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.”