Chapter Forty Two

Sorcha didn’t so much get through the morning as surf over the top of it and hope that nobody was looking too closely. She chose to walk back to the office by a slightly circuitous route to try to finish waking herself up: it was a bright, if not particularly warm, morning, which helped. By the time she got to an inter-departmental meeting about business development, she almost felt as if she was on the same planet as the rest of the people in the room. And she was on her way to lunch with two of the slightly less gormless representatives of one of the recruitment agencies they used for experienced hires before she had time to think about Jake: she grinned to herself, wondered briefly whether his meetings were like her meetings, and then promptly forgot about him again.

When she eventually got back into the office, she knew that she didn’t have long before she and Norman had to head out again to go and see Guy. She hurried through to her desk, barely noticing the fact that the rest of the team all seemed to be hanging around gossiping as if it was Christmas Eve, and started logging onto her computer before she sat down. As she looked up, waiting for it to finish thinking, she noticed that Caroline was standing by Maggie’s desk, and that they both seemed to be deep in conversation with a man about a telephone. She managed to swallow the moment of anger, telling herself that if Caroline was there at least whatever it was was likely to be fixed more quickly.

Given that she was in a hurry, it was inevitable that there would be a systems upgrade. She tried to log onto her voicemails while she was waiting for her computer to finish churning through it, but got an error message. She was about to switch her mobile back on, and discover that she had sixteen messages and thirty-four texts waiting for her, when Maggie walked into the office and shut the door behind her. She was grinning, in a way which was probably meant to show that she was excited about something but somehow looked slightly menacing. It certainly wasn’t how Maggie usually looked, but Sorcha didn’t really have time for that either.

“Sodding voicemail won’t let me in, and my computer has decided that it’s more important to upgrade software I never use than actually let me into my e-mail. Have you come with more bad news?”

Maggie almost seemed to skip: it was more obvious than it needed to be because she was having a gold shoes day.

“You should have said before, you silly girl. I’d have booked a proper limo, not a car.”

Sorcha’s computer finally let her in, and she sat down and was focusing on the various log-on screens rather than the detail of what Maggie was saying. She responded without looking up.

“What was wrong with the car?”

Maggie took stock of the situation, and concluded quite rightly that Sorcha was missing the point. She unfolded a copy of a newspaper that she was carrying, and stuck it directly into Sorcha’s line of sight, mid-way between her head and her computer screen. It was one of the free evening papers, and she and Jake had about a quarter of the celeb-spread in the middle: they had caught the mega-smile moment, just before the flashes had spooked her. Sorcha’s immediate reaction was that she ought to be panicking, not least because she really didn’t have time to talk to Maggie about it now. But the strange thing was that it was hard to panic that much: she didn’t have the energy, it wasn’t that bad a photo, there was no unfortunate underwear on show, and apart from the fact that the comments underneath it made it clear that she had been hanging around in a bar far later than she should have been, it wasn’t even particularly nasty. She couldn’t even pretend to be that surprised.

She looked up through the glass partition, and could see that most of the team seemed to be gathered round the secretaries’ desks in the corridor. Several of them waved at her, and she suddenly didn’t know whether to wave back or not.

“Shit.” Maggie was still grinning, which didn’t help, “Can you remember how much longer I have before I need to leave?”

“It’s OK, my dear.” Sorcha didn’t know what it was about being carried out of a club by someone vaguely famous meant that a secretary who had known her for less than a month could suddenly start calling her “my dear”, but it was in danger of making her teeth itch again, “I spoke to Norman a little while ago, and explained the situation. Guy’s going to come here instead for five so you’ve got heaps of time.”

Sorcha’s blood pressure spiked so hard her ears nearly popped, and she spun round on her chair.

“You did what?! What the hell did you say to Norman?”

“I just told him that he ought to be aware that there was a danger that you might be the target of some unhelpful press attention, and that he might want to make sure that your mutual client didn’t get caught up in it all. There have been a couple of people trying to get into the building already, you know.” Maggie was peculiarly unrepentant, and clearly enjoying herself, “He was very gracious about it, actually.”

Sorcha still couldn’t imagine it as a discussion which had actually taken place.

“Did you show him the picture?”

Maggie smiled even more, flashing gums as well as teeth.

“Of course. He kept the first one I had: I had to go back out to St Paul’s to get some more.”

As soon as Maggie had been persuaded to leave her alone, Sorcha called Norman to begin an apology which she expected to last several months; but he was surprisingly calm. His main concern was that a large part of the firm would be charging some or all of the afternoon to team meetings or office admin, rather than doing things for which they would get paid. And Guy seemed to find it funny, and didn’t seem to expect her to have been suspended before the next round table meeting the following week. The main problem was her direct line, which had been posted on the firm’s website, and which was being called by a very surprising number of rather odd people; but Caroline had come up with a cunning plan for dealing with that by using a dummy mailbox, and everything seemed to be more or less under control.

As she sat at home that evening trying to stay awake until bed time, Sorcha couldn’t help feeling that the explosion when her worlds had collided had been much less spectacular than she had expected. In fact, it had barely rated as a collision at all. She felt rather cheated, and she told Jake as much when he called that evening. At first he didn’t know whether to take her comments as a joke; and then seemed genuinely concerned that she was somehow disappointed. It was a while before she realised just how relieved he was, partly because she still found his phone silences difficult to decode, but mostly because it hadn’t occurred to her that her reaction was important to him.

Jane’s reaction was difficult to guess, too. Sorcha had received an e-mail saying that she had a suspicion why she hadn’t wanted to talk, and that she would call, and it was Jane she was expecting to hear when her mobile rang late the following evening. Instead it was Jake, who apologised for calling several times, and then apologised for having had a crap day, and then apologised for wanting to tell her about it, before he could bring himself to tell her what had happened.

“I’ve had the police here all day, and it’s just doing my head in.” He paused, still feeling the need to vocalise his sense of guilt, “I know you don’t need to listen to all of this stuff.”

Sorcha wished that he was there in person, so that she could empathise with him without trying. On the phone it was all still a bit of an effort.

“I’m sorry Pet, I really am. Is this still about your Dad?”

“No. I only wish it was. They were here about him this morning, and then the bloody stalker came while they were here.”

He was sufficiently something, possibly angry, that there was at least a degree of urgency to his responses, but they still felt frustratingly incomplete. Sorcha could feel herself starting to pull faces at the phone.

“But surely that’s good? They must at least have been able to do something about her?”

Sorcha had a sudden pang of uncertainty as she said it: she had always assumed that it was a woman, but presumably it didn’t have to be. Jake didn’t pick up on it.

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” He sounded bitter as he said it: it made him sound like someone else, “Some lunatic sticks a letter threatening to kill me on a window ledge in from my own back garden, while there are three police officers in the next room asking me what I was doing eleven years ago, and nobody notices them do it.”

Sorcha suddenly felt very cold and slightly sick.

“Christ! How the hell did she get that close to you?”

“They don’t know. They just spent hours asking me more questions, when they know I haven’t the faintest clue who it is. They reckon it’s someone from… the old days. I just know that I started getting letters earlier in the summer, and they’re getting weirder. You know, this one wasn’t even all in English.”

Sorcha had an overwhelming urge to try to reach out and protect him.

“You can always come here, Pet. You know that, don’t you?”

Jake seemed to start saying something, and then reconsider before the first syllable really happened. He sighed heavily before replying.

“Not while all this is going on. There’s a circus camped on my doorstep and a nutter following me around: you don’t deserve that.”

“Neither do you. It might be easier if we tried going halves.”

She thought that she could feel his mood lift slightly, but it might have been an illusion.

“Doesn’t work like that. It’d just make the circus bigger and the nutter more…” he stopped and thought before pronouncing judgement “psychotic, I suppose.” Sorcha was still trying to think of something to say in response when he carried on, “Jeff really doesn’t get it, though. We were meant to be playing this new film awards thing on Saturday. The police say we shouldn’t do it, and we finally give in – but he then goes and agrees that we will show up anyway. I got some stupid explanation about TV rights and cancellation fees, which is fine for him. He’s not the one in the fucking firing line.”

Sorcha was frustrated that she didn’t have a clearer sense of what had happened.

“So is this person now threatening to shoot you as well? Are they sure that it’s not Stephen Warren come back and trying to mess with your head?”

Jake was frustrated too, but it was hard to tell what was frustrating him.

“It’s hard to figure out what they are threatening. It went on for pages, you know, and wound up with a bit of Dante about asking no more, in Italian. At least, that’s what the police decided it was: they said it was to do with souls lining up to be transported into Hell.” Jake paused, before deciding that Sorcha might not understand what that meant, “That’s not Stevo.”

“What else did it say?”

“All sorts of weird shit. There was some stuff about hunting pistols and ornamental swords, which was mostly what got the police worried. And there was a lot of stuff about my beard, which made me wonder if they meant Duncs instead of me: I mean, he has actually got a beard at the moment. And there was a very odd bit about frog-swans.”

Sorcha wasn’t sure if she had even heard him correctly, as it sounded like a very odd pronunciation of frogspawn, and desperately wanted to read the letter to gauge for herself what was going on, but she had no idea whether Jake would have access to a copy. Even if he did, telling him to scan it and e-mail it to her was unlikely to be something that he would respond to well.

“Christ, that all sounds a bit complicated. I thought pop stars had groupies who just got drunk and let them shag them.”

Jake made a noise at the end of the line: it took Sorcha a moment to realise that he was laughing to indicate that he didn’t find any of what was going on funny.

“Maybe. Even that can get a bit dull, especially once they’re twenty years younger than you are and you have no idea who’s legal.” He seemed to realise that he was going off-track, and paused to recollect himself, “I’d been planning on finally taking you out to dinner if Saturday was cancelled, you know.”

Sorcha wasn’t sure if it was a question or not, and hedged her bets.

“Maybe another time, Pet. I just wish that I could make it all less awful for you.”

A silence followed which was long enough for Sorcha to feel the need to turn the TV on, and start channel-hopping on mute. When he next spoke, Jake seemed to be getting things back into perspective: he was starting to sound more like himself.

“The problem is that they’re actually pretty awful anyway. I mean, because of the police stuff we’re not doing the red carpet stuff, so it’ll be a minivan with blacked out windows to an entrance round by the dustbins. Then you have to eat crap food with people staring at you, and Mouse will get drunk, or at least he usually does. Then we all try talking at the same time while we’re presenting whatever award it is, and try to pretend that Mouse isn’t drunk after all, if he is, I mean. Then more dustbins.”

Sorcha wasn’t sure if it was safe to laugh at him.

“Sounds like you’re in the wrong job, Pet. I can think of plenty of evenings worse than that.”

He suddenly went silent at the end of the line, from which she could only surmise that his sense of humour wasn’t feeling as robust as she had hoped it was. She was about to apologize, when he stuttered rather quietly back into life.

“Will you come with me?”

She wasn’t quite sure what he meant.

“What? Do you reckon I’m scary enough to keep the nutters at bay?”

Jake laughed briefly and bleakly, wondering why she tied him in bigger knots than usual.

“Hell. I must be much, much worse at this than even Duncan thinks I am. I meant would you be my date? It wouldn’t be so bad if you were there.” He sounded miserable again, “I haven’t made it sound like much of a night out, have I?”