really wasn’t doing much, other than looking for ways to escape, and closer up he looked painfully thin as well as being terrified. Her last memory was of wondering why somebody wasn’t feeding up the poor guy, because he might then have been reasonably good looking.

Sorcha pieced together what happened next from a muddle of explanations and press reports. The two men had been getting closer and closer to her, but she could move no further back because of the window and doors behind her. Then Stephen Warren had physically picked Jake McDonald up, with one of his hands almost around his throat, and flung him backwards with all the force he could muster. Straight into Sorcha. Her glass had smashed in her hand, into long shards which sliced into her shoulder and the top of her breast, a split second before her head had hit hard against the window. Her only bit of good luck was that the window cracked but didn’t shatter, but she was oblivious to it.

All she knew was darkness.